Posts Tagged ‘Missouri’
Renewable energy measure falls short in Missouri
>> St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Renew Missouri didn’t collect enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot this fall that would require investor-owned utilities to ramp up use of green power to 25 percent by the middle of the next decade.
Habitat homes achieve efficiency and affordability
A Habitat for Humanity chapter in North Carolina built this zero-energy house in 2005, thought to be the first of its kind in the state. (Photo by skrobotic via Creative Commons)
Volunteers last year helped East Central Minnesota Habitat for Humanity build one of the state’s most energy-efficient homes.
The 1,100-square-foot ranch-style house in Princeton, Minnesota, includes a solar water heater, exterior insulation, and Energy Star appliances.
Altogether, those and other energy saving features are expected to help the single mother who bought the home save $769 annually on her utility bills.
Across the country, Habitat for Humanity is demonstrating that efficiency and affordability can go together. Its leaders are making the case that a little extra upfront investment in efficiency pays off in the long run.
“We can’t afford not to,” says Molly Berg, sustainable buildings specialist at Habitat for Humanity of Minnesota. “Small changes that we can make up front during the planning and construction process actually result in long-term, large changes in the abilities of a family to meet their basic needs.”
As energy efficiency advocates (including Fresh Energy, which publishes Midwest Energy News) press for tougher energy codes in Minnesota, Illinois and elsewhere, they’re pointing to affordable housing supporters such as Habitat to help make their case.
Bill Fay, executive director of the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition, a program of the Alliance to Save Energy, said he began reaching out to low-income housing groups about five years ago in California.
“I was getting a little tired of the National Association of Home Builders trying to speak for low-income families,” says Fay.
A common argument made by home builders’ associations is that requiring them to build more efficient homes will put ownership out of reach for people with lower incomes.
But many Habitat for Humanity chapters have taken the opposite approach in recent years, putting more money into efficiency even during a severe recession.
All of the homes built since 2008 by Habitat for Humanity St. Louis have been LEED Platinum certified, and one project in 2010 achieve LEED Gold.
In Lansing, Michigan, officials and donors broke ground last week on the first of four green, energy efficient Habitat homes.
And in Iowa City, a chapter is getting ready to build its first net-zero-energy home, which will draw the little energy it needs from solar panels and solar water heaters.
Habitat is made up of scores of independent chapters around the country and world. The organization’s state and national offices support the local chapters, but doesn’t speak for them or set policy.
A survey sent to Minnesota chapters five years ago showed a desire for more resources on sustainable building, which led to a green building conference in 2008 and the hiring of a sustainable building specialist.
Several local chapters were already moving in the same direction, and Berg now helps coordinate training and other support around sustainable building in the state.
All but a few of Minnesota’s 33 chapters have since built homes that meet or exceed Energy Star for homes. The methods and materials being used include installing windows that transfer less heat, covering homes with exterior “blue board” insulation and spacing studs 24 inches apart instead of 16 inches, which creates fewer gaps in wall insulation.
The state office has been tracking Habitat homes’ energy use since the 2009-2010 heating season. The average monthly heating bill has been $110, compared to almost $170 for an average Minnesota home.
“Affiliates have seen the value and the continuous return on investment these things have for families that don’t make as much money a year,” says Berg.
That nearly $60 average monthly wintertime savings has a greater impact for families making 30 percent to 80 percent of median income, the target demographic for Habitat buyers.
There is an added upfront cost, which gets passed on to the home buyer (Habitat sells its homes at-cost with zero-interest loans to families that qualify).
“We have seen a little bit of an uptick [in costs],” says Matt Clark, Habitat’s national director for construction technologies, “but nothing that throws it way out of whack.”
Often its just a couple thousand dollars or less. In the Iowa City the solar and other improvements are expected to add about $15,000 for a home that would otherwise cost about $125,000 to build.
“My guess is that the extra item payback will be [in] 10 to 15 years, but the life of those [additions] will be over 20 years, so there’s actually a net gain there,” Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity Director Mark Patton told The Daily Iowan.
While many Habitat chapters are deciding efficiency is a worthwhile investment, they’ve been quiet in the arguments over state energy code updates.
For Clark and others in the organization, it’s less a political concern and more a practical one: “It just makes sense for us.”
