Green Energy

Because the price is right.

That’s why solar energy advocates say the commonwealth’s timing is good to begin transitioning to solar energy, as officials announced last month they would soon do thanks to solar “arrays,” as the installations are called, in York and Juniata counties in the Midstate as well as four others (Columbia, Northumberland, Montour and Snyder) in the state.

What do folks in York and Juniata think of that?

Well, the counties themselves aren’t really involved — the state will buy solar-powered energy from Constellation, an electric utility, which, in turn, is contracting with Lightsource bp to build, operate and own the solar arrays. Lightsource, in turn, plans to lease land for the arrays from Pennsylvania farmers.

Officials in York and Juniata counties told abc27 News they weren’t aware of the plan before a public announcement last month but were generally, if cautiously, supportive.

A potential wrinkle? “Because we are an agricultural county, the amount of land that might be sacrificed for solar panels,” said Juniata County Commission Chairperson Alice Gray (R) — in other words, productive farmland potentially coming offline. But she added: “I have all the confidence that in the state’s plan, that they have considered all this,” and she said she supports clean energy.

Indeed Emilie Wangerman, Lightsource bp’s senior vice-president of business development, said the economics are such that farmers would never want to lease highly productive farmland anyway. Lightsource said it couldn’t yet name specific potential sites for the solar arrays, which are due to begin producing energy Jan. 1, 2023. The project is called Pennsylvania PULSE, or Project to Utilize Light and Solar Energy.

Seven arrays in six counties will form a 191-megawatt project. How much is that?

“Just to put it in perspective, my university, Stanford University, the entire campus is running now effectively on 100 percent clean, renewable energy,” said Mark Jacobson, director of the university’s atmosphere energy program. It’s the largest physical campus in the world, he said, and it runs on half as much energy as the solar arrays will produce for Pennsylvania’s state government.

But again: With a sun that’s billions of years old, and an energy production industry that’s hundreds of years old, why now?

Well, consider the economics, on a much smaller scale, for a consumer like Bob Kefauver, who recently installed solar panels in his roof in York. For more than a decade, the idea intrigued him — he liked the environmental benefits. But “in the last 10 years, the installation costs are down dramatically, Kefauver said. And “the efficiency is way, way up.” He said he calculated he could make loan payments on the panels that would be roughly equivalent to his former electric bills, and after a decade or so — once the loan was paid down — his energy would be nearly free.

Kefauver said over the course of a year, the panels on his roof provide nearly enough energy to power his house, although sometimes (such as on a sunny day) they produce more than he needs, and he can provide excess energy to the power grid, while other times (like a cold night) he uses more energy than his panels produces.

Solar advocates say the same calculation is true for large organizations. Whereas at one time environmentally-minded companies and organizations paid a premium for solar, “now it’s about the economics and renewable benefits” said Wangerman of Lightsource.

Surprising that Pennsylvania would boast of what it claims will be the largest such solar project for a state government?

Not really, says Kevin Schreiber, president and CEO of the York County Economic Alliance.

“We have always led the way in Pennsylvania internationally and certainly nationally, in terms of energy production, from oil to coal to natural gas,” Schreiber said. “And now this.”

If you live in California, chances are you could be taking many more Uber and Lyft trips in electric vehicles in the coming years. The state’s clean air agency is poised to mandate that nearly all vehicles used by drivers working for ridesharing companies be electric by 2030.

The proposal from the California Air Resources Board, announced at the end of last month and set to be decided on next month, would slowly ratchet up mileage standards for ridesharing companies by mandating a certain number of yearly miles traveled be with electric vehicles. The requirements would begin by requiring 2% of all yearly miles driven by ridesharing companies be in electric vehicles in 2023, rising to 30% in 2026, then 50% by 2027, and arriving at 90% by 2030. This represents a step up from last year when CARB considered mandating that 60% of rideshare miles traveled be electric by 2030.

CARB found that in 2018, rideshare vehicles like Uber and Lyft made up 1% of the state’s total emissions from passenger vehicles on the road that year. That may not sound like much, but cars are a pretty big deal in California. Passenger vehicles make up a whopping third of the state’s total emissions, ahead of other big emitting sectors like livestock and electric plants. The move to regulate rideshare emissions is just part of a bigger push from the state to get a handle on its vehicle emissions. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to get all vehicles sold in-state to be electric by 2035, which is estimated to reduce the state’s overall emissions by 35%. Pretty big moves!

