Green Energy

Innergex Renewable Energy has signed off on a long-term PPA with an investment grade rated US corporation for its 200MW Hillcrest PV project located in Brown County, Ohio. Sales under the PPA will start upon the facility reaching commercial operation, which is slated for 2020.

Hillcrest will be developed on approximately 849 hectares of existing pasture and agricultural land in Green Township, a part of Brown County that is north of Mount Orab. It is a site rich in solar resource and adjacent to a point of interconnection in the regional transmission system.

Once completed, the project will feature a field with arrays of more than 600,000 photovoltaic solar panels arranged in rows on single-axis tracking foundations, for an estimated annual power generation of about 410,000 MWh. An interconnection service agreement is already in place.

Michel Letellier, president and chief executive officer of Innergex, said: “We are thrilled to have signed a PPA for all the electricity to be produced at the Hillcrest solar project. We will soon move forward with the project construction and further diversify our renewable energy portfolio by adding more solar energy capacity. “The solar energy market is booming at the moment and technologies are improving fast. It is a great market to evolve in as there are a lot of opportunities to seize for Innergex.”

Texas dominates wind energy, producing far more wind-generated electricity than any other state. But when it comes to solar energy, Texas lags far behind California, North Carolina and other states.

But that’s about to change. Texas is expected to double its solar electricity output next year and then again the year after that, further transforming the state’s energy mix and pressuring traditional power generators that bet heavily on natural gas-fired power plants.

Solar developers are taking advantage of ample land, abundant sunshine and federal renewable energy tax subsidies before they drop from 30 percent this year to 10 percent for commercial projects and disappear entirely for rooftop installations in 2022.

Energy experts predict that as the solar industry grows, it will disrupt the status quo much as low-cost wind generators did, driving down power prices and profits of coal, natural gas and nuclear generation. Solar, however, may pose an even greater threat because unlike wind, it produces the most power when demand is highest — hot, sunny summer afternoons.

The additional supply could ease shortages and lower the extreme peak prices that drive a large share of generators’ profits and ultimately boost retail prices for consumers and businesses. Power generators recently reported increased profits over the summer as an extended period of triple-digit temperatures pushed wholesale prices to the state maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour, compared to average prices during July 2018 of $112 per megawatt hour.

One analyst predicted that the energy market will feel the full impact of solar power sometime over the next five years as the industry reaches a critical nexus of about 20 percent of the state’s generation capacity. The impact will come faster if utility-scale battery storage, rare on solar farms now, becomes more common, making it possible to store solar energy for times when the sun isn’t shining.

“That will stabilize prices and make $9,000 per megawatt hour a distant nightmare, possibility never to be seen again in Texas,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, chief energy officer at the University of Houston.

Slow start

Today, solar energy produces about 1 percent of the electricity in Texas, according to the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. About 91 percent of that comes from utility-scale or large solar projects that supply the power grid. Another 6 percent is generated by residential roof-top solar and the rest from commercial and industrial installations.

The solar industry taken off slowly in Texas because low electricity prices have made it difficult for businesses and homeowners to justify the cost of installing solar panels. Another factor is Texas doesn’t have policies in place that require utilities to buy back excess power generated by roof-top solar systems or mandates such as California’s, which require solar energy on new residential construction.

But solar is gaining in Texas as the costs of solar panel construction and installation fall, declining by nearly one-third over the past five years, according to the solar trade group. Frequent, powerful storms that knock out electricity also have pushed companies to install back-up power, including solar and battery systems.

Some corporations alos are turning to solar power as a way to prove their commitment to environmental sustainability at a time when climate change is becoming a greater public concern. The financial services company JP Morgan Chase, for example, installed solar panels its its Plano facility to provide up to 7 megawatts of renewable power as part of sustainability goals to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2022.

A megawatt is enough electricity to power about 200 Texas homes on a hot summer day.

NRG Energy bet heavily on renewable energy under its previous CEO, but sold off that business under pressure from investors unhappy with the company’s returns. Now NRG, which has headquarters in Houston and Princeton, N.J., is back doing solar projects, teaming up with California solar developer Cypress Creek Renewables, which includes several solar farms near Houston and Dallas, totaling around 25 megawatts.

NRG has another 1,375 megawatts of solar energy in development with most projects becoming operational in 2021 and 2022.

