Advanced Energy Perspectives

This week we saw news that for the first time natural gas nudged past coal to  lead as an electricity generation source in the U.S., Iberdrola Renewables announced a historic wind installation in the Southeast, and the Tennessee Valley Authority beefed up its targets for a range of advanced energy sources in its latest IRP. All in a week’s work for advanced energy.

In many ways, California is a special case. With an economy about the same size of Canada’s ($2.3 trillion in 2014) and a population of more than 38 million (roughly one in eight Americans is a Californian), California’s energy policies affect huge numbers of people and a large portion of the American economy. And now, under new rules set by regulators, California’s investor-owned utilities are getting set to pull rooftop solar, energy efficiency, energy storage, and other distributed resources into their system planning. In California, the electric power system is not just about power plants and wires any more.

Beautiful, sunny, and on track to 100 percent renewable energy – is Hawaii paradise, or what?, Xcel Energy’s consumers in Colorado get a break, and a different kind of nuclear power renaissance in the making. That’s what the advanced energy news looked like this week.

When discussing any networked technology these days, talk turns to “the Cloud.” Cloud computing and massive online data storage is the latest and greatest service on offer from many of the nation’s top tech companies, from Dropbox to Amazon to Google. But the cloud is not just for computer jockeys anymore. The concept is now being used for the distributed system of networks that the U.S. electricity system could become in the 21^st Century.  Just ask Navigant Research, which has put out a new white paper on what it calls the “energy cloud.”

Unless you have been getting your energy trade news from the undersides of rocks recently, you know energy storage is a hot topic. The U.S. alone deployed 5.8 MW of energy storage in Q1, and GTM Research sees U.S. energy storage on track to break records in 2015. This week Navigant Research released its Leaderboard Report on Energy Storage Systems Integrators, which included RES Americas and Stem, both AEE member companies. Predictions of 250 percent growth in the storage market this year aside, does storage really deserve all the hype? Some critics are telling everybody, Elon Musk included, to cool their jets.