Battery Metals

At the New York International Auto Show this week, over a dozen major automakers have teamed up to launch a marketing campaign “to increase electric car use throughout the Northeast.”

But the effort is led by the automakers’ lobbying groups who have historically been anti-EV.

They describe the effort:

The Drive Change. Drive Electric. campaign will focus on the benefits of electric cars and advancing consumer awareness, understanding, consideration and adoption of these vehicles in the region. Together, states and automakers are working towards a sustainable future with more battery electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles on the roads and infrastructure support in place. The campaign launch coincides with the NYIAS, where automakers are featuring a broad range of electric cars.

But the effort is led by the Association of Global Automakers and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, two auto industry lobbying groups who have repeatedly asked Trump’s administration to lower the already agreed upon fuel consumption standards that would require them to produce more electric vehicles.

It’s unclear what form this new campaign will take aside from the current social media accounts and website, but they say that their goal is to communicate the benefits of electric vehicles.

A 12-acre solar power array may soon grow in a vacant farm field in Schaghticoke, part of a spreading wave of so-called “community” solar farms proposed across the state.

While there are now slightly more than a dozen such solar farms running statewide, more than 300 more are in development after receiving state approval.

In Schaghticoke, developer Forefront Power wants to build a two-megawatt farm on vacant land on Verbeck Avenue, just west of Route 40, said town planner Frank Alessandrini.

It would be the first such project in a predominantly rural town with a lot of farmland, although there are “fewer farmers than there used to be,” he said.

“It should be a good project. Doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t make any odors,” said Alessandrini. Town planners have issued conditional approval for the work, marking the first approval under Schaghticoke’s 2017 solar farm siting law, which set standards on how the farms must be built, he added.

California-based Forefront Power last year pitched a two-megawatt farm in Feura Bush, Albany County, to help cover the energy needs of the Bethlehem Central School District.

Unlike home-based solar systems, in which a single yard or rooftop is covered with panels, a community project is much larger and can involve thousands of panels spread across acres. Power is purchased by customers who might live far away, allowing them to avail themselves of clean energy without installing individual systems.

Today, just 14 community farms are running, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. The authority is spearheading state efforts to grow renewable power as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s goal to dramatically cut state emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases by 2030.

Current facilities are capable of generating a combined total of less than seven megawatts, which is a small fraction of what just one traditional fossil fuel-fired power plant can generate.

One such array opened last year in the Rensselaer county town of Pittstown off Route 7. There, about 1,200 panels in a five-acre field are supplying power to support the Albany City School District, with the remaining electricity earmarked for 26 homeowners or apartment dwellers throughout the Capital Region.

The Schaghticoke project is just one of many more community farms that are coming. So far, the state has approved another 315 projects statewide, according to NYSERDA figures. Once built, those projects could supply a maximum of nearly 700 megawatts, which represents the equivalent of nearly three traditional power plants.

Alicia Barton, NYSERDA president and CEO, said the projects will cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and help slow man-made climate change.

“Projects like these in Rensselaer County spur local investments, help create even more clean energy jobs and reduce harmful emissions while saving consumers money on electric bills,” she said.

“There are some challenges to bringing on community solar, but we are committed to it,” said Nate Stone, a spokesman for National Grid, the utility that covers most of the Capital Region.

There are 76 approved community solar projects spread through National Grid territory, including Altamont in Albany County, Schenectady and Rotterdam in Schenectady County, in Troy, East Greenbush and Brunswick in Rensselaer County; and in Waterford in Saratoga County.

Those projects would total about 142 megawatts, or enough to power about 25,000 average homes.

Before a utility can agree to connect a community solar farm to the transmission grid, engineering studies must determine if it can be done safely, said Stone.  That review process can take a year, he said.

Stone said National Grid has added additional crews to handle the work of reviewing and then plugging in community solar arrays. “There is an explosion of solar right now in the state,” Stone said.

In almost every corner of the solar industry, key players are struggling to standardize design, construction, operations and maintenance, regulation and permitting. As an industry grows and matures, it must go through multiple stages of process standardization.

In the auto industry, this was exemplified by the production line of the Model T, then Toyota (followed later by Ford, Chrysler, GM and others) adopting W. Edward Deming’s total quality framework, and in modern times by the industry standardizing on OBD-2 computer systems for diagnostics.

