Solar Power – The Wrongologist

Wake Up To Monday’s Hot Links

The Daily Escape:

Cypress trees, Lake Verritt, LA – November 2023 photo by Rick Berk Photography. Note the egret in the background.

For today’s Wake Up Call, we return to a staple of yesteryear, some hot links that caught Wrongo’s eye over the past few days.

Wrongo isn’t happy with how the Ukraine War has slipped from the consciousness of America’s media and thereby, from our view. Saturday’s WSJ offered an intriguing idea with its column, “Does the West Have a Double Standard for Ukraine and Gaza?” (free link). The article makes two excellent points. First, how these two wars have divided the world. Here’s a view of the division:

From the WSJ: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Outrage and political mobilization have become subordinated to geopolitical allegiances—a selective empathy that often treats ordinary Ukrainians, Palestinians and Israelis as pawns in a larger ideological battle within Western societies and between the West and rivals such as China and Russia.”

Second, the article concludes by saying that the main difference between the two wars is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with all its complexities, lacks the moral clarity of the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. They quote British lawmaker Alex Sobel:

“There is no moral justification for the Russian invasion. Zero. It’s just about Russian imperialism….But in Israel and Palestine, it’s about the fact that there are two peoples on a very small amount of land, and political and military elites on both sides are unwilling to settle for what’s on offer.”

Yes, America may have the moral high ground in both cases, and views can differ on how both wars are being waged. But as the article says in its second paragraph:

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was unprovoked, while Israel sent troops into Gaza because of a mass slaughter of Israeli civilians…”.

Make of the article what you will, but it’s important to think through why you (like Biden) think both wars are morally equivalent.

Link #2 is apropos of the COP28 conference now underway in Dubai. Grist Magazine has an article: “Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms.” As solar energy expands, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it through the grid later. One new idea is to source that battery back up at least in part from used electric vehicle batteries:

“Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80% of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.”

“Before they are disassembled…studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage.”

Apparently there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV battery packs sitting around in the US that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

Link #3 also shows the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act. Wolf Richter writes that:

“In October, $18.5 billion were plowed into construction of manufacturing plants in the US ($246 billion annualized), up by 73% from a year ago, by 136% from two years ago, and by 166% from October 2019.”

“The US is the second largest manufacturing country by output, behind China and has a greater share of global production than the next three countries combined, Germany, Japan, and India.”

All of this construction spending will take time to turn into production. When these new plants are up and running and producing at scale, manufacturing’s share of US GDP will rise. And much of the new construction is happening in fly-over America, which can use the help.

Finding factory workers in sufficient numbers to support the new capacity will be a key. America has energy in abundance and has robotic manufacturing. So pulling production from overseas with fewer workers needed will be a giant plus for the US.

Link #4 is a downer. Civic Science says in this week’s 3 things to know column, that “Nearly 3 in 10 Americans say they have had to forgo seeing a doctor in the past year due to costs.” Here’s their chart”:

Civic Science says that 12% of US adults have had to miss or make a late payment on medical bills in the last 90 days, a two percentage point increase over September 2022.

A far larger percentage of Americans – 27% of the general population and about 30% of respondents under 55 years old or with an annual household income under $100,000 – report they could not go to a doctor in the past 12 months because they could not afford the cost. Gen Z adults and households making between $25K-$50K are more likely to have held off seeing a doctor due to cost (34% and 31% respectively).

We all know that medical costs have continued to rise and that medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. If Congress was really interested in helping provide for the general welfare, they would deal with this out of control problem.

Time to wake up America! There’s plenty going on that isn’t getting visibility in the mainstream media or on social media. You have to cast your net widely to be on top of the good and bad happening in the US.

To help you wake up, we turn to Shane MacGowan, frontman for the Irish group the Pogues who died last week. He left behind a body of work that merged traditional Irish music and punk rock. He wrote many songs that could easily be mistaken for traditional Irish tunes including this one, which was also used as the music for wakes by the Baltimore Police Department in the great, great HBO series, “The Wire“. Here’s “The Body Of An American” from their 1986 album, “Poguetry in Motion”:

RIP Shane.