While ridesharing companies have in the past promoted the carpooling options provided by services like Uber Pool as an environmentally friendly option, a study conducted last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that Uber and Lyft trips created almost 70% more emissions than the rides they displaced. The study calculated a solo trip in a ridesharing car created on average 50% more emissions than if the person had just used their own car, mostly due to the rideshare vehicle driving to and fro without a passenger before and after the trip. Meanwhile, those pool rides that ridesharing companies said were greener options actually generated around the same amount of emissions as a normal car ride. And with the pandemic temporarily halting pooling options, it’s likely that when people do use Uber or Lyft most won’t be opting for group rides in the near future—meaning we’re even more likely to take those emissions-heavy solo rides.

At first glance, today’s wind resource assessors and mining prospectors of the past seem quite different. Look closer and you will find some striking similarities. Notably, a willingness to sift through volumes of information to dig up resource nuggets worth their weight in gold.

Unlike the past, however, today’s wind resource prospectors share their findings with the world. Using state-of-the-art modeling tools and sophisticated resource assessment technologies, the Wind Resource Characterization team at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) makes available new offshore wind data sets.

“Existing offshore wind data are largely outdated, lacking precise, real-world observations,” said NREL researcher Mike Optis, who is leading efforts to update publicly available offshore wind data. “Our goal is to provide more accurate data sets to the public that can improve offshore wind plant site selection, design, and operational decisions.”

Offshore Wind Data Evolution

In July 2020, NREL published an article about novel techniques and tools to produce offshore wind-speed data. Now those tools—such as numerical weather prediction and buoy-mounted lidars—have borne fruit.

The team has made data available for the outer continental shelf of California, the Mid-Atlantic, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest, with more on the way.

“Advancements in numerical weather prediction models supply us with more accurate estimates of wind resources,” Optis said. “The combination of increasing observations from the field and our enhanced ensemble modeling technique improves our confidence in the accuracy of the data we collect and disseminate.”

Like crowd wisdom, which holds that the shared thoughts of multiple people will produce a picture closer to the truth than what a single person could produce, ensemble modeling compiles many individual simulations to yield a spread of possible wind resource data sets. Researchers then run these individual simulations through a machine learning algorithm to produce an aggregate of responses. This results in a collective judgment closer to reality than what a single model could generate—preserving the good judgments while eliminating the idiosyncrasies of each data set.

The new offshore wind data sets span 20 years and will be combined with a data set covering the continental United States. Together they will replace the original WIND Toolkit that was based on 7-year time frames. Data sets with lengthy time intervals like this would not be possible without high-performance computers like NREL’s Eagle, which can quickly process the exceedingly complex simulations necessary to create data sets that cover extended time periods. As a result, the extended time interval introduces less chance for outlier years—where wind speeds are drastically higher or lower—to tilt data averages, resulting in more accurate data sets.

How and Where To Access the New Data Sets

Several methods of accessing the new offshore wind data sets exist. Some wind prospectors might prefer a fully customizable approach to extracting offshore resource data—that is where the Resource eXtraction (REX) tool comes in.

Accessible through GitHub, REX provides a Python-based code library for the efficient and scalable extraction, manipulation, and computation with various renewable resource data sets, including the WIND Toolkit and the National Solar Resource Database. It helps analysts and developers extract new offshore wind data, while also allowing code modifications to time averaging, spatial ranges, and other methods of processing data.

Other users may elect to get the new data sets from NREL’s Wind Prospector—a geospatial web application that visualizes wind resource data sets, while also serving as a data repository by making many of the data layers available for download. Wind Prospector gives users a simple point-and-click method to download data, which can aid wind developers, consultants, and researchers with their siting decisions and analysis.

There is also an API option to download the new offshore data sets, courtesy of NREL’s Developer Network.

More Data Sets on the Horizon

While a small but diligent and nimble fleet of NREL researchers work to make new offshore wind resource data sets available, they soon hope to add these to an update of the original WIND Toolkit, which will include wind data for the continental United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. For this update, both continental and offshore data sets will be stitched together, laying the foundation of the WIND Toolkit Long-term Ensemble Dataset (WTK-LED).

“Combining offshore and onshore wind resource characterization efforts can form the basis for broader grid integration and wind energy capacity expansion,” Optis said. “The combined data set could significantly boost the U.S. power system by linking continental wind resources with their coastal and offshore brethren, informing local community decisions on where to derive power.”

