Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
US: 32 GW utility-scale solar pipeline expected to be operational by 2017
09. JUNE 2015 | TOP NEWS, APPLICATIONS & INSTALLATIONS, INDUSTRY & SUPPLIERS, INVESTOR NEWS, MARKET & TRENDS | BY: BECKY BEETZ
Analysts predict that a massive 32 GW of utility-scale solar will come online in the U.S. by the end of 2016, when the Federal energy investment tax credit (ITC) expires. Almost half of this is expected to be installed in leading solar state, California.
Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/us--32-gw-utility-scale-solar-pipeline-expected-to-be-operational-by-2017_100019762/#ixzz3cZfRE6T5
California, with a current cumulative installed capacity of 8.65 GW, is expected to benefit from the bulk of the 32 GW pipeline
Business Wire
ased on its latest Solar Deal Tracker, IHS says more than 32 MW of utility-scale solar projects – over 5 MW in size – are currently under development or construction in the U.S. as companies hurry to complete them before the ITC deadline on December 31, 2016. In a report, also released today, the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research backup this analysis.
Companies within the deadline will benefit from a 30% tax break. If it is not extended, and this looks likely says IHS, the Federal ITC for commercial and utility solar projects will drop to 10% in 2017. "Completion of these projects prior to the deadline could be crucial to ensure financial viability," it added.
At 44%, California, the leading solar state, with an installed capacity of 8.65 GW, is expected to benefit from the bulk of the 32 GW pipeline. North Carolina, however is likely to see 19% of the 32 GW installed across the state, while it is anticipated that 7% will be installed in Texas.
Under a supply deal announced in April with South Korean PV module manufacturer, Hanwha Q Cells, NextEra has indicated it will install 1.5 GW across a number of states, including California, Georgia, Florida, and Hawaii, by the fourth quarter of 2016.
Meanwhile, Canadian Solar’s recent US$265 million acquisition of Recurrent Energy has significantly boosted its U.S. solar pipeline.
Seven late-stage projects have now come under the company’s umbrella, adding 1 GW of soon-to-be-completed capacity chiefly in the states of California and Texas. The projects have pre-approved power purchase agreements (PPAs) in place with what the company terms "investment grade counterparties."
Challenges
In addition to projects under development and/or construction, a number of companies are also aiming to develop new projects before the deadline, the majority of which appear to be within the 20 to 100 MW range, says IHS.
While the news is positive, IHS cautions that all will not be plain sailing. Permitting and approval delays can still be expected, and power off takers must also be secured, if the projects are to be operational by December 31, 2016.
"Some areas in California are plagued with contentious environmental issues, from Native American Tribes fearing the removal or destruction of artifacts from their ancestral homeland to environmental issues," says IHS. It adds that work on the 150 MW Imperial Solar Energy Center West, located in California’s Imperial Valley, halted for a few weeks "when the flat-tailed horned lizard became a possible candidate for protection under the California Endangered Species Act."
Helping pave the path for expedited solar projects are the Bureau of Land Management’s designated Solar Energy Zones (SEZ), which were introduced in 2012 to speed up permitting processes. A total of 17 SEZ were identified at the time, covering 285,000 acres across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Overall, it was estimated that a total deployment of 23.7 GW of renewable energy from the 17 zones would be possible.
"Other projects in less optimal areas will eventually be completed, but possibly not before the deadline, which seems to have affected priorities and caused a saturation of PV projects in certain areas," continues IHS.
Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/us--32-gw-utility-scale-solar-pipeline-expected-to-be-operational-by-2017_100019762/#ixzz3cZgRxzpW
US: Solar accounts for 51% of all new Q1 energy additions
09. JUNE 2015 | BY: BECKY BEETZ
Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/us--solar-accounts-for-51-of-all-new-q1-energy-additions_100019763/#ixzz3cZeHukrO
In another positive announcement for the U.S., a record 1.3 GW of solar PV has been installed in Q1. The residential sector boosted growth, installing more capacity than natural gas, thus highlighting the significance of its future role in the electricity market. Overall, solar accounted for 51% of all new energy generation brought online.
ccording to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and GTM Research, a record 1.3 GW of PV was installed across 66,440 systems in the U.S. in Q1 2015 (compared to 5 GW in China, according to SolarPower Europe). This is the sixth consecutive quarter more than 1 GW has been added. California saw the most capacity installed, at 718 MW, followed by Nevada at 97 MW and New York at 59 MW.
A highlight for the U.S. industry, solar energy accounted for 51% of all new energy generation in Q1. Moreover, both the residential and utility sectors added more new capacity than natural gas.
n their Q1 U.S. Solar Market Insight Report, SEIA and GTM Research calculate that 2015 will see 7.9 GW installed across the country, a 27% increase on 2014. The residential sector is expected to see the most rapid growth, while the utility-scale sector, despite its booming pipelines ahead of the December 31, 2016 Federal ITC deadline, is expected to be the most sluggish.
All hail residential
Marking a 76% increase on the previous year, and rising 11% from Q4 2014, the residential sector saw 437 MW deployed in the first quarter. "Through Q1 2015, nearly one-fourth of cumulative residential solar installations have now come on-line without any state incentive," say the report's authors. This compares to just 2% in 2012. Net metering, the ITC and accelerated depreciation have boosted growth.
On the back of these strong figures, GTM Research’s senior vice president, Shayle Kann, believes the residential sector will become the "primary driver of not only solar market growth, but the overall electricity generation mix." Overall, three million residential systems are expected to be deployed in the next five years.
Representing a 10% decrease on the previous year, the reports states that average costs for residential solar systems are now at $3.48/watt. As usual, California is leading the way, however, Arizona is also experiencing "meaningful residential installation growth." Although still "minor", the share of unsupported installations in New York and Nevada is said to be growing.
Large-scale
In addition to the 437 MW installed across residential systems, the non-residential sector saw 225 MW of new solar capacity added – a decrease of 24% Q/Q and 3% Y/Y.
Despite the decrease, SEIA and GTM Research say they remain "cautiously optimistic" about the sectors’ future health, predicting a 21% increase for the whole year. "Non-residential solar’s incremental rebound in 2015 is expected to come from three factors: California utilities expanding their solar-friendly tariffs for commercial solar, community solar’s emergence, and corporate procurement of onsite solar," they explain.
Non-residential systems costs are said to have dropped by 6% to from $3.43/Wdc in Q4 2014 to $3.23/Wdc in Q1, according to the companies' bottom-up pricing model.
Representing a 10% decrease on the previous year, the reports states that average costs for residential solar systems are now at $3.48/watt. As usual, California is leading the way, however, Arizona is also experiencing "meaningful residential installation growth." Although still "minor", the share of unsupported installations in New York and Nevada is said to be growing.
Large-scale
In addition to the 437 MW installed across residential systems, the non-residential sector saw 225 MW of new solar capacity added – a decrease of 24% Q/Q and 3% Y/Y.
Despite the decrease, SEIA and GTM Research say they remain "cautiously optimistic" about the sectors’ future health, predicting a 21% increase for the whole year. "Non-residential solar’s incremental rebound in 2015 is expected to come from three factors: California utilities expanding their solar-friendly tariffs for commercial solar, community solar’s emergence, and corporate procurement of onsite solar," they explain.
Non-residential systems costs are said to have dropped by 6% to from $3.43/Wdc in Q4 2014 to $3.23/Wdc in Q1, according to the companies' bottom-up pricing model.
Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/us--solar-accounts-for-51-of-all-new-q1-energy-additions_100019763/#ixzz3cZeme0TE
Sounds like nobody got the memo......
It's getting so late in the year, that any acquisition won't have any effect this year.
Graphene layer could quadruple rate of condensation heat transfer in generating plants
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-graphene-layer-quadruple-condensation.html
An uncoated copper condenser tube (top left) is shown next to a similar tube coated with graphene (top right). When exposed to water vapor at 100 degrees Celsius, the uncoated tube produces an inefficient water film (bottom left), while the coated shows the more desirable dropwise condensation (bottom right).
Most of the world's electricity-producing power plants—whether powered by coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission—make electricity by generating steam that turns a turbine. That steam then is condensed back to water, and the cycle begins again
But the condensers that collect the steam are quite inefficient, and improving them could make a big difference in overall power plant efficiency.
Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of coating these condenser surfaces with a layer of graphene, just one atom thick, and found that this can improve the rate of heat transfer by a factor of four—and potentially even more than that, with further work. And unlike polymer coatings, the graphene coatings have proven to be highly durable in laboratory tests.
The findings are reported in the journal Nano Letters by MIT graduate student Daniel Preston, professors Evelyn Wang and Jing Kong, and two others. The improvement in condenser heat transfer, which is just one step in the power-production cycle, could lead to an overall improvement in power plant efficiency of 2 to 3 percent based on figures from the Electric Power Research Institute, Preston says—enough to make a significant dent in global carbon emissions, since such plants represent the vast majority of the world's electricity generation. "That translates into millions of dollars per power plant per year," he explains.
There are two basic ways in which the condensers—which may take the form of coiled metal tubes, often made of copper—interact with the flow of steam. In some cases, the steam condenses to form a thin sheet of water that coats the surface; in others it forms water droplets that are pulled from the surface by gravity.
When the steam forms a film, Preston explains, that impedes heat transfer—and thus reduces the efficiency—of condensation. So the goal of much research has been to enhance droplet formation on these surfaces by making them water-repelling.
Often this has been accomplished using polymer coatings, but these tend to degrade rapidly in the high heat and humidity of a power plant. And when the coatings are made thicker to reduce that degradation, the coatings themselves impede heat transfer.
"We thought graphene could be useful," Preston says, "since we know it is hydrophobic by nature." So he and his colleagues decided to test both graphene's ability to shed water, and its durability, under typical power plant conditions—an environment of pure water vapor at 100 degrees Celsius.
They found that the single-atom-thick coating of graphene did indeed improve heat transfer fourfold compared with surfaces where the condensate forms sheets of water, such as bare metals. Further calculations showed that optimizing temperature differences could boost this improvement to 5 to 7 times. The researchers also showed that after two full weeks under such conditions, there was no measurable degradation in the graphene's performance.
By comparison, similar tests using a common water-repelling coating showed that the coating began to degrade within just three hours, Preston says, and failed completely within 12 hours.
Because the process used to coat the graphene on the copper surface—called chemical vapor deposition—has been tested extensively, the new method could be ready for testing under real-world conditions "in as little as a year," Preston says. And the process should be easily scalable to power plant-sized condenser coils.
"This work is extremely significant because, to my knowledge, it is the first report of durable dropwise condensation with a single-layer surface coating," says Jonathan Boreyko, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech who has studied condensation on superhydrophobic surface. "These findings are somewhat surprising and very exciting."
Boreyko, who was not involved in the research, adds that this method, if proven through further testing, "could significantly improve the efficiency of power plants and other systems that utilize condensers."
Even in Canada!
Egan: Solar power soars as price of panels plummets
BY KELLY EGAN, OTTAWA CITIZEN, OTTAWA CITIZEN JUNE 7, 2015 5:37 PM
Dick Bakker, President of the Ottawa Renewable Energy Co-operative, standing amongst the solar panels on the roof of Franco-Cite School on Smyth Rd. Assignment - 120849 Photo taken at 10:51 on June 5. (Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen)
Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington , Ottawa Citizen
http://www.canada.com/business/Egan+Solar+power+soars+price+panels+plummets/11116673/story.html#__federated=1
Solar power is threatening to save the world again. And this time, it really, really means it.
Forget the energy evangelists for a moment — trust your own eyes. You can’t swing a cat in this town without hitting a solar panel. Hydro Ottawa reports that, in just over five years, some 720 renewable energy projects are now feeding the grid, the vast majority being solar.
Take just one school board. The Ottawa public has solar projects at 41 schools and there are plans to add 24 more. The other three boards have a combined 20 projects and growing. The French public board — how did this slip by? — is producing some 1.2 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 200 homes.
And Bloomberg just reported this astounding fact: in 2013, for the first time, the world added more renewable energy capacity (143 gigawatts) than oil, coal and natural gas combined (141), described as a historic “turning point.”
So here we are, on a gorgeous June evening, on the roof of Franco-Cité, a French Catholic high school on Smyth Road, with the tall, debonair Paolo Maccario, an Italian-born engineer.
He is the general manager of Silfab Ontario Inc., which manufactured the hundreds of panels that lie tilted, checkerboard like, on the flat roof. The Mississauga plant now runs 24/7, he said, and has expanded four times since 2011. “We make four of these in one day,” he said, scanning the 150-kilowatt array, which went online in February.
The story of solar cells, he explained, is comparable to the evolution of the microchip. With enough scale, with continued innovation, they get cheaper and better at an exponentially rapid rate. Not to mention the China effect.
In four years, the price of a solar cell has dropped from about $2.20 per watt to 75 cents, he said, a decrease of 66 per cent. And the trend will continue, as solar production is marching ahead in every corner of the world.
Maccario was touring the site with Dick Bakker, once an all-star football lineman with Queen’s University and now the president of Ottawa Renewable Energy Co-Operative, and its treasurer, Johan Hamels, a longtime Green Party activist in Belgium and Canada.
Bakker installed a $70,000 solar grid on his rural property at Manotick Station in 2010. Today, it would cost less than half and produce better.
They think the comparison to computers and online networks is apt.
“When I was in high school, we worked on a dumb terminal connected to a couple of centralized computers,” said Bakker, in his late 50s.
“Now, over the last 40 years, the grid has evolved so that everybody is carrying a main frame in their pocket.”
The c0-op, which began in 2010, now has 400 members who invest sums in exchange for a set return over long periods, usually 20 years. It has nine projects up and running, fully owned or shared, and four more in the pipeline. They are typically in the 150-to-200-kW range — much bigger than a household unit, but smaller than industrial monsters.
The co-op stresses the idea of local ownership and fundamentally believes in the wisdom of producing power very close to where it will be consumed. Bakker does not see one “silver bullet” solar solution to Ontario’s energy needs but many varied options of tapping into renewables — water, wind and sun.
Much of the progress now depends on the ability of the existing grid to accept the power.
