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Facebook’s Prineville Data Center will soon be powered by nothing but solar energy.
Pacific Power and Facebook are partnering to build six new solar farms.
Two of them will be in the Crook County area.
They are expected to generate enough energy to power Facebook’s entire Prineville operation.
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Schools can be the nexus of a neighborhood, a community space and reference point for kids and parents alike. In Buffalo, New York, a new adaptive reuse project that opens today aims to turn an unused elementary school into something even more central to the neighborhood and its future.
The transformation of School 77 into what local leaders have called an “energy democracy” building—complete with community space for seniors and children, offices for nonprofits, as well as low-income housing and a massive community solar project—demonstrates how classrooms can be given a second life, and new mission.
“We operate from the theory of change,” says Rahwa Ghirmatzion, a former Eritrean refugee and executive director of PUSH Buffalo, the group that led the charge to renovate the school. “This was community led, driven, and controlled because we believe those closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.”
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The drive to turn an 80,000-square-foot-plus public school on the city’s west side began in the winter of 2014. Community groups such as PUSH Buffalo (People United for Sustainable Housing) saw potential in this unused structure and wanted the neighborhood’s blessing to move forward. PUSH had already focused on the surrounding west side, having spent close to a decade turning it into a Green Development Zone through a combination of sustainable community development, policy advocacy, and community organizing.
For months, organizers passed out comment cards to the neighbors asking for feedback on the plans. Once organizers collected more than 600 responses, they presented them to the local city councilman, David Rivera, and then the Department of Planning. Throughout the buildout, fundraising, and design of what would eventually become a $15 million renovation, PUSH and other groups, including Hester Street, a urban planning firm, and Stieglitz Snyder Architecture, stayed in close contact with neighbors.
“Often with projects like these, locals are engaged at the beginning, and they don’t hear from you again until the ribbon cutting,” says Ghirmatzion. “We were interested in the time between the application and ribbon cutting, and how interaction could improve the school.”
For Ghirmatzion, the neighborhood around School 77 and the building itself represent what Buffalo is and can be, as much as what Buffalo was. An former industrial, Rust Belt town connected to the Erie Canal, and once one of the country’s leading cities, Buffalo has suffered from decades of economic difficulties. But over time, the city and its demographics have changed. Now one of the leading cities for resettlement in the nation, the city, and the area surrounding School 77 in particular, is home to an eclectic array of refugees and immigrant—more than 60 languages are spoken in Buffalo today—as well as significant economic challenges. Median household income in the 25-square-block Green Zone is $20,000, with 40 percent of residents and 60 percent of children living in poverty.
It’s important to create these kind of community hubs to help new and old residents, and help provide the tools to create a “self-determined community,” says Ghirmatzion.
“This is healing work,” she says. “There is a lot of trauma in these communities, deeply embedded trauma from what these immigrants and refugees have been through. We’re trying to create a more interconnected, holistic solution.”
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School 77 took the community’s requests, basically and “all-of-the-above” approach, to heart. The school offers a community inside the community, with 30 affordable, energy-efficient apartments for low-income Buffalo seniors, and myriad recreation and gathering spaces. The refurbished gymnasium hosts basketball games, yoga classes, and job training sessions. Three local nonprofits—PUSH Buffalo, Peace of the City, a program for at-risk youth—and the Ujima Theater Company will move into new office inside.
Finally, a 64-kw community solar array on the building’s roof will provide cheap, renewable energy, an important benefit considering the surrounding area’s older housing stock and elevated energy costs during the winter months. Residents in the affordable apartments inside can subscribe to solar to cut down on energy bills, and community members will be able to manage and spend money raised from the 200-panel solar array, providing an extra source of funds for additional community projects. While its famous for snow storms, Buffalo actually has as many sunny days as Tampa, Florida.
Installed by workers hired from the surrounding community, the solar array will become another asset to help bolster the neighborhood’s development.
“We’re trying to bring back a level of confidence and healing in the community, that they can do it themselves,” says Ghirmatzion.
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esVolta, a developer and owner of utility-scale energy storage projects across North America, has been selected by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) to build an energy storage system in Santa Clara County, Calif.
Under the proposal, which is pending approval by the California Public Utilities Commission, esVolta will develop, build and operate the Hummingbird Energy Storage project, a 75 MW/300 MWh lithium-ion battery storage facility. The project is slated to be in service by December 2020.