Nuclear Power vs. Solar And Wind

The Daily Escape:

Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon NP – February 26, 2023 photo by Adam Schallau Photography. The Grand Canyon NP was created on 2/26/1919.

There’s lots of talk about America’s need to move away from traditional sources of energy to renewable energy. Wolf Richter gives us some perspective: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Electricity generation, as measured in gigawatt-hours, [faced] near-stagnation in demand since 2007, as efforts to make everything more efficient…produced results…[but]…These upfront costs by electricity users…reduced electricity consumption. For electric utilities, it meant that they were stuck in a demand quagmire….But…in 2022…electricity generation rose by 3.5% from 2021, to a new record of 4,297,000 gigawatt-hours…”

Wolf helpfully provides a chart of electricity generated by type:

The decline in coal and the remarkable increases in natural gas and renewables are easy to see. The renewables category includes wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and biomass.

The green line above is for nuclear power, which very few people think of as a “green” source of power generation. Wrongo believes we need to reconsider nuclear power if we are to hit our ambitious targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades.

Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic has a long and well-reasoned article about how, after a decade of regulatory and financial uncertainty, small modular light-water nuclear reactors are getting closer than ever to commercialization. Rauch describes the vision is for small nuclear reactors:

“Forget about those airport-scale compounds…and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of…a suburban self-storage facility. It will be mass-produced in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city.”

Given new technologies currently in advanced testing, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the reactor cooling system, this new type of reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.

But for decades, nuclear has flopped as a commercial proposition. It has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time. And despite an enviable safety record, the public still fears catastrophic accidents. The Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979 was the US nuclear industry’s worst accident. Although no one died or was injured, it hardened the public and environmentalists against increasing the use of nuclear power in the US. In fact, the plant’s second reactor operated without problems until 2019 when it was decommissioned. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 18% of American electricity, and the US has fired up only one new nuclear power reactor since 1996.

It seems perverse to avoid nuclear, since it’s carbon-free, and as few realize, very safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity. Remember, that plant was subpar and mismanaged by Western standards.

Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. Yes, more than 2,000 people may have died in Fukushima, but most of that happened during the evacuation.

Solar and wind have huge problems because of how much land they require. According to Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, meeting all of the eastern US’s energy needs requires 100,000 square miles of solar panels, an area larger than New England. Wind is worse: It requires more than 800,000 square miles of onshore windmills to meet the eastern US power needs, an area the size of Alaska plus California. NIMBY opposition will prevent the building of sufficient power generation from wind and solar.

Contrast this with the space required by small nuclear reactors: They would take up about 500 square miles of nuclear plants, equal to the size of Phoenix, Arizona to power the eastern US.

Dozens of companies and labs in the US and abroad are pursuing small nuclear plants. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has a signed agreement to build the first grid-connected small modular reactor (SMR) for Ontario Power Generation. It will be a 300-megawatt light-water SMR in Ontario, Canada.

NuScale Power, a pioneer in small reactors, cleared the ultimate US regulatory hurdle when the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the design of NuScale’s 50-megawatt power module. It’s the first design ever approved for use in the US. The US Department of Energy is helping to fund NuScale’s project at the Idaho National Laboratory, including $1.35 billion in funding. The first of six clustered SMRs at the site is expected to go online in 2029, with the rest expected to follow in 2030.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act also provides a tax credit for advanced nuclear reactors and microreactors.

Ultimately, choice of energy generation will come down to cost. Solar is widely deployed today because it’s the lowest-cost generation source. But how can it scale?

If SMRs can demonstrate a cost advantage in real-life operation, orders will follow. And the long-promised nuclear renaissance might actually arrive.

Along with a better shot at a low carbon future.

