Looks like California utility PG&E is finally giving up on wave power, for the time being. PG&E’s renewable energy spokesman Denny Boyles tells KQED’s Climate Watch, that the company has essentially abandoned any wave power projects it had been researching, including pilot projects and permits for three areas along the California coast.
It’s not all that shocking. Despite many companies’ best efforts, wave and tidal power installations have been largely stuck in the pilot stage, and bigger projects in particular have faced technical glitches and a lack of funding. According to research done by Black and Veatch (B&V) for the California Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) last year, ocean power — both wave and tidal — have one of the highest levelized costs of energy (the cost over the life of the system) out of all the clean energy generation options out there (see graph).
Four years ago, PG&E agreed to buy energy from a wave power project that was going to be built by Finavera, and was slated to become the country’s first commercial wave power project. However state commissioners with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) decided the technology was too new and the prices too high for a viable project, and approval for the energy procurement contract was denied.
PG&E also scrapped a plan last year to build a 5-MW pilot wave project off the Humboldt County cost in northern California, after finding the project was just too expensive. PG&E had estimated it would cost $50 million just to cover the expenses of installing the infrastructure for the power transmission, monitoring and other equipment. The figure didn’t include the cost of the equipment for converting the wave motion into energy. PG&E also abandoned a plan to build another pilot project off the cost of Mendocino County in Northern California in 2009.
The now-lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom (formerly San Francisco Mayor) has long been calling for a wave project off the California coast in the 2012-2013 time frame. In 2009, San Francisco submitted its own preliminary application to federal regulators for a permit to develop a 10 MW-30 MW project with potential to generate up to 100 MW. For comparison, the PG&E-Finavera deal that the regulators shot down was for just 2 MW.
CNet reports that customer complaints about PG&E's smart meters turned out to be well founded in some cases, with a significant number of meters examined being faulty - PG&E admits to flaws in some smart meters. Hopefully confidence in the meters can be restored quickly and the bad smart grid publicity slowly undone.
California utility Pacific Gas & Electric has released a report acknowledging that thousands of its smart meters have had technical problems and that its customer service has been insufficient.
The company has been the source of ire by customers in California who have complained that their utility bills went up after the two-way digital meters were installed. More than 5 million meters have been installed since 2007.
Prompted by customer complaints over billing accuracy, California regulators ordered PG&E to provide details of its smart-meter program.
On Monday, the utility released four years' worth of project management reports (PDF) and the results of a review that identified "issues" related to wireless communication, data storage, meter installation, and accuracy.
"We've let some of our customers down with the quality of customer service they received. While 99 percent of our SmartMeter devices are installed and working properly, we recognize that even having less than 1 percent of meters with issues is still 50,000 customers, and that's too many," Helen Burt, PG&E senior vice president and chief customer officer, said in a statement.
Burt noted that the 99 percent billing accuracy is better than traditional meters and that smart meters provide more details.
At a press conference Monday, company executives said the number of problems related to inaccurate bills could be as high as 23,000, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.
For fun summer beach reading I don’t recommend the 700 page report that PG&E released this week (as ordered by the state regulator the California Public Utilities Commission). Chock full of endless installation graphs, budget details, risk tables and status reports, the report unveils data about the utility’s smart meter deployments over the past three years. Not exactly Game Change.
But the report does offer a smart-grid-brand of high drama, painting a sweeping picture of a utility racing to install millions of smart meters in a short period of time, while facing potential budget overruns, and at the mercy of its vendors. As PG&E acknowledged in its press conference this week (and also said at our Green:Net conference on April 29), the utility responded to these forces for a long time by looking at its smart meter project entirely as an infrastructure play. It was largely only when the press started to report on negative customer reaction that they substantially beefed up customer outreach efforts.
If you haven’t been following the backlash in select locations over smart meters, basically a handful of customers are complaining that recently installed smart meters are responsible for unfair higher bills. The consternation has even resulted in a lawsuit in Bakersfield (PG&E’s territory) as well as one in Dallas (Oncor’s territory). While specific tech problems can easily be dealt with, the greater issue is a lack of customer outreach and an inability of utilities to adequately explain the benefits of smart meters to customers.
PG&E’s contact center received its first customer complaint related to a meter exchange all the way back in June of 2007 (Page 150 of the report). Just a month prior to that, PG&E decided to cancel “the requirement of sending letters to customers in advance of impending installs,” (Page 134). However, several months later, PG&E took one of the only proactive (albeit it minimal) customer outreach moves in this saga and decided in January 2008 (Page 260): “To minimize incidents in the field the team is going to begin sending out pre-deployment letters to both gas and electric customers.” PG&E estimated at the time that giving customers a heads up in this way would cost $495,000.