The president and auto industry maintain the nation is on the cusp of a gigantic shift to electric vehicles and away from liquid-fueled cars, but biofuels producers and some of their supporters in Congress aren’t buying it. They argue that now is the time to increase sales of ethanol and biodiesel, not abandon them.

To help address climate change, President Joe Biden has proposed an infrastructure plan that includes billions of dollars to pay for 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, electrify public vehicles and enhance the nation’s power grid. These moves follow initiatives in California and other states to mandate electric vehicle sales and a goal by General Motors to shift production fully to electric vehicles by 2035.

Yet any shift from liquid-fueled cars to electric would be gradual, given the fleet of 279 million petroleum-powered vehicles now on U.S. roads. And producers of corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel argue that biofuels will be needed for the foreseeable future.

The government’s promotion of electric vehicles comes as the U.S. works to reduce carbon emissions that worsen climate change and to compete in the increasingly electric global auto market. The transportation sector accounts for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 80% of that comes from cars, pickups and larger trucks, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

LMC Automotive, a consulting firm, predicts more than 1 million electric vehicles will be sold in the U.S. in 2023, rising to over 4 million by 2030—still less than one-quarter of normal annual new vehicle sales of around 17 million. Electric vehicles now comprise less than 2% of U.S. new-vehicle sales.

Citing a recent study from Harvard and Tuft universities that found ethanol emits 46% less carbon than gasoline, biofuels advocates say it’s imperative for the climate that the nation prioritize increased biofuel production.

Geoff Cooper, who heads the St. Louis-based Renewable Fuels Association, calls ethanol the “low-hanging fruit” for reducing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. He supports an immediate move from gasoline blended with 10% ethanol to a blend of 15%.

“If the goal is to reduce carbon impacts of our transportation sector and we knew we’re going to be using hundreds of billions of gallons of liquid fuels for the next several decades, why not take steps now to reduce the carbon intensity of those liquid fuels?” Cooper said.

Each year, U.S. refineries produce about 15 billion gallons of ethanol—about 10% the volume of gasoline—and 1.5 billion gallons of biodiesel, which is typically blended with petroleum-based diesel for trucks and other heavy vehicles.

Plants around the country produce the fuel, but most are in the Midwest, led by Iowa with 43 ethanol refineries and 11 biodiesel plants. Nearly 40% of the U.S. corn crop is used for ethanol, and 30% of soybeans goes to biodiesel.

Despite the carbon benefits of ethanol, others note the growth of biofuels prompted an expansion of corn acreage, increased use of fertilizers and more pollution of waterways. Biofuels plants also typically use hundreds of millions of gallons of water annually.

Iowa’s two Republican U.S. senators consider the shift toward electric vehicles a threat to farmers.

Sen. Charles Grassley said last fall that a proposal by Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. Mike Levin of California to end U.S. sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 would devastate Iowa.

“This … would absolutely destroy Iowa’s economy because it’s so dependent on agriculture and agriculture is so dependent on biofuels,” Grassley said.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst argues that tax credits for buying electric cars typically go to well-to-do people on the East and West coasts and are propping up an industry that hurts demand for biofuels.

“It’s not only the move to all-electric vehicles that should have Iowans concerned; it’s the crazy tax breaks that wealthy coastal elites are getting for their electric vehicles,” Ernst states on her Senate website. “I firmly believe Iowa taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for millionaires to get a discount on luxury cars.”

It is true that many who got the $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit since its inception in 2009 could afford a car that cost six figures or more. But since then, new models and higher sales have brought economies of scale and lower prices that appeal to more mainstream buyers.

The ethanol industry itself was a beneficiary of a 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit that provided about $30 billion to help the industry get established before that expired a decade ago. And farmers who grow commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans, still receive help from the federal government, including subsidized crop insurance costing billions of dollars annually.

Despite assurances the move to electric will be gradual, many farmers see the shift as a threat to their livelihoods and doubt state and federal officials from urban areas will protect rural economies.

“It’s like you’re almost helpless,” said Ed Wiederstein, a semi-retired livestock and grain farmer near Audubon in western Iowa. “It’s like a snowball that goes downhill.”

Joel Levin, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Plug In America, said the market will favor electric cars not only for environmental reasons but also because they’re high performance.

“It’s not like Californians wants you to eat your broccoli. These cars are fun to drive,” Levin said. “People don’t drive Teslas just because it’s good for the environment. They drive Teslas because it’s a sick car.”

