Energy Exchange

Pecan Street Advances: Next Phase in Smart Grid Project Gets Underway

By Marita Mirzatuny / Published: September 30, 2011

Pecan Street Inc. announced this morning the selected group of companies chosen to participate in testing and constructing the utility grid of the future – a “consumer-focused smart grid built around home applications and consumer electronics” in the Mueller neighborhood of Austin, Texas. My colleague Colin Meehan and I attended the annual Pecan Street retreat earlier this week, where these companies, such as Chevy, Best Buy, Freescale, Intel, Landis+Gyr, LG Electronics, Oncor, Oracle, Sony, SunEdison, Texas Gas Service and Whirlpool Corporation, and researchers from the University of Texas came together to report the latest data and findings and to present what technologies will move us all forward. Very fascinating information has already come to light which pose interesting challenges and unlimited opportunities that we will see play out over the course of this project. This includes home energy monitoring of new and old houses across Austin, a home research lab, and installations of smart meters, smart appliances, electric vehicles, solar panels, and home energy management systems in hundreds of homes.

Pike Powers Home Research Lab in Austin, Texas. Photo Courtesy of Pecan Street Inc.

This smart grid consortium is positioned in a unique way to achieve huge innovative feats in reinventing America’s electric system. Having the involvement of the technology industry, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, the University of Texas Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Computer Science, a progressive, municipally-owned utility such as Austin Energy, and EDF, Pecan Street is aligned in a very collaborative way. EDF will be working to ensure that consumers have the information to know what their real-time energy consumption looks like and have the power to change their behavior to reduce their personal costs and the societal costs of pollution.

Participants of Pecan Street Inc.’s smart grid demonstration project joined Pecan Street staff, University of Texas researchers and members of Pecan Street’s Industry Advisory Council to announce an agreement with Chevrolet that will make 100 Chevy Volts available to participants in Pecan Street Inc.’s research. The deployment of 100 Volts in the 1 square mile area will be among the densest concentration of plug-in vehicles in the country. Photo Courtesy of Pecan Street Inc.

We at EDF have been involved in this project from the beginning as board members and continue to ensure that a newly realized grid is, not only smart, but green as well. In order to facilitate demand response, increased renewable energy, and electric vehicle consumption, a smart grid is essential. In order to achieve home efficiencies as well as determine where energy loss is occurring and where consumption can be reduced during peak times, a smart grid is essential. In order to reduce greenhouse gases and other pollution from power plants, a smart grid is essential. Therefore, EDF is proud to welcome this next phase of Pecan Street and focus on ensuring that the promises of the smart grid include environmental benefits.

As Pecan Street Inc. Technology Director Bert Haskell noted, there are times when industries need to consort in order to change the world, and now is the time for the clean energy industry to do just that.

Also posted in Texas / Comments are closed

MacArthur Energy Genius Wins Award For Innovation That Can “Change Our World”

By Lauren Navarro / Published: September 22, 2011

A 29-year old computer scientist, Shwetak Patel, was one of this year’s 22 individuals to receive a ‘genius award’ given out by the MacArthur Fellows Program. (He was also one of the youngest.)

Patel pioneered simple ways for households to monitor and manage how much water and energy they use from specific appliances and fixtures. His approach uses tiny, wireless sensors connected to: a home’s central utility hookups; existing infrastructure — such as gas lines and electrical wiring; and a smart machine that analyzes activity patterns of each appliance. When combined, the sensors help consumers measure how much energy and water they use and identify ways to be more efficient.  

Innovations like these that focus on managing and reducing energy use are desperately needed. A report just released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that global energy use will rise 53% by 2035, boosting energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by 43%.

Innovations like Patel’s can keep that growth in demand and emissions in check, while saving huge amounts of money for American families and businesses. For example, Since EDF launched our Climate Corps Program in 2008 – which places specially-trained MBA and MPA students in companies, cities and universities to build the business case for energy efficiency – our Climate Corps fellows have unearthed energy savings totaling more than $1 billion over their projects’ lifetimes.

Improving energy efficiency is in fact the easiest, least expensive and fastest way to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, according to Pulitzer-Prize winning author and oil expert Daniel Yergin. The New York Times called his new book about energy, The Quest, “necessary reading for C.E.O.’s, conservationists, lawmakers, generals, spies, tech geeks, thriller writers, ambitious terrorists and many others.” In it, he “focuses on the importance of thinking seriously about one energy source that ‘has the potential to have the biggest impact of all.’ That source is efficiency…More efficient buildings, cars, airplanes, computers and other products have the potential to change our world.”

Advances like Mr. Patel’s are part of a broader move to a “smart grid,” which uses information technology to make every part of the electric system more efficient.

