November 23, 2015
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Those solar panels you’ve seen glinting on your neighbors’ rooftops throughout California? If the state’s investor-owned utilities get their way in negotiations with the Public Utilities Commission,, you’ll be seeing a lot less domestic black silicon in the future.
That’s because big utilities are petitioning to radically alter the rules about net metering, the system by which homeowners, schools and businesses that generate excess electrical capacity on a sunny day sell their unused power back to the grid, the same as the utility companies sell it to the rest of us.
Our big power suppliers have the same right to operate under a fair business model as the small homeowner who makes an investment in solar. Few of the latter, except isolated cabin owners and the like, are ever really “off the grid” entirely. They make use of electricity sold to them by Southern California Electric, PG&E and the state’s other large private firms as well, or buy it from the city-owned utilities in cities such as Los Angeles, Pasadena, Burbank and others that operate municipal, taxpayer-owned nonprofit power companies. It’s the big utilities that have to operate the grid — the complex system of power lines, from the big ones coming down from Tehachapi wind farms, Utah coal plants, dams with hydro plants and the like to the small wires that come into your own homes.
But even though those big firms still control 97 percent of the electrical power market in California, they are worried about the tiny but growing group of homeowners and businesses in the state that have chosen to generate some of their own power. So they have a proposal before the California Public Utilities Commission targeting net metering by making it more than twice as expensive for the little guy through fees and smaller payments.
Those electrons are sold back to the rest of us at the same rate as electricity made by the utilities. So even though it’s true all of us have an interest in maintaining the grid, the proposals are not only not fair — the solar-panel installation industry says it would deeply harm their own business model. And this is not just about staying in business. As U.S. negotiators prepare to head to the Paris talks on climate change next month, all of us have an interest in creating a country with fewer carbon emissions that lead to global warming.
When a similar measure to the one before the PUC was approved in Arizona recently, the solar industry said it saw an immediate 95 percent decline in its business. Homeowners said that it no longer penciled out for them to invest the $15,000 or so it costs to go solar and recoup their invest- ment through energy savings over 10 or so years. Hawaii just passed an anti-solar bill after intense lobbying by that state’s largest utility, and …
White House Press Releases And Documents
FACT SHEET: Obama Administration Joins with Public and Private Sector to Increase Access to Off-Grid Clean Energy and the Deployment of Innovative Technologies Globally
22 October 2015
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President Obama is committed to reducing carbon pollution and ensuring that people everywhere can tap into clean sources of energy to power their homes and businesses.
That is why, today, the Administration is announcing new actions to help bring off-grid clean energy systems and energy efficient appliances to the approximate 1.3 billion people without energy access.
Along with other solutions, like grid extension and new energy generation supply investments, off-grid energy systems hold tremendous promise to speed the delivery of affordable modern energy services. Improving access to renewable energy solutions has direct positive effects on education and economic opportunities, while also reducing families’ exposure to pollution, providing clean water access, and empowering farmers and families by providing them with the technology they need to stay connected and learn.
Coming just a month before the Paris negotiations, these actions underscore our commitment to ensuring all countries have the opportunity to power economic growth based on clean, sustainable energy solutions.
To bring the promise of clean energy to more households, the United States, Benin, Bangladesh, and Kenya are taking the following actions:
*The Department of Energy (DOE) is announcing the launch of the next round of the Global Lighting and Energy Access Partnership (Global LEAP) Awards competition focused on identifying and promoting super-efficient, high quality off-grid fans and televisions.
*The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is announcing a new $75 million loan guarantee through the Power Africa program to scale-up off-grid energy investments across sub-Saharan Africa.
*The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is announcing more than $20 million in loans to promote solar energy in 90,000 households in Kenya and Nigeria
*The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is providing $46 million for off-grid electrification in Benin.
*The Governments of Benin, Bangladesh, and Kenya are taking steps to increase access to off-grid energy efficient products, which will be powered by clean energy, and develop standards to ensure the quality ofoff-grid appliances.
Nineteen companies and organizations also are announcing new independent commitments to take a strong step forward toward a low-carbon, sustainable future. These commitments include:
*New funding totaling over $125 million to finance clean energy projects, such as the deployment of high efficiency solar equipment to reach millions of low-income customers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
*Advancing the deployment of over 170 million new off-grid, energy-efficient, standalone and scalable products.
In total, the commitments made today will:
*Provide access to off-grid clean energy products and services to more than 500 million people by 2020, changing people’s lives and livelihoods.
*Prevent the equivalent of over 350 million metric tons of CO2 emissions over the lifetime of the products deployed by 2020, including significantly cutting black carbon emissions, equivalent to …
In an echo of the VW emissions scandal, a Siemens power plant paid for entirely with public money was built on the basis of false claims about its energy saving potential.
