California Utilities Are Fighting Solar Progress

[kristopher]

California Utilities Are Fighting Solar Progress
Adam Browning of Vote Solar suggests that utilities really don’t appreciate solar power.

ADAM BROWNING: JANUARY 30, 2013

Solar energy is one of California's biggest success stories. Homes, schools and businesses are going solar in record numbers. The growing industry now employs 43,000 Californians and has infused $10 billion in private investment into our otherwise limping economy.

Yet California's investor-owned utilities are quietly gearing up for battle against rooftop solar, using fuzzy math to distort the impact of the program that is the backbone of our state's solar energy boom. The interests of a few monopoly utilities should not outshine the rest of us.

...snip...

But just as California’s grid is beginning to truly transform, here comes the backlash. Rooftop solar is under attack like never before by the state’s investor-owned utilities.

Why would your utility oppose customers going solar?

Utilities make money by getting a guaranteed rate of return on the infrastructure they build -- and that you, the ratepayer, pay for -- such as transmission lines or power plants. Building more infrastructure is better for their bottom line. Rooftop solar reduces the need to build more infrastructure because power is produced on rooftops, right where California needs it most. Rooftop solar generation is good for our electricity grid, but it upsets the status quo that has boosted utilities’ revenues for so long.

The utilities criticize net-metered rooftop solar by claiming that consumers who install solar systems “shift” the costs of running the grid to other utility customers, thereby raising their rates. But this view leaves out one big piece of the cost-benefit equation: namely, the benefits.

...

Read more at: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/guest-post-california-utilities-are-fighting-solar-progress?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=013113&utm_campaign=GTMDaily

[pscot]

1. Nationalize the grid

The grid is too important to be left in the hands of investors who put profit ahead of the country's interests.

[Archaic]

2. A lot of the grid is controlled by co-op/not-for-profits.

But your point is very well taken for the areas it's not.

I would like to see more programs put in by state and federal legislatures that force the utils to accept and pay for electricity generated by homes and businesses. There will always be baseload requirements, and right now coal is king. Until there's some sort of inexpensive awesome storage device for renewable energy, it'll play second fiddle to nuclear/coal/natgas. But when that happens, it's going to be huge.

I am very excited about that story that came out about Lockheed and the fusion reactor they think they'll be demoing in a few years. Most companies can say something like that, and we can ignore it. However, Skunkworks saying something like that is very interesting. If a clean, 100MW power generation station could be plopped down in the right spot, it would allow the dirtiest coal plants to shut down early.

Think about it, if somebody came out with a proper fusion plant, the Feds could fast-track its install, eating the paperwork and regulation fees for any power generating company that will shutdown an equal amount of coal generation permanently.

Knock down the coal, then the NatGas, then the nuclear.

[kristopher]

5. You say "There will always be baseload requirements"

Nope. That just ain't so.

"Baseload" is a concept derived from the characteristics of large scale centralized thermal generation and it is more economic than technical.

Here is an example of how it works:
Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time
Open Access Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2012.09.054

Abstract
We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaics) with electrochemical storage (batteries and fuel cells), incorporated into a large grid system (72 GW). The purpose is twofold: 1) although a single renewable genera- tor at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites, with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours. And 2) we seek minimal cost, calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs. Our model evaluated over 28 billion combinations of renewables and storage, each tested over 35,040 h (four years) of load and weather data. We find that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacity—at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse re- newable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost. At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we find that the electric system can be powered 90%–99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs comparable to today's—but only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759

[Archaic]

6. The very next sentence in my statement said "until there's storage."

Come on man, read the whole paragraph.

[kristopher]

7. No, you wrote "awesome inexpensive storage"

And if you read the study you'd know that there is nothing we are waiting for except to deploy and refine existing technology. The statement &quot t)here will always be baseload requirements" is unambiguous and means the reference to storage is your opinion that we need to duplicate "baseload" with massive storage systems. As I said before, it just ain't true.

Don't feel alone or picked on - lots of people hold the same belief. I just hope that you share the fact that a distributed grid is a machine that has characteristics wholly different than any of its individual generating units the next time you exchange ideas with someone repeating that view as gospel.

Give the study a good read, please.

[Archaic]

8. By Awesome, I meant cool, not huge.

I agree with the study that putting enough renewables online reduces the need for large amounts of storage.

I just worry that the cost of implementing it will be higher than a utility will pay. I know that some utilities use their limits on cost growth as an excuse to do nothing.

