Along with the recent burst of six new solar licenses granted by the California Energy Commission since late August, the California Independent System Operator is beginning to consider a variety of novel ways to integrate the record percentage of renewable resources into the grid.

With the 20% Renewable Energy Standard mandate expected to be on the grid by 2013, and an ongoing solar ramp-up to get to 33% by 2020, California now joins countries like Finland and US regions like the Pacific Northwest that are considering distributed storage to gain more control during times of over-generation, congestion and extreme system ramps.

One option is to develop more distributed storage for renewable power in everything from electric vehicles and water heaters to rooftop ice cooling systems. In the Bonneville Power Administration’s Pacific Northwest, for example 4.3 million water heaters that can store 2,600 megawatt-hours by allowing the storage temperature to vary by five degrees are to be used in this way to store energy to feed back to the grid on demand.

To this end the CPUC recently invested $1.5 million of California Solar Initiative R&D money in a co-generation start-up making solar electricity and solar hot water for industrial and commercial customers like food processors, restaurants, hotels and breweries. Potentially, the Cogenra Solar co-generation systems could provide distributed storage for when there is excess solar and wind power on the California grid.

These businesses would then be able to send that energy back to the grid on demand. In this novel approach, California would become more like Finland, which is now able to supply fully 30% of its energy from industrial heat and power co-generation by large industrial users like paper mills.

But an additional alternative being considered by Cal-ISO would be to encourage variable resources such as wind and solar power to take payments in exchange for curtailing output. Some newly wind-powered states which had too much wind power on the grid at low demand times forced developers to give away their energy for free or below cost.

This puts California’s recent investment of $1.5 million in co-generation distributed storage in perspective. It might seem like an extravagance for a state that is short of cash. But it makes financial sense, instead of spending state money on non-generation of energy, by paying wind and solar companies to shut down when they produce more than needed. California’s many industrial businesses and even smaller commercial users like restaurants and hotels would then be able to make money by supplying power to the smart grid. That would be a very novel win-win.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Large majorities of Americans incorrectly believe that completely irrelevant behavior would reduce global warming. For example, an astounding 67% believe that reducing toxic waste, or banning aerosol spray cans (69%) would be effective.

When asked which one action would do the most to reduce global warming, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources was the action most selected – but by only 36% of those polled. Not so much because the remaining 65% agree on something that might do it better, but more that a great variety of wacky notions compete for the job.

These odd solutions come from misunderstanding about the causes. Majorities of Americans incorrectly believe that the hole in the ozone layer, or toxic wastes, or aerosol spray cans, volcanic eruptions, acid rain, and (thanks, Rush Limbaugh) the sun are to blame for global warming.

But even stranger – considering that Rush indoctrinates 20 million of us about the sun being the cause, so in sense, these are actually “educated” Americans – but almost half of Americans (49%) incorrectly believe that the space program contributes to global warming, something that I don’t believe Rush takes a position on.

An additional 43 percent incorrectly believe that if we stopped punching holes in the ozone layer with rockets, it would reduce global warming.

More than half incorrectly believe that while they are generating energy; nuclear power plants actually contribute to global warming.

There is hope though, for those of us in the business of spreading knowledge about the solutions to climate change. The many government-sponsored communications you see everywhere about the need to switch from the old incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs seems to have really paid off. A solid majority (69%) believes that changing light bulbs will stop global warming. Clearly these kinds of post-secondary public education efforts have had an effect.

And the Americans polled would agree. While they themselves got their information from television, for the most part, and would search on the internet if they wanted to get more information, 75% say that schools should teach our children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming and (68%) that the government should establish programs to teach Americans about the issue.

Image: Thomas Hawke
Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Cogenra Solar has just been awarded a $1.5 million research grant from the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) and CSI’s R&D incubator to finance a full scale 272 kW demonstration prototype of its solar hybrid co-generation of heat and electricity at the Sonoma Wine Company near Santa Rosa.

In addition, the CPUC  funds will enable Cogenra Solar to modify its units for potential integration with PG&E’s smart grid to provide distributed energy storage for use during peak demand.

