Wind and Solar Fight Through Recession With More Strong Growth

This past week, 2009 statistics for new wind and solar installations were released.  In spite of the economic slowdown, both industries grew at impressive clips.  This was due in large part to the stimulus from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

New wind capacity additions in the United States grew almost 20% from 8,366 MW in 2008 to 10,010 MW in 2009.  These 10 gigawatts of wind raised the US cumulative wind capacity 40% to over 35 gigawatts.  This also amounted to 39% of all new nameplate generating capacity installed in the country.

American Wind Energy Association U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report – Year Ending 2009

Texas remained the leading state in the country with almost 2,300 MW of new wind capacity which was more than 2.5X the amount of the next state.  That next state was a surprise, though, as Indiana burst onto the scene with over 905 MW of new installations representing a 700% increase of its 2008 total.

Not to be outdone, solar also shined in 2009.  Solar capacity additions grew 37% from 351 MW in 2008 to 481 MW in 2009.  This grew total US cumulative solar electricity capacity almost 30% to 2,108 MW.  Those numbers include both solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power.  The most striking growth came in the residential solar market, where the removal of the $2,000 cap on the Investment Tax Credit resulted in a 100% increase of residential PV installations, for a total of 156 MW.  The other major factor in the growth of solar PV installations was the continued fall in the price of solar modules which ended the year down 40% from mid-2008 at $1.85-$2.25 per module.

SEIA US Solar Industry Year in Review 2009

California continued to lead the nation in capacity additions with 220 MW representing 45% of total US installations.  This was mostly due to California’s high electricity prices, generous solar incentives, and robust renewable portfolio standard.    A distant second was New Jersey with 57 MW, which showed that you don’t need to be a sunny state to install a lot of solar.  You just need an aggressive solar incentive structure, like New Jersey’s aggressive solar carve-out in its renewable portfolio standard.

A scary looking renewable investment climate, in early 2009, was saved mostly due to aggressive government intervention in both the solar and wind space.  The result was another banner year for both industries and predictions of strong future growth.

References:

1.  American Wind Energy Association U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report – Year Ending 2009

2.  SEIA US Solar Industry Year in Review 2009

3.  http://www.gwec.net/fileadmin/documents/PressReleases/PR_2010/GWEC%20forecast%20-%20annex.pdf

Energy Storage Breakthrough?

A cost-effective solution for energy storage, that is not geographically limited, is one key ingredient missing from the vision of a solar and wind dominated electricity generation profile.  Currently, the only cost-effective storage solution for load shifting of renewables are Pumped hydro and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES).  Unfortunately, both technologies are limited by geography.  Pumped hydro needs water bodies separated vertically and CAES needs an underground cavern with specific geology.  Other solutions, up to this point, have been batteries that are too expensive and limited by inadequate cycle lives.

Isentropic Energy, a UK-based startup, claims that they now have a solution.  Their technology is the Pumped Heat Electric Storage System (PHES). The storage device works by taking advantage of a heat pump that uses electricity to compress air into a gravel tank on one side and expand air into a second gravel tank on the other side.  The result is one tank with compressed air at 500 degrees celsius and one with expanded air at 150 degrees celsius.  The energy differential can then be used as needed to run a heat engine.

PHES Device Schematic

http://www.isentropic.co.uk/index.php?page=storage

So key questions are how big, with what duration, and how much does it cost?  As for size, Isentropic claims a land footprint of only 120 square meters for a 16MWh system.  The system would be able to deliver 2MW of power for a duration of 8 hours.  And best of all they claim that they can deliver this solution at a cost of $55/kWh of storage, they hope to be able to get this number down to $10/kWh as they scale up.  This compares favorably to pumped hydro at a fraction of the footprint, would be slightly cheaper that CAES, and would be significantly cheaper than battery technologies like sodium-sulphur and lithium-ion.  (see table below)

http://www.isentropic.co.uk/uploads/Power_Engineer_International.pdf

A technology like this could be the key to the large-scale integration of wind and solar.  Currently, the intermittency of both technologies is thought to limit the potential for either or both to provide the majority of our power.  However, with a low-cost storage option, like PHES,  that intermittency could be evened out with storage, and wind and solar would then be able to provide consistent power.

As promising as this technology sounds,  Isentropic Energy is still in the prototype development stage.  They are currently developing their fourth prototype and are still probably have another year or two until they are ready for commercial development.

Even if everything goes according to plan and PHES becomes a reality, there is still one more ingredient necessary for a wind and solar dominated grid.  That ingredient is sufficient transmission to access the tremendous wind resources in the Midwest and solar resources in the Southwest.  That’s where we still need policymakers to get things done.  Due to the locally focused structure of electricity transmission and the failure of the national government to step in and get transmission funded and built, a transmission infrastructure necessary to get to most of the wind and solar resource seems very far away.  I mean a 750Kv national transmission infrastructure would only cost $60 billion and what is $60 billion amongst friends or a nation of 300 million people (approx. $200/pp).

Our clean energy future is just two steps away:

1.  Energy storage for wind and solar grid integration

2.  Legislation from the congress and directives from FERC to allow for a nationwide high voltage transmission infrastructure.

Sources:

1.  www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/breakthrough-in-utility-scale-energy-storage-isentropic/

2.  www.isentropic.co.uk/

3.  www.aep.com/about/i765project/docs/WindTransmissionVisionWhitePaper.pdf