“We’re going to move forward, then sideways a bit, then forward again. It all ties back to the grid and if the grid in that locale is set up (to accept production).”
A senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Energy recently told a conference that Ontario has 1,550 megawatts of solar electricity installed, enough to power roughly 300,000 homes, with another 825 megawatts under way.
There has been controversy, of course, about solar subsidies from taxpayers, which were once at levels some found obscene, especially in an over-supply market. But, in hand with cheaper setup costs, new contracts for small projects pay 38 cents a kilowatt/hour not 80.
The industry predicts solar will be competitive with other renewables by 2018. Look at fossil fuel exploration and the trouble with pipelines, they ask: where will the smart money go?
“It’s the money that makes things go around,” says Maccario.
There is considerable buzz, as well, about a new generation of sleek-looking batteries built as an offshoot of the Tesla electric car. The batteries, intended for homes, industries and utilities, store power for the dark hours or when the draw is at peak.
Then again, there is always considerable buzz in solar — perfectly sunny somewhere, even if it’s the future.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Cost of solar power vexing to Colorado system owners, electric coops
By Mark Jaffe
The Denver Post
POSTED: 06/07/2015 12:01:00 AM MDT
When Tim Edmonson moved to Castle Rock, the one thing he wanted on his new home was solar panels. He thought it was the right thing to do and that it would save money. Edmonson still thinks rooftop solar is the right thing. But he fears he may not save under proposed rates by the Intermountain Rural Electric Cooperative.
The proposal — which after customer protests is already under revision — would cut the residential credit for solar electricity and add a new charge based on peak demand.
"It completely changes the economics (of solar panels)," said Edmonson, 35, who moved to Colorado from Minnesota in July.
Still, faced with a growing pace of solar installations, the current rate structure would lead to a huge subsidy to solar-equipped homes, IREA officials say.
"A solar grows, it becomes unsustainable," IREA general manager Patrick Mooney said.
Still, after criticism from customers, the IREA board is slated to meet before the end of the month to consider changes to its proposal — including exempting current solar homes from the new rates.
The battle in this swath of Colorado — IREA's service territory stretches from the Eastern Plains to the mountains — is part of a larger war going on across the nation between utilities and the solar industry.
"There are cases in 30 states where utilities are challenging distributed solar," said Rick Gilliam, regulatory policy director for Vote Solar, an advocacy group. "It is an industrywide effort."
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has also been holding meetings on the net-metering costs for Xcel Energy, the state's biggest utility. Xcel executives have said that net-metering credits overstate the value of rooftop solar to the system.
IREA's Mooney said the cooperative's proposed rate changes are aimed at keeping the system viable and the books balanced.
"We do have a business to run, and we are struggling just like everyone else," Mooney told solar homeowners at an IREA board meeting Tuesday.
The cooperative's solar homeowners are not convinced.
"IREA makes it hard," Edmonson said. "They don't offer any incentives. When I spoke to solar installers and they heard I was in IREA, there were moans and groans."
IREA, however, offers one of the highest credits in the state for rooftop solar electricity put on the grid — the so-called net-metering credit.
Solar panels occupy Tim Edmonson's roof, but a proposal to change solar rates
could stop others from adding panels. (Patrick Traylor, The Denver Post)
The number of rooftop units in the cooperative's service area has doubled this year to about 650. IREA is the state's largest co-op, with about 148,000 customers.
"It isn't costing us a lot now," Mooney said. "We act now so we don't have tens of thousands of installations that we can't unwind."
The cooperative's proposal also cuts at the solar industry, which has been making sales in IREA territory, which includes parts of Arapahoe, Adams, Douglas, Elbert, Jefferson and Park counties.
"IREA is discriminating against its solar customers," said Nate Watters, a spokesman for SolarCity Corp., the country's largest solar installer.
Solar households in unincorporated areas of the service area now pay 12.3 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they get from IREA.
In incorporated areas, the charge is 11.3 cents a kilowatt-hour.
By state statute, the utility has to credit solar homes the same residential rate for each kilowatt-hour they put on the grid.
Under the proposed rate change, the retail rate and the net-metering credit, just for solar customers, would drop to 6.5 cents a kilowatt-hour.
A "demand charge" — $7 a kilowatt for the top 15-minute peak use — would be added to the bill.
IREA estimates that this would be an average charge of $9.30 to the monthly bill.
The utility's customers aren't so sure.
In addition to solar panels — installed at a cost of $19,000 after tax credits — Edmonson has a Nissan Leaf, an electric vehicle.
"It is our primary car. Our gasoline auto sits in the garage for weeks," said Edmonson, who now worries that charging his Leaf, even in the middle of the night, will give him a high peak rate.
"It looks like it could add $50 onto my monthly bill," Edmonson said.
The use of a demand charge on solar customers is a new device being used by utilities.
People's Electric Company, in St. Paul, Minn., has initiated one that is being challenged at the state Public Utility Commission.
"If utilities choose this tactic, there will be more conflict with customers," said John Farrell, energy director at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
The Salt River Project, an Arizona utility with nearly 1 million customers, adopted a $50-per-month demand charge in February.
In March, SolarCity sued Salt River for anti-competitive behavior.
Before the demand charge, Salt River was averaging 300 applications for solar arrays a month. In the past six months, there have been 89, Vote Solar said.
SolarCity has not yet decided what it will do if IREA adopts a demand charge, company spokesman Watters said.
Cass Zebroski, 39, signed an agreement with SolarCity to put panels on his Roxborough home in the hope of cutting his electric bill.
Zebroski is a fireman with the West Metro Fire Protection District, his wife is a Jefferson County social worker and they have two boys, ages 5 and 7.
"With a family, you try to make every saving," Zebroski said.
The investment — $1,000 with the option of buying the system — has paid off, Zebroski said. Instead of paying IREA about $100 a month, Zebroski pays SolarCity $60 to $70 a month for electricity, plus a $10.30 service fee to the utility.
But if you add in the demand charge, Zebroski said he'd be paying more than if he had no solar panels.
The economics also don't look good for Parker resident Norman Pozner, 73, who invested about $35,000 in a solar array to meet his home's electric demands.
"I feel energy costs are going to go up," said Pozner, a retired businessman.
Under the current rates, the payback period on Pozner's solar array would be nine years. Under the proposed rates, it could be 40 years.
"I may not live to recover the costs," he said.
The demand charge is a more accurate way of recovering the cost of the system, IREA's Mooney said. "More utilities will be using demand charges."
Large businesses have demand charges so a utility can ensure the infrastructure a big electricity user needs. But these businesses also can better manage their electric use.
"I am not a business," said Parker resident Sarah Mann, 53. "I am going to cook dinner when I get home from work. ... I'm not moving it to some other time."
Mann said she is concerned not only about the proposed charges but what they may mean for her home's value.
She has a 25-year lease with SolarCity, which sells her electricity generated by the panels on her roof at about 8.8 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with 11.3 cents from IREA.
But if her cost of electricity goes up, she'll be locked into a lease that will make it harder to sell her home, Mann said.
Under the lease, SolarCity also collects any net-metering credits from IREA at 11.3 cents a kilowatt-hour.
"It's why SolarCity is fighting. It is a sweet deal for them," said IREA's Mooney. "It is the same reason we can't let it continue."
After nearly three hours of public comment during its Tuesday meeting, the cooperative board decided to revise its proposal.
There was a consensus that existing solar-array owners need to be exempted from rate changes for at least some period.
"We need to do something to help these people," said board member James Dozier.
The way the demand charge is calculated may also be modified, Mooney said.
Board member William Kempe said the proposed rate structure needed to be modified because it didn't make it "viable to put in solar."
The board will have a working session this month to go over possible changes, Mooney said. The next official board meeting is in July.
In the meantime, SolarCity has put on hold all solar projects in IREA territory, such as the one Greg Sorge was set to have installed at his home in Bennett.
Sorge, 47, has three big horses and two miniature horses and was hoping to use the panels to help heat the barn and stock tank.
"We have some huge electric payments in the winter, up to $350, and we were hoping the solar panels would help even it out," Sorge said. "But now I don't know what's going to happen. It is frustrating."
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe
Solar power pitch shifts gears
I P Singh,TNN | Jun 8, 2015, 03.06 AM IST
JALANDHAR/NAWANSHAHR: Punjab Energy Development Authority (Peda) has started motivating farmers to diversify towards power production through solar power plants in its education programmes - a move that has come after the Punjab government launched Farmers Solar Power Scheme.
Even as the scheme was being projected as a lucrative proposition, farmers have reservations about the price at which the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited would be purchasing power and the high cost of establishing a power plant.
The PSPCL has fixed Rs 7.04 for purchasing a unit of power and the price has been frozen for 25 years - the duration of agreement between PSPCL and the power plant owner. But during Peda's motivation programme at Nawanshahr on Saturday, farmers asked officials to impose a clause about increasing the price of power yearly or after every two years.
Farmers also demanded subsidy so that price of establishing the plant could be reduced. They told Peda that only rich farmers or NRIs would be able to invest at the given rates and those falling in middle class section could not make such big investment.
Under the scheme, farmers could set up solar power plants of 1MW to 2.5MW. "For installing 1MW solar power plant, five acres of land and Rs 5 crore investment is required. If any farmer wants, he can easily get a bank loan up to Rs 5 crore," said Peda district in-charge Sukhwinder Singh.
Peda officials said for setting up a solar power plant, the land should be within 5 km from the PSPCL grid.
PEDA officials also told farmers that they could also cultivate crops on land where solar power plant would be set up while farmers could also install solar-powered tubewells on their land. "Vegetables or other crops which do not require direct sun can easily be cultivated between two rows of solar panels," said Singh.
Why The Military Will Drive Energy Innovation to a New Level
By Travis Hoium
June 7, 2015 |
California setting new solar records at rapid pace
Sammy Roth, The Desert Sun 9:02 a.m. PDT June 7, 2015
http://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2015/06/07/california-setting-new-solar-records-rapid-pace/28573421/
Photo: Crystal Chatham/The Desert Sun)
California generated a record amount of solar power last week — but don’t expect the high mark to last long.
The state has already set 14 solar records this year, including the latest high of 6,078 megawatts of simultaneous solar generation. And experts expect a steady clip of new records over the next few months, as sunny summer weather kicks into full gear.
“We’ve had moments where the whole state was over 50 percent powered by renewable energy,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a national advocacy group. “Think about that: the seventh-largest economy of the world running on what was formerly an empty pipe dream. It’s absolutely amazing.”
California hit 6,078 megawatts of solar generation at noon on Sunday, May 31, according to the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit corporation that manages the state’s electricity grid. That beat a previous record set May 19, which in turn beat three records set the previous month.
Some of the latest record-breaking marks have only been slight increases over previous highs. But on the whole, solar has been growing at a rapid pace.
California hit 1,000 megawatts of solar generation for the first time in 2012, followed by 2,000 megawatts in 2013 and 3,000 megawatts in 2014. Over the first few months of this year, the state regularly set new records above 5,000 megawatts, followed by its first 6,000-megawatt mark in April.
As California utilities add more renewable energy capacity over the next few years, new solar records will come fast and furious, said Steven Greenlee, a spokesperson for the California Independent System Operator.
“We’re going to see that those (records) fall quickly — maybe even daily, in some cases,” Greenlee said.
The solar numbers reported by the independent system operator aren’t complete. They don’t include several parts of the state, including areas served by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and the Imperial Irrigation District.
They also don’t include rooftop solar and other “behind-the-meter” solar installations, which Browning estimated could total nearly 3,000 megawatts across the state.
More than 73 cities in Southern California installed at least one megawatt of rooftop solar capacity last year, according to GTM Research, a clean-tech consulting firm. And rooftop solar capacity has continued to rise even as state incentives to install solar panels have mostly ended.
“All the growth that we’re seeing right now is without the state incentives. But the market has continued,” Browning said.
California’s rapid solar growth has been fueled both by falling costs and by the state’s renewable energy mandate, which requires major utilities to buy 33 percent of their retail electricity from renewable sources by 2020. In 2013 — the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available — the state’s three largest investor-owned utilities, including Southern California Edison, collectively reached 22.7 percent.
Based on contracts for clean energy projects that haven’t yet come online, those utilities already have most of the electricity they’ll need to hit their 2020 targets. As a result, large-scale solar development has slowed somewhat over the past few years.
But that’s likely to change soon. Gov. Jerry Brown has called for California to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030, and the state Senate passed legislation last week that would make Brown’s target state law. It’s all but guaranteed that the same bill, or a version of that bill, will clear the Assembly as well.
The “instantaneous peaks” reported by the system operator are only one way to measure the state’s solar growth.
California led the nation in new solar capacity in 2014 for at least the eighth year in a row, installing more than 4,300 megawatts of solar. That brought the state to nearly 9,500 megawatts of overall capacity.
Not all of that capacity is actively generating energy at any given moment, for reasons ranging from cloud cover to the amount of dirt that’s built up on solar panels. After rain falls on a solar farm, cleaning off the panels, there’s generally an uptick in production, Greenlee said.
“Maybe the sunlight getting filtered down through the atmosphere isn’t as strong one day as it is the next day, even though our eyes can’t tell the difference,” he said.
Even if lawmakers approve a 50 percent renewable energy mandate, there are still some obstacles ahead for large-scale solar — particularly in the desert, which has some of the best sunlight in the state.
Solar developers have balked at the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a state-federal effort to promote clean energy in some parts of the desert while setting aside other areas for environmental protection. The draft plan released in September is supposed to make clean energy development easier and less expensive, but solar advocates have argued it could actually make development harder and more expensive.
State and federal officials said in March they would delay much of the plan’s implementation, going back to the drawing board on the permitting process for energy projects. Since then, officials have been going through public comments and hammering out details of development zones and conservation zones on public lands, said Dana Wilson, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management’s California branch.
Some environmental groups, meanwhile, have continued to oppose desert solar projects they say would threaten critical species, ecosystems and landscapes.
Officials at the Bureau of Land Management signed off on one of those projects Friday, granting preliminary approval to the 264-megawatt Soda Mountain solar plant near Baker. The project would be located less than one mile from the Mojave National Preserve and could impact bighorn sheep populations, issues that have rankled conservation groups and national park advocates.