So, to Mr. Patel, our Department of Energy, the utilities and clean tech companies that are inventing smart grid and other  technologies and services that let us do more with less electricity, and to the individuals and companies that are adopting those cleaner, cheaper alternatives, EDF congratulates and thanks you for your efforts. 

Your focus on industry-leading innovations is helping us change our world.

Also posted in Energy Efficiency / Comments are closed

The Solyndra Panic

By Jackie Roberts / Published: September 20, 2011

Source: Solyndra / BusinessWire

Bad news from Solyndra has set off a bit of a panic around everything from the future of solar in the U.S., the role of government in supporting innovative technologies, and prospects for clean energy jobs.  Caution is advised and perspective is needed lest we walk away from a pivotal new global market.  Let’s start with the big picture on solar.  I believe it is critical that we focus on the full value chain for energy and environmental solutions to better understand the economic growth inherent in the clean energy market.  In the case of solar, an analysis released last month by GTM Research examined the entire value chain – from raw material inputs and capital equipment needs to panel assembly and installation and maintenance.  The results show that the U.S. has a trade SURPLUS with rest of the world AND with China in the solar sector defined across the entire value.

Let me highlight some of the key findings: 

  • The U.S. was a significant net exporter of solar energy products with total net exports of $1.9 billion in 2010.
  • The U.S. solar industry had a positive trade balance with China with net exports of $247 million – $540 million.
  • The largest solar energy export product is polysilicon, the feedstock for crystalline silicon photovoltaics, of which the U.S. exported $2.5 billion in 2010.
  • 2010 U.S. solar energy installations created a combined $6.0 billion in direct value, of which $4.4 billion (75%) accrued to the U.S.

This is a good news story, and not surprisingly to me as over the past several years we’ve heard positive stories from companies like Komax Solar, an equipment supplier.  Six years ago, Komax took a risk and transitioned itself from medical technology and electronic machines to supplying the equipment needed in the assembly plants for solar panels.  Komax is exporting, has tripled its workforce, and has leveraged its expertise in precision machining to move into new solar markets.

What role the government played in the larger solar story is hard to pinpoint, but many solar companies had real and critical capital needs during the recession that the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) filled.  Project Sunburst, a Maryland Energy Administration (MEA) initiative that benefitted greatly from the ARRA funding, created demand for solar panels installation on public buildings and triggered $36 million private investment.  In addition, while the primary goal was making it easier for public entities to go solar, “It had an additional goal or larger goal to encourage the growth of solar energy generation in the state as a resource,” MEA spokesperson Ian Hines said. The investment helped give the industry the extra push that put it over the tipping point as a maturing industry in Maryland.

This leads me to believe that ARRA has indeed been an important ingredient.  The government has also taken a portfolio approach that includes companies like Nanosolar, which received almost $44 million as a 48C tax credit (one of the ARRA programs) and is currently hiring.  This is a company whose prospects excite me.   

At the end of the day, experience shows that the private sector is better at picking winners and losers, and the government is much better at “setting the table” – for example, investing in core, enabling innovations such as developing a well-designed, open-platform smart grid that enables new entrants such as solar power to compete with old electricity providers (the value chain for smart grid solutions, by the way, is extremely promising for US firms and job creation).  And, equally as important, the government must put into place energy policies that provide a level playing field and ensure that the full costs to society of energy products and services are accounted for, policies that ultimately put a price on carbon.

Also posted in Renewable Energy, Washington, DC / Tagged , , | Read 1 Response

Playing Politics With Power

By / Published: September 15, 2011

Source: The Lookout

Déjà Vu All Over Again
Listen carefully these days and you might think it was last year, 2009, or even 2006.  Just a year ago, Governor Perry lambasted the EPA’s decision that Texas’ air permitting program was illegal and amounted to special treatment for a single state when all other states are in compliance with the law.  In a statement at the time Perry claimed “The EPA’s irresponsible and heavy-handed action …. threatens thousands of Texas jobs, families, businesses and communities throughout our state.” Perry went on to claim that “it will also likely curtail energy supplies and increase gasoline prices nationwide.”  Last month the EPA announced that every former Texas permit holder is now successfully working with the agency on their new permits.  No more claims of job losses or gasoline shortages, just companies working with regulators to abide by the law and protect the health of Texans.

In 2006, TXU (now Luminant), the largest power plant owner in Texas, announced that they needed to build 11 coal plants to make sure there weren’t any rolling blackouts in the next few years.  A serious PR campaign ensued with TXU and Governor Perry trying to fast track the coal plants, but as it turned out, they weren’t needed, and that’s part of the reason TXU is now known as the Energy Future Holdings (EFH), the parent company of Luminant.  In fact, the coal plants that Luminant did build, Oak Grove and Sandow, were a big part of the reason Texas experienced the blackouts in February – supposedly reliable, 24-hour coal plants tripped offline when it got too cold.

