2018 is over, and a new year of energy evolution is upon us.
The past year laid a robust foundation for growth in 2019. It ended with six states and territories, including two of the three largest state economies, committing to 100 percent clean electricity. The solar industry weathered the much-feared tariffs without excessive bleeding. The list of cleantech failures was much shorter than in previous years.
There’s still plenty of room to grow.
In the 12 months ending in October 2018, solar accounted for about 1.6 percent of utility-scale generation, according to Energy Information Administration data.* That share rises to 2.3 percent if you count estimated small-scale solar. Wind delivered 6.6 percent. Grid edge technologies are helping the grid adapt, but they're still in limited real-world use.
Keeping in mind that contrast between heady potential and modest achievement so far, we shall venture into the prediction game to identify key clean energy developments to come over the new year.
Utilities get smarter about planning their investments.
Utilities had resource planning down to a science: figure out load growth and build enough gas plants to meet your future peak. Then things got a lot harder.
Load growth stopped showing up when it was supposed to. Wind and solar started filling in energy production, but not necessarily during those peak times. Battery storage appeared on the scene, frustrating the clean categories of generation and wires that had worked for so long. And controllable, customer-sited equipment created the possibility of lowering peak demand instead of raising production to meet it.
It took a while, but at least some regulators have caught up to these changes in how utilities can plan for the future. Now the utilities have to follow suit.
The harbinger came in March when Arizona’s all-Republican regulatory commission froze new gas plant construction for the year and rebuked the investor-owned utilities for relying too much on gas plants in their 15-year plans. The regulators had been mulling a clean energy overhaul to use storage to deliver more solar power during the evening peaks, rather than building lots of new gas peakers.
The unexpected news demonstrated how quickly new energy technology can move: Storage offered uninspiring economics when the integrated resource planning began in 2016, but that changed by the time the plans were submitted for approval.
The other conundrum was that Arizona Public Service, for instance, had already built more energy storage and solar than its own plan called for. The technologies spoke for themselves in competitive solicitations, and the gas-heavy planning document didn’t get in the way.
That might offer some comfort for all the other jurisdictions where utilities haven’t factored new assets like storage into their planning. Just this year, Duke Energy called for a base case of 300 megawatts of storage in its Carolina territories, while neighboring Dominion Energy didn’t plan for any.
But Virginia regulators rejected Dominion’s plan in December for overestimating load growth and failing to account for a recently passed grid transformation law that will hasten renewables deployments.
The message for other utilities: Expect greater scrutiny on your planning calculations than ever before. Conveniently bountiful load growth expectations, or exclusion of viable alternatives, are not going to slide anymore, at least for some regulators.
News from https://www.greentechmedia.com.