1. Most of the solar projects this year in the US are without state subsidies.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/
State renewable portfolio standards have long been the top driver of U.S. utility-scale solar and wind energy growth -- until now.
This year, for the first time ever, more than half of new utility-scale solar capacity will be brought on-line outside of state mandates. In fact, this year’s non-RPS solar capacity will exceed the total utility-scale solar installed in any previous year.Solar PV has gotten so cheap that it has taken on a life of its own.
2. Businesses are simply making their own electricity.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/Big Corporations Are Starting to Ditch Their Power Providers. A Sign of the Utility Death Spiral?
Nevada Power is likely doing a lot of soul-searching.
Last week, two of the biggest Las Vegas casino companies -- MGM Resorts and Wynn -- filed to leave Nevada Power and set off to buy wholesale electricity on their own. MGM has particularly strong renewable energy goals, and the company thinks it can procure clean electrons cheaper than can the utility.
As more large corporations make similar moves, will it lead to a financial disaster for utilities? On this week's podcast, we'll discuss the implications with Cory Honeyman, the associate director of GTM’s U.S. solar research practice, who has been following the commercial customer class closely.
3. Curtailment.
It's time to talk about curtailment, to know what it is.
Last month, the California Independent System Operator quietly announced that it could face a record-breaking need for curtailments -- paying, or forcing, generators to stop pumping electricity into a transmission grid that just doesn’t have the demand for it at the time.
Now that it is raining in California, hydroelectric power is dumping energy onto an already saturated electricity grid. In some cases, the authorities are forced to pay energy suppliers to stop generating electricity (a bit like the government paying farmers not to plant crops).
This might become more of an issue throughout the world -- too much renewable energy with unforeseen consequences.
First of all, when supply of power of any kind exceeds demand, prices drop, and generators can reduce output in response, if they have the flexibility and economic incentives to do so, Greenlee said.
Of course, most of CAISO’s oversupply is coming from generation resources that lack that flexibility, which has led to an increasing incidence of negative pricing.
When negative pricing does not work, it's time for a 'decremental bid'.
CAISO’s next step is to offer generators the opportunity to make money by reducing their power output, he said. “Once we go into an excess or oversupply condition, our market first goes out and sends signals to the generators that say, ‘How much would you take, bid in as a price, to reduce or quit producing?’”
That’s called a "decremental" bid, as opposed to an incremental bid that pays generators to increase production, and through it, “The market solves that oversupply almost in every instance,” he said.
When decremental bids don't work, then it is time for a manual 'exceptional dispatch' intervention.
If all of these market measures fail to bring supply in balance with demand, “We will go in and start manually intervening in the market,” he said. “We will cut self-schedules, and if that hasn’t worked, we will ‘exceptionally dispatch’ units to go offline.”
These manual "exceptional dispatch" interventions do occasionally happen, he said. But they’re very rare. Out of the 240 million megawatt-hours or so that CAISO delivered in 2016, it curtailed about 308,000 megawatt-hours, almost all of it through decremental bids. Self-scheduled cuts and manual interventions made up 1 percent or less of that total, he said.
The actual problem is the declining price of solar PV. If solar was not becoming so inexpensive, curtailment would not be an issue. More solar panels means that 1) households are generating and consuming their own power during the day, decreasing demand, and 2) solar energy is also flooding the grid during the day, increasing supply.
Another issue is the nature of technology. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind -- and in California today, hydro -- are intermittent and thus unpredictable. But there is a reverse problem: It is difficult to turn on and off older forms of electricity generation, like nuclear and coal plants, which ramp up and down rather slowly. That is, they cannot simply be turned on in the evening, when they would be most useful, and then turned off at midnight; instead, they tend to run 24/7.
4. Renewable electricity transformed into gas, liquids and solids
There are big plans for wind in the North Sea, which is now the site of oil rigs.
What is intriguing is how some of this electricity could be transformed into burnable gas.
Here are the advantages of converting electricity to gas, either methane or hydrogen:
A group of European countries is looking to build a giant island in the North Sea in order to support up to 100 gigawatts of offshore wind projects.
If built, the island would be sited on the Dogger Bank, a large North Sea sandbank where the water depth ranges from 15 to 36 meters.
It is intended to act as a staging post for turbine operations and maintenance crews, as well as to provide a central connection for planned far-shore wind farms and host direct current lines acting as interconnectors between Denmark, Germany, Holland, Norway and the U.K.
What is intriguing is how some of this electricity could be transformed into burnable gas.
The island might feature power-to-gas as a storage technique to utilize high volumes of wind generation, said Rasmussen. The North Sea is home to a sophisticated network of gas pipelines, which could help bring wind-generated gas to countries around Europe.
