Green Energy

While Tesla dithers and diddles with its SolarRoof, other companies are bringing new products to market that make rooftop solar more attractive than conventional systems and more affordable as well. “There is potential for solar to be offered by other trade services, including roofers, electricians and home-maintenance professionals,” Hugh Bromley of Bloomberg New Energy Finance tells the Mercury News. “Solar in its own right doesn’t need to be its own industry.”

Standard Industries, the largest roofing company in the world, has created a new division known as GAF Energy that will allow traditional roofing contractors to offer its customers a solar roof option whether they are building a new home or replacing the roof on their existing home. Martin DeBono, president of the new division, tells Fast Company, “The scale of the roofing industry is an order of magnitude greater than the solar industry. GAF Energy can now give those customers a simple option — a roof or a solar roof.”

He says about 5 million homes get new roofs every year, but only 300,000 add solar panels as part of the project. That leaves an enormous opportunity for a new company like GAF Energy. It will sell PV panels that are engineered to install like skylights. They are mounted at the same time as the regular shingles, giving a seamless look to the finished project and keeping installation costs low. The process also avoids the risk of leaks that are possible if solar panels are attached to a roof on separate racks, DeBono says.

The company says its integrated solar panels have an efficiency of around 17%, which is the norm for traditional rooftop solar panels. Tesla has not released specifications about its upcoming SolarRoof tiles but similar products have a lower efficiency rating of between 12% and 13% according to the Mercury News.

Fast Company says the design looks more like solar panels than Tesla’s solar shingles but it has a similarly low profile. And it points out somewhat coyly, the GAF Energy product is available now. The Tesla SolarRoof? Who knows when it will be available.

“We’re taking complicated installation logistics out of the equation for contractors to make choosing solar easier and more convenient,” DeBono says. The company will also work to streamline the permitting and financing process so that all customers and contractors need to do is decide whether or not to install the system.

“Standard Industries saw a chance to shift the conversation around rooftop solar to show contractors and consumers that your roof is valuable real estate that can be put to good use,” DeBono says. That’s the sort of integrated process Tesla is famous for and it’s the sort of convenience that can make all the difference when it comes to deciding whether to go ahead with a rooftop solar system or not.

GAF Energy expects to ship about 10 megawatts of solar systems this year in nine US states including California and New York. “We’re a growing startup in a hot space and we’re starting from zero,” DeBono says. “The goal is to make roofers solar people.” Seems like a plan.

It hasn’t been easy sailing. RECs looking to go solar have to disentangle themselves from existing contracts, in addition to bucking political headwaters.

Nevertheless, the barriers are beginning to crumble even in Wisconsin, a state that has been an epicenter of Koch-funded anti-renewable activity.

More Solar Power For Wisconsin

Wisconsin rates a lowly 41 for installed solar capacity, which is even worse when you consider that 41 is a step down from last year, when the state weighed in at number 38 for PV installations.

That’s why the latest news is so exciting. Earlier this week Wisconsin’s Dairyland Power Cooperative laid claim to the entire 149 in solar capacity anticipated from a proposed new PV array in Jefferson County.

The project, called Badger State Solar, is under the umbrella of the PV developer Ranger Power.

The capacity figure of 149 megawatts translates into enough electricity to power more than 20,000 homes annually, which just about doubles the current statewide milestone of 10,331 homes in one fell swoop.

Do follow the link and support your friendly neighborhood journalist for more details about the new PV project, and on the ambitious renewable energy plans of newly minted Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers.

Gosh, maybe elections do have consequences. Whatever. The gist of it is that Evers proposed a net-zero power generation for all utilities operating in the state by 2050. That’s quite a turnaround for a state that still beats the national average for coal power generation by a wide margin.

Other major utilities in the state, including Xcel Energy, are already on board with the plan.

