Renewable Energy Focus
Scientific American - Mar 13 Environmentalists are cheering California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León's (D) plan to double, and accelerate, the state's current renewables mandate of 50 percent by 2050. Several experts said it can be done, with a lot depending on definitions, technological advancements, and acceptable price tags. De León's S.B. 584 comes as California leaders vow to aggressively push ahead on climate change policies and defy any attempt by the Trump administration to roll back climate and clean energy measures. It also emerges as California's electricity market undergoes a multiyear transformation, said Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association, a trade group that represents natural-gas-fired power and renewable generators. The demand footprint of big utilities is shrinking as several cities have opted for community choice aggregation (CCA), forming groups that contract to buy power.
SanJoseInside - Mar 20 As part of a sweeping transformation in California’s energy market, Silicon Valley cities are forming locally controlled agencies that offer ratepayers a higher mix of renewable energy at a slightly lower cost. San Jose’s City Council will discuss a plan for shifting authority to buy and sell power from investor-owned utilities to a public model called community choice aggregation. While Pacific Gas & Electric—the state’s largest utility company—offers about 30 percent renewable power, the proposed community choice model could potentially provide much more. Several other Bay Area cities have already adopted a similar program, setting a trend for the rest of the state. Residents from 12 local communities have signed on to Silicon Valley Clean Energy, the nonprofit tasked with running the energy agency. As of this month, there are five operational community choice programs in California with another seven poised to launch this year. Within five years, says Kerrie Romanow, the city’s director of Environmental Services, about half the state’s power load could be served by these new local agencies.
Renewable Energy World - Mar 13 Contracts to sell electricity directly to corporate users are among the key demand drivers for wind and solar power, while the influence of state mandates wanes, according to a recent report by Moody’s Investors Service. Multiple factors are spurring corporate power deals, especially from companies that have set their own sustainability goals. And the shift comes as costs continue to fall. Power purchase agreements with wind farms are now available for as low as $15/MWh, according to Moody’s, and $35/MWh for solar. Corporations agreed to buy nearly 3.7 gigawatts of power generated by clean-energy projects in 2015, and another 2.5 gigawatts last year, almost all from wind and solar, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
SFGate - Mar 14 Oakland’s Sungevity has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection A collection of investors, led by Northern Pacific Group, has agreed to take control of Sungevity’s assets in exchange for $20 million in financing to keep the company’s operations going. Those assets will then be sold off in a court-supervised auction, according to Sungevity. The company specializes in a software platform that connects homeowners interested in going solar with installers who could perform the work, supplying instant online quotes. Although executives touted their asset-light model and aggressively expanded both in the U.S. and Europe, Sungevity’s share of the residential solar market remains well behind such competitors as SolarCity and Sunrun.
Los Angeles Times - Mar 15 Solar power led the nation last year among new sources of electricity production, but growth slowed significantly as California homeowners and businesses cooled to the idea of rooftop panels. U.S. rooftop solar installations increased 19 percent in 2016 compared with an average growth of 63 percent year-over-year from 2012 to 2015, even as the solar industry celebrated a record-breaking year. Solar energy represented 39 percent of new electricity production in 2016 compared with 29 percent for natural gas. Overall, solar still provides just 4 percent of the nation’s electricity capacity. Industry experts attributed some of the slowing expansion of the rooftop solar sector to policies that have increased consumer costs as well as to moves by the utility sector to stifle homeowner and business efforts to generate their own electricity from the sun.
Hanford Sentinel - Mar 16 Kings County is processing a conditional-use permit to build a 20-acre, six-phase battery storage facility, designed to work with nearby utility-size solar plants to save and deliver electric power to the grid in morning and evening hours. The California PUC has mandated that utilities contract to buy 1,325 megawatts of battery storage by 2020, and some of it right now. PG&E has awarded a contract to NY-based Convergent Energy for 10 megawatts of DC powered batteries that will be set up at a site near the Henrietta substation near Lemoore, that is already surrounded by a sea of solar farms. Criss-crossed by major transmission lines and popular with solar farm developers, Kings County is likely going to get more of these next generation of renewable energy facilities in coming years. Kings County has been a hotbed of solar activity in the past few years with more coming projects in the pipeline.
UC Berkeley - Mar 15 UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute has entered into a five-year research agreement with Shell International Exploration and Production to fund research that meets the growing demand for energy in ways that are economically, environmentally, and socially responsible. The agreement is to spend up to $25 million over five years on fundamental research in the areas of global energy transition and new energy technology. EBI and Shell are now accepting proposals to initially pursue fundamental research in the areas of solar energy transformation, advanced energy storage, and novel synthesis routes to create new products, and to leverage new capabilities in computational material science and biosciences and bioengineering.