In mid-2007 PG&E was only installing around 1,000 smart meters per day. But by the end of 2007, it had ramped up to 2,250 smart meter installations per day (Page 185). And by the middle of 2008 (Page 408) PG&E’s daily average smart meter installs bumped up to 10,000 per day.
Drawing power from the churning sea can seem as difficult as finding Kraken the mythical sea monster. Despite tales of successful trials and imminent commercialization, the wave power industry remains largely in the research and development stages. But a utility-backed project in California could help propel this class of technology into a reliable supply of energy.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) recently filed a federal application to build a 5-megawatt (MW) project about three miles off the coast of Humboldt County in Northern California. The utility plans to select three to four wave energy converter device makers for the 5-year project, which PG&E considers a pilot effort to test different types of technologies, said Jana Morris, a PG&E spokeswoman. (See list of companies that responded to PG&E's Wave Energy Converter System Request for Information (RFI) here.)
“Studying wave energy is important for California’s future,” Morris said. “Renewable and clean energy is not only what our customers want but it’s the [best] thing for the environment.”
The utility’s involvement is a big boost for wave power technology developers, many of whom have struggled to overcome technical problems or raise enough capital for their projects. Scotland-based Pelamis Wave Power suffered a major setback when its devices stopped working off the coast of Portugal in late 2008, and the company saw the departure of its CEO last year. Canada-based Finavera Renewables surrendered its federal license to build a project off the state of Washington last year, citing a difficulty in finding financing.
Finavera’s license has been the only license issued by FERC, according to the agency’s website. FERC has issued 10 permits for studying the feasibility of building wave power farms in the country, all of them located in the Pacific Ocean. The agency has one pending permit application for a project off Oregon’s coast.
PG&E’s effort is “a wonderful thing for the industry because they are leading the way to get all the permits and regulatory approval to get that done. That's a daunting task,” said Bill Staby, CEO of Resolute Marine Energy, a Massachusetts-based startup.
PG&E has long showed a strong interest in wave power and at one point was poised to buy this type of electricity from what would've been the first wave energy project in California. The project, also proposed by Finavera, sank when the California Public Utilities Commission said no to the power purchase agreement in October 2008. The CPUC said the technology was too unproven and costly.
Since then, PG&E has stepped up efforts to explore wave power projects on its own. It has $1.2 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and $4.8 million in approved spending from the CPUC to take two projects through the regulatory processes, Morris said.
Aside from the Humboldt project, PG&E also is looking at developing a wave farm off Santa Barbara. The utility filed for a FERC permit last December to conduct a feasibility study and see if it's suitable for a project up to 100 MW in generation capacity.
Obtaining the license for the Humboldt project won’t be a breeze, however. The utility still has to carry out an environmental study to figure out what monitoring and other measures are necessary to protect the marine resources. PG&E also is facing opposition from some of the local fishermen who have hired an attorney to negotiate compensations for financial losses that might be incurred by the wave farm operation.
How Much Will It Cost?
What PG&E and the tech developers it picks also will have to figure out are the costs of constructing and operating a 5-MW wave energy power station. PG&E estimates that it would need to spend $50 million just to cover the expenses of installing the infrastructure for power transmission, monitoring and other equipment, according to its FERC application. The figure doesn’t include the cost of the wave energy converters, which make use of the wave motion to run a motor that in turn drives a turbine for electricity generation.
The operation and maintenance cost of the project is likely to be $5 million annually, though this figure excludes the cost of carrying out environmental protection measures, the filing said. The utility is still figuring out what those measures should be.
Company executives and analysts say wave power won’t be cheap without large-scale deployment, but it could be competitive against other types of renewable energy. Waves have higher energy density compared to other renewable sources such as wind, so a wave power farm could produce more electricity more consistently and with a smaller footprint, said Paul Jacobson, the ocean energy leader and senior project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
Estimates for the cost of producing wave power range widely. A 2007 study by EPRI shows that a wave power farm in the United States that could generate 300,000 MWH per year is likely to see production costs of range from roughly $0.11-$0.39 per kWh, depending on its location.
The Carbon Trust has pegged the production cost at about 22-25 pence [US $0.34-0.38] per kWh.
