IDC Energy Insights Community > Renewable & Distributed Energy Blog

Renewable Energy Impacts from the BP Oil Spill (3 Comments)

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:51:47 +0000

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With the BP oil spill successfully capped, at least temporarily, and the completion of a relief well in sight, it's time to look forward and assess the impact this disaster will have on renewable energy. Sadly, there's not much to assess. Since Senator Reid shelved the planned climate and energy bill until at least the fall, it looks like Congress couldn't or wouldn't use the oil spill as leverage to pass a carbon cap-and-trade program or a national renewable energy standard. What that leaves is an assessment of BP's own role in the renewable energy markets.

BP has publicly stated that it plans to sell noncore exploration and production assets for $10 billion and withhold dividend payments as a means of providing a cash reserve for Deepwater Horizon cleanup costs. The company has already announced the sale of $7 billion in upstream assets to Apache Corp. and there is speculation among financial analysts and the media that additional sales are being considered.

BP's alternative energy unit, which includes BP Wind and BP Solar, is also rumored to be high on the list of potential assets to be sold. BP Wind has gross generating capacity in the U.S. of over 1,200 megawatts (MW), with a further 1,000 MW of capacity in an advanced stage of development. BP's solar module sales were 203 MW in 2009, primarily in markets such as Germany and the U.S., representing sales growth of 25%. However, BP already announced last year that it was planning to divest BP Solar, which has become a small player in that market. Its wind assets are large, but selling them would be just another transaction in that market, which are commonplace these days and would not significantly alter the market landscape.

If BP sells all or part of its alternative energy unit then we believe that the company's "beyond petroleum" mantra will be effectively dead, which raises the question of whether another oil and gas company will step in to be the renewable energy leader for the oil and gas industry. Shell certainly has concrete views on renewable energy and the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Chevron is a significant player in solar via its Chevron Energy Solutions subsidiary and is the world's largest producer of geothermal power. However, in the end, we believe the oil and gas companies have already missed their opportunity to be anything but followers in renewable energy.

Your thoughts?

The Climate Bill is Dead, Long Live the Energy Bill! (2 Comments)

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:00:07 +0000

Entry by Sam Jaffe

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For more than a year, we at IDC Energy Insights have been predicting that a comprehensive climate/energy bill would not happen. Our reasoning was simple: With 60 senators needed for any legislation to advance, there are too many Republicans and coal state Democrats to make a cap and trade program viable. The final nail in the coffin was hammered in by the distinguished new senator from West Virginia, Carte Goodwin, announcing that he would not support any bill with cap and trade in it. Imagine that: a West Virginia politician not wanting to harm the interests of the coal industry. While much of Washington is now transfixed with its usual mourning procedures for any bill that dies before becoming a law (first order of business: everybody blame everyone else), a few lonely voices are starting to whisper "What's next?" The answer is that there will definitely be some sort of energy bill passed by Congress before the August recess. What exact form it takes is anybody's guess.

Denise Bode of the American Wind Energy Association is one of those voices, although it's not right to say that she's whispering. She's shouting at the top of her lungs for a Renewable Energy Standard (RES) of 15% by 2020. The wind industry, she claims, is dying due to legislative uncertainty, with less than 1 GW of new capacity added in the fourth quarter. That's more than a 50% decline from last year's installation numbers (although a skeptic might point out that there's more than 5 GW of wind projects in the pipeline due to be deployed over the next six months--that doesn't quite sound like the last gasps of a mortally wounded industry).

Another voice that can be heard amidst the din is that of the energy storage industry. It wants some form of the STORAGE act (as proposed by Oregon senator Ron Wyden more than a year ago) to be included in an energy-only law. While there are now different variations floating about the Beltway, most have an Investment Tax Credit of between 15 and 20% for energy storage projects. Each segment of the energy storage industry (CAES, pumped hydro, batteries, thermal, etc...) wants to also make sure that their particular technology is directly listed in the final law's wording.

One more industry contingent whose lobbyists are working sleeplessly for some Energy bill participation is the electric vehicle sector. While they differ on exactly how to create incentives for the emerging technology (the aggregators like Better Place and Coulomb want grants for large demonstration programs, while the carmakers want basic industrial subsidies), its clear that there's a big push for some form of support for vehicle electrification.

Of course, everyone else wants in on the action: solar, nuclear, natural gas and even petroleum companies are all pushing for their own agendas as some form of energy bill is rushed through Congress. It's clear that something will result from all this, but nobody knows right now what exactly it will look like.

