Arizona Stands Up for Solar Rights

 By Annie Lappe

 

In a  victory of David vs Goliath proportions, policymakers in Arizona stood up for its citizens by rejecting an attempt from the states largest utility to squash rooftop solar. Five months after Arizona Public Service (APS) sought approval to slap hefty new fees on its customers that go solar, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) voted yesterday to uphold Arizona solar savings and energy choice. While the vote was clearly a win for Arizonans, the ACCs approval of a small but troubling new fee makes it clear that there is a significant amount of education left to be done regarding distributed solars tremendous value.

Driving this proposal was that fact that solar is offering customers an affordable new energy option, and Arizonans are increasingly choosing to generate their own power from the sun. Rather than working with its customers and meeting this new market demand, APS attempted to dig in and regulate against competition to maintain its monopoly hold on electricity.

APS Proposal Denied

APS had proposed a new $50-100 monthly charge for solar customers, a discriminatory fee that would have wiped out any savings these customers would currently receive from their solar investment. APS justified the solar fee by saying that net metering a program that ensures solar customers receive full retail credit for power they deliver to the grid for their neighbors to use is a bad deal for Arizonans but thats just not true: private investment in reliable, local power generation benefits all ratepayers. Full retail net metering credit is a simple and proven way for customers and utilities to assign value to that power.

A study conducted this year for SEIA showed that these net metered systems actually deliver much more: $34 million in annual net grid benefits for APS customers alone. Thats before accounting for the social and environmental benefits: cleaner air and thousands of local jobs. APSs proposals were clearly not grounded in a fair accounting for DG solars real value, and our allies argued strongly in favor of undertaking that fair accounting in the appropriate venue: the next rate case.

Despite millions of dollars on spent on a misleading campaign by the utility and its proxies, public outcry against the APS proposal was overwhelming. A poll conducted last week found that, even after months of being blanketed by utility ads, a whopping 81% reject APSs solar fee and 77% would be less likely to vote for a candidate who ends solar savings. Over the course of this long campaign, more than 30,000 Arizonans emailed the ACC in support of rooftop solar.

Arizonans Show Up to Support Rooftop Solar

That support was demonstrated in person earlier this week when 1,000 Arizonans gathered in front of the ACC this week to protest APSs proposed fee. Inside a steady stream of about 100 citizens solar workers, solar customers, non-solar customers, environmental advocates, retirees, veterans, even one passionate 11-year old girl urged the Commissioners to stand up against the utility for the good of Arizonans. Yesterdays vote is a resounding demonstration that the peoples support of solar trumps corporate money. It showed just how out of step APSs anti-solar efforts are with the needs and demands of its own customers, and we were pleased to see Commission acting on behalf of the public they serve.

Interim Fixed Fee Adopted

Its important to note that while the most egregious aspects of APSs proposal were soundly rejected, the Commission did vote by a 3-2 vote to implement a relatively small but still unjustified new fixed fee of $0.70 per kilowatt as a monthly charge for all new residential solar customers (i.e. if you have a 5kW system on your house, you would pay $3.50 a month). The vote broke down as follows: Commissioners Stump, Bitter-Smith and Bob Burns voted yes, and Commissioners Pierce and Brenda Burns voted no, arguing that the fixed fee was too low.

The fee will be collected through the Lost Fixed Cost Recovery (LFCR) adjustor mechanism. APS is already using the LFCR to collect funds from customers to account for the fact that the Company is losing money when customers invest in energy efficiency or DG solar.

The new fixed charge will stay in place until APSs next general rate case, which must be filed in June 2015. However, the Commission did add a clause that allows the ACC to periodically adjust this charge in any APS LCFR reset proceeding, which happen on an annual basis. During the next rate case, net metering will be addressed in more detail.

Existing solar customers will not be assessed this charge, and will be grandfathered under their current rate structure arrangement, at least until the next rate case, though verbally several Commissioners expressed intent that they would be grandfathered from the charge in perpetuity. However, all rooftop solar customers, including existing customers, will soon need to sign a disclaimer that acknowledges that rates can change in the future.

Workshop Process Established

In the interim between now and the next rate case, the Commission has also decided to hold a series of workshops to determine the true costs and benefits, and any associated cost shift, of net metering.  Vote Solar looks forward to participating in this process and making sure that individual solar investment is properly valued.

We strongly disagree with the Commission that net metering represents a cost to non-solar ratepayers, and we hope through the workshop process facts can be brought to the table to dispel this myth once and for all. Rooftop solar is helping Arizona families, schools and businesses take charge of their power supply and their electricity bills like never before. This private investment is helping build a cleaner, safer and lower cost energy supply for all of us.