Russia, Iran Form Energy Cartel

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Lookout Point, Harpswell, ME – August 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography

Good strategy is supposed to include a look at what the logical outcomes may be, once you’ve implemented your strategic plan. Was that done when the US and the EU decided to sanction Russia about its Ukraine invasion after having sanctioned Iran, well, for being Iran?

When you treat much of the world as your enemy, you should expect them to eventually find common cause and fight back. We’re speaking about the world’s supply of natural gas (NatGas). There is a new alliance between Russia and Iran on NatGas. At Oil Price, Simon Watkins says that a new energy cartel is forming: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“The US $40 billion memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed last month between [Russia’s] Gazprom and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is a steppingstone to enabling Russia and Iran to implement their long-held plan to be the core participants in a global cartel for gas suppliers in the same mold as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for oil suppliers.”

The article describes how Russia and Iran are creating a NatGas OPEC. The two countries are first and second respectively in holding the world’s largest NatGas reserves. Russia has just under 48 trillion cubic meters (tcm) and Iran has nearly 34 tcm, so the two countries are in an ideal position to form a cartel.

NatGas is a vital commodity. It is widely seen as the optimal product in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. And controlling the global flow of it will be the key to energy-based power over the next 10 to 20 years. This has already been demonstrated in Russia’s hold over the EU through its NatGas supplies.

From a top-down perspective, this Russia-Iran alliance might also draw other Middle East gas producers, who have tried to be neutral between the Russia-Iran-China axis or the US-EU-Japan axis.

Qatar has long been seen by Russia and Iran as a prime candidate for this kind of gas cartel because it shares its gas field with Iran. Iran has exclusive rights over 3,700 sq.km of the well-known South Pars field (containing around 14 tcm of gas), with Qatar’s North Field comprising the remaining 6,000 sq.km (and 37 tcm of gas).

If they can enlist Qatar, this new cartel would control 60% of world gas reserves, allowing them to control NatGas prices globally. It would be logical for prices to rise, given the growing demand for NatGas in the coming decades.

America can dodge this bullet for a few years because proven gas reserves in the US amount to about 13.5 tcm. So, at the current level of production we can produce sufficient NatGas for another 13-15 years.

But this means that in a decade or so, the US, Europe, and Asia will all be more dependent on imports from Russia, Iran, and Qatar, while competing with the rest of the world for our share in order to maintain our economy and lifestyle.

So, strategy can be a bitch. By creating a global political and economic environment that pushes Russia, Iran, and Qatar into a cartel, we’ve created a significant future economic vulnerability.

There are immediate NatGas cost implications in the US today. Bloomberg’s article, A ‘Tsunami of Shutoffs’: 20 Million US Homes Are Behind on Energy Bills, paints a picture:

“…about 1 in 6 American homes…have fallen behind on their utility bills. It is, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), the worst crisis the group has ever documented. Underpinning those numbers is a…surge in electricity prices, propelled by the soaring cost of natural gas.”

That’s 16% of American homes for the math challenged. Winter in the US may not be as big a disaster as in the UK and Europe, (better insulation). But plenty of people here will have to choose between food and heat.

The world is sorting itself out into blocks of countries aligned with each other. Russia, China, Iran and perhaps India, want their own commodity-based financial system to reduce their exposure to the political impacts from the West’s corporate/state “free” market system, which has used trade as a weapon for the past few decades.

There are two ways of looking at this. We could just build this energy vulnerability into our economic planning and prepare to devote a growing share of our GDP to paying the cartel for more NatGas.

Or, we could immediately start seriously building out our renewable energy capacity. There’s a model. Europe is attempting to pivot away as quickly as possible from its dependence on Russia.

We could do the same thing.

That could reduce our exposure to imported NatGas because it’s largely a bridge from coal to renewables. Massive investing in renewables would give Russia and Iran a shorter bridge than they think they’re getting.

