Australia
The unseen benefits of renewable energy
Last week’s Global Insights highlighted the official opening of the Hornsdale Power Reserve – the Tesla Big Battery – in Jamestown, South Australia. As well as providing reliable, sustainable energy to the district it has also provided other benefits as Neoen, the owners of the Hornsdale wind farm, have shown foresight in how to make renewable energy have a positive impact on a local community.
At all stages of the development Neoen worked with local stakeholders. During construction 250 jobs were created over three years which led to knock on effects with new local businesses opening to accommodate this rise in local incomes. After construction there will be 10 permanent positions. The landowners will see an increased income provided by the rental for their land. Neoen have become an industrial partner with Canberra institute of Technology to create the Renewable Energy Skilled Centre of Excellence to provide education and training for skilled workers, with an on-site station at Hornsdale for the students. Neoen are also providing funding for research for the survival of a rare species of lizard that was found during the wind farm environmental impact assessment.
Australia hits another record month for solar installations
November was a record breaking month for domestic and commercial solar in Australia. The previous record was set in June 2012, when the FiT was 44c/kWh. The interesting thing about last month’s record is that FiT’s are now set by the retailers and are on average c10c/kWh. November 2017 saw a monthly total of 120MW installed capacity of rooftop solar.
The rapidly falling costs of solar and storage, and the guarantee of reliability has made rooftop solar a viable alternative for many businesses. This can be seen by the fact that 28% of this years installed capacity has been for commercial sized systems (10-100kW). Another interesting fact from last month’s figures is the growth in larger scale domestic systems with 6-8 kW systems being as common as the 5kW range.
US
Perry grants FERC another month
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry on Friday granted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 30 (until January 10) more days to act on his agency’s controversial cost recovery proposal for coal and nuclear plants. This was in response to FERC Chairman Kevin McIntyre who said FERC has received more than 1,500 comments (mostly negative (IGov comment)).
New Californian $40m DER project to replace a 168MW diesel plant
Pacific Gas & Electric and California grid operator CAISO unveiled a plan that seeks to proactively deploy DERs as an alternative to fossil fuel generation and transmission-scale infrastructure. This is to include solar, batteries, smart thermostats and other passive or active energy assets. PG&E and CAISO will seek over the next five years to contract for enough DERs (between 20-40 MWs said to be worth about $40 million) to replace an aging power plant in Oakland, Calif., without building new transmission lines that would otherwise be needed to keep the entire state’s grid running reliably. There are other substantial grid edge projects in California but this is the first where CAISO has agreed to accept DER to deliver secure flexibility. It will replace a 168-megawatt diesel-fired power plant in West Oakland which runs about 35 days per year but has so far been crucial for CAISO during those 35 days.
US Storage
According to the latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor from GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association (ESA), 41.8 megawatts of energy storage were deployed across the U.S. in the third quarter of 2017.
The Value of Solar
A key fight at the moment is whether solar and DER are the solutions to a smart and flexible energy system, or whether they are a destabilising, costly problem. Over the past year or so, First Solar, California grid operator CAISO, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have been testing out how a 300-megawatt solar farm in the Mojave Desert can provide grid frequency regulation, voltage and reactive power control, and several other valuable grid-balancing tasks. While the 300-megawatt solar farm isn’t storing and shifting its energy to different hours of the day, it can run at lower than full capacity to provide headroom to shift up or down along with CAISO wholesale market prices. Its inverters can also manage the voltage fluctuations that may arise from intermittency of its output from passing clouds, and meet CAISO’s frequency regulation signals at a speed that exceeds natural-gas-fired power plants. These provides a significant stack of grid benefits, if they can be made part of everyday operations. See technical paper on the project for more details.
3 Day printing and wind turbines
The California Energy Commission has awarded a $1.25 million grant to RCAM Technologies to develop and test 3-D printing technology so concrete turbine towers can be constructed onsite.
Energy efficiency and clarification on responsibility for wholesale markets
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in a Dec. 1 order, barred states from blocking energy efficiency from competing in regional electricity markets, reaffirming its (i.e. FERCs) authority over wholesale power markets. It’s a win for advocates of demand management technologies, particularly as electricity sales stagnate and utilities may consider spending less on managing or reducing those loads. Kentucky has won an exemption. FERC has confirmed that state regulators cannot bar particular technologies from wholesale energy markets without its approval.
