Tag Archives: grid

The Cal ISO-PacifiCorp deal — Getting more green energy on the grid

Posted: February 12th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The best way to integrate wind and solar energy onto the electric grid — without creating big spikes that require the frequent firing-up of natural gas peaker plants to even things out – is to spread out the renewables over as wide a geographic area as possible.

So, in the case of California, if the wind’s not blowing in the San Gorgonio Pass, it might be nice and breezy up north in the Alta pass; ditto for sun in east Riverside versus San Bernardino or Kern counties.

The California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages the main grid in the state, is taking this concept a step further. The agency on Tuesday announced a memorandum of understanding with PacifiCorps, a utilitythat serves customers in Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, to create something called an Energy Imbalancing Market or EIM.

PacifiCorp is owned by MidAmerican American Energy Holdings Company, owned by Warren Buffett.

So what the EIM will do is allow the ISO, at times of peak demand, to tap into PacifiCorp’s renewable resources, which include more than 2,000 megawatts of wind energy, much of it located in Wyoming.

“This opportunity is something that will resonate through the West where we are on this constant march to integrate renewables into the system while maintaining best rates,” said Steve Berberich, Cal ISO’s CEO, during a press call Tuesday morning. ”We can ultimately share resources efficiently over a much wider footprint.”

The way things work now is that the ISO has a super-charged system that balances energy supply and demand every five minutes, picking energy sources at lowest cost to meet energy needs on the grid. But, beyond the ISO grid, utilities such as Southern California Edison still have to maintain regional balances between supply and demand with manual systems.

The EIM will allow other utilities, such as PacifiCorp, to tap into the five-minute market to even out times of over- or undersupply and ease stress on local utilities.

Widening the footprint from which ISO can draw power should also lower costs. If wind or solar power is available from Wyoming to fill a gap in peak power demand here, that could mean less need to fire up natural gas peaker plants, which are an extremely expensive source of backup power.

The system will run both ways, so any excess renewable power in California could be sold out of state.

Exactly if or how this will affect our energy bills has yet to be determined. Berberich said the cost to set up the EIM will be a “modest” $2.1 million, but projections on savings are still being calculated.

The MOU announced Tuesday is the first step in what could be a lengthy process. The ISO has scheduled a meeting for stakeholders to gather public input on Feb. 27 and the ISO board will also have to give its OK to move forward with the EIM, tentatively at its March meeting.

The system will likely not be online and working until 2014, so it’s not going to be an easy solution to filling in Southern California’s energy needs this summer if the San Onofre nuclear power plant stays off-line as it seems more and more likely it will.

Certainly there will be problems to iron out, unintended consequences to be manged, but the potential is exciting and enormous. A regional EIM covering the Western states could be possible in the future, making integration of wind and solar less of a problem across the region.

You can follow the implementation of the EIM, and daily supply and demand balancing  on the grid with the ISO’s new free smart phone app, ISO Today,

 

Clean Energy Summit wrap-up: The future of the grid

Posted: August 10th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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One of the more frustrating aspects of the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this week was the lack of opportunity for interaction with the speakers.

At most conferences I go to, any presentation includes about 15 minutes of Q & A time, even for high-level speakers such as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.  In fact, most speakers welcome the opportunity; they don’t only want to hear themselves talk.

But in Las Vegas, speakers were brought on and off stage with no opportunity for extra questions from the audience or the press. We were there to listen, not to participate or raise other points of view.

Which was unfortunate since some of the speakers and panels had important things to say, which in turn might have prompted good questions and comments from the audience.

A panel on providing better energy choices for consumers turned into a relatively high-level conversation of what modernization of the electrical grid could mean for consumers in terms of their daily use and conservation of electricity – certainly a timely topic as we face a weekend of high temperatures, utility alerts urging us to conserve and potential power outages due to overheated utility equipment.

Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, spoke of smart grid innovations as eventually allowing consumers access to wholesale energy markets and the ability to change their energy use – when and how much to use certain appliances — based on wholesale prices.

Audrey Zibelman, founder of CEO of Viridity Energy, an energy management consulting firm, took that idea a step further, speaking of how access to wholesale markets would change consumers’ fundamental understanding of energy.

“Because storage is not readily available, the price of electricity is the price for the demand we have at that moment,” she said. “We can manage demand by exposing them to the impact they’re having on price. People don’t understand how much money they’re leaving on the table. Imagine what we could do if people (understood), ‘I can remove myself from the grid if I knew what the price is.’”

Zibelman also sees energy management and the smart grid as emerging technologies where American innovation can create jobs at home and a valuable export market.

But the real game-changer will be storage said Phil Giudice, CEO of Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, which is developing grid-level storage technology.

Instead of an energy system built around meeting minute-to-minute or peak demand, storage will allow the grid to operate on average demand, he said, which in turn will allow much greater use of intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar.

It’s not a matter of if, but when. Giudice is thinking about two more years before workable, cost-effective storage options are available.

Once again, Zibelman took it a step further,  envisioning the ultimate incentive for energy conservation for U.S. consumers, a cash payback for the energy they save or feed back into the grid.

“You have a home energy system; you might have solar, might have a battery. You signed up for a system that reduces energy cost, but you also get a check in the mail,” she said. “Consumers are easily becoming active members (in the grid). They know they are doing well because they’re getting a check in the mail.”