The Hummingbird project is designed to provide an affordable and reliable capacity resource for PG&E and to support California’s transition to a cleaner and more resilient electric system, says esVolta. The project will also facilitate greater ability to integrate renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar energy.
“esVolta is delighted to be selected by PG&E for the Hummingbird project. PG&E is a leading North American energy company and a key customer for esVolta, and this contract award is an important milestone for our company as we build towards our goal of assembling a large portfolio of utility-scale, advanced energy storage projects,” says Randolph Mann, president of esVolta.
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The renewables industry and green groups have accused ministers of striking a major blow against household solar power after the government said a green energy subsidy scheme would end next year without a replacement.
The closure of the feed-in tariff (FIT) to new applicants from next April marks the final chapter for the scheme, which has encouraged more than 800,000 households to install solar panels since it was launched in 2010.
Solar installations had already largely dried up after the incentives were cut drastically in 2016, but renewables advocates had hoped a replacement would take its place. On Thursday, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy made clear there would be no extension or new alternative.
“Today’s confirmation that there will be no replacement for the feed-in tariff is a major blow to small-scale renewables in the UK,” said Emma Pinchbeck, executive director at RenewableUK.
The group also attacked the government for indecision, pointing out it had known for three years that the subsidies were coming to an end.
Climate change charity 10:10 said the government had called “lights out” for small-scale renewables. Max Wakefield, a campaigner at the group, said the decision “ignores the role that people and communities want to play in energy transition”.
Controversially, anyone installing solar after April will no longer even be paid for exporting their excess solar electricity to local power grids.
The only financial benefit to people fitting solar at home will be if they consume the electricity themselves and reduce their energy bills. A typical solar installation costs around £6,000, less than half what it did when the FIT started.
The government said the scheme had “triggered a small-scale electricity revolution” but the costs of the subsidies, which are levied across all energy bills, needed to be reined in.
“As costs continue to fall and deployment without direct subsidy becomes increasingly possible for parts of the sector, it is right that government acts to ensure continued value for money for billpayers over the longer term,” officials said.
Labour had promised to keep the scheme alive if it came to power, by using a “modest” portion of a £557m clean energy subsidy pot earmarked largely for offshore windfarms.
The government’s announcement came on the same day that it launched a consultation to allow exploratory shale well gas wells to be built without planning permission.
The recent weeks of sunny weather have helped solar power to smash a series of records in the UK, and solar panels have regularly been providing more than a fifth of the country’s electricity generation for several hours a day.
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The newest partnership to come from the rise of distributed generation could be between utilities and new home developers.
Customer demand for distributed energy resources (DER) has already created new partnerships for utilities with their customers and with DER providers. Policies to support state climate and clean energy goals are aimed more and more at increasing customer access to DER. Among them are net zero energy (NZE) initiatives for new homes.
A new approach to NZE, validated in research released May 1 by the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) and the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA), could put new renewable resources to work and form the foundation for new uses of community solar and new partnerships between utilities and NZE homebuilders.
These new partnerships could mean big new opportunities for the utilities, homebuilders and developers of community solar and other distributed renewables.
Support for the NZE concept produced 1,153 NZE projects in the U.S. in 2017, an increase of 56{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} over 2016, according to the 2017 Net Zero Energy Coaliton report. That included 6,059 NZE buildings, up 49{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} from 2016, and 13,906 NZE units, up 70{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974}. California accounted for 5,279 units, far more than second-place Arizona’s 1,021 units. Units would be part of small NZE multifamily apartment and condominium complexes. They could also be units in larger housing projects.
A landmark addition to California’s building code, approved in May, mandates that all new homes built from 2020 include advanced energy efficiencies and solar. It was widely credited as an important boost for rooftop solar. But a little-noticed provision allows developers to use community solar instead of rooftop solar if they so choose.
Why community solar?
Utilities like big solar projects they can control, and consumers like rooftop solar that they can own. Community solar can work for both. And it can be a better deal for new NZE homeowners, according to a June report done for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) by The Brattle Group.
Community solar projects are interconnected with utilities’ distribution systems in ways that give utilities the same control they get with larger projects. But they are owned or leased like rooftop solar by individual customers. And they are big enough to get economies of scale that make them more affordable than rooftop solar.
“Community solar makes that conversation a little more two-way because it includes the utility providing an interconnection service to the developers and could result in them jointly developing the project.”
