Comments on: Micropower's Quiet Takeover

Micropower's Quiet Takeover

flabdablet — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:02:14 -0800

Small-scale, low-carbon generation now produces one-quarter of world electricity (Rocky Mountain Institute)

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:21:41 -0800

Yet by the end of 2013, the rapid output growth of both modern renewables and cogeneration (Fig. 1) had eclipsed shrinking nuclear power by 3.34-fold in capacity and 2.35-fold in output. Modern renewables alone, those other than big hydro dams, reached 1.95 times nuclear power's capacity in 2013 and should exceed its annual electricity output by 2015. This role reversal (Fig. 2) is accelerating, due mainly to economics and to modular renewables' extraordinarily dynamic scaling mechanism. . . . For micropower as for cellphones and personal computers, the race goes to the quick—but photovoltaic power worldwide is scaling up even faster than cellphones. Advocates who assume renewables can't do much without a breakthrough in bulk storage of electricity are in for a rude awakening.

This is terrific stuff.

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:23:25 -0800

Related: the BBC reported that wind generators in the UK produced more power on October 22nd than any of the nation's nuclear plants.

By: No Robots

No Robots — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:24:01 -0800

I'm truly excited by the changes going on in the energy sector. Such a great time to be alive.

By: howfar

howfar — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:30:22 -0800

Let's just hope the changes are rapid enough to keep us alive, eh?

By: Think_Long

Think_Long — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:32:34 -0800

Related: the BBC reported that wind generators in the UK produced more power on October 22nd than any of the nation's nuclear plants. Kind of funny that this video was posted on that same day.

By: Zalzidrax

Zalzidrax — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:42:14 -0800

In terms of climate change, shrinking nuclear power is just more ground that growing modern renewables have to make up for.

By: shothotbot

shothotbot — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:43:32 -0800

Solar power keeps getting cheaper — but not for the reasons you'd expect We are getting better at putting the systems together.

By: emptythought

emptythought — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:43:43 -0800

My question is, how many reactors have shut down in this time period? i know a whole bunch shut down, and were scheduled to shut down post fukushima. especially in europe. How much of the gains shown by this ramp up/overtake are because the other side is winding down?

By: Naberius

Naberius — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:49:47 -0800

Yes, that's great, but it doesn't address the larger context of what happens around all this micropower as it grows. The author might have found a really clueless power industry guy to talk to, but they're not all like that. They're not going to dimly go "whaaa?" as they die with no clue what's happening to them. The entrenched interests are already fighting back on the regulatory level. They're using their captured regulatory bodies to reduce subsidies on micropower, cut the prices they're required to pay for extra power fed into the grid, or even taxing solar to keep it from becoming more competitive. This is the classic capitalist tactic of using political clout to shore up the profitability of an obsolete business model through artificial barriers to competition. But there is a more legitimate issue to be addressed here. Our electrical infrastructure was designed - economically as well as from an engineering standpoint - around the assumption that everyone's power would be generated by those large power plants and delivered through the grid. It's one thing to say that large centralized power plants can just go away, but we're still going to need the grid. Without that, you have no way of getting backup power in case your micropower setup isn't equal to your needs at some point, and some applications will probably never be suitable for micropower. So if the utilities can't make money anymore, who maintains the grid? The best answer IMO is to basically nationalize the grid and treat it as public infrastructure that everybody from small micropower users to corporate-owned power plants can connect to. But you can well imagine the shrieks of "socialized power" from the Republicans and Tea Party types. That strikes directly at the foundation of the Tea Party backers' fortunes. (I'm looking at you, Koch Brothers.) From a political and economic standpoint, getting to a stable system that uses all this awesome energy tech is not going to be nearly as simple as putting up some solar panels in that spare corner of your property that you aren't using.

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:52:58 -0800

How much of the gains shown by this ramp up/overtake are because the other side is winding down? There's a graph for that.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:54:45 -0800

Meanwhile, here in Indiana, Big Coal Power has been running scare ads, telling Hoosiers straight-up that their electric bills WILL go up, unless they contact the EPA and tell them to kill new proposed clean air regulations.