“This decision breaks trust with our desert community and contradicts BLM’s professed desire to balance energy development with the protection of special places,” David Lamfrom, senior desert program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement. “This is not balanced decision making. No one thinks this is a wise decision for the Mojave Desert or those of us who live and work here.”
Federal officials said their proposed decision would reduce the project size from 358 megawatts to 264 megawatts, and from 2,557 acres to 1,923 acres. They also noted that the project would generate enough electricity to power more than 79,000 homes.
“Eliminating the array of solar panels north of Interstate 15 provides for scenic vistas and ensures that the project will not be seen from most parts of the neighboring Mojave National Preserve,” the Bureau of Land Management said in a statement.
Sammy Roth writes about energy and water for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.
Solar records
California has set 14 solar records in 2015, thanks to falling costs and the state’s 33 percent renewable energy mandate. Here are the new highs that have been reached this year, in megawatts of simultaneous solar generation:
Feb. 10: 4,933
Feb. 12: 5,117
Feb. 17: 5,166
Feb. 24: 5,309
March 4: 5,638
March 5: 5,790
March 6: 5,812
March 25: 5,861
March 26: 5,890
April 3: 5,935
April 16: 6,000
April 28: 6,038
May 19: 6,072
May 31: 6,078
Source: California Independent System Operator
I'm not asking for much. Only $10 PPS. Is that too much to ask????
Another one bites the dust!
Walter Energy Said Negotiating Bankruptcy as Soon as June
by Laura J Keller
June 5, 2015 — 4:08 PM CDT Updated on June 5, 2015 — 5:18 PM CDT
Walter Energy Inc. is negotiating a debt restructuring with senior lenders that may put the unprofitable coal producer into bankruptcy as soon as this month, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
The coal miner, which rejected earlier proposals sent by creditors, is expected to send a revised plan to first-lien lenders, including Blackstone Group LP’s credit arm, Franklin Resources Inc. and Cyrus Capital Partners, that includes a request for a debtor-in-possession loan that would allow the company to operate while in bankruptcy, said the people, who requested not to be identified because the talks are private.
William Stanhouse, a spokesman for Birmingham, Alabama-based Walter, declined to comment on the talks. Peter Rose, a spokesman for Blackstone’s GSO Capital Partners, and Ember Shmitt, a spokeswoman for Cyrus Capital, declined to comment. Rebecca Radosevich, a spokeswoman for Franklin, didn’t immediately provide comment.
Walter, which last generated an annual profit in 2011, has been in talks with lenders for almost two months on a reorganization as it struggles amid the worst downturn for coal in decades. Prices of metallurgical coal have been undermined by excess supply and slowing demand from China.
Going Concern
The mining company warned last month that there was “substantial doubt” that it could continue as a so-called going concern. If Walter is unable to restructure, it “may consider filing voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11,” according to a May 5 regulatory filing.
The company and the creditor group have so far been unable to agree on how to structure a bankruptcy plan. Creditors expect that the company’s coming proposal may include better recoveries for parties including mine workers to whom Walter owes pensions, the people said. Walter had earlier rejected a proposal by creditors that floated pursuing a sale of the company through the bankruptcy maneuver known as a 363 sale, said one of the people.
The first-lien creditor group, which includes Apollo Global Management LLC, has been pushing for the company to convert its debt holdings into equity and hand over ownership to them, said the people. The creditors had sought to persuade Walter not to make payments due to two sets of junior debt holders in April, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg at the time.
Charles Zehren, a spokesman for Apollo at Rubenstein Associates Inc., didn’t immediately respond to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment.
June Payment
Walter said last month it would make those interest payments 30 days after the due date, taking advantage of a grace period, according to a May 7 statement. Its next payment is due on June 15 to holders of its $388 million of 9.875 percent senior unsecured notes maturing December 2020. Walter would have to pay that coupon by July 15 in order to avoid giving those junior creditors the ability to file a notice of default.
The notes traded at 8 cents on the dollar on May 7, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Walter’s $970 million of 9.5 percent first-lien secured bonds due October 2019 dropped about 1.8 cents to 52.8 cents on June 3, Trace data show.
I'm waiting for that explosion!
I had to sell 10% of my SLTD for grocery money.....
The Tide Is Turning Against ALEC In The Renewable Energy Battle
BY SAMANTHA PAGE POSTED ON JUNE 5, 2015 AT 8:00 AM
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/05/3661566/alecs-rps-battleground/
Powerful interests are facing off on the future of renewable energy in North Carolina.
A bill to freeze the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) — a mandate on how much clean energy utilities have to use — was shoved through committee last month, but despite a wide Republican majority (34-16), the bill hasn’t been brought to the Senate floor. Similar legislation has been introduced and shot down in past years.
Environmental and business groups fighting the bill say that reintroducing the same bill until it passes is a classic American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) tactic. The North Carolina bill was brought by a legislator affiliated with ALEC, the conservative group backed by the Koch brothers, whose billion-dollar enterprise is built largely on fossil fuels.
But despite the time and money ALEC is pouring into fighting the transition to renewable energy, it seems that wind and solar have some powerful supporters, as well. Big businesses, including data services and clean energy developers, have paired with environmental advocates to stymie many of ALEC’s challenges.
Last year, ALEC-affiliated legislators in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Ohio proposed rolling back state RPSs. New Mexico and New Hampshire saw efforts, as well. Only the efforts in Ohio were successful, while Kansas reached a different agreement this year.
Across the country, supporters have relied on free market rhetoric to say RPSs make electricity more expensive. “The high cost of renewable energy is paid by all state citizens, including those who already struggle to pay the cost of electricity,” according to ALEC’s sample legislation for repealing an RPS.
In North Carolina, where a companion bill already passed in the House, Americans for Prosperity’s North Carolina state director Donald Bryson echoed ALEC’s position, saying that the customer fees were set to triple.
“This compromise measure provides relief to families who pay their utility bills and work hard to grow the economy without taxpayer support or government favors,” Bryson said.
The local utility company, though, disagreed with that analysis.
Duke Energy, North Carolina’s giant electricity company — which doesn’t have the cleanest record — doesn’t have a problem with the RPS, and says that ratepayers have not been put on the hook for clean power investment in the state.
“We did not ask for this legislation; we are actually neutral on this legislation,” Randy Wheeless, a spokesman for Duke Energy, told ThinkProgress. The utility has stayed “well under” the cost cap stipulated in the RPS, Wheeless said. “We don’t think the current REP is a cost burden to customers,” he said. In his home area, customers pay about 50 cents a month to support renewable energy development.
North Carolina has been something of a solar success story. Last year, the state was in the top five for solar job growth, adding 2,500 workers, , $652 million was invested in solar installations, and 13 times more solar was installed than in 2010. In fact, North Carolina recently extended an investment tax credit for solar, and the state has attracted some of the biggest names in technology. Data centers use a phenomenal amount of power, and for tech companies, renewable energy is a key component in plans to go green.
While the bill flounders awaiting Senate vote, Apple, Facebook, and Google co-signed a letter to state leadership last week, saying the RPS actually saves money for ratepayers. The companies cited the RPS as a reason they have located in North Carolina.
“The undersigned companies have chosen to locate in North Carolina in part because the state’s existing energy policies enable us to operate and grow our businesses in furtherance of the goals mentioned above,” the letter says.
Renewable energy might save money, but it also has widespread support. A recent University of Michigan poll found that the majority of Americans, “of every race, income and education level, and religious and political affiliation,” support state-level mandates on renewable energy.
The more popular renewable energy is, the more pressure companies have to get off fossil fuels. In one stark example, Amazon has been asked to account for its energy mix after announcing new cloud computing centers in coal-heavy Ohio (which did freeze its RPS last year). Yahoo, Hootsuite, and 17 other online companies have all asked the company to reveal its energy sources.
“Given the threat of climate change and the significant amount of electricity needed to power the cloud, we are increasingly concerned about our responsibility as companies who value sustainability and share concerns about climate change,” the companies wrote.
The fact is solar and wind are becoming better and better investments for companies and utilities, even without mandates. The price of solar, for example, has dropped in half since 2010, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a DC-based trade group. Nearly all of the solar installed in North Carolina is utility-scale. (Apple and other large private electricity users have installed some of their own projects, but a limit on leasing for residential users has prevented the homeowner market from taking off.)
In other words, killing the RPS won’t kill renewable energy, in North Carolina or around the country. Duke’s Wheeless said they have four major solar projects expected to come on line this year and that solar development will continue “with or without this bill.”
ALEC’s one RPS win this year was somewhat of a hollow victory, industry insiders say. For five years, some legislators in Kansas had pushed to rollback that state’s RPS, which is fulfilled primarily with wind farms. Last month, the wind industry and conservative groups came to a compromise, scrapping the RPS in exchange for tax certainty.
But the wind industry is a juggernaut in Kansas. Last year, wind provided 21.7 percent of all the electricity generated in Kansas, more than the 20 percent mandated under the RPS. The 2,967 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity in the state — with another 827 MW under construction — has led to 12,000 jobs and $8 billion in investment, according to the Wind Coalition, an industry group involved in the negotiations.
“This bill is a paper victory that won’t change any of the underlying economic realities favoring the continued development of Kansas’ cheap, clean, inexhaustible wind resources for years to come,” said Dorothy Barnett, executive director, Climate + Energy Project. “The renewable energy momentum we are seeing signals to the world that Kansas is still open for business.”
Republican Governor Sam Brownbeck also knows how important wind is to his state. “I want to see the industry keep growing,” he said flat out when the repeal was announced.
But despite assurances and investment from states and utilities, renewable energy advocates say repealing RPSs send a bad message — and highlights a bigger issue.
“There’s no cost to the state. The utilities aren’t asking for it. So why do it? The only logical answer: politics,” said Ken Johnson, vice president for SEIA. “Some groups supported by fossil fuel interests are hell bent on killing clean energy, and the people of North Carolina shouldn’t be duped by their sleight-of-hand tactics.”
We need some real news again....
Reminder:A great event....
https://www.midwestrenew.org/home
Damn, we are just about the only thing green on my watch list........
Solar, wind and electric cars see countries grow richer and cleaner
Our Common Future Under Climate Change - Tue, 2 Jun 2015 19:38 GMT
Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The exciting and increasingly affordable combination of solar power, wind energy and electric vehicles is transforming the energy sector, says a leading researcher ahead of 2015’s largest meeting of climate scientists.
“The reduction in [clean energy] costs and therefore availability is a fundamental game changer…emerging economies have a real chance to follow a different developmental path than western economies,” said Michael Grubb, Professor of International Energy and Climate Policy at University College London and keynote speaker at the Our Common Future Under Climate Change conference, which aims to profile the latest climate science innovations ahead of December’s landmark UN climate conference in Paris.
“When you look at the aggregate global trends of energy and emissions, it looks very depressing. However when you look at specific contexts, you find lots of interesting opportunities for countries to get richer and cleaner at the same time – and plenty of growing examples.”
Many believe that ever since the industrial revolution, industrial development and economic growth means using more energy, said Grubb who is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Climate Policy.
“What we have found is that this is not really true once a certain level of development and wealth is reached. Many industrialised counties have been able to grow their economies without increasing the amount of emissions per person from the level 25 years ago.”
Countries should focus on transforming their energy sectors through policies that focus on ‘efficiency, pricing, and innovation’, including investing in other sustainable alternatives such as wind and solar.
“By improving efficiency, not only will you reduce people’s bills, but as consumers they will feel like they have more control and involvement in their consumption and will become more conscious of how their energy is made,” said Grubb who has also co-authored a new book Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development.
This is part of a blog series profiling climate scientists, economists, social scientists and civil society members who are presenting and discussing innovative climate science at Our Common Future. For more follow @ClimatParis2015 and #CFCC15 on Twitter.
Below is an edited transcript of an interview with Grubb, who can be reached for comment at m.grubb@ucl.ac.uk
Q: Your new book, Planetary Economics, looks at the history of the energy sector and discusses the need for policies that focus on ‘innovation, efficiency and pricing’. Could you explain what this means?
A: In a nutshell the ‘innovation’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘pricing’ pillars form a framework that helps us understand which policies would be most effective in relation to energy and environmental problems. Most economists expect the problem of energy efficiency to be solved by markets. Markets are seen as the most efficient way of allocating resources and therefore if there is a problem with carbon, the solution would be to raise the price, so that people will use less.
However, not only is this idea difficult to implement in practice, but we now know that the argument is flawed. People are already extremely wasteful in their energy use and they don’t respond to prices in the clear, rational, cost-minimizing way they do when they shop for a can of beans. By improving efficiency, not only will you reduce people’s bills, but as consumers they can have more control and involvement in their consumption and will become more conscious of how their energy is made.
Also, the energy sector has historically been one of the least innovative in our whole economy. And as we have seen with the last decade, fossil fuel price rises just increased the wealth of existing fossil fuel industry and gave them an incentive to find new ways of extracting more fossil fuels. There is huge scope for public policy to accelerate and innovation to accelerate innovation in low carbon directions.
Q: What will be the focus of your presentation at the conference?
A: For 200 years, industrialisation has gone hand-in-hand with more fossil fuel use. But one of the key themes of my presentation is challenging our assumption that economic growth continues to mean using more energy. This is not really true once a certain level of development and wealth is reached.
As countries have passed the $10-15,000 income per year per person threshold (which the rich countries reached decades ago and many emerging economies have reached), emission trends become far more varied. For the past quarter of a century, many rich countries have grown without increasing the amount of emissions per person. Initially, that was because they outsourced emissions. My presentation will show that many have now passed that point and their total ‘carbon footprint’ is starting to decline.
This is not only because of technological innovations and cleaner energy. Once our basic energy needs have been met in terms of housing, security and warmth, economic growth becomes more about information-rich, service-orientated activities – entertainment, dining out, and so forth - which consume much less energy. The global picture of energy trends and emissions has looked daunting from a climate perspective because it has been dominated by the industrialisation of the emerging economies - however when you look at specific contexts, you find lots of interesting opportunities for countries to get richer and cleaner at the same time.