The new hybrid solar-solar water heater start-up is backed by Vinod Khosla, and like his other solar hybrid start-up PVT Echo,  it addresses the same problem of reducing solar costs by producing both electricity and heat from one unit.

Its unique technology is intended for a mid-sized commercial market, neither for homeowners’ rooftops, nor for utility-scale solar production, but for commercial users like food processors, hotels, restaurants, laundromats and similar businesses. The arrays are taller than a person, but not than a building, and they rotate on their trackers to follow the sun.

Each unit focuses sunlight reflected up into a small but efficient solar array that faces down into the mirror.

A long narrow array of solar photovoltaic cells face downwards towards the reflected and highly focused sunshine bounced up by the mirrors. Above the solar array is the tube that carries the liquid being heated by the same intense focused sunlight. It removes the heat for use in solar hot water.

As with PVT’s Echo, the hybrid solar co-generation technology also solves a problem with solar PV: that it is somewhat less efficient when it is too hot. Solar electricity can be more efficient in Minnesota on a snowy day than in Arizona during a heat wave, because solar panels produce more power when they are not overheated.

The liquid is constantly removing the heat built up behind the solar panels, siphoning off heat so that the panels produce at their optimum. Nevertheless, the heat production versus the solar electricity production is about four to one: making these ideal for businesses like large industrial food processors, hotels, laundromats and restaurants: that need to make four times more hot water or heat than electricity.

These panels are intended for ground-mounting, making a vineyard a great place to showcase the units. The units are about 7 feet high, and will use some of their electricity to power their trackers. The glass mirrors are economical to produce, as instead of being one big curved mirror, these are made in units, about 8″ wide. This means they can simply be slotted in and easily replaced if broken.

Cogenra Solar was one eight other grant recipients awarded by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to support the development of improved photovoltaic production technologies and innovative business models.

The company plans to provide the industry’s first Heat & Power Purchase Agreement (HPPA) which, like the solar PPAs or leases offered by solar innovators Sungevity, SunRun and Solar City, have sky-rocketed solar adoption because they enable the provision of clean renewable power at below utility rates.

The CPUC hopes that the system could also provide tri-generation, making electricity, hot water, and cooling as well, greatly reducing California’s energy demand.

Importantly, they believe that these systems, if widely adopted by industrial and commercial customers, would be able to coordinate with the PG&E  smart grid and provide the state a significant quantity of distributed solar energy storage during the afternoons, to release that during California’s evenings, reducing California’s use of fossil energy.

I will visit them when they show this in Sonoma next month to get some more detail. Khosla’s PVT Solar seems a bit stalled over the last few years, and seems to have been bypassed by SunDrum Solar, which at least has a few actual customers for its similar heat-siphoning solar co-generation hybrid. So it will be interesting to see another very innovative approach to this useful and much needed work.

Related stories:

Why Finnish Paper Mills Became Electric Utilities
53 MW Ice Energy Distributed Energy Storage Begins in Glendale, California
Why California Has Nearly Quadrupled Solar Installations Since Last Year

SusanKraemer@Twitter

Some very exciting news for US clean energy today. Google announced on their blog last night that they will invest in building 350 miles of transmission off the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Virginia to tap into a gigantic off-shore wind potential that has only just been opened up this year with the first-ever US approval of an off-shore wind farm, by the Obama administration.

The new transmission cables, a superhighway for clean energy, will enable the connection of up to 6,000 MW of offshore wind turbines. That’s equivalent to 60% of the wind energy that was installed in the entire country last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.

Putting this system in place removes the major barrier: the lack of infrastructure, and should – with a friendly administration, jump-start off-shore wind in this country. The US currently so lags behind Europe that the first off-shore farm approved, this year’s Cape Wind that signed the first lease last week, was reduced to using German turbines (Siemens).

Google’s new superhighway of energy will be built by transmission company Trans-Elect and be financed by Google, Good Energies and Marubeni Corporation.

