Buried lead : Los Angeles Utility to pay a premium for peak watts to Distributed Generators

First off DUH. From page 2 of this Inside Climate News story. (never heard of them either but this story had a pretty good level of detail.)

"Farrell pointed to programs by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Austin Energy in Texas as leading examples. The Los Angeles utility recently rolled out a 100-megawatt feed-in tariff program for distributed solar projects, with a twist. The utility will pay developers 17 cents for every kilowatt-hour of solar electricity. But solar power produced in the middle of the day and during hot summer months—peak demand periods—will earn extra money on top of that, as much as 2.25 cents more per unit."

I mean really, duh. If you don't pay users for those watts they'll just use them themselves and you'll have nothing to resell, and you'll have to get back on that grid building treadmill - in a time when more folks push back and say "don't charge me for long transmission lines - I don't use them." And they are finally right to a degree and that degree is growing.

Counting - what do we count? watts? watts peak? Wm^2? GWhr/Acre/yr? $/W? LCOE? ROI?

Moving targets everywhere when it comes to counting and accounting for solar.

Here is a summary of land use rates for solar power:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/What-Is-The-Best-Solar-Power-Plant-Technology-to-Cut-Land-Costs

Really neat to have it run together in one place. It has a huge utility bias of course. Rooftops have so many other services they are offering that disentangling the cost of land for those installations is a no go. There might be some way to compare by using parking cover structures... Anyhow, lots to learn here I think:

First was something called Direct Area

 

which is weird... (you can't build without ancillary-land slop so why analyze direct?)

  

so instead lets attend to the TOTAL AREA. (shown next)

That right-hand column is the meat and seeing the direct (whatever that is) vs total land. I think total land is more important. And 2-Axis CPV is looking pretty impressive. Even to me a CPV skptic (unhybridized at least) it is neat to see aperture (basically) given some respect.

OK... there is plenty more there to read and learn. More when I have had some digestive time.

 

Seeing around corners - NYT opinionator on letting go of nukes

I'm back at the grindstone.

first up:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/the-new-nuclear-craze/?src=recg&_r=0

I'm not sure about all the cost figures but the overall gist "let's remember nuclear has many many expensive and unsolved problems" strikes me as right on.

It makes me think about how by now, if it were going to really be safe we'd have seen the cost  and risk curves go in the right direction but nobody in the private sector is interested in underwriting the risks of new plants both energy wise nor disaster wise.  The formula is supposed to be
1) we produce a product/service for X and
2) sell it for X+
where X+ is enough to justify the risk of doing it in the first place.

YES that is an over-simplification. But if we get too far from it... we get in trouble.  I do see there is a place for keeping the door open to innovation by stimulating experiments and disturbing monopolies.  But the long history of subsidizing nuclear power plants and putting off the disposal issues strikes me as not the same thing. I could be wrong. But the point of the opinionator piece I think lands either way: renewables and distributed power and conservation are all growing fast are mutually reinforcing and could just fill in to address our load with carbon neutral juice and leave conventional plants with less and less to do. If those plants have, wrapped up in their fundamentals a bunch of thousand year poison - that we get if we run the plant or not... seems like we should think twice or thrice.

Just got to keep your eyes out for groovy reports... like this one

Working through the ARPA-E FOE FOCUS Funding Opportunity Announcement and this turns up:

THE THERMAL SPECTRUM OF LOW-TEMPERATURE ENERGY USE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Just read the abstract. I'll wait... 

Pretty darn cool no? It was done with 2008 data but it is not terribly time sensitive information. And I think it over simplified the uses temperature vs the advantageous delivery temperatures (you'll want to  have, in most cases a higher temp on the sources to deliver energy to the "thing to warm." You can touch the hot toast (thing to be warmed) but not the toaster element.  But still, the high quality dense energy we generate at such losses (energy system losses are huge - see the report!) are misused when we drive even "efficient" low-temp loads. Solar thermal is a great (zero emissions) source for low temp heat and a good source for medium temp heat. This report shows how broad the need is for low and medium temp heat and is enticing as to how much in the way of greenhouse gas displacement it can accomplish.