The industry also uses government-set wave power feed-in tariffs (FITs) as benchmarks, said Derek Robertson, head of the U.S. operations of Wavebob, based in Ireland. Several European countries have FITs for wave power. Ireland, for one, is requiring utilities to pay 22 euro cents [US $ 0.29] per kWh, Robertson said.
Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain, are offering FITs of up to US $0.34/kWh.
Israel-bases SDE claims that its systems could produce power for much less than those figures. In late April, the company completed construction of a 1-MW wave power plant off the coast of China, the first commercial project for the company, according to Inna Braverman, SDE’s international marketing manager.
The project, located off the coast of Dong Ping in the Guangzhou Province, cost $650,000, to build, she said. The electricity generation cost would reach merely US $0.02 per kWh said Braverman, who declined to disclose the financial arrangements of the project or the materials used to build the equipment.
“Our system is very simple and easy to implement and it’s fully automated,” she said.
San Francisco's Pacific Gas & Electric said today it filed a filed a preliminary permit application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for a three-year study of a potential wave power site with a capacity of up to 100 megawatts off the coast of northern Santa Barbara County.
If the study is successful, the utility proposes the installation of wave energy conversion devices that would feed into the electrical grid at Vandenberg Air Force Base. PG&E said it already signed an agreement with the U.S. Air Force to allow it to conduct the study.
PG&E has received approval from FERC to conduct environmental studies of a potential wave power site off the coast of Humboldt County. The utility says it plans to give a maximum of four wave energy converter (WEC) manufacturers the chance to test their devices.
The five-year trial is expected to be installed in fall 2013.
A push by California's electricity provider to modernize its power grid is turning into a public relations disaster, as allegations mount that it's responsible for stratospheric overcharges.
At issue are the 10 million smart meters Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, is rolling out to customers throughout the state. The digital meters, unlike the analog devices they're replacing, provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power stations that serve them. That eliminates the need for meter readers to visit each customer to know how much power has been consumed. ...
PG&E, and the providers of the smart meter gear take strong exception to those claims.
"The manufacturers test and certify the meters before they leave the factory," said PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno. "We also do some testing of meters upon arrival, and when meters are deployed in the field, before we convert the billing, we also check usage reads to ensure they're consistent with a customer's historic usage."
Once the complaints started rolling in, PG&E began paying visits to angry customers to test their meters. So far, it has tested more than 1,100 of them and none has been found faulty, he said.
Moreno said customers' bills are rising not as a result of the new meters, but because of recent rate increases and a hotter-than-normal summer, which has driven up air-conditioning costs.
Landis+Gyr and Silver Spring Networks, two of the companies providing technology for the smart meters, also insist their gear has been rigorously tested. Among other criteria, the equipment must pass accuracy and performance muster spelled out in in ANSI C12.20, they say.
"The system itself is working exactly as intended," said Eric Dresselhuys, an executive vice president for Silver Spring. "The accuracy of the meters and the accuracy of the system in total is excellent."
Erfan Ibrahim, a technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, also argues that the meters are accurate.
"If the accuracy was in question, all the meters would be showing errors because it would be a structural issue," he said. To date, the complaints amount to a tiny fraction of the people using them.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced yesterday that it has entered into a series of contracts with BrightSource Energy, Inc. for a record total of 1,310 megawatts (MW) of solar thermal power. These power purchase agreements, covering seven projects, supersede the agreements PG&E executed with BrightSource in April 2008 for up to 900 MW of solar thermal power.
The first of these solar power plants, sized at 110 MW and located in Ivanpah, California, is contracted to begin operation in 2012. BrightSource says it will build andl operatate each of its plants as quickly as permitting and infrastructure allow.
Yesterday's announcement of the record solar deal between PG&E and BrightSource Energy was a major endorsement of the future of clean, renewable solar power in California. But it's important to remember that word "future." Solar is coming on so fast, we sometimes forget how small it still is.
The latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show solar contributing just 0.08 percent of all energy (electric, thermal and other) consumed in the United States in 2007.
For 2008, EIA estimates the total amount of solar electricity generation capacity at 1,200 megawatts (MW), compared to 25,000 MW for wind and just under 1,000,000 MW from all sources. In other words, solar represents just 0.12% of U.S. generation capacity.
Finally, the contribution of solar to actual power output--taking into account that solar facilities don't create power at night--was only 2 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), compared to 53 billion kWh for wind. Total retail electricity sales in the United States were about 3,800 billion kWh. By my calculation, solar represented only 0.05 percent of the total. sunpowerinstallationspain.jpg
So think of solar as a small acorn that's just sprouted. The Solar Electric Industries Association reports that the United States added 292 MW of solar photovoltaic capacity to the electric grid last year. That represents an 81 percent increase over the capacity added in 2007, an accelerating growth rate relative to previous years.
