Advanced Energy Perspectives

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.”

The big advanced energy news this week broke early: on Monday morning Google announced plans to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. The most famous product from Nest Labs is the Nest Thermostat, which allowed a home’s “learning” HVAC control system to be remotely controlled and networked with smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.

Katie Fehrenbacher, writing in GigaOM, noted some of the “winners and losers” from the deal. Winners include Nest investors (who saw significant returns on their investments), advanced energy investors overall, and the home energy management market, “which just hit the big time.” Losers included Apple (from which Nest execs were drawn), traditional thermostat makers, and privacy advocates, who wonder where all that home energy data is going. Fehrenbacher specifically noted the irony in one of Apple’s iPhone designers getting snatched up by Google, “Apple’s arch rival.”

The week started out with much consternation over a CBS “60 Minutes” segment Sunday night proclaiming “The Cleantech Crash.” DOE slammed it, with spokesman Bill Gibbons declaring 60 Minutes “flat wrong on the facts.” GigaOM said it got some things right and others wrong, notably conflating government programs (which have had some failures but are largely successful in achieving public goals) and VC investment (which have had some successes but more failures, but that’s what VC does). Energy Collective contributor Robert Rapier, who was featured in the piece prominently as a critic, complained of selective editing. “I gave several examples of cleantech successes to Lesley Stahl, and I told her in no uncertain terms that cleantech is not dead,” he posted after the segment aired. One solid rejoinder came from an AEE Partner, New England Clean Energy Council, along with an excellent Storify collection of pushbacks on Twitter. AEE joined in the social-media chorus with a series of “Memo to @60Minutes” tweets pointing toward our Economic Impacts of Advanced Energy report, which sized the advanced energy economic opportunity at $1.1 trillion globally and clocked the $130+ billion U.S. industry growing at a 19% rate. Perhaps the best rebuttal-in-advance of the “cleantech crash” thesis was this story that appeared in the New York Times the day before, documenting a “Solar Power Craze On Wall Street,” a trend doing well by AEE member company Solar City, in particular.

To wrap up the year, we are taking a look back at 2013. For the first five of our Top 10 Advanced Energy News Stories of 2013, see Part One. Did we miss one of your favorite stories? Let us know in comments.

6) Fortune 500 companies invest in advanced energy 

Another major trend for 2013 was increased investment in advanced energy by major corporations of various types. Though investment in advanced energy is not a new trend, 2013 saw especially strong investment from private companies.

As discussed regarding data centers (see story #5 in Part One), Google has invested in wind and other renewable energies. The company also invested heavily to develop a transmission system that will act as a “backbone” for offshore wind farms. “At Google, we believe investing in renewable energy makes business sense,” wrote Needham, in a guest column for New Jersey’s Star-Ledger.

Walmart, the largest retailer in America, agrees. The company has continued its investment in advanced energy in general and solar energy in particular: Investing in solar panels on stores and distribution centers has made it the top non-utility private company for solar installations. “Investing in renewable energy and energy conservation are good for business, good for communities and good for the environment,” said Walmart CEO Mike Duke. “When we use less energy, that’s less energy we have to buy, and that means less waste and more savings for our customers.”