Another factor making solar more attractive is the price of utility-scale lithium-ion battery storage has fallen 35 percent during the first half of the year, according to the New York accounting and consulting firm Deloitte. The ability to store power will make intermittent wind and solar power sources even more competitive with fossil fuels, according to Deloitte.

“It’s a game changer for solar and renewables broadly,” said Marlene Motyka, U.S. and global energy leader for Deloitte.

Texas had about 100 megawatt hours of installed battery storage on the grid last year, but expects to add more than 2,400 megawatts hours in the next five years, according to a study by the research firm Wood Mackenzie and the Energy Storage Association, a battery industry trade group. That would be enough to provide power for 480,000 homes on a hot summer day in Texas.

As more batteries and more efficient solar generation comes online, power prices will ultimately decline, reflecting the lower cost of solar power compared to other sources, said Motyka. The cost to build and operate a solar plant last year ran as high as $44 per megawatt hour compared to combined cycle gas plants which topped out at $74 per megawatt hour and coal which costs as much as $143 per megawatt hour.

ERCOT predicts Texas will end the year with about 3,000 megawatts of solar capacity and should more than double that to about 6,200 megawatts next year. By 2021, ERCOT expects Texas to have more than 11,000 megawatts of solar power capacity. Texas has about 22,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity, according to ERCOT.

To the rescue

Solar energy is already having an impact, albeit small, in Texas. When triple-digit temperatures in Texas pushed electricity demand on Aug. 12 to a new record, the wind didn’t blow as hard as usual and solar energy generators stepped in to cover some of the load, contributing about 1,400 megawatts of power out of that state’s 80,000 megawatts of total capacity.

At that point, the grid manager calculated Texas had only 1,460 megawatts of reserve power remaining before Texas faced rolling power outages. But the small amount of solar on the Texas grid wasn’t enough to keep wholesale power prices from soaring to $9,000 per megawatt hour.

The high prices are encouraging more solar development, especially utility-scale, said John Hall, director of regulatory and legislative affairs for the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund. The move to solar — about two-thirds of new power projects in Texas are solar — is much like it was several years ago when wind generation accelerated and the low-cost, clean and abundant power source had the effect of lowering the overall cost of electricity.

The world is getting windier, according to a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change. Researchers analyzed decades of weather data and determined global wind speeds have risen dramatically over the past 10 years.

The study says wind farm operators are likely to benefit from the uptick in wind speeds since faster wind means more efficient wind turbines.

Princeton University scholar Timothy Searchinger, one of the study’s authors, says researchers expect wind speed to continue to increase, he says, which has multiple positive effects.

Green energy through wind turbines will see these impacts.

“When you increase the wind speed by a little bit, you still increase the power quite a lot,” he says.

The study also debunked a “clear belief” that global wind speed from 1980 on was slowing due to humans. Increased buildings, and in some places vegetation, were a source of concern for the global climate system. “This paper showed that’s not the case,” he says.

As a result of increasing wind speed, the average wind turbine generated roughly 17% more electricity in 2017 than it did in 2010, the study found.

What’s influencing wind speed is ocean oscillations, he says, “which are different patterns of pressure and temperature and winds in different parts of the ocean that go through these sometimes irregular but recurring patterns.”

To get an accurate measurement, researchers had to make a wide variety of statistical analyses based on differing biases such as height and elevation.

Now, humans can capitalize on this change for at least the next decade, he says.

“When you size wind turbines, you can size them differently to take advantage of that additional power,” he says. “That’s really the key point, is that if we can predict these changing patterns 10 years in advance, we can size our turbines so that they take advantage of the maximum amount of wind that is reasonable and economical.”

Innergex Renewable Energy has signed off on a long-term PPA with an investment grade rated US corporation for its 200MW Hillcrest PV project located in Brown County, Ohio. Sales under the PPA will start upon the facility reaching commercial operation, which is slated for 2020.

Hillcrest will be developed on approximately 849 hectares of existing pasture and agricultural land in Green Township, a part of Brown County that is north of Mount Orab. It is a site rich in solar resource and adjacent to a point of interconnection in the regional transmission system.

Once completed, the project will feature a field with arrays of more than 600,000 photovoltaic solar panels arranged in rows on single-axis tracking foundations, for an estimated annual power generation of about 410,000 MWh. An interconnection service agreement is already in place.