And there's lots more capacity in the pipeline. PG&E alone has contracts for more than 2,000 MW of solar power, nearly double the entire installed capacity of grid-connected solar in the United States today.
The trade journal PHOTON International reported in March that a staggering total of about 83,000 MW of new solar capacity is in "various stages of product development in North America . . . roughly equal to the current summer peak demand for electricity in California, Arizona and Nevada."
However, one of the unsettling facts the journal also noted was that the land requirements for all that capacity could be "nearly as large as the US state of Rhode Island."
You can bet that the future of the solar power industry will depend as much on its skill and wisdom in negotiating land-use agreements as it will on continuing to improve the price-performance of its technology.
First Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) today announced it reduced its manufacturing cost for solar modules in the fourth quarter to 98 cents per watt, breaking the $1 per watt price barrier.
“This achievement marks a milestone in the solar industry’s evolution toward providing truly sustainable energy solutions,” said Mike Ahearn, First Solar chief executive officer. “First Solar is proud to be leading the way toward clean, affordable solar electricity as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.”
First Solar began full commercial operation of its initial manufacturing line in late 2004. From 2004 through today, manufacturing capacity has grown 2,500 percent to more than 500 megawatts in 2008. First Solar’s annual production capacity will double in 2009 to more than 1 gigawatt, the equivalent of an average-sized nuclear power plant. These escalating volumes have been accompanied by a rapid reduction in manufacturing costs. From 2004 through today, First Solar’s manufacturing costs have declined two-thirds from over $3 per watt to less than $1 per watt. First Solar is confident that further significant cost reductions are possible based on the yet untapped potential of its technology and manufacturing process.
Sempra Generation says it’s building the biggest—and cheapest—solar power plant in the U.S. And it’s not even looking to outer space to do so.
The San Diego-based Sempra announced a 48-megawatt addition to its existing 10-megawatt thin-film solar-power installation near Las Vegas. It’s part of Sempra’s push into renewable energy, especially solar and wind power. That will include “in excess of 300 megawatts” of solar power near Sempra’s existing power plant in Arizona, said chief executive Mike Allman in an interview.
Proximity to existing power plants is key, the utility says. The 58-megawatt Nevada installation, using thin-film solar panels made by Tempe-based First Solar, piggybacks on an existing natural gas-fired plant.
That gives Sempra “the lowest-cost solar ever delivered…nobody can hold a candle to our costs,” Mr. Allman says. That’s partly because there’s no need to secure permission or financing for new power lines. Solar power also provides the most power during the afternoon, right during times of peak demand for electricity.
That said, the economics of Sempra’s thin-film installations aren’t quite as rosy as some have speculated, with never-confirmed analyst cost estimates as low as 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour. “It’s more than double that,” Mr. Allman said. The national average for all electricity is about 9 cents a kilowatt hour.
The planned expansion of the El Dorado plant in Nevada is also conditional on Sempra finding a utility willing to buy the electricity; the first 10 megawatts were contracted to Pacific Gas & Electric. Mr. Allman said Sempra is looking at buyers in California, Arizona, and Nevada—all states that have renewable-energy requirements forcing utilities to get a certain portion of their power from clean energy.
And they are scrambling. PG&E just announced a plan to get solar power from space, in part to meet its renewable-energy targets. Mr. Allman says the El Dorado expansion shows earth-based solar power still has a future, too. “It’s a vote of confidence in centralized, desert, large-scale solar infrastructure,” he said.
A new 53MW solar power plant near the German city of Cottbus, could well be unique and come to represent the explosive growth of thin film solar leader, First Solar, Inc in years to come. 700,000 modules will be required for the project, which would become the largest in Germany. The project is being organised by First Solar and Juwi Holding AG, having secured funding from a consortium of banks, with 162 hectares of land leased from the State of Brandenburg on very attractive terms. This was due to the site being a former Soviet Union Army training camp that is ‘littered’ with land mines, grenades and other munitions, according to a joint statement from the project developers.
“First Solar’s mission is to enable a world powered by clean, affordable solar electricity,” said Stephan Hansen, Managing Director, First Solar GmbH. “This project alone is expected to displace approximately 35,000 tons of C02 emissions a year. But we are particularly proud of this project because it adds an additional element to ‘clean.’ Not only will the project produce clean electricity, but it will also result in the removal of hazardous munitions from this project site.”
