Advanced Energy Perspectives

Solar cells power Apple's data center in Catawba County, North Carolina.

This week, we saw updates in energy storage and behavioral energy efficiency, while some of the biggest names in business weighed in on North Carolina’s Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard (REPS). Memo from Apple, Google, and Facebook to Tar Heel State lawmakers: leave REPS alone.

This photo of the Hoover Dam intake towers was taken by Raquel Baranow in 2014. Water elevation on that day at noon: 1086.39 ft.

As the saying goes, in the West, the whiskey’s for drinking and the water’s for fighting. While much of the attention related to EPA’s Clean Power Plan is focused, appropriately, on the emissions and economic benefits of the new standards, a report just released by the CNA Corporation identified another benefit that may end up being worth more than all the other impacts combined: water.

This post is one in a series of feature stories on trends shaping advanced energy markets in the U.S. and around the world, drawn from Advanced Energy Now 2015 Market Report, which was prepared for AEE by Navigant Research. 

The energy storage market is in a process of transition. It is going from a large infrastructure market focused on pumped hydro and underground compressed air projects to an advanced energy technologies market, fueled by technological innovation, liberalized market structures, and supportive policies. While the global market still revolves around pumped storage, energy storage in the United States is all about new batteries and other technologies. This distinction accounts for recent market dynamics.

“We haven’t changed the way utilities do business in over a hundred years,” Lisa Frantzis explained in this week’s Energy Gang podcast, which focused on building a 21^st century electricity system. Lisa, senior vice president of strategy at AEE, gave an expert’s perspective on a trend that everyone can see coming. The way we produce and consume energy is changing, and “at such a fast clip that the regulation basically has to catch up,” she said.

On her work convening industry stakeholders in New York, Lisa said, “people know that this is a good market. People know that the current business models aren’t necessarily going to work moving forward as these more innovative technologies come into the marketplace.” On February 26, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) issued its much anticipated order in Track One of the “Reforming the Energy Vision” (REV) proceeding – and set the ball rolling on the most comprehensive reworking of the utility marketplace now under way nationally.

While policy wonks wait with bated breath for release of EPA’s final Clean Power Plan, some of us in the advanced energy industry are just as eagerly awaiting EPA’s draft Federal Plan for compliance, which will be revealed at the same time. Why the excitement about a Federal Plan? Because the stakes are high: Not only will the Federal Plan serve as a model for states as they begin to consider compliance options for the final CPP, it will apply to any state that does not submit a plan that passes muster with EPA. Questions have been raised about whether EPA can incorporate advanced energy options like energy efficiency and demand response, renewable energy, and advanced grid technologies into a Federal Plan for compliance. Our answer: Yes, it can.