Posts tagged california
Why Solar Power’s Reliance On Utilities Is Growing
Dec 15th
Julia Hamm, President and CEO of the Solar Electric Power Association, discusses the current status of the solar industry and why the utility’s role in the growth of the solar industry is growing.
How EnergyGridIQ Helps You Find Available Energy Project Funding
Dec 8th
Reena Russell, one of the founders of EnergyGridIQ, talks about the importance of knowing what funding options are available for energy projects.
Palo Alto Green Program: A Green Power Road Map For Cities
Dec 5th
Andrea Hart, Palo Alto’s Green Program Manager, discusses how their green power initiatives have evolved over the last decade.
San Francisco’s Community Choice Aggregation Plans
Nov 29th
Danielle Murray discusses what the city of San Francisco is doing to offer its citizens new ways to purchase renewable power.
| Danielle Murray: | My name’s Danielle Murray and I’m the Renewable Energy Program Manager for the San Francisco Department of Environment. We cover a range of topics everything from environmental education in schools to waste reduction, recycling, composting and again education on those, toxics reduction, green buildings and then the section I’m in is energy so we have a large energy efficiency as well as renewable energy that I work on. Got a couple of exciting things going on right now; one is that the Mayor announced a 100% renewable goal for the city last year, so we’re currently working with a task force of really excellent numbers from across the energy community and local stakeholders to come up with an actionable plan to get us to 100% renewable power for the entire city, not just the municipalities but the community as well. So, that’s under way now, look for that early next year come out with a recommendation report from the task force. The crux of that is community power and local control over power. If we want to get to 100%, we need to either have the help of utilities or our own local power system helping us meet that goal.One of the ways we’re hoping to do that is through Community Choice Aggregation, which is a bill that came out in the California legislature almost a decade ago now that enables local governments to aggregate their customers, residential-commercial customers within their area and source power for them. What we’re working on right now is contracting with a power supplier to provide a 100% green electricity supply for customers in San Francisco and it would be essentially an alternative to the existing utility PG&E, in terms of where people get their power from. The power still gets carried over the same line, re-distributed, transmitted over PG&E’s infrastructure but the power is sourced by the city or the city’s agents. As a result, we can say that as customers of this Community Choice Aggregation Program, which will be called CleanPowerSF, choose to take a 100% green power. That may involve a small cost premium but it’s something that, what we’ve seen from polls and from our local citizens is that they’re willing to pay a little bit more, a couple of dollars a month, ten dollars a month, to have a completely green product coming into their house rather than what they’re getting off the PG&E grid right now, which should be meeting our renewable portfolio standards in California at 20% right now, but actually are lagging behind. So, this is the way to move our electricity supply into a greener space and actually make sure that we’re meeting those state mandates and going beyond even. So, this is a main way that we can do that and we obviously hope we can work with PG&E to get there also and to work with our local citizens to get more distributed generation in the city, on roofs, etc.We’re also looking at some local projects, like a wave power project off-shore, but this is the main way that, particularly citizens who don’t have the roof space for solar system, whether they’re renters or leasers or they’re businesses, they’re tenants in a building that they don’t own can actually buy green power through the CCA rather than only having the option of going with their utility and getting right now it’s about 16% renewable power.Marin County is a great proving ground for doing Community Choice Aggregation. It’s been a great success; they’ve had a lot of interest from their community members, high sign-up levels. They’ve actually got two products; a light green and a deep green product. They’ve got one that I think is 23 or 26% green, that’s their light green product. They’re also offering 100% green product, at a slight price premium over the average utility rates right now. It’s been great to see them move forward and to see the interest that they’re getting and also frankly they’re working out some of the kinks and have gone through the process of contracting and procuring the supply that we’ll have to do that on the line. So, we’re learning a lot of lessons, we’re watching them intently to see how things go and as I mentioned, we’ve opted to skip the light green product and go straight to 100% deep green renewable energy product because we think that there’s a demand for that here in San Francisco. Honestly, we found that the folks who are willing to take part in the program at all, who wanted to see more renewable power, didn’t just want to see 30% or 40% green. If they’re going to opt into this, they wanted to see 100% green power. So, they were willing to pay that very slight price premium in order to say not just I’m doing a little bit better than our utility, but we’re going all the way and we’re getting 100% green power from it. I think that climate change is really the most pressing issue facing the entire world right now. Honestly, I’m incredibly concerned about it. I have been since I was in college and first started hearing about it and learning from scientists the true effects going on in the world and just how dangerous it is and where we’re headed if we don’t change things right now. I think energy is at the core of this issue which is what motivated me personally to get into sustainable energy and I think that’s the driving factor for most people to support renewable energy and sustainable energy in addition to the health effects, which is previously what I was interested in, human health. The way that renewable energy impacts air quality, human health and ultimate sustainability and liveability of this planet is important. On the political side, government has to be there leading the way to encouraging the shift towards renewable energy, towards sustainble sources of power. As we’ve seen in the last few years, it’s very hard to move things forward on the international stage and there’s been a lot of action at the local level. I think working for a progressive city like San Francisco, in particular, has been a great opportunity to move things forward, to set an example and show that you can change the status quo and that it’s possible and can even be practical and financially sound to shift towards, not just renewable energy but all sorts of sustainable measures, like I was talking about in the department, that range from reducing toxics to shifting to green buildings, recycling and composting. So, we’ve seen financial benefits for the city from all of those and our constituents have supported those movements and it’s not because we just live in a fairyland where we think that everything should be good and green but because it makes financial sense for us and it makes sense for our health and for our well-being. It’s a great place to be doing the work and I think that other cities have been leading the way as well and there’s a lot of good work to be done at this level but again you need both the people and the administration in cities, like myself, as the bureaucrats might say and the politicians to be supporting that movement as well and listening to the constituents, who care deeply about these issues and taking that forward and creating positive change. |
Conservation Services Group Secures $100M In Energy Saving Contracts
Oct 31st
Stephen Cowell, CEO of the Conservation Services Group, talks about the newly signed contracts that his company recently signed with numerous organizations.