Repetitive Stress Injury
Raising the threat of job losses, blackouts or other specters has become so common for Perry and industry that it probably amounts to muscle memory at this point. It reached a new level this week, however, when Luminant decided that it would lay people off in order to make a statement.  While Luminant may not like the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), it’s essentially a “Good Neighbor” rule and none of the clean air protections in the rule require any power plants to shut down.  Companies like Luminant make the decision — either invest in common retrofits like scrubbers to clean up pollution or close down old and poorly controlled plants and replace them with cleaner more efficient generation.

Numerous companies, such as Houston based Dynegy, Exelon, PPL Generation and NRG Energy, have publicly announced that they are well-prepared to meet the updated clean air protections.  As Dynegy’s CEO Robert Flexon points out: “Any efforts to delay or derail CSAPR would undermine the reasonable, investment-based expectations of Dynegy.  In our case, CSAPR allows competitive markets to confer deserved economic returns on our investments in clean energy technology.”  In his Houston Chronicle business column today, Loren Steffy muses: “Funny how much difference good financing and a little planning can make. After all, power generators knew that, sooner or later, stricter air standards were coming.”

Scare Tactics
This also means that claims of rolling blackouts are vastly overstated.  While a study released by Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has received a lot of coverage, the headlines have focused far more on flash than substance.  In fact, ERCOT admits that Texas has had 6 years to prepare for this rule, beginning with the passage of the Clean Air Interstate Rule in 2006, which included Texas.   What’s even more troubling is that ERCOT seems to assume that neither the grid operator, nor any of the power companies, intends to learn from the lessons of this past year in terms of better preparations for extreme weather.   ERCOT assumes that this time next year our power plants will again be unprepared for long periods of hot weather.  In Texas.

In fact, a close reading of the ERCOT study actually rebuts the most popular arguments of state officials and industry that Texas had no warning that this rule was coming:

“The rule is a replacement for the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), which was implemented in 2005. The CAIR was remanded to the EPA by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2008. In the CAIR program, Texas was regulated for particulate matter emissions (annual NOX and SO2 emissions).”

In their presentation to the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC), ERCOT directly contradicted the claims of industry and officials protesting this rule.  At the center of this argument is the idea that EPA’s modeling, which shows increased prices for low sulfur coal, is incorrect.  ERCOT’s conclusions seem to support the EPA’s modeling, though, stating that the rule “will have impacts on national fuel markets, increasing demand for natural gas and low sulfur sub-bituminous coal.”

A Texas Tradition: Politicizing ERCOT
It would be much easier to take ERCOT’s study seriously if the organization hadn’t become so politicized over the last 5 years.  In 2006 TXU (now Luminant) seized on a flawed ERCOT analysis to justify the need to build 11 new coal plants to boost reserve margins in 2009/2010.  The plan stalled and 2010 reserve margins proved much higher than ERCOT’s original projections.  Since then, using ERCOT studies to meet the needs of the moment has become a science, whether it serves the needs of someone running for President on a platform of clean air bashing or one of the companies running their committees.

In the latest example, the desired outcome of ERCOT’s latest study was made clear by a number of public statements from Texas PUC Chairwoman Nelson prior to the study’s release, including her August 4th letter to the EPA and her statement in late August:  “I have no doubt in my mind that this rule will result in reliability issues and rolling outages in Texas.”  It’s a little like the boy who cried wolf, but this time businesses are laying off workers because their management team failed to plan accordingly to abide by the law.   It’s an especially hard claim to swallow given that ERCOT’s own planning documents show over 12,000 MW of resources are expected to come online within the next few years.

Gambling Away Jobs
The truth is that Luminant, just like Dynegy, Exelon, NRG, the Lower Colorado River Authority, Austin Energy and San Antonio’s CPS made a choice in 2005.  As other companies planned for compliance, Luminant chose to fight it, gambling with their shareholders’ money and their employees’ jobs.  Think of this: In 2005, there were 32 other power plants in the nation that emitted more sulfur dioxide (SO2) than Luminant’s Martin Lake coal plant.  By 2010 there were only three.  At the time, Luminant probably thought that by not investing in retrofits like scrubbers to clean up pollution, they could get ahead of the competition.  Ironically, what they have found out instead is that they are actually behind the competition, and now their employees may suffer for poor decisions made by management.

Also posted in Climate, Texas / Read 1 Response

San Diego Outage Triggers A Green Grid Revolution (in author)!

