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This article is a pretty novel idea. They propose to make a kite with flexible PV cells mounted on top that will harness light energy and transport it to the ground by a copper wire connection. This idea may allow many Californians to harness solar energy even on a cloudy day by flying this kite above the cloud layer. Pretty interesting idea. I've also read about a kite that is connected to a generator that spins as the spool is released. The electricity harnessed is then used to pull the kite back in with an excess amount stored. Kite Power may be used in California where there is usually a cloud or fog cover.

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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From reading this article, I found out that California produce a lot of solar energy that they were paying other states such as Arizona to take the excesses amount electricity.I found this to be very interesting because California is like encouraging other states to use the solar energy. The reason for California to paid other states to take the excess amount of energy because they didn't want to overload the power lines. At first when offering Arizona the idea of free solar energy, the operator of the grid declined their offered which made California a little desperate so they paid Arizona to take the solar energy.

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

The number of days that California dumped its unused solar electricity would have been even higher if the state hadn't ordered some solar plants to reduce production - even as natural gas power plants, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, continued generating electricity.

Solar and wind power production was curtailed a relatively small amount - about 3% in the first quarter of 2017 - but that's more than double the same period last year. And the surge in solar power could push the number even higher in the future.

Why doesn't California, a champion of renewable energy, use all the solar power it can generate?

The answer, in part, is that the state has achieved dramatic success in increasing renewable energy production in recent years. But it also reflects sharp conflicts among major energy players in the state over the best way to weave these new electricity sources into a system still dominated by fossil-fuel-generated power.

No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

Perhaps the most glaring example: The California Legislature has mandated that one-half of the state's electricity come from renewable sources by 2030; today it's about one-fourth. That goal once was considered wildly optimistic. But solar panels have become much more efficient and less expensive. So solar power is now often the same price or cheaper than most other types of electricity, and production has soared so much that the target now looks laughably easy to achieve.

At the same time, however, state regulators - who act independently of the Legislature - until recently have continued to greenlight utility company proposals to build more natural gas power plants.

These conflicting energy agendas have frustrated state Senate Leader Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), who opposes more fossil fuel plants. He has introduced legislation that would require the state to meet its goal of 50% of its electricity from renewable sources five years earlier, by 2025. Even more ambitiously, he recently proposed legislation to require 100% of the state's power to come from renewable energy sources by 2045.

"I want to make sure we don't have two different pathways," de Leon said. Expanding clean energy production and also building natural gas plants, he added, is "a bad investment."

Environmental groups are even more critical. They contend that building more fossil fuel plants at the same time that solar production is being curtailed shows that utilities - with the support of regulators - are putting higher profits ahead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"California and others have just been getting it wrong," said Leia Guccione, an expert in renewable energy at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, a clean power advocate. "The way [utilities] earn revenue is building stuff. When they see a need, they are perversely [incentivized] to come up with a solution like a gas plant."

Regulators and utility officials dispute this view. They assert that the transition from fossil fuel power to renewable energy is complicated and that overlap is unavoidable.

They note that electricity demand fluctuates - it is higher in summer in California, because of air conditioning, and lower in the winter - so some production capacity inevitably will be underused in the winter. Moreover, the solar power supply fluctuates as well. It peaks at midday, when the sunlight is strongest. Even then it isn't totally reliable.

Because no one can be sure when clouds might block sunshine during the day, fossil fuel electricity is needed to fill the gaps. Utility officials note that solar production is often cut back first because starting and stopping natural gas plants is costlier and more difficult than shutting down solar panels.

Eventually, unnecessary redundancy of electricity from renewables and fossil fuel will disappear, regulators, utilities and operators of the electric grid say.

"The gas-fired generation overall will show decline," said Neil Millar, executive director of infrastructure at CAISO, the California Independent System Operator, which runs the electric grid and shares responsibility for preventing blackouts and brownouts. "Right now, as the new generation is coming online and the older generation hasn't left yet, there is a bit of overlap."

Utility critics acknowledge these complexities. But they counter that utilities and regulators have been slow to grasp how rapidly technology is transforming the business. A building slowdown is long overdue, they argue.

Despite a growing glut of power, however, authorities only recently agreed to put on hold proposals for some of the new natural gas power plants that utilities want to build to reconsider whether they are needed.

A key question in the debate is when California will be able to rely on renewable power for most or all of its needs and safely phase out fossil fuel plants, which regulators are studying.

The answer depends in large part on how fast battery storage improves, so it is cheaper and can store power closer to customers for use when the sun isn't shining. Solar proponents say the technology is advancing rapidly, making reliance on renewables possible far sooner than previously predicted, perhaps two decades or even less from now - which means little need for new power plants with a life span of 30 to 40 years.

Calibrating this correctly is crucial to controlling electricity costs.

"It's not the renewables that's the problem. It's the state's renewable policy that's the problem," said Gary Ackerman, president of the Western Power Trading Forum, an association of independent power producers. "We're curtailing renewable energy in the summertime months. In the spring, we have to give people money to take it off our hands."

Not long ago, solar was barely a rounding error for California's energy producers.

In 2010, power plants in the state generated just over 15% of their electricity production from renewable sources. But that was mostly wind and geothermal power, with only a scant 0.5% from solar. Now that overall amount has grown to 27%, with solar power accounting for 10%, or most of the increase. The solar figure doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar systems that produce an additional 4 percentage points, a share that is ever growing.

Behind the rapid expansion of solar power: its plummeting price, which makes it highly competitive with other electricity sources. In part that stems from subsidies, but much of the decline comes from the sharp drop in the cost of making solar panels and their increased efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity.

The average cost of solar power for residential, commercial and utility-scale projects declined 73% between 2010 and 2016. Solar electricity now costs 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour - the amount needed to light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours - to produce, or about the same as electricity produced by a natural gas plant and half the cost of a nuclear facility, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Fly over the Carrizo Plain in California's Central Valley near San Luis Obispo and you'll see that what was once barren land is now a sprawling solar farm, with panels covering more than seven square miles - one of the world's largest clean-energy projects. When the sun shines over the Topaz Solar Farm, the shimmering panels produce enough electricity to power all of the residential homes in a city the size of Long Beach, population 475,000.

Other large-scale solar operations blanket swaths of the Mojave Desert, which has increasingly become a sun-soaking energy hub. The Beacon solar project covers nearly two square miles and the Ivanpah plant covers about five and a half square miles.

The state's three big shareholder-owned utilities now count themselves among the biggest solar power producers. Southern California Edison produces or buys more than 7% of its electricity from solar generators, Pacific Gas & Electric 13% and San Diego Gas & Electric 22%.

Similarly, fly over any sizable city and you'll see warehouses, businesses and parking lots with rooftop solar installations, and many homes as well.

With a glut of solar power at times, CAISO has two main options to avoid a system overload: order some solar and wind farms to temporarily halt operations or divert the excess power to other states.

That's because too much electricity can overload the transmission system and result in power outages, just as too little can. Complicating matters is that even when CAISO requires large-scale solar plants to shut off panels, it can't control solar rooftop installations that are churning out electricity.

CAISO is being forced to juggle this surplus more and more.

In 2015, solar and wind production were curtailed about 15% of the time on average during a 24-hour period. That rose to 21% in 2016 and 31% in the first few months of this year. The surge in solar production accounts for most of this, though heavy rainfall has increased hydroelectric power production in the state this year, adding to the surplus of renewables.

Even when solar production is curtailed, the state can produce more than it uses, because it is difficult to calibrate supply and demand precisely. As more homeowners install rooftop solar, for example, their panels can send more electricity to the grid than anticipated on some days, while the state's overall power usage might fall below what was expected.

This means that CAISO increasingly has excess solar and wind power it can send to Arizona, Nevada and other states.

When those states need more electricity than they are producing, they pay California for the power. But California has excess power on a growing number of days when neighboring states don't need it, so California has to pay them to take it. CAISO calls that "negative pricing."

Why does California have to pay rather than simply give the power away free?

When there isn't demand for all the power the state is producing, CAISO needs to quickly sell the excess to avoid overloading the electricity grid, which can cause blackouts. Basic economics kick in. Oversupply causes prices to fall, even below zero. That's because Arizona has to curtail its own sources of electricity to take California's power when it doesn't really need it, which can cost money. So Arizona will use power from California at times like this only if it has an economic incentive - which means being paid.

In the first two months of this year, CAISO paid to send excess power to other states seven times more often than same period in 2014. "Negative pricing" happened in an average of 18% of all sales, versus about 2.5% in the same period in 2014.

Most "negative pricing" typically has occurred for relatively short periods at midday, when solar production is highest.

But what happened in March shows how the growing supply of solar power could have a much greater impact in the future. The periods of "negative pricing" lasted longer than in the past - often for six hours at a time, and once for eight hours, according to a CAISO report.

The excess power problem will ease somewhat in the summer, when electricity usage is about 50% higher in California than in the winter.

But CAISO concedes that curtailments and "negative pricing" is likely to happen even more often in the future as solar power production continues to grow, unless action is taken to better manage the excess electricity.

Arizona's largest utility, Arizona Public Service, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of California's largesse because it is next door and the power can easily be sent there on transmission lines.

On days that Arizona is paid to take California's excess solar power, Arizona Public Service says it has cut its own solar generation rather than fossil fuel power. So California's excess solar isn't reducing greenhouse gases when that happens.

CAISO says it does not calculate how much it has paid others so far this year to take excess electricity. But its recent oversupply report indicated that it frequently paid buyers as much as $25 per megawatt-hour to get them to take excess power, according to the Energy Information Administration.

That's a good deal for Arizona, which uses what it is paid by California to reduce its own customers' electricity bills. Utility buyers typically pay an average of $14 to $45 per megawatt-hour for electricity when there isn't a surplus from high solar power production.

With solar power surging so much that it is sometimes curtailed, does California need to spend $6 billion to $8 billion to build or refurbish eight natural gas power plants that have received preliminary approval from regulators, especially as legislative leaders want to accelerate the move away from fossil fuel energy?

The answer depends on whom you ask.

Utilities have repeatedly said yes. State regulators have agreed until now, approving almost all proposals for new power plants. But this month, citing the growing electricity surplus, regulators announced plans to put on hold the earlier approvals of four of the eight plants to determine if they really are needed.

Big utilities continue to push for all of the plants, maintaining that building natural gas plants doesn't conflict with expanding solar power. They say both paths are necessary to ensure that California has reliable sources of power - wherever and whenever it is needed.

The biggest industrial solar power plants, they note, produce electricity in the desert, in some cases hundreds of miles from population centers where most power is used.

At times of peak demand, transmission lines can get congested, like Los Angeles highways. That's why CAISO, utilities and regulators argue that new natural gas plants are needed closer to big cities. In addition, they say, the state needs ample electricity sources when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough.

Utility critics agree that some redundancy is needed to guarantee reliability, but they contend that the state already has more than enough.

California has so much surplus electricity that existing power plants run, on average, at slightly less than one-third of capacity. And some plants are being closed decades earlier than planned.

As for congestion, critics note that the state already is crisscrossed with an extensive network of transmission lines. Building more plants and transmission lines wouldn't make the power system much more reliable, but would mean higher profits for utilities, critics say.

That is what the debate is about, said Jaleh Firooz, a power industry consultant who previously worked as an engineer for San Diego Gas & Electric for 24 years and helped in the formation of CAISO.

"They have the lopsided incentive of building more," she said.

The reason: Once state regulators approve new plants or transmission lines, the cost is now built into the amount that the utility can charge electricity users - no matter how much or how little it is used.

Given that technology is rapidly tilting the competitive advantage toward solar power, there are less expensive and cleaner ways to make the transition toward renewable energy, she said.

To buttress her argument, Firooz pointed to a battle in recent years over a natural gas plant in Redondo Beach.

Independent power producer AES Southland in 2012 proposed replacing an aging facility there with a new one. The estimated cost: $250 million to $275 million, an amount that customers would pay off with higher electricity bills.

CAISO and Southern California Edison, which was going to buy power from the new plant, supported it as necessary to protect against potential power interruptions. Though solar and wind power production was increasing, they said those sources couldn't be counted on because their production is variable, not constant.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the project, agreeing that it was needed to meet the long-term electricity needs in the L.A. area.

But the California Coastal Conservancy, a conservation group opposed to the plant, commissioned an analysis by Firooz to determine how vital it was. Her conclusion: not at all.

Firooz calculated that the L.A. region already had excess power production capacity - even without the new plant - at least through 2020.

Along with the cushion, her report found, a combination of improved energy efficiency, local solar production, storage and other planning strategies would be more than sufficient to handle the area's power needs even as the population grew.

She questioned utility arguments.

"In their assumptions, the amount of capacity they give to the solar is way, way undercut because they have to say, 'What if it's cloudy? What if the wind is not blowing?' " Firooz explained. "That's how the game is played. You build these scenarios so that it basically justifies what you want."

Undeterred, AES Southland pressed forward with its proposal. In 2013, Firooz updated her analysis at the request of the city of Redondo Beach, which was skeptical that a new plant was needed. Her findings remained the same.

Nonetheless, the state Public Utilities Commission approved the project in March 2014 on the grounds that it was needed. But the California Energy Commission, another regulatory agency whose approval for new plants is required along with the PUC's, sided with the critics. In November 2015 it suspended the project, effectively killing it.

Asked about the plant, AES said it followed the appropriate processes in seeking approval. It declined to say whether it still thinks that a new plant is needed.

The existing facility is expected to close in 2020.

A March 2017 state report showed why critics are confident that the area will be fine without a new plant: The need for power from Redondo Beach's existing four natural gas units has been so low, the state found, that the units have operated at less than 5% of their capacity during the last four years.

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power. Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

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California Invests Heavily In Solar Energy

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California Invests Heavily In Solar Energy

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In this you tube video it talks about how California is moving in the direction of using renewable energy such as solar panels to help move towards an environment concision society. They have now made it possible for low income families to be able to afford solar panels making renewable energy available to a wide demographic through the use of government programs that help pay for the installment of green power. Not only is solar energy making an impact on the environment but is also providing a new industry of employment opportunities for the community. Solar panels are becoming a wide use sustainable renewable energy source, which requires people to become trained in installing green power. There has already been 300 trainees employed and hired to expand renewable energy. It has also created employment of over a hundred thousand Californians. With the use of government funded programs and treaties its become a goal of California to make half of its electricity come from renewable electricity sources by the year 2030.

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California invests heavily in solar energy

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This TED talk goes over the specifics of renewable energy sources. The speaker is an advocate of renewables, but wishes to share the realities of them all. The talk begins with stating that population densities are increasing with energy consumption directly increasing as well. Specifics examples are given about energy consumption values in the U.K. On average, U.K. citizens consumer 1.25 watts per square meter.