Solar manufacturing, installation, operation and maintenance comprise a huge number of processes, many of which don’t follow modern manufacturing and process engineering standards. The solar industry has used many of the lessons of mass-manufacturing science in order to produce cells and panels more effectively, but it has not yet ported these lessons to the more effective installation of solar.

In fact, in solar installation, operations and maintenance, the industry deploys some of the same metrics to determine the outcome of installation capacity that were common in a 1920s-1940s automotive factory. These methods revolve around reworking failed components and assemblies, or rolling a truck to re-work a site in the solar example. Often, this inspection occurs at the intake for solar asset management, or system activation in residential systems.

Diagram of a Rework-on-Failure Based Quality Assurance Framework

The world’s biggest solar project is going to get underway in Saudi Arabia, according a plan whipped up by the country’s sovereign wealth fund and the Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank.

The partners are joint investors in the $100 billion Vision Fund, the world’s largest private equity fund, which will provide the initial cash for the first phase of the scheme.

Here’s what you need to know about the project.

How big is “biggest”?

SoftBank and the Saudis say the solar project will be able to generate around 7.2 gigawatts of power in 2019, and 200 gigawatts by 2030.

Today, all the solar deployments around the world generate around 400 gigawatts (which is slightly more than is generated by nuclear, incidentally.) The largest installation at the moment, the Tengger Desert Solar Park in China, generates just over 1.5 gigawatts. So yes, this is a big deal.

How does Saudi Arabia generate power today?

Mostly by burning oil, unsurprisingly. Because domestic petroleum is so heavily subsidized, around 60% of the kingdom’s electricity comes from it. But because consumption is rising, that has implications for the amount of oil Saudi Arabia has left to sell abroad. So there’s a big economic angle to this.

Saudi Arabia is also a signatory to the Paris Agreement on climate change, but it has not been clear as to how it intends to achieve its carbon emissions reduction targets. It’s a bit clearer now. And that doesn’t just matter for the global pact—the country is also particularly sensitive to climate change.

How much will this cost?

According to SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son, the first phase will cost $5 billion. The Vision Fund will stump up $1 billion for that, while the rest of the financing will come from debt.

By the time the project is completed, it will have cost an estimated $200 billion. That includes the cost of labor, panels—which will be imported until local production capacity is up to speed—and an unprecedented network of batteries that will be able to store this energy for measured distribution over the Saudi grid.

“The project will fund its own expansion,” said Son, who explained that the profits generated in each step of the build-out would help fund the next phase.

Windfarms and solar panels produced more electricity than the UK’s eight nuclear power stations for the first time at the end of last year, official figures show.

Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions also continued to fall, dropping 3% in 2017, as coal use fell and the use of renewables climbed.

Energy experienced the biggest drop in emissions of any UK sector, of 8%, while pollution from transport and businesses stayed flat.

Energy industry chiefs said the figures showed that the government should rethink its ban on onshore wind subsidies, a move that ministers have hinted could happen soon.

Lawrence Slade, chief executive of the big six lobby group Energy UK, said: “We need to keep up the pace … by ensuring that the lowest cost renewables are no longer excluded from the market.”

Across the whole year, low-carbon sources of power – wind, solar, biomass and nuclear – provided a record 50.4% of electricity, up from 45.7% in 2016.

But in the fourth quarter of 2017, high wind speeds, new renewables installations and lower nuclear output saw wind and solar becoming the second biggest source of power for the first time.

Wind and solar generated 18.33 terawatt hours (TWh), with nuclear on 16.69TWh, the figures published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy show.

Subsidy-free renewable energy projects set to soar in UK, analysts say
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But renewables still have a long way to go to catch up with gas, the UK’s top source of electricity at 36.12TWh, which saw its share of generation fall slightly.

Greenpeace said the figures showed the government should capitalise on its lead in renewables and “stop wasting time and money propping up nuclear power”.

Horizon Nuclear Power, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, is in talks with Whitehall officials for a financial support package from the government, which it says it needs by midsummer.

By contrast, large-scale solar and onshore wind projects are not eligible for support, after the Conservative government cut subsidies in 2015.

However the energy minister, Claire Perry, recently told House Magazine that “we will have another auction that brings forward wind and solar, we just haven’t yet said when”.