What if everything you thought you knew were not exactly true?

"Conventional wisdom" in the utility-scale renewable energy world says that we can never reach a high penetration of renewable sources of electricity generation because of the intermittency of wind and solar. Also, based upon assumptions of traditional transportation analysts, we will be limited in the number of electric cars that we can plug into the grid because of the significant increase in infrastructure that will have to be added because these vehicles will all tend to plug in at precisely the time we experience the peak electricity demand (after work on summer evenings). Because of this, we have had to temper our goals of increased use of non-damaging energy sources; if the grid cannot handle them, and we need to invest in much more battery storage and upgrades to transformers and transmission lines, it will be a long time before we reach even modest goals.

Thankfully, I have stumbled back into podcast listening, and have reconnected with the work of Steven Lacey who now hosts the Energy Gang podcast at GreenTech Media. I originally found Steven's work when he hosted the This Week in Renewable Energy podcast, and I find the work that he does provides the best balance of what's ahead and what's possible. In just the few weeks I have been listening, I have come across information that takes down the assumptions about interconnecting electric vehicles and renewable sources to the grid...and it's all for the better.

Electric vehicles and the 1950s version of the average American's day

Thanks to some research by Pecan Street Research Institute out of Austin, we know that EV charging habits would not be quite so deleterious to our grid infrastructure as originally thought. Even ignoring for a moment the opportunity available in using energy efficiency to create capacity for new load, the habits used to predict the dire circumstance no longer exist on a grand scale. The load spike assumption relies on a model that predicts people work 9 to 5, and drive home to immediately plug in the car that they have driven to work. Over the past forty years, we have moved to a much less reliable model of employment. Some people work from home, many use alternative transportation, and still others will follow price signals and plug in when it costs less. All of these factors and other contributed to the result that EV charging nowhere near approached the models predicted; that means good news for widespread EV adoption. This will contribute to opportunity related to the next misconception.

A high penetration of renewables may have equal or lower intermittency to conventional fuels...even without storage

Economic estimate of the cost to integrate renewables have almost always added the "gotcha" cost of adding energy storage in order to deal with intermittency. Work at the Rocky Mountain Institute, as well as real-world data from Germany, has shown that when taking into account the variability of loads - and when those loads appear - that the higher the penetration of renewables, the more the grid acts like the current grid. Non-renewable thermal plants already have expected downtime rates of 10-15%, and their failure is much less predictable than solar or wind plants. The existing grid management strategies to deal with that intermittency can carry over to the renewable intermittency without a loss in reliability. Add into that the opportunity presented by the storage capacity of say, 100,000,000 electric vehicle batteries, and we have - at worst - the same reliability with significantly lower environmental impact.

In order to achieve widespread adoption of both of these sets of technologies, we will need to make significant improvements to our grid. It will need to become smarter, more reliable, and better and communicating with the end user. All of that improvement needs to happen anyway as our grid in many eras exceeds the average age of the population. These targeted improvements are necessary regardless of the energy source, so renewables and EV offer no additional requirements. Also, if we move toward more distributed renewables and deeper dives into energy efficiency, we will need to spend less and less on the upgrading of the utility-scale power lines. If planned out, this means we could actually achieve this transition to renewables for much less than expected. Amory Lovins points out during his visit with the Energy Gang that with no new technology adoption and no new policy, a transition to an almost entirely renewable electricity generating grid would SAVE us $5 trillion over the next 35 years.

I know we can do it faster...and that was before I found out how wrong some of my assumptions were.

Friday Five: July 18, 2014

This week has seen a great number of stories about increased numbers of earthquakes, water shortages, and fracking chemical disclosure. With my birthday coming up, I am using my author's prerogative to focus on the positive and forward-thinking...it also helps that almost every one of these supports statements I have been making for several years now.

We start with the electric car revolution, and how it will not only change transportation, but also the ways we produce and use power at home. Combined with smart-grid communications technology, it will also change the way grid operators manage distributed resources. We have heard so much about the cost of battery storage for solar, and assumed it had to be a stand-alone battery system in the basement. What if the battery is sitting in your driveway surrounded by soft, bucket seats and an eight-CD sound system?
Electric cars will change the way you power your home
"The most striking data was from EV owners who also had solar panels. From 7 a.m. to midnight, they used about one-fourth as much power from the grid as the typical household, because they were getting power from their rooftops and often selling power back to the grid. In other words, they took very little from the grid when demand was high — at times even helping to increase supply — and took much more from the grid when demand was low. They helped smooth out demand."

Of course, in the future I see, there isn't a car in every driveway...but maybe we can adapt the plan a little bit to store cars around the city so they can balance out the grid and provide the same benefit as if they were parked right outside ones house.
Helsinki's ambitious plan to make car ownership pointless in 10 years
"Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here."

Creating a space like this, powered by low-to-no cost renewable energy, with ubiquitous, low-cost public transportation, and full of the culture and activity that urban areas provide...it might just bring back a whole host of cities that we had left for dead.
What's the key to turning around Rust Belt cities?
"Some cities effectively prepared for this change, Piiparinen said. Pittsburgh’s educational institutions, for example, produced developers with strong tech skills who could create start-ups in Pittsburgh, especially in the areas of robotics. Buffalo just completed a clinical sciences building, part of $4.4 billion of medicine-related development announced in 2012. Cleveland’s new strengths are rooted in medical device companies, largely because of the Cleveland Clinic, which started doing heart research and married manufacturing and health sciences."

We can even look past carbon to other destructive forms of energy extraction, and if we trust our ingenuity, we can make sure that when we use energy to improve our quality of life, we do not threaten anyone's life or quality of life in the process.
As more nuclear plants shut down can distributed energy fill the gap?
"In the last couple of years, five nuclear power plants in the U.S. have been put on the list for closure. These plants are getting challenged from two sides: competitive natural gas and renewables are eroding the economics of merchant projects, while technical challenges associated with age are making the plants more expensive to operate. In this week's show, we'll look at whether renewables and efficiency are capable of filling the gap left by retired nuclear plants, including the SONGS plant in southern California."

As I predicted, utilities are at the crossroads: either get behind distributed renewables and energy efficiency, or go down fighting - but you will go down. We are already seeing that play out. We cannot life in a country based upon liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then tell someone they have to support a monopolistic business enterprise if it does not make sense to them. Those enterprises do not have to exist in that fashion...and the successful ones are already changing their business model willingly.
Green Mountain is a perfect example of how utilities can embrace distributed renewables
"Enter, Green Mountain Power, the leading electricity provider in the state of Vermont. Rather than simply working against the (likely inevitable) spread of distributed generation, the utility has been transforming itself a company with a business model that puts renewable energy and distributed generation at its core."
In Iowa, solar is fighting back against utilities, and winning
"IPL, the local utility, noticed the solar panels going up, and promptly complained to the Dubuque City Council. The local utility board agreed with IPL in March 2012, but Eagle Point appealed, and in April of last year, the Polk County District Court overturned the utility board’s decision, partly because, as the ruling put it, “The customer will still be connected to the grid, will still be an IPL customer, and must continue to purchase energy and capacity from IPL. Eagle Point is neither attempting to replace or sever the link between IPL and the city. it is simply allowing the city to decrease its demand for electricity from the grid.” In other words, the solar panels weren’t any more illegal than an energy-efficient appliance would be."

Happy Friday!