Month: February 2018

A decade ago I argued to a group of skeptical engineers that solar PV was now on an unstoppable trajectory.
At that time, new PV in California was just starting to beat out gas turbine plants in head to head bidding for “peaking” power in hot summer afternoons.  That meant, more production, more economies of scale, and a positive feedback of market forces.
One by one, you could see the light bulbs come on in the room…

It’s happening again.

Wall Street Journal:

Giant batteries charged by renewable energy are beginning to nibble away at a large market: The power plants that generate extra surges of electricity during peak hours.

Known as peakers, the natural-gas-fired plants are expensive to run, and typically called into service only when demand rises and regular supplies are insufficient. That makes them vulnerable to disruption from lithium-ion batteries, which have fallen in price in recent years, and are emerging as a competitive alternative for providing extra jolts of electricity.

Numerous big batteries are under construction or consideration in the U.S., especially in the Southwest, where some companies see a shiny future for “solar plus storage” projects.

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…Calif. Fluence Energy LLC, a joint venture of AES Corp. and Siemens AG SIEGY +1.36% , is building a battery that could power 60,000 southern California homes for up to four hours. It will be the largest lithium-ion battery in the world—three times larger than a battery built last year by Tesla in Australia.

“It really is a substitution for building a new peaking power plant,” says John Zahurancik, chief operating officer of Fluence. “Instead of living next to a smoke stack, you will live near what looks like a big-box store and is filled with racks and rows of batteries.”

 

Above, the most recyclable yet reliably accurate headline of the last decade.

Zachary Shahan for Cleantechnica:

Solar power prices have been dropping faster than people expected, even faster than experts expected, and even faster than bullish experts expected.

I wrote about this general point a couple of years ago for an article for The Economist Group. The question I was supposed to explore was whether we needed solar technology breakthroughs in order for solar to take over the electricity generation market. Various solar experts emphasized to me that known, predictable, incremental improvements in solar PV technology and manufacturing would keep bringing down the cost of solar PV — at an incredible clip. The standout point was from Jenny Chase of Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), who highlighted that her team forecast a solar module* price drop from 62¢/watt in 2015 to 21¢/watt by 2040. That was with an assumption of no technological breakthroughs.

During a Zayed Future Energy Prize review committee meeting in September (I’m on the committee), I brought this up in one of the discussions we were having. Other analysts from BNEF who were there noted, “Actually, they’ve come down much quicker than we expected.” The average had already dropped to approximately 40¢/watt. They showed me a graph of the more recent cost drops as friendly proof. Astounding — even BNEF’s relatively “bullish” projections were far too conservative.

These BNEF analysts recommended I talk to Jenny Chase again, since she’s top of the world for tracking the solar industry, these prices, and what’s behind them. Incidentally, I was giving a presentation at Intersolar ME a couple of days later where I ended up standing right next to her at an evening rooftop reception that I nearly skipped. We had a nice long chat about the interesting history of BNEF, the disruptive solar energy industry, Donald Trump (ugh), and these surprising cost drops. I asked Jenny to provided some follow-up statements on email so that we could have the points in a nice format for this article. Here’s a deeper look at what happened, as well as some broader points of interest: Continue reading “Solar Prices Continue to Plunge”

While  “Virtual reality” isn’t really real – Virtual Power Plants are definitely a network -enabled thing.

Dark Warning for Trumpers: If the US doesn’t start catching up, our grandchildren will all be speaking Australian.

TheVerge:

The South Australian government will build what it says is the world’s largest virtual power plant by rolling out solar panels and Tesla batteries to at least 50,000 homes. Installation is planned over the next four years, and those households will combine to create the 250MW virtual power plant. Energy generated from the solar panels will be stored in the Tesla batteries, and any excess energy will be fed back to the grid, which will be centrally controlled and provide energy to the rest of the state when required.

In an initial trial, which has already commenced, a 5kW solar panel system and a 13.5kWh Tesla Powerwall 2 battery will be installed in 1,100 public housing properties for free, with the sale of electricity to cover costs. Following this, an additional 24,000 public houses will receive the systems. A wider rollout for private homes is planned in 2019, depending on the success of the trial phases.

Tesla says that, when completed, the virtual power facility could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant. “Powerwall can detect an outage, disconnect from the grid, and automatically restore power to your home in a fraction of a second,” the government’s virtual power plant FAQ section reads. “As long as the battery has storage in it at the time, you will not even notice that the power went out.”

The South Australian government says the virtual power plant can provide 20 percent of the state’s average daily energy requirements. The South Australian government says Tesla will review all properties to determine whether or not they’re able to support the system and participate in the program. Tesla will also build a service hub at Adelaide’s innovation district Tonsley, which will allow technicians to monitor and service the company’s Powerpacks in Hornsdale, the Superchargers installed across the state, and the residential Powerwall installations.

Continue reading “Not the Roadster – the Loadster: Tesla Building Largest “Virtual” Power Plant”

Monologue below:

Continue reading “Bill Maher with Rep. Adam Schiff”

Theme song above has been totally my jam all week.

Black Panther is the newest Marvel movie coming out next weekend.
The protagonist is King of a hidden, high tech paradise in the middle of Africa – and a superhero.

‘..My Heart don’t skip a beat even when hard times bust the needle..” – Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd

Clearly the movie is striking a huge chord even before it’s come out – the trailers, endless fanboy analysis, and now critical reaction, all seem unanimous that Black Panther is a cultural milestone, and transcends the super hero genre.
It may also be a metaphor, in the wake of America’s ongoing political disgrace and retreat from the larger world, that new space is open for plucky, tech empowered underdogs – and I know someplace where there are a lot of them….