Full Transcript:
| Ben lack: | Your company recently announced that you’ve agreed to more than a $100M worth of new and renewed contracts with clients. I’d like to get your thoughts on what these types of contracts look like and why this is such a significant feat for your company? |
| Stephen Cowell: | The specialty we have is in managing program initiatives sponsored by government or utilities to help residential consumers improve the energy efficiency of their home. That’s our core business and these contracts range in size, scope and location. Many different states from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, to California are represented, so it is very geographically diverse. The kinds of things we are going to be doing are similar to the things that are our core competency is working with contractors providing technical oversight, marketing, quality control, data management, financial management for this program and ultimately responsibility for ensuring that the work gets done right, the customers get served, the funds are utilized properly and saving people’s energy bills go down. That’s the end of the day our mission and what we try to do. Why is it so important for us? It’s critical in terms of our business because many of these are multi-year contracts. A lot of these programs that are sponsored go out to bid every couple of years and they’re big chunks. Getting a multi-year contract either renewed or put in place is important to the stability of our company and be able to invest on a longer time horizon than year-to-year business fluctuation. |
| Ben Lack: | One of the new programs your company is working on is the Energy Upgrade California Program for the state. Could you provide us a little bit of detail of what that relationship looks like? |
| Stephen Cowell: | In the case of that particular program, our primary deliverable is training contractors, both in terms of HERS audits and technical assessment skills and quality standards that measures materials. Our role in that particular program is focused on training particularly contractor and technician training. |
| Ben Lack: | And your program that you have partly been working on with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Green Jobs – Green New York Program is trying to increase the number of jobs for weatherization. Share a little a bit of color how that relationship is expanding. |
| Stephen Cowell: | What we really had in New York, we’ve been working with NYSERDA for now a decade, really building the whole concept of whole house performance, weatherization, adding both equipment and shell. That program has been evolving in the last two years. There’s been a very significant legislative boost to that program. In 2009, the state of New York passed Green Jobs – Green New York legislation. This year, they passed legislation requiring an on-bill financing option for consumers working with utility companies. What happened is the base work that we’ve been doing building the industry of home performance contractors in New York, really has gotten a shot in the arm from legislation in expanding it. The allocation of stimulus money, I think it was about $40 million, was allocated to support this program and then the on-bill financing legislation really will give us an additional avenue to help get financing into the hands of consumers who want to do this work but don’t have the upfront cash to do the investment. One of the interesting observations that I have made, in New York, in the last two years, these two pieces of legislation have been by far the most bi-partisan legislative agreements that have been passed in the state of New York which has been very heavily divided 50-50 Republicans and Democrats. Both of these legislations passed with both republican and democratic strong support. |
| Ben Lack: | In addition to energy savings, are there other quantifiable metrics that these clients of yours hold your feet to at the end of the day so that you end up getting the next round of contracts from these and other potential customers? |
| Stephen Cowell: | Absolutely. Energy savings is number one. If we don’t produce the energy savings, they don’t get their metrics reached but at the same time, almost across the board, there are customer satisfaction requirements. There are metrics like, we answer 400,000 phone calls a year from consumers looking for information on energy efficiency. There are regional call centers around the country. We have a hundred staff members whose job it is to be real-live people answering people’s questions. We have metrics like how quickly we pick up the phone, how many people actually pick up the phone and get a live person, how many rings? We get down to that level of detail, customer satisfaction, the uptake rate if there’s energy audits involved, how many people go on to implement those measures. We have very detailed metrics and standards that we have to do that lead up to how much energy we save. There’s a pre-cursor but almost every contract has a fairly detailed set of performance metric that we have to deliver on. |
| Ben Lack: | Steve, why are you in this business and why have you chosen to do what you’re doing? |
| Stephen Cowell: | I’m mission driven. I call myself a public purpose entrepreneur and I recently have told people my exit strategy is when I feel I’ve left a sustainable planet. I love doing this from a point of view of I think this is absolutely critical to the health of the country, the world. It’s what motivates me to come to work everyday. The feeling that doing this is helping the environment, helping the national security, helping the economics of millions of American families. That’s what drives me to do what I do. |
| Ben Lack: | Before we let you go, is there anything else that you want to share with our audience? |
| Stephen Cowell: | I think it’s the sense that the things we do really are driven by good economics. They are supported above politics and it really gets down to the nitty-gritty. We work with a lot of small contractors. President Obama asked me to help put together his proposed Home Star plan which I did and spent a fair amount of time in Washington helping with that. What was really fascinating about that was I was able to see the Chamber of Commerce, environmental groups and labor unions all agreeing that this was a good thing to do and they don’t agree very often. Being part of something like that is really very rewarding and I feel honored to be able to be part of that. |
Google Helps Drive Solar
Oct 11th
On September 27, 2011, Google announced that it was putting $75 million into financing for solar rooftops on homes in California. It is great that Google made their second investment into solar. The first investment was $280 million for solar rooftops.