[kristopher]

11. "the cost of implementing it"

The transition to a distributed grid is not going to be the choice of the utilities. It will be brought about largely by individual decisions at the local level where economic self interest favors taking control of their own energy supply by individuals, companies, and communities.

The process will steadily whittle down the strength of utilities to dictate the terms of the status quo.

[cprise]

3. This is why the Natural or Green Capitalism concept

...doesn't work.

There is always some externalized cost/benefit to be ignored, and the short term gains of some group of consumers to be played against other people. Those who try to use consumer choice to side with sustainability will be pilloried and excluded sooner or later.

These private utilities will be allowed to develop and propagate their anti-renewables attitude, and it will just be a matter of time until they can make the public uncertain enough that capital can enact its preferred regulatory environment.

[kristopher]

4. I wouldn't jump too quickly to that conclusion

Another point of view is that there are always winners and losers in any tech transition like this. It is natural for the established players to attempt to protect their interests and they often do it successfully - until they don't. There comes a time when those standing to be winners from the new technology form a critical mass that is more powerful than that protecting the status quo and then things change.

It happens all the time and (IMO) we are at that inflection point right now.

Lobby group calls for national standard for US rooftop solar
08. MARCH 2013

The Solar Freedom Now (SFN) grassroots campaign to make household solar affordable has stepped up its campaign by demanding a national policy for all U.S. householders.



The Solar Freedom Now campaign is demanding a unified standard process for installing household rooftop solar in the U.S.

SFN wants to reduce the cost of household installations by half and is calling for a national right to install a standard sub-10 kW rooftop system, using components listed by the independent safety company UL, conforming to the U.S.' National Electric Code standards, installed by a qualified contractor and subject to only one local inspection.

The lobby group is echoing the U.S. Energy Department's war on non-hardware soft costs which, recent research suggests, are responsible for the higher cost of solar systems in the U.S. compared to Germany.

With 18,443 cities in 50 states covered by 3,273 public utility companies, SFN says a unified national process for installing household rooftop solar will drastically reduce the soft costs associated with permitting, inspections, interconnection requirements and documentation.

...

Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/lobby-group-calls-for-national-standard-for-us-rooftop-solar_100010500/#ixzz2N7ZIm563

[cprise]

9. If cost were the overriding issue

...then solar thermal would be a huge success already.

The culture here won't likely support an energy shift for the foreseeable future.

[kristopher]

10. I'm not seeing where I wrote that cost was the overriding issue...

...although I do think it is critical to creating an opportunity for a new set of winners to become manifest.

I'm interested in your perceptions about culture on this issue. Could you expand that comment a bit?

[cprise]

12. In the USA

There is too much greed and too much adulation for people with concentrated wealth and power. With such a mindset, people get very impatient and irate whenever sustainability issues are insinuated into their own plans.

I think about the times I've gone to Democratic events here in Massachusetts. There is this evident schizophrenia going on, where they like to use environmental lip service to sort of pad the margins of their exhortations against Republicans like an optional oh yeah, and that too... very parenthetical. But then you look in the parking lot and its SUV city... I could go to any local Baptist church and see more vehicular humility on display. If you gently brooch the subject of their personal choices, they totally go off on you... like you just flat out called them a racist or murderer or something.

We can all sit down for the PSAs and nod our heads in agreement when the sustainability messages are reluctantly trotted out, but in our own homes and workplaces nothing but nothing is allowed to get in the way of Livin' Large.

There is a difference between what is known to be 'proper' by the intellect, and what is internalized and acted upon at the emotional and social level. In the public mind the former has been starved of a coherent message by TPTB, while the latter has been incessantly directed and reinforced into consumer frenzy.

Think about that: There is an animalistic cultural dynamic that remains largely unaddressed by environmentalists. If you offered people a perfect solar collector, how would they react in their guts if usage of said collectors did not lead to a world where they could imagine themselves becoming the next Bill Gates... to sit on a pile of stocks and bonds that became relatively much more valuable than what others possess? Would they find reasons (even financial incentives) to turn their backs on energy democracy?

By asking people to give up the heat engine model of economics, I think we may also be asking them to give up on Livin' Large. As things stand, that will not fly. Its like facing the consequences of the computer revolution and deciding to legislate a system of artificial scarcity into existence so the old business models of major publishers could continue (you may not be aware, but over the past 13 years our computers and other consumer electronics have been re-engineered to enforce this).

Between the machinations of Finance and corporate media there exudes enough myth-making and vilification to reify almost any fiction (at least until its too late). Environmentalists have to start focusing hard on these two sectors, calling their methods and social arrangements into question from a radical perspective.