New England Public Radio

The California Public Utilities Commission has called on utilities and private companies to install about $5 billion worth of batteries and other forms of energy storage to help the state power grid cope with the erratic power supplied by wind and solar energy.

The need to store energy has become urgent because the state is planning to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by the end of the decade. And the shift in strategy could open up some big opportunities for small startups, including one called Stem.

Stem is housed in an abandoned showroom in Millbrae, Calif., just across the highway from San Francisco International Airport. And the company’s not just aiming to help the state’s power grid.

“We make a product that reduces electricity bills for businesses,” says Tad Glauthier, Stem’s vice president for customer development.

In fact, Stem’s first priority is to focus on individual businesses. To explain how this works, Glauthier walks over to a couple of large computer monitors hanging on the wall.

“The monitor on the right is showing the electric load from the carwash across the street,” he says.

The graph is all over the place. There are lulls when the carwash is waiting for business — punctuated with big spikes when blowers, vacuums and other large pieces of equipment switch on.

“If you look at just the range within the last 15 minutes, that’s an incredible amount of volatility,” Glauthier says. “The utility has to serve them that electricity.”

It turns out the car wash has to pay extra on its electric bill for those periods of high demand. All companies in California get billed for their peak use, as well as their total electricity consumption.

So if the carwash can shave off those power peaks, they can also shave this extra charge from their electric bill.

Here’s how Stem does it: When demand spikes, batteries kick in so the company doesn’t have to draw so much from the grid.

The battery packs they install in businesses look like glitzy gym lockers, and are controlled by a small computer, connected to the Internet. The computer’s job is to decide when a company should be pulling energy from its batteries, rather than from the grid. When the company’s energy demand is low, it can recharge the battery.

“With the Stem system, they’re not using less power,” Glauthier explains. “They’re just using power in a more level way.”

And by doing that, the company is reducing the part of its bill that’s based on peak power usage.

So is Stem simply building a system that allows companies to “game” their electric bills? Glauthier says, no. “You absolutely help the [power grid] system,” he says.

But Glauthier may be getting a little ahead of himself here.

“Right now, it does only help the customer,” says Haresh Kamath, a battery expert at the Electric Power Research Institute in nearby Palo Alto.

Kamath says batteries will eventually help the state power grid deal with the ups and downs of electricity supplies from wind and solar. But it will take a lot of battery power to make a difference.

That’s exactly why the California Public Utilities Commission has called for billions of dollars of energy storage to be installed between now and 2020.

“If you get a small energy storage system in every body’s home, or every business, that could have a substantial impact on the grid as a whole,” Kamath says. “Of course right now it’s difficult to do that because it’s a relatively expensive product.”

Everybody’s hoping that creating this huge demand for batteries will also help drive down the cost.

Batteries can help with short-term power fluctuations — like those created when a cloud passes over a bank of solar panels, for example, or when the air goes still at a particular wind farm. And they can help keep the power grid stable, as operators work to match supply and demand second by second.

Stem is planning to scale up its operations so it can play a role in stabilizing the grid. The grid operator actually pays for that service, so it could be another revenue stream for Stem.

Glauthier says the company has installed just 10 systems so far, but they have 150 more orders in the works. And once they reach a critical mass, they will be able to control all the batteries they install from one central location.

“It’s taken us four and a half years to get here, and I think there’s another three to four years to go before we’re really blowing the doors off,” Glauthier says.

And they do have competition, including Tesla Motors, which has teamed up with a solar energy company to get into this business as well.

The race is not simply to refine battery technology, but to invent business models that will make energy storage practical.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

California is regarded as the leading state when it comes to addressing climate change. But in 2012, according to analysts at Rhodium Group, California’s carbon emissions actually increased more than 10 percent, bucking the national trend of decreases. That’s in large part because California shut down one of its few remaining nuclear power plants.

That rise in carbon emissions underscores the huge impact nuclear power can have in efforts to combat climate change.

Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, cites the shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station as he explains why he has reluctantly shifted from being an anti-nuclear activist to someone who now argues that we can’t afford to dismiss nuclear power.

Cohen says authorities did the right thing when they shut down the troubled and aging nuclear plant near San Diego. But he’s not happy to see California lose a major source of low-carbon energy.

“San Onofre produced as much carbon-free energy as all the wind power installed in California to date,” Cohen says. “So it’s going to be a pretty heavy lift to replace all that nuclear with low-carbon energy.”

As a lawyer in the 1980s, Cohen fought against the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. But he has since become a grudging proponent of nuclear power, as he looks at the world from a perspective of trying to stop global warming.

The world’s demand for energy is likely to double or triple in the next few decades. And while wind and solar power should be expanded as fast as they can, Cohen says, he is just plain worried about how quickly they can grow from their niche status today. It’s a question of scale.

“If you drive by the San Onofre site, you see two cooling towers sitting on a few acres of property,” Cohen says. “Think about that and think about the tens of thousands of wind turbines that equal that same amount of energy. And then you get what I’m talking about, associated with the scalability problems [of] renewable energy.”

Cohen points to a recent study that looked at what it would take for California to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050. It concluded that renewable sources are an important element; but the demand is vast if the state is to convert all its vehicles and the heating of homes from fossil fuels to clean electric energy. A state-funded study by the California Council on Science and Technology concludes that nuclear power would also need to be a big part of the state’s response — providing one-third to two-thirds of the energy.

“I think you can do it all with renewable energy,” says Jane Long, who co-authored that study. “[But] just how long will it take? Can you do it by 2050?”

Her study found renewables couldn’t meet that deadline, but nuclear power could. That would require bringing the nuclear industry back to its once-rapid pace of construction — building a nuclear plant every year, starting in 2020.

Right now that idea isn’t just unpopular; it’s downright illegal in California. The state has banned new nuclear plants until there’s a permanent home for the waste.

And Mark Jacobson at Stanford University says that’s a very good thing. He argues that the nuclear discussion is a distraction from a much better solution: an all-in effort to expand wind and solar — and a few other sources of renewable energy.

“It’s cleaner to go wind and solar,” he says. “You can put it up faster. There’s a larger abundance of it. There’s the potential to power the world many times over. And the costs are coming down – whereas nuclear costs are going up.”

Nuclear plants take a decade or two to plan and build, so Jacobson doesn’t see nuclear as a speedy solution at all. And, he says, there are problems of scale.

“If you wanted to power the entire world on nuclear, you’d need about 17,000 large nuclear power plants, each 850 megawatts,” Jacobson says. “And we only have 400 today.”

Jacobson authored a study that charts a path to a future that relies 100 percent on renewable energy. There are about a dozen studies that conclude that would be possible. But, there are other studies – like Jane Long’s – arguing the opposite. Jacobson has no doubt about his conclusions.

“I’m absolutely sure we can do it,” he says. “It’s a question of whether we want to do it and whether we will do it.”

Armond Cohen says nobody should be that confident about what it would take to convert the world to clean energy supplies.

A future that relies only on renewable sources of energy, “may be possible,” he says, “but it’s not something you want to bet the planet on.

Cohen acknowledges the risk of a nuclear accident, and the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But he’s also looking ahead to a world likely to be transformed by global warming, over the course of this century — possibly catastrophically.

“Unfortunately we’re in a world of ‘choose your poison,’ ” Cohen says.

There’s some logic to hedging our bets by building new nuclear reactors now, he says. In fact, China has 30 advanced Westinghouse units under construction. And he says there’s logic to pressing forward on a new generation of reactors with more safety features.

“I can tell you it wasn’t easy for me – who, as a lawyer back in the ’80s, started my career fighting nuclear power — to come around to the view that it actually may be one of the things in the portfolio that may be necessary to save us,” Cohen says. “But that’s where the facts lead you.”