Ryan Hledik
Report author and principal at The Brattle Group
Community solar has been held back by program design complexities. But the appeal is clear, and the complexities are being resolved. Community solar’s installed U.S. capacity grew 112{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974}, from 387 MW at the end of 2016 to 734 MW at the end of 2017, according to the Brattle-NRECA study.
At least 228 utilities now have community solar offerings, including 160 electric cooperatives, 37 public power utilities and 31 investor-owned utilities, SEPA Manager Dan Chwastyk told Utility Dive.
Those numbers could get much bigger much faster if the findings in Brattle’s “Beyond Zero Net Energy? Alternative Approaches to Enhance Consumer and Environmental Outcomes” prove out. It reports buildings can get to NZE using community solar with a 25{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} or greater output at a 30{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} or lower cost.
To take advantage of those benefits, utilities, community solar developers and homebuilders may see reasons to work together to expand community solar’s growth even faster than its current pace.
“Community solar developers and homebuilders now go to the utility with their plans,” Brattle Group Principal and paper lead author Ryan Hledik told Utility Dive. “Community solar makes that conversation a little more two-way because it includes the utility providing an interconnection service to the developers and could result in them jointly developing the project.”
The benefits of a systems approach
Rooftop solar is used in the vast majority of NZE buildings, Hledik said. “This analysis compared the economics and environmental impacts of using community solar and of using rooftop solar in New Mexico and Minnesota, not to show one is better, but to show there are ways to expand thinking on net zero energy.”
NZE initiatives are too narrowly focused on the individual building level, Brattle found. Using community solar instead of rooftop solar is an example of achieving better outcomes with “a broader, system-oriented approach to satisfying decarbonization objectives.”
At some locations, a community solar project’s economies of scale and higher capacity factor could serve a 200-home NZE development and reduce solar costs by 30{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} to 35{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974}, Brattle concluded.
A system-oriented approach to an NZE building involving community solar or other types of renewables might make the building’s “total energy consumption” greater but produce greater “net environmental benefits,” Brattle reported.
It could expand the kinds of NZE buildings, the number of NZE homeowners and the diversity and capacity of renewables used, Brattle found. The end-uses of the renewables generation could be expanded to things like heating, charging electric vehicles and providing grid services like peak shaving and resilience, Brattle added.
The study, one of the first to compare rooftop and community solar for NZE homes, used actual 2016 market data and technologies and assumed a community solar project of 500 kW to 1,000 kW that matched the output of 200 individual 5 kW to 10 kW rooftop solar systems in New Mexico and Minnesota markets.
Its focus is “non-urban” new NZE housing developments. “One of the potential disadvantages of community solar is the very high land cost,” Hledik said. “But there are a lot of opportunities, especially in non-urban or less urban areas, where land for community solar would be lower cost.”
Under these specific market conditions, the economies of scale and locational advantages of community solar would deliver “13{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} lower total solar PV project expenditures per watt,” Brattle found. The 25{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} to 30{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} greater annual energy output per watt is how community solar gets to 30{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} to 35{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} cost savings.
The community solar approach could also produce enough electricity for 80 to 90 more NZE homes than in the study’s 200 hypothetical home rooftop solar development scenario, Brattle found. It would also provide 50{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} to 60{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} lower electricity bills, through the avoided use of grid generation, and a 40{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} to 45{0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974} average CO2 emissions reduction.
Brattle’s study “is a data-based representation of what was already intuitively clear,” CCSA Executive Director Jeff Cramer told Utility Dive. “As policymakers working on the NZE concept lead California-like reviews of building codes, this will be a good data-driven argument to use a system-oriented approach and to include community solar.”
Policymakers working on building codes have focused on getting homes’ net energy consumption to zero energy, NRECA Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives Keith Dennis told utility Dive. But that is a flawed way to design NZE homes because it can result in homes that produce energy at the wrong time of the day and do nothing to alleviate system congestion or offer grid services.
A system-wide approach allows for “all sorts of other ways that you could optimize the system and provide better consumer cost and environmental outcomes,” he added.
What it means to utilities
“Policymakers, utilities and community solar developers, and homebuilders should be doing this type of analysis on a project by project basis,” Brattle’s Hledik said. “Under the right conditions, there are opportunities.”
The opportunity for utilities, though unquantified by the report, is substantial, he added. Using community solar instead of rooftop solar for new housing developments allows utilities “better visibility into the capacity and operation of solar PV.”