Saturday Soother – October 30, 2021

The Daily Escape:

A Halloween prayer – photographer unknown. Fear is everywhere in the world. Is there reason for hope?

In comments on Wrongo’s post, “Climate Change Summit, Part II”, blog reader Gloria R. asked for some suggestions about how older people could help with climate change, given that the outcome will only be clear after the elderly are long gone.

Good question. In some ways, climate despair is a new kind of climate denial, blunting the momentum for action, just when we need it most. Despair can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But young people aren’t feeling hopeless. The first truly global social movements dedicated to climate action and climate justice have gained in size and strength, beginning with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future and spreading to the Sunrise Movement in America and to climate justice movements around the world.

First suggestion: These movements are long on enthusiasm and short of money. Maybe geezers could fund them?

Second, capital continues to leave fossil fuel investments. According to a recent study. this shifting of financial assets could potentially stop the fossil fuel companies from giving lip service to climate change, particularly if they lose political power. Maybe geezers could direct their financial advisors to move their investment $$ away from these big emitters?

Third, state and local governments set building codes and local energy-use regulations. They also set zoning and land use rules. So, maybe geezers could get political on a local level and work to make what we tend to call the “living laboratories for democracy” (state and local governments) havens of better climate policies and practices?

Fourth, some of us don’t have funds to back up our ideals. One thing geezers can do that is costless is to send a letter to their kids about what they did to make sure the future isn’t an environmental wasteland. That’s the premise behind DearTomorrow, a project that’s archiving letters about climate change written by people to their future children, selves, or family. The idea is to foster personal engagement with the problems and solutions to climate change. DearTomorrow asks letter writers to focus on positive themes and why they have hope for future generations. Writing a letter to their future self or loved ones makes it personal.

Fifth, join Elders Climate Action, a group of grandparents who mobilize elders to address climate change. They’re trying to protect the well-being of their grandchildren.

There you go, Gloria (and all geezers), five ideas. There are many, many others.

Finally, the response to the Covid pandemic demonstrated how societies and economies can pivot very quickly in response to a global emergency. The response was far from perfect. The rich countries took care of their own citizens first, and then moved in some cases reluctantly, to help the poor nations. But for the medium-term, we now have a blueprint for the globe working together on a global crisis.

Other reasons for hope:

The global economy is growing faster than global emissions. That means energy efficiency is increasing without any erosion in economic growth. The pandemic slowed this down, but the trend is clear.
Energy efficiency is moving from the margins toward a new normal in the products we use. Think how commonplace LED light bulbs are today.
The price of solar and wind power has plunged, and there’s reason to expect that the cost of energy storage, key to an electric power grid reliant on renewable energy, will decline over time.
The supply of clean energy resources is growing faster than new sources of “dirty” energy. Now, the potential for electric power generated from clean, steady sources is becoming a reality.

That’s Wrongo’s brief take on reasons to be hopeful about our climate future. But that’s no reason to stop the effort to hold corporations and politicians accountable for making climate change a top priority. On Thursday at a House Oversight Committee hearing, four fossil fuel CEOs refused to declare climate change an “existential crisis”, using weasel words to avoid reality. They must be stopped.

Enough for today, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we take a brief break from whatever is going on in the Virginia governor’s race and spend a few minutes concentrating on the natural world around us. Here in CT, we’ve seen temperatures in the mid-30s. We’ve started leaf blowing. It will go on until at least the first week of December.

Time to bundle up, grab a comfy chair by a window, and listen to Broken Peach perform a live Halloween version of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” in zombie makeup. Broken Peach is a cover band from Spain:

Utilities Face Declining Demand for Electricity

The Daily Escape:

Mt Baker, WA – 2018 photo by np2fast. The two smaller peaks on the right are Colfax and Lincoln.