Michel Letellier, president and chief executive officer of Innergex, said: “We are thrilled to have signed a PPA for all the electricity to be produced at the Hillcrest solar project. We will soon move forward with the project construction and further diversify our renewable energy portfolio by adding more solar energy capacity. “The solar energy market is booming at the moment and technologies are improving fast. It is a great market to evolve in as there are a lot of opportunities to seize for Innergex.”

On the last Friday before Thanksgiving, Xcel Energy filed a document with Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission called a Renewable Energy Standard Rider. In two read-throughs, a reasonably informed layperson would have only an even-money shot at understanding it.

The gist, though, is that Minneapolis-based Xcel asked regulators to approve bringing more than $100 million of wind-energy projects into the calculations of regulated electricity rates. And the news is that the new power will be cheaper.

“People tend to focus on what goes up and not what goes down,” said Chris Clark, president of the Xcel’s Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota region. “That wind coming into service is actually displacing other generation sources, so we are actually saving customers money with the wind we’re bringing on to the system.”

An unconscious focus on only what increases in price doesn’t really explain the intensity of arguments over electric energy, which can seem more like the Wars of Religion than a discussion of costs. Yet the case the industry makes — renewables are cheap enough, and getting cheaper — is getting clearer in the latest numbers.

“The pricing that we are seeing on this build-out that we are doing — and we are doing one of the largest build-outs in the nation of wind — is substantially undercutting the price of our coal units,” Clark said. “We had thought it would be mixing it up with them, but it is actually undercutting the coal units.”

The cost to generate electricity from the new wind projects falls in the range of $15 per megawatt hour to $25, Clark said. The same electricity from a coal-fired generating station costs between $25 and $35 per megawatt hour.

But there are a couple of wrinkles in the cost picture.

Development of new wind power facilities generally has been subsidized by what’s called the production tax credit, or PTC. It’s a simple federal tax credit — for taxpayers that otherwise would have a tax liability — based on the power generated and sold by an eligible generating project.

In the past, though, there have been years when the PTC had been set to expire, leading to a development boom to beat the deadline. That has been happening again, as the tax credit is going to be gradually phased out after Jan. 1, 2021.

Xcel is one of the first utilities in the country to start a project that will earn less than the full PTC credit, Clark said, as “we knew we couldn’t get it in by the 2020 time frame, but as that rush of 2020 ends there will actually be the ability to do build-out at a very competitive price.”

The wind-power industry has gotten a lot more efficient since it first got going in earnest here in the 1980s. There are older and far less efficient turbines still spinning on sites with some of the region’s most consistent winds, and “repowering” older wind farms with new towers, blades or whole turbines is one approach the industry has taken.

Utilities are eager to see how much more efficient big utility wind power can become as the PTC slides to zero. “The big debate is whether they will be able to take enough costs out … of the build-out of those wind projects to stay below that $25 per megawatt hour range,” Clark said.

With no tax credit, the current wind technology would deliver energy at maybe $40 per megawatt hour, at least according to Xcel. And here’s where it gets more interesting, because that’s comparable to the high end of the range on what it costs to generate power with the so-called combined-cycle gas plants the industry uses, like the High Bridge Generating Station Xcel operates in St. Paul.

Big utilities invest in gas plants because of their usefulness in balancing the overall portfolio when a lot of the power comes from sources with variable output, like turbines dependent on the wind.

But at up to $40 per megawatt hour for wind and gas, old-fashioned coal can look cheaper — if those coal plants can dump their emissions into the air for free.

The electric utility industry emits more than carbon dioxide from its fossil-fuel plants, but it’s carbon that gets most of the attention these days. The most recent total for a year’s emissions in the state from electric power generation is about 31 million tons. That’s a lot of carbon.

The cost of emissions is known as an “externality” in economics, a well understood idea that’s been around a very long time. All it really means is that there is a cost or benefit that someone isn’t paying for.

It can be a good thing you don’t have to pay for, like farmers collecting the benefits of pollination thanks to a neighbor’s honeybee operation. They can certainly be bad, too, getting stuck with part of a cost that someone else got away with not paying — like stack emissions.

Putting a price on carbon emissions is a dark art, relying on economic modeling rather than the bid-and-ask price of an active market. The numbers used by the state fall in a big range, arrived at through what appears to be objective analysis mixed with politics, with even the industry’s players in the past differing on what the right number should be.

Yet it’s not clear how anyone could stand next to Xcel’s big Sherco coal-burning generating station in Becker, look up and argue all that stuff going into the air costs nothing.

