The U.S. solar and wind sectors got shut out of the last coronavirus stimulus package. The battle is far from over.
By Jeff St. John for gtm
The renewables industry is hoping to secure changes to two key federal policies.
The U.S. renewables industry was left out of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill passed last week, but the battle is far from over.
Congress is already considering further legislation to rescue the economy from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and renewable energy groups are ready to bring their proposals back to the table.
As with the last stimulus bill, the industry’s plans center on securing changes to two federal policies: the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar power and the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind power.
Instead, they’re focusing on two key concepts. The first is extending “safe-harbor” deadlines for receiving the credits that may be thrown off track by the pandemic’s economic disruptions. The safe-harbor fix could potentially be made by the Treasury Department, without a need for congressional action, at least for solar.
The second is allowing the relatively small pool of tax equity investors in renewable projects to receive some of their value back as refundable credits or via “direct pay” provisions. Tax equity investors are likely to have lower tax liabilities amid an economic downturn and thus less “tax appetite.”
The ostensibly revenue-neutral aspect of these two requests could help differentiate solar and wind from requests for support in other areas like energy storage, and energy efficiency and electric vehicles. President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) opposed efforts to put clean energy support into the last stimulus package, incorrectly conflating them with the Green New Deal and other proposals from House Democrats.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham gives her State of the State address during the opening of the New Mexico legislative session in the House chambers at the state Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M. on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Craig Fritz)
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico will reinstate a tax credit for households and businesses that adopt solar energy systems and take new steps to modernize the electric grid and export more renewable energy under bills signed Tuesday by the governor. New Mexico will reinstate a tax credit for households and businesses that adopt solar energy systems and take new steps to modernize the electric grid and export more renewable energy under bills signed Tuesday by the governor. SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico will reinstate a tax credit for households and businesses that adopt solar energy systems and take new steps to modernize the electric grid and export more renewable energy under bills signed Tuesday by the governor.
Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation that revives a state income tax credit of up to $6,000 for the installation of solar panels or thermal solar equipment that heats water. The state will forgo up to $8 million in taxes a year to offset the investments.
Lujan Grisham endorsed a bipartisan grid modernization bill that opens the door for new infrastructure investments by utilities, with customer rate increases vetted by the state Public Regulation Commission.
That bill commissions a grid modernization plan from state energy officials and establishes a grant program for non-utility projects that help improve grid resiliency and expedite the state’s transition toward carbon-free electricity.
Another bill will eliminate some local taxes on utility-scale electrical transmission projects through the use of industrial revenue bonds, with an eye toward opening up new terrain for wind and solar development. State government offsets some of the tax breaks with payments to school districts under the new law.
In a statement, Lujan Grisham praised lawmakers for providing new tools to address climate change by modernizing the electricity sector.
She and the Democrat-led Legislature enacted reforms last year that set aggressive new deadlines for increasing reliance on renewable energy and provides financing to phase out a major coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico.
A bill that would have provided a tax credit toward the purchase or lease of plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles stalled in the Legislature during its annual session that ended Feb. 20.
As solar prices fall and efficiency increases, countries like Finland are discovering the benefits of summertime solar.
The use of solar is increasing in Finland and other Nordic countries. Aitiopaikka, an apartment complex in Turku, sports 516 rooftop solar panels. Credit: Turku Student Village Foundation (TYS)
Paul Hockenos reports for Inside Climate News
ULU, Finland — For years after northern Finland’s largest printing plant blanketed its facility’s eight roofs with solar panels, the curious beat a path to the extraordinary spectacle.
There were skeptics who doubted that solar power would pay off in this northern city, just 100 miles shy of the Arctic Circle, a geography known not for its sunny climes but rather its dark, snow-bound, sub-zero winters.
“They wanted to see what we’d done, how it worked, whether it worked,” said Juha Röning, chief technician at the Kaleva Media printing plant. In 2015, the 1,604 solar photovoltaic (PV) units made Kaleva Media’s rooftop the most powerful photovoltaic solar plant in Finland, and indeed in all of Scandinavia’s north country.
Today, Kaleva Media’s rooftop PV park is no longer a curiosity—it’s not even the largest solar producer in the city of Oulu, much less all of Finland. Across Europe’s far north, municipalities, businesses and households are increasingly taking advantage of solar power as solar cells’ efficiency increases and costs fall.