In the industrialised world, for example, the Scandinavian economies rank amongst the most developed economies (and desirable places to live) in the world, but their energy and emissions have substantially declined. Amongst the emerging economies, Brazil stands out as an exceptionally low emitter, and continues to lead the world in biofuels and in low carbon transport, demonstrating that cities with integrated transport systems with exceptionally low emission patterns can be highly attractive.
Q: Do you think that bottom-up approaches would be the most effective way to transform the energy sector?
A: One of the reasons I used the term ‘Planetary Economics’ is that with climate change you are talking about a huge global issue, but when you look beneath the surface, there are lots of ecosystems and processes at work, at all levels. You cannot understand planetary forces without understanding these myriad processes. Once you understand them in their own right, you realise that there are many countries making their own progress on these issues, whether they are directly concerned about the impacts of climate change, whether they are facing environmental pressures in their own countries, or whether they are worried about fossil fuel import dependence.
However, there is a risk of the pendulum swinging from legally binding agreements and conventions to purely bottom-up action, but there needs to be both. The relationship between the two must be mutually reinforcing.
Q: What do see as the most significant advancement in the clean energy sector?
A: I think the biggest single development is solar energy. Fifteen to ten years ago, it looked like a great idea that was far too expensive to reach four fifths of the population. However the huge reduction in costs and therefore availability is a fundamental game changer.
It means that emerging economies have a real chance to follow a different developmental path than western economies. There is still a way to go and there are still many challenges, particularly around storage and its effectiveness particularly given the interseasonal mismatch in colder countries. Still, the exciting combination of solar power development, combined with wind energy and electric vehicles, could really transform the energy sector.
Q: What message do you hope people take from the conference?
A: I think one of the main messages that needs to be communicated from the societal level to policymakers forming a new climate treaty is the need to move away from the ‘blame and burdens’ mentality.
The politics of trying to identify who is most responsible for climate change has proven difficult and unproductive, particularly between the two worlds largest emitters, China and America. This mentality is slowly changing but there is still resistance.
I think the biggest prizes will go to those countries that are smart enough to realise the opportunities presented by climate change to transform their energy sectors to cleaner, more efficient alternatives.
Q: What do you see as the future role for climate science?
A: That is difficult to say because I do feel that there are still too many scientists who talk about climate change as one big problem that the world can go off and ‘solve’.
I think one of the best articles I have ever seen was by Jonathan Rowson, who said that ‘if there is one thing we have learnt is that the solution to this problem does not lie in simply repeating that there is a problem’. We need to craft solutions that align global needs to local politics and deal with the dissonance between people as citizens who are concerned about the future, and people as consumers who want more and cheaper energy.
Businesses will say that they are happy to be clean and green as long as they have the right government policies in place, but as soon as they have to pay for being emitters, they oppose it.
So science needs to help bridge the gap between the macro and the micro levels. What role is there for the natural sciences? Perhaps we need to look at the social science of communicating the hard science in an effective way to maintain momentum i.e. communicating climate change as an ongoing problem, a bit like sound economic management, rather than something to be dealt with every few years in a big UN conference.
A colleague mentioned to me that for the economy, there are established statistics available every month, like GDP, which summarise the state of the economic, but you don’t have anything like that in relation to the climate. Maybe if we had a regular cycle of reporting tangible indicators of both emission and climate change, the problems of energy use and waste would seem more far real to many people. And it could have all the more impact if linked to action – such a carbon price or low-carbon R&D spend indexed on these indicators.
The Nevada solar project.....
Release Date: 06/01/15
Contacts: Jessica Kershaw , Interior_Press@ios.doi.gov
Interior Department Approves First Solar Energy Zone Projects
Three Nevada Projects to Generate 440MW of Clean Energy; Streamlined Review Process Speeds Permitting
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan to cut carbon pollution and create clean energy jobs, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today announced the approval of the first three solar energy projects to benefit from the streamlined permitting process of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Western Solar Plan. When built, the three solar energy projects on public lands in Clark County, Nevada, will generate up to 440 megawatts of energy – enough electricity to power roughly 132,000 homes – and are expected to create up to 1,900 construction jobs.
The Western Solar Plan allows for a more efficient and predictable permitting process by focusing development in solar energy zones with the highest resource potential and lowest conflicts. The expedited reviews of these three projects were completed in less than 10 months, or less than half the amount of time it took under the previous project-by-project system. These reviews also include consideration of the first regional mitigation strategy for solar energy zone projects.
“Through thoughtful planning and upfront public participation, these solar projects demonstrate we can reduce permitting times, create certainty for energy developers, and achieve better outcomes for communities and the environment,” said Secretary Jewell. “Through a landscape-level approach, we are cutting carbon pollution and creating jobs through responsible solar development on our public lands.”
The new projects – Invenergy’s Harry Allen Solar Energy Center, First Solar’s Playa Solar Project, and NV Energy’s Dry Lake Solar Energy Center – were submitted for approval by the three successful bidders to a competitive auction BLM held on June 30, 2014, netting $5.8 million for solar leasing on parcels of public lands in the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone. The auction was part of the competitive leasing process required for solar energy zones under the terms of the Western Solar Plan.
“Today’s announcement realizes the promise of the Western Solar Plan and reinforces the BLM’s commitment to smart-from-the-start renewable energy development in the West,” said BLM Director Neil Kornze. “Projects like these demonstrate that regional planning and mitigation can achieve much faster permitting times and better outcomes. The Western Solar Plan provides a win-win approach for communities and for our public lands.”
The BLM will require a robust set of mitigation measures to avoid, minimize, or compensate for adverse impacts of the proposed development, including an offsite mitigation fee to fund mitigation projects that will compensate for unavoidable impacts as a result of the solar projects. Additionally, the BLM will require funding for long-term tortoise monitoring, post-construction monitoring of birds and bats in compliance with the approved Bird and Bat Conservation Strategy, salvage and relocation of special-status plants, and measures to reduce visual impacts.
These measures reflect the mitigation standards set forth in the Western Solar Plan and the April 2014 Regional Mitigation Strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone. The availability of these standards in advance of the June 2014 auction allowed industry to take future mitigation costs into account when preparing to bid for parcels within the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone.
Under the Western Solar Plan, BLM has designated 19 Solar Energy Zones covering more than 298,000 acres of public land. If fully developed, projects in the designated leasing areas could produce as much as 27 gigawatts of solar energy – enough to power about eight million homes.
Under the President’s Climate Action Plan, the Administration is taking a wide array of actions using existing authorities to reduce carbon pollution, increase energy efficiency, expand renewable and other low-carbon energy sources, and strengthen resilience to extreme weather and other climate impacts. As part of the plan, announced in June 2013, the President directed the Interior Department to approve at least 20,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity on the public lands by 2020.
With the approval of the three Dry Lake solar projects, since 2009, the BLM has authorized 55 solar, wind, and geothermal utility-scale renewable energy projects on public lands, including associated electric transmission facilities and infrastructure to connect to established power grids, for a total of 14,599 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. When built, these 55 projects would provide an estimated 23,000 construction and operations jobs, power about five million homes, and attract private capital investments of approximately $36.6 billion.
Possible 27GW project!
Look Out Coal, Here Comes Fast-Track Solar
June 2nd, 2015 by Tina Casey
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/06/02/look-coal-comes-fast-track-solar/
The Obama Administration seems to be messing with someone’s minds, and we’re guessing that the US coal industry is its target. Late last week, the US Bureau of Land Management announced that it was issuing 28 new coal leases on federal property in Wyoming, only to follow up a few days later with a huge solar announcement: the first three fast-track solar projects in the agency’s new Western Solar Plan have just been approved and they will tote up to an impressive 440 megawatts.
If coal executives were cheered by the Administration’s continued support for their favorite fossil, the fast-track solar announcement http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/info/newsroom/2015/June/nr_06_01_2015.html sure must have shut down that party, and this is only the beginning.
Fast-Track Solar In The USA
The three projects come under the Western Solar Plan, which the Department of the Interior set up in 2012. The Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was tasked with seeing it through.
Keep in mind that for generations, BLM has been the agency responsible for leasing out fossil projects on federal property, and now look at how it enthuses over the latest addition to its energy portfolio:
Solar radiation levels in the Southwest are some of the best in the world, and the BLM manages more than 19 million acres of public lands with excellent solar energy potential in 6 states: California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. State renewable energy portfolios, investment tax credits for solar energy projects, volatile oil prices, and international concern about global warming have all contributed toward public and industry interest in utility-scale solar energy development.
Western solar potential is somewhat limited by the large swaths of flat land required by utility-scale solar, as well as water resources issues and other environmental concerns. Still, under the Obama Administration, BLM has already racked up more than 8,500 MW (megawatts) of solar energy among 29 projects, and more than 70 applications are pending.
The Western Solar Plan is intended to speed things along by setting up pre-approved fast track solar zones in areas with high solar potential and “low conflict,” covering Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. One important criterion is proximity to existing or planned transmission lines, and so far 19 zones have been identified.
If you guessed that many megawatts are involved, run out and buy yourself a cigar. BLM estimates that if and when solar potential in the zones is fully exploited, the total would top out at 27,000 MW. That’s 27 gigawatts for those of you keeping score at home, around enough for 8 million homes.
But wait, there’s more. BLM has also identified areas for solar that could be called into play on a case-by-case basis.
First There Were Three…
With all that in mind, let’s look at the first three projects to come up through the new fast-track solar process.
Fittingly, all three are located in the Dry Lake region of Clark County, Nevada, which also happens to be the home of Nellis Air Force Base, an early adopter of onsite, utility-scale solar.
The three projects were awarded to the winners of a competitive bidding process. That would be Invenergy (the Harry Allen Solar Energy Center), First Solar (Playa Solar Project), and NV Energy (Dry Lake Solar Energy Center).
A case-by-case review of the three projects would have taken close to two years, but under the Western Solar Plan, the reviews for all three took less than 10 months.
Included in the package is a “robust” mitigation plan that covers a range of environmental issues such as long-term wildlife monitoring (think tortoises, birds, and bats) as well as relocating plants from the construction site to other areas.
Solar vs. Coal
Here’s where it gets interesting. Since these are renewable energy projects, there is no such thing as tapping out the field. In addition, the market for solar energy is strictly domestic, which means that you are not going to get the kind of environmental issues — and public pushback — related to fuel transportation and export, let alone local public health hazards on top of climate change issues.
Coal can’t compete, at least not domestically. The cost of solar is sinking like a stone and the US coal-burning industry is shutting down, and the country’s one showcase “clean coal” facility, the $1 billion FutureGen project, has gone dark.
Our friends over at Think Progress have made the point that as crazy as the BLM’s new round of coal leases may look from a climate change perspective, given the current energy scenario, all that coal won’t reach the domestic market. Now that the Western Solar Plan’s fast-track solar process is beginning to bear fruit, the future looks pretty gloomy for coal sales in the US.
As for relying on exports to take up the slack, take a look over at China’s dramatic coal turnaround and it’s pretty clear that the global market for coal doesn’t look all that rosy, either.
Image Credit (screenshot): Solar array courtesy of Nellis Air Force Base.
Keep up to date with all the hottest cleantech news by subscribing to our (free) cleantech newsletter, or keep an eye on sector-specific news by getting our (also free) solar energy newsletter, electric vehicle newsletter, or wind energy newsletter.
With the coal/nat gas/oil energy glut out there. They are starting to attack each other now.
Oil is pushing nat gas + renewables to knock out coal.... Even pushing for a carbon tax....
Oil Industry Takes Aim at Coal, Pushes Gas Ahead of Climate-Change Talks
Executives from Shell, BP and Total say increased gas production could help reduce carbon emissions
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-industry-takes-aim-at-coal-pushes-gas-ahead-of-climate-change-talks-1433258932
PARIS—Europe’s largest oil companies on Tuesday came out forcefully against coal, taking aim at a competing fossil fuel as they push cleaner-burning natural gas ahead of climate-change talks.
Got a shovel to bury this BS?!?!?
Solar Inefficiency Is Economically Ruinous
May 31, 2015
http://news.heartland.org/editorial/2015/05/31/solar-inefficiency-economically-ruinous
In a previous post we pointed out that alternative energies (solar, wind, ethanol and other biofuels) bump up against implacable physical realities which no amount of government spending or research can overcome, and which are environmentally destructive despite propaganda to the contrary. Ethanol in gasoline, for example, according to EPA's own data, increases key pollutants such as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide by as much as 7 percent. Yet it was on the basis of phony scientific claims that ethanol would reduce pollution from automobile emissions that it use was mandated by the government.
Biofuels have a power density of only 0.3 watts per square meter, and modern solar voltaic panels about 6 watts per square meter. An average oil well producing 10 barrels per day is at 27 watts per square meter, and an average nuclear plant more than 50 watts per square meter. Biofuels used 247 million acres of land—that's more than twice the size of California—to produce less than one-half of one percent of the world's energy, according to Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in 2014.
Now I have come across a book that really drives home how impractical it is to talk about replacing fossil fuels, which comprise 87 percent of the world's energy, with any meaningful amount of these alternative sources. The book is Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism. Significantly, it is not from the fossil fuels industry or based on its data or research. Rather, author Ozzie Zehner assembles his case “from government offices, environmentalists, and scientists promoting solar photo-voltaics.” References for the quotations below can be found in the abundant footnotes in his book.
Zehner calculates what it would cost to replace the world's use of fossil fuels with solar power using today's technology. He writes:
By comparing global energy consumption with the most rosy photo-voltaic cost estimates, courtesy of the solar proponents themselves, [emphasis added] we can roughly sketch a total expense. The solar cells would cost about $59 trillion; the mining, processing and manufacturing facilities to build them would cost about $44 trillion; and the batteries to store power for evening use would cost $20 trillion; bringing the total to about $123 trillion plus about $694 billion per year for maintenance.
For comparison, GDP (gross domestic product) of the entire world is now $74 trillion, and U.S. GDP is $17 trillion. This includes all food, rent, industrial investments, government expenditures, military purchases, exports, etc. “This means,” writes Zehner,
that if every American were to go without food, shelter, protection, and everything else while working hard every day naked, we just might be able to build a photo-voltaic array to power the planet in about a decade. But, unfortunately, these estimations are optimistic.