Biofuel (energy crops) deliver .5 watts per sq. meter and solar energy 20 watts per square meter. Basically there is literally just not enough surface area in the U.K. to support that amount of energy use via renewables. Although solar, wind, water and biofuel are all ways to help shave off some of the 90% dependence on fossil fuels, there is still room for improvement. The speaker gives three ways that people can help decrease unnecessary energy consumption. The first is more efficient transportation, the second

heating and insulation, heat loss is 1/3 of energy consumption. Lastly

read meters, this helps give a number on how much energy your household is consuming.

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David MacKay: A reality check on renewables

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How much land mass would renewables need to power a nation like the UK? An entire country's worth. In this pragmatic talk, David MacKay tours the basic mathematics that show worrying limitations on our sustainable energy options ... and explains why we should pursue them anyway.

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Trump has offered no valid reason for revising California's desert plan

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Trump has offered no valid reason for revising California's desert plan

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This article that the LA Times published in February 2018  reported about Trump's recent stall on the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation plan, a plan that is set to use 400,000 acres of land in southern California deserts for solar wind and geothermal energy production. Trump and his administration are claiming that for the environmental benefit, they want to revise the plan to arrange a larger space of land for the renewable energy production, but the article argues that stalling the project will negatively impact the environment, by detaining the production of renewable energy sources in the area. Furthermore, it claims that the Trump administration has not stated any factual or legitimate reasoning for why they want to rewrite the plan, and that in reality it is not Trump's environmental interests that are at play here, but in reality his ultimate plan of undoing as much of the Obama administrations work as possible.
This article brought up yet another example of the faultiness in the Trump administration's environmental decision making skills, and emphasized on the ridiculousness of stalling a plan that had been looked over for over a year with no legitimate reasoning.

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The Interior Department gave final approval 17 months ago to a massive planning document that, among other things, designated nearly 400,000 acres of desert in Southern California for wind, solar and geothermal energy production. The plan capped eight years of work, nearly a dozen public meetings and consultations with a wide range of stakeholders to determine which parts of 10.8 million acres of federal land should be preserved for conservation, which for recreation, and which for development.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, as it was called, was far from perfect, but it was embraced as a workable, balanced compromise. Until last week, when the Trump administration announced that it was considering a do-over that could expand the area designated for energy production, mining, grazing and recreation (including all-terrain vehicles). What has changed in the desert since the original plan was approved? Nothing.

Californians need to stand firm against this ploy to remove hard-fought protections and to endanger some of the state's defining landscapes.

The administration cynically framed its motives for reopening the deal as pro-environment by suggesting that more land is needed for wind and solar farms if California is to meet its goal of 50% renewable energy by 2030. But apparently that's not true. "This is not needed," Karen Douglas, a member of the state energy commission, told The Times. "We have sufficient land designated in this plan to support meeting our renewable energy goals." Ironically, reopening the process could slow down renewable energy development in the desert by injecting fresh uncertainty into the process.

Ultimately, this move has less to do with renewable energy development than with the Trump administration's desire to significantly reduce the amount of land set aside for conservation, and to undo every vestige of the Obama legacy that it can get its oil-stained hands on. The administration has made no plausible argument that the desert plan is faulty or no longer suitable, other than the risible excuse about California's energy plans and complaints by Riverside County and the city of Blythe that the plan might shift the burden for wind and solar farms from public land to private.

President Trump has said often that more energy of all types should be produced from federal lands, though his energy source of choice is usually fossil fuels. Although there is little gas or oil to be pumped in the desert - good news, otherwise he might turn the Mojave into west Texas - there are deposits of borax and other minerals that could be opened to mining if the plan is revised.

Of the 10.8 million acres at issue, the conservation plan set aside 3.9 million acres of land for some level of protection, including the Silurian Valley and the Chuckwalla Bench. Habitats were protected for a wide range of native plants and animals, including desert bighorn sheep and tortoises, pupfish and burrowing owls. It's clear that the administration has a jaundiced view of environmental causes and protections, and that it has fallen in with Western Republican politicians who have been trying for years to wrest control of public lands from the federal government and convert it for local economic development. They argue that local political figures know best how to be stewards of local lands.

But that's not a credible argument when their interest centers on drilling, mining and cutting roads in pursuit of a relative handful of jobs. In fact, developing public lands could cost jobs. One study of the impact of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah found that it gave rise to a tourism industry that helped fuel a 25% increase in local jobs and a 17% increase in per capita income. Notably, the Trump administration announced last year that it would reduce the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument by nearly half (at least five legal challenges have been filed to stop him).

This administration has pursued some of the worst environmental policies in modern memory. It has let enforcement slip, worked to undercut landmark laws to clean up air and water pollution, denied the science behind climate change in service of increased emissions of greenhouse gases, and sought to slash budgets for the Environmental Protection Agency and other offices charged with protecting the environment. This effort to undo the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan is of a piece with all that. Californians need to stand firm against this ploy to remove hard-fought protections and to endanger some of the state's defining landscapes.

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desert renewable energy conservation plan

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Trump has offered no valid reason for revising California's desert plan

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The Interior Department gave final approval 17 months ago to a massive planning document that, among other things, designated nearly 400,000 acres of desert in Southern California for wind, solar and geothermal energy production.

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Community Choice Energy Drives Growth in California 

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Community Choice Energy Drives Growth in California 

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Community choice aggregation (CCA) is a tool to encourage local control of energy systems that can drive significant growth in clear. It offers an opportunity for communities to join together to offer choice of their electric provider and source of electricity. It was authorized by the legislature in 2012, but was delayed until 2010. There are currently nine active CCAs in California with a dozen in the works. The motivation to many are the desire to go green faster than state policy. San Diego adopted a Climate Action Plan in 2015 that call for 100% renewable electricity by 2035. Local activist pushed for the City to use CCA to meet the goal but unfortunately in February it was declined. Although it was declined I think activist should still push for CCA to help meet their goal. I think this is a great tool because it gives people the ability to choose where their energy is coming from and the source. If used properly this can not only benefit California but many other states as well.

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Community choice aggregation (CCA) is a tool to encourage local control of energy systems that can drive significant growth in clean energy. In California, communities are using CCA to invest in renewable energy; in other US states, it's a different story. Ben Paulos takes a look.

As communities across America seek to take climate action into their hands, they are finding that community choice aggregation can be a powerful tool - though not all towns are willing to use it, and not all willing towns have access to it.

California is at the vanguard of the community choice movement, and it is driving major growth in clean energy.

Community choice aggregation, or CCA, is a process where locals form a group to buy their own energy. It was authorized by the legislature in 2002, but was delayed by years of wrangling. Marin County was among the first to start the process of creating a CCA, but was hindered by the utility PG&E. In 2010, PG&E spent $46 million on a ballot initiative to weaken the law, and lost. Marin Clean Energy launched the same year.

There are currently nine active CCAs in California with another dozen in the works, but the number could rise as high as eighty, according to state officials.

Most are motivated by a desire to go green faster than state policy dictates. Current state law requires utilities to reach 33% renewables by 2020 and 50% by 2035, but currently active CCAs already exceed those targets. Silicon Valley Clean Energy, serving towns like Cupertino and Mountain View - home of Apple and Google - is the first to be 100% renewable.
Silicon Valley Clean Energy - Your New Community Electric Provider from SVCE on Vimeo. San Diego
The biggest battle currently is in San Diego. The city adopted a Climate Action Plan in 2015 that calls for a 50% cut of all greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, 100% renewable electricity, and various efficiency, waste management, and transportation measures.

Local activists have pushed both the City and the County to use CCA to meet the renewable energy goal, arguing that San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) couldn't be trusted with the task.

"There doesn't exist another viable way for the city of San Diego to get to 100% other than to be in control, and community choice offers this proven model," said Nicole Capretz with the Climate Action Campaign.

The County declined in February to launch a CCA program, but the City is still considering it.

Long a laggard on clean energy, SDG&E has changed its ways, becoming the first investor-owned utility in the state to reach the 33% landmark (five years ahead of the 2020 schedule under state law). The utility is now at 43%, not counting the 124,000 rooftop solar systems installed by their customers. San Diego alone has more than 38,000 solar customers, making it one of the biggest solar cities in the US. By 2021 SDG&E expects that 52% of the energy received by San Diegans will come from renewables.

In late October SDG&E filed a proposal with the City to meet San Diego's 100% renewable energy goal. Under SDG&E's plan, the utility would work with civic leaders to shape their renewables procurement, and let customers choose different levels of renewables, above the state-mandated level, just as CCAs do.

Capretz was not impressed. "This is not a serious proposal, much less a viable, vetted or feasible plan," she told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "It's just another delay tactic to deny San Diegans choice and keep us tethered to an outdated monopoly."

Thirteen other companies have also expressed an interest in working with the City.

One big wildcard for CCAs is the size of an exit fee that utilities are able to charge departing customers to cover the cost of past contracts. State regulators are pondering the charge now. If it is high, it will undermine the economics of CCAs, eroding their ability to deliver more renewables at a lower cost. While California consumers are certainly green, they are also price sensitive, and may balk at a big bill increase. SDG&E points out that no exit fees would be necessary under their proposal to San Diego.

Meanwhile, the state legislature is considering a bill (SB 100) that would increase the RPS goal to 60% by 2030, and to 100% from renewables and zero-carbon resources by 2045.

The combination of higher exit fees and higher mandatory state renewable energy goals, plus SDG&E becoming more aggressive in pursuing renewables, could undermine the rationale for a San Diego CCA.
Other states with CCAs
California is currently the hot spot for CCA, but six other states offer it.

Illinois has been the most active, where at one time 80% of the residential load was served by over 600 CCAs. The rapid uptake in Illinois was due to a brief window of time where CCAs could guarantee savings compared to the default utility rate. But as the default rate fell, the savings evaporated and most CCAs shut down, sending their customers back to the utility or to choose from a competitive power supplier.

CCA is growing in Massachusetts, where 128 cities and towns have authorized it. The largest, Boston, authorized CCA in October through a vote of the City Council. But Mayor Walsh's office expressed some doubts about it, saying CCA is "a very powerful tool" but "it can be a very expensive tool."

Unlike in California, renewables are only part of the push for CCAs in Massachusetts. While many towns let consumers choose an all-green option, only a handful of towns have opted for slightly higher levels of renewables in their basic plan, due to fear of higher costs. " Five percent is the magic number," according to the Mass Energy Consumers Alliance, an advocacy group. "It supports more renewable energy on our power grid while keeping the new aggregated supply rate competitive with what the electric utility is offering."
States without CCAs find it tough
CCA offers an easy way for communities to take control of their energy use without the trouble of creating a municipal utility. Under this "muni-lite" approach, a CCA does not own or operate the equipment needed to generate or deliver the power, but does choose the fuel sources and set some policies.

In states without a CCA option, communities pushing for greater local control are finding it difficult.

The poster child is Boulder, Colorado. Frustrated by the heavy reliance on coal of their investor-owned utility, Xcel Energy, and inspired by the Kyoto Protocol, Boulder has been working to create a municipal utility since 2002. The effort barely survived a referendum on November 7, when voters approved another $16.5 million in funding for legal and engineering fees by a margin of only 1000 votes.

Another Colorado city, Pueblo, is finding itself on a similar path. In February the city, home to a major wind turbine manufacturing plant, pledged to go 100% renewable by 2035. But they are served by a monopoly utility, Black Hills Energy, that has repeatedly raised rates in recent years.

"We thought Black Hills was going to be a good corporate citizen of Pueblo," Councilman Larry Atencio said at a September 25 City Council meeting. "They have not been. They have gouged us. They have taken advantage of us. They have gone over and above being a corporate robber of the citizens of Pueblo."

With the city's franchise agreement with Black Hills expiring in 2020, the City Council voted unanimously to start looking into municipalization, with a $250,000 budget for research.

William McEwan, the city's energy advisor, told the Council, "I truly believe the long-term solution for Pueblo ratepayers is a municipal utility, but its a tough, tough process."
This article has been updated to reflect the newest figures for SDG&E's solar customers.

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Community choice energy drives renewable growth in California

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Community choice aggregation (CCA) is a tool to encourage local control of energy systems that can drive significant growth in clean energy. In California, communities are using CCA to invest in renewable energy; in other US states, it's a different story. Ben Paulos takes a look.

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Distributed solar and efficiency saves California $2.6 Billion on power line

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Distributed solar and efficiency saves California $2.6 Billion on power line

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This articles talks about how large amounts of savings the estimate to a total of $2.6 Billion are being seeing due to new transmission projects are being approved which consist of revisions of energy efficiency and solar power altering. Since some of the projects had were within PG&E's service area the changes have made an impact on allowing CA's goal of meeting 33% renewable goal. According to this data it has been stated that CA plans on meeting 50% renewable energy by 2020.Another factor that has contributed to these savings is the reduced solar peak demand by 6%. Overall, the main idea that can be taken from this informative article is that California is doing its part to increase renewable energy by reducing aspects that oppose this goal.

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Last week California's grid operator signed off on the state's 2017-2018 Transmission Plan, which approved 17 new transmission projects combined at a cost of nearly $271 million.

This may seem like a large number, however 20 transmission projects were canceled and 21 were revised due to energy efficiency and residential solar power altering local area load forecasts. The projected savings from these changes is approximately $2.6 billion.

The majority of the projects were located in the service area of utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), while two of the canceled projects were located in San Diego Gas & Electric territory. PG&E recently announced hitting California's 33% renewable goal in 2017, and including nuclear and hydroelectric power 78.8% of its electricity came from GHG free sources.

In fact, last year California's three large investor-owned electricity utilities announced that they will reach 50% renewable energy by 2020 - far ahead of the 2030 Renewable Portfolio Standard goal.

The report suggested that by 2027, there could be almost 13 GW of behind-the-meter solar, with nearly 6 GW installed today. Statewide, self-generation is projected to reduce peak load by more than 8 GW by 2027.

The report includes a section on the contribution of solar on the operation of the grid, Briefing on renewables and recent grid operations. A few pieces of data from the report:

September 1, 2017 - peak demand of 50,116 MW

February 18, 2018 - minimum net load 7,149 MW

March 4, 2018 - maximum 3-hour upward ramp 14,777 MW

March 5, 2018 - maximum solar production 10,409 MW

As an example of what the grid will look like with higher penetrations of renewable energy, on February 18th 48.5% of all electricity came from GHG-free sources, with solar and wind peaking at 60.9% of electricity demand.

Another eye opening slide showed the contributions of solar to the grid on September 1, 2017:

The daily peak was shifted from approximately 5:30 PM, till almost 9 PM. The state's instantaneous peak load was lowered by almost 3 GW.