National Geographic:

The pride of Engineer belongs to a wave of digital entrepreneurs who aim to transform sub-Saharan Africa. Their emergence coincides with the ubiquity of mobile phones throughout the continent, as well as the arrival of high-speed Internet—which, as recently as a decade ago, was rare in most of Africa. During the past few years, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital has flowed from the West into such countries as Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa. The result is a generation of innovators whose homegrown ideas could, in the manner of SafeMotos, improve the lives of their fellow Africans.

Renewable Energy World:

It’s not been a great year for Silicon Valley’s image when it comes to women in tech. Firms faced a reckoning this year as women (and sometimes men) spoke up about the culture that persists in numerous firms, which continues to make inclusion a pipe-dream for many.

There are also some signs that the start-up boom may be slowing. So, with aspects of the Silicon Valley model coming under question, where can the next generation of young, aspiring and talented data scientists, coders and entrepreneurs look to?

 

For many, Africa is considered to be the next place for growth. This isn’t as new as it is sometimes made out to be: Kenya, for example, has had mobile money for 10 years now, in perhaps the most famous example of technological leapfrogging. But technology is playing an increasingly significant role in Africa. Continue reading “The Weeknd Wonk: Black Panther and the Revenge of the S**tholes”

Below — even George Bush sees evidence of Russian meddling.

 

Incoming in 5,…4,…3,…

YES: It’s Competitive and Necessary

By Rich Powell

A robust civilian nuclear sector is mandatory for the U.S. to remain a major geopolitical, economic, military and environmental leader. After decades of policy neglect, Washington is finally addressing what is both a national and global necessity and a tremendous opportunity.

Bipartisan political support is growing to reform new reactor licensing and improve tax incentives for new nuclear facilities, led in Congress by clean-energy advocates as well as national-security and energy-reliability hawks.

The Trump administration has taken bold action to support nuclear energy, including expanding federal financing for the two reactors being built in Georgia and proposing that regulators change the way electricity is priced so that nuclear and coal-fired plants can earn more based on plant resiliency.

Market pricing reform would be an important step in helping to restructure power markets and bring an end to the closures of reactors seen in recent years. Current markets undervalue the greater reliability of nuclear energy in the face of natural disasters—true resilience likely comes with greater capital cost. New plants would also be tremendously aided by proposals for improved tax incentives backed by the White House that would benefit deployment of nearly 4 gigawatts of advanced nuclear power.

Some don’t believe in a nuclear future because of the low cost of natural gas. Gas is certainly cheap right now, but most vertically integrated utilities don’t want to rely on a single fuel source, especially one with historically significant price swings. There is also nothing fundamentally expensive about nuclear. Much of the current additional capital cost is due to years of inactivity and resulting lack of experience and standardization—gaps that deny projects the kinds of knowledge transfer than can lower costs through repeated construction of the same design. China and South Korea have been able to drive out costs through scale and repeated construction experience.

Skeptics also point to falling renewable costs and stalled growth in demand for electricity as an argument against investing in nuclear. But wind and solar, because of their intermittent character, require grid-scale energy storage, and that is expensive. And despite low electricity growth, there will be need in the generation market to replace many kinds of retiring plants in the coming years. In fact, this just opens the door for advanced technologies, particularly smaller reactor designs.

Several U.S. entrepreneurs are developing advanced nuclear-energy technologies that are smaller, more nimble and even have the potential to be cost-competitive with natural gas. One of these, a startup called Oklo Inc., is designing a microreactor it says could operate for 10 to 20 years at a time with low overhead. It’s less than 1% the size of a traditional reactor and could be perfect for quick deployment to areas such as Puerto Rico, which saw its grid devastated by a hurricane. Continue reading “Wall Street Journal Debates: Does Nuclear Power Have a Future?”

New York Times:

Jessie Diggins is a cross-country skier on the American women’s team and a favorite to win a medal at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. If she succeeds, it will be only the second time the United States has won a medal in the sport and the first for an American woman.

Diggins is also an advocate for climate action. I interviewed her to understand more about why she believes winter is worth protecting. (The following has been condensed and edited.)

How has climate change affected you?

Over the last 10 years, it has been hard to ski on real snow. Over the last three years, most venues have been exclusively on man-made snow. And in places like Davos, Switzerland, where they normally have three feet of snow, they’ve been snow farming and saving it for the next year because they don’t even count on getting snow anymore. I’ve spoken to people in Switzerland who are losing their jobs because winter’s going away.

How is skiing on man-made snow different?

It’s a little faster. So the same World Cup courses that we race get more and more dangerous with man-made snow because it gets icy. One of my teammates broke his leg on a corner on a course where it never should have been as fast as it was. Real snow, it feels softer. It’s not as hard when you fall.

What about people who say that fighting climate change is going to hurt the economy?

You can look at different solutions for the economy, but you only get one earth to live on, and you have to breathe the air that is on this earth. We have to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt families economically, which is why I’m supporting the carbon fee and dividend solution, because it puts a fee on carbon and returns the revenue to households.

What do you say to those who say, ‘You’re just an athlete, stay in your lane’?

I’m also someone who lives on this planet. I think you need to be able to stand up for things you believe in, and saving winter is something I believe in. It just breaks my heart because this is such a cool sport, and winter is so amazing and beautiful and I feel like we’re actually really at risk of losing it. And I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where they’ve never experienced snow because we weren’t responsible enough.

Continue reading “Olympic Athletes: Save Our Winters”

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Former CIA Director John Brennan sit down with Director/Actor/Activist Rob Reiner for a candid conversation about what Russia did during the 2016 election and why they are concerned by what they are seeing now.

As Chris Mathews notes below –  not separate from the climate crisis and Carbon Bubble.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Investigate Russia”