Siemens claimed it would save Warren County NY at least $1.5m over 5 years. When a former Siemens employee questioned this, he was told he was not a team player.
A fraud investigation by the Warren County sheriff’s office found there was probable cause to charge a top county official with misconduct for his handling of the project, involving a cogeneration plant deal built by Siemens Building Technologies, based in Penn Plaza Manhattan.
Siemens is well known to be morally bankrupt. A 2008 investigation found Siemens’ culture of corruption extended far beyond the executive suite. As one investigator said “bribery was Siemens’ business model”. In fact, the company even had a handy accounting euphemism for its bribes: “nützliche Aufwendungen,” or “useful money”.
The Warren County investigation, which began in 2011 and ended earlier this year, determined that County Administrator Paul Dusek could be charged with official misconduct, a misdemeanor, for allegedly misinforming the county Board of Supervisors when he negotiated an energy-performance contract with Siemens in 2004, when he served as the county attorney, according to the sheriff’s department’s investigative file. The contract was tied to the cogeneration plant at the Westmount Healthcare Facility. As the county attorney at the time, Dusek was responsible for reviewing the contract and offering advice to the county board of supervisors on the agreement with Siemens.
However, Siemens intentionally overstated energy savings in the contract, and Dusek “repeatedly misrepresented his comprehension of Energy Performance Contracts to the board, other elected officials and the public,” according to a portion of the investigative report — about 150 pages — that was released by the sheriff’s department this week in response to a Freedom of Information Law request by the Post-Star newspaper in Glens Falls, which first reported the information.
In 2004, Warren County signed a contract with Siemens to finalize the building of the cogeneration facility designed to supply electricity to the Westmount Health Care Facility, the county’s former Social Services building and another annex. The cogeneration plant was installed at the county-owned Westmount nursing home in 2005. County officials celebrated the system as a money-saver at the time.
The equipment was fueled by natural gas purchased from National Grid, another energy company which has been exposed and fined for false accounting and overcharging consumers.
the equipment allowed the county to generate its own electricity for the nursing home and move the facility partially off-grid. The equipment also generates heat used to warm the air and water inside the building.
The initial coast to build was $3.5 million and the county was expected to generate a savings of $1.5 million over the next 15 years, according to the documents. However, the
Tyalgum in Australia wants to make a name for itself by becoming the first town in the world to voluntarily disconnect from the electricity grid.
The New South Wales community is quietly working on a plan to unplug its 300 citizens from the energy grid.
Its location, about an hour’s drive north-west of Byron Bay, puts it in the perfect position to do it.
“Geographically it’s in the right location as far as networks go,” said Andrew Price from Australian Radio Towers, the company spearheading the town’s renewable energy project.
“It’s right on the end of the grid so it’s not disruptive to other communities further down the power line.”
Mr Price said the community is very receptive to the idea as there is already a huge push toward sustainability and renewable energy in the area.
“Ultimately it’s got to be a community-based decision but (because of) the size of the community and the style of the community it is, we’ve got a really good chance of doing that,” he said.
Tosh Szatow, from Energy For the People, wrote a feasibility study for the renewables project that found frustrated community members want to take back control of energy infrastructure.
“The community there is pretty frustrated with the rise in energy prices and not really seeing benefits proportionate to that — they’re not seeing more renewable energy, they’re not seeing better services and more reliable power,” he said.
Deputy Mayor Gary Bagnall has also expressed his support, but hurdles must be cleared before town can unplug
Mr Szatow said there are two approaches the community could adopt to achieve this.
“One way is that every house and every business gets their own solar system, potentially gets their own battery storage,” he said.
He said the second option would be to construct a hub somewhere in the town that individuals and businesses could source energy form.
“It means the town can be either completely off-grid or largely self-sufficient using renewable energy,” he said.
The cost of switching entirely to renewables would depend on which option is taken, but early estimates have the cost from anywhere between $4 million to just over $7 million.
And there are several hurdles that need to be cleared before the town could completely unplug from the grid.
One is that those developing the project would need to negotiate viable access, tariffs and potentially the transfer of ownership of a portion of the electricity network from the local power provider.
It will also require strong community support and legislative change from the New South Wales Government.
Organisers from Australian Radio Towers are in talks with school and community groups to discuss funding options and said they are confident the project could begin as soon as it is given the green light.
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National Grid finance chief Andrew Bonfield says solar panel costs are falling so rapidly that energy from the sun is expected to be one of the most cost-effective ways to power homes within 18 months.
With home storage of electricity and using battery technology fast advancing in the United States, he said that the prospect of pulling the plug on a power company and going off-grid could become a reality for all in the UK within five years.
