Green Energy

Helen Holifield, a yoga instructor and substitute teacher who lives in Shelby County, is alarmed by the warming climate.

“Everything is dying on the planet; we’ve got to do something quickly,” she said.

After getting an electric car, Holifield last summer looked into putting solar panels on her house in Shelbyville to generate her own renewable electricity. But the tree shade and the orientation of her roof made that impractical, she said.

Then one day, while driving on Interstate 64, Holifield noticed the massive array of solar panels being installed by Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities, the local power monopoly, alongside the highway in Simpsonville.

She would soon become one of the roughly 1,300 residential customers and businesses who have signed up to help pay for the build-out of the solar farm, a program LG&E-KU calls Solar Share.

“I was like, well sure, I would like to support that,” Holifield said.

Holifield isn’t directly receiving solar-powered electricity at her home. Instead, she pays for a “share” of solar power produced at the solar farm and fed into LG&E-KU’s broader grid. Holifield gets both a extra monthly charge for the cost of the solar plant and a credit against her energy bill for her share of the power it produces.

Because the cost is more than the credit, the net result is that her bills are few dollars more than they would be otherwise.

Holifield, who bought in to Solar Share at the lowest available level, calls the few extra dollars she pays per month “a little token gesture” to support renewable energy, though acknowledged she would have to buy dozens more shares to fully offset her household’s electricity usage through the solar farm, which would be too expensive.

Thanks to customers like Holifield, LG&E’s “community” solar farm beside I-64 is growing.

After putting the solar array into service last year, the utility is about to start construction of the second of what could eventually be eight sections of panels. And it has signed up about half of the customers – called “subscribers” – needed to start building the third section.

About 80% of LG&E-KU’s electricity comes from burning coal, the fossil fuel energy source responsible for more plant-warming carbon dioxide emissions than any other. As concerns about climate change grow and more people and businesses become interested in renewable electricity, LG&E casts Solar Share as an easy alternative to residential solar panels.

A solar panel system requires upfront investment on the order of buying a newer car ($20,000 or more) and isn’t an option for homeowners with irregular roofs or too much shade or people who don’t own their homes or live in multi-family buildings.

“It comes back to the convenience factor,” said John Bevington, director of business and economic development for LG&E-KU. “… It’s a completely worry-free situation for our customers, and I think there is something to be said for that.”

But LG&E-KU’s solar subscribers pay a lot for that convenience. So much, in fact, that some say there are more effective ways to support clean energy.

“It’s not a very good deal,” said Sarah Lynn Cunningham, executive director of the Louisville Climate Action Network, a group focused on local efforts to combat climate change.

Cunningham said there is “value” in giving customers an option to pay for renewable energy, but “as far as the overall cost per (unit of energy), their system is a rip-off.”

How it works

Unlike its natural gas or coal-burning plants – which all customers pay for through their electricity bills – LG&E wants to ensure that the cost of installing and maintaining the Shelby County solar farm is entirely borne by the small group of customers, like Holifield, who are willing to support it.

The utility accomplishes this by selling “shares” of the solar farm to customers who become “subscribers.”

Each subscriber then receives credit, in the form of a discount on their monthly bill, for the actual solar energy created when the panel absorbs sunlight on a clear day.

But, unlike a typical home with a rooftop solar system, the bill credits for the Solar Share program will never be enough to offset what the utility charges to subscribers, according to a WDRB News analysis.

In other words, customers will always pay more to participate in Solar Share.

LG&E did not dispute that conclusion, with spokeswoman Natasha Collins acknowledging Solar Share subscribers “will not be able to offset the cost of their participation through associated energy credits.”

LG&E offers two ways for customers to pay for the program. Each “share” costs either a flat, $5.55 monthly fee or a one-time $799 fee for 25 years.