If actual installed costs for solar projects in California are any guide, a global solar program would cost roughly $1.4 quadrillion....Mining, smelting, processing, shipping and fabricating and their associated hardware would yield about 149,100 megatons of carbon dioxide. And everyone would have to move to the desert; otherwise transmission losses would make the plan unworkable.
The cost of solar cells has dropped markedly, but Zehner says the panels
account for less that half the cost of an installed solar system, according to the industry. Based on research by solar energy proponents and data from the California Energy Commission ...cheaper voltaics won't offset escalating expenditures for insurance, warranty expenses, materials, transportation, labor and other requirements. Low-tech costs are claiming a larger share of the high-tech solar system price tag.
Finally, unforeseen limitations are blind-siding the solar industry as it grows. Fire departments restrict solar roof installations, and homeowner associations complain about the ugly arrays. Adding to the burden, solar arrays now often require elaborate alarm systems and locking fasteners; without such protection, thieves regularly steal the valuable panels...For instance, California resident Glenda Hoffman woke up one morning to discover thieves stole sixteen solar panels from her roof as she slept. [Replacement cost $95,000, was paid by insurance.]
There is no reason to believe a smaller program or a graduated one would be any more workable than worldwide replacement of fossil fuels. The losses would be smaller but would still be outweighed by costs in proportion. The only “benefit” of a smaller scale might be to make it easier to hide the costs in a labyrinth of subsidies and budgetary gimmicks and push the cost onto future generations by adding it to the national debt.
It is worth noting, too, that the losses are not limited to the direct cost of the inefficiencies of solar energy. The financial increment consumed by overpaying for energy results in that increment being spent less optimally, too. For example, the argument is made that the solar industry creates jobs; however, those jobs will be in areas such as producing more solar panels for an artificially created demand for an uneconomic product, rather than for the needs of consumers which would be better met by jobs in other fields.
It also means that consumers who are forced to overpay for energy have less money available for other purchases.
Las Vegas Casinos Challenging Warren Buffett's Energy Company
By Travis Hoium
May 31, 2015
Warren Buffett loves solar when he can get a guaranteed return from owning projects, like he does at this one being built by SunPower. But when it challenges his utilities the story changes. Image: SunPower.
Warren Buffett has made his fondness for utilities well known over the last decade. And what's not to like? Customers are more or less captive to their energy companies thus guaranteeing a reasonable rate of return on the assets he installs in regulated territory.
The Las Vegas Strip could soon buy energy from solar plants much like this one. Image: First Solar.
But the energy industry might be changing faster than Buffett realizes, and Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK-B ) $10 billion takeover of Nevada utility NV Energy two years ago could show just how problematic the business is today. He's not being challenged by environmentalists or fossil fuel prices; instead, it's casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, NV Energy's biggest customers, that are threatening to leave the utility and find their energy elsewhere.
24/7 neon takes a lot of energy
It takes a lot of power to run a Las Vegas casino. MGM Resorts (NYSE: MGM) alone accounts for about 5% of NV Energy's electricity delivered, and that's from just 12 properties. Add in Wynn Resorts (NASDAQ: WYNN), Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS), and data center company Switch, and NV Energy relies on just four customers for about 10% of its demand each year. All the more problematic is the fact that; all four companies want to leave the utility.
MGM recently filed an application with the Nevada Public Utilities Commission to purchase 174 megawatts of energy from Tenaska Power Services, an independent power provider. Wynn, Las Vegas Sands, and Switch have also filed paperwork to buy from independent sources.
The companies would still need to use NV Energy's infrastructure to get energy from where it's generated to the casino, but a 2001 state law allows them to shop around for energy instead of buying it from the monopoly utility. The problem for NV Energy is that Nevada has plenty of sunshine and lots of land to build solar fields that provide energy that is cheaper than buying power from the utility.
More than likely, the casinos will follow a model Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) is using with First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR ) to buy solar energy. Apple has agreed to buy 130 MW of energy from a project being built in California. But the project isn't on campus at Apple; it's south of Cupertino, and the energy will in theory be sent through the utility's transmission lines to Apple for consumption. The Las Vegas businesses would use a similar design, building power plants outside of Las Vegas (more than likely solar energy) and using NV Energy's power lines to get the power to the casino or data center.
This is a growing trend for corporations, and the problem for utilities is that large customers are now starting to either buy energy directly from solar and wind projects or are building solar on their own rooftops. This is a major challenge to the utility business model that has had a monopoly over energy for over a century. And Warren Buffett could be affected more than anyone if 10% of NV Energy's customers leave out of the blue.
Be careful what you wish for
The utility business model is being challenged more than it ever has been before by new forms of energy such as wind and solar. Now that corporate customers have the option to put resources on their own properties or buy energy from direct power purchase agreements, they're in total control over energy.
This challenges utilities as we know them and, as Las Vegas is showing, they could lose a big portion of their business. The utilities Buffett grew up with are changing, and NV Energy could feel the pain from new competitive pressure faster than even the Oracle of Omaha could have imagined.
Travis Hoium owns shares of Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, SunPower, and Wynn Resorts, Limited. The Motley Fool recommends Apple and Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple and Berkshire Hathaway. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Busting lies!
Why Germany’s Energiewende is causing ripples in US
By Craig Morris on 1 June 2015
Renewables International
This year, US Senator Lamar Alexander has lashed out against Germany as an example of where the United States should not go. The desperate attempt to reframe the Energiewende as an “energy mess” shows what the real threat is: Germany is poised to prove that a low-carbon future without nuclear is the best option for a thriving industrial country.
In February, Senator Alexander spoke about a future United States “without nuclear power – a day we don’t want to see in our country’s future.” He focused on three countries as examples, one of which was Germany. Here are five things he said (in italics) followed by my response below.
“The cost of attempting to replace nuclear power with wind, solar, and accompanying infrastructure is estimated by the German government at 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars”
The Senator is exaggerating. He probably got the figure from former German Environmental Minister Peter Altmaier, who announced a price tag of a trillion euros for the Energiewende. But over the next 35 years (Germany has targets for 2050), this number only amounts to 30 billion euros a year. Even that amount is probably less than what we will have to pay anyway. After all, Altmaier was not only talking about phasing out nuclear, as the Senator seems to think.
Rather, Germany also aims to reduce the share of fossil fuel in Germany’s energy supply from the current level of around 85 percent down to 40 percent by midcentury. Pursuing the Energiewende is cheaper than not pursuing it. And the Germans aim to do so not only with solar and wind, but also with biomass, efficiency, smart grids, etc.
In this chart from early 2014, Germany’s Fraunhofer IWES calculated the total cost of Germany’s energy transition. The net cost impact (dotted red line in middle) is currently significantly negative, but investments in the energy sector are made for decades. The breakeven point is expected to come in around 2030, and by 2050 the hundreds of billions that Germany will have invested in a future proof, sustainable energy supply will have paid off considerably.
2) “… the subsidies for wind and solar are very high…”
Germany doesn’t subsidize wind and solar; it simply pays what these energy sources actually cost – much in the way the US government arranges prices for medical products and services in Medicare, a program not considered to be a subsidy by the American people and probably not by Senator Alexander (oh, well, never mind). In fact, given its poor wind and solar conditions, Germany has some of the lowest prices for wind and solar in the world; as I recently explained, Dubai has twice as much sunlight as Germany but does not have solar prices twice as low.
Chart 2: The price of an installed solar roof in Germany has historically been much lower than the price in the US, primarily because solar installations involve so much red tape in the US. Today, a solar array in Germany still costs only around 40 percent as much as in the US. So much for Germany overpaying for solar power.
3) “Germany does not produce enough reliable, base-load energy for an important manufacturing economy.”
In 2014, Germany already had nearly 30 percent renewable electricity and among the highest power reliability in Europe. What Senator Alexander fails to accept is an unavoidable truth in Germany: baseload power generators are incompatible with fluctuating wind and solar. And nuclear is baseload, so nuclear is incompatible with wind and solar towards a low-carbon power supply (as Americans will eventually realize when they have as much solar and wind as Germany does).
4) “So, while closing its own nuclear reactors, Germany is buying nuclear power from France, buying natural gas from a very unreliable partner, Russia, and – in a remarkable turn of events – Germany started building coal plants.”
France historically imports more electricity from Germany than it exports to Germany.
Chart 4: In 2014 and previous years, Germany was the only country from which France was a net power importer. Source: French grid operator RTE
While Germany does indeed buy natural gas from Russia (along with hard coal and oil), this situation has not changed in recent years. In fact, over the last years Germany has been diversifying its gas supply by increasing gas imports from Norway. Buying gas from Russia is not a reaction to the nuclear phaseout, particularly because most gas is used outside the power sector for heat.
Above: Sources of natural gas in Germany from 1991-2013. German dependence on Russian imports (light blue bar) has remained relatively stable, whereas dependence upon Norway (pink) has more than doubled. Source: German Ministry of Economics BMWi
Finally, since the nuclear phaseout of 2011, Germany has indeed completed construction of a number of coal plants, but none of them were a reaction to the phaseout. Coal plants generally take around six years to construct, so plants that went online in 2014 were probably first proposed around 2008 at the latest. In fact, since Fukushima Germany has canceled numerous coal plant projects without adding a single one to the pipeline.
5) “Prices are now more than double those in the U.S., and Germany has among the highest household electricity prices in the European Union.”
I’m with the former FERC chairperson on this: “We need to stop looking at rates and start looking at bills.” German power rates are high, but power bills are low by US standards. Most Germans have efficient flat screen TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, and all of the other creature comforts that Americans also love – except for air conditioning, which Germans do not need. In many parts of the US, however, air-conditioning drives up power consumption considerably. Furthermore, industries that consume a lot of electricity pay low power prices in Germany; businesses that consume less electricity pay considerably higher rates than in the US, but power bills make up a small share of expenses for these firms . Labor costs are a more important component .
Above: German household power bills are low by US standards
In conclusion, Senator Alexander is recycling Energiewende myths. During his visit to Germany, he apparently was not curious to see what was really going on. Instead, he cherry-picked numbers to trash talk the German energy transition. He complains about government support for renewables without acknowledging that nuclear only survives today because of governmental support.
His frustration is understandable: Germany is in the process of demonstrating not only that a highly industrialized country does not need nuclear power. The Energiewende also reveals that baseload nuclear is incompatible with a power supply largely based on wind + solar and that a renewable supply is the better option. As such, the Energiewende is a great challenge to Senator Alexander’s baby.
Craig Morris ( @PPchef ) is the lead author of German Energy Transition . He directs Petite Planète and writes every workday for Renewables International
This article was originally published on Renewables International – http://www.renewablesinternational.net/energiewende-doesnt-translate-as-energy-mess/150/537/87819/
0.19620578778/KWH for my power bill
Up 3% over the month!
Damn I need solar!
A Look at Wind and Solar, Part 2: Is There An Upper Limit To Variable Renewables?
http://theenergycollective.com/jessejenkins/2233311/look-wind-and-solar-part-2-there-upper-limit-intermittent-renewables
In our last post, we offered a survey of the progress made so far in wind and solar deployment at the grid-wide scale throughout the world. An accurate and honest accounting of variable renewable energy (VRE) is essential to our goal of building zero-carbon power systems on a high-energy planet. In this follow-up post, we’ll consider what we can glean from VRE performance and modeling about scaling wind and solar further this century.
As our journey through the world’s variable renewable energy leaders illustrates, while wind and solar have come a long way, they have only recently reached double-digit penetration at the grid-wide level in a couple of places (namely Texas, Iberia, and Ireland).
But is it only a matter of time before wind and solar dominate power systems worldwide?
We think there are clear reasons to expect the share of VRE in system-wide electricity mixes to be constrained. Indeed, we offer a rough rule of thumb that is supported by a growing body of power systems research: it is increasingly difficult for the market share of variable renewable energy sources at the system-wide level to exceed the capacity factor of the energy source.
Capacity factor is the ratio of the average output of a wind or solar plant to its maximum rated capacity. For wind power, this typically ranges between 20 and 40 percent, while for solar it runs between 10 and 25 percent, depending on the quality of the renewable resource.
Why is the share of wind and solar in the grid likely constrained to a share equal to their capacity factors?
While much ink has been spilled about the challenges of “integrating” variable renewables into the grid — ie, the increased system flexibility needed to handle the wider variations in power system output necessitated by fluctuating wind and solar output — we actually have a couple more fundamental dynamics in mind. These integration costs are real, but power systems can be remarkably flexible. Natural gas combined-cycle and combustion turbines ramp rapidly, and even coal and nuclear power plants can contribute to system flexibility needs. While accurately accounting for system integration costs is important, we don’t believe these costs will be a showstopper.
Instead, the fundamental economics of supply and demand is likely to put the brakes on VRE penetration.
First, as a growing body of scholarship concludes, the marginal value of variable renewable energy to the grid declines as the penetration rises.
Indeed, where renewable energy earns its keep in the energy market — and is not supported outside the market by feed-in tariffs — the revenues wind or solar earn in electricity markets decline steadily as their market share grows. Here’s why.
Why wind and solar eat their own lunch
Wind and solar produce electricity at roughly zero marginal cost. In effect, whenever they are generating, they shift the supply curve of power plants to the right, or the so-called “net demand” curve (demand minus wind/solar output) to the left. Like any market, more supply and equal demand means lower prices. In the electricity market, this is known as the “merit-order effect.”
As wind or solar energy production increases, the “net demand” (demand minus wind/solar) declines, reducing the electricity market clearing price (eg, from P1 to P2).
In other words, wind and solar depress the market price at exactly the times of day these VREs are generating the most power. The revenues earned by wind and solar for each unit of generation thus falls as the share of renewables rises.
This isn’t a hypothetical. The following graphic illustrates the decline in midday wholesale electricity prices already caused by the rise of solar in Germany from 2006 to 2012.
Source: Lion Hirth, “The market value of variable renewables: The effect of solar wind power variability on their relative price,” Energy Economics (2013), reprinted in the MIT Future of Solar study (2015).