“From a consumer’s point of view, the solar on the rooftop is going to be the baseload,” Steve Holliday, the transmission network’s chief executive, said. “Centralised power stations will be increasingly used to provide peak demand.”
Mr Holliday, who is scheduled to leave National Grid next year after 15 years with the business, said that energy markets were “clearly moving towards much more distributed production and towards microgrids” — a big break from the past, when big power stations delivered centralised power to consumers and businesses on demand.
“This industry is going through a tremendous transformation,” he said. “We used to have a pretty good idea of what future needs would be. We would build assets that would last decades and that would be sure to cover those needs. That world has ended. Our strategy is now centred on agility and flexibility, based on our inability to predict or prescribe what our customers are going to want.”
National Grid, the operator of Britain’s gas and electricity transmission and distribution network, is overseeing an overhaul of the country’s energy network to accommodate sources of renewable electricity, including domestic solar electricity production and onshore and offshore wind. It predicts that by 2020 small-scale distributed generation will represent a third of total capacity in Britain.
Mr Holliday made his remarks in an interview with World Energy Focus, a publication of the World Energy Council, an alliance of 90 nations that collaborate on energy policy matters. “The amount of solar being added to the system is incredible,” he said. “[There was] 1,500 megawatts in the first three months of this year. That’s the capacity of two power stations. I made a comment to the energy minister four years ago that there was little probability we would have 20,000MW of solar in the UK. Now three of our scenarios have more than 20,000MW of solar by 2035.”
Britain has slashed the subsidies available for solar energy. Last month, ministers said that the 90 per cent cut in the “feed-in tariff” for generating power from new rooftop solar panels was necessary to prevent rising green energy payments from hitting consumer bills. The cut from 12.9p per kilowatt hour to 1.63p is set to come into force in January for all new solar projects.
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More than a third of energy executives in Europe believe that it will become common for customers to self-supply energy and go off-grid by 2020, according to a survey. Some believe the same is true for water.
The rapid development of batteries and electric vehicles are identified as important drivers for change.
Energy execs were near-unanimous that the trend towards more decentralised electricity generation will continue.
The survey by Vlerick Business School’s Energy Centre funded by KPMG, polled manager from “top Distribution System Operators (DSOs)” in 24 countries on the changes they foresee in the industry landscape in the next five years. These executives represent 70% of European energy networks.
Nearly half of the operators (45%) do not limit themselves to electricity, but they also manage natural gas networks (39%), telecommunication networks (21%), or water networks (15 %).
65% believe that multi-utility is the future of the DSO business.
72% of the respondents think that DSOs will become more service-focused than asset-oriented.
76% of the respondents expect that investment needs will require substantial amounts of new equity by 2020.
69% also believe that more collaboration among DSOs is required of which half think that M&A is the most beneficial way to collaborate.
Daniel Dobbeni, Chairman of Vlerick’s Energy Centre, says: “Decentralised and renewable electricity as well as customers becoming self-suppliers will change the power sector like never before. Industry actors must therefore quickly acquire new knowledge and experiences. We believe that dedicated education, networking and research will support DSOs in achieving their ambitious objectives.”…
Increasingly it is big business that is taking a leaf from the off-grid philosophy.
Australia’s largest integrated off-the-grid solar power system will be up and running in 2016 at a copper mine in remote Western Australia.
The 10.6 million megawatt station, which is part financed by Government green loans, is expected to provide Sandfire Resource’s DeGrussa mine with 80 per cent of its daytime energy needs and slash carbon emissions by 12,000 tonnes a year.
Construction work on what will be one of the world’s largest integrated solar installations used to power a mine is due to begin in late July.
Sandfire’s chief operating officer Mike Spreadborough said the power station will reduce the mine’s reliance on diesel fuel.
“By integrating diesel with solar power we’re significantly saving, it’s much cheaper than the historical costs of other fuels,” Spreadborough said.
“It’s a double-whammy result in lowering energy costs with significant environmental benefits.”
More than half the A$40 million ($44.6 million) solar power and battery storage facility’s cost was funded by federal Government loans, with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) putting up nearly A$21 million.
The federal Government’s other green lender, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), committed up to A$15 million while French renewable energy firm Neon, which will own the power plant, made up most of the difference.
Details about the project follow the federal Government’s decision to redirect wind farm funding to bolster large-scale solar projects.
The decision to direct the CEFC to pull funding for wind farms in favour of large-scale solar projects and new technologies drew criticism from the Greens, opposition and the Victorian state Government.
ARENA was also instructed to refocus on larger-scale solar and thermal energy products.
Sandfire’s sprawling project will feature 34,080 solar panels spread over 20ha.