Dairyland Hearts Solar Power, But Baby Steps

If all goes according to plan, the new Badger State project will represent a decent chunk of Dairyland’s power generation. The current total is 1,350 megawatts, which includes only 25 megawatts in existing solar capacity.

Don’t break out the bubbly just yet, though. First of all, the Badger project is still in the proposal stage.

More to the point, Dairyland’s service territory includes a large swath of Wisconsin. It also spills over into Minnesota and two other states. According to a report in the Lacrosse Tribune, Dairyland is still wedded to the idea that a proposed joint venture for a new 550 megawatt natural gas plant with Minnesota Power is a good idea. In addition, its 2027 goal still includes 70% in natural gas and coal capacity.

Phooey!

RECs & The Green New Deal

Putting that little thing about natural gas aside, the Badger State project has all the markings of the Green New Deal. Here’s Barbara Nick, Dairyland President and CEOB enthusing over the new PV project with props for the environmental angle:

Resource diversification is foundational to Dairyland’s commitment to a sustainable, future-facing power supply. We look forward to Badger State Solar’s benefit to our cooperative membership, local communities and the environment.

Dairyland also points out that the project “is expected to bring significant economic impacts to the area,” including hundreds of construction jobs.

The project will support only five permanent jobs, but Ranger Power points to other benefits that support the agricultural community. Here’s the rundown from Ranger:

The site will feature grass and seed mixes below panels and within the site that will help build soil nutrients and reduce fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide use.

The facility will create pollinator habitat as well as possible opportunities for grazing.

Reduced stormwater runoff and soil erosion from the land hosting solar panels can improve downstream water quality.

That’s in addition to that thing about improving community health by cutting down on greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

For the record, Dairyland is under the umbrella of the Touchstone Energy Cooperative. Touchstone’s network includes 750 local RECs in 46 states, making it the largest utility in the US.

Yes, really.

Touchstone has a pretty nifty way of summarizing the intention behind the co-op system, so we’re including it in full:

Electric cooperative members share more than electricity. They share the same principles. That’s because electric co-ops are located in the communities they power and work hard to improve quality of life for all.

Additionally, electric co-ops are locally owned and operated by the very members they serve, which means the co-op is always looking out for you with a focus on member needs and local priorities. Member-ownership also guarantees every member has a voice in co-op business decisions. How the co-op is run is up to you.

As a not-for-profit entity, members know they can trust their electric co-op, because it was created to deliver on the promise of providing safe, reliable and affordable electricity to members – not to generate money for shareholders.

Community-friendly values mixed with the cooperative business model is what makes electric co-ops stronger and sets us apart from traditional, investor-owned power companies.

If you can find anything in this statement that contradicts the basic goals of the Green New Deal proposal, drop us a note in the comment thread.

Onward & Upward For RECs

Despite all the pro-coal rhetoric emanating from the White House, the US Department of Energy promotes renewable energy for RECs as part of its broader support for energy diversification and grid resiliency, with a big emphasis on wind power as well as solar.

Part of that effort involves a partnership with NRECA, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, to provide a new PV toolkit for local RECs.

Among other recent developments, the Lake Region REC in Minnesota is introducing a first-of-its kind renewable energy facility. The new hybrid solar and wind power plant is expected to increase capacity and output while reducing costs, mainly by eliminating the need for a solar inverter.

CleanTechnica is reaching out to Dairyland for more details about future plans for wind and solar, so stay tuned for more on that.

In less than a decade, community solar has become the fastest-growing segment within the solar industry, achieving a five-year compound annual growth rate of 53 percent, opposed to 26 percent for the rest of solar.

Legislators across the country are beginning to understand the value that community solar brings to their constituents: equitable access to clean and affordable energy for thousands of homeowners, renters and businesses. Today, we are seeing an unprecedented number of states introduce community solar legislation across the country, most recently including Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Florida.

At the same time, political decision-makers are becoming more comfortable acknowledging the inherent value in distributed solar and recognize that distributed generation increases grid resiliency and reliability. Above all, consumer demand for more clean, distributed energy in America is at an all-time high.