With the combination of solar reducing peak demand by 6% and behind-the-meter resources minimizing transmission spending by $2.6 billion, it is clear that renewable energy is making for a more efficient grid in California.

A key takeaway is that in contrast to utility claims that distributed solar under net metering imposes a net cost on other ratepayers, it is clear that it in addition to costs it also provides significant benefits. This makes for a more complex cost-benefit calculation, and it is possible that the reverse is true - that net-metered solar is providing benefits to other ratepayers in California, particularly since the shift to net metering 2.0.

This is of course, before we consider externalities such as broader pollution, health effects of air pollution and global climate change. California has reduced GHG emissions and gas use in its electricity sector every year for the past three years, while the penetration of renewable energy grows.

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Distributed solar and efficiency saves California $2.6 billion on power lines

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Last week California's grid operator signed off on the state's 2017-2018 Transmission Plan, which approved 17 new transmission projects combined at a cost of nearly $271 million. This may seem like a large number, however 20 transmission projects were canceled and 21 were revised due to energy efficiency and residential solar power altering local area load forecasts.

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California is embarrassing the rest of the country with the amount of solar energy it's producing

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California is embarrassing the rest of the country with the amount of solar energy it's producing

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While California has set the goal of having 50% of its power produced from renewable resources by 2030, the state has currently made profound strides in its production of solar energy. For instance, California produces more than half the energy produced by solar power in the nation, which meets on average about 13% of the states power needs. This is so much energy that California has to either slow down its solar power production or sell off the excess power to neighboring states.

The important thing I gleaned from the article is that transitioning to a renewable energy source for the majority of the state's power needs can create problems that we never thought of. How can we create an efficient way or harnessing all of the excess energy from renewables as we create more and more renewable energy plants? Its very easy to forget that while generating power might be relatively easy, storing that power when there is an excess or rerouting it to other end users might be difficult. It seems that while we are certainly moving in the right direction, we still need to consider the novel problems that arise from these novel power sources.

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California is the poster child for solar energy: in 2016, 13% of the state's power came from solar sources. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, California is in the lead for the cumulative amount of solar electric capacity installed in 2016.

In fact, the California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution.

The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides - it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California reached a milestone: for a few hours, more than half the state's power needs were sourced from solar energy. This put wholesale energy prices in the negative.

When there's too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power.

But it's not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction.

California's state goal is to get 50% of all its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

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California is embarrassing the rest of the country with the amount of solar energy it's producing

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California is the poster child for solar energy: in 2016, 13% of the state's power came from solar sources. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, California is in the lead for the cumulative amount of solar electric capacity installed in 2016.

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Trump’s new tariff could hurt California’s effort to go solar

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Trump’s new tariff could hurt California’s effort to go solar

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Our President, Donald Trump, imposed a 30 percent tariff on solar panels imported from overseas in the beginning of this year. These recently tariffed solar panels make of 70% of the solar panels deployed in the US. This extreme tariff has caused many American solar panel manufacturers into foreclosures. Experts in this industry say that Trumps decision will make the alternative energy source more expensive for homeowners and business owners. Solar growth has been growing due to the effect of tax credits, but does this new tariff make the tax credit monetarily worth getting solar panels? Trump claimed this new tariff was to help the troubled US manufacturing industry, but there are many quotes from Trump stating he would support coal and fossil fuel option in the US. Is this new tariff really for helping our economy for manufacturing or is it mainly so Trump can say he keeps his promises…I believe the latter. Either way, this industry will survive. A solar panel plant is being made in North Highlands that will provide jobs in this renewable energy industry.

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Solar energy shines brighter in California than practically anywhere else, with solar panels perched on more than 450,000 rooftops.

Now the state's solar industry has been sent reeling by President Donald Trump's decision Monday to impose a 30 percent tariff on solar panels imported from overseas.

Imports make up 70 percent of the solar panels deployed in the United States, with China accounting for the lion's share. The influx of imported panels has eviscerated America solar manufacturers, including several that set up shop in the Sacramento area a decade ago but have since disappeared.

At the same time, though, solar energy has flourished in other forms in the United States, particularly in California. About 100,000 Californians work in the solar business, installing panels, manufacturing components and developing large-scale "solar farms" that have sprouted in the sun-drenched Central Valley, according to the California Solar Energy Industries Association.

Industry experts said Trump's decision, announced by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, will make solar more expensive for homeowners and business owners. They don't think the higher prices will kill the industry, but it could depress demand and slow a business that has made renewable energy a rising star in California's economy. The tariffs will start at 30 percent and taper off to 15 percent in the fourth and final year they remain in effect.

"It's definitely not going to help our industry," said Scott Wallace, a project developer with Spectrum Energy Development Inc. in Elk Grove. Spectrum develops and installs solar panels for businesses and apartment complexes.

For homeowners, a typical rooftop array of solar panels costs around $15,000, although homeowners are eligible for a 30 percent federal tax credit, said Ed Murray of Aztec Solar Inc., an installer in Rancho Cordova.

As it stands now, Murray said homeowners can expect the panels to pay for themselves, in the form of cheaper electricity, in six to nine years. With the tariffs, he said, the payback time will likely be eight to 10 years.

"There will still be people wanting (solar)," Murray said. "We always bounce back from these things. We will prevail."

Solar's growth in California has been explosive, thanks in part to declining costs and the effect of the tax credits. Solar generated 9 percent of California's electricity in 2016, a one third increase from the year before. About 20,000 homes in greater Sacramento are powered by solar, according to SMUD, and the increasingly familiar dark blue panels are found on Golden 1 Center and some of the region's other signature buildings.

For all its success, the industry still thinks of itself as an up-and-comer that will suffer damage from the effect of pricier solar panels.

"We're an emerging technology," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar Energy Industries Association. "Anything that increases our cost is bad."

Because manufacturing represents such a small slice of the American solar industry, the U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association said the tariffs will eliminate an estimated 23,000 jobs. Of the estimated 260,000 solar jobs nationwide, only 38,000 are in manufacturing, the association said, and only 2,000 of the factory workers make solar panels.

Solar advocates accused Trump, who has been outspoken in his support of coal and other fossil fuels, of undermining a popular form of renewable energy. "Declining solar costs have been critical to the growth of solar as a tool for states, cities and utilities to provide energy bill assistance to low-income customers, and the growing industry has created tens of thousands of good jobs," said Grid Alternatives, an Oakland nonprofit that works to bring solar power to low-income communities.

The Trump administration portrayed the tariffs, however, as an attempt to support a troubled U.S. manufacturing industry that has suffered at the hands of unfair competition from China. In its official findings, the office of the U.S. trade representative said imports have grown by 500 percent since 2012, and "by 2017, the U.S. solar industry had almost disappeared." It added that China's government subsidizes solar panel production and its companies sell in the United States "for less than their fair market value, all to the detriment of U.S. manufacturers."

The tariff comes as one Chinese company, CSUN, prepares to open a solar panel factory at McClellan Business Park in North Highlands. The company has said its U.S. subsidiary, Sunergy America, could employ 200 workers at McClellan.

"The plant is being built right now," said Ken Giannotti, a senior vice president at the business park. "We see them under way. A number of their employees are already in the space, in pre-startup mode."

McClellan and the rest of the Sacramento region have had poor results with solar manufacturing. At least four companies were in the process of opening factories in the area in 2009, during an initial wave of solar expansion, raising hopes that green energy would help lead Sacramento out of the recession. One company, OptiSolar Inc. of Hayward, said it would hire more than 500 workers at McClellan.

But the companies collapsed under the weight of inexpensive imports. Giannotti said Sunergy America could open a new chapter.

"I hope it's a second coming," he said.

The biggest debacle in the U.S. solar industry took place in the Bay Area, where solar panel startup Solyndra fell apart after receiving a $500 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration as part of the economic stimulus package.

Nevertheless, the solar industry has continued to expand as rooftop installations have become increasingly affordable. SolarCity, the solar installer owned by Elon Musk's Tesla Motors Inc., employs several hundred installers and customer-service workers in the Sacramento region - although it did lay off 140 workers in Roseville last summer.

Other companies have found mico-niches. Eco Foundation Systems Inc. of Sacramento, which installs specialty screws for mounting solar panels on the ground, said it believes it can withstand the impacts of an increase in solar panel prices.

"Business is always being faced with challenges," said Ed Ayala, the company's president. "This is no different than a fuel increase or an insurance increase. You can't let this stop you."

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Trump's new tariff could hurt California's effort to go solar

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Solar energy shines brighter in California than practically anywhere else, with solar panels perched on more than 450,000 rooftops. Now the state's solar industry has been sent reeling by President Donald Trump's decision Monday to impose a 30 percent tariff on solar panels imported from overseas.

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California is taking a cooling off period after generating too much energy from the sun

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California is taking a cooling off period after generating too much energy from the sun

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The solar sector in California is "taking a break" for a little while following record energy production from the sun. Recently, solar energy accounted for 50% of the state's demand, which beat last years production by 5%. California has been directing power to other states such as Arizona to avoid overpowering the power lines. There are currently no plans to purchase more solar sue to lack of knowledge of what to do with it. Much of the solar energy in the country was installed in California last year (2,500MW). The California senate has made a big proposal following the ease at which we can reach 50% renewable energy by 2030: 100% renewable by 2045.
I think it's great that we are exceeding our energy needs and the residential market is still growing. However, there is a problem in storage of power, which will need to be fixed because they are stopping production and/or paying other states to take our excess power.

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California's solar sector has been on fire. But after a building sprint that saw its share of solar rise from 0.5% of generation in 2010 to 10% last year, the state may be taking a break following two new production records this month.

Solar served up an unprecedented 50% of the state's demand on a sunny day around 1pm PT on March 5. The next day, utility operators reported a second record for total generation from solar which produced 10,411 megawatts, beating out last year's record by 5%. The state is regularly shunting electricity to Arizona and other states (sometimes paying them to do so) to avoid overloading its own power lines.

Greentech Media reports there's little prospect of big new purchases of solar, or other renewable energy sources for that matter, by utilities. With investor-owned utilities all well ahead of state targets of 25% renewables by 2020 (and more distributed generation coming online), no new renewable capacity was procured last year and no plans to contract more (although plenty is in the pipeline, and homes and businesses are still adding more). "They're basically saying, 'There's too much going on; we don't know what to do, so we're not going to do anything for a while,'" Jan Smutny-Jones of the Independent Energy Producers Association told Greentech.

Things on the home front are slowing down as well, although for different reasons. The US residential rooftop solar market, after at least 16 consecutive years of growth, shrank slightly in 2017, reports Bloomberg. The main reason was that Tesla, recent acquirer of SolarCity, cut its marketing spending to concentrate on profitability instead of growth, ceding the top spot to US residential solar installer Sunrun. But the residential industry is not going away, with an estimated 2,500 MW installed last year, much of it in California. Analysts expect expansion to continue in emerging markets Utah, Texas, South Carolina and Florida

One thing could tip California's solar market back into a furious growth period: a new target. With the mandate to generate half the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2030 now easily within reach (renewables accounted for 27% of total generation last year), the California state Senate has proposed legislation to require 100% of the state's power come from renewable sources by 2045.

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California is taking a cooling off period after generating too much energy from the sun

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California's solar sector has been on fire. But after a building sprint that saw its share of solar rise from 0.5% of generation in 2010 to 10% last year, the state may be taking a break following two new production records this month. Solar served up an unprecedented 50% of the state's demand on a...

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Current Solar Power Projects in California. 

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Current Solar Power Projects in California. 

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The California Energy Commission gives a well put together list of current solar power projects in Califronia along with information on their statistics and design. What was interesting to see was that the majority of projects listed are solar thermal parabolic troughs. Basically a parabolic trough focuses light onto a tube containing a fluid with a low boiling point. Steam generated by the heat transfer is then guided into a turbine where the heat energy is transferred into kinetic, mechanical, then electrical energy. This design is highly efficient, and can generate a comfortable 125 MW per complex. Total length of the troughs is approximately 7 miles long and the complex itself is about 10 square miles. In comparison to the "Solar Towers" posted in Nevada, it generates more power over a smaller area and with less materials.

A question I have, is how are these projects going to progress, in terms of  location, in the future? Mainly, these projects are mostly located within San Bernadino County. Can this energy be transferred to more distant cities, or are more units going to be spread out across the state?

An interesting side note, was that by 2020, electrical utilities are going to be required to have 33% of their provided power be totally renewable.

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Information about projects that have filed applications under the Energy Commission's jurisdiction

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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California generates so much solar power that the state often pays other states to receive California's unused solar power in order to not overload the electric grid in the State. A prominent state that California pays to receive it's unused solar power is Arizona. During certain days in the months of January through to March, California generates more electricity through solar power than it can afford to use. California is also ordering Solar Plants to cut back on energy production as a result. Due to this, Arizona is able to help it's locals save millions each year as a result, however grid operators decline to disclose exactly how much a citizen saves. The reason for why California produces so much power is due to their "dramatic" success of the state's renewable energy projects. Even though the state is still extremely fossil fuel dependent, the state is showing great promise in switching to alternative energy and away from fossil fuels.

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

The number of days that California dumped its unused solar electricity would have been even higher if the state hadn't ordered some solar plants to reduce production - even as natural gas power plants, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, continued generating electricity.

Solar and wind power production was curtailed a relatively small amount - about 3% in the first quarter of 2017 - but that's more than double the same period last year. And the surge in solar power could push the number even higher in the future.

Why doesn't California, a champion of renewable energy, use all the solar power it can generate?

The answer, in part, is that the state has achieved dramatic success in increasing renewable energy production in recent years. But it also reflects sharp conflicts among major energy players in the state over the best way to weave these new electricity sources into a system still dominated by fossil-fuel-generated power.

No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

Perhaps the most glaring example: The California Legislature has mandated that one-half of the state's electricity come from renewable sources by 2030; today it's about one-fourth. That goal once was considered wildly optimistic. But solar panels have become much more efficient and less expensive. So solar power is now often the same price or cheaper than most other types of electricity, and production has soared so much that the target now looks laughably easy to achieve.

At the same time, however, state regulators - who act independently of the Legislature - until recently have continued to greenlight utility company proposals to build more natural gas power plants.

These conflicting energy agendas have frustrated state Senate Leader Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), who opposes more fossil fuel plants. He has introduced legislation that would require the state to meet its goal of 50% of its electricity from renewable sources five years earlier, by 2025. Even more ambitiously, he recently proposed legislation to require 100% of the state's power to come from renewable energy sources by 2045.

"I want to make sure we don't have two different pathways," de Leon said. Expanding clean energy production and also building natural gas plants, he added, is "a bad investment."