If the utility is more proactive, it could take “a coordinated approach with housing developers” and increase “flexibility in planning the distribution system for the new housing development,” Hledik added. That would “expand the portfolio of products and services that could be offered to customers.”
“The savings are not only economies of scale but eliminating redundancy of hardware and streamlining management.”
Keith Dennis
Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives, NRECA
Both Great River Energy (GRE) executive Jeffrey Haase and Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Corporation (MTEMC) executive Brad Gibson agreed.
Community solar has already demonstrated cost savings per unit of energy and locational benefits for the utility’s distribution system, GRE’s Haase emailed Utility Dive. As Brattle reported, properly located community solar can “reverse power flow, voltage fluctuations, and overloading of feeders.”
A systems approach would allow the utility to collaborate with the homebuilder on the solar project and on other end-uses, like grid-integrated water heating. These uses could deliver grid services that help utilities balance their systems without investments in new resources, he added. A west-facing community solar system with single axis tracking can, at significantly less cost than rooftop solar, generate power later in the day, helping to shave peak demand.
Other advantages of community solar for MTEMC are that it keeps customers engaged with the utility and compliments an “evolving grid,” Gibson said. The utility has limited visibility of the operational performance of rooftop solar, but it can “see, control and use” community solar.
Both NRECA’s Dennis and Brattle’s Hledik added that interconnecting and maintaining a single community solar project, though not simple, is less complicated and costly than doing it for a neighborhood of individual rooftop solar arrays.
That is the advantage of designing and managing at a system level, NRECA’s Dennis said. “The savings are not only economies of scale but eliminating redundancy of hardware and streamlining management.”
A new partnership?
In places where NZE mandates include the option, homebuilders and community solar developers should be talking to utilities the same way rooftop solar installers are talking to them, Dennis said. “When policymakers wake up to the opportunity in that approach, it could mean a big new market for community solar.”
Either the utility or the homebuilder could take the community solar project on, Brattle’s Hledik said. Or they might bring a community solar developer into the discussion.
The study shows that, with the right conditions, there would be cost savings, he added. “How they would be shared between the utility, the developer, the homebuilder, and the home buyer would depend on the business model, but would likely be shared between them.”
Homebuilders now sell the idea of rooftop solar to prospective buyers, Hledik said. Community solar would work the same way, though it introduces technical issues related to pricing and crediting customers. “The logical next step for this research is understanding those numbers.”
Some builders have already begun testing possibilities.
Off-the-Grid Design’s six-story, four-condominium Sol-Lux Alpha NZE complex in San Francisco is powered by what is almost a community solar project, according to company founder John Sarter.
“It is the most energy efficient building we could build,” he said. A 40-kW rooftop solar canopy supplies twice the amount of energy needed by the four units and the common areas.
Each unit has enough battery energy storage for at least two days, with smart inverters and other technologies to allow it to operate off-grid, Sarter added. “It demonstrates that living spaces can be luxurious and carbon neutral.”
Because the four units share the power from the solar canopy, it is much like a community solar-powered building, though Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) required separate metering, Sarter said. He subsequently discovered that ownership of the canopy by the Homeowners Association (HOA) could have made it a true community solar installation.
Sarter did not have per-kWh pricing for the solar-plus-storage system, but believes it is competitive with grid electricity. Amortized over the life of the energy system, and including incentives, the price is about $1,000 per year, he said. “And these owners will never see an energy bill.”
Sarter’s company recently put a hold on a community solar-rooftop solar-energy storage NZE development planned for Sonoma, Calif. in partnership with PG&E and several clean energy advocates.
The development, which would have been as many as 40 homes with land set aside for community solar, was put on hold when PG&E, facing financial burdens from the 2017 wildfires, was forced to back out. Sarter’s company would have financed the real estate development, but the community solar project could have been owned by PG&E or the HOA, he said. “Other real estate developers could certainly do this.”
Planning had not gone as far as cost estimates, but “it would be less expensive than the Sol-Lux project because of economies of scale and falling system costs,” he added.
But the Brattle report is not about whether community solar or rooftop solar is a better deal, it is about a new approach to NZE building, NRECA’s Dennis stressed again.
“A mandate to reduce BTUs or kWh to zero is simpler to explain but it is misguided,” he said. “The mandate should focus on the things like cost and CO2 savings that policymakers want to achieve. That kind of policy would create a technology-neutral playing field and offer homebuilders the opportunity to partner with rooftop solar installers or community solar developers.”