In short, it’s a good time to be in the community solar business.

Like most nascent-stage industries, the community solar industry has been primarily focused on innovation and market share. As programs launch in new markets, community solar companies from around the country are vying to secure as much capacity as they can get their hands on. This was recently evidenced in Illinois, where the state opened just over 200 megawatts of capacity for community solar and received nearly 2 gigawatts’ worth of projects from developers.

There is a gold-rush mentality starting to emerge, with most companies focused on building near-term capacity to fuel their bottom lines, sometimes at the cost of advocating for good programs, developing inclusive projects, and building a sustainable model for long-term industry growth.

Meanwhile, utilities around the country are making aggressive commitments to replace coal generation with wind and solar, and they are pledging to do it faster than previously planned. Just recently, Xcel Energy became the first investor-owned utility to commit to 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2050. Utilities are becoming more aggressive with their pricing, in many cases building projects for half of the traditional credit rate for community solar facilities. Cheaper clean energy is a good thing, but providing it solely through the traditional monopolistic system eliminates the opportunity for market innovation through competition.

With utilities waking up to the clean energy revolution and providing default electric services that are cleaner and cheaper around the country, community solar could be faced with an existential threat.

As advocates continue to push for newer and bigger community solar programs across the country, it is more important than ever for us to reflect on what we’ve accomplished to inform a bold vision of where we’re heading. We must establish a long-term vision that goes beyond pilot programs and presents a clear rationale for how community solar fits into the larger energy mix and the future grid. We need a vision for how we achieve gigawatts, not megawatts. This is especially important on a state-by-state level where demand planning and legislative and regulatory activity take place.

Without a bold, long-term vision backed by a broad coalition of stakeholders, I’m worried that legislative momentum for community solar could slow in the coming years as multiyear pilot programs wrap up and states begin to reach program capacity. This would be bad for developers. But more importantly, this would be bad for the transformation of our grid and anyone who favors increased customer choice, more distributed energy solutions, and faster adoption of clean energy.

The community solar industry is doing a good job of getting small to midsized programs up and running around the country and creating fixes for programs that need a boost. One example of a new program is in New Jersey, which has a newly passed community solar program that could scale to 250 megawatts within three years. The pilot program will have an annual capacity of 75 megawatts with 40 percent of the overall capacity dedicated to serve low- and moderate-income customers.

This is a great start for New Jersey, but it comes at the same time Governor Murphy announced a commitment to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, including 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind — a sizable development that does not deliver the localized grid and economic benefits that community solar can offer the state.

States that are making progress toward long-term program solutions are often the same states that have been the punching bags for industry criticism. The Illinois’ program drastically underestimated the market for community solar and confirmed that a lottery is everyone’s least favorite way to run a business. But more subtly, Illinois’ community solar program is paving a regulatory path to the future, through lessons learned of a bill-crediting mechanism that is uncapped, and a requirement to calculate and credit the value of distributed resources on the grid once a near-term rebate expires.

Similarly, New York has received plenty of criticism for the slow and complex deployment of everything from interconnection queues to the new Value of Distributed Energy Resources credit scheme. While VDER hasn’t been easy, it is a long-term framework that will allow a distributed future, and the state has committed to stable, meaningful incentive programs to bridge the gap from here to there.

It’s important that we continue to fight to open new markets and work to improve existing ones, but at some point, we must be bolder and offer a large-scale vision for how community solar should be included into the conversation about the nation’s electrical grid of the future.

The good news is that some states are already having conversations with stakeholders about how to transform and update their electric grids. It is critical that we use this opportunity to push for transformation that creates more competitive markets, increased customer choice, and access to clean and affordable energy. This is the promise of distributed energy generally, and community solar specifically.

If we do not consider how we position ourselves to be longstanding contributors to a distributed energy future, we will concede all our hard work and progress to the incumbent. Most importantly, we will fail to fulfill the implicit vision this industry was built on.

