Island Rhythms
Cost implications of a standalone all-renewables + storage grid, plus a few California regulatory updates (e.g., California microgrids, changes to investor-owned utilities' ROE adjustments, etc.)
Gorona del Viento
Two years ago I wrote about how Francis Menton at Manhattan Contrarian had assembled several, detailed criticisms of energy storage and its feasibility at scale. In 2022 alone Menton produced at least 10 posts on this issue:
Calculating The Full Costs Of Electrifying Everything Using Only Wind, Solar And Batteries
What Solution Do Renewable Energy Advocates Offer For The Problem Of Storage?
More Focus On The Impossible Costs Of A Fully Wind/Solar/Battery Energy System
More Confirmation Of The Infeasibility Of A Fully Wind/Solar/Storage Electricity System
The People Promising Us "Net Zero" Have No Clue About The Energy Storage Problem
Menton referenced a pilot program called Gorona del Viento (GdV) that served to demonstrate the concept of a standalone renewables + storage grid. GdV is an ambitious project in El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands in Spain (population: 11,000). Its origins trace back to 2010, when construction began on an electricity system consisting only of wind turbines and a pumped-storage water reservoir.
Apparently things haven’t gone well — Menton cited a semi-retired geochemist named Roger Andrews at a website called Energy Matters, who concluded that for El Hierro to do away with its diesel backup generation, it would need a pumped-storage reservoir about 40 times the size of the one it currently has.
“If cost is no object, GdV’s storage could be increased,” Andrews wrote. “If the sea were used as the lower reservoir and the rotten rock in the upper reservoir somehow strengthened to the point where it could be filled to the top, storage capacity would increase to around 700 MWh. But this would still be over ten times too little. And even if a miracle did happens and GdV found itself able to supply El Hierro with 100% renewable electricity it would still be filling only a quarter of El Hierro’s total energy demand.”
Now over at Energy IQ, the blogger Pandreco offers another way of looking at El Hierro: namely, even a successful island prototype means very little because such off-grid experiments are only possible due to on-grid integrated energy, technology, and manufacturing. He writes:
…an island isn’t really an island: it is simply a geographically isolated part of a massive global industrial complex.
None of the concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper etc used in the hydro-wind infrastructure comes from the island, nor the engineers who design and manufacture the wind turbines and hydro pumps, nor the geologists who have found the mines, nor the professors who taught the geology students, nor the installation and maintenance equipment and personnel, nor the ships who bring the materials to the island, nor the people who make those ships, nor the fuel used in all these steps, nor the food that feeds all the people all the way down the complex chain to the copper miners in Peru, the people who make the polysilicon and so on ad infinitum…
A greater point is that cost is not simply monetary — there’s also the cost of energy to get more energy. “The more industrialized we are, the more surplus energy we need to maintain our complex systems.”
CALIFORNIA NEWS
A common criticism of the California Public Utilities Commission is that the agency is too cozy with the utilities it regulates. Many critics view the CPUC as having a symbiotic relationship with Pacific Gas & Electric in particular.
A decision by the CPUC earlier this month does little to quell those concerns. On September 12, the Commission authorized PG&E to recover $944 million in costs associated with wildfire mitigation work. This is the third time in 15 months that PG&E has received permission to increase its rates to recover wildfire and disaster-response costs (March 2024 and June 2023 were the two other occasions).
Importantly, each of these authorizations was for “interim” recovery, meaning the permitted amounts, as big as they are, only represent a percentage of PG&E’s actual requests. The remaining requested amounts are not disallowed — they too will be subject to Commission review and potential approval.
The CPUC opines that cost recovery of the $944 million will maintain PG&E’s financial health and that the length of the amortization period (17 months) will provide a benefit for ratepayers in terms of accrued interest savings.
“Financial health” means PG&E’s ability to avoid adverse impacts on its credit rating and limitations on its financing abilities, concerns that are likely irrelevant to any long-suffering, captive ratepayer who can no longer make reasonable budget accommodations for his monthly electric bill. (As of January 1, 2024, the average bundled electric rate for PG&E residential customers was 45 cents per kWh. By contrast, the average residential rate for my local utility was 19.95 cents per kWh.)
If a final decision in this proceeding decides that PG&E is entitled to less than the $944 million, the difference will be returned to ratepayers.
IOUs’ RETURN ON EQUITY: For ratepayers of CPUC-regulated utilities, there is some potentially good news on the horizon. A new draft decision at the Commission seems to concede that a CPUC-authorized cost-of-capital adjustment mechanism for its regulated utilities is unfairly biased toward utility shareholders and operates at ratepayers’ expense. The new proposed decision (or PD, in the parlance of the Commission) takes some steps to correct this perceived imbalance. This item will likely be considered by the Commission in mid-October.
MICROGRIDS: Separately, another CPUC draft decision seems to raise more questions about the commercial viability of microgrids in California than it answers. The PD opts for a utility-designed community microgrid tariff over plans submitted by various non-utility stakeholders. It reasons that the utilities’ proposal better aligns with the CPUC’s statutory obligations (as enshrined in the Public Utilities Code) and allows for superior ratepayer protections.
The item rejects a plan from PearlX, who proposed a framework where microgrids could operate full-time, not simply during outages, and could use their own distribution infrastructure, sans a required interconnection to the utilities’ distribution system. Proposals submitted by the Clean Coalition, Sunnova, the Green Power Institute, the Microgrid Resources Coalition, and the Applied Medical Resources Corporation were also rejected in favor of a plan submitted by PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric.
“If adopted as is,” Tam Hunt from Community Renewable Solutions told Microgrid Knowledge, “this proposed decision all but ensures that community microgrids in California are dead on arrival for the foreseeable future.”
The item is tentatively scheduled for an early November vote.
RATES: More than 1/3 of total authorized U.S. utility rate increases in 2023 went to PG&E and Southern California Edison (that’s $2.5 billion for PG&E and nearly $1 billion for SCE.)
DECARBONIZATION: A group called the Anthropocene Institute anticipates that by 2045, the California grid will be dependent on intermittent solar and wind resources, which will need continuous backup from natural gas. Following a vast expansion of solar, wind, and batteries at a cost of nearly $1 trillion, California’s grid will be burning as much natural gas as it does now. While society-wide GHG emissions will be down because fewer gasoline-driven cars will be on the road and more homes will be electrified, retail sales of electricity will not be emissions-free — EVs will mostly be charged at evening times by the burning of natural gas.
MISCELLANY
For something completely different, I riffed here on the strange metaphysics of World War II, as inspired by this Daniel Miller post at IM-1776. And something’s really in the air because Paul Kingsnorth also has a two-part essay on similar subject matter called “Into the Void.”
An excerpt from Into the Void Part II (“Legends of the Fall”):
Christians tend to see the world, in C. S. Lewis’s words, as ‘enemy-occupied territory.’ Prayer is a clearing in a dark forest. A monastery is a fortress and keep. The Eucharist is a candle lit in a pitch-black cave. Close down the monasteries, give up on the prayers, blow out the candle, and all the spirits of the dark forest will come roaring back in, perhaps via Bambi Thug’s beloved ouija board. Society itself will become a giant ouija board, and the wild hunt will rage over it every night.