We are late to the story, but Bloomberg had a report in April, 2017 that electric power consumption in the US has been stalled for the last 10 years. Since the dawn of the electric light bulb, electricity demand grew in a direct relationship to the growth in GDP, but that relationship no longer holds. Here is a chart showing the divergence:

The white line is US GDP, indexed to 1997. GDP in 2016 was 151% of what it was in 1997, while the blue line, representing US electricity sales, is only at 118% of 1997.

Why? It is a combination of greater energy efficiency, offshoring of heavy industry, and both commercial customers and homeowners generating their own power. Demand for power from utilities is flat, and most forecasts expect it to remain that way.

Flat demand for electricity has big implications for the utility industry. They need to forecast demand for electricity about 20 years ahead, because they invest in large and capital-intensive infrastructure like power plants and transmission lines, costing billions of dollars so they can offer Business Utilities as well as household utilities. The utility wants to be sure that facilities they invest in will produce profits for many years to come. This is why it is important that the utility industry adapts in order to stay competitive by offering cheaper Energy Plans for customers.

But, investor-owned utilities (IOUs), which provide electricity for more than half of Americans, need to make money for their investors. They can’t make money selling electricity; monopoly regulations forbid that. Instead, they make money by earning a rate of return on investments in electric power plants and infrastructure. And with stagnant demand, there’s no value in new investment. And a drop in investment means a drop in profit. So, the IOUs are treading water as their revenues decline.

We are in a new normal. There is pressure from falling power prices, due largely to increased usage of natural gas and renewables to produce power. Wholesale power prices are down 70% percent from 2007, but little of those cost savings have been passed on to consumers.

We should see what’s going on as a good thing, says David Roberts at Vox:

For both economic and environmental reasons, it is good that US power demand has decoupled from GDP growth. As long as we’re getting the energy services we need, we want overall demand to decline. It saves money, reduces pollution, and avoids the need for expensive infrastructure.

Saturday Soother – October 7, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Naiman Nuur (Eight Lakes) National Park, Mongolia. The lakes are just 22 miles from the Orkhon waterfalls, but are accessible only by hiking, or by horse. You can get to it with 4 wheel drive vehicles, but it is 80+ miles one way, 160 if there are heavy rains. You are probably never coming here.

Rick Perry heads Trump’s Department of Energy, (DoE). With the Russians, nuclear war with North Korea, ditching the Iran deal, and hurricanes, we have ignored Perry. But Perry hasn’t ignored the coal industry Trump hired him to protect. The DoE has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to begin the rule-making process to subsidize coal and nuclear plant operator’s costs and profits. From Vox:

Perry wants utilities to pay coal and nuclear power plants for all their costs and all the power they produce, whether those plants are needed or not.

This takes a brief unpacking. The DoE did a study of power grid reliability that said:

The loss of coal plants had not diminished grid reliability; in fact, the grid is more reliable than ever. Reliability can be improved further through smart planning and a portfolio of flexible resources.

Then the DoE said to FERC: Address a crisis we determined doesn’t exist. They are asking FERC to adopt a rule forcing utilities in competitive energy markets to pay the full cost of plants that have 90 days’ worth of fuel on-site. Perry’s argument is that the levels of renewable energy produced from wind and solar is variable. And since backup is needed for days with calm winds or cloudy skies, we need to preserve the aging coal and nuclear plants to protect the power grid from dips in availability, because they alone among electric power sources, have 90-days of fuel on hand.

Perry’s contention is that coal and nuclear stored fuel is necessary for grid reliability, and, that these plants are unfairly being driven out of business by subsidies to renewable energy. This is patently false. It is cheap natural gas that is driving coal out of business.

Having fuel on-site does little for grid resilience. No one expects energy outages if coal and nuclear plants continue closing. But, let’s have more corporate welfare for the least useful part of the energy industry!

Perry’s alleged problem isn’t real, and his solution, subsidizing coal and nuclear plants, is a form of theft. A transfer from the most deserving, clean renewable and safe plants, to the least deserving, most polluting and dangerous coal and nuclear plants.