By Lauren Navarro / Published: September 15, 2011

I landed at San Diego International Airport at 4pm on Thursday.  Since I sat towards the front of the plane, I was one of the first people to walk up the corridor.  Suddenly, the lights went out.  “Perfect timing,” the woman in front of me said.

As I walked through the airport, the lights were off, the lines had grown long.  Cell phones weren’t working, and I was reminded of a zombie movie I had seen.  Waiting in the late afternoon heat, I tried to remember the exact words in my colleague’s quickly written agreement to pick me up and drive me to the event.

I hoped that it was just the airport, but as we inched our way through the traffic, it was clear that San Diego had ground to a halt.  Gas stations became crowded with people who literally ran out of gas and couldn’t get home.  As the sunlight waned, we rushed to buy provisions (water, protein bars, etc.) at an Albertsons – possible only because it had installed fuel cells or solar panels.  From the freeway we could see that University of California San Diego, which has its own microgrid, was also lit up thanks to distributed generation. 

We learned that a transmission problem in Arizona had caused a possible sequence of events that included the protective functions at the nuclear power plant turning the plant off and lead to extensive power outages throughout San Diego, southern California, and parts of Mexico.  The funny part?  I was with a colleague from San Diego Gas and Electric, traveling to speak about our collaborative smart grid planning effort.  We couldn’t help but think about how the smart grid could have helped here. 

Storage and advanced grid sensing and control technologies could have isolated the problem at its source and kept it from growing.  The smart grid’s ability to incorporate larger amounts of renewable energy could have kept electricity flowing.  Microgrids – with their own local generation and smart technologies – could have switched to an off-grid mode and remained powered through the outage.  Buildings with demand response capabilities and appropriately designed roof top solar or other forms of distributed generation, could have reduced their consumption and used smart technologies to share their power with businesses running critical equipment or with people who need air conditioning or medical equipment to maintain their health.

Source: AP Photo/Gregory Bull

Smart grids can play an even bigger role after an outage is over: Electricity production is a huge source of air and water pollution– emissions from U.S. electricity production make up 30% of domestic climate change pollution and over 6% of global emissions.  A thoughtfully-designed smart grid could reduce harmful emissions by up to 30% and fight against the tragedy of more than 34,000 deaths a year from power plant pollution – more lives than are lost on U.S. highways.

A greener grid will also put us at the forefront of the world’s competitive clean energy economy.  A recently released Duke University report commissioned by EDF identified smart grid companies already flourishing in 37 states at 315 locations—including headquarters, manufacturing plants and hardware/software development facilities.

All of this adds up: the green grid revolution will create as many as 180,000 domestic jobs per year while saving lives.  Now that’s worth standing up for.

Also posted in California / Read 1 Response

Jobs For Today AND Tomorrow

By Jackie Roberts / Published: September 13, 2011

 The President’s response to the call for jobs now is necessarily focused on short-term triggers.  But, we must simultaneously seed the jobs for the next two to five years, or we will just keep putting ourselves back into the same hole.  These so-called “medium term jobs” must come from growth sectors in the global economy where the U.S. has skills and ideas to offer.  To me, the most promising of those sectors are health care and clean energy & resource management.

Source: Veterans News Now

It is in the latter area that the U.S. needs to, as David Brooks recently described, “set the table” with policies that create customers for the many small to large businesses that are striving to participate in this new sector.  In our survey of clean energy businesses, 73% are small businesses with less than 50 employees.  Of these, according to market research by Frost & Sullivan, one third believed that the failure to pass clean energy legislation last year had an effect on their business and 7 out of 10 thought their sales would increase if the U.S. passed new policies to reduce greenhouse gases.

When business of all sizes know that they are going to have customers – not just today from a short term stimulus or other plan, but customers derived from a long term commitment by our country to move to clean energy and less air pollution – they can  hire permanent employees.   In California, where the state has been slowly but steadily setting the table with rules for cleaner vehicles, a renewable portfolio standard, the Global Warming Solutions Act and energy efficient building codes, the clean energy sector is a growing source of jobs.  For example, according to Next 10 report from May 2011, jobs in manufacturing of clean energy and resource management activities grew 19% between 1995 and 2008 while total manufacturing employment in the state dropped 9%.

Without creating customers, “clean energy jobs” workforce training programs become a bridge to nowhere, the promise of clean energy jobs falters and businesses remain faced with lots of uncertainty and a natural reluctance to permanently hire new people.  The National Infrastructure Bank and rebuilding schools will hopefully create customers for some of these firms.  But what businesses really need to hire people is the prospect of customers over the medium-term.  We need Presidential leadership on federal clean energy policies to help deliver a steady-stream of customers and seed the jobs of tomorrow.

Also posted in Energy Efficiency, Jobs, Renewable Energy, Washington, DC / Read 2 Responses