I would have loved to hear more about that, if only we’d had the opportunity to ask.

 

Solar impulses — from roof tops to around the world

Posted: May 25th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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One of the challenges of writing about net metering, as I have been doing the last few days, is trying to figure out why the issue has become so fiercely controversial.

On the face of it, the idea behind net metering seems pretty much a matter of common sense. People or businesses or even schools with solar panels on their roofs will not, to varying extents, be using all the power they generate, which can then go back into the grid and be used elsewhere. If you’re feeding power into the grid, you should get some kind of fair and reasonable compensation for it. 

The more power going into the grid from rooftops, the less need the utilities might have for other sources of power – like fossil fuel-burning power plants.

A February 2012 study from UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment also points to additional benefits arising from the local generation of power that is the foundation of rooftop solar and net metering.

“. . . on-site solar generation has substantial benefits for the electric grid. By producing energy on-site, transmission and distribution losses, wear and tear on utility equipment, and vulnerability to fuel cost increases are all reduced.”

Yet, since California passed its first net metering law back in 1995, any advance or expansion of the program has always been a battle against utility opposition. In the first law, for example, the cap on the amount of power the utilities would have to accept from net metering was set at .1 percent.

A bit bewildered by all this, I asked Southern California Edison officials why it seems in principle the company opposed net metering. 

Now, I have to say that usually, the media folks at Edison are straightforward and as helpful as they can be, working for a major private utility; we know each other and have cordial, professional relationships.

But on the net metering issue, I ran into the proverbial brick wall. Questions were either not answered at all or answered with statements so broad and vague as to be virtually meaningless.

Thursday morning, as soon as the California Public Utilities Commission voted on the net metering issue – expanding the program cap and ordering a study of economic impacts – I was on the phone to my contacts at Edison asking for a comment. I joked around, saying, “You knew I was going to call.”

That was around 11-11:30 a.m., and I told them I had a 5 p.m. deadline. It took them all day to send me a five-line statement – at 5:25 p.m. — that did not even mention the main issue of the net metering cap while making only the most general remarks on the need to analyze all the impacts of the program.

From a reporter’s point of view, this is totally bush league behavior. As a major corporation with a large media department, Edison must have known the decision was coming and should have had a press release with some kind of reasonably substantive statement ready to go the minute the vote was taken and a point person ready to handle media calls.

 The Solar Energy Industries Association sent out a statement by email within minutes of the vote, and I was quickly able to contact the group’s West Coast representative on her cell phone.

Clearly something bigger is going on here.

 At this point, it seems germane to point out that of California’s three private utilities, Edison has so far lagged behind the other two – Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric – in the amount of net metered power it is getting onto the grid.

One of Edison’s filings on the net metering issue incuded a chart showing that as of June 30, 2011, the utility had reached 1.06 percent of its 5 percent net metering cap, compared to 2.36 percent for PG&E and 2.2 percent for SDG&E.

My question to Edison about this was one of the ones that went unanswered, along with my request for more recent figures.

I did ask some other solar folks for their thoughts on these figures as well. Most answered off the record, pointing to things like the cultural differences between Northern and Southern California. We have all those tech folks in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area who are generally more environmentally aware and more likely to try out new technology. Same with San Diego.  I don’t know that I completely buy that — particularly in the Coachella Valley where we have Edison’s summer electric bills as a major incentive.

Another possibility might be how long it takes the company to set up net metering accounts. In recent weeks I’ve heard from two local residents who installed solar and had to wait months for Edison to sort out their net metering accounts.

Ed Trost of Palm Springs installed his solar system last summer and, he reported, by September, he still wasn’t on net metering.

“We were able to generate some free electricity and not get credit,” he told me.

My own personal and no doubt way oversimplified theory is that Edison and the other utilities struggle with small rooftop solar because, while publically they must appear supportive,  it’s something they can’t control and it’s cutting into their business. They’re still trying to figure out a way to make money off it and so far, they haven’t.

That said, large utilities have a tendency not to give up and should never be underestimated. They got the power.

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And before everyone takes off for Memorial Day, here is something totally cool and inspiring – a solar-powered airplane flying around the world.

A picture of the Solar Impulse. a completely solar-powered plane, from the project's website. Madrid was the first stop on the Swiss plane's round-the-world flight.

Called the Solar Impulse, the plane is the product of a Swiss team led by Bernard Piccard, who made the first around-the-world balloon flight, and Andre Borschberg, an engineer and management expert.

The plane has a wing span of 63.4 meters — 208 feet –  covered in 12,000 solar cells. Its next stop is a solar plant near Rabat in Morocco. Needless to say, you can follow the trip online, either on the Solar Impulse website or Twitter feed.

The team’s statement of principles is worth reading.

The ultimate goal of Solar Impulse, beyond the adventure of flying a solar airplane round the world, or rather thanks to it, is to express a humanistic vision which devotes a major place to the pioneering spirit, to the questing mind and to innovation in our everyday lives. For this purpose, we want to bring together and give a voice to all those who share our beliefs –  that the survival of our planet depends on sustainable development; that nature can be protected without fanatical environmentalism; that individual initiative cannot be dissociated from social responsibility; that ethical values and respect for the environment must prevail in the worlds of commerce, finance and politics;  that respect is not an outdated moral precept; and that spirituality does not necessarily entail dogmatism.

God speed, ladies and gentlemen. Have a sustainable weekend.