Advanced Energy Perspectives

This week, Tesla Motors announced plans for a $5 billion “gigafactory,” a large-scale factory designed to produce batteries for mass-market electric vehicles by 2017. This kind of facility would allow Tesla to produce more cars, faster and cheaper, and would allow for a more vertically integrated production of Tesla vehicles. Tesla expects that, by moving the manufacturing of the batteries in-house, it can reduce the per-kilowatt cost of a battery by more than 30 percent in the first year of production.

This week AEE released Advanced Energy Now 2014 Market Report, which featured a breakdown of advanced energy’s $1.1 trillion estimated global revenue in 2013. The report itself was picked up by several major news organizations.

Rod Kuckro, writing for E&E’s Energy Wire, described the report and what it could mean for states considering advanced energy policies during this legislative year. Kuckro described AEE as “a challenge to robust efforts by the American Legislative Exchange Council to repeal state laws” that promote advanced energy. While emphasizing AEE’s pro-prosperity mission, CEO Graham Richard told Kuckro, “We are involved in protecting and keeping policies that we believe give us a fair and level playing field such as protecting the renewable portfolio standards in states, protecting energy conservation initiatives.”

In response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, New York City began moving toward updating its grid to a more advanced, resilient system. Last year, we published a post from Lockheed Martin describing their microgrid systems, which provide reliable energy solutions for customers like the U.S. military.

Last year we saw battles over net metering play out in Idaho and Arizona  (it was even one of our Top 10 Stories of 2013). This week a familiar story surfaced in Kansas: utilities are lobbying for lower net metering reimbursement for solar customers. Kansas utility Westar Energy’s executive director of government affairs argued that the utility is paying solar customers “a retail price for a wholesale commodity.”

We write a lot here about the potential of advanced vehicles to transform the transportation sector and the electrical grid as a whole. One Honda dealership in Vineland, NJ, managed to one-up us when it became the first dealership in America to be “electric grid neutral.”

The dealership has instituted policies that both produce and save energy. It installed 900 solar panels attached to canopies in the dealer’s parking lot – simultaneously giving the vehicles shelter – and changed all the lights in the parking lot to LED lamps. As a result, the dealership’s monthly energy bills have diminished to “almost zero.”