That share then produces solar energy that earns the customer a bill credit worth $0.50 to $3.52 per month, the utility estimates. The credits vary depending on the month (May is sunniest) and whether the customer uses the solar energy at the same time it’s produced, which is more lucrative for the subscriber than feeding the power back to the broader grid.

A customer who pays monthly will never get enough bill credits to offset the $5.55 charge. For the typical residential customer, it would take about 38 shares – a net cost of about $78 to $193 per month (or more than $30,000 if paid upfront) – to offset a household’s entire electricity usage through Solar Share.

Even those who pay the upfront fee have little hope of recouping it over the 25-year lifespan the LG&E solar farm. WDRB calculated that, at current electricity rates, it would take at least 25 years and possibly more than 80 years for the Solar Share bill credits to equal the upfront charge.

On the other hand, a typical residential solar project with a $22,000 price tag could pay for itself in 9 to 15 years when factoring a hefty federal tax credit ($5,720) available to solar owners, said Matt Partymiller, owner of Lexington-based Solar Energy Solutions, which sells solar systems for homes and businesses.

A key difference is that – for now – Kentucky solar panel owners get significantly higher compensation for the excess electricity that they feed back into the power grid than do Solar Share subscribers.

LG&E and other state utilities successfully lobbied the state legislature in 2019 to roll back a policy called “net metering,” in which solar panel owners are entitled to retail-rate compensation for whatever electricity their systems produce beyond their own household usage.

The Kentucky Public Service Commission is expected to reduce the compensation that solar owners get for excess power, but the new rates haven’t been set and current owners are grandfathered for 25 years.

Solar Share subscribers, on the other hand, get credited at only about one-third of the retail rate for any excess power their “shares” feed back into the grid.

To get the most out of the program, a customer would have to plan to use more electricity during the day when the sun is shining, but that wouldn’t be ideal for people who aren’t normally home during the day.

Despite those limitations, LG&E stresses that the value of the program is in not having to come up with thousands of dollars to buy a private solar array and never occurring additional costs to maintain such a system.

For example, having to remove solar panels to replace a roof can mean a few thousand dollars in added costs down the road.

With Solar Share, “We’re taking on the responsibility of managing the project, engineering the project (and) maintaining the project over time,” Bevington said.

Solar companies say they could offer better deal

Partymiller, who is also president of the Kentucky Solar Industry Association, said there are some aspects of the LG&E farm – such as its visibility along I-64 – that are laudable.

“The more people that know that solar is happening and that utilities believe investment in solar makes sense, the better off our industry is,” Partymiller said.

At the same time, the growth of the program highlights the challenges that private solar installers in Kentucky face in competing with regulated monopolies, he said.

Partymiller questioned the overhead costs that LG&E charges its Solar Share subscribers, for example. But state law ensures that businesses like his couldn’t open a competing solar farm in a utility’s territory, he said.

“If I could build a single large-scale array in the middle of Simpsonville and offer that to customers from the far ends of the state – from eastern Kentucky to western Kentucky – at a fixed rate … I think I could do so far more cost-effectively than what LG&E is offering right now,” Partymiller said.

Another limitation, Partymiller said, is that Kentucky is not one of the states that allows solar installers to lease panels to customers instead of selling them. That’s essentially what LG&E is doing when Solar Share subscribers opt for the $5.55 per month cost, he said.

Leasing is a way around the hefty upfront costs of residential system, he said.

Partymiller acknowledged one benefit of the Solar Share design: It allows customers to buy solar energy in small increments, which would not be possible with a typical residential system.

Cunningham, of the Louisville Climate Action Network, said it might be more effective for customers who want to spend a few dollars a month to buy “Renewable Energy Certificates” through LG&E instead of signing up for Solar Share.

But Ben Haydon, a nonprofit executive who lives in Lexington and serves on a volunteer advisory board for LG&E-KU, said he gets a little bit of satisfaction each time he drives by the solar farm on Interstate 64. Haydon bought one share in solar farm’s second section that is about to get underway.