While market prices and thus revenues fall for all generators, the impact is particularly acute for VRE generators, whose output is concentrated in the hours of greatest wind or solar resources, which also tend to be correlated across fairly large areas. The following graphic from MIT’s Future of Solar study illustrates the decline in revenues for a solar farm owner relative to the decline in average wholesale market prices, as solar penetration rises in a Texas-like power system.
Source: MIT Future of Solar study, Chapter 8.
A 2013 Energy Economics paper by Lion Hirth illustrates, the same dynamic as the market share of wind power rises as well. The figure below depicts the decline in the “value factor” or the ratio between the market prices earned by wind generation and the average market price (effectively the ratio between the blue and red lines in the MIT figure above) as wind penetration grows (the rightmost graphic also includes solar).
Source: Lion Hirth, “The market value of variable renewables: The effect of solar wind power variability on their relative price,” Energy Economics (2013).
In short, wind and solar eat their own lunch!
If renewable energy is ever to become truly subsidy independent and earn its keep in electricity markets, that means there is a natural stopping point at which a marginal increment of wind or solar will become unprofitable. The market revenues earned by these VREs will eventually fall far enough that it’s no longer worth deploying more.
This is also why the idea of reaching “grid parity,” or a levelized cost equal to the prevailing market price, is pretty meaningless. As soon as wind or solar penetration grows, the goal posts move further away due to this merit-order or market price effect. Wind and solar costs will have to keep falling to secure greater penetration levels and remain profitable at the ever lower and lower market prices caused by increasing VRE penetration.
Alternatively, if wind and solar are to remain subsidized, the amount of public subsidy per unit of energy supplied will have to keep growing in order to push VRE shares higher and higher. The total subsidy cost could rise sharply, as the price per MWh required increases alongside the quantity of electricity generated from these sources.
Economic and security-related curtailment
While the ‘merit-order’ or market price suppression effect could limit the maximum wind and solar penetration all on its own, there’s a second, even more challenging effect which kicks in right around the point where wind or solar reach a market share equal to their capacity factor.
In effect, once the market share of wind or solar equals its capacity factor, output from this resource will regularly vary between 0 and 100 percent of total electricity demand.
At that point, wind or solar output will have to be regularly curtailed or spilled as VRE supply will begin to routinely exceed demand.
We can illustrate this dynamic by considering the case of Germany. In 2013, 4.5 percent of Germany’s total electricity generation came from solar PV. But on certain sunny days in the summer, solar power supplied half of midday electricity demand.
Simple math suggests what will happen when German solar approaches just 10 percent of total annual generation: at certain times, solar panels will be generating more than 100 percent of demand.
In the short-term, Germany can solve this problem by exporting excess solar output to its neighbors, just as Denmark sends excess wind production to its Nordic friends. Yet if variable renewables are to contribute this kind of share to the whole power system, and not just isolated pieces of the grid, export is not an option.
Indeed, it will be both economical and necessary to curtail wind or solar output long before they reach 100 percent of system-wide electricity demand at any given hour.
To keep the power system stable, a certain amount of flexible and controllable generation (“dispatchable generation” in industry parlance) must remain online and “spinning” to provide the “operating reserves” needed to meet unexpected fluctuations in either demand or VRE output or the failure of a thermal power plant or transmission line. These generators have minimum technical output levels, so in order to keep enough flexible capacity running, wind and solar will not be able to supply 100 percent of demand in any given hour. System security requirements will require curtailment of VRE before this point.
Indeed, according to a major new study of the challenges of integrating wind and solar in the Western Interconnection of North America, the maximum production of variable renewables at any instant can't exceed about 55-60 percent of total demand without risking system stability.
In Ireland, which, as we saw in part 1 is the world leader in variable renewable penetration, system operators currently limit variable renewable production to 50 percent of demand at any given time, although operators are working to increase this limit.
In short, the capacity factor threshold may actually be generous: if the instantaneous penetration of wind and solar can't exceed half or two-thirds of power system demand in any given moment, system security concerns will begin to bind before the penetration of variable renewables reaches their capacity factor.
In addition, it is often economic to curtail wind or solar even if it is not strictly necessary for system security. Big coal, gas, or nuclear-fueled power stations can’t switch on or off on a minute’s notice and have to remain offline for several hours before they can restart. If wind or solar generation is expected to peak for only an hour or two, as is common, it doesn’t make economic sense to turn these lower-cost baseload power plants off to make room for a short-term surge of wind or solar. That would require relying on costlier combustion turbines or other quick-acting power stations when the wind or solar output inevitably died back until the baseload plants can be turned back on again. It is thus cheaper for consumers to ramp the baseload power plants down to their technical minimum output, but then curtail any wind or solar beyond that point. And if those baseload plants are emissions-free nuclear stations, this strategy is both less costly and just as good for the climate.
The following figure, again from the MIT Future of Solar study, illustrates how both economic and system security related curtailment rises rapidly as solar penetration reaches its capacity factor in a Texas-like power system.
Source: MIT Future of Solar study, Chapter 8.
As the figure illustrates, security related curtailment picks up precisely as solar’s share equals its capacity factor—about 18 percent in Texas—while economic curtailment begins well before that point. The same dynamic holds for wind power as well, although it tends to have a higher capacity factor and less “peaky” production profile (which may reduce the amount of economic curtailment compared to solar).
This all matters because even a small percentage of curtailment can quickly ruin the economics of a solar or wind project.
Can’t energy storage help avoid curtailment and keep VRE shares growing? Yes, but only somewhat.
Storage isn’t free after all, and storage owners will make their money on the spread between the price they buy power at and the price they sell at later in the day. They can’t afford to pay a premium for excess VRE output, nor will they have to: with wind or solar output flooding the market at zero variable cost, these VRE generators will be willing to sell at close to nothing to avoid losing all revenues to curtailment.
So storage can help, particularly at reducing the prevalence of economic curtailment, but it’s no a panacea.
The capacity factor threshold: new rule of thumb
If we look at both the market price suppression effect and the growing levels of curtailment as VRE penetration rises, its clear that the “capacity factor threshold” introduced above could be considered a (fairly generous) rule of thumb for power system planning.
We believe this concept — that it is increasingly difficult for the market share of variable renewable energy sources at the system-wide level to exceed the capacity factor of the energy source — should become a much more significant part of power systems discussions now that wind and solar power have left their infancy and are becoming integral parts of power systems worldwide.
This capacity factor threshold is a rough rule of thumb, one that is useful in guiding our thinking about the eventual role of mature wind and solar sectors in various electricity grids.
So far, the insights behind this capacity factor threshold are primarily drawn from modeling the impact of VRE on the grid, but as wind and solar shares grow in a variety of real-world power systems, these dynamics will soon become realities.
Where does this leave us? Wind and solar’s role in decarbonized power systems
The capacity factor threshold implies that wind may eventually be able to provide on the order of 25-35 percent of a power systems’ electricity, while solar may top out at 10-20 percent in most regions.
Achieving those penetration levels would be a remarkable accomplishment for any energy source.
A wind sector at that scale would supply more electricity than nuclear power currently does in the United States or Europe and would rival natural gas for market share. Solar would generate two to three times more electricity than hydropower in the United States today and could even match nuclear’s share in very sunny regions.
Indeed, no single energy source today supplies more than 40 percent of US electricity, so wind and solar could become major contributors to electricity supplies before running afoul of the capacity factor threshold.
No surprise then that the US wind energy industry and the Department of Energy’sambitious “vision” calls for wind to provide 20 percent of America’s electricity by 2030 and 35 percent by 2050. That would make wind one of the most important energy sources in the country.
Yet even at that scale, it’s clear that wind and solar alone will come far short of decarbonizing the electricity system, let alone the full energy sector.
That’s where the capacity factor threshold is most important: in considering the contribution of wind and solar to a fully decarbonized power system, which is an essential component of any credible plan to confront climate change.
At the upper end, this threshold indicates that wind and solar may be able to supply anywhere from a third to a half of all electricity needs. Whether you’re a glass-half-empty or half-full kind of person, that still leaves the job at most half done.
This is precisely why we both laud the growth of wind and solar, but are very concerned when conversations about decarbonizing the power system become overly focused on a “renewables-only” path forward. Wind and solar will be important contributors to a high-energy, low-carbon planet. But they can’t do the job alone — far from it.
Other nonvariable renewable power technologies like biomass and geothermal face different, but potentially even greater obstacles in the form of resource availability in the case of geothermal and land footprint in the case and bioenergy. Nonrenewable zero-carbon technologies like nuclear power and carbon capture, likewise, have their own challenges. An honest conversation about decarbonization necessitates we ask tough questions about how these technologies fit together (and of course it requires making clean energy cheap!).
We are quite doubtful that a renewables-only path is the most technically or economically feasible or desirable path to a high-energy, low-carbon planet. It’s well past time for a much more nuanced discussion about the role wind and solar will play in global power systems.
A systems-level perspective is critical for that conversation, as we hope this article has illustrated.
Wind and solar power are becoming mature, important contributors to power grids worldwide. It’s time for an equally mature conversation about the role of variable renewable energy sources in the decarbonized power systems of the future.
A Look at Wind and Solar Energy, Part 1: How Far We've Come
Posted May 27, 2015
This post is co-authored by Alex Trembath and Jesse Jenkins.
After decades of incipient growth, it seems that wind and solar power are finally ready for prime time. These two renewable energy resources are growing rapidly and are beginning to move the needle in global energy supplies.
Renewable energy’s growth has been fueled for years by deployment subsidies and other support policies — feed-in tariffs, tax credits, portfolio standards, and the like — exactly the kind of proactive public policies that the Breakthrough Institute (where one of us worked and the other still does) has supported since its inception.
While we have both called for reforms to improve the efficacy and sustainability of dominant approaches to deployment policies, we also recognize the tremendously important role deployment policies — however imperfect — have played in driving nascent industries. Just as government investment in research development and demonstration and subsidies for early deployment were central to unlocking the shale gas revolution or giving rise to the modern nuclear power sector, public investment in renewable energy adoption has taken the wind and solar industries a long way.
How far have we come exactly? In 2013, wind turbines generated almost three times as much electricity globally as they did in 2008. Solar generation grew by more than a factor of 10. Together, wind and solar increased from 1.1 percent to 3.3 percent of global electricity over that same period, not an inconsiderable feat as overall global electricity demand simultaneously expanded 14 percent. Of the 6,340.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of power generation growth between 2003 and 2013, 10.9 percent came from wind (564.8 TWh) and solar (122.8 TWh).
Unfortunately, wind and solar will have to sustain rapid growth rates in order to truly compete with coal and other fossil fuels, not just for relative market share, but to drive fossil fuels from the global energy marketplace in absolute terms. [See “Has Renewable Energy Finally Ended the Great Clean Energy Stagnation?”]
At the same time, global figures can mask the larger contributions that wind and solar are already making today in certain grids around the world. As wind and solar move in from the power grid’s margins, the global conversation has shifted in important ways. No longer is the discussion about if renewables will play an important role in the global energy system, but how much of a role and how will they impact energy systems when their penetration levels reach scale?
In short, it is time to start thinking of wind and solar power less as niche technologies and start thinking more about their place in fueling the low-carbon, high-energy world we need in the 21st century.
In that spirit, this post will provide a quick lay of the land on wind and solar’s best performances to date. In a follow-up post, we will consider what implications we can draw from both practical experience and emerging research in power systems modeling.
Wind and solar leaders
When it comes to renewable energy leadership, Germany almost certainly spills the most ink, but it is actually not the world leader in terms of penetration of variable renewable energy sources (or VRE, our shorthand here for wind and solar).
Italy actually out-generates Germany in terms of solar’s contribution to the grid, and Denmark has long held the mantle of global wind leader.
Likewise, several states in the United States have earned accolades for generating significant shares of their electricity with wind –– including Texas, Iowa, Colorado, and California.
Unfortunately, the shares of VRE in these jurisdiction’s energy mixes often overstates the real penetration of these renewable energy sources.
The reality is that while wind may provide 32 percent of Denmark’s electricity and solar generates 8 percent of Italy’s, for example, these countries and states are really part of much larger power grids. Renewable energy advocates sometimes obfuscate this fact, implying that VRE has reached much higher shares of the power system than they truly have. [Data above from the 2014 BP Statistical Review.]
Integrated grids
For example, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) has celebrated that Iowa generated 28.5 percent of its electricity with wind power in 2014. But Iowa is part of a regional energy market and power system run by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator –– which spans parts or all of 13 states, from North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa in the Great Plains to Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, down to Arkansas and Louisiana. As a whole, wind power supplied 5.7 percent of MISO’s demand in 2014.
Source
At the same time, MISO is strongly interconnected with power systems controlled by other market and grid operators, including the PJM market, the largest organized electricity market in the United States (in terms of total demand), which spans from Illinois to the mid-Atlantic coast. The MISO and PJM grids are so well integrated they are moving towards establishing a common power market. At this scale, wind provides just 3.7 percent of combined MISO-PJM demand.
Source
Finally, Iowa is part of the 610 gigawatt Eastern Interconnection, a synchronized gridspanning virtually the entire eastern continental United States (excepting parts of Texas) as well as the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. Wind energy accounted for 3 percent of electricity generated in the American portion of the Eastern Interconnect in 2013 (for which data is available from the EIA).
Source
Similarly, wind supplied more than 10 percent of electricity consumed in Idaho, Colorado, and Oregon, according to AWEA. But each of these states is a member of the 160-gigawatt Western Interconnection, a synchronized grid spanning the entire western half of the continental United States plus Alberta and British Columbia, which gets only 6.6 percent of its electricity from wind.
Finally, most of Texas is supplied by its own synchronized grid known as ERCOT — Texas has always had a go-it-alone mentality! Here, wind penetration finally tops double digits at the grid-wide level, reaching 10.6 percent of electricity demand in the ERCOT system in 2014.
We mention all of this not to diminish the importance of wind energy, but rather to bring the scale of analysis to the power system level. When evaluating the impact that VRE has on the grid, it’s essential to look at the whole grid. We’ll illustrate this with a quick detour to Europe.