While Germany was experiencing its mega solar boom in the 2000s, in Nordic countries like Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Finland the sight of a suburban home with a PV panel was an oddity. Today, although still dwarfed by Germany’s solar force, tens of thousands of buildings, from Copenhagen to the Arctic Circle, brandish the cutting edge in solar tech.
“They wanted to see what we’d done, how it worked, whether it worked,” said Juha Röning, chief technician at the Kaleva Media printing plant. In 2015, the 1,604 solar photovoltaic (PV) units made Kaleva Media’s rooftop the most powerful photovoltaic solar plant in Finland, and indeed in all of Scandinavia’s north country.
Today, Kaleva Media’s rooftop PV park is no longer a curiosity—it’s not even the largest solar producer in the city of Oulu, much less all of Finland. Across Europe’s far north, municipalities, businesses and households are increasingly taking advantage of solar power as solar cells’ efficiency increases and costs fall.
While Germany was experiencing its mega solar boom in the 2000s, in Nordic countries like Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Finland the sight of a suburban home with a PV panel was an oddity. Today, although still dwarfed by Germany’s solar force, tens of thousands of buildings, from Copenhagen to the Arctic Circle, brandish the cutting edge in solar tech.
“The technological developments in PV [cells] have driven the price way down,” said Henrik Borreby, the Nordic representative of BayWa r.e., a global renewable energy developer. “The general perception had been that the further north you go, the harder it was to make a business case, even impossible. That’s not so anymore,” he said, though he acknowledged that the further north one pushes—and the lower the domestic power price—the longer it takes to make the upfront investment in solar pay itself back.
Europe’s Nordic countries, roughly at the latitude of Alaska, are pushing the boundaries of solar power deployment.
They boast some of the world’s most progressive climate protection agendas, and much of the momentum behind the growth of renewables there stems from their national action plans, which are designed to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. Norway is still a major oil producer, but Finland’s new progressive government—led by the world’s youngest prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin—has set ambitious decarbonization targets that would render the country of 5.5 million carbon neutral by 2035.
The Walney Extension wind farm off Britain’s east coast. New England states would have to build the equivalent several times over for decades to help meet clean energy goals, one study finds. Phil Noble/Reuters/Newscom
The Walney Extension wind farm off Britain’s east coast. New England states would have to build the equivalent several times over for decades to help meet clean energy goals, one study finds. Phil Noble/Reuters/Newscom
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia have committed to slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with several planning at least an 80% cut.
Some Democratic presidential candidates are outlining goals for the majority of electricity to be decarbonized within the next two decades.
But how big a lift will that be at the state level?
State agencies and private research firms are only beginning to produce specific numbers — and fuel debate — about whether the scale of the electricity and transportation infrastructure build-out required to dramatically reduce carbon emissions across the economy by midcentury is feasible.
In the case of New England’s six states, one measure of the challenge can be counted in terms of “Walneys” and “Solar Stars.”
One refers to the Walney Extension, the largest offshore wind farm in the world, which is a forest of 87 towering turbines in the Irish Sea off England’s west coast. It opened in September 2018 with a capacity of 659 megawatts, power enough for 600,000 homes in Britain.
The biggest U.S. solar farm is Solar Star in Southern California, covering four times the size of New York’s Central Park and producing a peak output of 579 MW in full sunlight.
For all the New England states to reach targets of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, generally from a 1990 starting point, electricity output may have to double to charge electric vehicles that must fill the streets and to replace gas heat with electric heat pumps, according to an analysis last year by the Brattle Group consultancy.
The region’s generating capacity — now just over 31,000 MW — would have to soar to 160,000 MW, mostly through wind and solar, in one of several future scenarios Brattle calculated.
That’s the equivalent of four Walneys and six Solar Star projects a year for the next 30 years in New England.
The idea of replicating those two projects again and again on an assembly line track for decades defines one view of the clean energy summit New England and the rest of the U.S. could have to scale.
Jürgen Weiss. The Brattle Group
“People completely underestimate the scale of the challenge,” said Jürgen Weiss, co-author of the Brattle Group study. “In some sense, that was a little bit of the purpose of the study.
