EDF, Southern California Public Power Authority Enter 20-Year PPA Tied to Solar Project
March 23, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
March 23, 2023
EDF Renewables North America on March 21 announced a 20-year power purchase agreement with Southern California Public Power Authority for the energy and renewable attributes from the 117-megawatt Sapphire Solar project.
Sapphire Solar is guaranteed to begin delivery of energy to SCPPA’s participating members, Anaheim, Pasadena and Vernon, by December 31, 2026. Along with the solar production, SCPPA reserves the option to a four-hour battery energy storage system. Sapphire Solar will be located in Riverside County on private land.
In early 2021, EDF Renewables North America announced the completion and commercial operation of two solar projects, one of which is supplying energy and renewable attributes to SCPPA under a 25-year renewable energy credit plus index structure contract.
SCPPA is a Joint Powers Authority, created in 1980, for the purpose of providing joint planning, financing, construction, and operation of transmission and generation projects. Comprised of eleven municipal utilities and one irrigation district, SCPPA’s members serve more than 5 million Californians (2 million customers) across a service area of 7,000 square miles. SCPPA members supply 16% of California’s power.
Benefits of Distributed Wind Generation Detailed in Report
March 21, 2023
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
March 21, 2023
Despite a recent decline in installations, distributed wind energy generation can provide value and benefits for many communities, according to a new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which says its data can help guide communities value the benefits of distributed wind.
Even though small-wind-turbine manufacturers have seen increased interest in microgrids and hybrid systems that pair wind energy with other renewable energy sources, like solar panels and energy storage, newly distributed wind energy capacity dropped from about 22 megawatts in 2020 to 12 megawatts in 2021, according to national laboratory researchers.
The researchers partially attributed that decline to a lack of knowledge about distributed wind energy’s value in terms of economic benefits, grid services, reliability and resilience, and energy security. They noted, however, that a Department of Energy program can help fill some of those knowledge gaps.
In 2018, the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office began the Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad project to evaluate how communities could safely, effectively, and efficiently integrate wind energy into distribution, islanded, hybrid, or microgrid systems.
The program was a collaborative effort of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Idaho National Laboratory.
The researchers found that distributed wind energy generation can provide a variety of value streams, ranging from bulk energy services to societal impacts such as energy resilience and more cost-effective energy systems. The values depend on ownership, system configuration and whether the energy is distributed to individual homes or to the grid, the researchers said.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers designed a framework to estimate distributed wind energy’s actual value across a range of case studies and scenarios. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia members of the team examined advanced controls that can compensate for, or even forecast, changes in wind speeds to improve the wind turbine operations. Idaho National Laboratory researchers looked at how distributed wind energy could provide greater reliability and resilience to communities that experience extreme weather events and also evaluated the potential threat cyberattacks might pose to distributed wind energy systems.
The researchers found that coupling distributed wind energy with solar power and energy storage can enhance consistency in power generation. “Compared to solar power, distributed wind energy provides a different generation profile that can potentially serve customers better both on its own and in hybrid systems,” Caitlyn Clark, a researcher at National Renewable Energy Laboratory and lead investigator for the project, said in a statement.
Calif. Community Choice Aggregator Seeks Storage, Renewable Energy and Resource Adequacy Bids
March 20, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
March 20, 2023
California community choice aggregator MCE has issued a request for offers seeking energy storage, renewable and carbon-free energy and resource adequacy proposals.
MCE is seeking offers for renewable energy — including renewable energy paired with energy storage — and stand-alone energy storage. Additionally, MCE is seeking offers for firm block carbon free energy and resource adequacy.
Offers will be accepted between March 20 and April 14, 2023, and will be evaluated and shortlisted on a rolling basis.
Additional details on the RFO are available here.
Serving a 1,200-megawatt peak load, MCE provides electricity service and programs to more than 575,000 customer accounts and 1.5 million residents and businesses in 37 communities across four Bay Area counties: Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, and Solano.
The American Public Power Association has initiated a new category of membership for community choice aggregation programs.
DOE Expands Offshore Wind Transmission Program With West Coast Wind Study
February 28, 2023
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
February 28, 2023
The Department of Energy recently took another step in its effort to facilitate the development of transmission lines for wind farms in waters off the continental United States with the announcement of the West Coast Offshore Wind Transmission Study.