It is estimated that each solar roof will spend approximately $30K per solar installation. The homeowner will not own the system since it is being funded by Google but the homeowner will purchase the energy (kWh) produced from that solar system as if Google is the electric utility for that residential meter. This concept is also referred to as a power purchase agreement (PPA) and is very prevalent around the U.S. but specifically in California, which has driven the large uptake in solar installations across the country.
We still have many states that do not allow third parties to produce energy and sell it to a consumer of that power, which in reality monopolizes the electricity system. In order to increase the market rate of solar in the U.S., we have to embrace a new economy of energy policies. A company like Google should have the ability to take their investment dollars and leverage them in the energy economy. We are poised with an increasing demand of energy needs then why not invest funds locally that can transition our need for energy to renewable sources like solar.
The California market for solar can certainly be a model for success for this country, and yes many states like to wave off California as “that is just California”. But we cannot continue to write off a progressive state that understands the rising costs of energy and is seeking solutions so consumers have cost effective choices.
On a recent trip to Hawaii for a clean energy conference, I was struck by their pure dedication in both the political and private sectors to take the state off of foreign oil. A state of islands faced with global pressures of oil prices has to make hard decisions. One staggering quote from a mayor on the Big Island of Hawaii stated that just his county spends $750 million on energy costs per year. Think about that with the average U.S. resident in a single family home spending $1600 per year on electricity. A county spending almost a billion dollars! By following the realities of what that means for an economy, they are motivated to find clean energy sources to generate electricity. Large scale usage of solar, wind, and geothermal energy are in the near future to make this a reality.
We have options to strengthen our economy by looking locally at energy options. Whether we embrace solar energy like Google or favor other methods to achieve energy efficiency, we need to make the decisions that will drive our cost effective choices today and sustain a nation for tomorrow.
Written by Ben Taube, President, EnergyFool.
Why Capitol Hill Is Keeping U.S. From Creating Clean Energy Jobs
Oct 10th
Nathanael Greene, Director of Renewable Energy Policy in New York City for the National Resource Defense Council, discusses our country’s struggle to create clean energy jobs.
Bloom Energy Fuel Cells Added To 11 AT&T Sites
Jul 13th
AT&T to Power 11 California Sites with Bloom Energy Fuel Cells
AT&T and Bloom Energy Corporation have teamed up to add Bloom Boxes to eleven California-based AT&T locations. AT&T will become the first telecommunications company to power some of their operations with Bloom Boxes. The Bloom Boxes, which are based on a solid oxide fuel cell technology, will generate 62 million kilowatt-hours of clean power each year and reduce CO2 emissions by almost 50%.
DOE Offers Conditional $105 Million Loan Guarantee for Innovative Cellulosic Bio-Refinery in Iowa
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has made official a commitment for a $105 million conditional loan guarantee to help develop the country’s first-ever commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant. Known as “Project LIBERTY”, the program will produce up to 25 million gallons of ethanol per year and bring an approximate $14 million infusion of cash to local farmers.
Investment in Renewable Energy Surges Around The World
According to a report released UNEP, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, global green energy investment have jumped nearly a third to $211 billion. A lot of money has been spent on government-based research and development. Renewables in this sector are up over 120%, to well over $5 billion. China and other developing countries are now the biggest investors in large-scale renewables, while Germany has surged ahead on rooftop solar. In Kenya, geothermal energy is surging – even powering rose growers – and UNEP’s new headquarters building in Nairobi has one of the largest solar installations in Africa.
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