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California’s Grid System Operator Confronts the Prospect of 33 Percent Renewables by 2020

The ISO CEO’s five-year plan has four simple components—and they may require fossil fuels.

Building enough new solar and wind capacity to meet California’s 33 percent renewables by 2020 mandate will not be easy -- but reliably getting the electricity generated by those resources to the places where it will be consumed may be even tougher. That is the responsibility of the California Independent System Operator Corporation (ISO).

The ISO has just released a five-year strategic plan that lays out what needs to be done in four… Read More ›

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Multinationals Invade Scotland for Offshore Wind Wealth

Samsung follows Mitsubishi and Gamesa to a place where ocean winds will be big money.

Samsung Heavy Industries just made a 100-million-pound ($158 million) commitment to offshore wind in Scotland, where the harnessing of far-offshore, deeper-water wind was first proven. This investment in the future of offshore wind follows a 100-million-pound commitment from Mitsubishi Power Systems and a 40-million-pound ($63.3 million) commitment from Spanish wind turbine manufacturing giant Gamesa.

With Scotland’s 206-gigawatt offshore… Read More ›

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You Can’t Outsource Retrofitting a Window

Just how important is the green jobs debate?

Lisa Jackson, the administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, headed to Mission Motors in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about clean jobs.

The company, which plans to double its workforce this year, is being highlighted as a shining example of using American ingenuity to build something -- in this case, electric powertrains for motorcycles and vehicles -- that contributes to a “green” economy and “green” jobs.

But there… Read More ›

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GM Releases Smart Grid APIs for Chevy Volt, via OnStar

General Motors wants developers to program plug-in Volts for the smart grid.

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Who Are the Smart Grid Players to Watch in 2012?

GTM Research shares more intel from The Networked Grid 150 report.

Last week, GTM Research unveiled its latest smart grid research report, The Networked Grid 150: The End-to-End Smart Grid Vendor Ecosystem Profiles and Rankings. This article is the second in a series of perspectives from the report's author. To read the first perspective, click here.

While The Networked Grid 150 'Top 10 Vendors in Smart Grid', which we announced here last week, includes many of the well-known, established players in the… Read More ›

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Adobe Adds 400 Kilowatts of Bloom Fuel Cells

But can the fuel cell firm survive as subsidies fade?

Earlier this week Adobe announced that it had added another 400 kilowatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells to its current fleet of Bloom Boxes.

I spoke with Mike Bangs, Adobe's Director of Global Facilities, about the installation. The two 200-kilowatt units installed at the company's San Francisco site are Bloom's next-generation design and put out twice the power of the previous 100-kilowatt model -- in the same footprint. Those two units… Read More ›

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Smart Grid Needs ‘Round Two’ Investment

A Microsoft-OSIsoft global smart grid survey finds that half of utilities are looking at system integration needs.

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Rubenius, 1 GW of Energy Storage, Revisited

Layoffs and deployment delays at the ambitious and mysterious Dubai firm, plus a trail of unpaid and unhappy contractors

In September of 2010, Greentech Media scored one of the first U.S. interviews with Claus Rubenius, CEO of the eponymous firm that was going to build the most massive electrochemical energy storage project in the world.

Rubenius was going to construct an "energy warehouse" of up to one gigawatt (or four to six gigawatt-hours) of NGK sodium sulfur batteries on 350 acres of land in Baja California to provide an energy storage resource to… Read More ›

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Balancing Hawaiian Wind Power With Demand Response

Honeywell and Hawaiian Electric plan out fast demand response program to balance wind power ups and downs.

Can the right combination of technology and economic incentives get utility customers to turn down megawatts of power use fast enough to balance wind power’s ups and downs? Honeywell and Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) are going to try it out on the island of Oahu, using Honeywell’s automated demand response technology.

Under the two-year pilot announced Thursday, HECO plans to offer customers lucrative incentives to turn over their power loads… Read More ›

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Who Are the Smart Grid’s ‘Big Fish’?

GTM Research pinpoints the players with the biggest market caps—and their unprecedented appetite for software solutions.

Last month, GTM Research unveiled its new report, The Networked Grid 150: The End-to-End Smart Grid Vendor Ecosystem Profiles and Rankings. This article is the third in a series of perspectives on the topic from the report's author. To read the first perspective, click here; the second piece is here.