Keywords

renewable energy, energy policy, climate policy, cap and trade, wind energy, energy storage, electric vehicles

Honda and Toyota Cross the Rubicon on Electric Vehicles

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:42:40 +0000

Entry by Sam Jaffe

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For the last three years, the world's auto manufacturers have been playing business history's biggest poker game. GM anted up first when it announced in 2007 that it would build the Chevy Volt--the world's first plug-in electric vehicle. Ford also got into the act, working on a plug-in version of the popular Focus sedan. The Europeans were next, with Daimler, BMW and Renault all coming up with their own EV models. Then Nissan made a splash with its announcement in 2009 that it would sell the Nissan Leaf. Each company came to the table with a slightly different technology. Two companies--Toyota and Honda--famously held back from the game. Toyota felt that it could ride its mild hybrid lead (thanks to the Prius). Honda claimed that EV's would be leapfrogged by fuel cell cars. That is until the past week.

On Friday, Toyota announced that it would launch an all-electric production version of the RAV-4 crossover vehicle in 2012. By utilizing its new partnership with Tesla Motors (whose battery system design and electric drivetrain experience complement Toyota's manufacturing expertise), the company will rush to market a competitor to the Leaf and the Volt.

And then we get this news: according to Japanese press reports, Honda will announce tomorrow a new all-electric EV for 2013. The last major holdout (Besides Chrysler--but nobody much cares what Chrysler does these days) has surrendered to the coming EV tsunami.

Does this mean that EV's are going to take over the world? Not by a long shot. But it does mean that the first major war of perception over electric vehicles is over and the battery-heads have won. Every major auto manufacturer is now going to launch an EV in the course of the next two years. These cars, with all their weaknesses (range anxiety, battery costs, etc.), are not going to go away.

The next stage of the game is crucial: will the players double up on their bets and turn these initial launches into a major component of their corporate strategy? Or will they sell EV's to a very small niche of a buying community consisting of fleet owners and treehuggers? We'll see how this stage of the game plays out over the next two years. In other words, break out the popcorn and settle down to watch the most fascinating business story that we'll see in our lifetimes.

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Keywords

plug-in electric vehicles, electric vehicles, distributed energy, lithium ion batteries, green transportation

The $16 Billion Non-Solution (1 Comment)

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:38:51 +0000

Entry by Sam Jaffe

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A recent report from the American Energy Innovation Council, a star-studded organization that includes everyone from climate scientist Ken Caldeira to Bill Gates, has called for a simple solution for solving America's energy problems: Have the federal government fund energy research to the tune of $16 billion per year. It seems like a good idea until you ponder the question of what problem this idea is trying to solve.

If the problem is a lack of technologies that can compete with coal, then a basic research budget upgrade won't solve it. There are dozens of whiz-bang concepts that have come out of university laboratories and think tank committee rooms, all of which have failed to beat the cost of dumping coal into a boiler.

That's not because these ideas don't have merit. It's because they are beset by challenges that no lab-based scientist is capable of overcoming. Things like manufacturing scale-up (think of CIGS solar cells), real-world conditions (think of the failure of several tide-powered devices due to the unrelenting conditions under the surface), and unforeseen obstacles (such as the political opposition that the Cape Wind offshore wind project unleashed). These are problems that can't be solved in a test tube.

What the alternative energy industry needs from the federal government--far more than scientific grants--is a policy push towards more widespread commercialization. This would cause the companies who will profit from such a push to spend an equivalent amount or more in their R&D budgets. That's money that will probably be more smartly spent than cash doled out by a government bureaucrat.

Take General Electric. It has recently announced that it has bet heavily on cadmium telluride panels as its future technology direction for its photovoltaic division. It will probably spend hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D money in order to figure out how to make these panels more cheaply (right now the bogey to beat is First Solar's production costs of about 80 cents per Watt). The kind of research the company will be doing, however, has little to do with laboratory work. Instead, it will invest in manufacturing technology as it concentrates on how to run modules off its production lines faster and faster. Likewise, it will be figuring out how to reduce the use of Tellurium (a high-cost input for such panels), from a 2 micron film to a theoretically achievable 0.2 micron film. But GE won't be trying to achieve a super cell in the lab--it will be spending money to ensure that it can consistently produce such cells on a production line. You simply can't give out a research grant for that kind of effort. Another way of putting is to say that what's needed is less R and more D.