“On the other hand — and the message we are trying to emphasize — the challenge means growing the annual deployment of wind, solar and batteries by about 10% a year,” Weiss said. That growth rate has been met globally by wind power installations and surpassed by solar investments, the study said.
“If New England keeps growing these new industries at roughly the current rate, the region may have a chance to achieve the commitments made to decarbonize our economies by 2050 and do its part to reduce the risks of catastrophic climate change. And, in the process, it will create a substantial and sustainable new green economy,” the Brattle group reported.
But the Brattle study is just one bookend in the debate surrounding the costs and infrastructure involved in decarbonizing the grid.
“I think we’re just on the cusp of a new wave of questions that are emerging that have to be answered,” said Emil Dimanchev, senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
“How do we actually build a power system that is mostly wind and solar? We’re just starting to look at this, and there are a lot of unanswered questions about how we get there and get there cost effectively, as well,” said Dimanchev.
Another study, which focused on California, found a more economically feasible path forward, although it did not track the exact timelines and scenarios as the Brattle study.
That analysis from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the ClimateWorks Foundation last month found that California could mobilize investment, research and public support to remove increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping create a carbon-free economy by 2045.
The cost was estimated at $8 billion a year, or nearly 4% of the proposed California budget for 2020-2021. Under less favorable assumptions, the cost could get to $30 billion annually, the study authors said.
The state would still have to add investments in new zero-carbon power plants, power transmission and distribution lines, and EV charging infrastructure.
The new plan would collect greenhouse gas emissions from landfills, dairies and wastewater treatment plants; remove hydrogen from the emissions for sale as fuel; and transport the CO2 over new pipeline networks to centralized sites for underground storage.
In addition, some of the CO2 removal would be achieved through direct air capture — pulling massive amounts of air through processing machines to chemically extract CO2.
“It was a welcome surprise to see how reasonable the costs appear compared to other studies,” said Sarah Baker, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore and lead author of the report. “We were pleased.”
‘Urgently needed’
[+] The chart illustrates one scenario for how fast renewable generation — mostly offshore wind power and solar units — would have to grow to achieve New England’s low-carbon emissions goals for 2050, according to a Brattle Group study. Brattle Group
National polls indicate that while public concern over climate change is widely shared, an understanding of future costs of climate action is not.
Roughly half of Americans believe action is “urgently needed” in the coming decade to avoid the worst effects of climate damage, according to a Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation poll in November. But only four in 10 were willing to make “major sacrifices” in response.
Three-quarters of poll respondents said they would oppose a 25-cents-a-gallon tax on gasoline to combat climate change threats, only half of the tax on carbon emissions that some leading economists argue would be needed to tilt the economy away from fossil fuels toward zero-carbon alternatives. Against that background, Americans are headed into the 2020 presidential campaign with Republican and Democratic parties diametrically divided on the climate issue.
New England states and others that have aggressive clean energy goals are just starting to calculate the costs of their climate commitments and speak to ratepayers and voters about what that may mean.
In Massachusetts’ case, David Ismay, then a senior staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, wrote last year, “While we know that achieving net zero by 2050 is technically possible, we also know it won’t be easy. There’s no ‘silver bullet’ policy or single program that can do it all or save us from having to make some hard decisions over the next 30 years.”
Ismay — now undersecretary for climate at the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs — has the assignment of producing draft pathways this year for achieving Massachusetts’ pledge to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.
“For Massachusetts, questions about costs are a year too early,” said Caitlin Peale Sloan, senior attorney at CLF and Ismay’s former colleague.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) issued a master plan last month intended to eliminate carbon emissions in the state’s energy sector by 2050. Estimates on the costs to ratepayers are to come later this year, officials said. Rutgers University professor Frank Felder warned that the transition would be “expensive and regressive” and predicted a “substantial increase” in residents’ energy costs (Energywire, Jan. 28).
New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, enacted last July, requires utilities to rely on renewable energy for 70% of the electricity supply by 2030 and to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from man-made sources in the state by 2050.
Rich Dewey, president of the New York Independent System Operator, the state’s grid operator, said the organization’s top planning priorities this year include how to meet requirements of the climate act and the prospect of a surge in power demand if a large transition to EVs and electricity-based heating happens (Energywire, Jan. 23).