The announcement, by the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, calls for a 20-month study to detail transmission options to support offshore wind development in the Pacific Ocean along the U.S. West Coast.
The DOE said the study is part of a longer-term effort to convene meetings with state policymakers, local leaders, and private industry, and eventually report out key recommendations and an action plan for offshore wind transmission development on the West Coast.
The study is the first stemming from $100 million included within the Inflation Reduction Act for transmission planning and complements a DOE analysis in which the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reviewed 13 existing studies that evaluate offshore wind energy transmission through potential points of interconnection along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.
The analysis identifies gaps that industry needs to address to develop wind energy resources off the West Coast. The analysis also considers existing and emerging state policies and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) wind site lease activities, like the buoy study off the coast of California.
The DOE and BOEM are working together to support the Biden administration’s interagency goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and the future deployment of 110 GW or more by 2050 and beyond.
The West Coast wind study was one of several announcements by the DOE on February 22, including new investments aimed at securing U.S. leadership in floating offshore wind development. The DOE also announced that California has become the seventh state to join the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium, which will fund research and development projects that respond to critical, near-term offshore wind development priorities.
The Biden administration, through its Floating Offshore Wind Shot program, hopes to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind energy by more than 70 percent by 2035 and deploy 15 GW of floating offshore wind by 2035.
The DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office is already leading a two-year Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Study being conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and PNNL. The study will evaluate multiple pathways to reach offshore wind goals through coordinated transmission solutions along the Atlantic Coast under various generation mix and load futures in both the near and long term, 2030 and 2050, respectively.
The topologies and datasets derived from the study will identify benefits and shortcomings in production costs, system reliability, and resilience of specific transmission infrastructure concepts. DOE said those findings will fill research gaps and support timely and informed recommendations on offshore wind transmission strategies for the convening workshops, and offer feasible solutions that may benefit stakeholders in their planning processes.
DOE and BOEM said they plan to use the workshops and study to inform their development of a set of offshore wind transmission-focused recommendations and associated time-bound, regionally specific action plans for enabling solutions, starting with the Atlantic Coast.
PJM Interconnection to Produce Energy Certificates Hourly
February 27, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
February 27, 2023
PJM Environmental Information Services, Inc. will provide hourly, time-stamped certificates for PJM generation starting in March 2023, “answering the growing demand for procuring and tracking carbon-free energy around the clock,” PJM Interconnection said.
PJM Environmental Information Services, a subsidiary of PJM Interconnection, manages the Generation Attribute Tracking System (GATS).
GATS is a trading platform designed to meet the needs of buyers and sellers involved in the carbon-free energy market, from homeowners and aggregators to state and federal agencies and other market participants seeking to reduce their carbon footprint.
For both the electric utilities and generation suppliers, GATS helps meet state and federal environmental requirements associated with electric operations, such as renewable portfolio standard compliance and emissions disclosure.
Each certificate represents one megawatt-hour of electricity produced and includes generator location, emissions output, fuel source and date the generator went online.
Currently, GATS produces certificates based on how much energy a resource produces in a month. Now GATS becomes the first registry in the U.S. to produce hourly, time-stamped certificates to reflect not only where, but the hour and date when energy is produced.
“Advocates of the 24/7 clean-energy approach maintain that that hourly certificates can help electricity consumers, including large government and business customers, tailor their energy consumption to the availability of carbon-free energy at all hours of the day,” PJM said. “Such demand expressed through the market could also incentivize new carbon-free generation resources to serve the hours of the day when renewable energy production is currently lacking.”
TVA Study Will Examine Creating Pathways to Clean Energy Economy
February 23, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
February 23, 2023
The Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors on Feb. 16 announced plans to move forward with a study that will look at all segments of the economy to accelerate the region’s clean-energy economy.
Jeff Lyash, TVA president and CEO, said that the study — a partnership between the University of Tennessee’s Baker Center and TVA — is critical to help the region better define the pace of electrification and identify the connections between the power industry and all sectors of the economy to pinpoint ways that will allow for adoption of sustainable, carbon-free solutions.
Lyash noted that, after a decade of nearly flat load growth, TVA has experienced nearly 2.5% demand growth from 2020 to 2022. Southern states are the fastest-growing region in the nation, and Tennessee is among the states with the largest rate of population increase for the past year for the entire country. TVA’s service area is expected to exceed 10 million residents in the next Census Bureau report.