The company hopes the solar plant, which will be about 900km northeast of Perth, will set new benchmarks for mines around the world using renewable power.
Spreadborough acknowledged without Government finance, the renewable energy project would have had trouble getting off the ground.
However, he was adamant Sandfire didn’t receive a free kick.
“CEFC and ARENA are expecting a return, with ARENA expecting to use the product to refund,” he said.
Spreadborough hoped once the solar farm proved successful, Sandfire would attract other financiers for future projects.…
I love seeing how other people do their solar systems, especially those who create and maintain their systems on a shoestring budget, which is how we do things around here.
A quick search on YouTube for solar power netted this video called “Solar Power on a Budget”, sounds like my kind of system. This is a good way for most folk to start out, learning as you go, building and enlarging as needed, replacing what isn’t working with something that works better.
These 4 videos show the transformation from a very simple starter system, so a more expansive system.
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Thanks to Dustin Real for this video just added to our YouTube Channel. His solar power video is a complete solar power primer and explains to people how to size each component of their system; batteries, PV array size, charge controller and inverter.
Its full of really practical tips on what kit to buy when setting up your Solar array, and how much to spend.
Dustin and his wife recently quit their careers, moved to the country, started new jobs and an off-grid life.
They are living in a pole barn, camper/military tent right now while they build their home.
Dustin built a water catchment system and off-grid solar power system so far.
Dustin says: “I am not a solar power guy by trade so much of what I learned was from multiple sources on youtube, rv forums, off-grid forums and trial and error by my brother and I. This video should help people build a small/medium off-grid solar system step by step.”…
Murray Peden, runs an off-grid auto repair workshop in his home in the hills high above the isolated rural community of Little River, Banks Peninsula.
He has lived here off-grid for 17 years, with his wife, Tori, and their two young children.
The steep southeast-facing section is 700 metres from the nearest power supply. “I thought that could either be a disadvantage or an opportunity. I looked at it as an opportunity.”
Peden realised the potential of the site when he saw the small spring-fed creek running through it. This provides their drinking water and has also been harnessed to drive a mini hydro plant.
Although the unit produces only 125 watts, which is less than that required to operate a large household light bulb, it is sufficient. The electricity is stored in a bank of batteries, and because it is charged 24/7 the battery pack doesn’t need to be large to cope with the fluctuations that would come from only using solar-powered photovoltaic panels, as most systems use.
His system has since been reinforced with 450 watts of photovoltaic panels, but as they receive only three hours of sunlight during a winter’s day, the hydro is essential.
“The idea of not having power, not being able to turn lights on, doesn’t appeal. I did research and worked out we could set up here and live, not just survive. I want to have the TV and a microwave, but the idea of not paying power bills is always appealing.”
A coal and wood-burning range heats the water, warms the house via under-floor heating pipes, and cooks the meals.
Operating an automotive workshop on alternative power has required some clever thinking. Most commercial machinery requires three-phase power, and this isn’t available from Peden’s system.
His vehicle hoist, essential in a workshop, operates on hydraulics, which require an electrical pump. A part from a forklift has been modified to do the job, and the A-grade mechanic is proud of his handywork. “I sometimes work in town, and their hoists are a bit slow. Mine’s better,” he grins. Tyre machines and compressors have also been bought with their power requirements in mind.…
2015 JUL 3 – Sydney, Australia, “A new wave of social and academic discussions is sweeping the web, about the possibility of installing PV-battery systems and ‘leaving the grid’ or ‘living off-grid.”
The recent rapid decline in PV prices has brought grid parity, or near grid parity for PV in many countries. This, together with an expectation of a similar reduction for battery prices has prompted research from R. Khalilpour, School of Chemical & Biomolecullar Engineering, University of Sydney, “This, if uncontrolled, has been termed the ‘death spiral’ for utility companies. We have developed a decision support tool for rigorous assessment of the feasibility of leaving the grid. Numerous sensitivity analyses are carried out over critical parameters such as technology costs, system size, consumer load, and feed-in-tariff. The results show that, in most cases, leaving-the-grid is not the best economic option and it might be more beneficial to keep the connection with the grid, but minimize the electricity purchased by installation of an optimized size of PV-battery systems. The policy implication of this study is that, from an economic perspective, widespread disconnection might not be a realistic projection of the future. Rather, a notable reduction of energy demand per connection point is a more realistic option as PV-battery system prices decline further.”
The research concluded: “Therefore, policies could be devised to help electricity network operators develop other sources of revenue rather than increasing energy prices, which have been assumed to be the key driver of the death spiral.”
For more information on this research see: Leaving the grid: An ambition or a real choice? Energy Policy, 2015;82():207-221.
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