Over time, a switch to electric vehicles likely will force farmers to adapt, said Chad Hart, an agriculture economist at Iowa State University. Farmers in states such as Iowa and Illinois still will mainly grow corn and soybeans because the soil and climate are perfect, but farmers elsewhere will raise other crops, he said.

“Agriculture is always shifting the crop mix to fit whatever markets offer the best opportunity,” he said.

An electric version of the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck will get an estimated 400 miles of range per charge, General Motors says.

The company announced the range in a webcast on Tuesday and said the truck would be built at a factory straddling the border of Detroit and the enclave of Hamtramck. It also announced that the plant would build the new 2024 GMC Hummer SUV.

The pickup announcement raises the level of competition for future buyers in the hot truck market. Ford already has announced plans to build an electric F-150 starting next year in Dearborn, Michigan, while Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis) has said it plans to have an all-electric Ram pickup.

GM would not say when the electric Silverado would arrive in dealerships, but the company plans to sell 30 electric vehicles globally by the end of 2025. It also has set a goal of making all of its passenger vehicles electric by 2035.

Ford’s F-Series pickups are the top-selling vehicles in the U.S., followed by the Silverado and Ram pickups. In addition to conventional automakers, electric vehicle leader Tesla plans to start selling a futuristic “Cybertruck” pickup later this year, and EV startup companies Bollinger Motors, Nikola, Rivian and Lordstown Motors are planning to enter the market.

GM President Mark Reuss said the electric Silverado will be designed from the ground up as an an electric truck for commercial and individual users. “This announcement affirms Chevrolet’s commitment to build on 100 years of truck expertise leadership while transitioning to an all-electric future in the light vehicle space,” he said.

The Detroit-Hamtramck plant, named “Factory Zero” by GM, is being retooled to build four electric vehicles with an investment of $2.2 billion. Eventually it will employ 2,200 workers to make the two GMC Hummers, the electric Silverado and the Origin, an autonomous passenger vehicle for GM’s Cruise subsidiary.

Reuss said the factory has built 4 million vehicles since 1985 and “will help lead us into the future of transportation.”

United Auto Workers Vice President Terry Dittes said that in November of 2018, GM announced it would close the factory. But it became part of the 2019 negotiations with the union that resulted in a 40-day strike, and was brought back as one of four North American electric vehicle factories. The others are in Orion Township, Michigan, north of Detroit; Spring Hill, Tennessee; and in Ingersoll, Ontario.

In the next two years, GM will build more electric models than any other manufacturer, Dittes said. “It’s always a good day when GM tells us there is more product coming into our location. Because that is more jobs,” he said.

But the future for workers is also a bit of a mystery. Electric vehicles have 30% to 40% fewer moving parts than those run on internal combustion engines, so companies will need fewer workers to put them together. Also, jobs making complex internal combustion engines and transmissions could be in jeopardy when more electric vehicles are on the road.

Europe’s biggest utilities Enel and Iberdrola saw the clean energy transition coming decades ago when others baulked at the high cost of producing energy from the sun and wind and instead stuck with coal and oil.

Thanks to early decisions to buy power grids and build renewable plants, the once-staid utilities are now among a handful of global green energy majors going into battle with Big Oil to supply low-carbon power full of confidence.

European oil giants such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total have sharpened their focus on power, seeing it as the sector to build their businesses around as they reinvent themselves as clean energy suppliers.

But they will need to wrestle market share from incumbents such as Enel and Iberdrola that have been positioning themselves for years to profit from the shift to cleaner energy, betting the demise of fossil fuels was inevitable.

“The energy transition has been part of my life,” Enel Chief Executive Francesco Starace told Reuters. “There was no eureka moment for us. We just said this is too stupid to be continued for a long time.”

The transformation of the two companies into global green powerhouses has helped boost their profits and share prices while generating cash and dividends despite a global pandemic. Over the last two years their shares have skyrocketed as investors shifted from oil stocks to buy into businesses they felt had the financial footing and skill sets to lead the accelerating energy transition. tmsnrt.rs/3fwgdeJ

Enel and Iberdrola have built clean energy capacity in key markets such as the United States and Latin America and are now aiming to have a combined 215 gigawatts of their own renewable capacity by 2030 – enough to power some 150 million European homes, based on an estimate by consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Other leading green utilities that have also benefited from the shift away from fossil fuels include wind and solar power giant NextEra Energy in the United states and Denmark’s offshore wind farm specialist Orsted. (Graphic: Stock markets favour green utilities, )

‘KISS THE FROG’

Even before joining Enel at the turn of the century, Starace was pushing companies hooked on oil and coal to switch to less-polluting gas turbines.