“I really like the idea of just being able to pay a little bit of money and saying, ‘Hey, I have a stake in that solar panel right there on the side of interstate,'” he said.”… That’s really not going to be hurting me financially, and it’ll be doing a little bit of good in the world.”

Dr. Hun-Gi Jung and his research team at the Center for Energy Storage Research of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Lee Byung Gwon) have announced the development of silicon anode materials that can increase battery capacity four-fold in comparison to graphite anode materials and enable rapid charging to more than 80% capacity in only five minutes. When applied to batteries for electric vehicles, the new materials are expected to more than double their driving range.

The batteries currently installed in mass-produced electric vehicles use graphite anode materials, but their low capacity contributes to electric vehicles’ having a shorter driving range than vehicles with internal combustion engines. Consequently, silicon, with an energy storage capacity 10-times greater than graphite, has drawn attention as a next-generation anode material for the development of long-range electric vehicles. However, silicon materials have not yet been commercialized because their volume expands rapidly and storage capacity decreases significantly during charge and discharge cycles, which limits commercialization. A number of methods have been suggested for enhancing the stability of silicon as an anode material, but the cost and complexity of these methods have prevented silicon from replacing graphite.

To enhance the stability of silicon, Dr. Jung and his team focused on using materials that are common in our everyday lives, such as water, oil, and starch. They dissolved starch and silicon in water and oil, respectively, and then mixed and heated them in order to produce carbon-silicon composites. A simple thermal process used for frying food was employed to firmly fix the carbon and silicon, preventing the silicon anode materials from expanding during charge and discharge cycles.

The composite materials developed by the research team demonstrated a capacity four-times greater than that of graphite anode materials (360mAh/g – 1,530mAh/g) and stable capacity retention over 500 cycles. It was also found that the materials enable batteries to charge to more than 80% capacity in only five minutes. Carbon spheres prevent the usual volume expansion of silicon, thereby enhancing the stability of silicon materials. Also, the use of highly conductive carbon and the rearrangement of the silicon structure resulted in a high output.

“We were able to develop carbon-silicon composite materials using common, everyday materials and simple mixing and thermal processes with no reactors,” said Dr. Jung, the lead researcher of the KIST team. He continued, “The simple processes we adopted and the composites with excellent properties that we developed are highly likely to be commercialized and mass-produced. The composites could be applied to lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems (ESSs).”

The research results were published in the most recent issue of Nano Letters.

The cost of solar power is sinking practically by the day, and the next new “hot” solar cell material — perovskite — will push costs down even more. So far you can’t get perovskite solar cells in stores but this year will bring a trickle into the market, and a batch of new research suggests that the trickle will become a flood. When that happens, look out. The thermal coal market is already in the toaster and perovskite could fry it to a crisp while also dragging natural gas down along, too.

Perovskite For More & Cheaper Solar Cells

Perovskite is a naturally occurring mineral (aka calcium titanate) that has been known to science since its discovery in the Ural mountains in 1839.

Science may have known perovskite, but researchers didn’t fully cotton on to its photovoltaic properties until the 1950s.

Synthetic perovskite is relatively inexpensive and easy to make, which brings up the prospect of using it as a substitute for silicon, the main ingredient in today’s solar cells. Silicon is efficient but pricey, and the hunt has been on for substitutes.

That brings us up to today, when researchers have figured out how to resolve the Achilles’ heel of perovskite, which is its tendency to fall apart in humid conditions. One solution, for example, is to add a dose of graphene to the mix.

NREL To The Rescue With Sealed-In Perovskite Solar Cells

Another piece of the puzzle is the use of lead in perovskite solar cells. According to our friends over at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, adding lead in minute quantities can ramp the efficiency of perovskite solar cells close to the 25% range. Without that assist, efficiency is cut in half.

The problem is that lead is toxic in the environment, and the form of lead used in perovskite cells dissolves in water. That’s actually not a problem if the cell is just sitting there undisturbed, but lead could be exposed if the cell is damaged.

