Advanced Energy Perspectives

This week we saw wind turbines reaching heights, new opportunities for energy storage in California, and the grid’s “best kept secret.” (Spoiler: it’s Combined Heat and Power, but that’s apparently not sexy enough for your average consumer). But let’s begin this week in Iowa, where time-lapse footage from MidAmerican Energy gives us a look into the construction of the tallest wind turbine ever built in the United States. Working night and day, construction crews build the turbine, which has a capacity of 2.4 MW. And you can see it put together in just 5 minutes and 42 seconds! 

In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released “Phase II” of its reliability assessment of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). Those of us familiar with NERC’s Initial Reliability Report and its “Phase I” report were bracing for an exaggerated list of reliability threats we saw as inconsistent with current trends in the electricity system. What we got was quite different. The new NERC in a nutshell: Change is coming, CPP or not. But before we dig in, let’s recap the earlier reports, which did so much to raise concerns about the CPP.

This post is one in a series featuring the complete slate of advanced energy technologies outlined in the report This Is Advanced Energy.

Montana's big sky. Photo by Lexie Briggs. 

This week, the news was shining bright with solar energy, both new generation and new policies. We’re used to those stories coming from a few key states, but this week it’s like Kevin Spacey’s entire oeuvre: not just the usual suspects. Take Montana, for instance. Though the state is known as an energy producer, it’s mostly been in the news as an example of the resurgence of the U.S. gas and oil drilling industry or of the country’s growing wind generation capacity. This week, however, Tom Lutey, writing for the Billings Gazette reported that recently, solar has become the rage.