Europe
Germany must exit coal but not at the expense of workers says SPD
SPD leader Martin Schulz said that Germany must exit coal while addressing the SPD party convention where delegates voted to hold coalition talks with Angela Merkel’s CDU party, also emphasising the importance of achieving a ‘just transition for workers’.
The SPD has a significant support base to North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the country’s most important coal mining region, and traditionally has strong links to the German coal industry and labour unions. However in an address to the party convention, Schulz said climate change was ‘the major challenge of our time’ and that there was no alternative to phasing out coal in Germany. He suggested that the industrial tradition of coal regions could be maintained through generating jobs in renewable energy industries but fell short of discussing a time frame for the coal phase out.
‘World first’ as blockchain underpins new ‘green’ electricity trading platform in Germany
Municipal utility Wuppertaler Stadtwerke (WSW) says that it has launched the world’s first green power trading platform based on blockchain technology. The ‘Tal.Markt’ platform allows customers to buy electricity from local renewable power producers and determine their own power mix with blockchain technology enabling the secure completion of contracts over the internet, verifying sales and providing proof of where the delivered electricity is produced.
The platform was developed with the Swiss energy trader Axpo with WSW acting as an intermediary responsible for “the energy management of the trade” as well as billing. WSW head Andreas Feicht said that blockchain technology has the potential to help renewable energy suppliers in Germany to overcome challenges to their business model stemming from the loss of feed-in tariffs under the framework of the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG).
Eurelectric pledges carbon neutral power supply ‘well before’ 2050
Europe’s power utilities trade association, Eurelectric, has produced a long term vision for the continent’s electricity industry that will see the sector accelerate the transition to clean energy sources. The vision includes a pledge that European power supply will be carbon neutral well before 2050. The announcement follows a series of commitments putting decentralised generation and digital solutions at the centre of the trade body’s expectations about the future European electricity system.
ENTSO-E head calls for utility model re-invention
In an interview with Euractiv, Laurent Schmitt, secretary general of the European Network of Transmission Operators-Electricity (ENTSO-E) argues that digital technologies will bring “total revolution” in the electricity industry, allowing energy communities to proliferate. The new model for utilities will be “community enablers”. Schmitt also talked about a common data hub for transmission operators across Europe, the coming agenda of the transmission-distribution interface, the importance of common approaches through the European network codes, and the need for cybersecurity.
Wider Globe
BlockChain Report on Electro-Mobility
Eurelectic, which is the sector association in Brussels representing the major power companies, has published a report on the opportunities and challenges of Blockchain’s for eletro-mobility. This is the first output from the body’s blockchain expert discussion platform launched in June, when the technology was described as a ‘potential game changer for the industry’. The report highlights some of the regulatory issues for the technology and notes that the European Commission is planning to launch a European Blockchain Observatory and that ‘it is important to anticipate a similar level [from the financial sector] of activity from energy regulators once the use cases of blockchain in the energy sector reach a similar level of technological maturity and public awareness, in the same way cryptocurrencies did’ and that given this ‘it is crucial for the energy sector to evaluate the potential disruption factor of blockchain’.
The European Commission report on Strategic Energy Technology
The new Strategic Energy Technology (SET) report from the Commission gives an upbeat assessment of the transformation of the energy sector. It is ten years since the first SET was launched and the report states that ‘few would deny that the chances of success [of the energy transformation] seem today much brighter than a decade ago’. The future SET plan anticipates that, in addition to making further progress on the deployment of renewable energy, a major research and innovation challenge lies in designing innovative services, business models and ways of engaging consumers in the energy system. The plan includes targets to speed up the penetration of smart energy services and applications with the aim that 80% of energy consumption will be controlled by ICT by 2030.
IEA report on Energy Efficiency Indicators
The annual report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), on energy efficiency indicators highlights the extent to which global energy consumption and economic development have decoupled – with global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increasing by more than 95% between 1990 and 2015, while total primary energy supply grew by only 56%. In IEA countries (mainly the OECD countries), energy efficiency was responsible for responsible for three quarters of the downward pressure on consumption, with the remaining associated with changes in the structure of the economy (moving away from heavy industry to more service sector). At a sectorial level, the efficiency of the residential sector has improved the most, followed by industry and the service sector, with the least gains in the transport sector.
Posted by: HPoulter
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