Live blogging: Notes from the Kansas Energy Council full meeting on energy efficiency and wind
June 12, 2008
The full Kansas Energy Council met this week to discuss carbon regulation and energy efficiency. Hot day, cool and windowless room, lots of people crammed in.
Yale scholar Dr. Robert Repetto was scheduled to talk about cap and trade in national climate policy – but his presentation fell victim to the airline industry. He ended up stranded in Hartford, CT.
Only his paper made it to Kansas. It’s an extremely cool paper and will probably be posted on the KEC website, but we all missed hearing him speak. Quotable from the first paragraph:
The United States is approaching a tipping point in climate policy. After decades of relative inaction, the federal government is very likely to adopt a national policy within the next few years requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This presents enormous opportunities and risks.
The point of KS policymakers hearing Dr. Repetto speak, of course, was to help them figure out how the state can capitalize on the opportunities and avoid the risks. (For example, Warner-Lieberman offered incentives to reward states that had been early adopters of climate policies.)
The second speaker was consultant Randy Gunn of Summit Blue, presenting the draft results of an energy efficiency study commissioned by the KEC. The study focused on demand side management (DSM), or ways for utilities to get customers to reduce energy. (Energy efficiency measures also exist on the generation and transmission side.)
The study drew from a national pool of data, with an emphasis on utilities in the Midwest whose information was publicly available (or made available to Summit Blue, as in the case of KCPL and Midwest Energy). It also took into account the different ranges of state policies on EE, as well as the fact that each utility starts from a different baseline of resources and alternatives.
What can Kansas utilities expect to gain from energy efficiency? Gunn cautioned that not everyone should expect to do as well as California has. In our case, it’s much more reasonable to try and catch up with Iowa or Minnesota first.
After the presentation, the KEC reported on how its recommendations from the last legislative session had fared - several got caught up in the coal bills and died with the vetoes. The Kansas Energy Office also reported on the legislative history of the coal bills.
The KCC gave a quick overview of its most recent EE docket. This was the first of two dockets, and the date for release of the second (originally scheduled for August) has been pushed until later in the fall.
The KEC Electricity and Greenhouse Gas committees also gave their reports – a suggestion that the full KEC hear a presentation on the KCC wind study was rejected. The Electricity Committee’s draft chart showing baseload generation resources in Kansas was presented. There was a request to see wind resources in the state placed on the chart as well. The response was that this information is available in other places.
There was also some discussion of the Governor’s new energy policy advisory group, KEEP (Kansas Energy and Environmental Policy). KEEP is carrying out the climate plan process that KEC rejected last year.
It was asked how KEC and KEEP might complement or conflict, and if there would be redundancies and overlap. The response was that yes, there might be, but energy is such a huge issue in Kansas that you can’t have too many people studying it – also, KEEP sunsets in 2010 while the KEC presumably lives on into the next administration.
Additionally, it was mentioned that the legislature’s new joint committee on energy and environment is probably meeting earlier than many of us had expected – by statute the group starts in November, after the elections. However, the planned members of the committee will meet this summer to get started, and their appointments will be confirmed after the elections.
Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson spoke at length on the growth of the wind industry in Kansas. In particular, he discussed wind as not only an energy resource, but as a driver for economic development – in terms of the jobs that wind turbine manufacturers could bring to the state. At the recent AWEA conference in Houston, it was obvious that other states are spending huge dollars to aggressively pursue these businesses – Arkansas, Colorado, and Iowa among them.
— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org
Right now, wind is getting most of the press in Kansas. Ten years ago, however, that was not the case – and that is the position that solar power finds itself in today.
This past week, the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) released a new solar radiation map. As the consultant who developed the map explained, Kansas has even more solar potential than Florida. The key for Kansans will be figuring out how to take advantage of the resource.
Tah dah, here it is. The copy below will probably be blurry, but you can download the original pdf here (all three pages):
Hint: Yellow is good. Blue, not so much. Pretty clearly, southwestern Kansas wins.
Note, if you live in NE KS and you have solar panels that work great even despite all the blue and green colors, don’t holler. The resolution of the map is on a 10K grid. For the smaller scale of home and business use, microclimates and exposures will certainly vary. (Keep reading for further explanation.)
