It’s Cold Out There. Unless you were within a few miles of me in South Florida, you were wearing a sweater this weekend. I won’t rub it in but we had a cozy 85 degrees for the long weekend. Cold weather, especially where it is normally not expected, causes major pain in grid operations. You saw that Texas, with power plants coming off line and wind turbines needing to be deiced to continue turning, reached its peak power price of $9,000/MWh. Demand not only exceeded forecasts many times over but also happened simultaneously across major metro areas. Grid geeks debated the pros and cons of capacity markets, like PJM versus ERCOT, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the arbitrage opportunity between peaks for energy storage asset owners that were not contracted ahead of time.
A Central Grid, Decentralized. Two former state regulators including Sunrun’s VP of Policy, Anne Hoskins, write that it is shortsighted for regulators and grid planners to not proceed with major enhancements to the way distributed energy resources are dispatched and monetized. Look at the situation in Texas, if DERs had been included in the analysis and grid operations, the peak demand could have been shaved to some degree even though Texas is just getting started. California on the other hand, with over 1 million solar roofs plus a plan to get to a million solar with storage roofs can dramatically impact grid peaks. The dispatch ability for planners doesn’t come without a cost, it competes with other peaking or near peaking capacity but isn’t looked at by regulators as a solid asset just yet. California regulators are letting monopolies double down on peaking generation capacity contracts and more fossil fuel generators as a way to manage peak. But the CAISO CEO said it best once, we cannot simply manage peaks, we must also shape demand.
Gates Writes Book. Bill Gates has a new book about the energy transition, “How to avoid a climate disaster?” The CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute reviews the book and politico publishes an interview with Gates.
C&I PPA Webinar. My C&I solar friends at Sustainable Capital Finance (SCF) are hosting an exciting free webinar for EPCs and Installers on Feb 24th, demonstrating how their software users were able to improve PPA project conversions by 25% or more. Learn best practices in executing C&I solar & storage PPAs, helpful strategies for a remote sales process, industry insights, and more. You can sign up here or contact the SCF team at info@scf.com for more information.
- Reuters: Texas wholesale electric prices spike more than 10,000% amid outages
- Bloomberg: Blackouts Hit 13 States Beyond Texas in Deepening Power Crisis
- Greentech Media: Doubling Down on a Centralized Grid Is More Expensive Without Distributed Energy
- Utility Dive: CPUC moves forward with plan to prevent 2021 blackouts despite criticism from environmental groups
- PV-Tech: Duke Energy’s IRP ‘ignores the synergistic benefits between solar and storage’, says E3
- Politico: Bill Gates – Forget the climate policy tweaks and go for the big stuff
- PV-Magazine: Military veterans are poised to help lead record solar growth
- Axios: Biden’s climate innovation push comes into partial focus
Opinion
Best, Yann