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Solar and wind are likely the fastest growing new electric generating sources since cities started electrifying in the late 1800s. A new report out from Environment America shows that the amount of solar power in the US energy mix was just a percentage of a percentage (0.05 percent) to 2 percent of the US’s electric generation mix, an 39-fold increase in just a decade.
To put it another way, in 2008 there was only enough solar power in the US to power about 180,000 homes. By the end of 2017, there was enough to power 7 million US homes—and its still rising. By the end of the first quarter of 2018 there was enough to power 10 million US homes. That’s according to Frontier Group and Environment America’s new co-produced report: Renewables on the Rise: A Decade of Progress Toward a Clean Energy Future, which finds that despite the Trump Administration’s efforts to promote fossil fuels over renewable, clean energy, it’s still on a significant rise.
“The Trump administration chose to abandon the Paris Accord and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies, but we can overcome those obstacles by harnessing clean energy’s potential,” contended Rob Sargent, energy program director for Environment America Research and Policy Center. “Americans are forging ahead and adopting renewable energy in both the public and private sectors. With such strong allies at the state and local levels, we’re taking clean energy to the next level.”
Indeed, it’s not just rooftop solar, the US has also drastically increased the amount wind power and energy storage it has installed as its reduced overall electric consumption through energy efficiency efforts, all while the economy has grown, the report showed, essentially echoing findings from a recent report on California’s efforts to reduce emissions on a large scale.
Wind power, for instance, was providing 1.5 percent of the US’s electricity in 2008, in 2017 it provided 6.9 percent of the US’s electricity. During the same period overall energy consumption has fallen by 1.1 percent since 2008. The report found that the country now uses less energy than it did in 2000, when the country had 44 million fewer people.
“Over the last decade, key clean energy technologies have spread across the country and become core parts of our energy system,” said Gideon Weissman of Frontier Group, report co-author. “In 2017, nine states produced at least 20 percent of their electricity with wind and solar power. Back in 2008, not a single state was even close.”
The report anticipated that the trends will continue as state and companies are taking actions to shift to renewables even as the federal government dawdles under Trump. It looked to Hawaii’s example as the first state that is moving to 100 percent renewable energy and other states like California and Massachusetts that are significantly increasing their portion of renewable energy generation by boosting their renewable energy portfolio standards.
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Facebook’s Aquila project wasn’t the only solar-powered drone being developed to provide internet and cellular access to rural and remote areas. In 2014, Boeing’s Phantom Works division applied for a patent that detailed a similar high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) vehicle. BAE Systems is currently tirelessly working on such an aircraft, too. While Airbus might’ve seemed more focused on passenger drones as of late, it’s now clear the aviation giant is HALE-hungry, as well, as the company’s Zephyr S drone will take flight in September.
According to ZDNet, the Zephyr S weighs 165.3 pounds (75 kilograms) and has a wingspan of 82 feet (25 meters), thereby being incredibly light for such a physically large and technologically capable vehicle. Designed to cruise within the stratosphere at an altitude of 13 miles (21 km), Zephyr’s engineers killed several birds with one stone. Namely, avoiding commercial airplane traffic, continuously refueling through solar energy, and having a stronger line of communication to devices on the ground.
“The first [advantage] is that you are much closer to the Earth, so you can get far higher-resolution imaging,” explained head of the Zephyr program, Sophie Thomas. “Secondly for communications you get reduced latency. The beauty of it is we have an endurance that is really powerful, so we can persist for over 100 days, yet [have] the flexibility of being able to retask.”
Though Airbus has already managed to keep the Zephyr afloat for 14 days without refueling, the company is eager to reach the 100-day mark, and traversing 1,000 nautical miles (1151 miles) per day. Thomas claimed the Zephyr S is substantially more inexpensive than conventional satellites, but that this wasn’t always the case. Essentially, the project was conceptually sound and made complete sense from a physics and engineering standpoint for a long time. It just took the tech landscape time to catch up.
“The vision was there over ten years ago,” said Thomas. “What we’ve been waiting for and working on is the technology developments in different areas like battery technology and the solar array—for that to be ready and available to the standard we need to make this a really viable product. That’s where we are today.”
