California’s failure to pass 33% RPS legislation is creating real havoc in the renewable market.

A month ago, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to create a new 1,000 MW program for distributed generation renewables (Reverse Auction Mechanism (RAM)). It’s a great program, but earlier this week, Southern California Edison (pdf) and Pacific Gas and Electric filed legal challenges. Their argument? Once they’ve met the current 20% legislative standard, they believe that means they are off the hook for doing anything more. Read PG+E’s here (pdf) and SCE’s here (pdf) for the full deal.

The legal merits of their position notwithstanding, it’s clear that we have an acute problem in California’s renewable energy markets–one that can be solved by immediate action to raise the RPS to 33%. Last summer we came close, but the Legislature failed to move the legislation across the finish line before the clock ran out and the session came to a close. The Legislature needs to make this a priority and move on a 33% solution immediately.

Vote Solar is a non-profit grassroots organization working to fight climate change and foster economic opportunity by bringing solar energy into the mainstream.

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It’s not good news, but it represents an all-too-human failing, one we call NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard). Even if a project is beneficial, offering jobs and clean energy, some people don’t want it becoming part of the view out their windows.

A step up from that is those individuals and groups who oppose projects on other grounds, chief among them that the project will hamper, alter or even destroy some landmark, life form or entire ecosystem.

This latter is true of the Calico solar thermal power plant project, but to an even greater extent. There, the problem approaches desecration, as an entire Native American tribe attempts to protect ancestral ground.

The result: Stirling Energy and Tessera Solar have abandoned the Calico project, with the former company facing executive decampment, the latter staff layoffs, and both feeling the impact of Southern California Edison canceling the power purchase agreement.

The whole Calico-down-the-tubes thing was likely precipitated by a judge’s ruling in favor of the 3,500-member Quechan tribe, which insists that the U.S. Department of the Interior (Bureau of Land Management) did not conduct an appropriate review of the project’s potential for destroying cultural artifacts. No one has mentioned grave sites, but I suppose it’s impossible to rule that out.

Rumor suggests that First Solar or NRG might step in to rescue the situation by changing solar thermal to solar photovoltaic, perhaps, but we at CalFinder liker to think we know a jinx when we see one.

It isn’t even about solar thermal hitting some downside, as witness BrightSource’s progress at Ivanpah. More like, we can move desert tortoises, fringe-toed lizards – we can even move foxtail cacti and human beings – but perhaps we shouldn’t try to move chindi (which are, in Navajo tradition, the ghosts left behind when we bury our loved ones).

Some things really are sacred.

Related posts:

• Controversial Solar Plant Finds New Owner, But Will It Find New Life?
• Native Americans Turn to the Sun (Solar Energy, That Is)
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Not so long ago, consumers seemed to like energy efficiency just a little bit more than going to the dentist. Clearly that has changed, as evidenced by the recent run on appliance and home retrofit subsidies in several states.

Greens are no longer alone in swooning over front loader washing machines and geothermal heat pumps. But who exactly are these new energy efficiency buyers and what do they want? Two recent surveys shed some light.

E Source partnered with Nielsen Claritas in surveying 32,471 U.S. consumers to find out how ready they are to pursue efficiency. The survey revealed that larger households are more inclined toward energy efficiency than those with one or two people. In addition, demand response seems to be somewhat addictive. Try it once and you want to do it again. And, no surprise, appliance rebate programs are very popular.

Energy efficiency consumers can be broken into four categories, says E Source, which trademarked each of the names.

EE Indifferents, fortunately for the EE industry, represent only about 37%. Even if efficiency saves them money, they’re not motivated.

More details are available at E Source.

Meanwhile, the Electric Power Research Institute and Southern California Edison surveyed southern California residents to uncover their expectations when it comes to electric cars. It turns out that potential electric car owners are much like Internet users. They like speed. Survey participants do not want to wait around for their cars to be charged, and they’re willing to pay a premium to speed up the process.

“Public fast-charging availability (for example, a 10-15 minute charge facility) may have a strong influence on PHEV adoption, as two in five hybrid owners and one in three non-hybrid owners say the capability will ‘definitely’ influence their buying decision. About 75% said they would pay a 33% premium (over the slower, at-home rate) to fast charge. That percentage drops to 30% if the relative cost of fast charging is double that of slow charging,” says EPRI.

The EPRI report is available for free download here.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many of the industry’s top magazines and newsletters. She is publisher of the Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

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FERC may have recently put the kibosh on states implementing European-style Feed-in Tariffs, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. is left high and dry without ways to drive wholesale solar markets. We’re seeing daily action from utility PV programs that play by FERC’s rules.

