Fixing Our Electric Grid and Solar Panels for All (even the underfunded)
We’re coming at you no-longer-quite-live at New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.
The summit is over for today, but I wanted to throw some concluding thoughts out after an afternoon spent discussing good business models for producing alternative energy and for overhauling our current electrical grid.
>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit: Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments.
Two presentations stuck out to me from the afternoon, Tioga Energy and Acorn (no, not that ACORN) Energy. Without turning this into too much of a publicity-fest for either company, here’s what they were about.
Solar Panels for All
Tioga has gotten pretty good at a business model that I’ve actually heard about in a few different places: effectively, they lease people’s roof space and put solar panels up on homes and businesses. Then, they sell the energy to the people in the home at a fixed rate (below market value for the customer) that goes up slowly over a 20 year period. There are options for the owner of the property to purchase the solar panels if they would like to down the line, but until they do Tioga maintains everything for them. This means that the company soaks the initial start-up costs for people: often that prohibitive thing reinventing a small business or a home-owner from taking a plunge.
Plus, they have a super sweet panel you can use to check how much energy your roof is or is not producing. They called it the “Prius panel” today, which gets at how well it does at being another way of turning your energy consumption into something that you track and are viscerally aware of.
Check out their Solar Panel display, a case study of their model being put into effect for the Athenian School, a college prep out in Danville, CA. The presenter talked about this model, and he’s right: it really is photogenic!
That’s a whole field of panels for a school that could never have afforded the cost of such a large installation. Hard to find a downside, as far as I can tell — and it seems to be a sustainable model for the company to make real money at it.
(side note: please don’t take this as an endorsement of a company. I know nothing about their business practices, only about the theoretical workings of their organization!)
Can We Fix Our Electric Grid by Building More of the Same?
The presentation from John Moore, the Director and CEO of Acorn Energy, was an examination of the ways our current electrical grid is failing. Since much of the afternoon was taking up by a discussion of energy REC markets, it made sense to look long and hard at how the alternative energy we are generating is developed and transported to you, the user. Moore posed the above question about our current electric grid, and noted that our current system is massively inefficient and could be headed for collapse. However, he made the same point that I’ve been making for a while: that fixing the way we move our energy about is a real and effective thing we can do in the short term in a green collar economy. It makes jobs, saves MWh, and buys us some time to get everything else up and running.
UPDATE: I managed to catch up with Moore to clarify exactly where he stands on his own question. I asked him what he thinks is keeping the logical smart grid from getting off the ground.
“The inertia preventing us from improving efficiency on the grid is the monopoly nature of the electric markets. Asking a utility to adopt smart grid technology is like asking AT&T during their monopoly to offer Skype as a service to their customers. Utilities want to sell more electricity not less. Decoupling is widely hailed as the solution but at best decoupling makes a utility neutral to the smart grid. In Delaware the utility has been threatening to implement smart meters for three decades but the battle is always over how the savings get split. Traditionally the utility wants to earn the avoided costs of building transmission and generation from the smart grid savings eg Duke Energy’s “Save-A-Watt Proposal”. It is human nature to only adopt a technology when the pain of not adopting it is much greater than the pain of learning and implementing the new technology. This is so fundamental to human nature it is part of the declaration of independence. …..all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.“
I guess I’ve tried to keep up with what’s out there, but it was interesting to hear just how low the technology barrier is when it comes to smart grids. For example: the issue of storage came up, something of great concern to those folks producing the strong but intermittent power generated by things like wind and solar. Many a Clean Technica reader might be familiar with this concept, but the technology for storage on a large scale exists: there are 34 megawatt storage batteries already in place and functioning in Japan. That’s a lot of juice.
My takeaway? That there is some “low hanging fruit” in our energy grid that, if picked, would massively improve our our country uses it’s energy. The question really is: who walks away with the dough? After a day of hearing about potential, big markets and post 2012 Cap and Trade programs, it was exciting to look down and see a shovel ready project right there. Stimulus money going into good ol’ American infrastructure… even your staunchest Republican has to think that’s a good idea! And just think: Acorn was willing to install everything we need at a low low price! For example, Acorn produces these little Smart Alarms that will give early warning signs for when one of the increasingly ancient transformers that we count on for our power is going on the fritz. When one of those puppies goes, bad things happen.
Then again, we already knew that big capitol was lining up behind the smart grid.
(side note: please don’t take this as an endorsement of a company. I know nothing about their business practices, only about the theoretical workings of their organization!)
In case you missed it: the first set of reactions from the summit are available here and avalible here.
Images: via wsgts.com and tiogaenergy.com
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About the Author
Alan Smith Alan Smith is a Freelance Producer in Brooklyn New York who’s been fortunate enough in the past to work on a Peabody award winning radio show (the Brian Lehrer show, WNYC Radio) and an Emmy nominated TV program (Brian Lehrer Live on CUNY TV). Other highlights include PhilanthroMedia, a new media company which works for social change with non-profits and foundations across the globe. In my spare time, I’m interested in the science and politics of the current green movement, and write about those things in and around whatever else crosses my grill at www.livingtheamericangreen.org
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