So how can the Federal government spur private companies to spend their own money on development projects? Cultivate a market for future energy technologies (solar, nuclear, wind and geothermal) by spending that $16 billion per year on subsidies for new markets, not on research grants. Build the market and the development dollars will come.

Keywords

renewable energy, distributed energy, solar, photovoltaics, geothermal, wind, nuclear

Operationalizing Virtual Power Plants in Europe

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:56:29 +0000

Entry by Roberta Bigliani

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We just published a new piece of research focused on Virtual Power Plants (Best Practices: Operationalizing Virtual Power Plants in Europe - RWE Collaborates with Siemens, Document #EIR01S). The report provides in-depth into the RWE Virtual Power Plant (VPP) implementation, which seeks to demonstrate how the virtual power plant concept can be concretely adopted, by aggregating large enough quantities of generated electricity or power capacity that can be trade on the energy power markets.

The report starts with the description of how Virtual Power Plants function and the ICT involved to making them work; a brief overview of two other EU funded initiatives being undertaken in Europe for comparative purposes, and then a detailed description of what RWE has put in place. In the future outlook section ADDRESS, another EU funded project, is briefly mentioned.

To start the discussion let's be clear on definitions: a Virtual Power Plant is a technical, operational, and economic construct that aggregates distributed supply and demand resources in a manner that enables the VPP operator to treat the distributed energy resources as if they were a single power plant. From a technical perspective the VPP concept is not itself a new technology, but a scheme to combine decentralized resources by interlinking them with the use of ICT.

The software solution that constitutes the “brain” of a VPP, and specifically of RWE's, system enables demand-driven production planning, production optimization, monitoring and control. The program is fed all the relevant information, such as the latest electricity prices and the energy requirements of customers. On the basis of this data, the software calculates a scheduling plan for the upcoming day and, thus, determines which plants are to be dispatched. The other key component is installed locally at the generation unit site, and allows bidirectional communication with the "central brain." Its main functionality is to execute control commands. Communication also plays a fundamental role in the success of VPP management. In order to fully integrate the generation units to the central control system, and between themselves, each unit is tracked with GPRS.

Even if centralized power generation goes on being the most important pillar in energy supply, distributed power generation will continue gaining importance in the coming years. These types of plants, typically belonging to consumers (industrial, commercial and residential) are usually connected, but not fully integrated in the national power supply network. But their increasing deployment must be coordinated more effectively if such plants are to be economically and environmentally viable and are to play a greater role in providing a reliable power supply.

What is your view on VPP? Are you engaged in similar projects? Do you think the technology offer is mature enough? And most importantly … any idea on WHO could play the role of the Aggregator? And consequently how regulation should be changed to allow it happen on a wide scale?

Click here to read the press release regarding this topic.

Keywords

smart grids, low carbon economy, distributed generation, demand management, ICT

ProLogis Welcomes Solar to its Rooftops (1 Comment)

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:02:24 +0000

Entry by Jay Holman

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Coauthored by Casey Hogan.

The IDC Energy Insight's team recently had the opportunity to tour the ProLogis Rooftop Photovoltaic Test Site in Denver. ProLogis, which owns 475 million square feet of warehouse properties in North America, Europe, and Asia, is aggressively pursuing the deployment of solar on the rooftops of its buildings. However, as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), ProLogis does not have the kind of tax appetite that would enable it to take advantage of tax credit or tax grant based incentives for solar installations that have boosted the growth of renewables in the US. Beyond that challenge, generating electricity is too far outside the company's core business model to warrant significant investment. Instead, ProLogis is working to become the partner of choice for rooftop solar PV developers.

ProLogis has created a secondary real estate market for its distribution centers through their rooftop space. Utilities or independent power producers lease rooftop space from ProLogis and own the solar PV installations and the energy they produce. For its part, ProLogis greases the skids by providing project management, permitting, and oversight to successfully develop the rooftop installations.

So, why the testing facility? By using its test facility to develop expertise in the technologies and practices best suited for installation of solar PV on warehouse rooftops, ProLogis will be able to improve the performance of the projects while reducing costs and implementation time. Why place a PV power plant on a random rooftop when you can work with an experienced partner who will guide you through the process and provide your investors with confidence along the way? Placing PV panels on a rooftop is not as easy as it sounds: improperly installed systems can cause damage to the roof, make leaks more difficult to access or create unnecessary operations and maintenance challenges. The type of roof and its resulting structural integrity can have an impact on technology selection, as some of the most efficient panels can also require some of the heaviest racking systems. By understanding and guiding the project development process, ProLogis reduces its risks (and the risks to its buildings) while providing services that we expect should earn them a premium in the rooftop real estate market.

