EGEB: Smart V2G extends battery life, Massachusetts pushing smarter(Tesla)grid, more

Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news.

Baker-Polito Administration Announces Over $4.6 Million in Grants for Peak Demand Reduction Projects – The state has put money behind 9 grants aimed at reducing peak demand via, mostly, deploying energy storage intelligently. For instance – Tesla – $996,455 – Will demonstrate aggregated energy storage for peak demand reduction in National Grid territory. Tesla will work to quantify the benefits of the demonstrated peak demand reductions and evaluate the model’s viability at scale. – This reminds me of Tesla’s distributed grid work in Vermont. Look at the list of projects (it’s short). Within three to four years, Massachusetts will have the fundamental knowledge – funded and trusted by their taxpayers – to change move their energy grid well into the 21st century.

Clean energy stored in electric vehicles to power buildings – Given that battery degradation is dependent on calendar age, capacity throughput, temperature, state of charge, current and depth of discharge, V2G is an effective tool that can be used to optimize a battery’s conditions such that degradation is minimized. Hence, taking excess energy from an idle EV to power the grid actually keeps the battery healthier for longer – These batteries are worth too much to just sit in cars. If this research is correct, and we can use the grid to optimize batteries while the grid uses those batteries for services, then we need redo all of our equations for getting energy storage onto the grid to make use of electric car batteries also.

Tokyo May Soon Get Wind Power From Asia Super Grids – Yes sir, I would like to order one Asian Supergrid, please. If you could – add a healthy amount of wind-generated electricity from the plains of Mongolia. Thanks! – Mongolia is considering a $7 billion plan to build coal, wind and solar plants that could send electricity across China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, according to Tamir Batsaikhan, a project director with the Shivee Energy Complex. – Obstacles: linking different grids and infrastructure and deciding how the power would be priced and much more importantly – countries may also worry about becoming too reliant on imported power or technology from China. 

TSEC expanding PERC solar cell capacity – Only high-efficiency solar cells, especially PERC models, are profitable and this is TSEC’s motivation of capacity expansion, Liao said – The reason high-efficiency is profitable is because solar cells are sold on a $/W standard. And solar cells that are more efficiency, of course, have more watts in the same physical area – thus more revenue can come to the company for almost the same inputs of time, machines, money, etc. Course – you need spend $500M to upgrade your factory first… I like this because manufacturers now see high-efficiency as a path to profits – that means you and I will see higher efficiencies very soon.

Texas city council rejects El Paso Electric proposed rate hike, solar fees – El Paso wants to increase fees on solar so the power company can partially offset a 5% increase in demand…except…solar power installations lower overall demand. Residents with solar panels on their roof could have seen rates go up $14/month, while a standard residential customer would have seen rates rise $7-$10/month depending on the season, and summer rates would have risen more than $9/month. The average customer currently pays close to $83/month – The article notes that the power company needs to deal with 90MW of demand growth and wishes to upgrade their gas facility. Tesla deployed about that much volume of energy storage in a few months.

Coalition wants wind, solar forced to match each MW with storage – It puts the average cost of wind and solar without storage at around AUS$92-$92/MWh, and AUS$107-$108/MWh with storage. – Are they fools? Are the fossil fuel majors so out of touch as to think that they’d be able to alter their ends by increasing the price of renewables around 16% – knowing that renewables might fall in price by 16%…in a year or two? And if they require all of this energy storage – then they must realize that it will only accelerate the rate at which these energy sources consume their precious ‘baseload’ monopoly? Careful what you ask for gentlemen.

Those first quarter numbers for solar in 2017 are about 1.4% of total electricity. That last month in 2017 represents 2%. Roughly 5 million megawatt hours.

#Wind and #solar in March 2017 accounted for 10% of U.S. #electricity generation for first time https://t.co/DaL3jl7rEw #PV #energy pic.twitter.com/Q5HMkhQhA9

— EIA (@EIAgov) June 14, 2017

Header image is of a solar farm at Nellis Air Force Base

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