By: Ahab

Ahab — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:58:16 -0800

Hey look Thorzdad, that shit worked in Australia, so why not. Why not. {

By: filthy light thief

filthy light thief — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:59:05 -0800

In the US, there are more strict rules on power plants, making it harder to build new coal plants, and existing plants are cutting back (even as coal extraction continues, with the coal getting exported overseas). Also, power companies are diversifying a lot more now, getting into multiple streams of power sources. Even as they're building new solar and wind farms, they're also building new on-demand power stations to fill the lulls in renewable sources. Until there's a way to reliably store huge amounts of energy at a minimal (or inexpensive) energy loss.

By: bove

bove — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:13:00 -0800

Naberius, Vox recently had an article on exactly that topic. The utility companies are now trying to fight against the growth of solar.

By: gwint

gwint — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:15:04 -0800

Walton Family Undermining Rooftop Solar

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:15:10 -0800

In terms of climate change, shrinking nuclear power is just more ground that growing modern renewables have to make up for. I'm okay with that.

By: Ahab

Ahab — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:15:48 -0800

power companies are diversifying a lot more now And there lies our slim fingers crossed hope. On the one hand the coal and gas industry bought our government (or even several of them). On the other Rupert holds a share of the ten billion currently invested in renewables here that will be lost if the current twits in Canberra continue as planned.

By: msbutah

msbutah — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:18:45 -0800

Rocky Mountain Power here in Utah recently tried (unsuccessfully) to institute a $1.65/kw of generation capability fee on net metering customers (of which I am one). Net metering customers have a contract negotiated with the utility to sell back power at the grid rate. My summer monthly usage is negative (I make more than I use) which I use to offset winter use. Thanks to groups like UCARE, it's a tough fight but one that they're not getting away with so easily.

By: atrazine

atrazine — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:51:12 -0800

Rocky Mountain Power here in Utah recently tried (unsuccessfully) to institute a $1.65/kw of generation capability fee on net metering customers (of which I am one). Unbundling the various services provided by the grid is a good idea in principle, in fact there's an RMI blog post about it which references this report on rate design. Being connected to the grid isn't just about buying energy, it's about being able to buy as much as your connection can handle at any time at a pre-agreed rate (and being able to sell it back). If you unbundled and charged for: -physical grid -frequency stability -capacity As well as dynamically pricing energy purchases and sales over time and location, you'd end up with pricing that much better reflects the actual needs of the system. Of course that comes with the massive disadvantage that you'd have less predictable and difficult to understand billing. At the moment billing is usually either net usage times a unit energy cost or different buy and sell rates, sometimes the network charge is unbundled and charged as a separate connection fee which is a very good start. You'd also end up having to explicitly address subsidy and redistribution issues which have historically been hidden from public view which I don't actually think is necessarily a great thing. One of the major advantages of net metering is that it's a renewable subsidy¹ that is easier to sell to the usual 'pro-business' global warming-sceptic organ donors than an explicit subsidy. Existing energy tariff structures are also frequently designed with some element of progressive pricing built in to the bundle, again this is easier to get past the crooked used car dealers and real estate shmucks who dominate local politics than explicitly progressive policies. (1) The reason it's a subsidy is that the operator is selling you energy+capacity+ancillary services at the same price that you're selling them back only energy.

By: overglow

overglow — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:54:23 -0800

It's interesting to think of the fossil fuel divestment movement (which seems to be gaining momentum) in this context as a way of reducing the political and economic power of those entrenched interests... maybe it can function as the other arm of micropower, making a kind of pincher...

By: eye of newt

eye of newt — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:57:00 -0800

2009, a senior strategic planner for a major nuclear vendor told me micropower was trivial—having failed to find it in official databases of utility-owned central power stations, I've heard that a lot of Federal energy tracking groups don't even bother counting rooftop solar. If it isn't a giant power-plant it isn't in the data or on their radar. I can just imagine every house and apartment complex adding solar and the Federal officials looking at the data going "I don't understand! Did the country just disappear? This doesn't make any sense!" It is scary that they are making decisions based on this data.

By: MikeWarot

MikeWarot — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:54:37 -0800

I think net metering may get killed in enough places to cause some of those effected to consider going off grid much, much sooner than would otherwise happen. Those people will then help pull everyone off the grid much sooner than if things were left alone. In other words, kharma.

By: fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit

fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:01:20 -0800

It wasn't all that long ago that Germany was generating so much solar energy that power was free for the day. If only we had a whole bunch of states with a surplus of sunshine instead of being in overcast Europe. If only.