In the end, the biggest issue is not trying to decide how much nuclear energy needs to be in the mix. The biggest issue, Cohen and Jacobson agree, is motivating governments to take on the enormous challenge of phasing out cheap and abundant fossil fuels – and building a cleaner energy supply for the planet.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Giant batteries are coming to a power grid near you. In fact, they’re already starting to appear on the grid in California.

That’s because California is planning to rely increasingly on power supplies that aren’t necessarily available every minute of every day. The state plans to get one-third of its electricity from wind and solar energy by 2020.

Utilities in the state are trying to figure out how they can cope with that uncertain power supply. Batteries aren’t a panacea, but they could help.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is already starting to figure out how to make the most of batteries with a test at its Vaca-Dixon substation, near the Northern California town of Vacaville.

“Unfortunately there are no dancing bears, no mice running on wheels, so it’s not that exciting,” jokes PG&E’s Dave Fribush, as he leads us to two gray cabinets the size of moving vans.

Inside is enough battery power to store the amount of energy that two large wind turbines generate over the course of seven hours. It’s only a small fraction of California’s energy need, but it’s part of a bigger experiment that the California Public Utilities Commission has launched. The commission has called for hundreds of batteries of this scale to be connected to the grid over the next seven years, with a potential price tag of $5 billion.

Here’s the catch. Nobody really knows how the batteries can best smooth out the irregular power supply from wind and solar power.

“There are many possible different uses for a battery on an electric grid,” says Todd Strauss, Senior Director for Energy Policy Planning and Analysis at PG&E. “And the question becomes, how does it get used in practice in those different ways? What are the relative costs of actually using a battery in those different ways?”

Looking at the batteries looming over us, Strauss adds, “This is one attempt to try to get some sense of that.”

You can think of a fully charged battery as a source of energy, ready to sell its product to the electric grid, just the way a power plant does. For that to work, battery owners would need to buy electricity to charge the battery when the price is low, and then sell that electricity back to the grid when the price is high.

But that idea turns out to be a dud.

“I think in the hour we did it the battery made nine dollars,” say Fribush, who manages battery storage integration at PG&E. “So we have a long way to go. We’re not even making (San Francisco’s) minimum wage with the system yet!”

That’s partly because batteries aren’t very efficient. Batteries waste about 25 percent of the energy in the process of being charged and discharged. These sodium-sulfur batteries need to be heated to 600 degrees Fahrenheit to work.

Considering this battery setup cost $10 million, they need to find a more valuable use of its time.

Strauss expects batteries could be useful in keeping the overall electric grid reliable — and the grid operators will pay for that service, too. Electricity supply needs to match electricity demand second by second, and batteries can provide some of that essential fine-tuning.

“So there’s no doubt,” Strauss says, “that as we get more renewables — particularly more wind, and especially more solar photovoltaics — on the system, there needs to be a lot more flexibility on the system.” Power supply and demand will need to be adjusted — hour by hour, as well as minute by minute — to deal with passing clouds and fickle winds.

And batteries can’t fill in if the wind stops blowing for days or weeks, as sometimes happens. Instead, PG&E will fall back on its gas-fired power plants during those stretches, or it might import more energy from out-of-state.

“And also we’d look to the customer side,” Strauss says.

Industrial customers can sometimes scale back their power demands. And – maybe, someday — home appliances will be able to reduce their power consumption automatically when supply is lean.

Batteries aren’t the only storage option for short-term needs. PG&E owns two reservoirs in the High Sierra that are connected to one another. When there’s abundant power on the grid, the utility pumps water uphill. And when the demand for power rises, they can let the water flow through turbines to generate electricity.

Utilities are also experimenting with flywheels as a way to store energy. And PG&E is thinking about pumping compressed air into underground caverns. They can then release that pressurized air to power a turbine. And thermal solar energy is a method of storing energy in the form of heat — molten salt.