“This is not the first energy transition, before there were coal steam cycles which then transitioned to gas steam and so on,” he said. “I liked the sustainable side of renewables, the fact you keep reusing the same energy from the sun.”

The turning point for Enel was its creation of Enel Green Power (EGP) in 2008, just after it launched a 39 billion euro takeover of Spain’s Endesa, a deal that boosted its access to Latin America’s fast-growing markets. Starace was tasked with running EGP as a viable independent business which did not rely on the generous incentives governments were offering then to kick-start their green drives.

“Renewables were a whole different ball game – smaller plants, less competitive, costlier. It needed its own space with the right footprint and technology mix to deliver,” a source who worked at EGP said. By the time Starace became chief executive of the Enel group in 2014, he lost little time in buying back the part of EGP listed in 2010 so the growth engine was fully in-house.

Iberdrola Chief Executive Ignacio Galan made an even earlier switch away from coal and oil when he took the helm at Spain’s largest private utility in 2001.

He started closing fuel oil power plants – 3.2 gigawatts (GW) of capacity had been decommissioned by 2012 – and shut the company’s last two coal-fired plants in 2020.

At the same time, Iberdrola boosted its spending on building renewable plants, mainly wind farms, in Spain from 352 million euros ($413 million)in 2001 to over 1 billion euros in 2004.

Galan met with internal and regulatory resistance, though Swiss bank UBS said in a 2002 report entitled “Kiss the Frog” that Iberdrola’s new low-carbon focus could produce profits.

Investors still needed convincing. One Iberdrola source recalled a U.S. asset manager’s doubts about wind farms in 2004, calling them pretty white darts stuck on a hillside. He changed his mind when he visited one in Spain in 2007.

“He was sceptical, but three years later he said we were right,” the source said. (Graphic: Ambitious targets, but long way to catch up to the renewable energy majors, )

GRIDS APART

Consultancy Rystad Energy says oil giants have a long way to catch up with the renewable energy majors in terms of capacity, despite their ambitious target. By 2035, it estimates Enel will still be leading followed by Iberdrola and NextEra.

Enel and Iberdrola have another significant advantage that analysts say oil majors will struggle to match – thriving power grids businesses. Almost half of Enel and Iberdrola’s earnings come from millions of kilometres of power lines carrying electricity into homes in Europe, the United States and Latin America.

“Grids are the backbone of the energy transition,” says Javier Suarez, head of the utility desk at Milan’s Mediobanca. “Owning them means steady cash flow and lower investment risk.” Most grids are monopolies with regulated, guaranteed returns and operators rarely put them up for sale. “Any new entrant into the industry is not going to be able to get access easily or certainly not cheaply to the really good legacy assets that Iberdrola and Enel have – the infrastructure assets,” said Wood Mackenzie analyst Tom Heggarty.

Networks built to take one-way power flows from fossil-fuel plants now need a massive round of investment to accommodate electricity generation from sources such as rooftop solar panels that can also inject power back into the grid.

Incumbents like Enel and Iberdrola are the most likely candidates to provide capital, analysts say.

Because returns are typically locked in with contracts, more spending on grids and renewable power generation assets will translate into more profit for the major green utilities, said Goldman Sachs. By the U.S. bank’s calculations, reaching international targets to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 will require a 200% jump in spending on such power infrastructure. Enel is now looking to expand its grid network in Europe, Latin America, the United States and the Asia Pacific region, sources said.

In November, it said it would spend 150 billion euros of its own money to help cut its carbon emissions 80% by 2030 and nearly triple its owned renewables capacity to 120 GW, with grids soaking up almost half the overall investment. Iberdrola, meanwhile, has earmarked more than a third of its spending plans for grids, mostly in the United States, which will become its biggest market for regulated assets.

It has pledged to spend 150 billion euros on tripling its renewable capacity and doubling its network assets by 2030. The sums dwarf amounts European oil majors have pledged for their fledgling green businesses so far.

“I don’t think it was simple to decide to spend money in renewables,” Pierre Bourderye of PJT Partners said of Enel and Iberdrola. “If it had been simple others would have done it at the same time, but they did it 10 years later.”