TVA anticipates adding 10,000-14,000 megawatts of new resources by the end of this decade to meet the growing power demand from both businesses and homeowners.
“We are aggressively investing in our system, more than $18 billion in capacity expansion and base capital, since 2014,” said Lyash in a statement. “In addition, we plan to continue these investments as we work to bring online about 3,800 megawatts of generation to create an energy system that is affordable, reliable, resilient, and clean. Those investments are now paying dividends to Valley families in terms of good jobs, lower power bills and cleaner air, and the Valley Pathways Study can help support our region’s economic competitiveness.”
With a 57% carbon reduction against the 2005 benchmark, coupled with no base rate increase since 2019, TVA noted that it has helped attract $2.7 billion of business additions and expansions, which is projected to create or retain more than 21,700 jobs, in the first fiscal quarter alone.
Over the past five years, those figures are much larger – 346,000 jobs and $47 billion of investment.
Silicon Valley Clean Energy Receives Wind Power Through 15-Year PPA
February 22, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
February 22, 2023
Under a 15-year power purchase agreement Terra-Gen will provide 77.7 megawatts of electricity generated between three sites in Kern County, Calif. Electricity received through this PPA accounts for nearly 5 percent of SVCE’s annual retail load.
This is the second long-term wind project to come online for SVCE and is complementary to other resources in the agency’s power mix, including solar with battery storage and long-duration storage.
The three Terra-Gen wind sites generating the electricity were built in 1986 and partially repowered in 1999. The projects still operate at high availability rates. The SVCE portion of the project is made up of 430 turbines.
The PPA is a result of a request for offers issued in 2020. To date, SVCE has signed 16 contracts for clean energy projects totaling more than 670 MW of capacity and over 803 MWh of battery storage.
Silicon Valley Clean Energy provides electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources to more than 270,000 residential and commercial customers in 13 Santa Clara County jurisdictions.
Community Solar Installations Slowed Last Year, But Are Expected to Rebound
February 18, 2023
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
February 18, 2023
Community solar installations dipped last year but are expected to grow rapidly over the next five years, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie.
Community solar installed capacity declined 16 percent in 2022 compared with last year, according to the report, US community solar market outlook: H1 2023.
Last year’s drop in community solar installations was primarily driven by interconnection delays that hindered growth in key markets such as Massachusetts, Maine, and Maryland, the report’s authors said, adding that industry wide supply chain constraints pushed project timelines into 2023.
Despite last year’s slow down, the community solar market is forecast to grow 118 percent with at least 6 gigawatts of direct current capacity expected to come online in existing markets between 2023 and 2027, according to the report, which was done in collaboration with the Coalition for Community Solar Access.
If a “conservative forecast” of new market opportunities is included Wood Mackenzie estimates that 11.5 GW of community solar could be installed by 2027.
CCSA’s new target of 30 GW of community solar by 2030, announced in January, will require an acceleration of installed capacity in existing markets and continued establishment of new state markets, the report said.
“Any upside to our existing forecast will require strong policy and market reforms that release pipeline backlogs in existing markets, as well as additional capacity from new state markets,” Caitlin Connelly, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The newly passed state-wide program in California, for example, has the potential to yield a significant number of megawatts in the coming years.”
New state markets will provide upside to the national forecast starting in 2024, the report said. Wood Mackenzie’s preliminary forecasts call for a 605-megawatt (MW) boost by 2027 from potential new state markets, including Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
“The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is cause for optimism,” Connelly said. “Community solar developers are well positioned to take advantage of the new and extended investment tax credits (ITC) once guidance is released in 2023, with many developers interested in qualifying projects for the low-to-moderate income and domestic content adders.”
The report also found that as project portfolios grow, community solar developers are increasingly outsourcing subscriber acquisition and management services to third-party companies. The top three subscriber companies now manage over 37 percent of the total market, according to the report.
“The landscape for subscriber companies is becoming more competitive and complex,” Connelly said. “Developers seek partners that can successfully subscribe projects, form trusting relationships with subscribers, and manage these relationships throughout the lifetime of the project or program.”