At the moment, the mantra in smart grid is 'Software, software, software.' Across the board, the biggest players are snapping up the most… Read More ›

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PG&E Will Offer Analog Meters for Opt-Out

CPUC rules that only one option will be available for opting out.

The California Public Utility Commission ruled today that Pacific Gas & Electric customers that do not want smart meters could pay to have an analog meter.

The long-awaited vote is being watched by other states, although California is not the first to formalize its smart meter opt-out plans.

Residents who are concerned about their smart meters, whether due to privacy issues or electromagnetic radiation health concerns, they can pay a… Read More ›

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Aclara Turns on Green Button for Pepco

Can every home in America share energy-use data in a common language?

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Ira Ehrenpreis on the State of the Cleantech Industry

The annual gathering of the cleantech cognoscenti

PALM SPRINGS, California --- Reporting from the Clean-Tech Investor Summit.

Ira Ehrenpreis is the cleantech partner at VC-investment firm Technology Partners. For the eighth year in a row, Ehrenpreis is serving as the Conference Chairman of the Clean-Tech Investor Summit today and tomorrow in Palm Springs, Ca. He has been investing in cleantech since long before it was called 'cleantech.'

When Ehrenpreis first started investing in… Read More ›

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Silverado Power’s Different Approach to Building Solar

Will it make a difference in a region torn by contention over renewables?

Silverado Power believes its approach to development can avoid the controversies impeding the advance of renewables in Southern California.

In response to those controversies, major renewable energy projects got some not-so-great news from Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors in the last week of January. The Supervisors’ decisions threaten California Governor Jerry Brown’s ambition to obtain 33 percent of the state’s power from… Read More ›

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Smart Grid Roundup: Pennsylvania Peak Drop and Smarter Capacitor Banks

Pennsylvania utilities call on Comverge, EnerNOC and Johnson Controls to control customers’ peak power. Plus, cap banks are cool.

Here’s some post-DistribuTECH smart grid news for the week so far, the lead item being Pennsylvania's emergence as the new gold rush market for demand response. The state legislature has commanded utilities to shave 4.5 percent of their peak load by next year, and utilities have hired EnerNOC, Comverge and Johnson Controls to help out.

The latest is Johnson Controls, which announced Monday it would build a platform for PECO to connect up to… Read More ›

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First Solar on the Future of Photovoltaics: Part 2

In order to thrive, First Solar must deploy 65 GW of photovoltaic panels over the next decade.

First Solar is the largest solar module firm by market capitalization, the largest thin-film solar firm, and one of the largest solar firms by capacity, shipments, and certainly by cumulative profits. The company is in the cross-hairs of every other solar firm and continues to set the bar in terms of solar panel value and corporate performance.

What first Solar does in the next few years is important.

Which is why more than 200 people… Read More ›

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One Solar-Wind Hybrid Goes Down, Another Goes Up

Element Power and NextEra get delayed; enXco gets started.

Element Power’s proposed Wildflower Renewable Energy Farm, which would be composed of 150 megawatts of wind and 100 megawatts of solar, got dealt a significant setback on January 24 when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously rejected the company’s application for new meteorological (met) towers.

Without met tower data, Element Power is unlikely to be able to obtain financing to proceed.

Across Antelope Valley on the… Read More ›

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Guest Post: US Shows China Writing on the PV Tariff Wall

The US Dept. of Commerce makes a critical circumstances finding on Chinese solar cells/panels.

The Department of Commerce Finding

· The U.S. Dept. of Commerce on Jan. 27, 2012 makes a critical circumstances finding on Chinese solar cells/panels.

· The finding was based on import data from Suntech Power and Trina Solar [Editor's note: see Trina response here] for the three-month periods of October to December 2011 vs. July to September 2011 and the four-month periods of September to December vs. May to August 2011.

· All the… Read More ›

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Report: Solar Trade Barriers Threaten Over 60,000 American Jobs

Study warns of dire impact on US solar industry jobs if tariffs are imposed.

The Brattle Group has issued an economic analysis on the impact of a 100 percent tariff on PV cells imported from China.

Keep in mind that the study was commissioned by CASE, the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy -- the group that opposes the tariffs sought by SolarWorld and its anti-dumping claims with the Department of Commerce.

Jigar Shah, President of CASE, said, "We are greatly concerned over the adverse impact of tariffs." He… Read More ›