While this test facility should accelerate ProLogis' move into rooftop solar, the company already has projects installed or in development on 32 buildings in France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and various regions in the US. These projects cover more than 10.6 million square feet of rooftops and have a capacity of 24.6 MW.

A bit more about the test facility:

The project generates 11 kWp of DC power from 99 modules
There are eight module manufacturers represented on site: Ascent Solar, First Solar, GS-Solar, MiaSole, Solyndra, Suniva, United Solar Ovonic and Xunlight.
The project is a real-world lab test of technologies including monocrystalline, glass-on-glass thin film and membrane-applied thin film modules.
There are 16 strings connected to a SMA inverter.
Different technologies may have varying appeal beyond the cost and efficiency --- the flexible PV panels may win simply because of the regional constraints – for example, an installation on a wind abused warehouse in Portland may justify the purchase of a less efficient, but secure flat, flexible PV panel.

A bit more background on the test facility can be found here.

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Keywords

solar photovoltaic, c-Si, a-Si, CIGS, Cd-Te, PV, rooftop PV, distributed energy, renewable energy

Bringing Energy Efficiency to Le Hive

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:54:36 +0000

Entry by Sam Jaffe

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Have you ever tried one of those bio-degradable, recycled cardboard coffee cups and felt all good about yourself until the cup started leaking onto your lap? Environmentally aware consumer choices can be a negative experience when the green option turns out to be fundamentally inferior to the conventional choice. That's what I wanted to find out during my visit to"Le Hive"--the new Schneider Electric headquarters in Paris: Did the dramatic reductions in energy consumption that the building has achieved, all by utilizing Schneider-built technologies--lead to a noticeably negative experience in terms of comfort level? The answer, in a word, was non.

The average electricity consumption of an office building in Paris is 400 kWh’s per square meter per year. By 2030, the European Union has directed that all buildings consume only 50 kWh per square meter per year. Le Hive is showing how the path towards that goal can be quick and relatively painless. It has reduced its energy consumption by more than 50 percent in less than a year, and it is currently at an annualized consumption level of 65 kWh. It will reach 50 kWh by the end of this year.

It’s not coincidental that this particular building belongs to Schneider Electric, the French energy conglomerate which is entering the electrical efficiency retrofit market in a big way. Le Hive is just outside of La Defense, the Parisian business and financial center. The doors of Le Hive opened at the end of 2008 and it now holds more than 1,700 employees. It was designed with no particular emphasis on energy efficiency—the company wanted to learn how to reduce energy consumption and then put that learning process into its products.

The Schneider system, dubbed EcoStruxture, starts with a detailed measurement process that defines the building’s energy consumption from a locational and seasonal basis. Then a series of software and hardware components are installed, all of which can be integrated into a comprehensive system with a “single pane of glass” control. That pane of glass can even be a laptop or smartphone. In other words, the heating system, the air conditioning system, the lighting management system, the security system, the fire control system, the surveillance system, the IT system and the ventilation system (all of which used to be discrete systems with separate controls and dedicated technicians and managers) are all integrated into a single comprehensive building management system with a single point of control.

Next up were the RFID cards distributed to every employee. Each card alerts a sensor system where the employee is and adjusts the lighting and HVAC systems accordingly. A worker leaves his office for lunch, for instance, and the lights and air conditioner turn off immediately. He returns and the comfort settings he has pre-requested kick right in. Other sensors track the amount of visible sunlight and adjust the artificial lighting up or down accordingly. Similarly, an automated window shading system adjusts itself in calibration with the cooling, heating and lighting needs. If the blinds are open and sunlight is streaming in, then the lighting system dims by just the right amount to maintain a consistent environment.

The annualized electricity consumption of Le Hive is down to around 65 kWh, as of our visit in mid-June. “It’s much more difficult to get from 65 to 50 than it is to get from 100 to 65,” says Pierre Tabary, Schneider Electric VP of educational buildings and office buildings. “All the low hanging fruit is gone.” But Schneider isn’t finished with ideas. The next segment to tackle is IT plug load—aka personal computers that are plugged in 24/7. The company hopes to eventually link that load to the control system so that someone’s monitor turns off automatically when they leave the room and the monitor dims when extra sunlight is available.