And people will be taxed through artificially higher electricity rates to subsidize coal and nuclear plants. More from Vox:

It’s hard to overstate how radical this proposal is. It is wildly contradictory to both the spirit and practice of competitive energy markets. It amounts to selective re-regulation, but only for particular power sources, which wouldn’t have to compete, they’d just have to have piles of fuel.

So does FERC have to do what DoE asks? No, but consider this: FERC has three commissioners (a quorum), two of which, including the chair, are Trump appointees. The chair is Neil Chatterjee, who was a staffer for Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s champion of coal. Chatterjee recently said:

I believe baseload power should be recognized as an essential part of the fuel mix. … I believe that generation, including our existing coal and nuclear fleet, needs to be properly compensated to recognize the value they provide to the system.

So, this market-wrecking plan to Make Coal Great Again is likely to happen.

This is an old-school Ayn Rand-style looter giveaway from a bunch of self-described free-market “conservatives” trying to rescue a dinosaur industry that is choking the world.

Just another issue that raises our anxiety level. It’s Saturday, and we need to dial it back, relax and stop thinking about how these Trump termites are quietly undermining everything. Grab a hot, steaming cup of Mystic Monk Paradiso Blend coffee ($15.99/lb.), find a quiet corner, put on the Bluetooth headphones and listen to Telemann’s “Concerto in D major for Violin, Cello, Trumpet and Strings”, TWV 53:D5. Here performed by the Bremer Barockorchester, recorded in a November, 2015 live performance at the Unser Lieben Frauen Church, Bremen, Germany:

Note the valveless trumpet played by Giuseppe Frau. It is an Egger (three-hole system) Baroque trumpet.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Heading to Daylight on the Winter Solstice

The winter solstice is the shortest day and longest night in the year. The US East Coast sees only nine hours and 15 minutes of daylight today.

With an awesomely bad 2016 drawing to a close, the good news is that days will get longer. From now on, there will be more light, though little of it will emanate from Washington.

Wrongo has a nearly pagan appreciation of the Solstice as a turning point (and favorite day) in his year. We now count forward the added minutes of daylight. This map shows that winter arrived in the Northern Hemisphere @ 5:44 am:

Here are more fun solstice facts. From Yahoo:

Tonight, two astrological events will combine to create a truly rare occurrence. The winter solstice occurs tonight — or tomorrow morning, depending on where you happen to live — meaning that it’s the longest night of the year. Combine that with a lunar eclipse, which only occurs a few times per year, and you have the recipe for one of the longest, darkest nights that any living human has had the opportunity to witness. This rare combination hasn’t occurred since 2010, and before that it hadn’t happened in nearly 400 years, so it’s pretty special.

The eclipse should begin at around 1:30 a.m. EST, but the best time to view the eclipse will be around 3:17 am tomorrow.

With the Winter Solstice, there are 24 hours of darkness at the North Pole. It is the opposite at the South Pole, where the sun never sets at this time of the year. This reverses for the Summer Solstice.

Time for upbeat music about the sun, something that’s not all new age-y, or about cleansing your spirit. Here is George Harrison with “Here Comes the Sun” from the album “Abbey Road” released in 1969. Here, George plays with Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live in 1976:

This song should make your day brighter, and give you some hope in what are otherwise dark times.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sample Lyrics:

Little darling
It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter
Little darling
It seems like years since it’s been here.

Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun
And I say
It’s alright.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes x4

Little darling
I see the ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since it’s been clear.

Here comes the sun.
Here comes the sun.
It’s alright.
It’s alright.

Smart Guys, Smart Power

When we think of entrepreneurs involved in renewable energy, usually just one name comes to mind, Elon Musk, a smart guy who has given Tesla a new meaning. He just merged Tesla with Solar City.

