Advanced Energy Perspectives

California’s 2014 legislative session has finally come to a close. August was a busy month in Sacramento as the Legislature worked to get bills through both houses in the final stretch, after which Gov. Brown signed them into law during the month of September. In addition to approving several bills and budget items that will improve the business climate for advanced energy companies, the Legislature also faced an attempt to push off a key milestone in the state’s climate plan.

As the UN summit on climate in New York City came to a close last week, all eyes were on the United States as the world’s leading economy. Yet, those seeking action from the U.S. should actually be looking at the states and what they’re already doing. As international climate talks open up to “sub-national” participants, states may get a chance to take their rightful place among the world’s advanced energy leaders.

It may be hard to imagine the U.S. Senate ratifying an international agreement on climate change (which requires a two-thirds vote). But every year states around the country pass legislation to move advanced energy forward to serve a growing U.S. and global market. As documented in AEE’s Advanced Energy Technologies for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, advanced energy products and services improve the electric power system in myriad ways – and reduce emissions associated with climate change as well.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan to regulate carbon emissions is just the latest challenge facing the U.S. electric power system. Technological innovation is disrupting old ways of doing business and accelerating grid modernization. Earlier this year, AEE released Advanced Energy Technologies for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, a report detailing the use, application, and benefits of 40 specific advanced energy technologies and services. This post is one in a series drawn from the technology profiles within that report. 

A ground-source heat pump is a heating and cooling system that exchanges heat between the earth and the interior of a building. It relies on the fact that ground temperatures tend to be constant throughout the year – this allows it to achieve higher efficiencies than air-source heat pumps, and also makes it suitable for any climate. In the winter, it transfers heat stored in the ground into a building, and in the summer, the system works like an air conditioner, transferring heat out of a building and into the ground. Ground-source heat pumps require vertical wells or horizontal loop fields to be installed to enable the heat transfer to occur. Ground-source heat pumps can also provide domestic hot water from desuperheaters, one of the heat pump’s components, and heat water for free in the summer.

As the U.S. gets closer to a 21^st century electricity system, how energy is distributed, managed, and consumed becomes just as important as how energy is generated.  Two of the fastest-growing segments in the advanced energy industry today are demand response and energy storage. Each has huge potential for market growth, and we see it in this week’s headlines. 

First, according to a new report from Navigant, the global demand response (DR) market is set to increase six-fold in less than a decade, from 31 gigawatts (GW) today to 196 GW by 2023. Both commercial/industrial and residential sectors will drive DR growth, according to the report.

In a recent post, we updated you on the status of the “Reforming the Energy Vision” (REV) proceeding in New York State, through which the Public Service Commission (PSC) is seeking to fundamentally reshape the electricity sector to meet a range of challenges, including the need to replace aging infrastructure, make the system more resilient, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Tackled separately, addressing each of these needs would impose new costs that would lead to higher rates for customers and put at risk a basic tenet of utility regulation: provision of safe and reliable electricity at just and reasonable rates. At the same time, electricity sales in New York are flat to declining (due in part to increasing levels of efficiency and wider deployment of customer-sited solar), which limits the revenue growth available to utilities with which to finance modernization of the grid, unless rates go up.