A team of researchers from NREL has figured out a way to practically eliminate that risk. Their solution is to coat both sides of the cell with a durable lead-absorbing film.

How durable? Check into the journal Nature and get all the details from their paper, “On-Device Lead Sequestration for Perovskite Solar Cells,” which describes tests that involved hammers, knives, and acid, among other stressors.

A Market-Ready Perovskite Cell From Panasonic

Meanwhile, Panasonic and NEDO (Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) have been working on bringing manufacturing costs down for perovskite solar cell modules.

In the latest development, the collaboration has resulted in a 16.09% efficient PV cell that can be fabricated by deploying a high volume, high throughput process similar to inkjet printing.

Aside from bringing down costs, the lightweight cell can operate efficiently in applications where silicon solar cells are impractical, such as windows and building facades.

A conversion efficiency of 16.09% is pretty decent for that type of cell, but the partners plan on tweaking their perovskite formula for future improvements. In any case, the lower efficiency is balanced out by the potential for covering larger areas at less expense.

Perovskite & Silicon Together

On the higher end of the efficiency scale is the strategy of combining perovskite with silicon in a single tandem solar cell. The latest development on that score comes from a research team at the Kaunas University of Technology, in Lithuania.

Their new perovskite-silicon tandem cell has been Fraunhofer-certified at 29.15% efficiency, a record-breaker for that type of cell.

The basic idea is to use low-cost perovskite a a means of stretching out the more expensive silicon.

According to the researchers, one gram of silicon is only good for producing a few square centimeters of solar material. Their tandem material can cover up to 1,000 square meters.

On the manufacturing side, costs are lowered by deploying a self-assembly process. Here’s the explainer from the school:

“The self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are as thin as 1-2 nm, covering all the surface; the molecules are deposited on the surface by dipping it into a diluted solution. The molecules are based on carbazole head groups with phosphonic acid anchoring groups and can form SAMs on various oxides.”

Got all that? A company called Tokyo Chemical Industry Co. certainly did. The Japanese company has already purchased a license to produce the tandem material.

Meanwhile, other researchers have been tackling the lead issue by exploring tin as an alternative material.

As for when those new perovskite PV cells will hit the shelves of your local hardware store, CleanTechnica is reaching out to the UK company Oxford PV for an update on its timeline for 2020, so stay tuned for more on that.

Seasonal pumped hydropower storage (SPHS), an already established yet infrequently used technology, could be an affordable and sustainable solution to store energy and water on an annual scale, according to new IIASA research published in the journal Nature Communications. Compared with other mature storage solutions, such as natural gas, the study shows that there is considerable potential for SPHS to provide highly competitive energy storage costs.

“The energy sectors of most countries are undergoing a transition to renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar generation,” says IIASA postdoc Julian Hunt, the study lead author. “These sources are intermittent and have seasonal variations, so they need storage alternatives to guarantee that the demand can be met at any time. Short-term energy storage solutions with batteries are underway to resolve intermittency issues, however, the alternative for long-term energy storage that is usually considered to resolve seasonal variations in electricity generation is hydrogen, which is not yet economically competitive.”

Seasonal pumped hydropower storage means pumping water into a deep storage reservoir, built parallel to a major river, during times of high water flow or low energy demand. When water is scarce or energy demand increases, stored water is then released from the reservoir to generate electricity.

The new study is the first to provide a global, high-resolution analysis of the potential and costs for SPHS technology. In their analysis, researchers assessed the theoretical global potential for storing energy and water seasonally with SPHS, focusing on the locations with the highest potential and lowest cost. They also analyzed different scenarios where the storage of energy and water with SPHS could be a viable alternative. The study included topographical, river network and hydrology data, infrastructure cost estimation, and project design optimization, to identify technically feasible candidate sites.

