Utilities seem to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t when it comes to solar. 27 states plus DC now have renewable portfolio standards in place with mandates for an increasing portion of electricity to come from sources like wind and solar. Yet, when utilities Southern California Edison and Duke Energy Carolinas responded by launching aggressive utility-owned distributed rooftop solar programs recently, their ambitious plans were heavily criticized as being too expensive and unfriendly to competition. Duke has already chopped their planned program in half due to the critiques.
Just this week, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, announced their plans to have 10% of the city’s energy generated by solar by 2020. This aggressive and precedent-setting goal is already drawing criticism. That doesn’t seem quite right - shouldn’t we be praising utilities that are early-adopters and innovators?
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A few months ago I was at a conference on energy storage in Waltham MA and there, something I had long suspected, was confirmed - A123 Systems was indeed expanding into the utility-scale energy storage market. By leveraging the lithium-ion battery technology they developed for their powertools and vehicle products, A123 was able to develop a storage unit capable of providing ancillary services to the grid. What are these “ancillary services” that batteries can address? Ancillary services are required to ensure the reliable delivery of electricity and represent some of the highest-value and most-lucrative capacity in an electric market. Most of these services are designed with “grid stabilization” in mind and are used to address short-term fluctuations in supply and demand, frequency, or voltage.
While grid-connected storage isn’t a new concept, it has only been deployed in limited fashion. Battery-based technologies have been held back by technical limitation (i.e. lead-acid) and cost. Pumped hydropower, which uses the flow from water resevoirs to spin turbines, has been a form of storage that has seen relative success (about 90 GW deployed worldwide), but it is hampered by topographical requirements, cost, and construction time.
Different storage technologies have different characteristics and therefore different applications. For example, pumped hydro is not well-designed for rapid, short duration dispatch, but it can provide capacity for longer periods. This is what makes two rapidly growing battery technologies so exciting: lithium-ion and sodium-sulfur.
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Welcome to EnerBlog. We’re here to cover the future of energy and the technologies and policies that will take us there, all through the prism of those within the energy industry. This site has been in development for the past couple months, but now that we’re live you can expect more frequent updates.
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The Sacramento Bee reports that the city may kill plans to build a next generation waste to energy plant that uses a technology called plasma arc gasification. City council is citing uncertainties around the developer’s opaque financials and the unknown environmental impact of the plant as the reasons why they are hesitant to greenlight a project that will put renewable electricity on the grid while preventing most if not all of the city’s trash from being driven to a dump in Reno.
OK, I get the part about the developer’s financials – but the environmental impact? You’d think there probably isn’t a high environmental bar to get over when the status quo is driving diesel trucks 280 miles roundtrip to throw trash into a hole. But Sacramento’s hesitation actually reveals a pretty good point about this technology: we really have very little idea what will happen if we built one of these plants to utility scale. It’s time for someone to make a sound case for the gasification of solid waste.
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The latest BusinessWeek has a brief article on femtocells - the toaster-sized device you’ll soon be able to buy from your cell phone provider to improve coverage in your house. A device that improves reception in homes should be especially appealing to those who want to join the 20% of homes that have already made the switch away from landlines. Political pollsters may not appreciate a shift en masse to cell phone-only households, but as one of the 20% that has already converted I can say I’ll never go back.
This article on femtocells got me thinking about the parallels between the growth of cell phones and the developing smart grid. There certainly are many similarities. In fact, femtocells are solving a very similar problem for cell phone companies that distributed rooftop solar panels will for electric utilities.
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