Environmental groups are even more critical. They contend that building more fossil fuel plants at the same time that solar production is being curtailed shows that utilities - with the support of regulators - are putting higher profits ahead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"California and others have just been getting it wrong," said Leia Guccione, an expert in renewable energy at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, a clean power advocate. "The way [utilities] earn revenue is building stuff. When they see a need, they are perversely [incentivized] to come up with a solution like a gas plant."

Regulators and utility officials dispute this view. They assert that the transition from fossil fuel power to renewable energy is complicated and that overlap is unavoidable.

They note that electricity demand fluctuates - it is higher in summer in California, because of air conditioning, and lower in the winter - so some production capacity inevitably will be underused in the winter. Moreover, the solar power supply fluctuates as well. It peaks at midday, when the sunlight is strongest. Even then it isn't totally reliable.

Because no one can be sure when clouds might block sunshine during the day, fossil fuel electricity is needed to fill the gaps. Utility officials note that solar production is often cut back first because starting and stopping natural gas plants is costlier and more difficult than shutting down solar panels.

Eventually, unnecessary redundancy of electricity from renewables and fossil fuel will disappear, regulators, utilities and operators of the electric grid say.

"The gas-fired generation overall will show decline," said Neil Millar, executive director of infrastructure at CAISO, the California Independent System Operator, which runs the electric grid and shares responsibility for preventing blackouts and brownouts. "Right now, as the new generation is coming online and the older generation hasn't left yet, there is a bit of overlap."

Utility critics acknowledge these complexities. But they counter that utilities and regulators have been slow to grasp how rapidly technology is transforming the business. A building slowdown is long overdue, they argue.

Despite a growing glut of power, however, authorities only recently agreed to put on hold proposals for some of the new natural gas power plants that utilities want to build to reconsider whether they are needed.

A key question in the debate is when California will be able to rely on renewable power for most or all of its needs and safely phase out fossil fuel plants, which regulators are studying.

The answer depends in large part on how fast battery storage improves, so it is cheaper and can store power closer to customers for use when the sun isn't shining. Solar proponents say the technology is advancing rapidly, making reliance on renewables possible far sooner than previously predicted, perhaps two decades or even less from now - which means little need for new power plants with a life span of 30 to 40 years.

Calibrating this correctly is crucial to controlling electricity costs.

"It's not the renewables that's the problem. It's the state's renewable policy that's the problem," said Gary Ackerman, president of the Western Power Trading Forum, an association of independent power producers. "We're curtailing renewable energy in the summertime months. In the spring, we have to give people money to take it off our hands."

Not long ago, solar was barely a rounding error for California's energy producers.

In 2010, power plants in the state generated just over 15% of their electricity production from renewable sources. But that was mostly wind and geothermal power, with only a scant 0.5% from solar. Now that overall amount has grown to 27%, with solar power accounting for 10%, or most of the increase. The solar figure doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar systems that produce an additional 4 percentage points, a share that is ever growing.

Behind the rapid expansion of solar power: its plummeting price, which makes it highly competitive with other electricity sources. In part that stems from subsidies, but much of the decline comes from the sharp drop in the cost of making solar panels and their increased efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity.

The average cost of solar power for residential, commercial and utility-scale projects declined 73% between 2010 and 2016. Solar electricity now costs 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour - the amount needed to light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours - to produce, or about the same as electricity produced by a natural gas plant and half the cost of a nuclear facility, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Fly over the Carrizo Plain in California's Central Valley near San Luis Obispo and you'll see that what was once barren land is now a sprawling solar farm, with panels covering more than seven square miles - one of the world's largest clean-energy projects. When the sun shines over the Topaz Solar Farm, the shimmering panels produce enough electricity to power all of the residential homes in a city the size of Long Beach, population 475,000.

Other large-scale solar operations blanket swaths of the Mojave Desert, which has increasingly become a sun-soaking energy hub. The Beacon solar project covers nearly two square miles and the Ivanpah plant covers about five and a half square miles.

The state's three big shareholder-owned utilities now count themselves among the biggest solar power producers. Southern California Edison produces or buys more than 7% of its electricity from solar generators, Pacific Gas & Electric 13% and San Diego Gas & Electric 22%.

Similarly, fly over any sizable city and you'll see warehouses, businesses and parking lots with rooftop solar installations, and many homes as well.

With a glut of solar power at times, CAISO has two main options to avoid a system overload: order some solar and wind farms to temporarily halt operations or divert the excess power to other states.

That's because too much electricity can overload the transmission system and result in power outages, just as too little can. Complicating matters is that even when CAISO requires large-scale solar plants to shut off panels, it can't control solar rooftop installations that are churning out electricity.

CAISO is being forced to juggle this surplus more and more.

In 2015, solar and wind production were curtailed about 15% of the time on average during a 24-hour period. That rose to 21% in 2016 and 31% in the first few months of this year. The surge in solar production accounts for most of this, though heavy rainfall has increased hydroelectric power production in the state this year, adding to the surplus of renewables.

Even when solar production is curtailed, the state can produce more than it uses, because it is difficult to calibrate supply and demand precisely. As more homeowners install rooftop solar, for example, their panels can send more electricity to the grid than anticipated on some days, while the state's overall power usage might fall below what was expected.

This means that CAISO increasingly has excess solar and wind power it can send to Arizona, Nevada and other states.

When those states need more electricity than they are producing, they pay California for the power. But California has excess power on a growing number of days when neighboring states don't need it, so California has to pay them to take it. CAISO calls that "negative pricing."

Why does California have to pay rather than simply give the power away free?

When there isn't demand for all the power the state is producing, CAISO needs to quickly sell the excess to avoid overloading the electricity grid, which can cause blackouts. Basic economics kick in. Oversupply causes prices to fall, even below zero. That's because Arizona has to curtail its own sources of electricity to take California's power when it doesn't really need it, which can cost money. So Arizona will use power from California at times like this only if it has an economic incentive - which means being paid.

In the first two months of this year, CAISO paid to send excess power to other states seven times more often than same period in 2014. "Negative pricing" happened in an average of 18% of all sales, versus about 2.5% in the same period in 2014.

Most "negative pricing" typically has occurred for relatively short periods at midday, when solar production is highest.

But what happened in March shows how the growing supply of solar power could have a much greater impact in the future. The periods of "negative pricing" lasted longer than in the past - often for six hours at a time, and once for eight hours, according to a CAISO report.

The excess power problem will ease somewhat in the summer, when electricity usage is about 50% higher in California than in the winter.

But CAISO concedes that curtailments and "negative pricing" is likely to happen even more often in the future as solar power production continues to grow, unless action is taken to better manage the excess electricity.

Arizona's largest utility, Arizona Public Service, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of California's largesse because it is next door and the power can easily be sent there on transmission lines.

On days that Arizona is paid to take California's excess solar power, Arizona Public Service says it has cut its own solar generation rather than fossil fuel power. So California's excess solar isn't reducing greenhouse gases when that happens.

CAISO says it does not calculate how much it has paid others so far this year to take excess electricity. But its recent oversupply report indicated that it frequently paid buyers as much as $25 per megawatt-hour to get them to take excess power, according to the Energy Information Administration.

That's a good deal for Arizona, which uses what it is paid by California to reduce its own customers' electricity bills. Utility buyers typically pay an average of $14 to $45 per megawatt-hour for electricity when there isn't a surplus from high solar power production.

With solar power surging so much that it is sometimes curtailed, does California need to spend $6 billion to $8 billion to build or refurbish eight natural gas power plants that have received preliminary approval from regulators, especially as legislative leaders want to accelerate the move away from fossil fuel energy?

The answer depends on whom you ask.

Utilities have repeatedly said yes. State regulators have agreed until now, approving almost all proposals for new power plants. But this month, citing the growing electricity surplus, regulators announced plans to put on hold the earlier approvals of four of the eight plants to determine if they really are needed.

Big utilities continue to push for all of the plants, maintaining that building natural gas plants doesn't conflict with expanding solar power. They say both paths are necessary to ensure that California has reliable sources of power - wherever and whenever it is needed.

The biggest industrial solar power plants, they note, produce electricity in the desert, in some cases hundreds of miles from population centers where most power is used.

At times of peak demand, transmission lines can get congested, like Los Angeles highways. That's why CAISO, utilities and regulators argue that new natural gas plants are needed closer to big cities. In addition, they say, the state needs ample electricity sources when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough.

Utility critics agree that some redundancy is needed to guarantee reliability, but they contend that the state already has more than enough.

California has so much surplus electricity that existing power plants run, on average, at slightly less than one-third of capacity. And some plants are being closed decades earlier than planned.

As for congestion, critics note that the state already is crisscrossed with an extensive network of transmission lines. Building more plants and transmission lines wouldn't make the power system much more reliable, but would mean higher profits for utilities, critics say.

That is what the debate is about, said Jaleh Firooz, a power industry consultant who previously worked as an engineer for San Diego Gas & Electric for 24 years and helped in the formation of CAISO.

"They have the lopsided incentive of building more," she said.

The reason: Once state regulators approve new plants or transmission lines, the cost is now built into the amount that the utility can charge electricity users - no matter how much or how little it is used.

Given that technology is rapidly tilting the competitive advantage toward solar power, there are less expensive and cleaner ways to make the transition toward renewable energy, she said.

To buttress her argument, Firooz pointed to a battle in recent years over a natural gas plant in Redondo Beach.

Independent power producer AES Southland in 2012 proposed replacing an aging facility there with a new one. The estimated cost: $250 million to $275 million, an amount that customers would pay off with higher electricity bills.

CAISO and Southern California Edison, which was going to buy power from the new plant, supported it as necessary to protect against potential power interruptions. Though solar and wind power production was increasing, they said those sources couldn't be counted on because their production is variable, not constant.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the project, agreeing that it was needed to meet the long-term electricity needs in the L.A. area.

But the California Coastal Conservancy, a conservation group opposed to the plant, commissioned an analysis by Firooz to determine how vital it was. Her conclusion: not at all.

Firooz calculated that the L.A. region already had excess power production capacity - even without the new plant - at least through 2020.

Along with the cushion, her report found, a combination of improved energy efficiency, local solar production, storage and other planning strategies would be more than sufficient to handle the area's power needs even as the population grew.

She questioned utility arguments.

"In their assumptions, the amount of capacity they give to the solar is way, way undercut because they have to say, 'What if it's cloudy? What if the wind is not blowing?' " Firooz explained. "That's how the game is played. You build these scenarios so that it basically justifies what you want."

Undeterred, AES Southland pressed forward with its proposal. In 2013, Firooz updated her analysis at the request of the city of Redondo Beach, which was skeptical that a new plant was needed. Her findings remained the same.

Nonetheless, the state Public Utilities Commission approved the project in March 2014 on the grounds that it was needed. But the California Energy Commission, another regulatory agency whose approval for new plants is required along with the PUC's, sided with the critics. In November 2015 it suspended the project, effectively killing it.

Asked about the plant, AES said it followed the appropriate processes in seeking approval. It declined to say whether it still thinks that a new plant is needed.

The existing facility is expected to close in 2020.

A March 2017 state report showed why critics are confident that the area will be fine without a new plant: The need for power from Redondo Beach's existing four natural gas units has been so low, the state found, that the units have operated at less than 5% of their capacity during the last four years.

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power. Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

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Discussing the recent transition to a new type of farming, this article investigates the reallocation of farm land to allow for increased solar energy collection in California. With the drought taking its toll on crop harvests in recent years, many farmers have turned to using their pastures to collect sunlight rather than fruits and vegetables with 30% of installations now occupying croplands. Researchers have begun to use the Carnegie Energy and Environmental Compatibility computer model to identify future conflicts between energy and environmental resources throughout the state. In order to achieve the 80% reduction in green house emissions the country is striving for however, re-purposing land already in use by American society is necessary.

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Washington, D.C.-With mounting vigor for combating global climate change, increasing the use of renewable energy resources such as solar, without compromising natural habitats, is a challenge to the traditional model of utility-scale solar energy installations. Such facilities use vast swaths of land for solar gathering and generating equipment. Until now, studies quantifying the effects on land-cover change and analyses of impacts on protected areas near solar facilities have been limited.

New work from Carnegie's Rebecca R. Hernandez (now at UC-Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Madison K. Hoffacker (now at UC-Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology), and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assessed the siting impacts of 161 existing, under construction, and planned utility-scale solar energy facilities in California. Utility-scale solar energy facilities generate at least 1 megawatt, which is enough to power approximately 165 homes. The researchers found that a majority of sites are located in natural California shrub- and scrublands covering about 145 square miles (375 km2); 28% are in croplands and pastures; less than 15% are in developed areas; and some 19% are in areas far from existing transmission infrastructure, which has adverse economic, energetic, and environmental consequences.

This study included two kinds of solar technologies, photovoltaics (PV), which use semiconductors, and concentrating solar power (CSP), which use mirrors to focus the sun's rays for generating steam. Previous work by Hernandez and colleagues, published in Nature Climate Change, found that these solar technologies in built-up areas could meet California's energy demands three to five times over.

"California, as an early adopter of solar energy, is a model system for understanding the complex siting decisions made by all parties-from developers, to governmental agencies, to stakeholders and communities-involved in utility-scale solar energy development," remarked Hernandez. "Solar energy in developed areas, or for example on contaminated lands, would have great environmental co-benefits, but this is not what is being emphasized. Instead, we see that 'big solar' is competing for space with natural areas. Knowing this is vital for understanding and creating predictions of a rapidly changing global energy landscape."

In analyzing impacts on protected areas, the researchers calculated the proximity of solar installations to them. The fact that nearly 20% of solar facilities were far (greater than 6 miles, or 10 kilometers) from transmission infrastructure means that the energy must travel farther and therefore have greater energy losses; they cost more to build; and new transmission corridors degrade the natural environment. Michael Allen of UC-Riverside, a co-author on the study stated, "As a goal of reducing the human carbon footprint, and protecting the environment including California's incredible biodiversity, careful planning of siting of facilities and selection of appropriate technologies should become standard."

Almost 30% of all installations were in croplands and pastures. "We were struck by this finding too," Hernandez stated. "We are seeing landowners, particularly in the Central Valley, shift from harvesting crops and forage to harvesting the sun." It is possible that the mounting pressure from drought has made this shift to solar energy an easier decision for farmers, a novel interaction that Hoffacker is currently studying in greater depth.