The new study shows that water storage costs with SPHS plants vary from 0.007 to 0.2 US$/m3, long-term energy storage costs vary from 1.8 to 50 US$/MWh and short-term energy storage costs vary from 370 to 600 US$/KW of installed power generation capacity, considering dam, tunnel, turbine, generator, excavation, and land costs. The estimated world energy storage potential below a cost of 50 $/MWh is 17.3 PWh, which is approximately 79% of the world electricity consumption in 2017.

The researchers found that significant potential exists for SPHS around the world, in particular in the lower part of the Himalayas, Andes, Alps, Rocky Mountains, northern part of the Middle East, Ethiopian Highlands, Brazilian Highlands, Central America, East Asia, Papua New Guinea, the Sayan, Yablonoi and Stanovoy mountain ranges in Russia, as well as a number of other locations with smaller potential.

“Concerns about the intermittency and seasonality of wind and solar can be valid, but are also sometimes exaggerated,” says IIASA researcher Edward Byers, a study coauthor. “This study demonstrates that there is an extremely high potential for SPHS to be used across much of the world, providing a readily-available, affordable and sustainable solution to support the transition to sustainable energy systems and overcome real and perceived barriers to high shares of renewable generation.”

The study also addresses some of the potential environmental concerns related to hydropower. Because SPHS reservoirs are deep and constructed parallel to, rather than within the course of a river, the environmental and land use impacts can also be up to 10 to 50 times smaller than traditional hydropower plants.

Hunt says, “With the need for a transition to a more sustainable world with lower CO2 emissions, renewable energies and energy storage will play a major role in the near future. Given the vast untapped and cheap potential of SPHS, it will soon play an important role in storing energy and water on a yearly basis.”

Climate activists in Ukraine with the Energy Transition Coalition have demonstrated at the Ministry of the Environment and Energy in Kyiv, demanding a switch to 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2050.

The protest action on Friday was backed by some 14,000 Ukrainians who had signed a petition to shut down existing coal-fired and nuclear power plants – and halt the construction of new ones – by 2035.

Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and other international movements are supporting efforts by local groups to speak out against the pace of the Ukrainian government’s transition to a low-carbon economy.

Activists say the government’s newly proposed climate policy should invest even more in energy efficiency, green public transport and electricity grid improvements.

The Ukraine Green Deal, which was published last month, aims to cut power demand by 50 percent and reduce Ukraine’s reliance on imported coal, natural gas and nuclear fuel. Much of the funding would be through an updated carbon tax.

Svitlana Romanko, managing director of 350.org in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, said, “Our priority [is] to mobilise and campaign towards keeping fossil fuels in the ground, cutting finance flows to fossil fuels and support[ing] the demands of national organisations for a more just, prosperous and equitable future.”

In addition to her organisation, the other members of the nongovernmental Energy Transition Coalition are Ecodia, Ecoltava, Ecoclub, Khmelnytskyi Energy Cluster and the All-Ukrainian Agency for Investment and Sustainable Development.

‘Significantly cheaper’

Romanko told Al Jazeera that a key component of the shift is “the adoption of socioeconomic support programmes for coal regions”.

The Ukrainian government is facing public pressure to take care of front-line communities that could suffer in an economic transformation, and to adopt more ambitious energy targets than the 70-percent renewable figure set by the ministry.

“Renewable energy becomes significantly cheaper as a technology every year and could provide 91 percent of the Ukrainian total energy balance” 30 years from now by using existing capabilities, she added, citing academic research that explores a range of energy scenarios.

Experts from the Institute of Economics and Forecasting at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine say that Ukraine could generate up to 93 percent of its electricity from clean sources.

As of 2018, just over one-quarter of Ukraine’s power mix was from nuclear sources, with about two-fifths from coal. But with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster still fresh in people’s minds, nuclear energy is a particularly controversial electricity source.

Romanko said that coal owners and operators – who dominate the energy supply chain – are loath to refuse investments into fossil fuels from abroad.