But smart entrepreneurs in solar are emerging. The NYT wrote yesterday about Nicholas Beatty, a former banker who has covered about 25 acres of his farm in England with solar panels. This isn’t a new phenomenon, lots of farms have solar arrays both in the UK and elsewhere, most of which also use Rooftop Solar Forecast software to plan and manage energy use around solar intermittency:

What’s new in Mr. Beatty’s field is a hulking 40-foot-long shipping container. Stacked inside, in what look like drawers, are about 200 lithium-ion cells that make up a battery large enough to store a substantial portion of the electricity the solar farm puts out.

The battery and its smart software give Mr. Beatty an advantage over other solar panel farmers. Power prices rise and fall depending on the supply and demand. The spread between the high and low price can be dramatic. By storing power in the battery, Mr. Beatty can feed it into the grid when prices are high:

The battery effectively takes power off the line when there is too much and puts it on when there is too little…

Farmers, business owners, and homeowners looking to install a solar power system for their own energy needs and uses may want to consider the services of Gietzen Solar to help set this up.
Improved industrial-sized batteries are a way of achieving that flexibility. Mr. Beatty’s battery storage system cost about $1 million, but could increase revenue for his solar farm by as much as $250k per year. Beatty is one of many entrepreneurs and businesses trying to play the fast-shifting electric power landscape. This is a capital-intensive business:

With about a dozen friends and family members…he spent £6.5 million ($8 .1 million) to build the solar farm in 2014. The solar panels…generate about £650,000 ($810k) in revenue a year…

Improved battery storage and its smart controlling software has been one of the two pillars required to make solar power competitive with non-renewable energy sources, you could definitely say that this is a case where the question Deep Cycle Versus Shallow Cycle Solar Batteries comes into play. The other is the cost of solar panels. Tesla has been working on both axis. They have built a solar demonstration project on the island of Ta’u in American Samoa that generates 1.4 megawatts of energy. The microgrid has 60 Tesla Powerpacks, the company’s large commercial battery with 6 megawatt hours of battery storage. These batteries can be fully charged with only 7 hours of daylight from 5,300 solar panels.

The microgrid facility can fully power the island of 600 residents for 3 days on battery power. It is expected to save the island 109,500 gallons of diesel per year or $8 million in fuel costs. Ta’u previously relied on diesel fueled generators for power.

Cost of solar energy per kilowatt or megawatt hour has been uncompetitive for a long time, but that is changing. And most countries and most US states now are willing to purchase power from independent generators, like Mr. Beatty in the UK. Many in the UK, including in locations like derby, are following suit and investigating how they can benefit from installing solar panels to their properties and harness the renewable power of the sun for themselves. The Economist has this chart of the relative costs of sources of energy:

price-of-solar

All of this means that American farmers could open a new revenue stream by becoming smart solar power generators. Farmers own large acreage in sunny locations. They have a deep understanding of farming, another capital-intensive business. They understand that farming is a climate-dependent enterprise, another factor in common with solar power generation.

A key factor is whether their state allows interconnection with the power grid, and whether the state’s program to pay the independent power generator for power sent to the grid at an economic rate.

Let’s hope that Donald Trump’s fascination with coal doesn’t lead to bad policy. The Economist reports that Trump has promised to make more public land available to miners; but access to coal reserves isn’t their problem. Coal employment peaked in the 1920s, and today, fewer electric utilities want to use coal. If he intervenes on behalf of coal, he will be actively handicapping renewables and natural gas. If Trump’s energy policy is focused on a few unprofitable coal-mines, China will take a commanding lead in batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. That wouldn’t be so smart.

We are at a time when the cost of solar energy has dropped dramatically, and with greater economies of scale, it will fall even further.

It is past time for a few smart entrepreneurs to take up the disruption of the fossil fuel industry and its fellow travelers, the electric utilities.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Solar Power

Nuclear Power vs. Solar And Wind

Russia, Iran Form Energy Cartel

Saturday Soother – October 30, 2021

Utilities Face Declining Demand for Electricity

Saturday Soother – October 7, 2017

Heading to Daylight on the Winter Solstice

Smart Guys, Smart Power