After evaluating land-cover change from solar facilities, the researchers used the Carnegie Energy and Environmental Compatibility computer model to develop a compatibility index to identify areas of potential and direct conflict with respect to environmental resources California-wide. Compatible areas are areas that are already developed. For photovoltaic technology, they identified some 8,500 square miles (22,028 km2) of these compatible areas (11.2% of total PV installations) and 30,000 square miles (77,761 km2) of potential compatible areas (71.7% of PV installations). Potentially compatible areas are the next best thing. They are not protected, they would not require heavy site preparation, such as grading steep slopes, and they are within 6 miles (10km) of transmission lines and roads. There are many locally unique considerations that come into this category, for instance view disruption for local residents. Incompatible areas are natural and protected areas. The scientists found that some 55.5% of CSP installations were in either compatible or potentially compatible areas.

Hernandez explained, "If our country wants to reduce greenhouse emissions by 80% of 1990 emissions by 2050, some 27,500 square miles (71,428 km2) of land could be required for solar installations, which is about the area of South Carolina. We can increase the land-use efficiency in ways such as decreasing spaces between rows of photovoltaic modules or concentrating solar power mirrors. Better yet, is to locate installations in areas already affected by humans, such as on land fills, over parking lots, and on rooftops and nearest to where the energy is being consumed."

Kara Moore, an applied ecologist at the Center for Population Biology at UC-Davis, who has conducted landmark experimental studies on effectiveness of rare species mitigation within a utility-scale solar energy facility stated, "This study gives policy-makers clear guidance on the great potential we have to site utility-scale renewable energy more sustainably by building it into our existing human-affected landscapes. By doing so we benefit by simultaneously increasing the efficiency of renewable energy systems and by avoiding unnecessary impacts to our precious remaining natural areas."

Image courtesy NASA

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This work was supported by The McGee Research Grant of the Stanford's School of Earth Sciences, the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, the Jean Langenheim Research Fellowship of Graduate Women in Science Society, the Hispanic Scholarship's Fund's William Randolph Hearst Fund Scholarship, and the Vice Provost Office of Graduate Education's Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence Program. Other authors are Michelle Murphy-Mariscal, Grace Wu, and Michael Allen.

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Washington, D.C.-With mounting vigor for combating global climate change, increasing the use of renewable energy resources such as solar, without compromising natural habitats, is a challenge to the traditional model of utility-scale solar energy installations. Such facilities use vast swaths of land for solar gathering and generating equipment.

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Reflecting on this article from 2017, fourteen different days in March, eight days in January and nine days in February, the issue raised as California produced so much solar power needing to pay Arizona, Nevada and other states to take excess electricity to avoid overloading its power lines. The outcome, California has ordered some of its solar plants to reduce generation and in fact the solar and wind power production was reduced by around 3% in the first quarter of 2017 which was more than double the same period last year. The California legislature has mandated that half of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030 which is about double what it is today. State regulators have then had utility companies build the natural gas power plants to deliver reliable power and back-up power to the wind and solar units in California. Electricity prices in California have increased faster than in the rest of the United States and they are over the area of forty percent higher comparing to the national average, looking at 2017’s records. These articles help realize potential issues we can have for the future.

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On 14 different days in March, California produced so much solar power that it needed to pay Arizona, Nevada and other states to take the excess electricity to avoid overloading its power lines. The phenomenon also occurred on eight days in January and nine days in February. As a result, California has ordered some of its solar plants to reduce generation. In fact, solar and wind power production was curtailed by about 3 percent in the first quarter of 2017-more than double the same period last year.[i]

California has an ever-increasing glut of power because of the state legislature's push for renewable energy and state regulators' push for natural gas. The California legislature has mandated that half of the state's electricity come from renewable sources by 2030-about double what it is today. At the same time, state regulators have had utility companies build natural gas power plants to provide reliable power and back-up power to the wind and solar units. Utilities are happy to comply because constructing power plants provides new revenue. Once state regulators approve new plants or transmission lines, the cost is included in users' electricity bills-no matter how much or how little is used. This two-track approach has created the glut and has proved costly for California electricity consumers. Electricity prices in California have increased faster than in the rest of the United States and they are over 40 percent higher than the national average.

Because no one can be sure if the sun will shine or the wind will blow, natural gas generation is needed to ensure electricity is available on demand. And when a glut exists, solar production is often reduced first if it cannot be exported because starting and stopping natural gas plants is costlier than shutting down solar plants. California has so much surplus electricity that existing power plants run, on average, at slightly less than one-third of capacity. And some plants are being shuttered earlier than planned.

While natural gas plant construction has slowed, it is unclear if and when California will be able to rely on renewable power for most or all of its needs, which many of its legislators are striving to achieve. In order to be heavily dependent on wind and solar power, battery storage technology must improve, become more reasonably priced, and store power closer to customers for use when renewable energy is not available. That breakthrough in storage power is probably decades away.
California's Renewable Energy
In 2010, California generated about 15 percent of its central station electricity from non-hydroelectric renewable sources-mostly wind and geothermal power. Today, renewable energy generates 27 percent, with solar power accounting for 10 percent. Disbursed rooftop solar produces an additional 4 percentage points of power. The rapid expansion of solar power in California is a result of substantial subsidies, improved efficiencies and its declining cost. Southern California Edison produces or buys over 7 percent of its electricity from solar generators, Pacific Gas & Electric 13 percent and San Diego Gas & Electric 22 percent. When a glut occurs, these utilities must either export power or curtail production.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/

In 2015, solar and wind production was curtailed about 15 percent of the time, on average, during a 24-hour period. In 2016, the curtailment increased to 21 percent, and in the first few months of this year to 31 percent. Heavy rainfall increased hydroelectric power production in California this year, adding to the surplus of electricity. Either too much electricity generation or too little generation can doom the transmission system and result in power outages. Further complicating the situation, the California Independent System Operator has no control over the state's solar rooftop installations.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/
Neighboring States Get Paid to Take Excess Power
If the neighboring states need excess power from California, they pay California for that power. However, if they do not need the power, California pays them to take it because they must curtail their own sources of electricity, which can cost money. In the first two months of this year, the California Independent System Operator paid to send excess power to other states seven times more often than during the same period in 2014. The phenomena of "negative pricing" occurred in an average of 18 percent of all sales for the first two months of this year, versus about 2.5 percent during the same period in 2014. California has paid as much as $25 per megawatt-hour for other states to take the excess power.

"Negative pricing" typically occurs for relatively short periods of time at midday when solar production is highest. In March, however, the periods of "negative pricing" lasted longer-often for six hours at a time, and once for eight hours. During the summer when electricity demand in California is 50 percent higher than in the winter, less curtailments are needed. But, if solar production continues to grow, curtailments and "negative pricing" are likely to occur more often, unless action is taken to better manage the excess electricity.
Conclusion
Rapid expansion of renewable power can cause unexpected problems with electric grid stability. Since too much power is destabilizing, as is too little power, excess power production must be exported or curtailed. While consumers in the neighboring states benefit from lower electricity costs, California's ratepayers are footing the bill for the utility generators that produce the power.

This is reminiscent of Denmark and Germany which have had to export heavily subsidized wind and/or solar power to other countries because too much electricity was being generated. As a result, Danish and German consumers are paying some of the highest residential electricity prices in Europe-three times as high as in the United States-for the "benefit" of having wind and solar power generated in their country regardless of whether that power can be used domestically.

[i] Los Angeles Times, California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it, June 22, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/

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On 14 different days in March, California produced so much solar power that it needed to pay Arizona, Nevada and other states to take the excess electricity to avoid overloading its power lines. The phenomenon also occurred on eight days in January and nine days in February.

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California Aims to 'Bottle Sunlight' in Energy Storage Push

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California Aims to 'Bottle Sunlight' in Energy Storage Push

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This article presents very interesting information about one of the crucial factors about energy production which is the one concerning storage; certainly, the capture and stock of energy produced is a critical part of the efficiency of any method of creation, and its ultimate benefit which would be delivering the energy to consumers can be greatly influenced by this condition as well as the green energy production itself due the monetary element being that the cost of energy storage is quite high in comparison to the one of building a whole new gas plant, as it is referred in this article.

I liked the expression “holy grail” used by the authors for the energy storage; indeed, it is a decisive component in the proficiency of energy usage because it can provide additional power-time per day preventing peak demand transmission or the need for building more production plants, so the interest and investments from both the government - because of the state renewable energy targets of 1/3 of the electricity supply and up to 1.3 gigawatts storage by 2020 – are very promising regarding reaching substantial development in this particular.

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By Braden Reddall and Nichola Groom

SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California, whose green ambitions helped the solar and wind industries take root, is taking an essential next step by proposing a sharp rise in energy storage to better integrate renewable power with the rest of the grid.

Power from sun and wind fluctuates dramatically, so capturing it for later use makes the supply more predictable.

"We can't just rely on sunlight," Governor Jerry Brown told the Intersolar conference in San Francisco last month. "We've got to bottle the sunlight."

California's storage push comes as renewables move toward a mandated one-third of the state's electricity supply by 2020. The proposal has fired up a technology race that has already attracted venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla, large-scale battery makers such as LG Chem, and establishment forces like General Electric Co and Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates.

It isn't just about California. Germany is a storage pioneer, and in the United States, stimulus funds have backed projects in states such as New York and Texas.

But the Golden State's aggressive renewables target is forcing the issue here: it wants storage of up to 1.3 gigawatts by 2020. That capacity is enough for traditional plants to power more than a million homes.

Lux Research analyst Steven Minnihan said California's proposal is the first legislation that will have an immediate and lasting impact on the grid storage market, which he estimates will soar to installations worth $10.4 billion in 2017 from just $200 million last year.

But storage is costly when compared to building new gas plants, and many storage projects were set up with the help of stimulus funds that have since run dry, meaning utility customers will end up with much of the tab. There are also risks that unproven storage technologies will not deliver on their promise.

"The ratepayers would be on the hook," said Farzad Ghazzagh, who is analyzing the proposal for the Division of Ratepayer Advocates, an arm of the California Public Utilities Commission. His analysis is not complete, but Ghazzagh has seen estimates of $1 billion to $3 billion to install so much storage.

Proponents argue ratepayers will benefit because storage enables utilities to avoid building power plants or transmission to meet peak demand, simply by providing extra power for a few hours a day. The Electric Power Research Institute found in a report for California's grid regulator this summer that storage's cost is worth it if all benefits are considered.

As in solar manufacturing, the storage business has had its share of difficulties as it struggled to bring costs down and prove technologies. Battery maker A123 Systems and flywheel maker Beacon Power LLC were among the most high profile, both filing for bankruptcy after receiving generous support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

Both have reinvented themselves under new ownership. A123 was bought for $257 million by the U.S. unit of Chinese auto parts maker Wanxiang, and still makes grid-scale batteries, selling one to Hawaii's Maui Electric Company in June.

Beacon was snapped up by energy-focused private equity firm Rockland Capital for $30.5 million and is working on a new project in Pennsylvania with government backing. A third project will not need government support, according to Scott Harlan, Rockland's managing partner.

Beyond batteries, Gates, Thiel and Khosla all invested this year in compressed air startup LightSail Energy, which in May was awarded $1.7 million from the California Energy Commission to demonstrate its technology at a Ventura County naval base. Gates and Khosla also invested together in another storage startup - battery company Ambri.

"Grid scale storage has always been one of the areas that we knew and know will happen. It's a matter of timing," said Andrew Chung, a partner with Khosla Ventures.

California's push "really cracks open the door" for startups that until now have had difficulty expanding small pilot projects into big purchases, Chung added.

The true impact of California's initiative will be felt between 2020 and 2030, Lux's Minnihan said, and he expects the move to inspire efforts by other states.

"HOLY GRAIL"

Storage is seen as energy's "holy grail" because of the efficiency it brings to any grid. For example, California has 51 gigawatts of peak capacity to handle heat that boosts air-conditioning demand, even if only two-thirds of that is needed for most of the year.

Still, without more government money, utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego's Sempra Energy will shoulder much of the upfront costs.

A natural gas-fired plant costs about $1,000 per kilowatt to build, whereas EPRI's base case for a battery substitute has a breakeven capital cost of $1,684 per kilowatt.

"We all agree, as we sit here today, storage is uneconomic," SunPower Corp Chief Executive Tom Werner told a meeting of utility executives in San Francisco. "But if you go out five years, I wouldn't bet against it."

The market potential means many are willing to play the odds.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who founded Tesla Motors, is deploying the car maker's battery technology in solar systems installed by another company he backs: SolarCity.

"I am increasingly confident that there will be major breakthroughs in electricity storage tech," Musk told the Reuters Global Markets Forum chat room.

Germany, having subsidized a massive roll-out of rooftop solar, is aggressively funding storage to balance its grid, driving a domestic market predicted to be worth $19 billion by 2017.

Germany's Gildemeister is providing vanadium energy storage batteries for miner American Vanadium to market and sell in the United States. The batteries can recharge electric vehicles, store wind and solar power for electric power grids, and set up micro grids when main power sources are not available. In Nevada, American Vanadium is developing the only U.S. mine that will produce the little-known metal.

American Vanadium CEO Bill Radvak sees particular interest among building owners and public service providers on the U.S. East Coast after the power disruptions of Hurricane Sandy.

Among power companies, AES has 1 GW of storage planned, mostly using lithium-ion batteries, and says its projects require no government incentives to pay off.

Most projects are still government backed. PG&E has unveiled in San Jose a 4-megawatt sodium-sulfur battery from Japan's NGK Insulators, while LG Chem is supplying a 32 MW-hour lithium-ion system to an Edison wind farm in Tehachapi - California's wind power hub. PG&E's project was aided by a $3.3 million state grant and Edison's got $25 million in DoE funds.

Meanwhile, however, GE says a new sodium nickel chloride battery system integrated into its own Tehachapi turbines is cheaper than grid-scale batteries at wind farms because it requires less investment in certain hardware.

The technology makes a turbine's power steady over periods of 15 to 30 minutes thanks to a battery roughly equivalent to one in GM's Volt electric car. Project developer Invenergy will install three at a Texas wind farm this year.

Venture capitalists poured $2.2 billion into storage in the last five years, according to the Cleantech Group, or well over double that of the previous five years. Werner, of San Jose-based SunPower, noted that the same minds behind smartphones are moving into smart meters and storage in Silicon Valley.

"These are capitalists. They're not doing this as a science experiment."

(Reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco and Nichola Groom in Los Angeles; Editing by Patricia Kranz, Martin Howell and Richard Chang)

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California Aims to 'Bottle Sunlight' in Energy Storage Push

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By Braden Reddall and Nichola Groom SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California, whose green ambitions helped the solar and wind industries take root, is taking an essential next step by proposing a sharp rise in energy storage to better integrate renewable power with the rest of the grid.