Just today, Southern California Edison announced 60 MW worth of contracts under its new wholesale distributed generation (WDG) program. These winning bids will be installed on 31 rooftops and five ground-mounted sites across SCE’s service territory and deliver clean, reliable, wholesale power to the grid (as opposed to meeting on-site load).This is the first traunch of contracts for the utility’s 500 MW distributed solar program – half of which the utility will own and half of which must be contracted like this through independent producers.

As you may recall, SCE proposed the program as a mechanism for meeting its RPS requirements. The RPS may have set the end-goal of 20% by 2010 (with efforts still underway to increase to 33% by 2020), but it was the utility that opted to develop distributed solar to meet part of that requirement – a departure from the previously exclusive focus on large-scale projects in the 10 – 500 MW range. SCE’s move into WDG is significant for a few reasons:

Northern California’s PG&E has a similar program in the works, so expect to see more WDG on the way.

Vote Solar is a non-profit grassroots organization working to fight climate change and foster economic opportunity by bringing solar energy into the mainstream.

Related posts:

• First Solar Announces Major Solar Project for Mojave Desert
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Southern California Edison has had a voluntary Renewable Standard Offer Program for the past several years–a fixed-price offer to buy renewable energy from systems under 20 MW in size, with the price set at the Market Price Referent (MPR). It’s not a FIT per se, as it is not ‘must take’, but a standard fixed-price offer nonetheless.

In 2009, SCE contracted for 140 MW of PV. These contracts used the 2008 MPR price (pdf) (Note that pricing also uses a time-of-delivery adder (TOD). In SCE territory, if you model the TOD factor on expected PV performance, you get a levelized boost of about 1.35. So, take the applicable MPR, and multiply accordingly). The MPR is calculated annually by the CPUC; it’s the 20 year levelized cost of energy of a combined-cycle natural gas plant, meant to represent the next marginal unit of generation. It’s a great story–here’s significant amounts of solar purchased below the cost of fossil fuels.

However, how will this work in the future? Natural gas prices have plummeted since 2008, and the MPR went down about 20% this year. The question is: is the new price enough to deploy solar? Big problem.

Today, SCE announced a change to the program that will solve this problem. Here’s the email I received (nothing on the web yet):

Southern California Edison (“SCE”) will officially launch the 2010 Renewables Standard Contract Request for Offers (“RSC-RFO”) on Monday, August 2, 2010. This program is open to all RPS eligible technologies 20MW or less and interconnected within the CAISO control area. You are welcome to download and review the materials when we make them available on August 2 at SCE’s website.

E-mail: RenewablesStandardContracts@sce.com

So, instead of pricing solar based on the cost of natural gas, they will price solar based on…the cost of solar as bid. In order to make sure that the bids are viable and not aspirational phantom projects, the program requires development security of $20/kW (by requiring skin in the game, developers will only bid numbers that they are confident in delivering), and project development timelines. In order to reduce parasitic transactional costs and help developers line-up financing ahead of time, the program uses standard, non-negotiable contracts. In order to get projects that can come on-line quickly and don’t need new transmission, it is only eligible for projects under 20 MW. (Note that SCE also has a similar program for rooftop PV systems, 1-2 MW in size.)

It’s FPA/FERC compliant, it captures the latest in solar’s cost reductions and delivers that value to ratepayers, and it helps drive down solar’s costs by sending helpful market signals throughout the solar value chain (polysilicon manufacturers still have gross margins between 40%-50%; competitive markets can help with that).

While any program can be improved, this is a pretty good example of a promising approach to procuring sizeable amounts of wholesale distributed generation at politically palatable price-points. Arizona Public Service has a similar program. We expect to see many more in the days ahead.

Vote Solar is a non-profit grassroots organization working to fight climate change and foster economic opportunity by bringing solar energy into the mainstream.

photo: e pants

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First Solar, a maker of thin-film solar cells, has signed an agreement with Southern California Edison to sell the utility 550 megawatts of electricity produced by two massive photovoltaic solar farms in the Mojave Desert.

The plants, expected to go online by 2015 and produce enough electricity to power 170,000 homes, would be built on federal land set aside for such solar projects.

Analysts say that the First Solar deal is a sign that large arrays of solar photovoltaic panels can produce electricity competitively with so-called solar-thermal plants, which generate electricity by using mirrors to focus sunlight on liquid-filled boilers to produce steam. Southern California Edison said that Nevada-based First Solar’s solar farms also will produce electricity at a price competitive with natural gas.

“This is the very largest photovoltaic project we have done, demonstrating that at a utility scale, the time has come for such projects,” said a Southern California Edison executive.

Appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

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