Matthias Willenbacher, Juwi Chief Executive, said, “Large projects like this one demonstrate that solar power is already capable of making significant contributions to addressing climate change. With this project, Juwi, using First Solar modules, has developed the three largest PV power plants in Germany.”
The significant scale of the project, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2009, could enable economies of scale yet to be seen in the solar industry. According to the partners, construction of the project began in January 2009, and the first 15MW have already been installed.
Californian utility PG&E caused a stir in the media recently with an announcement that they are seeking approval from state regulators for a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp. to deliver 200 MW of power by 2016 for a 15 year period.
Californian utilities have been signing deals with a wide range of renewable energy providers in recent years in order to meet the state's mandated clean energy targets - the unusual aspect of this announcement is that Solaren is proposing to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County where it will be fed into the grid.
PG&E's Next 100 blog has an interview with Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak, in which he claims that while this will be the world's first SSP plant, and no system of this scale and exact configuration has been built before, the "underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology".
PG&E has promised to buy the power at an agreed-upon rate (comparable to the rate specified in other agreements for renewable-energy purchases) according to company spokesman Jonathan Marshall, however neither PG&E nor Solaren are saying what that rate is. PG&E is not making an up-front investment in Solaren's venture.
PG&E's interest in this sort of ambitious project is prompted by California's mandates to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020.
The benefits of space based solar power
If Solaren (or other companies pursuing similar ambitions, such as Heliosat, Space Energy, Space Island Group, Powersat and the Welsom Space Consortium) can collect solar energy in space and transmit it to earth they will have opened up a significant new energy resource. The sun's energy is almost continuously available to a satellite located in a geosynchronous orbit about the earth (leading promoters of space based solar power schemes to dub it "baseload solar power").
A 2007 study by the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office which included representatives from DOE/NREL, DARPA, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin found that a one-kilometer-wide band of space in earth orbit receives enough solar energy in just one year (approximately 212 terawatt-years) nearly equal to “the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today” (approximately 250 TW-yrs). The Pentagon study suggested such a system could be tested as early as 2012, with the likely first customer being the US military.
There are a number of key advantages that make space based solar power an interesting alternative to ground-based solar power:
There is more energy to be collected - the sun is more intense in earth orbit than on the surface of the Earth
Space based systems can collect energy almost around the clock
Ground-based systems suffer from weather phenomena such as clouds, precipitation, and dust - space based system do not (though the increasing amount of junk in orbit poses a similar hazard)
Real estate costs are minimal - the only land that need be acquired is the land for the receiving station.
Transmission line costs are greatly reduced compared to remote generation facilities if the ground station is located near existing transmission lines
The video below is from the National Space Society, showing what a space based solar plant might look like.
Challenges
There are 2 primary challenges to making space based solar a reality.
The first is the technological challenge of making a scheme like this work - this is not been so much converting solar energy into radio frequencies (which has been done before, though not on Solaren’s scale) - but in getting a supersized solar array into space and successfully commissioning it.
The second challenge is one of economics - can the cost involved in building a solar power plant in space ever be competitive with ground based concentrating solar thermal, regular solar PV or thin film solar power plants.
Plans for space based solar have traditionally included kilometre long structures of solar arrays connected to satellites, and launching thousands of tons of heavy metal into orbit is exorbitantly expensive.
Solaren's Spirnak says he has a solution - “We want to take the weight out of these systems. We came up with this design concept to break these things into pieces instead of trying to construct many, many kilometers of structures in orbit, which would essentially be unbuildable.”
Instead, his station will consist of two to four components that will float free in space (kept in alignment by software controls and small booster rockets rather than heavy wires, cables and struts). According to Solaren’s patent, an inflatable Mylar mirror a kilometer in diameter will collect and concentrate sunlight on a smaller mirror that will focus the rays on the solar array. By adopting a concentrating solar power approach, a smaller and lighter array can be deployed, reducing the cost of lifting the components of the structure into orbit.
At this point there is little information about cost available for Solaren's proposal, though Grist quotes Spirnak as saying the price tag for the 200-megawatt solar power station for PG&E will be “in the several billion dollar range” and will require 4 or 5 rocket launches.
History
The concept of space based solar power was first proposed in 1941 by science fiction author Isaac Asimov in his book “Reason,” about a space station that collects solar energy and beams it to Earth.