Biomass, geothermal replacing coal on campuses
>> Midwest Energy News
Michigan State University students hold up petitions calling for clean energy and not coal on campus at a rally on Wednesday. (Photo by Kim Teplitzky / Sierra Club)
April 13, 2012
By Dan Haugen
The Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla was founded in 1870 as a school of mining and metallurgy, supporting the Ozark region’s lead and zinc industries.
Next week, school officials will celebrate the start of a new chapter, one that involves extracting heat from the ground rather than minerals.
Missouri S&T will break ground Tuesday on a $32 million geothermal energy facility — a system of wells and pipes that will provide heat to 15 buildings, as well as chilling for the campus’ water system.
The project, which will replace an aging coal-fired steam plant, is expected to cut the school’s energy consumption in half and reduce carbon emissions by 25,000 tons a year.
It’s one of twenty victories the Sierra Club is counting as part of its Campuses Beyond Coal campaign, in which student groups have put pressure on administrators to shutdown coal-burning power plants (the Sierra Club is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News).
A dozen Midwest universities have recently committed to phase out coal-burning power plants on their campuses. They include schools in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin.
Support for transition
At Missouri S&T, it wasn’t much of a fight.
Graduate student Eric Farrow led a brief campaign in late 2010 that involved tabling and a petition drive. But by then, administrators had already announced plans to replace the coal-fired power plant with a geothermal facility. All that remained was for the school’s governing board to approve bonding money, which it did in November 2010.
“It was more of a showing of student support for the administration’s decision,” says Farrow.
Ted Ruth, the school’s director of design construction management, says several factors were behind the decision to mothball the coal- and wood-burning campus steam plant. For starters, it’s old, inefficient and in need of about $26 million in deferred maintenance.
Meanwhile, new environmental regulations are making it more expensive and complicated to keep operating coal plants.
“We’re trying to stay ahead of that curve,” says Ruth.
Sustainability concerns played a role, too. In addition to energy savings, the school expects to conserve about 8 million gallons of water per year using geothermal instead of steam heat.
Missouri S&T’s campus was built around the coal plant, which sits right in the center of it. Crews will remove the coal yard, elevator chute, and other pieces of the plant, but no decision has been made yet on how to repurpose the building, says Ruth.
“No coal plant I know is aesthetically appealing,” he says.
The geothermal project is expected to be completed in 2014. The school also plans to increase its reliance on natural gas in order to fully replace the energy it currently gets from the steam plant.
A mix of solutions
That type of hybrid approach is a pretty common one for schools that are working to phase out coal on campus, says Kim Teplitzky, a national press secretary for the Sierra Club campaign.
When the campaign began in September 2009, the organization identified 60 schools with coal-burning power plants on campus. It’s worked to organize or support student groups at each of those schools to encourage administrators to shut down the plants.
“Really the pitch is about leadership, it’s about preparing students for [clean energy] jobs, and about saving money in the long run by investing in clean energy solutions,” says Teplitzky.
So far, about a third of the schools on its target list have committed to phase out coal. Some have done so simply by switching to natural gas. Others have pursued major renewable projects.
Eastern Illinois University celebrated the opening of one of the country’s largest biomass facilities last fall. The Renewable Energy Center includes two biomass gasifiers and are expected to reduce the school’s annual carbon emissions by about 20,000 metric tons.
Other Midwest universities that have pledged to stop burning coal on campus include Case Western Reserve, Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Miami (in Oxford, Ohio), Minnesota (Crookston and Twin Cities), Oberlin College, Ohio, Southeast Missouri State, Western Illinois, and Wisconsin (Madison).
Other schools that haven’t signed the pledge are also moving forward with renewable energy projects, including Ball State and the University of Toledo.
Many of the early pledgers were, like Missouri S&T, already predisposed to moving off of coal. “The ones that are left are going to be the tougher campaigns,” says Teplitzky, citing Southern Illinois, Carbondale, in the heart of coal country, as an example.
Michigan State vote today
A two-story-tall inflatable inhaler went up this week at Michigan State University, where students demonstrated Wednesday against an Energy Transition Plan they say is inadequate.