Occidental Petroleum, one of America’s most aggressive drillers of oil, is trying to figure out a way to wipe out its vast carbon footprint.

Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s CEO, told the Financial Times that she wants her oil company to eventually be “carbon neutral.”

Occidental (OXY), a leading shale oil producer and the No. 5 US oil company by market valuation, is experimenting with ways to capture greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions released by its operations.

“I’m thinking about the long term for our shareholders,” Hollub told the FT. “We want to be the company that’s producing the last barrel of oil.”

A spokesman for Occidental confirmed the accuracy of the remarks attributed to Hollub, but declined to comment further.

The pledge could help make Occidental an environmental leader among US oil companies, which are grappling with a backlash over the environmental impact of drilling activities.

“It’s the largest American oil company to set the goal of becoming carbon neutral,” said Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James.Occidental’s push to use carbon capture technology may have a dual-pronged benefit. It could save the company money while simultaneously quieting pressure from shareholders who are worried about climate change.”It’s a very elegant solution. It’s environmentally friendly and there is an economic value to it,” said Molchanov.

‘Absurd’ to claim carbon-neutrality?

But it’s not clear just how “carbon neutral” Occidental is aiming to be — nor how feasible the goal even is.It would be one thing for Occidental to offset the emissions from its drilling operations and supply chain. But it would be far more challenging, if not impossible, to cancel out the carbon released by the burning of its products, namely the millions of cars, buses and airplanes that run on its oil.”It’s not remotely realistic to eliminate the carbon footprint of that,” said Molchanov.

Climate activists voiced even deeper skepticism and continued to push for a shift away from fossil fuels in favor of clean energy.”It’s absurd for an oil company to claim it will become carbon neutral,” said Alex Doukas, lead analyst at Oil Change International, a group focused on exposing the costs of fossil fuels. “Occidental is telling a fairy tale reliant on carbon-sucking unicorns to try to save its outdated business.”

Environmental impact of the US oil boom

Houston-based Occidental has capitalized on the US shale oil boom by aggressively scaling up production in the Permian Basin of West Texas. Production in the Permian surged by 52% in the fourth quarter. And Occidental has promised to ramp up its Permian output even further.The shale revolution, which is being led by West Texas, has made the United States the world’s leading oil producer and reduced the nation’s reliance on foreign oil. But there are also environmental consequences — and they aren’t pretty.New US oil and gas development — and the burning of those fossil fuels — could unleash the same amount of carbon pollution as nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants, according to a January report published by Oil Change International. The group called it a “climate catastrophe” that is arriving at precisely the worst time. total amount of carbon unlocked, including burning the oil gasoline and jet fuel.

Capturing carbon

Occidental told the Financial Times that it wants to reduce its carbon footprint by expanding on a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR.Oil companies typically inject carbon dioxide into aging traditional oilfields in a bid to push out the remaining barrels. Instead of getting released into the environment, the carbon dioxide is left underground in the EOR process.Normally, oil companies use CO2 that is created naturally or produced at factories.But for Occidental to truly reduce its carbon footprint, it would have to extend this process to shale oilfields and capture carbon emitted by humans activity, such as at coal-fired power plants or cement facilities.Occidental told the FT it is running pilots to extend its EOR process to shale oilfields, instead of just traditional oilfields.”Instead of paying a factory for that CO2, Occidental can get it at a very low cost by capturing it. And there is a PR benefit from this,” said Molchanov.Other major oil producers have set climate goals in recent months.For instance, ExxonMobil (XOM) pledged last year to cut methane emissions by 15% by 2020. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is blamed for significantly contributing to global warming. Exxon also announced plans to donate $1 million to a group urging Washington to enact a carbon tax.European oil majors have been more aggressive.Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) is aiming to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2050. Shell became the first major energy company to link executive pay to carbon emissions. BP (BP) is linking the bonuses of 36,000 employees to greenhouse gas reduction targets.