Taking the whole system view: a tour of Europe
We start our spin through Europe in Denmark, which for decades has been held up as a model for deployment in wind power. Wind generates about one-third of Denmark’s in-country electricity consumption, but again, looking at the whole grid is important. Denmark is a member of the Nordic Synchronized Area, which also includes Norway, Sweden, and Germany.
Here’s what total generation in the Nordic Synchronized Area looks like, where about 8 percent of electricity generation comes from wind power, while 43 percent comes from fossil energy, 22 percent comes from large hydro, and 17 percent comes from nuclear.
Indeed, when we look Denmark as part of the integrated Nordic system, we immediately see one of the main factors that enabled Denmark to achieve such a large share of its electricity from wind. Denmark benefits tremendously from its interconnections with all three of its Nordic neighbors, using this integrated grid to balance out fluctuating output of wind by importing and exporting over a third of its electricity annually.
On windy days when Danish wind turbines exceed the local demand, Denmark can effectively “store” its excess production in Norway’s flexible hydropower reservoirs, and then import that power again later once the wind dies down. As much as 40 percent of Denmark’s wind generation is exported, according to an analysis by Johannes Mauritzen.
As Roger Andrews at the blog Energy Matters has concluded, “It would appear that Denmark’s ready access to balancing power from the Nordic Grid allows it generate a lot more wind power than it would otherwise be able to, whether it consumes it or not.”
Another window into the Denmark wind situation is the through the Nord Pool Spot, which makes available data on power production from Nordic/Baltic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland). Among this club, wind penetration is approximately 4 percent. This graph shows the generation balance in these countries over the past 4 years:
Source
This analysis itself is incomplete, since Denmark and the Nordic system is also well integrated with the rest of Europe, which is creating a single, unified pan-European electricity market that will enable trade and flow of electricity across the continent. Yet even at the scale of the Nordic system, we see the importance of looking at power systems holistically.
So while countries like Germany and Denmark get most of the ink, it turns out Iberia and Ireland are the true leaders in variable renewable energy penetration Europe at the grid-wide-level.
Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid, and both are VRE leaders. Wind generated 20 percent of Spanish electricity and 24 percent of Portugal’s power in 2013. Solar contributed another 4.9 percent of Spain’s electricity and half a percent of Portugal’s, making the Iberian Peninsula the world leader for grid-wide variable renewable energy penetration.
The Irish grid, which supplies both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is a close second, with 16.3 percent of its electricity from wind in 2013. It is a truly island system with a 500 MW undersea DC cable to the UK its only connection to other grids. (Wind and solar in turn supplied about 8.4 percent of UK electricity in 2013.)
In our next post, we’ll look ahead to the future of wind and solar energy, and what that future tells us about how to build zero-carbon power systems on a high-energy planet.
Southern Co. goes all in on solar, storage, smart homes
Kristi E. Swartz, E&E reporter
EnergyWire: Thursday, May 28, 2015
PINE MOUNTAIN, Ga. -- Southern Co. Chief Executive Officer Tom Fanning made it clear at the company's annual meeting yesterday that Georgia Power customers will soon be able to go directly to the utility and get solar panels to put on their roof.
"Starting July 1, we will now offer distributed generation rooftop solar in Georgia," Fanning said.
Fanning is making good on his word that Atlanta-based Southern is trying to find strategies for customers and tap the rising demand for distributed forms of generation, like solar. His remarks also coincide with the date for a new state law that lets Georgians enter into long-term financing arrangements with independent solar power providers.
The law props open the door for a competitive solar market. For Georgia Power, it marks an opportunity for the dominant utility to get into the rooftop solar business.
Fanning told EnergyWire the utility is still working through the details on how the operation will be commercially structured. That includes issues such as who will finance the panel system and whether the customer will own the panels or lease them, he said.
"But you can call Georgia Power, and Georgia Power will arrange to get a solar panel on your roof," Fanning said in an interview after the meeting. "We'll get one up there."
Georgia's new solar law makes the state the first in the region to have such a wide range of financing options for solar panels, according to those involved in the months of negotiations.
For a large, regulated electric company like Georgia Power, the decision to get into the rooftop solar market is a significant one. Distributed solar generation conflicts directly with the typical utility model of building large, centralized power plants and recouping that money -- plus a profit -- from that investment.
Moving into the rooftop solar business in some ways marks a break from that arcane business model and into a new line of business. It also is a new way Georgia Power can keep its customers hooked as the entire electrical system continues to transform in a way that lets consumers be more in control of how much energy they use.
The announcement of Georgia Power's entrance to the residential solar market is one more sign of utilities' growing embrace of solar power and other distributed energy resources occurring across the country, said Julia Hamm, president and CEO of the Solar Electric Power Association. Solar is now viewed as a real growth area for many utilities, and they are moving ahead with new policies and business models, she added.
Teaming up with Tesla, Nest
According to multiple sources, there has been growing anticipation around Georgia Power's plans for entering the rooftop solar market once the law takes effect July 1. It was not the only news Fanning revealed yesterday, however.
Georgia Power also is prepared to offer roughly 10,000 adaptive thermostats from Nest Labs, the company spearheading the creation of the smart home. Fanning said Georgia Power is giving away the thermostats in exchange for those customers to agree to adopt time-of-use rates.
Such rates vary during peak and off-peak periods of energy use throughout the day.
Those rates will optimize the value of the adaptive thermostat, he said.
Georgia Power's program is the largest deployment of Nest thermostats from a regulated utility, but Fanning said Southern is "looking to take it higher and broader." He eventually thinks the technology can be used like an Internet server that would manage all of a customer's devices, appliances and electricity.
Southern's second announced deal is with Tesla Motors Inc., which earlier this month announced the creation of a new arm, Tesla Energy, along with a new line of electric batteries for homes and small businesses (EnergyWire, May 6).
Southern and Tesla will be testing storage technology for commercial customers -- apartments, big-box retails and others, Fanning said. The deal came out of discussions between Tesla and Southern that started more than a year ago, he said.
"You know we never like to make it public until it's public, and today, it's public," he said.
Utilities have been working on how to store electricity on a large scale. Fanning has been talking about energy storage for more than a year, but said yesterday he sees certain types of that storage as a niche right now. This is largely because of cost.
"We think with the technology that [Tesla is] putting out, its equivalent cost is about 20 cents per [kilowatt-hour], that's certainly more expensive than what we see in Georgia," he said. But the technology may make more economic sense in other parts of the United States where utility rates per kilowatt are higher, he said.
'We're trying to do everything'
Other deals are coming, Fanning said. Southern is testing solar in its residential areas. The company also has been trying to do utility-scale storage deals in California.
"So, we're trying to do everything," he said.
Besides Georgia Power, Southern owns and operates regulated utilities in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. It also owns a wholesale power unit that has been buying large-scale solar projects nationwide and most recently bought a large wind farm.
Fanning said he considers Southern to be a national player, despite its regulated utility concentration in the Southeast. The deals with Tesla and Nest have made it clear that the utility's profile is set to rise, however.
"I think the real interesting national play is ... think about the extension of infrastructure beyond the meter," Fanning said, adding that he will talk this up on CNBC's "Squawk Box," where he is scheduled to appear this morning.
"That is a place we should play," he said. "We can do that anywhere."
Duke Energy Corp To Provide Solar Power To Disney World
Duke Energy is making its latest solar investment by constructing a solar power facility in Florida
DUK
By: MICHEAL KAUFMAN
Published: May 28, 2015 at 6:51 am EST
US electric power company Duke Energy Corp (NYSE:DUK) plans to build a solar power facility in Epcot, one of the four theme parks at Disney World in Florida, the company announced on Wednesday.
The Reedy Creek Improvement District, the governing jurisdiction for the land occupied by the Walt Disney World Resort, voted on Wednesday to accept a fifteen-year power agreement with Duke. Under the terms of the agreement, Duke will lease the land from Walt Disney Co (NYSE:DIS) while the latter will purchase the solar power from the former.
Construction for the plant is to begin in the coming months, with the facility expected to come online as early as the end of current year. The facility is expected to have a capacity of five megawatts (MW), making it the largest solar-power project at Disney World. The resort already deploys solar power panels on a smaller scale, but the five MW project comes after the Improvement District put in a request for a solar facility at Disney World last year.
The project is a part of Disney’s efforts to make its operations green and sustainable, officials at the Reedy Creek said.
Duke Energy has been focusing on solar energy, amidst increasing climate change concerns. “The price of solar continues to come down and it’s a sound investment for us,” a company spokesman told the Orlando Sentinel. “Our customers are wanting more solar options and we’re certainly moving in that direction,” he said.
The latest investment in solar energy by Duke comes weeks after it pled guilty to nine violations of the Clean Water Act (CWA). A fine of $102 million was imposed on the company, along with five years of probation for its coal-ash spill in North Carolina last year.
Duke Energy stock is currently trading at $76.21, up 7.44% over the past 12 months.
Get more DUK research by Bidness Etc
Tesla Battery Being Used In Duke Energy Florida & University of South Florida Solar Project
May 29th, 2015 by Cynthia Shahan
Florida has been far behind in the solar power revolution. Finding better direction, Duke Energy news shares that the company’s efforts towards pursuing clean energy solutions through university research will also involve storing energy from the sun. A solar battery project is bringing together Duke Energy Florida and the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg (USFSP).
The USFSP research project is seeking to learn more about renewable solutions and how to store and use energy from the sun. The project comes from a $1 million grant from Duke Energy.
Take a look at the top of USF, St. Petersburg’s 5th Avenue South parking garage. Installed on the roof is a 100-kilowatt (kW) solar photovoltaic (PV) system. A freestanding canopy of solar panels of this size with space beneath for parking can produce enough energy to power an electric car for half a million miles. The 100-kW solar array at USF, St. Petersburg, measures approximately 7,100 square feet. It has 318 individual panels.
Duke Energy’s press release continues with Alex Glenn, state president of Duke Energy Florida, stating: “This partnership gives Duke Energy and the University of South Florida additional firsthand experience in solar battery storage systems. The innovative and cutting-edge research also provides students a real-world learning environment as we develop alternative energy solutions for our customers.”
The 5th Avenue site system uses solar energy in the garage for lights, elevators, and electric-vehicle charging stations, and the rest is stored in battery systems or put on the electric grid for immediate use. Displayed on the USFSP campus is the high-resolution data collected on the PV installation. Thus, students can follow and learn from the energy storage system. The data are displayed on an online dashboard and several kiosks on the St. Petersburg campus.
As noted in the headline, the batteries used for the Duke Energy & USF project are reportedly coming from Tesla Energy. The press release doesn’t mention that, but Mark Shreiner of WUSF actually has a pic of Tesla Energy mechanical engineer Chad Conway explaining the battery system to Duke Energy Florida President Alex Glenn.
Being at the “utility-scale” level, Tesla “Powerblocks,” as we’re calling them for now, will be the battery systems used in this pilot project — rather than the more widely discussed Powerwalls. According to Tesla CEO and Product Architect Elon Musk, these utility-scale batteries come at a super-low price of $250/kWh and are competitive with any other battery storage systems on the market. Some much larger flow batteries come very close in the lifetime per-kWh price if you estimate a 30-year life and unlimited cycling for them. But note that the warranty period for the Imergy batteries is just 5–10 years, despite claims of unlimited cycling and long life. Another top competitor is the Eos Aurora 1000 | 6000 from Eos Energy Storage. It’s actually much cheaper according to company specs, but it’s not actually on the market yet. All in all, this makes Tesla’s batteries, based on widely used lithium-ion chemistry that has proven itself in many industries, an attractive option for those looking to inch their way into the use of energy storage. I’m curious to see what results we get from the Duke Energy and USF pilot project.
The funding for the new, larger energy storage system generates an opportunity to build upon existing battery technology. At the same time, operating in conjunction with two smaller, existing USF energy storage systems, a growing system evolves.
The Duke Energy Press release continues: “This is an opportunity to manage energy costs while promoting sustainability on campus,” said USFSP Regional Chancellor Sophia Wisniewska. “We are pleased and proud to have been awarded this grant, and to provide faculty and students with a chance to help build something of lasting impact. USFSP has long enjoyed a strong partnership with Duke Energy and we look forward to future collaborations.”
A few more details from the press release:
“USFSP has an existing 2.0-kW solar energy system located at its Central Facilities Plant constructed in partnership with Duke Energy and the USF Tampa School of Engineering. Additionally, a series of solar panels provides power for decorative lights on campus.”
In other efforts, Duke Energy has a number of battery storage projects underway:
Duke Energy Florida’s SEEDS (Sustainable Electrical Energy Delivery Systems) program, which includes two battery storage projects at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg and the Albert Whitted Park, also in St. Petersburg. The two units combine energy storage systems with small solar arrays.
Twenty-four K-12 schools in the Duke Energy Florida service territory have received 25-kilowatt-hour battery backup systems funded by the company that are integrated with their solar PV installations. As with other battery storage projects at Duke Energy, there is performance monitoring of these systems to learn more about combining intermittent energy resources with storage. The installations also help foster educational opportunities for students at the schools.
The company’s Notrees Battery Storage Project in West Texas is North American’s largest battery storage installation project at a wind farm. Duke Energy matched a $22 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to install 36-megawatt (MW) large-scale batteries capable of storing electricity produced by its 153-MW Notrees wind farm.
In other hopeful news, CleanTechnica reports that a fair number of workers will have work from by Duke Energy via solar energy construction projects in North Carolina in the next few months: Duke Energy 900 Workers In North Carolina During Peak Solar Construction This Summer. The largest is at the Warsaw Solar Facility being constructed in Duplin County — a 65 MW project, but there’s also “the 40 MW Elm City Solar Facility being built in Wilson County and the 23 MW Fayetteville Solar project being constructed in Bladen County.”
It has not been so long since Florida’s Duke Energy announced plans to expand the company’s solar footprint. Its plan is to add up to 500 MW of utility-scale solar in Florida by 2024.