What I saw at Schneider Electric’s Le Hive was a glimpse into the future of smart buildings. One of Schneider’s corporate mantras is that you can’t have a smart grid without smart buildings. And Schneider’s EcoStruxure system can bring intelligence into all the controls of a building. And it can do so without anyone, including myself during a mid-June visit, breaking a sweat.

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Keywords

energy efficiency, demand response, smart grid, smart buildings, smart lighting

Will the Chevy Volt Just be a "Helium" Car? (2 Comments)

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:07:23 +0000

Entry by Sam Jaffe

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When Toyota launched the Prius in 1997, a new term was born in the auto industry: the "halo car". Although the early Prius was a loss leader, Toyota earned a favorable impression from consumers--even the ones that don't buy a Prius--for its eco-leadership. Many people think of the upcoming Chevy Volt--GM's first mass production electric vehicle--as its version of a halo car. Actually, GM is more interested in the Volt as a "helium car" than as a halo car.

By helium car, I mean a car whose express purpose is to raise up the overall mileage number of a particular carmaker's fleet. By boosting the overall fleet MPG numbers, GM will be able to sell more low-MPG SUV's and pickup trucks without being in violation of the CAFE regulations, thanks to the helium effect of the Volt. In other words, the Volt's primary purpose in the minds of GM's executives is a way to subsidize gas guzzlers.

In a recent insightful posting at gm-volt.com (a blog dedicated to covering the development and rollout of the Chevy Volt), GM's vehicle line director for the Volt, Tony Posawatz revealed that GM is not very serious about making the Volt a popular success. "I think we will always want to keep Volt in a position where demand for the product is slightly greater than supply...We would not want to see Volt's needing to be discounted for whatever reason." As a result, GM plans to make only a few thousand Volts in 2011 and about 60,000 Volts in 2012.

Those aren't the words or production numbers needed to make the Chevy Volt a mass market success. A typical new car launch is measured in the hundreds of thousands of cars produced in the first few years, not in the tens of thousands. But for helium purposes, only a few thousand Volts need to be sold, thanks to its extremely favorable government-certified MPG numbers (which haven't been released yet, but will probably top 100 MPG). For every Volt sold, GM will be able to sell a half dozen Silverado's and Sequoias, while still meeting the new CAFE rule of having an overall fleet MPG rating of 35 MPG.

Contrast this to Nissan's ambitious plans to make more than half a million Leafs in 2012. As part of that strategy, Nissan set the Leaf in the U.S. market at a very low price point: $32,500. Subtract the federal tax credit ($7500), and the Leaf is comparable in price to the gasoline-powered Nissan Sentra.

GM hasn't announced the price at which it will be selling the Volt yet--it will do so later this summer--but based on inferences from GM officials, it's clear that it will be priced much higher than the Leaf, and will probably be more comparable to a Cadillac than a Malibu. GM clearly doesn't see the Volt as a revolutionary new way to produce and sell cars. Instead, it sees a niche product to make money off of gullible tree-huggers.

All of this is a tremendous shame. GM's decision to pursue the development of the Volt at great cost and controversy, was the company's best chance at re-engineering the entire company from the car up. Instead, the senior management of the company has taken the golden apple presented by the company's engineers--what is by all accounts a spectacular car--and turned it into a way to build more SUV's, con a few thousand eco-conscious buyers out of their money by charging a premium for the car and missing out on an opportunity to build a new company with a wildly competitive flagship brand.

Of course, there's still the chance that GM will price the Volt to be competitive with the Leaf (it deserves a slight premium of about $1,000 for the internal combustion range extender). So if GM prices the Volt at $33,500, I'll gladly eat my radiator hose.

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Keywords

EV, PEV, PHEV, EREV, electric vehicle, green transportation

Chaebol and Kieretsu: Watch out for the Asian Conglomerates (2 Comments)

Sat, 22 May 2010 23:49:08 +0000

Entry by Rick Nicholson

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On my recent 10-day trip to Asia one thing became clear to me - the Asian conglomerates, known as Chaebol in Korea and Kieretsu in Japan, are poised to become much larger global players in the cleantech markets. In the west, most energy industry insiders already know that Sharp is one of the largest global providers of chrystalline silicon (C-Si) and thin film PV modules. A smaller number probably know that LG Chem was selected by GM to provide lithium ion batteries for the Chevy Volt. But few realize the true scope of these businesses and their planned levels of investment. Don't assume that these companies are only interested in dominating their home countries - markets that are too small to matter when compared to the U.S., China and India. And don't forget that Korea and Japan are essentially export economies.