More and more people are finding themselves with a new neighbor: a commercial electricity-generating system. As electricity grids move from centralized fossil fuel plants to decentralized renewables, the world is switching from fewer, larger plants to more, smaller ones. For some people, this means they’re looking out of their windows at wind turbines that weren’t there a few years ago.

How do people feel about these turbines? That may seem like a question best answered with “why should we care?” but if we get serious about addressing climate change, lots of people might end up living with generating hardware. To better understand people’s preferences, researchers Jeremy Firestone and Hannah Kirk analyzed the results of a large-scale survey on attitudes toward wind turbines. The results, published this week in Nature Energy, show that people in both red and blue states who live near wind turbines would rather keep them than swap them out for either solar or fossil fuel plants.

Wind over coal

The results came from a survey of 1,705 people living less than five miles from at least one commercial-scale wind turbine across the United States. The survey, conducted in 2016 by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, included a hefty set of questionsaiming to get a full understanding of how community members feel about their local turbines. It asked questions like how involved people felt in the planning process for the project, how noticeable the turbines are from people’s homes, and whether they notice the impact of things like turbine noise.

Because the data from the survey was publicly available, Firestone and Kirk were able to use part of it to delve into the question they were interested in: how did people feel wind power compared to other options? Research on people’s acceptance of wind power, they write, usually frames the question as being a choice between wind power or no wind power. But that’s unrealistic: society needs to generate electricity somehow, so they argue that the real question should be “whether society should generate electricity by wind or from some other source.”

So, they focused on the survey questions that explored people’s preference for wind power relative to other options. Those results were stark: around 90 percent of the respondents said they would prefer their local wind farm to a hypothetical nuclear, coal, or natural gas plant at the same distance from their homes. There was even a preference for wind over solar power, although that was less stark—around a third of respondents had no real preference, 15 percent said they would prefer solar power, and 45 percent said they were happier with wind power.

Those results were stable across different demographics. Across urban and rural areas, red and blue states, states that produce coal and those that don’t, people overwhelmingly preferred wind power. This held true even for the people who lived closest to the actual turbines, sometimes just around half a mile away from one. And this wasn’t just a case of people begrudgingly choosing the option they’d hate the least: on average, people had positive attitudes to their local wind farms.

The devil they know

The level of preference for wind power is startling enough to suggest a problem with the results: is it possible that people were just choosing the option they were already familiar with? People become accustomed to the technology they see every day, and so anyone who lives near wind turbines might naturally say they’d prefer wind, just because they have experience with it and not any of the alternatives.

The DOE survey can’t answer that question completely, but Firestone and Kirk did tackle it obliquely. They looked at whether people’s preferences were related to how long they’d lived near the turbines. If it’s true that people’s preferences grow stronger with familiarity, then you would expect to see stronger preferences among people who’d lived near turbines for longer. That’s not what they found, though: the length of time people lived near turbines wasn’t related to their preference strength. That’s a hint that the preferences were based on more than just familiarity, although most of those polled probably still had more experience with wind turbines than, say, a nuclear power plant.

Before and after

There’s another, thornier issue, which is that existing turbines might generally be installed near communities precisely because those communities were supportive. To understand the dynamics at play here, ideally you’d need to compare attitudes between people who live near turbines and those who don’t—as well as attitudes in a community before turbines are installed, and again after those same people have lived with the turbines for a while. Getting a handle on this would be important for understanding support for solar power, too.

Even with these limitations, this is still a useful addition to the current body of knowledge. Researcher Marco Sonnberger, writing about the research in Nature News & Views, points out that much of the research on social acceptance of renewables is limited to case studies. These are useful in-depth looks at individual projects, but they don’t allow for broader conclusions about how people feel. These survey results, on the other hand, give a broader snapshot of how people feel across different communities.