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According to the article by John Lindt, Camp San Luis Obispo (SLO) and the California Men's Colony will be joining in on Cal Poly's efforts in going solar. The camp is aiming to add to the 18.5 acre solar farm--implemented by the university and located near the highway 1--of which already is comprised of over 16,000 panels with the capability of generating over 11 million kilowatts annually! Currently, this solar energy system has the ability to provide up to 25 percent of the Cal Poly campus's energy. The camp is aiming to add panels to buildings and "parking canopies". Altogether, the entire system has the potential to meet up to 73 percent of the camp's energy supply demands, generating up to 2.8 million kilowatts. The Men's Colony's project will be able to supply up to 35 of their yearly electricity needs, generating up to 4.7 million kilowatts. The SLO project will begin being constructed this year and is aiming to be completed as soon as July while the Men's Colony project is expected to be completed by early next year! I also learned from this article that, according to the California Independent System Operator, solar power meets about half of California's energy demand! Additionally, Hearst Castle and an air force base has installed solar systems too.

This article was interesting and informative, as I was unaware of this huge solar energy system that really isn't very far from Ventura County! In San Luis Obispo, many homes (1,200) are even equipped with solar panels. I am looking forward to my next trip up the coast so that I can see the solar farm with my own eyes! California is moving in the right direction and I am proud to live in a state that is making such significant strides in the implementation of alternative and sustainable energy.

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Look for more solar panels to sprout along Highway 1 this year as Camp San Luis Obispo and the California Men's Colony add arrays to their properties.

The new installations will join Cal Poly's 18.5-acre solar farm, which was completed this year and will generate more than 11 million kWh per year.

The Cal Poly project includes more than 16,000 individual solar panels with a capacity of 4.5 megawatts (AC). It is designed to supply 25 percent of the university's power needs.

Camp San Luis Obispo plans to begin construction on its project next month.

The camp's photovoltaic system will include roof-mounted panels on several buildings generating 0.94 megawatts of electricity and solar parking canopies that will generate 0.58 kilowatts.

The total system will be able to generate more than 2.8 million kWh during its first year of operation, meeting about 73 percent of Camp SLO's electricity needs.

Installation should be complete in July.

The Men's Colony will install its solar system next to Cal Poly's facility beginning in the third quarter of 2018, according to Jacqueline Cummings, public information officer for General Services.

The 2.1-megawatt ground-mounted facility will generate about 4.7 million kWh per year - or 35 percent of CMC's annual electricity use.

The system should be online by early next year.

On March 4, the California Independent System Operator said solar energy supplied about half the demand in the state, an all-time high.

Elsewhere on the Central Coast, solar systems are in the works at Hearst Castle and Vandenberg Air Force base in Lompoc.

And solar energy conversions are also happening on a smaller scale across San Luis Obispo County. More than 1,200 homes added rooftop solar arrays last year, according to constructionmonitor.com. That was down from 1,650 the year before and 2,600 homes in 2015.

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More solar panels coming to Hwy. 1 as CMC, Camp SLO plan projects

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Look for more solar panels to sprout along Highway 1 this year as Camp San Luis Obispo and the California Men's Colony add arrays to their properties. The new installations will join Cal Poly's 18.5-acre solar farm, which was completed this year and will generate more than 11 million kWh per year.

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California Greenhouses Will Use Sun's Heat to Extract Sticky Oil.

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California Greenhouses Will Use Sun's Heat to Extract Sticky Oil.

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This article is very interesting is directing our resources to better energy. “We’re not running out of oil. We’re running out of easy oil.” One place where oil is hard (and heavy) is below the Californian ground, where extractors must blast the sludgy petroleum with steam to get it flowing. Most such operations use natural gas to make the steam, but one startup has turned to an unusual partner for oil mining—Solar Energy—to try to make the business more efficient. GlassPoint, a company based in Fremont, California, wants to use solar thermal energy to cook up some steam. Unlike photo voltaic solar, which converts the sun’s radiation directly into electricity, solar thermal projects trap and focus the sun’s heat. This article is very interesting is directing our resources to better energy. The application of Solar energy in greenhouses could change the way we think of energy.

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Perhaps you've heard the saying, "We're not running out of oil. We're running out of easy oil." One place where oil is hard (and heavy) is below the Californian ground, where extractors must blast the sludgy petroleum with steam to get it flowing. Most such operations use natural gas to make the steam, but one startup has turned to an unusual partner for oil mining- solar energy -to try to make the business more efficient.

How? Greenhouses full of mirrors.

GlassPoint, a company based in Fremont, California, wants to use solar thermal energy to cook up some steam. Unlike photovoltaic solar, which converts the sun's radiation directly into electricity, solar thermal projects trap and focus the sun's heat. Those projects typically involve using the heat to turn turbines and create electricity, but this design is simpler.

GlassPoint's system is cheaper because it doesn't need the turbines, and because it has redesigned its mirrors and pipes to pump out steam that's 250 °C to 300 °C (whereas the steam required to drive turbines must be 350 °C to 400 °C). [ Technology Review]

With greenhouses that don't require the expensive steel support beams of power plants-and by employing relatively inexpensive mirrors to focus sunlight-the company hopes to be able to drive down the cost of steam to $3 to $3.50 per million BTUs. That's opposed to $4 for the natural gas that's commonly used, and $11 to $12 for solar thermal plants that produce electricity. In addition, that $4 price for natural gas could be on the rise if the market bounces back, or when California's cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases takes effect.

"Steam is the largest cost associated with producing oil in these thermal projects," says GlassPoint vice president John O'Donnell. "Now you can run them longer because the steam is cheaper. You can get 10 to 20 percent more oil production out of the same well." [ Scientific American]

O'Donnell's company just debuted its first greenhouse, which took less than two months to build and occupies less than an acre of land. The greenhouse sits at a mining site run by Berry Petroleum in Kern County, California, where GlassPoint will test out its technology. The test project will generate about 1 million BTUs per hour. Though Technology Review points out that this is just 1 percent of the Berry site's total needs, O'Donnell remains sunny about scaling up the technology once the test run is complete.

Roughly 40% of the oil drawn out in the state relies on the natural gas method. The company claims that it could eventually take over 80% of that burden - and at cheaper rates, even though natural gas prices are currently low. [ Los Angeles Times]

Solar power veterans, though, have learned the difficulty of reaching such gaudy numbers. And GlassPoint is taking its first steps.

Whether GlassPoint can get that far remains unclear. The company has no track record in the oil industry and has had three different business strategies in less than two years. Formerly known as CleanBoard, GlassPoint changed its name in October 2009 when it abandoned plans to use a solar-powered factory to make gypsum-based wallboard and said it would work with other wallboard manufacturers. Last year, it refocused its business yet again on using solar power to extract oil. [ The New York Times]

Nevertheless, using solar energy to extract heavy oil is a way to use one ample California resource to tap another. And greenhouses themselves have a lot to offer solar energy producers:

The greenhouse also offers another key advantage: keeping the mirrors clean of the dust, dirt, sand and humidity that plague oil fields (and deserts generally) around the world. And automated washing equipment borrowed from the agricultural greenhouse industry-essentially automated water sprayers with brushes like those in a car wash-scan clean the glass house that shields the solar thermal equipment from the wind and dust. [ Scientific American]

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California Greenhouses Will Use Sun's Heat to Extract Sticky Oil - 80beats

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Perhaps you've heard the saying, "We're not running out of oil. We're running out of easy oil." One place where oil is hard (and heavy) is below the Californian ground, where extractors must blast the sludgy petroleum with steam to get it flowing. Most such operations use natural gas to make the steam, but one ...

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California ski resorts embrace solar energy

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California ski resorts embrace solar energy

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Ski resorts in California,Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows ski resorts, are planning to use only solar energy at their resorts by December and areas near by are also going more environmentally friendly by adding solar panels to their ski resorts in areas like Lake-Tahoe. Polls conducted by tourism agency show that many ski resort visitors are highly interested in environmental stability so that could be a plus for the resorts transitioning to all solar energy, although many people look for other resort amenities to be more important than environmental stability. Overall, I think its great that these resorts are trying to get rid of harmful emissions and are going to use solar energy to run their resorts entirely.

-Griselda Murias

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In the peaks near Lake Tahoe, the Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows ski resorts are hoping to draw skiers and snowboarders with some upgrades that have nothing to do with snow.

The two resorts, owned by the same Colorado parent company, plan to become the country's first resorts to operate entirely on renewable energy by December. Squaw Valley also plans to build a mountain-side structure that will contain batteries to store some of that energy.

"Squaw Valley is usually at the forefront of all of these issues," said Michael Reitzell, president of the California Ski Industry Assn., a trade group that represents the state's ski resorts.

Other California ski operations also are becoming more environmentally friendly.

Last year, another Tahoe-area resort, Boreal Mountain, installed 715 solar panels on the roof of its indoor sports facility on the base of the resort's mountain. About two miles away, the Soda Springs ski resort began using 100% recycled water in 2015 for all of its snow-making efforts.

Vail Resorts - the Colorado company that owns 11 ski resorts, including Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood in California - has vowed to eliminate all emissions and waste sent to landfills for the entire company by 2030.

"We believe climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing every country, every business and every person on our planet, and we all have a shared responsibility to address it," said Beth Ganz, Vail Resorts' vice president of public affairs and sustainability.

Ski resort operators say there is a sound business reason behind such efforts. Not only do the resorts expect to save money over the long run by turning to renewable energy and cutting waste, but they also hope to appeal to skiers - particularly millennials - who put a premium on environmentally friendly travel destinations.

"They are going to support brands that they see a piece of themselves in," said Laura Schaffer, a spokeswoman for Powdr, the Utah parent company of the Boreal and Soda Springsski resorts.

A 2016 study sponsored by Visit California, the tourism agency for the state, found that 63% of travelers say they are much more likely to consider visiting destinations where there is a strong effort to conserve and protect natural resources.

At Boreal, 78% of the 250 guests who were questioned said environmental sustainability is important to them.

But some local skiers say other factors - location, price and snow quality - are more important in helping them decide where to ski.

"Everybody is for renewable energy" said Richard Murray, president of the Conejo Ski & Sports Club, which organizes regular visits to Mammoth Mountain in the Eastern Sierra, Sun Valley resort in Idaho and Aspen Snowmass in Colorado. "It's a good thing, but we wouldn't make a decision based on that."

Bruce Lee, president of the Beach Cities Ski Club in Hermosa Beach, also said other factors, such as snow conditions, play a bigger role in deciding where the ski.

"I'm looking at the resort and the resort's amenities," he said. "I'm not sure [renewable energy] swings me to go to one place over another."

None of the resorts that have adopted the renewable energy projects are promising to lower ski lift prices as a result.

Renewable energy is not always cheaper than the power offered by traditional utility companies because power rates can vary depending on the price of the coal, natural gas and other resources used by traditional utility companies.

But Sara Baldwin Auck, director of regulatory programs for the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council, said renewable energy can be cheaper and less volatile in price over the long run than traditional energy.

"By locking in long-term renewable energy contracts and a dedicated set of facilities over time, they definitely will be reaping long-term savings," she said.

Boreal says the solar panels it has installed are expected to save $1.5 million in energy costs over 30 years.

To convert to renewable energy, Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows have teamed up with Liberty Utilities Co., the electricity provider for the Lake Tahoe area. The company delivers water, natural gas and electricity in 12 states.

Liberty now generates 25% of its energy from renewable sources and says it plans to develop "a series of projects," primarily involving solar power facilities, to achieve the 100% goal.

Squaw Valley is also working with Liberty Utilities to build a power storage "microgrid" facility on the slope to store some of the energy produced by Liberty.

The power company is talking to Tesla, the Elon Musk-led company, to develop the power storage project, which still needs the approval of state and local regulators.

The batteries would store electricity when demand is low and discharge the power when demand is high or in the event of a power outage.

At Squaw Valley, the power storage facility is intended to supply energy for the entire Olympic Valley, an unincorporated community that includes the ski resort. Skiers on the slope may benefit when the storage facility is switched on during power outages that would otherwise strand skiers on disabled lifts.

To read more about the travel and tourism industries, follow @hugomartin on Twitter.

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California ski resorts embrace renewable energy and hope skiers will love it

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In the peaks near Lake Tahoe, the Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows ski resorts are hoping to draw skiers and snowboarders with some upgrades that have nothing to do with snow. The two resorts, owned by the same Colorado parent company, plan to become the country's first resorts to operate entirely on renewable energy by December.

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In early March California set two new solar power records for energy output. They were higher now than they were in mid June of last year which is a great accomplishment and the grid could handle the extra energy flowing though it. Even though the alternate energy companies are having great success they are being put on hold and not actively growing. No one is putting the money into finding new ways to store the extra alternate energy sources so things are getting put on hold which is discouraging.

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Mild temperatures and sunny skies helped California set two newsolarrecords in recent days.

On Sunday, March 4, the California Independent System Operator saw an all-time peak percentage of demand served by solar, hitting a record 49.95 percent at 12:58 p.m. That's up from the previous peak of 47.2 percent set on May 14, 2017.

"The record is a result of a cool, sunny day," Anne Gonzales, senior public information officer at CAISO, wrote in an email.

"Because it was a weekend, and the weather was mild, the minimum load was relatively low, around 18,800 megawatts," she said. "Meanwhile, solar production was more than 9,400 megawatts."

A day later, on March 5, CAISO set another solar record, this time hitting a new peak for solar production of 10,411 megawatts at 10:18 a.m. The previous record was 9,913 megawatts set on June 17, 2017.

CAISO Overall Renewables Production for March 5, 2018

It's no surprise that solar is making up a larger and larger portion of California's electricity mix. The state's three investor-owned utilities are well ahead of schedule on their renewable energy procurement plans and on track to meet the state's 33 percent mandate for 2020. At the same time, community-choice aggregators (CCAs) are investing in additional solar installations.

California's success to date is driving a conversation around the possibility of reaching 100 percent renewables in the state, while also stirring debate over how to manage these variable resources in an evolving grid system.

"The escalating integration of solar power has created a new operating paradigm for our system operators," said Gonzales. She pointed out that on March 4 the grid not only set a new solar record, but also handled a record peak for ramping.

"Our operators are skilled at handling these ramps, and we expect them to continue," Gonzales said.

CAISO is also working to reduce curtailment when there is an oversupply of renewable resources on the system, which is expected to happen more frequently as the state introduces increasing amounts of wind and solar. The ISO is currently seeking solutions to maximize the use of clean energy sources, including energy storage, demand response, time-of-use rates, expansion of the western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) and the possibility of a regional energy market.

CAISO's fourth-quarter 2017 report on the EIM showed benefits of $33.46 million for its participants, bringing the total benefit to $288.44 million since the real-time market launched in 2014. The market also helped reduce carbon emissions in the western region by 7,730 metric tons by using 18,060 megawatt-hours of renewable energy that otherwise would have been curtailed.