Analysis Group Inc., a consulting firm, in a report last October noted that because of the newness of the act, comprehensive estimates haven’t been done. “Wind’s share of total generation rose from 1 percent in 2009 to 3 percent in 2018. This offers an important perspective on what is to come. The Act calls for unprecedented increases in renewable generation in 11 years so that renewables provide 70 percent of consumers’ needs.”
While analysts can estimate the amount of clean energy that state policies require, cost estimates are a moving target, analysts agree, because renewable energy continues to get cheaper.
In Brattle’s calculation, the annual investment in wind and solar power needed to meet New England’s goals must spurt from nearly 600 MW installed next year to six times that amount in 2030.
“This is not an easy lift by any stretch. The total dollars are quite significant,” Weiss said.
The offshore wind example
The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory pegs the current capital costs for offshore wind resources at between $4 million and $6 million per megawatt of capacity, including turbine, platform, electronics, transmission lines to shore and onshore costs.
If 3,000 MW of offshore wind projects were going up off New England today, with an average cost of $4 million per megawatt for a completed project, according to NREL, the cost would be $12 billion.
But NREL projects that cost per megawatt of offshore wind will drop steadily to between $2.5 million and $3 million, with the increasing size of turbines and the benefits of large-scale manufacturing providing the largest benefits.
Sono Motors reckons that extra bit of solar energy will make a difference. Analysts are skeptical.
A rendering shows the location of the PV panels on the Sion’s exterior. (Credit: Sono Motors)
Jason Deign reports for gtm
A German startup aims to sell a self-charging electric car covered in solar panels from 2022 after raising nearly $60 million in a recent 50-day crowdfunding campaign.
Munich-based Sono Motors expects its €25,500 ($27,600) electric car, the Sion, to benefit from a range extension of as much as 20 miles per day in Germany, depending on the season and weather, thanks to a solar charging system integrated into the body of the car.
More than 13,000 customers have already preordered the vehicle, the company said. It expects the first cars to roll off the assembly line of a former Saab factory in Trollhättan, Sweden in September 2021, with volume production at the start of 2022.
Sono’s €53.3 million community fundraising campaign should allow the company to build its first prototypes and tool up its production and testing facilities, said Ann-Kathrin Schroeder, marketing director.
Sono Motors reckons that extra bit of solar energy will make a difference. Analysts are skeptical.
The company is looking to raise a further €205 million before starting production, she said. Of this, around €70 million will be in the form of debt capital from banks, subsidy providers and private lenders.
The Sion will be powered by a 35-kilowatt-hour battery containing 192 prismatic lithium-ion cells with a nickel, manganese and cobalt ratio of 6:2:2.
Sono says the car will have a range of 255 kilometers (159 miles) on a single charge, and the battery should take 30 minutes to recharge up to 80 percent at a rapid charging station.
The Sion will include bidirectional charging technology so it can be used as a mobile energy storage device, and will also feature a novel moss-based dashboard air purifying system. But the most innovative feature is the presence of 248 solar cells spread across the outside of the car.
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Over the next three years, net-new renewable energy generating capacity will be 18 times greater than that of gas, coal, oil, and nuclear combined
By Editorial team at pv/buzz
Renewable energy is the energy that is collected from renewable resources, which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat (Image: Alberto Masnovo)
According to a review by the SUN DAY Campaign of data released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for the first eleven months of 2019, the mix of renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) is now in first place in the race for new U.S. generating capacity added in 2019.
FERC’s latest monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” report (with data through November 30, 2019) reveals renewable sources (i.e. biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) accounted for 8,784 MW of new generating capacity through the end of November. That is 8% more than that of natural gas (7,819 MW), nuclear (155 MW), oil (77 MW), and coal (62 MW) combined.
Combined, renewables provided 52% of new generating capacity through the first eleven months of 2019 and seem poised to increase their share once the final December numbers are released.
Renewables have now also surpassed 22% (i.e., 22.03%) of the nation’s total available installed generating capacity – further expanding their lead over coal capacity (20.92%). Among renewables, wind can boast the largest installed electrical generating capacity – 8.52% of the U.S. total, followed by hydropower (8.43%), solar (3.43%), biomass (1.33%), and geothermal (0.32%).