Alameda Municipal Power Secures 12-Year Agreement for Geothermal Power
February 18, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
February 18, 2023
California public power utility Alameda Municipal Power has secured a long-term purchase agreement with the Northern California Power Agency and the Geysers Power Company under which Alameda Municipal Power will procure and deliver up to five megawatts of energy produced from the Geysers geothermal power plants located in California’s Sonoma and Lake Counties.
The agreement will run for a period of 12 years beginning in 2025.
Alameda Municipal Power is a department of the city of Alameda that has served residents and businesses for 135 years. It provides 100 percent clean energy to more than 35,000 customers at rates that average 35 percent below neighboring communities.
Its clean power mix includes geothermal and hydroelectric sources, wind power and landfill gas.
Headquartered in Roseville, California, NCPA is a nonprofit California joint powers agency established in 1968 to construct and operate renewable and low-emitting generating facilities and assist in meeting the wholesale energy needs of its members.
The Geysers Power Company is an indirect subsidiary of Calpine Corporation.
NYPA Report Examines Integrating Dual-Land Use for Agriculture, Solar Energy
February 17, 2023
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
February 17, 2023
The New York Power Authority on Feb. 16 released a report that recommends proven and innovative approaches on integrating dual-land use for agriculture and solar energy production. The report was funded through a $102,000 grant from the American Public Power Association’s Demonstration of Energy & Efficiency Developments program.
The study determined that a best practice agrivoltaic site ideally involves stakeholder collaboration, community education, policy incentives, site safety practices, and site-individualized crop selection and solar array design.
Agrivoltaics is the simultaneous use of land for typical agricultural practices and photovoltaic power generation through the use of solar panels. Agrivoltaic systems are designed so that solar panels allow sufficient light to pass to ground crops while also capturing enough sunlight to generate electricity.
In March 2022, NYPA announced receipt of the DEED grant. The DEED program funds research, pilot projects and education to improve the operations and services of public power utilities.
NYPA collaborated with EPRI, an independent, non-profit energy research and development organization, to conduct research and publish the report.
Researchers who authored the new report examined how native vegetation, pollinators, low maintenance plants, agricultural crops as well as grazing livestock can coexist on the same parcel of land as a solar energy project.
The study determined that leading agrivoltaic practices are those that promote the following:
- Collaboration between the farmer, solar developer, and the power purchaser early in the site selection process to mitigate concerns and establish protocols for the development and management of the solar site that work for the farmer’s needs.
- Educational programming that fosters a two-way dialogue between farmers and solar developers to create a mutually beneficial site.
- State-level incentive policies for co-location that makes site-selection more affordable for developers.
- The development of solar site safety practices that complement a partnering farmer’s crop rotation schedule to ensure that they can access the site to tend to their crops or herd.
- Continued research to identify site-specific crops and array design alterations to accommodate the selected crop where appropriate.
The research initiative is one of NYPA’s projects that support New York’s goal to generate 70 percent of the state’s electricity from renewables by 2030.
The commitment includes the installation of 6,000 megawatts of solar power by 2025. New York is on target to meet that goal, and by annually installing more than 400 MW per year since 2018, it reached a combined total capacity of 3.3 GW of solar generation at the end of 2021.
“With this report, the Power Authority has drafted a blueprint for sustainable land practices to help guide New York to a more resilient, carbon-free future,” said New York Power Authority Acting President and CEO Justin Driscoll. “This agrivoltaic study provides significant insights for NYPA and New York State as we collaboratively work to meet our nation-leading climate and clean energy goals.”
“This project proves the value of collaboration in research and development and shows how diverse organizations can work together to forge new paths,” said Paul Zummo, Director of Research & Development at the American Public Power Association.
NYPA completed an agrivoltaic system comprised of 250 solar panels at the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill in partnership with the college and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in 2015.
In addition to the Power Authority’s efforts in agrivoltaics, New York State has established the Farmland Protection Working Group and the Agricultural Technical Working Group. The working groups are designed to ensure solar siting that is responsive to the needs of New York’s agricultural communities.
The report is available here. APPA held a webinar on Feb. 15 related to the report. A replay of the webinar is available to APPA members.
NYPA is a long-time DEED program partner and received $250,000 to fund two demonstration projects in 2021 — one that is analyzing the impact of ice on a hydropower plant and one testing an advanced technology that evaluates the health of high voltage assets in a substation.
Click here for additional details on the DEED program.