 

http://votesolar.org/2013/11/15/arizona-stands-strong-for-solar-rights/

 

Wasted Energy: Converting Discarded Food into Biofuels

Diverting just a portion of the world's food waste to waste-to-energy systems could free up large amounts of landfill space while powering vehicles and heating homes.

CHEW ON THIS: Diverting even just a portion of the world's food waste to energy could put a significant dent in our collective carbon footprint.

Food waste is indeed an untapped resource with great potential for generating energy. Some one third of all food produced around the world gets discarded uneaten, and environmentalists, energy analysts and entrepreneurs are beginning to take notice. Diverting even just a portion of this waste to so-called waste-to-energy (WTE) systems could free up large amounts of landfill space while powering our vehicles and heating our homes, and thus putting a significant dent in our collective carbon footprint. Perhaps that’s why WTE is one of the fastest growing segments of the world’s quickly diversifying energy sector.

Currently there are some 800 industrial-scale WTE plants in more than three dozen countries around the world, and likely thousands of smaller systems at individual sites. Most employ anaerobic digesters, which make use of microorganisms to break down and convert organic waste into a fuel such as biogas, biodiesel or ethanol. With some 70 percent of food waste around the world still going into landfills, there is a lot of potential feedstock to keep this environmentally friendly carbon neutral fuel source coming.

“Waste-to-energy doesn’t involve drilling, fracking, or mining, and it doesn’t rely on scarce and politically-charged resources like oil,” reports RWL Water Group, an international company that installs water, wastewater and waste-to-energy systems. The waste from small slaughterhouses, breweries, dairy farms and coffee shops can power hundreds of typical homes each day if the infrastructure is in place to sort, collect and process the flow of organic material.

Navigant Research, which produced the 2012 report “Waste-to-Energy Technology Markets, which analyzes the global market opportunity for WTE, expects waste-to-energy to grow from its current market size of $6.2 billion to $29.2 billion by 2022. “With many countries facing dramatic population growth, rapid urbanization, rising levels of affluence, and resource scarcity, waste-to-energy is re-establishing itself as an attractive technology option to promote low carbon growth in the crowded renewable energy landscape,” says Navigant’s Mackinnon Lawrence. “China is already in the midst of scaling up capacity, and growth there is expected to shift the center of the WTE universe away from Europe to Asia Pacific.”

The question is whether governments and individuals will make the effort to support diversion of waste into yet another separate stream. In areas where such systems are working, individuals are incentivized to separate out their organic and food waste because it saves them money on their trash pick-up bills. And bakeries, restaurants, farms, grocers and other big producers of organic or food waste provide an endless source of feedstock for WTE systems as well.

“We’re barely scratching the surface of this potential—dumping over 70 percent of the world’s food waste into landfills, rather than harnessing it for fuel and electricity,” reports RWL. “Over the next 25 years, global energy demand will grow by 50 percent, while global oil supply dwindles at a rapid pace. Waste-to-energy is an obvious solution to meet the world’s burgeoning energy demand.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=food-waste-to-energy

German 'Algae Experiment' Powers Houses

Can you imagine a house powered not by sun, wind or coal, but by living algae? A group of graduate students at the University of Cambridge can … and their idea has won them international recognition. Practising what they call “algaetecture,” the students designed an “Algae House” they say could provide a model for future energy-efficient living. In such a model, the house’s residents would get the energy they need from the hydrogen and bio-mass created by the cultivation of algae.

The Algae House design, created by graduate students in the university’s Departments of Architecture and Engineering, was awarded first prize in an international design competition run by SASBE2009 — the third CIB International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Built Environments. The competition challenged students to propose a concept of a small home that produces enough sustainable energy to equal out energy consumption.

The Cambridge team’s winning design uses in-built algae tubes and a photo bio-reactor to generate hydrogen. A glazing system and water pool are incorporated into the design to mitigate — reflect and cool — the sunlight the algae need to thrive. According to the students’ estimates, the house would produce 4,100 kilowatt-hours of hydrogen and bio-mass per year — enough to drive an electric MINI E car from London to Beijing and back twice over .

“Algae and people may not present themselves as obvious bedfellows, but through this project we hope to show that the integration of algae as an energy generator within a house is not only feasible, but that it opens up many exciting architectural possibilities for green living,” said Karuga Koinange from the Department of Architecture.

The competition, held at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, was organised and sponsored by the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB), the Passive and Low Energy Architecture association (PLEA) and the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE). The students presented their work throughout the week-long proceedings to a variety of conference attendees, including the Dutch Crown Prince, Willem Alexander.

http://www.greenbang.com/the-house-that-algae-power-built_10676.html