If you apply a carbon cost to Sherco unit 3, that adds at least $5.50 and up to $27.50 to the cost of one megawatt hour of power. At a midpoint in that range, the real cost of coal surges past the current cost of wind power even with no federal tax subsidy.

There’s a lot of stuff still to be figured out for a big power company like Xcel to reach its goal of delivering all carbon-free power by 2050, yet how to produce reasonably priced carbon-free power appears to no longer be one of them.

As the season of big holiday meals kicks off, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on just how much food goes to waste.

If you piled up all the food that’s not eaten over the course of a year in the U.S., it would be enough to fill a skyscraper in Chicago about 44 times, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And, when all this food rots in a landfill, it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. In fact, a recent report from the United Nations from a panel of climate experts estimates that up to 10 percent of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions are linked to food waste.

So, here’s one solution to the problem: Dairy farmers in Massachusetts are using food waste to create electricity. They feed waste into anaerobic digesters, built and operated by Vanguard Renewables, which capture the methane emissions and make renewable energy.

The process begins by gathering wasted food from around the state, including from many Whole Foods locations. We visited the chain’s store in Shrewsbury, Mass., which has installed a Grind2Energy system. It’s an industrial-strength grinder that gobbles up all the scraps of food the store can’t sell, explains Karen Franczyk, who is the sustainability program manager for Whole Foods’ North Atlantic region.

The machine will grind up all kinds of food waste — “everything from bones, we put whole fish in here, to vegetables to dry items like rice or grains,” Franczyk says as the grinder is loaded. It also takes frying fats and greases.

While Whole Foods donates a lot of surplus food to food banks, there’s a lot waste left over. Much of it is generated from prepping prepared foods. Just as when you cook in your own kitchen, there are lots of bits that remain, such as onion or carrot peel, rinds, stalks or meat scraps. The grinder turns all these bits into a slurry. “It really becomes kind of a liquefied food waste,” Franczyk says.

From here, the waste is loaded into a truck and sent to an anaerobic digester. “There’s no question it’s better than putting it in the trash,” Franczyk says. She says the chain is committed to diverting as much waste as possible and aims for zero waste. In addition to food donations, Whole Foods composts; this waste-to-energy system is yet another way to meet its goal. “We really do like the system,” she says.

We visited Bar-Way Farm, Inc. in Deerfield, Mass. Owner Peter Melnik, a fourth-generation dairy farmer, showed us how his anaerobic digester, which is installed next to his dairy barn, works.

“We presently take in about a 100 tons [of waste], which is about three tractor-trailer loads, every day,” Melnik says.

In addition to all the food waste from Whole Foods, he gets whey from a Cabot Creamery in the area, as well as waste from a local brewery and a juice plant.

In the digester, he combines all of this waste with manure from his cows. The mixture cooks at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. As the methane is released, it rises to the top of a large red tank with a black bubble-shaped dome.

“We capture the gas in that bubble. Then we suck it into a big motor,” Melnik explains. Unlike other engines that run on diesel or gasoline, this engine runs on methane.

“This turns a big generator, which is creating one megawatt of electricity” continuously, Melnik says — enough to power more than just his farm. “We only use about 10 percent of what we make, and the rest is fed onto the [electricity] grid,” Melnik explains. It’s enough to power about 1,500 homes.

He says times are tough for dairy farmers, so this gives him a new stream of revenue. Vanguard pays him rental fees for having the anaerobic digester on his farm. In addition, he’s able to use the liquids left over from the process as fertilizer on his fields.

“The digester has been a home run for us,” Melnik says. “It’s made us more sustainable — environmentally [and] also economically.”

Vanguard Renewables hopes to expand its operations in the state and elsewhere. “There’s more than enough food waste in Massachusetts to feed all of our five digesters, plus many more,” says CEO John Hanselman.

Massachusetts has a state law that prohibits the disposal of commercial organic waste — including food — by businesses and institutions that generate at least one ton of this waste per week. This has created an incentive for food businesses to participate in the waste-to-energy initiative.

Hanselman points to Europe, where there are thousands of digesters in operation. His hope is that the concept will spread here. “The food waste recycling through anaerobic digestion could be done in every part of the country,” Hanselman says.

The company is currently building an anaerobic digester on a farm in Vermont. The gas produced there will be piped to Middlebury College, which will help the college reduce its carbon footprint.