The EIM currently serves consumers in eight Western states through six participating entities. Another six entities will join by early 2020, including Idaho Power and Canada's Powerex in April 2018.

While California could break its latest solar records in the coming weeks and see solar reach even higher levels in the coming years, there's unlikely to be a significant increase in solar, or any other renewable energy resource, on the system in the near term.

Due to accelerated renewable energy procurements in recent years, coupled with departing load going to CCAs, retiring power plants and other market shifts, investor-owned utilities procured no new renewable energy capacity in 2017, according to a California Public Utilities Commission report. Furthermore, the CPUC recently proposed that utilities procure virtually no additional renewables in 2018.

"It's really disappointing," said Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association (IEP), in a recent interview. "They're basically saying, 'There too much going on; we don't know what to do, so we're not going to do anything for a while.'"

IEP, which represents solar, wind, geothermal and small hydro developers, asked California utilities to put out wholesale solicitations for 3,000 megawatts of renewables this year. But the request was not met.

Smutny-Jones criticized the CPUC for being "too absorbed in modeling" with the expiration date for wind and solar tax credits looming. "For me, it's a little hard to sit in a meeting and talk about 100 percent renewables when our chief regulator isn't moving the ball."

This story was updated with a more recent CAISO chart on renewable energy curtailment.

Join us for the 11th annual Solar Summit 2018 in San Diego, May 1-2. Powered by the unique blend of research and economic analysis from the GTM Research team, this year's agenda will feature themes from beyond traditional project finance to innovations in solar and the transformation of electricity.

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Mild temperatures and sunny skies helped California set two newsolarrecords in recent days. On Sunday, March 4, the California Independent System Operator saw an all-time peak percentage of demand served by solar, hitting a record 49.95 percent at 12:58 p.m. That's up from the previous peak of 47.2 percent set on May 14, 2017.

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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California has invested in increasing renewable energy production, such as solar panels and wind turbines, that now there is excess energy being produced. California is now paying other states, Such as Arizona, to take this power. This helps many residents pay less for the electricity they use. I think it’s great that California is giving power to other states. This can encourage other states to produce their own renewable energy.

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

The number of days that California dumped its unused solar electricity would have been even higher if the state hadn't ordered some solar plants to reduce production - even as natural gas power plants, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, continued generating electricity.

Solar and wind power production was curtailed a relatively small amount - about 3% in the first quarter of 2017 - but that's more than double the same period last year. And the surge in solar power could push the number even higher in the future.

Why doesn't California, a champion of renewable energy, use all the solar power it can generate?

The answer, in part, is that the state has achieved dramatic success in increasing renewable energy production in recent years. But it also reflects sharp conflicts among major energy players in the state over the best way to weave these new electricity sources into a system still dominated by fossil-fuel-generated power.

No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

Perhaps the most glaring example: The California Legislature has mandated that one-half of the state's electricity come from renewable sources by 2030; today it's about one-fourth. That goal once was considered wildly optimistic. But solar panels have become much more efficient and less expensive. So solar power is now often the same price or cheaper than most other types of electricity, and production has soared so much that the target now looks laughably easy to achieve.

At the same time, however, state regulators - who act independently of the Legislature - until recently have continued to greenlight utility company proposals to build more natural gas power plants.

These conflicting energy agendas have frustrated state Senate Leader Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), who opposes more fossil fuel plants. He has introduced legislation that would require the state to meet its goal of 50% of its electricity from renewable sources five years earlier, by 2025. Even more ambitiously, he recently proposed legislation to require 100% of the state's power to come from renewable energy sources by 2045.

"I want to make sure we don't have two different pathways," de Leon said. Expanding clean energy production and also building natural gas plants, he added, is "a bad investment."

Environmental groups are even more critical. They contend that building more fossil fuel plants at the same time that solar production is being curtailed shows that utilities - with the support of regulators - are putting higher profits ahead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"California and others have just been getting it wrong," said Leia Guccione, an expert in renewable energy at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, a clean power advocate. "The way [utilities] earn revenue is building stuff. When they see a need, they are perversely [incentivized] to come up with a solution like a gas plant."

Regulators and utility officials dispute this view. They assert that the transition from fossil fuel power to renewable energy is complicated and that overlap is unavoidable.

They note that electricity demand fluctuates - it is higher in summer in California, because of air conditioning, and lower in the winter - so some production capacity inevitably will be underused in the winter. Moreover, the solar power supply fluctuates as well. It peaks at midday, when the sunlight is strongest. Even then it isn't totally reliable.

Because no one can be sure when clouds might block sunshine during the day, fossil fuel electricity is needed to fill the gaps. Utility officials note that solar production is often cut back first because starting and stopping natural gas plants is costlier and more difficult than shutting down solar panels.

Eventually, unnecessary redundancy of electricity from renewables and fossil fuel will disappear, regulators, utilities and operators of the electric grid say.

"The gas-fired generation overall will show decline," said Neil Millar, executive director of infrastructure at CAISO, the California Independent System Operator, which runs the electric grid and shares responsibility for preventing blackouts and brownouts. "Right now, as the new generation is coming online and the older generation hasn't left yet, there is a bit of overlap."

Utility critics acknowledge these complexities. But they counter that utilities and regulators have been slow to grasp how rapidly technology is transforming the business. A building slowdown is long overdue, they argue.

Despite a growing glut of power, however, authorities only recently agreed to put on hold proposals for some of the new natural gas power plants that utilities want to build to reconsider whether they are needed.

A key question in the debate is when California will be able to rely on renewable power for most or all of its needs and safely phase out fossil fuel plants, which regulators are studying.

The answer depends in large part on how fast battery storage improves, so it is cheaper and can store power closer to customers for use when the sun isn't shining. Solar proponents say the technology is advancing rapidly, making reliance on renewables possible far sooner than previously predicted, perhaps two decades or even less from now - which means little need for new power plants with a life span of 30 to 40 years.

Calibrating this correctly is crucial to controlling electricity costs.

"It's not the renewables that's the problem. It's the state's renewable policy that's the problem," said Gary Ackerman, president of the Western Power Trading Forum, an association of independent power producers. "We're curtailing renewable energy in the summertime months. In the spring, we have to give people money to take it off our hands."

Not long ago, solar was barely a rounding error for California's energy producers.

In 2010, power plants in the state generated just over 15% of their electricity production from renewable sources. But that was mostly wind and geothermal power, with only a scant 0.5% from solar. Now that overall amount has grown to 27%, with solar power accounting for 10%, or most of the increase. The solar figure doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar systems that produce an additional 4 percentage points, a share that is ever growing.

Behind the rapid expansion of solar power: its plummeting price, which makes it highly competitive with other electricity sources. In part that stems from subsidies, but much of the decline comes from the sharp drop in the cost of making solar panels and their increased efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity.

The average cost of solar power for residential, commercial and utility-scale projects declined 73% between 2010 and 2016. Solar electricity now costs 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour - the amount needed to light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours - to produce, or about the same as electricity produced by a natural gas plant and half the cost of a nuclear facility, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Fly over the Carrizo Plain in California's Central Valley near San Luis Obispo and you'll see that what was once barren land is now a sprawling solar farm, with panels covering more than seven square miles - one of the world's largest clean-energy projects. When the sun shines over the Topaz Solar Farm, the shimmering panels produce enough electricity to power all of the residential homes in a city the size of Long Beach, population 475,000.

Other large-scale solar operations blanket swaths of the Mojave Desert, which has increasingly become a sun-soaking energy hub. The Beacon solar project covers nearly two square miles and the Ivanpah plant covers about five and a half square miles.

The state's three big shareholder-owned utilities now count themselves among the biggest solar power producers. Southern California Edison produces or buys more than 7% of its electricity from solar generators, Pacific Gas & Electric 13% and San Diego Gas & Electric 22%.

Similarly, fly over any sizable city and you'll see warehouses, businesses and parking lots with rooftop solar installations, and many homes as well.

With a glut of solar power at times, CAISO has two main options to avoid a system overload: order some solar and wind farms to temporarily halt operations or divert the excess power to other states.

That's because too much electricity can overload the transmission system and result in power outages, just as too little can. Complicating matters is that even when CAISO requires large-scale solar plants to shut off panels, it can't control solar rooftop installations that are churning out electricity.

CAISO is being forced to juggle this surplus more and more.

In 2015, solar and wind production were curtailed about 15% of the time on average during a 24-hour period. That rose to 21% in 2016 and 31% in the first few months of this year. The surge in solar production accounts for most of this, though heavy rainfall has increased hydroelectric power production in the state this year, adding to the surplus of renewables.

Even when solar production is curtailed, the state can produce more than it uses, because it is difficult to calibrate supply and demand precisely. As more homeowners install rooftop solar, for example, their panels can send more electricity to the grid than anticipated on some days, while the state's overall power usage might fall below what was expected.

This means that CAISO increasingly has excess solar and wind power it can send to Arizona, Nevada and other states.

When those states need more electricity than they are producing, they pay California for the power. But California has excess power on a growing number of days when neighboring states don't need it, so California has to pay them to take it. CAISO calls that "negative pricing."

Why does California have to pay rather than simply give the power away free?

When there isn't demand for all the power the state is producing, CAISO needs to quickly sell the excess to avoid overloading the electricity grid, which can cause blackouts. Basic economics kick in. Oversupply causes prices to fall, even below zero. That's because Arizona has to curtail its own sources of electricity to take California's power when it doesn't really need it, which can cost money. So Arizona will use power from California at times like this only if it has an economic incentive - which means being paid.

In the first two months of this year, CAISO paid to send excess power to other states seven times more often than same period in 2014. "Negative pricing" happened in an average of 18% of all sales, versus about 2.5% in the same period in 2014.

Most "negative pricing" typically has occurred for relatively short periods at midday, when solar production is highest.

But what happened in March shows how the growing supply of solar power could have a much greater impact in the future. The periods of "negative pricing" lasted longer than in the past - often for six hours at a time, and once for eight hours, according to a CAISO report.

The excess power problem will ease somewhat in the summer, when electricity usage is about 50% higher in California than in the winter.

But CAISO concedes that curtailments and "negative pricing" is likely to happen even more often in the future as solar power production continues to grow, unless action is taken to better manage the excess electricity.

Arizona's largest utility, Arizona Public Service, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of California's largesse because it is next door and the power can easily be sent there on transmission lines.

On days that Arizona is paid to take California's excess solar power, Arizona Public Service says it has cut its own solar generation rather than fossil fuel power. So California's excess solar isn't reducing greenhouse gases when that happens.

CAISO says it does not calculate how much it has paid others so far this year to take excess electricity. But its recent oversupply report indicated that it frequently paid buyers as much as $25 per megawatt-hour to get them to take excess power, according to the Energy Information Administration.

That's a good deal for Arizona, which uses what it is paid by California to reduce its own customers' electricity bills. Utility buyers typically pay an average of $14 to $45 per megawatt-hour for electricity when there isn't a surplus from high solar power production.

With solar power surging so much that it is sometimes curtailed, does California need to spend $6 billion to $8 billion to build or refurbish eight natural gas power plants that have received preliminary approval from regulators, especially as legislative leaders want to accelerate the move away from fossil fuel energy?

The answer depends on whom you ask.

Utilities have repeatedly said yes. State regulators have agreed until now, approving almost all proposals for new power plants. But this month, citing the growing electricity surplus, regulators announced plans to put on hold the earlier approvals of four of the eight plants to determine if they really are needed.

Big utilities continue to push for all of the plants, maintaining that building natural gas plants doesn't conflict with expanding solar power. They say both paths are necessary to ensure that California has reliable sources of power - wherever and whenever it is needed.

The biggest industrial solar power plants, they note, produce electricity in the desert, in some cases hundreds of miles from population centers where most power is used.

At times of peak demand, transmission lines can get congested, like Los Angeles highways. That's why CAISO, utilities and regulators argue that new natural gas plants are needed closer to big cities. In addition, they say, the state needs ample electricity sources when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough.

Utility critics agree that some redundancy is needed to guarantee reliability, but they contend that the state already has more than enough.

California has so much surplus electricity that existing power plants run, on average, at slightly less than one-third of capacity. And some plants are being closed decades earlier than planned.

As for congestion, critics note that the state already is crisscrossed with an extensive network of transmission lines. Building more plants and transmission lines wouldn't make the power system much more reliable, but would mean higher profits for utilities, critics say.

That is what the debate is about, said Jaleh Firooz, a power industry consultant who previously worked as an engineer for San Diego Gas & Electric for 24 years and helped in the formation of CAISO.

"They have the lopsided incentive of building more," she said.

The reason: Once state regulators approve new plants or transmission lines, the cost is now built into the amount that the utility can charge electricity users - no matter how much or how little it is used.

Given that technology is rapidly tilting the competitive advantage toward solar power, there are less expensive and cleaner ways to make the transition toward renewable energy, she said.

To buttress her argument, Firooz pointed to a battle in recent years over a natural gas plant in Redondo Beach.

Independent power producer AES Southland in 2012 proposed replacing an aging facility there with a new one. The estimated cost: $250 million to $275 million, an amount that customers would pay off with higher electricity bills.

CAISO and Southern California Edison, which was going to buy power from the new plant, supported it as necessary to protect against potential power interruptions. Though solar and wind power production was increasing, they said those sources couldn't be counted on because their production is variable, not constant.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the project, agreeing that it was needed to meet the long-term electricity needs in the L.A. area.

But the California Coastal Conservancy, a conservation group opposed to the plant, commissioned an analysis by Firooz to determine how vital it was. Her conclusion: not at all.

Firooz calculated that the L.A. region already had excess power production capacity - even without the new plant - at least through 2020.

Along with the cushion, her report found, a combination of improved energy efficiency, local solar production, storage and other planning strategies would be more than sufficient to handle the area's power needs even as the population grew.

She questioned utility arguments.

"In their assumptions, the amount of capacity they give to the solar is way, way undercut because they have to say, 'What if it's cloudy? What if the wind is not blowing?' " Firooz explained. "That's how the game is played. You build these scenarios so that it basically justifies what you want."

Undeterred, AES Southland pressed forward with its proposal. In 2013, Firooz updated her analysis at the request of the city of Redondo Beach, which was skeptical that a new plant was needed. Her findings remained the same.

Nonetheless, the state Public Utilities Commission approved the project in March 2014 on the grounds that it was needed. But the California Energy Commission, another regulatory agency whose approval for new plants is required along with the PUC's, sided with the critics. In November 2015 it suspended the project, effectively killing it.