Just a sample of recent announcements will give you a glimpse of what's coming in the next few years.

On May 11, Samsung announced its plan to invest $20.6 billion (yes, that's billion, not million) by 2020 in a range of clean technologies including solar cells, batteries for electric vehicles and LED lighting, directly challenging GE, Phillips and Sanyo.
Other Korean conglomerates including Hyundai, LG and SK Group are participating in the smart grid test bed projects on Jeju island - where they will gain experience that can be used in global markets.
On May 17, Mitsubishi announced that it would invest $76 million in clean technologies including smart meters, batteries, solar PV, electric vehicles and charging stations and communications networks at three of its facilities in Japan. Mitsubishi eventually plans to market smart grid related products globally, making it a competitor to companies like ABB, Siemens and GE.
The Japanese government is spending $1 billion on four smart grid projects in Japan that will include companies like Toyota, Panasonic and Toshiba.

And let's keep in mind some basic strengths of these conglomerates such as manufacturing (especially in critical related areas like semiconductors and LCD panels), construction (including power plants), financing, and consumer brand awareness - giving them the potential to be formidable competitors. My bet is that the Asian conglomerates will begin to grab a significant share of global cleantech markets in the next 2-3 years. Your thoughts?

Will Hybrid Solar Thermal Plants Make Thermal Storage Obsolete?

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:26:12 +0000

Entry by Jay Holman

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Hybrid solar thermal plants are getting hot: numerous projects are scheduled to come online in 2010, and developers are hoping the projects will demonstrate attractive economics that drive rapid growth in the sector over the coming years. At the same time, developers are undertaking efforts to use molten salt thermal storage to improve the economics of standalone central solar thermal (CST) plants. That raises the question: will these two approaches complement or compete with each other?

Hybrid solar thermal plants share a turbine and other critical hardware and control systems with a fossil-fueled generation plant. The goal is to lower the initial capital investment in the CST plant and achieve a lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE) relative to a standalone CST plant built in the same location. The three projects described below, all slated to come online in 2010, provide just a few examples of the wide range of approaches possible for this renewable technology.

The Colorado Integrated Solar Project uses parabolic trough solar collectors to preheat water entering an existing coal-fired boiler at a generating station near Grand Junction, Co. The efficiency improvement will be equivalent to producing 1 MW of electricity at the 49 MW plant.
The Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida will use parabolic trough solar collectors to generate steam that will be used to directly generate 75 MW of power at an existing combined cycle gas plant.
The Integrated Solar Combined Cycle (ISCC) project in Kuraymat, Egypt is a greenfield solar thermal and gas combined cycle plant that will have 40 MW of capacity based on solar and 110 MW based on gas.

The reduction in LCOE sought by hybrid solar thermal plants stands in direct contrast to the impact of adding molten salt thermal storage to a CST plant, which actually increases the plant's LCOE. However, the thermal storage can be used to increase the plant's output during periods of peak demand, and if prices for peak electricity are high enough relative to off-peak electricity, the increased profits earned during peak times can more than offset the additional expense of adding storage.

Because the two approaches to CST have different goals, I see them as more complementary than competitive. I suspect the economics of hybrid solar thermal projects will be tough to beat in those situations where they are feasible, but that does not mean thermal storage will be squeezed out of the game. As with everything related to electricity generation, the selection of one approach over another will depend on a whole host of factors, including the availability of a fossil-fueled plant suitable for the addition of solar collectors, the difference in price between peak and off-peak electricity, and the makeup of the region's existing generation portfolio.

Keywords

renewable energy, central solar thermal, hybrid solar thermal, molten salt thermal storage

IDC Energy Insights Community > Renewable & Distributed Energy Blog

Renewable Energy Impacts from the BP Oil Spill (3 Comments)

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The Climate Bill is Dead, Long Live the Energy Bill! (2 Comments)

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Honda and Toyota Cross the Rubicon on Electric Vehicles

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The $16 Billion Non-Solution (1 Comment)

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Operationalizing Virtual Power Plants in Europe

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ProLogis Welcomes Solar to its Rooftops (1 Comment)

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Bringing Energy Efficiency to Le Hive

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Will the Chevy Volt Just be a "Helium" Car? (2 Comments)

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Chaebol and Kieretsu: Watch out for the Asian Conglomerates (2 Comments)

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Will Hybrid Solar Thermal Plants Make Thermal Storage Obsolete?

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