Solar Surge

Contrary to appearances, your Minor Heretic has neither fallen down a hole, nor lapsed into a coma. My recent post-vacation-post silence is the result of a full schedule. That schedule includes two concurrent solar installations, finishing the curriculum for a two-day solar workshop for electricians, delivering said curriculum, plus creating and presenting two other renewable energy workshops for homeowners. Plus life in general.

The renewable energy business seems to be the only one holding its own in this recession. Solar and wind power aren’t experiencing the same geometric increase that they were a couple of years ago, but things are still moving along.

The sign-up for the photovoltaic portion of the Act 45 queue here in Vermont filled the same day it opened on October 19th. To refresh, Act 45 will allow providers of renewable energy to contract with utilities at a fixed rate for 20 years, that rate being sufficient to make as good a return as any existing generator. The limit on the entire program is 50 megawatts, and no single technology is allowed more than 25% of that, meaning 12.5 megawatts. There was a subscription of 176 megawatts of PV on the opening day, meaning that there had to be a lottery to see who would get a piece of that 12.5 MW.  Nothing like a 14:1 over-subscription to show the level of interest.

Even outside of Act 45 things are doing well. One of our local utilities, Green Mountain Power (GMP), had a sudden flash of brilliance about spot market power prices. Many states have a net metering program, where a homeowner or business can install a photovoltaic system and feed excess electricity back into the utility grid, racking up credits against future electric bills. GMP has gone one better, offering an extra 6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for solar production.  Are they insane?

Crazy like a fox. During summer peak demand GMP might have to buy power on the New England spot market for as high as a buck a kWh. Of course, it is during the middle of those long, hot, sunny summer days when photovoltaic systems are pumping out the most power. Nineteen cents per kWh looks cheap during those times. GMP did the math and offers a price that encourages solar but still let’s them come out ahead. Why the other utilities aren’t doing the same, I don’t know.

There’s an added benefit for the utilities from solar. I take anything Amory Lovins says with a grain of salt, but he did a very interesting set of calculations about the life span of transformers. You have probably seen a utility substation – a fenced-in array of huge gray objects with cooling fins and ribbed insulators, power lines converging on them. The transformers drop the high voltage of transmission lines down to the medium voltage of your local distribution lines. The key thing to understand about the life span of these transformers is that they do 90% of their aging during 5% of their operating life. That 5% is when they are running at high temperature during peak load times in the summer. That is exactly when solar arrays are pumping out the most power and reducing the amount of power that needs to go through those substation transformers. The more power generated downstream of the transformers, the less they heat up and the longer they last. Lovins calculated that even at the prices of five years ago utilities could save money by installing solar downstream of their substations and delaying the replacement of their transformers. Considering that the price of solar modules has dropped by half since then, I’d say it’s a viable option for a forward thinking utility.

I was talking with my elected representative today and he said that the important factor in shutting down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in 2012 is replacing the 600 jobs and the tax revenue. I offered that renewable energy was the only business actually expanding in this economy, and that energy efficiency work is labor intensive and pays back better than 5:1 on the initial investment. The renewable energy and efficiency path offers lower risk and higher local job creation per dollar invested than the dinosaur energy sources.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: We are heading towards a geologically inevitable end state. That is a time when the fuels we get out of the ground are so scarce and difficult to extract that they are impractical and too expensive to use. The earth stopped making oil and natural gas millions of years ago and coal hundreds of millions of years ago. It had some amount of uranium when it formed, and that was that. There is less of all these every day, and over time new discoveries get smaller, lower quality, and more difficult to extract. Someday this state, this nation, this planet will run on renewable energy. We can argue about the timing, but geology won’t change to meet our desires.

Given the inevitability of this, and especially given the unpredictability of the timing, we should be gearing up for renewable energy as fast as we can. I have used the analogy of a skydiver free-falling through clouds. If you don’t know how far away the ground is, and you don’t know how far from the ground you will find out, your best bet is to pull the ripcord now. Otherwise you may be rewarded with just enough time to say “Oh sh-“ after the clouds part.

The good news is that we can do it. The New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, just updated a study on local renewable power production. Their research indicates that many states could produce most of their power locally. Some, such as Maine, could produce far more than their local needs, mostly through a combination of wind power and energy efficiency. Maine could produce six times its need with commercially viable onshore wind power. North Dakota tops the wind potential list at 140 times demand.

Let’s look at just their numbers for Vermont. The percentage of demand that could be met by various renewables and efficiency is as follows:

Onshore Wind: 111%

Rooftop PV: 18%

Percentage of land area required for 100% PV: 0.16%

Untapped Combined Heat and Power: 8%

Untapped Small and Micro-Hydro: 15%

Matching California’s Energy Efficiency: 38%

Combined Renewables: 152%

If we pursued California-style energy efficiency it would give us plenty of leeway in rejecting renewable energy projects that were unsuitable for our communities.

One of their startling conclusions is that maximizing renewable energy use in Vermont would cost something on the order of 5.7 cents per kWh at a wholesale level. That beats Vermont Yankee by a mile.

Of course, that’s just electricity. We still have to heat our houses and get to work. We waste a huge amount of energy in those sectors, basically because we can.

It is not impossible to cut the heating load of an average house in half with serious weatherization. A friend of mine in the weatherization business says, “I talk to people about energy efficiency and they say that they have done all they can. Then we work on their house and cut their energy use by another 30%.” Likewise, there is a lot of waste in our transportation system. We still drive huge, inefficient vehicles, alone, a lot. The solution to that problem is a combination of zoning, gas mileage standards, public transportation, and, sadly, really expensive gasoline. Some people won’t do jack until they can’t afford to drive.

Let’s remember the geological imperative – the problem will solve itself, but not in a nice way. The alternative is for us to start the transition away from non-renewable fuels now, before we have an emergency. Is that possible with our political structure and our present mindset? No. Which is why we need to focus on our educational system and the way we elect our local and national representatives . The ground is down there, through the clouds somewhere, and it isn’t getting farther away.
 

Comments

[Merewyn]

Fascinating statistics - hope your rep was listening! Do you know the stats for Texas? I would think with the potential for wind power in west Texas, the numbers would be pretty good, and bottom line, for all the history Texas has with oil, it's all about 'bidness', so if it can make money, it's got legs. T Boone Pickens seems to think the numbers add up - any idea how much of a gamble he's taking?

[Minor Heretic]

Visit the link in the 10th paragraph for the full scoop. I think that Texas does fairly well with wind. The main gamble with wind development isn't the technology or the resource, it's the legal stuff - the contracts and the neighbors. T. Boone has access to all the up front capital he needs. The question is whether he can structure the deals in such a way that sufficient money comes out the other end. There probably won't be much objection to wind farms in West Texas, but one disgruntled landowner can delay a project for years.