“A part of this work will be to include power-to-gas technology and other storage technologies,” he said. “What, when [and] how much is what we will look into further. It is too early to go into details.”
Here are the advantages of converting electricity to gas, either methane or hydrogen:
Power-to-gas is the functional description of the conversion of electrical power into a gaseous energy carrier like e.g. hydrogen or methane. This technological concept is considered to be an interesting tool in the energy transition.The share of electricity from renewable sources in the European electricity mix is increasing. As the power generation from wind and solar fluctuates, the match between renewable power supply and demand is becoming more challenging. At the same time, there are additional challenges to transmit the increasing volumes of renewable power from wind or solar farms to end users. The gas infrastructure can accommodate large volumes of electricity converted into gas in case that the supply of renewable power is larger than the grid capacity or than the electricity demand. As a result, power-to-gas enables the share of renewables in the energy mix to increase, making this innovation an important topic in achieving a carbon-neutral gas supply in 2050.
Theoretically, the carbon and hydrogen that could be used to create methane could derive from the atmosphere (although the text does not explicitly state this). That would actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere, although it would be released later when it was burned. This would at least displace natural gas production, keeping all that natural gas in the ground.
The same is true with methanol production. Theoretically, electricity from renewable sources could be used to transform atmospheric carbon into methanol for vehicle fuel.
Even more tantalizing would be the prospect of making artificial wood from atmospheric carbon. That would semi-permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere (although trees already do a pretty good job at that).
Incidentally, in the process of colonizing the New World, 50 million people died by 1590, mostly indigenous peoples, mostly from disease. Much of what we now refer to as the "Amazon rain forest" was under extensive cultivation by native peoples, but by 1620 it was reverting to forest. Ice core samples from this period show an increases of oxygen in the atmosphere, and historical records indicate a period of global cooling.
It's not just indigenous people who perish from epidemics.
The point is, there might be greater threats to humanity than what we read about in the newspaper. Global warming is much more abstract than war or terrorism, so ordinary folks don't think about it much. But epidemics might not even be on the minds of elites or the attentive public or scientists. Historically, however, epidemics have been at least as bad war, and might "solve" global warming in the worst possible way.
5. Fuel economy standards
It seems that the Trump administration wants to peel back fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
5. Fuel economy standards
It seems that the Trump administration wants to peel back fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
There is, however, a problematic result of those fuel economy standards. For example, the Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the US, gets 26 mpg on the highway. That's a stunningly high fuel economy for a gigantic truck even when compared to the small Japanese imports back in the 1970s that were an alternative to clunky American gas guzzlers.
Because the government mandated higher fuel economy standards, new technology has been adopted by the automotive industry to dramatically reduce fuel consumption.
The result of that is that with their constantly improving vehicle mileage, Americans simply 1) buy bigger vehicles and 2) drive longer distances. Any kind of technological quick fix to improve gas mileage is canceled out by human desire. It's the Jevons paradox all over again.
Only the high cost of fuel will lower the amount of driving that people engage in, and shrink the size of their vehicles.
The problem is that no one wants more expensive vehicle fuel.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the great Achilles heel of democracies is taxes, because only in a democracy are the people who are taxed the same group who impose the taxes -- the people. So in places like California, with their initiatives and referenda and commitment to other forms of 'direct democracy', the outcome is predictable: People consistently vote for very high social spending and very low taxes. (Trump is the embodiment of democracy in this sense.) In this sense, democracy comes with its own self-destruct mechanism.
Liberals don't want higher fuel costs because it would be a burden on working-class families who live in houses in outer suburbs (and who drive giant trucks and voted for Trump). But it's like liberals are bribing people to live beyond their means and ruin their finances.
Theoretically, conservatives should be for carbon taxes because these would not be taxes, they would be fees imposed on those who use the roads. But of course conservatives don't want to pay fees either, nor do they want to advocate something so lethally unpopular.
There is one exception, and that is ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil rethought its entire operation after the ExxonValdez oil spill in 1989, and that included a new advocacy of a carbon tax. Interestingly, ExxonMobil was simultaneously funding institutions that denied climate change. Advocating a carbon tax is a dirt cheap way of appearing to be environmentally progressive without actually promoting legislation that would hurt the oil industry.
The new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is the former head of Exxon, and he is still warning about climate change and advocating a carbon tax, going against his own new boss in public. That is interesting because if vehicle fuel economy standards and Obama's regulations against the coal industry are negated by President Trump, it would be irrelevant if a carbon tax (fees) were imposed. (Coal is dying anyway.)
But what are the actual chances of a carbon tax (fees)?