Concentrator PV (CPV) companies notably absent at Intersolar SF

Maybe they are just saving their powder for the September CPV conference in SF?

PV insider conference 
(I can't embed a vimeo video... sorry)

Amonix High Concentration Photovoltaic and Solaria Low Concentration Photovoltaic presentation are pretty interesting. I'd forgotten about the Solaria approach, they slice Silicon cells cell up and attach those slices to thick and shaped glass panels that lens the light down to the slices at a 3 x concentration. Like me they want to leverage the Silicon supply that the flat panel industry has created. They do, as a result of the lensing, need 1 axis tracking, but they get some extra strength from the thickness of the glass. Enough to ditch the module frame (some non trivial aluminum expense.)

That conference sounds like a winner to me. I'm off to mark up the calendar.

"Curtailment of PV" or revenge of the Orphan Watts...

The famous uneven distribution of the future prompts us all to look around for what might be the shape of things to come. Germany and Hawaii are both at the leading edge of solar PV uptake. So I sat up and took notice when I saw this:

"A recent analysis finds that a new German program offering up to 660 EUR/kW subsidy for storage tied to PV will not lower battery payback periods enough to induce new investment.(10) Germany’s solar incentives now require PV systems to have a curtailment capability, to allow shut-off during periods of grid instability.(11)

here are the citations:

10 Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Will Germany’s energy storage subsidy spur investment?” London. (2013) p. 1.
and 11 Fulton, M. and Capalino, R., “The German Feed-in Tariff: Recent Policy Changes.” New York: Deutsche Bank (2012) p. 21

(I found it in the FOCUS FOA from ARPA-E (link later in this post)

So... what is "curtailment" in the context of PV? Curtailment is throwing away energy that cannot be matched to demand at that moment (Electricity has a fierce stale date: basically immediate.) Because of the unbidden rise and fall of the PV output it cannot easily be responded to by the various base-load supporting generators. Those generators need to ramp up and down. Those are mostly not built for throttling etc.

Down in the weeds it gets ugly. Here is a pretty good paper on it in the context of storage of CSP (Concentrating Solar Power - the current term for high temp solar thermal collection): Enabling Greater Penetration of Solar Power...

The FOA that tipped me off to the issue is here at ARPA.

Load management (and yes, storage) is looking like a great place to be. The smart grid cannot come soon enough if we hope to keep the gains that come from PV and other renewables.  For instance: freezers that go extra-cold when there is spare electricity available (a prepaid expense.) How about a clothes washer that sits waiting to pounce on extra watts? Same for a dishwasher and so-called "vampires" the small standby loads and converter boxes - if they could get a tiny bit of smarts they could wait for the scrap watts. OH I like that, "scrap watts." Or how about, "orphan watts." I'll keep working on that. What do you think?

Smart grid one day... Smart house maybe sooner.

Here is a neat story about efforts to improve what they gracelessly call "self-consumption."

The buried lead is here:

With IBC SolStore Pb Home, IBC SOLAR not only presents the newest generation of its proven battery storage solutions, but also allows customers to take advantage of German government incentives for solar storage systems: the IBC SolStore Pb Home complete system fulfils all current requirements of the German government’s storage incentive programme that entered into force on May 1st 2013 and that covers up to 30 percent of the acquisition costs. Inter alia, IBC SOLAR offers a seven-year guarantee.

I guess there are worse behaviors to incentivize. And they deserve credit for emphasizing smartening up the use of electricity as a way to get more out of the batteries and the system overall. PV forecasting I find especially neat. By having effectively a home energy Operating System and developing on that as a software platform they might be changing things in ways we are not yet understanding.

check them out: http://www.ibc-solar.com/

Or the pdf of the press release
http://www.ibc-solar.de/en/uploads/media/130619_IBC_SOLAR_PR_SolStore_Pb_Home_EN.pdf

I, for one, will watch this space.