Strauss says they have lots of choices. “It all seems technologically possible,” he says, “but at the end of the day the question is, ‘What will it cost?’ “

Batteries will find some role, but they are still very expensive. Strauss says for batteries to succeed, the technology needs the kind of revolution that brought down the price of solar panels by about 75 percent over the past decade.

“If we get that for batteries, terrific,” he says. “If battery costs remain what they are today, that’s not so good and we’re likely to look for different kinds of technology.”

And there’s not much time to figure this out. Utilities like PG&E are preparing for a huge surge of on-and-off power supplies in the next six years, as California’s wind and solar industries ramp up to meet the state’s 2020 renewable energy goal.

The lessons learned in California can inform the decisions of many other states, as they ponder how to deploy their own renewable energy resources.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The 2013 election marked a victory for foes of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Colorado. Voters in three Front Range communities decided to put limits on the practice.

Next week, the north Denver suburb of Broomfield will launch a closely watched vote recount on a proposed moratorium there.

Oil and gas companies say the measures create an uncertain business environment.

During its original vote count, Broomfield felt more like Miami-Dade County circa 2000 than a sleepy Denver suburb. About two dozen lawyers and other observers invested in the outcome of the proposed five-year fracking moratorium crowded into a windowless room.

Among them was Laura Fronckiewicz, head of the anti-fracking group Our Broomfield.

“There are other counties and other cities along the Front Range that have been planning for this for the last year,” says Fronckiewicz. “We really threw this together in a couple months … out of total concern about what’s going on. We couldn’t wait.”

But they’ll have to wait a bit longer, because the closeness of the vote triggered an automatic recount.

That adds up to a lot of uncertainty for Sovereign Operating Co., which has plans to drill 31 new wells in Broomfield.

“It would shut down future operations for new drilling, which is where all of our investment and our activity primarily are focused,” says Sovereign’s chairman and CEO, Thomas Metzger.

Metzger says losing access to the wells could translate into a loss of tens of millions of dollars. Earlier this year, he spent months negotiating an operating agreement with the city and county, which he says exceeds state and federal rules.

“Certainly, we are easily a year and a half to two years off our schedule, and its economic impact is very substantive,” Metzger says.

Tisha Schuller, president of the industry trade group Colorado Oil and Gas Association, says that for some smaller companies, bans can have a “really significant impact.”

Sculler’s group is already engaged in a pending lawsuit over a 2012 voter-approved ban in another Colorado town.

Schuller says the association is weighing its legal options. But for now, overall production across the state will not be affected.

“The vast majority — 99.9 percent — of all wells in the state are still operating in areas unaffected,” Schuller says. “And so we’re going to continue to work to engage our communities.”

Hoping to build on momentum, some environmental groups have said they’re considering putting a statewide ban or moratorium on the 2014 ballot.

That’s unwelcome news for energy producer Encana Corp. Community Relations Director Doug Hock says this year, Encana revamped its strategy and workforce to have more of a Colorado focus.

“A decision has been made to have a presence here in Denver and in Colorado,” Hock says. “And when you have these types of initiatives being bandied about — again — it doesn’t create a good business climate.”

Other companies are feeling the same pressure.

“There’s been a lot of talk recently about changing the conversation, of really changing the dialogue that’s been happening between the industry and our stakeholders,” says Robin Olsen, who handles external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the second largest operator in the region.

She says part of the engagement will take place through a media campaign Anadarko launched through a nonprofit 501(c)(6) organization created before the election, called Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development, or CRED.

“This is how the voters in the those four communities have told us they feel,” says Olsen. “How can we take that feedback, how can we take that, learn from it, and be better stewards of our environment?”

Olsen says Anadarko is committed to making a “significant” investment in CRED in the coming years.

That means Coloradans won’t be done hearing about hydraulic fracturing any time soon.

Copyright 2013 KUNC-FM. To see more, visit http://kunc.org.