Until recently, the potential rate impact of all the new contracts for renewable energy being added to meet California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard since 2006 has been a matter of some concern. According to the Division of Ratepayer Advocates in early 2012, an estimated $20.8 billion will have been spent in California on contracts for new renewable generation by 2020, and the rate impact was a big unknown.

But last month PG&E chief executive officer Anthony Earley estimated that the first of these new contracts now delivering renewable power to the grid will likely add only 1 percent to 1.5 percent to PG&E ratepayers’ household bills. This is a startlingly low impact. With the average California household paying $100 a month, another dollar or so is a fairly negligible addition; the sort of variation in bills that is really just noise. 

The estimate is also surprising from a technical point of view. Renewables like solar and wind represent a relatively new technology at utility scale, and haven’t had the decades of persistent government support to back them the way that traditional energy had. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the Department of Energy led R&D into fracking, which has led to the current glut in natural gas recoveries, and federal legislation has long allowed pass-through investment in fossil energy through favorable tax treatment via Master Limited Partnerships. 

So for new technologies that have only recently operated at commercial scale, a rate impact of just 1 percent seems very low.

“What Tony said is correct,” said PG&E’s Denny Boyles. “We’ve forecast all along that adding the renewables to our portfolio would increase rates by 1 percent to 2 percent a year through 2020. There’d likely be some years where as different projects come online there’d be some lower, some higher, but we are still confident we’ll still fall within that rate.”

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Every time an iPhone is charged or an episode of “Mad Men” plays on a television, puffs of vaporized carbon join the atmosphere, products of power-plant combustion. And every year the world demands more. That era may be nearing an end, as the world approaches “peak fossil fuels,” a phrased used by Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich at the group’s annual conference.

The concept of “peak oil” — that world oil production will plateau and decline — was popularized by a Shell Oil geologist named M. King Hubbert, who predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil production would max out in the early 1970s and gradually decline. Globally, the peak oil hypothesis has been consistently undermined by new extraction techniques: deep-water drilling, tar-sands extraction and most recently the fracking boom. The world now has enough of these fuels to last hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, the planet can’t take that kind of abuse. About 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuels must remain buried in the ground if we have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s the bad news.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Depressed carbon markets in the European Union underscore the need for a globally linked trading scheme, including California’s first-in-the-U.S. economywide cap-and-trade program, a top international climate official said yesterday.

The European Parliament’s rejection of a plan to fix a heavily oversupplied emissions trading program has led to a “dark night” among participants, said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, at a carbon conference in San Francisco.

“The environment, the carbon world environment in which California inserts itself, is not as optimistic as California,” she said, unspooling an extended metaphor invoking the conference’s theme of “Navigating the American Carbon World.”

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CARSON CITY — NV Energy will roll out a major policy initiative Wednesday, announcing that it will shutter its coal-fired plants, increase investment in renewable energy and create thousands of construction jobs over the next 12 years.

Under the plan, Nevada’s coal plants would begin closing by the end of next year, and the company would accelerate investment in wind, solar, geothermal and natural gas to replace the coal energy going offline. The company estimates the plan could result in a nearly 4 percent increase in rates over the next 20 years, and the proposed legislation would limit the Public Utilities Commission’s ability to approve the increases.

The utility plans to unveil the proposal it’s calling “NVision” on Wednesday at the Legislature as an amendment to Senate Bill 123.

“This does three things: it retires coal from Nevada, builds renewables, and it creates jobs,” said Tony Sanchez, NV Energy senior vice president.

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James E. Hansen of NASA, retiring this week, reflected in a window at his farm in Pennsylvania.

James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.

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After a deep slump at the end of last year, the wind industry is picking up.

First Wind, a Boston-based developer and operator that was sitting on a pile of stalled projects with the potential to power roughly 300,000 homes, now expects to go forward with many of them.

Broadwind, an energy manufacturing and services company, based in Cicero, Ill., recently announced winning two new orders for wind towers worth $62 million. At least nine utilities, including Xcel Energy and a subsidiary of American Electric Power, are exploring new wind projects.

“Deals are getting signed; people are ramping up their production facilities again,” said Peter C. Duprey, chief executive of Broadwind. “The whole industry went through either a shutdown or idling at the end of last year and are now quickly trying to gear back up again.”

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The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will be coal-free within 12 years under a plan announced Tuesday.

Under the plan, the utility would sell off one coal-fired power plant in Arizona and grant approvals for a second plant in Utah to be converted to run on natural gas. Los Angeles gets nearly 40% of its energy from the two aging plants, which environmentalists complain produce the same level of emissions as 2 million cars.

Evan Gillespie, who has been leading a campaign to transition the utility to cleaner energy on behalf of the Sierra Club, said the DWP’s plan will be a road map for other utilities seeking to get off coal.

(complete article)

After a deep slump at the end of last year, the wind industry is picking up.

First Wind, a Boston-based developer and operator that was sitting on a pile of stalled projects with the potential to power roughly 300,000 homes, now expects to go forward with many of them.

Broadwind, an energy manufacturing and services company, based in Cicero, Ill., recently announced winning two new orders for wind towers worth $62 million. At least nine utilities, including Xcel Energy and a subsidiary of American Electric Power, are exploring new wind projects.

“Deals are getting signed; people are ramping up their production facilities again,” said Peter C. Duprey, chief executive of Broadwind. “The whole industry went through either a shutdown or idling at the end of last year and are now quickly trying to gear back up again.”

(complete article)

The county, which has the state’s highest jobless rate, needs the construction boom to spur its economy. But some farmers and Native Americans are crying foul.

A worker installs a photovoltaic panel at the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy South project in the Imperial Valley west of El Centro, Calif.
(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times / February 12, 2013)

Situated in the southeastern corner of California, bordering Arizona and Mexico, Imperial County has long depended on agriculture and cash crops that grew from the good earth.

But lately the region — which carries the dubious distinction of having the state’s highest unemployment rate at 25.5% — is betting its future on a different kind of farm: green energy.

Spurred by a state mandate that requires utilities to get a third of their electricity from green sources by 2020, renewable energy companies are leasing or buying thousands of acres in Imperial County to convert to energy farms providing power for coastal cities — bringing an estimated 6,000 building jobs and billions in construction activity to the county.

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