To create the map, the KS energy office contracted with Joe King of Coriolis. Now a private consultant, when Joe ran the Energy Office – before it was combined with the KCC – he was the one who put together the original Kansas wind map of 50 meter data. (TruWind has recently updated with a 70 m map).
Second hint: Print that TruWind map and compare it to the solar map. Pretty cool.
How to interpret this resource: Sun and wind are both renewable resources. However, they work differently. Wind patterns are more fluid than solar – the sun holds a fairly fixed position in the sky. Its path varies daily and seasonally, true, but the patterns are probably not going to shift significantly over any human frame of time.
What matters to solar resources, though, are the levels of atmospheric interference with the sun’s rays. Interference includes particulates, aerosols, moisture, etc. Southwestern Kansas in particular has a combination of good solar and comparatively little atmospheric interference.
This map (especially pages two and three, which you will have to download) measures the average solar exposure in different parts of the state.
How counties and other planning groups can use this information*: The value of a solar resource depends on the technology that you plan to use to take advantage of it. Right now there are two ways to do this.
The first is photovoltaics (solar panels), which are currently most used in residential and commercial markets. Right now those panels are pretty expensive, but enormous amounts of capital are being poured into the industry to figure out more affordable technology. GE, a leader in getting wind power off the ground in the U.S., expects its solar interests to become a billion dollar business (Reuters).
For most Kansas businesses and homes, photovoltaics are not economically feasible right now (with the possible exception of hot water heating). Right now, there is no net metering in the state. If you can’t interconnect to the grid, you have to invest in batteries, which are expensive. King’s short comment on connecting to the grid: “Technically, it’s easy. Politically, it’s hard.”
There is some good news, though – the KEEP program of the Kansas Housing and Resources Commission has recently had its income restrictions removed. Now all Kansans are eligible for low-interest loans to install solar panels, buy energy-efficient appliances, etc.
The second option is CSP technology, which utilities in the West are starting to consider. The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Colorado has helped revive this technology, which has been around since the 1970s.
CSP installations mix old and new principles of electricity generation. They use mirrors to take the solar power and create heat, which then drive the turbines that create the electricity. CSP can be a challenge to site. Some styles of the technology take lots of land, and the right kind – meaning, flat. There are some forms of CSP that can work with tower installations.
Right now, there are many CSP manufacturers and technologies, not a lot of installations, and the market will probably shake out over the next ten or so years. Since CSP uses mirrors, it is also vulnerable to weather. Even super-duper mirrors are still subject to weather extremes, such as wind, snow, and hail.
Can we mix wind and solar? On a utility scale, quite probably. Wind and solar are both intermittent power sources, meaning they are not always available. For example, wind blows less during the summer, during times of peak load. However, except for in extreme events – summer is when the sun shines the most (during the day, anyway).
Combining wind and solar at one installation would help balance the intermittency issue. Already, wind developer Iberdola is mounting pyrometers on their Kansas wind turbines to measure the available solar resources.
Nationally, there is also some discussion of mounting CSP installations on or around traditional fossil fuel electricity generating plants, like natural gas. When available, the renewable source could be used to back off the fossil fuel.
Any downside to solar? During the Q&A session of the meeting, Commissioner Harkins pointed out that ethanol has been a cautionary tale – lots of government subsidies for a renewable fuel source, that ended up having unintended consequences.
He asked what the risks were with solar. King replied that an important question to ask of any renewable technology – how renewable is it? Are there lots of fossil fuel inputs? Waste streams? Etc. Also, is it economically viable?
For more coverage of the KCC meeting, check out Sarah Kessinger’s story from Harris News Service. Afterwards, she spoke to Chairman Wright. Quotable:
After the briefing, Wright said the commission has no role in promoting renewable energy, but they could ask lawmakers to change their mission in that regard.
“The Legislature has given us a certain level of authority in dealing with investor-owned utilities, but not to develop (renewable standards).”
*Note: Not all of the info above came from the KCC presentation. CEP has done additional research into solar technologies in the past. Some of the details about wind and solar are also drawn from recent KS news articles.
— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org