Google points out in their blog that just a beginning is needed at this early stage. “We are investing 37.5% of the equity in this initial development stage, with the goal of obtaining all the necessary approvals to finance and begin constructing the line. Although the development stage requires only a small part of the total estimated project budget, it represents a critical stage for the project”.

These four mid-Atlantic states are the middle states central to a consortium of what is now 11 Atlantic states whose governors have signed an agreement to develop their tremendous off-shore wind potential, which has been estimated at 330 Gigawatts in total, more than twice what the 11 states use.

Polling of the 5 mid-Atlantic state coastal residents has found that they are very supportive of the development of their off-shore wind (previous story).

These four mid-Atlantic states that Google proposes to get started with have more than 60 GW (60,000 MW) of this gigantic off-shore wind potential in relatively shallow waters that extend miles out to sea, making it easier to install turbines 10-15 miles offshore, where they are barely visible.

This is a historic milestone for the USA. Total off-shore wind power off the Atlantic has been estimated to be enough to take one third of the US population off the fossil grid.

Image: Google
Susan Kraemer@Twitter

You might have thought the long battle for the Cape Wind project was over back in April, when the Obama administration BLM filed its approval of the project, but there’s more steps than that!

Thursday, Secretary of the Interior Salazar surprised the AWEA at an annual meeting by announcing that at the conclusion of the event he would be publicly signing his approval of a 28-year Federal lease with Cape Wind Associates for 25 square miles of ocean floor 16 miles from Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts where the project is to be built.

The first ever off-shore wind project in this country would involve 130 wind turbines 16 miles off the coast that could produce up to 468 megawatts of electricity and sell power at $0.18 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than any other non-fossil power other than nuclear energy.

The most controversial renewable energy project in the US would raise National Grid customers in Massachusetts home electric bills per month $1.50.  Electricity rates for its commercial and industrial customers would increase between about 2%: well under the 5-7% annual rate rise seen among electricity bills nationwide.

On-shore wind is much cheaper, since off-shore wind is nonexistent, something that Salazar attempted to correct in forming the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium earlier this year with 5 Atlantic state governors, to fast track this nation’s stalled off-shore energy industry.

The consortium has worked on eliminating the barriers to off-shore wind development, by identifying the best offshore potential for wind projects, bringing the environmental review in line with reality and speeding up the permitting process by removing redundant layers of bureaucracy.

The Atlantic seaboard has a power potential of 330 Gigawatts, about twice the total electricity needs of the states involved. The consortium has doubled to include the governors from 11 Atlantic states.

“I am determined to accomplish a similar objective of orderly, responsible, and straightforward permitting for wind development on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf” Secretary of the Interior Salazar told the AWEA during his surprise announcement.

“The Atlantic OCS is receiving significant – and increasing – interest from communities frustrated by rising energy costs, states seeking to meet renewable energy mandates, and companies looking to advance their respective turbine and transmission technologies.”

“But as with any new frontier, there needs to be a clear, common-sense, and fair process for exploration and development. Until we started laying the rules of the road for offshore wind development a year and a half ago, no such process existed” he added. “That’s why it took the Cape Wind project eight years to clear necessary reviews.”

As with the solar projects now planned on BLM lands, the 28-year lease signed by Salazar will cost the company rents and fees payable to the federal government. The “ocean” rent is $88,278 in annual rent prior to production, and then once production begins, a 2% fee for fifteen years and from then: 7%. The first off-shore wind power is expensive at $0.18 cents a kilowatt-hour.

On-shore wind companies who can sell power for half that amount are understandably upset. TransCanada Energy, with on-shore turbines in Maine, offered to sell electricity to National Grid for less than $0.11 cents per kilowatt-hour.  And that’s just the objections on that side. The US Department of Justice is still battling four pending lawsuits in federal court by the NIMBY contingent.

With the project approval in April, and now the rent agreement signed with the US government, the next step is that the company will need to finalize a power purchase agreement with National Grid, the utility that will make history by purchasing the first off-shore wind power to ever be generated in the USA.

Image: A Scottish wind farm by Robin Rigg
Susan Kraemer@Twitter