During the recent public round-table event to address the government climate plan, activists suggested that the government was complicit in shutting dissenters out of the debate.

“Ministry representatives did not approve the registration to this round table to a representative of Merefa,” said Julia Pashkovska, a local campaigner for 350.org – a movement dedicated to fighting the climate crisis.

She was referring to the eastern city with the largest Ukrainian natural gas field, “where shale gas will be extracted by hydraulic fracturing, presenting a huge risk of loss of drinking water”.

‘Strategic impact’

Minister of Energy Oleksiy Orzhel responded by saying at the meeting that recent changes to energy legislation would “let the companies extract fossil fuels with no approval from the local community”.

Orzhel did commit, however, to follow up on “land approval and strategic impact assessment before mining”.

With Ukraine cut off from Russian gas supplies, shuttering coal plants by 2050 may not be easy.

The current plan has Ukraine reaching net-zero emissions in 2070, two decades after the European Union.

As President Volodymr Zelensky’s government continues discussions with clean energy providers, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development could be key to funding projects along the EU’s edges.

Since gas and nuclear represent major national aversions for Kyiv, lessening coal reliance could be the toughest part of Ukraine’s energy calculus.

While Jimmy Carter was in the White House, he championed new energy and became the first president to use solar panels to power portions of the building. That legacy has continued decades later and in a place much closer to Carter’s home — literally: Since 2017, the nation’s 39th president has used 10 acres of his farmland to power most of his hometown in Plains, Georgia.

Where the famed peanut-farming president used to grow crops like nuts and soybeans, 3,852 solar panels now stand to capture the Georgia sunlight, providing more than 50 percent of the small town’s energy.

The former president told the Sierra Club in 2017, soon after the panels were installed, that on a good day they could provide 1.3 megawatts — or 1.3 million watts. According to the U.S. government, one megawatt will provide enough energy to power 400-900 homes (though watts harnessed by solar panels provides a little less).

According to SolAmerica, the company that first reached out to Carter about the idea and worked alongside him to install the panels on his farmland, the nearly 4,000 solar panels are able to provide more than 50 percent of power to the 727 residents in the small Georgia town.

SolAmerica Energy President George Mori told PEOPLE this week that the solar panel farm remains operational “in its original size” and still provides more than half the power in the small Georgia town.

SolAmerica’s partnership agreement with Georgia Power, the state’s largest electricity company, will last until 2042 and it’s expected that the panels will provide more than 55 million kilowatt hours of clean energy for Plains.

“Distributed, clean energy generation is critical to meeting growing energy needs around the world while fighting the effects of climate change,” Carter said in 2017. “I am encouraged by the tremendous progress that solar and other clean energy solutions have made in recent years and expect those trends to continue.”

But the Trump administration has moved in the other direction, loosening Obama-era restrictions on coal and publicly criticizing environmentally friendly energy projects.

In September, President Donald Trump claimed energy-efficient lightbulbs were too fragile and becoming “hazardous waste” after they break. In December, he called windmills “monsters” and eyesores that spit “tremendous fumes” out into the atmosphere.

But Carter isn’t new to being at odds with future presidents over clean energy.

Soon after he left office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels he’d installed at the White House.

According to Scientific American, those same solar panels are now scattered around the world in museums as a display of the world’s development of more efficient energy. One is in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., another is in the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta and more are in China at the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou.

While unveiling the White House solar panels in June 1979, Carter left the future of energy to the public’s willingness to embrace it: “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

Though Carter’s solar panels didn’t last long at the White House, a University of Oxford study shows clean energy use has risen since the 1960s.

“When I told people we were getting solar panels, they said, ‘In Plains?’ ” Jan Williams, who used to run the Plains Historic Inn in the president’s hometown, told The New York Times in 2017 when the panels were first installed on his land. “They say, ‘Well, that’s because of Jimmy Carter.’ It is because of Jimmy Carter. Plains is all because of Jimmy Carter.”