Renewable energy from wind and solar went from impossibly expensive to nearly 10% of American electricity in less than 20 years. What's ahead may be even more astounding.
In 2000, wind and solar combined to be the source of just 0.1% of all electricity generated in the United States. No wonder renewable energy had so many critics. To be fair, wind and solar were expensive, inefficient, and hadn't done much of anything since being hyped up during the energy crisis in the 1970s. But all of that has changed now.
Today, wind power is, on average, the cheapest source of electricity on a levelized cost basis in the United States. Solar power is third, just behind natural gas, and together with wind, the renewable pair is responsible for nearly 10% of total electricity production in the country. Shares of companies that have led installments, such as NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) and Xcel Energy (NASDAQ:XEL), have thumped the S&P 500 in the last two decades or so as a result.
Investors probably haven't missed out yet. Considering that wind and solar could provide 25% or more of America's electricity by 2030, and new opportunities are emerging in offshore wind and a next-generation geothermal technology, there could be decades of growth left in renewable energy stocks. Here are five amazing facts about how we got here, and where we might be heading.
Read full story at The Motley Fool…
first published week of: 11/12/2018
To better map the city -- and track its recent growth boom -- Durham, N.C., replaced its satellite imagery with high-resolution aerial imagery available through the cloud.
Specifically, the city's Public Works Department uses aerial imagery from Nearmap to better map and bill residents and businesses for impervious properties -- those areas such as buildings, pavement and gravel that impede absorbtion of rainfall and result in surface runoff. The money goes to the city’s $16 million-a-year Stormwater Utility Fee fund.
“Right now, we have about half a billion square feet of impervious area that we monitor, and we have to break that out by parcels,” said Durham GIS Administrator Edward Cherry, adding that there are about 90,000 parcels. Without any imagery, the information would have to be assembled from site visits and construction plans.
Previously Durham received satellite pictures every autumn, but now it gets more-detailed imagery every six months. That helps the Public Works Department send more accurate bills, Cherry said, plus it makes the charges clearer.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 10/15/2018
AltaGas is continuing to sell assets in order to pay for the WGL acquisition that closed this summer, and the deal with Avenue highlights a trend of private equity firms purchasing power plants.
AltaGas will sell the three plants to Avenue-owned Middle River Power III. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must approve the deal, which the companies expect to close in the fourth quarter.
The company says it has now announced or completed approximately $1.5 billion in asset sales to date, and its plan to fund the acquisition of WGL "remains firmly on track to reach the expected total targeted asset sales of at least $2 billion by fourth quarter 2018."
Read full story at Utility Dive…
first published week of: 09/17/2018
The utility business model is evolving in response to a fundamental shift in our power system economics. Traditional utility models were built on the engine of inexorable electricity demand growth, which became less certain as America’s power system was built out and energy efficiency programs succeeded – electricity demand growth has been flat for 10 years, and it’s expected to stay that way.
Electrifying transportation and buildings promise to provide future growth for utilities, but just how much growth and when it will happen is uncertain. At the same time, customers are demanding more control over how they consume and produce their own energy, and energy economics have reached a critical cost crossover – renewable energy is now cheaper than many fossil power sources, even without counting health or climate benefits.
In response, utilities – and their regulators – are increasingly embracing a new revenue model that rewards performance against goals to meet evolving customer demands and avoid unwanted consequences: performance-based regulation (PBR).
Read full story at Forbes…
first published week of: 05/07/2018
Henderson, Kentucky, will close its coal-fired power plant next February after nearly five decades in operation.
The plant, known as Station Two, is among a vintage of older, smaller coal plants that have been hanging on by a thread. Maintenance costs, compounded by a glut of natural gas and increasingly cheap renewable energy resources are pushing plants like Henderson’s into retirement.
Henderson crossed that line earlier this year when plant operators cut their contract with the city saying the station was no longer profitable. The city received approval from regional transmission services last week, finalizing the decision.
“There are coal plants out there that are an economic option, but our coal plant was small, thermally inefficient and quite old, so it needed a lot of investment,” said Chris Heimgartner, the utility manager for Henderson Municipal Power and Light.
Read full story at 89.3 WFPL…
first published week of: 10/29/2018
A renewable energy ballot measure could up the state’s reliance on cleaner energy.