The Zephyr program has built numerous prototypes for research and development purposes in the past, but the Zephyr S is the first production model as capable as its engineers originally envisioned. Set to start production in Farnborough, England, the drone will initially be deployed from Airbus’ new operating site in Wyndham, Western Australia in September. Ultimately, this is a huge boon to rural and remote areas in desperate need of stable cellular and internet service, Airbus as a drone company, and the entire UAV industry at-large.
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July 19th, 2018 by Jake Richardson
A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance describes some of the implications of the growing solar power and energy storage trend as it relates to the current, centralized utility-based electricity distribution model. Because solar and energy storage can be cost competitive with grid electricity prices in some places, consumers now have an alternative to only using utility-based electricity. Report author John Farrell answered some questions for CleanTechnica.
1. Are you expecting home energy storage to continue decreasing in price? 
Yes, definitely. I’ve heard of prices today close to $500 per kilowatt-hour of capacity. I’d expect that to fall to closer to $100 in 5-10 years.
2. Is it likely that home solar power systems will be increasingly paired with home energy storage?
For sure. Given the evidence that pairing the systems can help decrease payback times under net metering successor policies (and the benefits of backup power), I expect to see that increase.
3. How can utilities plan for more and more homeowners using solar power and energy storage?
Don’t build any central-station power plants and instead look for ways to make money supporting choices customers will make anyway. Restructure rates to encourage customers to use their distributed energy systems to aid the grid (e.g. by storing energy when cheap and selling it back when expensive).
4. Will utilities ever become obsolete, or will they exist to back up individually owned solar and energy storage systems?
It depends on how you define a utility. Vertically integrated utilities that combine generation, transmission, and distribution aren’t suitable for a market in which customers can substantially fulfill the generation needs of the system locally. What we don’t need is centralized planning, what we do need is coordination.
5. Are you expecting that more and more homeowners will go off-grid completely, or will they remained grid-tied, most likely?
I don’t expect many homeowners to go off-grid at all in the next decade, but that depends a lot on whether they live in a particularly good region for it and if the utility makes it worthwhile with high fixed charges or other dumb policies.
6. How does the increasing number of EVs figure into the home solar and energy storage picture?
As we reported last year, increasing EV deployment can increase the local grid capacity for distributed solar. It’s also a large source electricity demand that can typically be time-shifted. It’s not quite as useful as a standalone battery until there are viable, commercial vehicle-to-grid services or ways for a vehicle owner to tap the battery.
7. Are there states currently that are leading the others in terms of solar and energy storage adoption?
Massachusetts comes to mind, as do Hawaii and California. Mostly those that have required utilities to do it, provided strong incentives, or where the economics have driven customers to it on their own.
8. Have you seen any cases where homeowners use their own electricity from home energy storage to avoid peak usage charges?
Personally? No. But I’m sure if you talk to Sunrun they will say that’s why 1 in 5 residential customers in California are combining solar and storage.
9. Are you expecting more home energy storage products to enter the market to increase competition?
Yes.
10. Are more businesses also using solar and energy storage onsite?
They will. Clean Energy Group’s landmark study last year shows how incredibly valuable storage is to cutting demand charges for commercial customers.
11. Should utility workers be planning to have their jobs phased out eventually?
Power plant workers should be exploring their options. Line workers will always be needed because we’ll still want a grid.
12. By 2030, how much home solar and energy storage penetration will there be?
Honestly, I have no idea because there are so many factors. I’d be willing to wager that about half of distributed solar installed in the 2020s will come paired with energy storage.
Image Credit: Institute for Local Self-Reliance
About the Author
Jake Richardson Hello, I have been writing online for some time, and enjoy the outdoors. If you like, you can follow me on Google Plus.
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Facebook and Pacific Power said Wednesday they are teaming up to construct solar projects that will produce enough power to offset what the social media giant consumes at its data centers in Prineville, Oregon.
The solar projects—two near Prineville and four in Utah—will generate 437 megawatts of power when completed by the end of 2020.
Data centers use large amounts of energy to run and cool the computers inside. The solar power for Facebook’s Prineville campus is roughly equivalent to the energy use of 100,000 Northwest homes. The company declined to say how much it will cost to build the solar projects or how the cost of the clean energy will compare to what it pays now, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
The companies along with Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced the deal at an event in Prineville. “This partnership bolsters Prineville’s 21st century model for a small town,” Brown said. “With projects like these, we continue to demonstrate that Oregon is ready for the clean energy economy of the future.”
Facebook, drawn by tax breaks, has three data centers in the Central Oregon community and is adding two more.
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