Related Stories:
NC Suspects Duke Energy Coal Ash In Water Well Poisoning
Insane Solar Jobs Boom About To Get $32 Million More Insane
Duke Energy Acquiring Majority Stake In REC Solar — Investing $225 Million Into Commercial Solar Projects
Duke Energy Attacks Rooftop Solar Energy (VIDEOS)
500 MW of Utility-Scale Solar in Florida by 2024 — 10 Year Plan from Duke Energy
Keep up to date with all the hottest cleantech news by subscribing to our (free) cleantech newsletter, or keep an eye on sector-specific news by getting our (also free) solar energy newsletter, electric vehicle newsletter, or wind energy newsletter.
Utilities change their tune on solar power
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/utilities-change-their-tune-on-solar-power/2231579
Just two years ago, the president of Duke Energy Florida said the Sunshine State had too many clouds for solar power to be effective.
But since early this year, Alex Glenn, the Duke Florida president, has touted one solar project after another, with promises of up to 500 megawatts over the next 10 years – more than twice the state's current solar capacity.
This week, for instance, Duke announced plans for about 1 percent of its goal with 48,000 panels laid out in a Disney-themed design near Orlando. That followed a solar power event filled with great fanfare, including a set of Tesla electric cars, a week earlier at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
Duke isn't alone.
Florida Power & Light, the state's largest investor owned utility, pledged in January to build three new solar farms that would nearly double the state's current solar capacity. Gulf Power, the smallest of the investor owned utilities, this year entered an agreement with the military for the state's largest solar power system so far.
So why have the Sunshine State's utilities suddenly changed their tune about solar?
Critics of the utilities say it's because they feel threatened by a ballot initiative that would essentially deregulate solar power in Florida through a constitutional amendment. Landlords could install solar panels on properties they own and sell that power directly to tenants, a practice that is currently illegal.
When asked at an energy conference in St. Petersburg Friday whether the ballot initiative is influencing the utilities' push for Solar, Glenn curtly responded: "No."
There are two reasons, he said: for one, panels have dropped in price by 60 percent and second, battery storage systems are developing to allow energy storage when it is cloudy and at night.
"The most significant change is solar panels have come down," Glenn said.
Still, he said, natural gas generated electricity remains cheaper than solar. But "four or five years from now, we think that's going to change" and solar will be even cheaper than natural gas.
Glenn points to battery storage technology under development by companies such as Tesla, Google and Apple that would help drive solar generation in Florida.
Utility critics argue that the power companies have stymied solar's growth in Florida.
Florida ranks 15th in solar development, behind the likes of North Carolina and New Jersey. Georgia has been nipping at the Sunshine State's heels and has threatened to surpass Florida in solar development.
Meanwhile, the Solar Energy Industries Association ranks Florida third in potential for solar power generation.
Scott McIntyre, president of the Florida Alliance for Renewable Energy and CEO of Solar Energy Management, said solar panels have dropped substantially in price but not just "in the last two or three months or the last six months."
"We would like them to participate and get behind the constitutional amendment," McIntyre said.
If the measure passes, solar proponents argue that it would open up Florida's solar energy market, which has largely stagnated for years. The measure would allow business or property owners to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and then sell that power directly to others, such as tenants, without having to go through a utility.
Under Florida law, only utilities can sell electricity directly to consumers, though solar proponents argue that 36 other states allow the practice. By removing the utilities as middlemen, the argument goes, it could help spur solar as a clean-energy alternative.
The ballot initiative is currently before the state Supreme Court for review and final approval of the language to place it on the 2016 ballot. The coalition will need an additional 600,000 signatures to get the petition on the ballot.
In a radio interview with WGCU public radio, state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, described the ballot initiative as "game changing when it comes to solar."
"I'm not a fan of putting things in the Constitution like this," Brandes said. But "the people of Florida are rising up. Boy, what a wake up call. I think it forces the conversation."
A large part of the success of the ballot initiative so far is that it enjoys broad support of an unlikely coalition that includes Tea Party and Christian Coalition conservatives and Libertarians as well as liberal environmentalists such as the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace.
The coalition says the utilities have become fearful that they are losing their monopoly control over the Sunshine State, so they're now reacting with plans for solar only to appease their customers.
"I think they're trying to do their best to try to stop the ballot initiative," said Tory Perfetti, director of the Floridians for Solar Choice, which is organizing the ballot initiative.
"They're going gung ho for this now," Perfetti said. "The fact that they realize that we the people have an alternative to the Legislature ... I think all of a sudden they're trying to run for cover."
Debbie Dooley, a Georgia Tea Party leader who is helping with the ballot initiative, said if the utilities do support solar and the best interest of consumers, they should back the petition.
"They can't have it both ways, these utilities," said Dooley. "Duke Energy wants solar, but they don't want the consumers to have the choice of third party sales.
"They're trying to say, we're not anti-solar, look at these solar projects," Dooley said.
Glenn and other utilities officials disagree with Dooley.
On the same radio show that Brandes appeared on earlier this month, FPL executive Buck Martinez said his utility has been involved in solar since the 1980s.
"We want to do solar in a manner that best meets the needs of our customers," Martinez said.
Glenn said in the analysis that he has seen, about 20 to 30 percent of rooftops are viable for solar in Florida. That means, he said, that while solar will play a significant role in the future, economics support more use of community sized solar projects.
That supports the utilities' business model of centralized power, where they make their money from building power plants and selling electricity – something that rooftop solar and batteries in garages won't do.
But with the state becoming increasingly reliant on natural gas as its electricity generation source, Glenn said solar with its declining costs and battery storage can help diversify.
"We think large scale needs to play a role," Glenn said. "You have to have your eggs in different baskets."
Contact Ivan Penn at ipenn@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2332. Follow @Consumers_Edge.
California Is Giving Poor Residents Solar Energy Using Polluting Companies' Dollars
The Huffington Post | By Robbie Couch
Email
Posted: 05/29/2015 5:09 pm EDT Updated: 30 minutes ago
California's fight against global warming is providing green energy to low-income residents -- and polluting companies are footing the bill.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, about $14.7 million raised from the Golden State's cap and trade system is going toward an initiative by nonprofit Grid Alternatives to install solar panels on homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods for free. The program reduces energy costs for families that could use the help, while simultaneously lessening their environmental footprints.
The state's cap and trade approach limits the amount of greenhouse gases a company can emit and forces polluting companies -- like oil refineries and power plants -- to purchase credit for each ton used. Grid Alternatives is now using those credits to help families save big.
Celebrating expanded access to solar power for California's most disadvantaged communities with Senator Kevin de Le?n, Senator Dr. Richard Pan, Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna, California Air Resources Board, CSD & Coalition for Clean Air today with an install for Mr. Rivera!
The group plans on installing the paneling for more than 1,600 families throughout the end of next year.
“These systems are saving families money every month for food, for clothes, for medical expenses,” Julian Foley, communications director for the organization, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Roy Rivera -- who lives with a disability and depends on a fixed income -- will save an approximate $818 on energy costs throughout the first year following the installation.
"When you have a budget like ours, which is stretched just about as far as you can go, it makes a big difference," he explained.
Although utilizing solar energy can cut down on a family's costs, the relatively hefty installation price -- which can cost $15,000 or more, according to the San Francisco Chronicle -- prevents many low-income Americans from greening their energy source.
Data from last year found less than 3.5 percent of all rooftop solar installations across three states -- New York, Maryland and Massachusetts -- occurred in zip codes with median household incomes at or below $39,999, the Center for American Progress noted.
On the other hand, more than 54 percent of installations in Maryland occurred on homes in zip codes with household incomes exceeding $90,000.
The California program is alleviating those financial burdens for their underserved residents with a win-win approach.
As Vice's Brian Merchant noted, mandating that polluting businesses ante up to help families in need is a popular strategy.
"[The program] also has the advantage of boasting 'good optics,'" he wrote. "As the pundits like to say: It's hard for even the steeliest-hearted, Randiest conservative to argue that taxing pollution to give the poor clean power is a bad idea."
Regulators give green light to largest Minnesota solar energy project
May 29, 2015
David Shaffer | Star Tribune
The biggest solar power project in Minnesota won approval Thursday from state regulators.
The $250 million Aurora Solar Project by Edina-based Geronimo Energy calls for the installation of ground-mounted solar panels at 21 mostly rural sites from Chisago County north of the Twin Cities to Waseca in southeast Minnesota. Geronimo plans to finish the project in 2016 and sell the power to Xcel Energy.
“This signals that something big is happening in solar energy in Minnesota,” said Michael Noble, executive director of Fresh Energy, a St. Paul nonprofit that advocates greater reliance on renewable energy.
It is by far the largest solar project approved in Minnesota, and in one sweep increases the state’s solar output sevenfold. The combined 100 million watts is the equivalent of a small traditional power plant. The largest of the 21 solar sites, near Paynesville, will cover an area the size of Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis.
The state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted 3-0 to approve a permit for project, but rejected three of the original 24 sites, in Pipestone, Wyoming and Zumbrota, because of local land-use objections. Another site, near Hastings, is in jeopardy because of recently discovered soil conditions.
Geronimo Energy said the project will go ahead without them.
“We had offered more sites than we would use because of the need for flexibility if a site ended up not being constructible,” said Betsy Engelking, vice president for policy and strategy at Geronimo.
In a major victory last year, the project successfully competed in a PUC bidding process against natural gas projects. It aims to be a cost-effective means to supply Xcel Energy extra power on high-demand summer days. Geronimo plans to achieve this by installing solar panels that track the sun from east to west, capturing solar power late in the day when electricity demand rises.
To avoid expensive transmission lines, Geronimo selected solar sites near existing electric substations, and will send power straight onto distribution lines. Most of the solar sites now are farmland, and at the request of environmental officials, Geronimo agreed to put bee-friendly native plants under and around the solar panels.
Enel Green Power, a global renewable energy company, will own and operate the solar project, selling the power to Xcel, the Minneapolis-based power company serving 1.2 million electric customers in Minnesota.
Related: Xcel Energy wants size limits on its Minnesota community solar gardens
First of a wave
Even more solar is coming to Minnesota under a 2013 solar energy law that requires investor-owned utilities like Xcel to get 1.5 percent of their electricity from the sun by 2020.
Xcel has signed deals with three other energy developers to build large solar projects in the state.
One of them near North Branch would be the same size as the Aurora project — but all the panels would be installed on one site. Those projects are now seeking permits from the PUC.
One Aurora site that the PUC rejected was in Pipestone, in the southwest corner of the state.
It is adjacent to a residential area. With homes on the south side of the project, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to screen from view the acres of solar panels. Any barrier, such as trees, likely would have blocked the sun.
“The record clearly demonstrates that’s probably not such a great site,” Suzanne Steinhauer, a state Commerce Department official who reviewed the site, told the commission.
A solar site off Hwy. 52 in Zumbrota was rejected because it lies in an area where local and state governments have upgraded roads and utilities hoping to attract commercial and industrial projects, which pay higher property taxes than solar projects.
“We weren’t against solar, just the area it was placed in,” Zumbrota City Administrator Neil Jensen said.
Related: Batteries to store solar energy could presage independence from utilities
Weighing local concerns
State law gives the PUC sole authority to approve or reject large energy projects — trumping local zoning laws — although regulators must consider local concerns. Some legislators have pushed for a change in state law to give local governments more say.
PUC Chairwoman Beverly Jones Heydinger said she recognized that communities raised issues with solar projects.
“Because this is the first facility that we are siting, we are particularly sensitive in having it go as smoothly with local units of government as possible,” Heydinger said.
Engelking said Geronimo hopes to begin construction this fall, using roving teams of construction workers who go from site to site.
Earth-moving crews would start off, followed by those who install the solar panel supports, then teams that install panels and do other work.
To retain eligibility for an expiring 30 percent federal solar investment tax credit, the Aurora project must be generating electricity by the end of 2016. After that, the tax credit drops to 10 percent.
(c)2015 the Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Visit the Star Tribune (Minneapolis) at www.startribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
This article was written by DAVID SHAFFER from Star Tribune and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
SunStation: Good looking solar panels, now affordable
Sami Grover (@samigrover)
Energy / Renewable Energy
May 29, 2015
http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/sunstation-best-looking-affordable-solar-panels-yet.html
© Solarcentury
Aesthetic concerns might seem shallow when compared to the urgent need to fight climate change. Yet I have no doubt the perceived "ugliness" of solar panels has been holding back adoption of renewables in many quarters.
Whether it's neighborhood associations banning panels or competing views about solar on historic listed buildings, we've covered these issues before.
Years back, UK-based Solarcentury launched its range of solar roofing tiles, to much excitement and considerable praise from many homeowners. Yet cost of both manufacturing and installation meant you had to pay a premium if you wanted to keep your roof slick.
That premium may now be a thing of the past.
Today, Solarcentury launched SunStation—a fully building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system that's black in color, and sits flush with the line of your roof. In a clear effort to woo design-conscious fence sitters, the company is trumpeting the fact that fashion designer Wayne Hemmingway is one of the early adopters. Here's what he had to say about the product:
"Great-looking solar is now available for people looking to generate their own energy and reduce their energy bills, whilst maintaining the character of the home. If you’ve been put off by traditional solar panels before, your worries are alleviated. We are fussy about the detail of our home that my wife designed but Sunstation does not compromise the clean lines. Installing Sunstation also allows us to do our bit for the environment, and be thrifty.”
Perhaps even more importantly than that, says Solarcentury, the systems are cost-competitive with traditional on-roof systems because they are manufactured on the same assembly line as regular solar panels. And because they have far fewer parts than previous tile-based systems, installation is much easier too as shown in the video below.
Video: https://vimeo.com/125235037
In terms of what kind of difference this will make in adoption of solar, Solarcentury are citing statistics from their own research showing that "four fifths (81%) of homeowners want their homes to be more eco-friendly, and 96% want to save money on their energy bills. However, more than half (58%) of homeowners believe existing on-roof panels are just too unattractive, with 86% wanting new additions to their home to ‘look stylish’. Two thirds (65%) said that if they installed solar panels they’d have to be less visible and not stand out and a third (32%) even said it was important what their neighbours think about new additions to their home."
Whether these new panels result in increased uptake of solar remains to be seen, but Solarcentury are by no means the only ones working on this puzzle. Elon Musk is on record as saying he wants to make "cool looking solar panels". But what has he ever achieved, right?
SunStation is currently only available in the UK market. We'll let you know if that changes.