Energy Exchange

Throughout 2012, EDF’s Energy Innovation Series will highlight more than 20 innovations across a broad range of energy categories, including smart grid and renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency financing, and progressive utilities, to name a few. This series will demonstrate that cost-effective, clean energy solutions are available now and imperative to lowering our dependence on fossil fuels.

For more information on this featured innovation, please view this video on solar financing for SolarCity’s project SolarStrong.

Project SolarStrong by SolarCity is not only expected to be the largest residential solar photovoltaic (PV) project in American history if completed, but will also be a groundbreaking milestone for solar financing in the United States.

In November 2011, SolarCity – along with Bank of America and Merrill Lynch – announced Project Solar Strong, an ambitious five-year plan to build more than $1 billion in solar projects for privatized U.S. military housing communities across the country.  SolarCity partners with leading privatized military housing developers to install, own and operate rooftop solar installations and provide solar electricity at a lower cost than utility-provided power.  SolarStrong is expected to create up to 300 megawatts of solar generation capacity that could power up to 120,000 military homes if completed.

This project will allow privatized military housing developers to save money on energy costs that can be reallocated toward quality-of-life improvements and enhanced services for military families.  SolarStrong will also help the Department of Defense (DOD)—the single-largest energy consumer in the U.S.—secure more of its energy needs from renewable sources operated in parallel with the utility grid.

SolarStrong is expected to create thousands of full-time and temporary jobs; SolarCity hopes to provide many of these jobs to U.S. veterans and military family members, which have been among those hardest hit by the economic downturn.  SolarStrong is a groundbreaking innovation that demonstrates the long term viability of distributed solar generation and the potential for creative financing structures to significantly grow residential solar in the U.S..

SolarStrong’s original plan to secure a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) did not come to fruition, but the project was fortunately able to launch without being part of the loan guarantee program.  Aggressive, creative projects that confirm the viability of alternative financing structures, such as SolarCity’s SolarStrong, are paving the way to making affordable clean energy available on a significantly larger scale.

Throughout 2012, EDF’s Energy Innovation Series will highlight more than 20 innovations across a broad range of energy categories, including smart grid and renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency financing, and progressive utilities, to name a few. This series will demonstrate that cost-effective, clean energy solutions are available now and imperative to lowering our dependence on fossil fuels.

For more information on this featured innovation, please view this video on Bloom Energy’s fuel cell technology.

California-based Bloom Energy is developing a different approach to power generation that has already had a profound impact on the way electricity is produced around the world.

Bloom Energy’s technology relies on fuel cells, which use an electrochemical process in which oxygen and fuel (natural gas or biogas) react to produce small amounts of electricity.  When these fuel cells are stacked upon each other and arranged into large modules called Bloom Energy Servers™ or “Boxes,” they produce up to 200 kW of on-site power.  This is enough power to meet the baseload needs of the average office building or 160 average homes.

Furthermore, this approach has the potential to reduce customers’ CO2 emissions by “40%-100% compared to the U.S. grid (depending on their fuel choice) and virtually eliminate all SOx, NOx, and other harmful smog forming particulate emissions.”  It also enables the possibility of affordable on-site, user-owned power generation that is as constant and reliable as a utility and   provides an attractive economic payback for customers.

This kind of technology is a win-win economically and environmentally; one from which all sectors stand to benefit.  The Bloom Energy Server also makes the micro-generation concept feasible.  Imagine subdivisions, apartment complexes or neighborhoods with their own carbon-free (if powered by renewables), mini power plants.

Source: Bloom Energy

Founded in 2001, Bloom Energy sold its first Bloom Box to Google and can trace its roots to the NASA Mars space program.  In the last few years, the company has lined up an impressive list of name-brand customers, including eBay, Walmart, Coca-Cola and FedEx and is rumored, according to GigaOm and others, to be “the supplier behind Apple’s planned massive 5 megawatt (MW) fuel cell farm to be built at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina.”  If built, this would be the nation’s biggest non-utility fuel cell installation.

In the U.S., much of the attention the Bloom Box has generated has focused on these large corporate customers.  But the on-site generation concept could make its biggest impact in developing nations like India and China, where small communities and villages don’t have an electric infrastructure and new energy sources are in high demand. 

The Bloom Box also has the potential to address problems here at home, with reliability concerns facing electric grids throughout the country. In Texas, where the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) struggles with how to add new capacity to meet growing peak demands and reduce water dependency at the same time, the Bloom Box offers an approach that can provide power at well below the peak prices paid for electricity during last year’s record drought.

To learn more about this topic, please view this post by Nobile Profit.

Update: eBay announced on June 21, 2012, that it will be using Bloom Energy fuel cell technology to construct a large-scale project at its data center in Utah. The proposed 30 fuel cells (the largest non-utility fuel cell installation) will run on biogas and will make their data center independent of the electricity grid.

Throughout 2012, EDF’s Energy Innovation Series will highlight more than 20 innovations across a broad range of energy categories, including smart grid and renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency financing, and progressive utilities, to name a few. This series will demonstrate that cost-effective, clean energy solutions are available now and imperative to lowering our dependence on fossil fuels.

For more information on our first featured innovation, please view this video on Xtreme Power’s energy storage solutions.

Energy storage helps integrate clean energy into the electric grid

The electric grid today doesn’t look all that different from when Thomas Edison first envisioned it over 100 years ago. Walk into a utility control room today and you might still see the “red phone” that they use for emergencies.

Thankfully, power companies throughout the U.S. see real value in upgrading our grid with modern energy management technologies and energy sources that are fast, more flexible and cleaner. Companies are taking various approaches, innovating across the clean tech spectrum from renewable energy to communications to energy storage.

In energy storage, some are working on battery technology, which – though much more advanced – works essentially the same way as traditional batteries. You charge them when power is plentiful, and use them when it isn’t.

Innovative energy storage solutions in action 

Source: Xtreme Power

Xtreme Power is a developer of digital power management and energy storage solutions and is currently designing the world’s largest battery system (36 MW) for Duke Energy’s 153 MW wind farm in Notrees, Texas, which was jumpstarted by a grant from the Department of Energy.

Xtreme Power’s Dynamic Power Resources™ (DPR®) solution combines their PowerCell™ battery” with sophisticated digital power management systems to instantly adjust for imbalances in the electric grid. Xtreme Power describes its PowerCell technology as a “unique, advanced lead acid battery that can beat lithium ion batteries in terms of energy storage, efficiency, cycle life and cost.”

How energy storage helps

Traditional fossil fuel power plants may be dirty, but they hum along pretty consistently, so the electric grid is able to manage the flow. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind not only vary from day to night, but also might vary from minute to minute, making power management more complicated.

Energy storage systems help ensure that we get the energy we need when we want it, and make it easier to use renewable energy in our homes and on the grid by balancing out a the effects of a cloud moving over a solar panel or of the wind dying down.

One of many opportunities in a complex system

This kind of innovation provides value all along the entire energy system.  It can make renewable energy more valuable by making it more predictable, and stabilizing the grid for far less money than larger infrastructure projects, all while helping us reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

When most people think of clean energy, they think of hybrid cars and solar panels. The truth is that there are countless opportunities along the supply chain for innovation, from the gears and ball bearings that improve the efficiency of wind turbines, to technology driven systems like Xtreme Power’s power management products.