Asked about the plant, AES said it followed the appropriate processes in seeking approval. It declined to say whether it still thinks that a new plant is needed.

The existing facility is expected to close in 2020.

A March 2017 state report showed why critics are confident that the area will be fine without a new plant: The need for power from Redondo Beach's existing four natural gas units has been so low, the state found, that the units have operated at less than 5% of their capacity during the last four years.

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California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it

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On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power. Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren't using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

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Billionaire Philip Anschutz plans to build the largest wind project that will help California. In 2017 his proposal was stopped by Sacramento but that didn't mean he gave up. Anschutz presented a new drafted by Chris Holden, supports of this bill believe that this will help with California's climate change with the renewable source.  Non-supports believe that this will push jobs that deal with solar energy out of the state. I really like that Anschutz is thinking ahead and trying to make California a better state.

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CLOSE

They were defeated in Sacramento each of the past two years. But supporters of a hotly debated plan to expand California's power grid to other western states aren't giving up.

Under a new proposal being drafted by Chris Holden, who chairs the state Assembly's utilities and energy committee, California would organize a regional grid that could eventually cover the entire western United States. Supporters say a regional grid would make it easier for California to meet its climate change goals by tapping into cheap renewable energy sources from other states, like Wyoming wind power or Washington hydropower. California would also be able to sell excess solar power to other states.
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The regional grid concept is a priority for Gov. Jerry Brown, who pushed the Legislature to adopt it in 2016 and again in 2017. But opposition from labor unions, community-run electric companies and some environmentalists has stymied the governor. Opponents worry a regional grid would send high-paying solar and wind jobs out of state, raise the cost of electricity for homes and businesses, and cede control of the energy Californians consume to lawmakers in other states, including coal-friendly Utah and Wyoming.

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RELATED: Trump falsely claims U.S. makes higher-quality solar panels than China

There's nothing in Holden's new proposal to mollify the powerful labor unions, at least so far. But Holden's amended language, which has been circulating in Sacramento for a few weeks, attempts to address concerns related to climate change and state control.

For one thing, California utilities would only be allowed to join a regional power grid if it had a tracking system for carbon emissions, which are the main cause of climate change. Such a system would help California add an extra charge to carbon-heavy energy that crosses over the state's borders, essentially blocking out-of-state lawmakers from foisting dirty electricity on California and undermining its climate policies.

Regional grid advocates also say they've moved on from Brown's original proposal, which was to merge California's power grid operator with PacifiCorp, a Warren Buffett-owned utility with customers in six states. PacifiCorp operates six coal-fired power plants in Utah and Wyoming, and critics worried California would be forced to buy electricity from those plants, extending their lifetimes and leading to a rise in climate pollution.

Supporters of Brown's plan say they're now focused on partnerships with utility companies in Oregon and Washington, where state officials share California's focus on fighting climate change, as well as Nevada, which is close to getting out of coal.

"We can really create a renewable engine on the West Coast," said Lauren Navarro, an attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

The Bonneville Dam, about 40 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River Gorge, is seen on May 26, 2005. Electricity generated at the dam is distributed by the Bonneville Power Authority, a federal agency. (Photo: Rick Bowmer, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The problem a regional grid is supposed to help solve is that two of the biggest sources of climate-friendly energy are intermittent: The sun goes down every evening, and the wind doesn't always blow. But the larger the geographic area covered by a power grid, the more clean energy sources there are that can meet electricity demand at different times of day, at least in theory. A study commissioned by California officials found that a unified power grid covering most of the West could lead to $1.5 billion in savings for Californians by 2030, and a 3 to 4 percent decrease in regional climate pollution.

Partnering with Washington in particular, advocates say, would allow California to tap the state's abundance of low-carbon hydropower dams, which have lots of unused capacity.

Hydropower distributed by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest, would be the "holy grail" of a regional grid, said Don Furman, director of Fix the Grid, an advocacy group backed by environmentalists and energy companies.

"Bonneville is losing revenues because of the penetration of wind. They are hungry to participate in the California market," said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a Sacramento-based trade group.

REWIRING THE WEST: Why Jerry Brown wants to unify the western power grid

REWIRING THE WEST: If a regional grid actually happens, who would profit?

But critics are still skeptical.

The Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based ratepayer advocacy group, has long argued that the risks of a regional grid outweigh the potential benefits. That's still the watchdog group's position. America's biggest environmental group, the Sierra Club, still opposes the plan, although it's been encouraged by some recent changes. Then there are labor unions, which regional grid advocates concede will need some sort of incentive to support a plan that could see fewer solar and wind farms built within California.

Matthew Freedman, an attorney at the Utility Reform Network, said nothing in the bill text being circulated by Holden would stop Buffett's coal-heavy PacifiCorp utility from trying to join a regional power grid. If California lawmakers vote to expand the state grid operator, known as CAISO, what happens next is out of their hands, Freedman said.

"There's no gate-keeping function that would exist to prevent disfavored utilities or states from partnering up," Freedman said. "They can't discriminate on the basis of, 'We don't like you.'"

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Large stacks fill the sky with steam at PacifiCorp's Jim Bridger coal plant in southwestern Wyoming on Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Holden's new proposals for tracking carbon and penalizing dirty electricity that's exported to California are designed to ward off coal-heavy utilities like PacifiCorp, and to attract cleaner utilities in Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. Nevada's main electric utility, NV Energy, is, like PacifiCorp, owned by Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

While Freedman likes Holden's new carbon proposals in theory, he's worried they won't work in practice. It's possible, he said, that out-of-state utilities will simply take renewable energy facilities that were built to serve their states and export that electricity to California instead, while continues to use coal- and gas-fired power plants back home. That could mean more renewable energy for California, but no reduction in planet-warming emissions across the West as a whole.

Freedman also worries the Trump administration will interfere, objecting to California's framework for a regional grid and ordering the state not to discriminate against coal-fired electricity from outside its borders. Regional grid advocates say that kind of interference is unlikely to hold up in court, and that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could object to California's climate policies on similar grounds right now if it wanted to. But Freedman said a regional power grid would invite the Trump administration's scrutiny.

"We don't see a compelling value proposition for regional expansion," he said. "There might be some benefits, but we don't think it's a slam dunk."

THE TRUMP QUESTION: Trump's energy secretary wants to save coal. Could Californians end up paying the price?

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The regional grid debate taps into a larger question over the easiest and cheapest way to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. California already gets nearly half of its electricity from climate-friendly sources including solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. But getting from 50 percent to 100 percent, as State Senate leader Kevin de León proposed last year, could be a lot harder, primarily because solar and wind are intermittent.

Academic studies have found that larger power grids would help solve the problem, with long transmission lines ferrying clean electricity from places where it abounds, like windy Wyoming, to places where it's needed, like California. While some renewable energy advocates have bought into that idea, others believe that focusing on local resources like rooftop solar, small-scale batteries and smart energy management systems would be cheaper and more sustainable. Neither vision is exclusive, and some experts have argued that the scale of the climate problem demands an all-of-the-above approach.

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Antelope pass through Duke Energy's Happy Jack wind farm near Cheyenne, Wyoming on Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

It's not clear how much of a personal role Brown will play in power grid discussions this year, after his failed last-minute effort to push a grand bargain on energy issues through the Legislature at the end of the 2017 session. A Brown spokesperson said a regional grid "remains a priority" for the governor. But Holden, a Pasadena Democrat, has taken the lead in recent months, circulating drafts of an amended bill and soliciting feedback.

Whatever happens with the proposal, supporters and opponents say the process has been better this year, with Holden's office incorporating suggestions from all sides.

"At this point, the proposed language hasn't met our requirements," said Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club's California chapter. "But I have to say I appreciate the fact that they're trying to figure out ways to address concerns, and that it's a more or less open process, compared to what it's been in the last two iterations."

Barry Moline, executive director of the California Municipal Utilities Association, said serious questions remain about whether building new power lines across the West would ultimately raise or lower energy costs for consumers. He thinks more rigorous analysis is needed. But he said he was "pleasantly surprised" by Holden's most recent proposal, and he thinks it will keep improving based on feedback from groups like his.

"In the past, the process has been more smoke-filled room, a lot of stuff going on behind the scene," Moline said. Not so this time. He called Holden an "honest broker."

Whether or not California starts a regional power grid, increasing amounts of clean energy will flow across state lines in the West. The main California grid operator, CAISO, launched a more limited interstate program in 2014 known as the energy imbalance market, which now includes five utilities with customers in eight states. Six more grid operators have signed up to join, including one from British Columbia. Mexico's grid operator has explored whether its Baja California Norte region should join, too.

Meanwhile, renewable energy developers are working on intestate projects that wouldn't depend on a unified western grid. Those projects include conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz's plan to spend $5 billion building America's largest wind farm in Wyoming, plus another $3 billion building a 730-mile power line to carry the electricity to California.
Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.
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It's the last chance for Jerry Brown's big plan to power the Western U.S.

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CLOSE They were defeated in Sacramento each of the past two years. But supporters of a hotly debated plan to expand California's power grid to other western states aren't giving up. Under a new proposal being drafted by Chris Holden, who chairs the state Assembly's utilities and energy committee, California would organize a regional grid that could eventually cover the entire western United States.

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Haya J : Solar power turns down costs for Ventura County schools

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Haya J : Solar power turns down costs for Ventura County schools

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School districts throughout Ventura County are saving thousands of dollars a year by switching to solar power; In the United States, 5,489 schools use solar energy now. It is amazing to see that everyone and all types of institutions are taking initiative to help switch to renewal resources.

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School districts throughout Ventura County are saving tens of thousands of dollars a year by switching to solar power - a trend mirrored across the United States.

The switch to solar is happening at a rapid pace and by switching, schools and districts are able to reduce electricity bills and free up resources to invest back into students, according to a recent study from The Solar Foundation, Generation 180 and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

In the United States, 5,489 K-12 schools use solar energy - a figure that has nearly doubled since 2016, according to the study.

The dramatic growth in school solar adoption has been driven by rapidly declining installation costs. The average price of a solar school installation has dropped 67 percent in the last 10 years, and 19 percent in 2016 alone, the report found.

Nearly 4 million students in the U.S. attend schools with solar power, with a combined capacity of 910 megawatts, an increase of 86 percent over 2014, according to the report. The amount of electricity these schools produce annually, at 1.4 million megawatt-hours, is enough to power over 190,000 homes, according to the report.

California leads the nation in the number of solar schools by state, with 1,946 and a 489-megawatt capacity, followed by New Jersey, Arizona, Massachusetts and New York.

In Ventura County, more than 40 school sites are utilizing solar power.

"Solar can help school districts save millions on electricity bills, freeing up funds for additional teachers, improved facilities, and enhanced academic and extracurricular programs," said Andrea Luecke, president and executive director of The Solar Foundation. "In addition to cost savings, solar energy installations can serve as hands-on STEM laboratories for students to learn about clean energy from the sun."

Solar in Ventura County

In Ventura County, Oak Park Unified School District, Simi Valley Unified School District, Oxnard School District and Oxnard Union High School District all incorporate solar power at their school sites.

All of the school sites in the Oak Park district operate with solar panels as of this school year, said Superintendent Tony Knight. The panels were installed and up and running in about a three-month time frame and started producing energy in July. The panels are standalone in the district - housed on parking structures or shade structures over playgrounds.

"It's a flagship program," Knight said. "We started with a project immediately helping the schools. We are proud of that. It's gone well. We've done the main ribbon cutting ... one at every single school so the kids can talk about how important they are all the schools are being powered like a spacecraft. I always say, 'Welcome to the 21st century.'"

Knight is excited about the new additions to the six schools in the district. He said it'll have a lasting impact, not just financially but environmentally.

"We can't just sit there and wring our hands about CO2 emissions," Knight said. "We need to do something, and (solar) is one of the best ways to do that. If more districts did it ... it would change everything."

The panels at Oak Park Unified together will create more 2 million kilowatt hours of electricity in a year.

An average elementary school uses about 500 kilowatt hours in a day, said Ron Todo, associate superintendent of business and facilities at Simi Valley Unified School District. Simi Valley Unified has had panels in place for several years.

"Seventy-three percent of our electricity usage is through solar power," Todo said. "Since we've had solar in the district, we've used about 30 million kilowatt hours and approximately 22 million kilowatt hours with solar."

Oxnard Union High School District also has solar panels at almost every campus, the district's Sid Albaugh said.

"The district implemented the districtwide solar program in 2010 with the intent to reduce the district's demand for energy using solar," Albaugh said. "The program has cut costs due to reduced energy consumption at our sites."

Paying for it

At the same time costs are going down, schools have more financing options that minimize up-front investment.

In recent years, most schools have financed their solar installations through power purchase agreements, in which a third-party finances, builds, owns and maintains the system. This allows schools and districts to purchase solar with very little initial cost. Within the past three years, nearly 90 percent of the schools for which data is available used a power purchase agreement to install solar.

"There's a reason solar is spreading so quickly across America's school districts, and it's pretty simple - when schools go solar, the entire community benefits," said Abigail Ross Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association president and CEO, in the report. "By switching to solar energy, schools immediately see their electric bills go down, leaving more money for learning. Plus, what teacher wouldn't want a life lesson in science and conservation right there on school grounds? It's a win all the way around."

Simi Valley Unified utilizes a purchase power agreement for its solar panels Todo said.

"We went with the power purchase agreement meaning Solar City is the one responsible for equipment," Todo said. "They do maintenance at no additional cost to the district. And we pay a lower rate to Solar City."

Every school but one in the district has solar panels, Todo said, and they have for several years.

"The district did it to reduce operational costs and it definitely has over the course of four years," Todo said. "We've saved $4.5 million compared to if we stayed on the grid."

The Oxnard School District has had panels at four sites since 2012. The panels were purchased using a power purchase agreement.

At Oxnard Union High School District, the solar program was financed through the sale of Qualified Energy Conservation Bonds, which are repaid through incentives and savings generated from solar energy production, Albaugh said. The district owns the panels and has an agreement with Sun Power for service and maintenance.

Oak Park purchased its panels outright, a strategic move Knight said would cut energy costs for years and ultimately put more money in the general fund for teacher salaries and school sites. The panels for all the sites cost the district just under $7 million of Measure S bond money, Knight said.

"In this case, we leveraged bond money to save money in our general fund, which directly goes back to schools and staff," Knight said. "We'll save just under $400,000 this year, and that'll grow as the cost of electricity increases. ... With all the air that goes in and out of classrooms, it makes it incredibly expensive. ... In the school, it's a money sink. We wanted to get our hands wrapped around that money."

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Solar power turns down costs for Ventura County schools

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CLOSE School districts throughout Ventura County are saving tens of thousands of dollars a year by switching to solar power - a trend mirrored across the United States.