By: bystander

bystander — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:10:31 -0800

(1) The reason it's a subsidy is that the operator is selling you energy+capacity+ancillary services at the same price that you're selling them back only energy. There is no reason the feed in tariff in a net metering setup has to equal the retail cost of power. Where I live it doesn't. The most economical approach is to size a system to cover your daylight energy use, with little excess sold back to the grid. Since I pay a separate connection charge which covers providing the availability to draw power from the grid on cloudy days, this kind of works economically. And for those proposing a socialised grid, here the government owns the grid, and runs it as an arms length corporation that has been gouging customers with unnecessary infrastructure upgrades, beefing up their profit. That the profit goes back to the government is of little consolation as they intend to privatise the corporation in the future.

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:51:21 -0800

About the author from gwint's link:

Stacy Mitchell is co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and directs its Community-Scaled Economy Initiative, which produces research and analysis, and partners with a range of allies to design and implement policies that curb economic consolidation and strengthen community-rooted enterprise.

Awesome. Please start a political party so I can vote for you :)

By: gwint

gwint — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 17:01:11 -0800

Economists Say Curbing Climate Change Will Help Our Economy

By: jenkinsEar

jenkinsEar — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:07:21 -0800

Sure looks like it's all Cogen plants that are the bulk of the growth and the energy- they're replacing coal with natural gas, not wind and solar. It's better, sure, but when the price of gas goes up, they just switch back to oil.

By: el io

el io — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:11:12 -0800

And there lies our slim fingers crossed hope. On the one hand the coal and gas industry bought our government You can't buy politicians. You can only rent them.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 02:16:14 -0800

The thing about cogen is that it has four climate wins built in: burning natural gas emits less CO₂ per kWh than burning coal to begin with, the generation plant is typically very close to the energy end user so transmission losses are almost nonexistent, both heat and electricity output from the cogen plant typically displace kWh previously supplied by burning coal separately for each, and the plants are typically small so they're quick to deploy and can get started displacing coal-fired emissions right away. Yes, natural gas is still a fossil fuel. But spending any given amount of dollars on cogen plant still yields about three times the greenhouse gas savings between now and any projected all-renewables future than spending it on nukes would do. Which is why it drives me nuts to hear people solemnly pronouncing that Climate Change is Serious Business so we need to deploy All Available Technologies including nuclear. NO WE DON'T. We need to deploy as much of our most cost-effective per avoided tonne of emissions technologies as the market will bear, ramp up the fully renewable technologies likewise, and stop bending over for the fucking coal industry.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 02:19:04 -0800

Mass producible solar cogen looks pretty sweet too.

By: scruss

scruss — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:54:58 -0800

> I've heard that a lot of Federal energy tracking groups don't even bother counting rooftop solar For two reasons:

Micro-power systems don't report back to system operators. This is partly a matter of scale and cost (system operators log generation in integer MWh, utility grade revenue meters cost the same as a small house) and partly because they're attached to distribution grids, which usually have no way of metering energy flows.
Once you get to street power pole level, they're invisible. They only appear as negative load, as the rooftop generation cancels out some/all of the domestic demand.

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 06:08:50 -0800

Micro-power systems don't report back to system operators. They don't? Mine does. Net metering and SRECs wouldn't work at all if it didn't. Most US states have net metering, so I really don't know what you're talking about.

By: atrazine

atrazine — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 07:34:42 -0800

They don't? Mine does. Net metering and SRECs wouldn't work at all if it didn't. Most US states have net metering, so I really don't know what you're talking about. They report back to the billing department of your supplier, that usually isn't the same as the grid system operator, in the US those are Regional or Independent System Operators (RTOs or ISOs), in Great Britain¹ that's National Grid. These organisations are responsible for balancing system-wide load and generation on a second-to-second basis and managing net flows around the network. They usually connect to local distribution networks which have much more limited capabilities to actively monitor and control internal flows. Utility scale meters aren't just for revenue, they're also for managing the network on a real-time basis. One of the problems with increasing distributed generation (generation attached to the distribution rather than the transmission network) is that as scruss said, a low-voltage distribution network shows up as a single number to the distribution networks. A distribution network will know what the net load is on a certain segment of its low voltage network but not how much of that load is 'negative load' from micro-generation. You could get these figures of course, but you'd have to combine the data from the system operator which has the data on transmission voltage generation with the net metering data from all the local utilities. The data reported directly by the system operator won't have the distributed generation in it. (1) NI runs separately and is operated together with the Irish transmission network