And right now, write Firestone and Kirk, a lot of research on the social side of wind power is—understandably—focusing on opponents and overcoming barriers, rather than looking at how supporters feel. The result of this, they note, is that we understand “less about supporters and their motivations than we do about opponents.” Turning the focus onto people who are happy with their local wind farms could pave the way to building more projects that are strongly supported by their local communities.

S2A Modular in Southern California is building a factory to manufacture modular net-zero-energy private homes, condominiums, apartment complexes, and commercial buildings. In an interview with Renewable Energy Magazine, co-founder and CEO Brian Kudzas says, “Right now there’s a need in the construction industry to be able to move faster than the traditional model does. In the traditional model, you stop at night, stop at the weekend, stop when it’s raining — it’s just start-stop, start-stop.

“In the modular industry, you’ve got first shift, second shift, third shift. It really doesn’t stop. Because of that, speed is so important. If you take a 2000 square foot home, on average, and build it traditionally, it takes you about a year to get that thing from start to finish. In the modular, you can do that within about three months, total. It’s about a week in the factory — that’s about 90 percent of the home — and then it gets transported. It only takes a day or two to actually set and then you’ve got the final 10 percent of the building materials to actually finish the home off, so we tell clients about a three month time frame.”

Speed is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is economics. If you are having a house built, payments on your construction loan begin when the first dollars are lent to the builder and go up each time the bank disperses another dollop of dollars. In the end, the homeowner can be on the hook for a year’s worth of mortgage payments before even moving in.

The S2A Modular concept has attracted a lot of interest from developers in other countries, like China, Mexico, and Pakistan. “Instead of shipping those orders, we’re looking simply to build a factory in those and oversee them, almost like a franchise concept,” Kudzas says. The first homes will be constructed for customers in Southern California but the company already has an order for 62 homes in Montana.

While the company’s target market is US homes of about 2,000 square feet, the modular concept can be adapted to any size home. Kudzas says there is a lot of interest in what he calls ADU or Accessory Dwelling Units — standalone units of about 600 square feet that provide a place where elderly or special needs members of a family can live independently.

The company says Tesla products — the Tesla Powerwall and Tesla Solar Roof — are integral parts of building homes that are energy self-sufficient. Excess electricity will be exported to the local grid at times, while at other times the home may draw power from the grid. But over the course of a year, each home will create as much energy as it uses. The modular approach allows for a more energy efficient building envelope with superior insulation properties, better windows and doors, and energy efficient appliances. Heat pumps with the highest efficiency available will also be part of the process.

Kudzas says some of the biggest corporations in the world are interested in being part of the process. “It’s Amazon, Google, Tesla, Mitsubishi, LG, it’s a combination. There’s so many people coming at us wanting us to use their products, so we’re investigating everything as the factory gets built as to what eventual suppliers we’re going to be using. Those names I mentioned, most of them are very much in front of us and we’ll probably end up using all of them.”

The best news is that with its modular approach, S2A Modular can provide a superior building for about 20% less money than a traditional structure. Much of those savings come from saving time by building in a factory versus building on site. Time is money and the more quickly the process can be completed, the less it costs. A home that would typically cost $700,000 can be completed by S2A Modular for about $560,000, meaning a lower mortgage payment and lower taxes for the owner.

Building modular means creating a more energy efficient package than is possible by trying to retrofit an existing structure. “It’s difficult for the average consumer to go out and retrofit their homes with special windows and insulation and doors and all the special components because the home was built in the 1950s,” Kudzas says. “Think of a Tesla car and taking that Tesla battery out and putting it into a Ford Fusion. It’s never going to work.”

The heart of the concept is the inclusion of the Tesla Powerwall residential storage battery. “Our concept is that if you’re going to start with the concept of running a home off a Tesla Powerwall battery, you’re going to need to surround that with specialized home components to capture as much energy as possible. So we’re starting with that concept and that’s the game-changer.”