Wikipedia's article on the topic includes a good timeline of developments in the field, noting that Dr Peter Glaser was granted a US patent in 1973 for his "method of transmitting power over long distances (eg, from an SPS to the Earth's surface) using microwaves from a very large (up to one square kilometer) antenna on the satellite to a much larger one on the ground, now known as a rectenna".
Asimov continued to promote the idea throughout his life, with this talk (part 1, part 2) on "Threats To Humanity", delivered to The Humanist Institute In New York in 1989, in which he described the threats of global warming and fossil fuel depletion, and recommended the solution as space based solar power whose delivery is managed by a federal world government / "stable world order".
Another peak oil observer who has regularly promoted the idea of space based solar power is JD at Peak Oil Debunked, who has looked at the idea of solar power plants based on the moon a number of times (Lunar Solar Power, More on Lunar Solar Power).
Skepticism
Another space based energy panacea, using helium 3 from the moon to fuel fusion reactors, has caused some cynics to mutter that this is just a scheme to funnel large amounts of funds to well connected aerospace companies. I suspect that similar charges will be laid against spaced based solar power plans until the economics of them can be proven to match those of terrestrial renewable energy projects.
The authors of the Pentagon report mentioned earlier noted that space based solar “has the potential to be a disruptive game changer on the battlefield ... [enabling] entirely new force structures and capabilities such as ultra long endurance airborne or terrestrial surveillance or combat systems” - which implies that there might be more than one reason for wanting to deploy space based solar power - like the symbiosis between nuclear weapons development and the nuclear power industry, it may be that space based solar power provides a civilian friendly reason for building 'star wars" type platforms in space.
Cryptogon has some speculation along these lines, and goes on to wonder if this is another possible example of the introduction of technology developed in "black" military projects (there is a section in my "Shockwave Rider" review that talks about the 5000 secret patents registered by the USPTO) into the civilian sector (echoing his speculation about the role of the new GM CEO appointed by the Obama administration).
Another skeptic commenting on the Solaren proposal at Peak Energy wondered cynically if this was a form of greenwashing by PG&E, saying "This is an opportunity for PG&E to get some free green publicity and "demonstrate" their interest in meeting their RPS requirements. When the power doesn't appear in 2016, they can just throw up their hands and say "we tried, not our fault"."
Most skeptics focus purely on the economics though, with the Motley Fool declaring Space-Based Solar? That's Just Silly and Energy & Capital asking "Why would anyone be interested in space-based solar power when commercial utility scale solar technology on the ground today costs 0.3% of its price?" in The Solar Race Will Be Lost in Space.
California's renewable energy outlook caught a rising tide today as the California Public Utilities Commission approved $4.8 million in funding for a major program to develop and demonstrate emerging wave power technology.
The study, called WaveConnect, will be led by PG&E off the coast of Mendocino and Humboldt counties. The program will receive an additional $1.2 million from the Department of Energy.
PG&E's first step will be to conduct meetings with local stakeholders and agencies to learn about their issues and concerns. After completing appropriate environmental reviews and permit applications, which could take a couple of years, PG&E then plans to build an undersea infrastructure, including power transmission cables, to support wave energy demonstration projects. The utility will then invite manufacturers of wave energy devices to install them offshore for testing and comparison.
Ultimately, the demonstration will help promising technology companies find funding and guide PG&E (and other utilities) in choosing which wave power developers to partner with.
There are many different approaches to choose from. Some systems take their power from surface waves, others from pressure changes below the surface. Some bob up and down with the waves, others let waves wash over them. Some even rest on the sea floor. WaveConnect will help sort out the technology whales from the minnows.
"The anticipated cost of wave power compares favorably to the early days of solar and wind," says William Toman, a renewable energy project manager at PG&E. "It will take several stages of design evolution to lower costs and increase reliability."
Last October, the CPUC rejected a 15-year contract signed by PG&E to purchase 2 megawatts of wave power from Finavera Renewables. The commission said the power was too expensive and the technology too experimental for prime time. (Finavera has since refocused on the development of wind energy in Canada and Ireland.)
But many experts believe wave power remains a highly promising new source of energy for California. Our 745-mile coastline could produce more than a fifth of the state's energy needs if--admittedly a big if--economic, environmental, land use and grid connection issues don't stand in the way, according to the California Energy Commission.
Making ocean power technology work reliably and at a competitive price will be the first big challenge. Serving offshore installations with power transmission lines will be another economic and engineering hurdle. Finally, ocean power developers must also convince local communities and government regulators that their installations will not destroy marine life, cause boating collisions or navigational hazards, or degrade ocean views.
Posts