West of Phoenix, Arizona, where cooling towers billow steam into the air, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station churns out more carbon-free energy than any other power producer in the country. But, in the light of a controversial ballot measure meant to steer Arizona towards renewable energy, Palo Verde’s fate has been caught in the crossfire of a battle between state utilities and environmentalists.
Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona, a committee backed by former Californian hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, drives the initiative. They submitted over twice the amount of signatures needed to get on the ballot. If successful, the measure would constitutionally require Arizona utilities to use 50 percent renewable resources by 2030, holding them accountable for certain percentages each year. But Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, funded a lawsuit filed last week against the initiative. The political action group that filed the suit claims most of the signatures are fraudulent, which the initiative denies. The utility has bigger worries than the signatures, though — they’re worried the measure would force Palo Verde to close in six years. An oversupply of solar, they say, would render the plant useless.
Read full story at High Country News…
first published week of: 07/30/2018
It takes a lot of electricity to keep the digital universe humming. Some of it powers the actual servers and data storage drives, but the majority of the electrons used by data centers at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and other tech companies are needed to power the fans and air conditioning units needed to keep all that hardware cool.
Publicly traded companies are under pressure from investors today to obtain the electricity they use from renewable sources. There’s something just not right about creating carbon emissions to operate the internet. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the tech industry has contracted for more renewable energy — 2,581 megawatts — than any other sector of the global economy. It has signed deals for 10.4 gigawatts more just this year.
Google is the largest consumer of green energy in the world at more than 3 gigawatts, followed by Facebook at 2 gigawatts, and Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon at around 1 gigawatt each. A typical nuclear power plant generates about 1 gigawatt of electricity.
Read full story at CleanTechica…
first published week of: 11/19/2018
Attorney General Maura Healey wants lawmakers to bar third-party power companies from providing electricity supply alternatives due to predatory marketing tactics and a new report that says customers paid $176 million more over two years than if they had kept getting power from the utility.
The report yesterday found that residential customers who switched to an alternative supplier paid, on average, 2 to 3 cents more per kilowatt hour than they would have using a standard utility plan. The difference — amplified over hundreds of kilowatt hours per month for half a million customers across Massachusetts — cost $65.4 million from July 2015 to June 2016 and $111 million from July 2016 to June 2017.
The report detailed an increase in complaints against some electric companies’ aggressive marketing tactics, including teaser rates that later balloon, contacting people on the do-not-call list, or having representatives falsely claiming they are with a state agency or power utility. It also said the companies seemed to target low-income consumers.
Read full story at Boston Hearald…
first published week of: 04/02/2018
Dozens of Massachusetts municipalities have already put their residents in group-buying programs, switching them from their local utility, largely to get more renewable electricity. Boston was the big market that had eluded the energy brokers — until now.
Environmental activists had been getting antsy. The Walsh administration sent out requests for information after the City Council endorsed the idea last fall, but did not take a big step toward hiring a broker. Many worried Mayor Marty Walsh was applying the brakes. (Protesters even tried to embarrass Walsh when he hosted the US Conference of Mayors in June.) Austin Blackmon, Walsh’s energy chief at the time, expressed concerns about potential higher costs for ratepayers and whether some residents would unknowingly be swept up into the program. Blackmon left City Hall to join a California solar company this summer.
Read full story at oston Globe…
first published week of: 09/03/2018
Previously Unnamed Utility Reached Record $2.7 Million Settlement Agreement
A previously unnamed U.S. energy company that agreed to a record $2.7 million settlement after it left 30,000 records about its information security assets exposed online for 70 days in violation of energy sector cybersecurity regulations has been named as California utility PG&E.
Officially known as the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, PG&E is a publicly traded utility headquartered in San Francisco. The company had previously admitted to unintentionally exposing sensitive data in 2016, although it initially claimed that a publicly exposed database contained fake data. Subsequently, however, it confirmed that it did, in fact, leave sensitive information - including hashed passwords for administrators that attackers could have reverse-engineered - exposed to the internet.
But it wasn't clear if that incident - or utility - was the subject of a settlement agreement announced early this year.
News of the settlement agreement - but not the name of the utility that had reached the agreement - first emerged in a Feb. 28 notice from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC, to Kimberly D. Bose, secretary of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Read full story at Bank Info Security…
first published week of: 08/27/2018