MSU Beyond Coal says the document, which calls for an eventual transition to 100 percent renewable energy, lacks concrete benchmarks and ignores the urgency of retiring the campus coal plant.
“We feel that there is a lot more potential to be more aggressive and use resources that are here now,” says sophomore Mollie VanOrsdol, one of the group’s organizers.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben spoke at the school this week to support the student group’s cause.
Michigan State’s board of trustees is expected to vote on the energy plan at its monthly meeting today.
Update: Michigan State’s board of trustees Friday morning unanimously approved the school’s Energy Transition Plan, which calls for the university to use 40 percent renewable power by 2040.
The MSU Beyond Coal student group issued a statement after the vote:
“We’re really disappointed that the board chose to move this so-called plan forward even though it lacks innovation, real clean energy goals or a plan for retiring the dirty coal plant on campus,” said student Talya Tavor. “This could have been an opportunity for MSU to be a national clean energy leader, but instead the transition plan simply puts off any real investments or dedication to clean energy to an unknown future date with no accountability.”
Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.
How are renewable standards faring in state legislatures?
>> Midwest Energy News
(Photo by Joe Gratz via Creative Commons)
April 6, 2012
By Dan Haugen
To repeal, reform, or ramp up?
State legislatures across the region have been considering a full spectrum of proposals related to renewable portfolio standards. With sessions winding down for the year, we decided to check in with a few political observers to see how the policies are faring:
Indiana
The ink has yet to dry on Indiana’s voluntary Clean Energy Standard, which encourages utilities in the state to generate 10 percent of electricity from clean energy sources by 2025. The legislation was signed last May by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels.
“They’re still figuring out how it’s going to work,” says Christopher Zumski Finke, a policy associate with Wind on the Wires.
As part of that process, the state House passed a resolution by Republican Rep. Dave Frizzell that calls for a study of the potential rate impact on customers, among other aspects of the policy. A legislative council will decide by next month whether to order the study.
(A similar rate-impact study was requested in Minnesota last year, the results of which showed the impact was mixed but mostly minimal from that state’s mandatory renewable standard.)
Illinois
Illinois established its 25-percent-by-2025 renewable standard in 2007, but the state’s competitive electricity market has limited utilities’ investments in new renewable energy projects.
Customers in Illinois can choose to purchase power from one of the state’s major utilities or any number of alternative suppliers, which pay a fee to sell their electricity across the utilities’ wires. Customers can also change electric companies much like cell phone carriers. This makes long-term planning a challenge for utilities and suppliers, because the number of customers fluctuates from month to month.
“A renewable energy developer needs long term certainty to build a wind project,” says Kevin Borgia, director of the Illinois Wind Energy Coalition. They can’t currently get that certainty from Illinois utilities, which have been meeting their RPS goals so far by purchasing renewable energy credits instead of investing in new projects.
A solution has been proposed in S.B. 678, which would establish a transmission tariff that would be used to fund renewable projects. The legislation would spread the cost of renewable investments proportionally across all utilities and electric suppliers, creating a steady stream of funding regardless of how customers move their dollars.
The bill is a broader piece of energy legislation that includes the controversial Tenaska Energy coal gasification project, which has overshadowed the renewable portfolio standard reforms. Borgia argues that it may be the most important renewable energy legislation in the region, considering Illinois has the Midwest’s largest electricity load.
“The most important renewable energy bill currently pending in the Illinois House is also the most important coal bill pending in the Illinois House,” says Borgia.
That’s made for some interesting bedfellows and a set of political dynamics that make it tough to predict how it will play out, Borgia says. The bill has cleared the Senate and is currently sitting with the House rules committee. The state’s legislative session lasts through the end of next month.
Michigan
The political action around Michigan’s renewable standard has been outside of the capital.
Since 2008, the state has had a target of 10 percent renewable generation by 2015. A coalition of labor, business and environmental groups called is collecting signatures for a ballot measure that, if approved by voters, would increase the standard to 25 percent by 2025.
“I don’t there’s any doubt that we’re going to get 322,000 plus signatures you need to put it on the ballot, and people are optimistic that it will pass,” says John Sarver, executive director of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association.
The deadline for collecting signatures is July 9. The proposal calls for the legislature to enact laws that would encourage renewable energy projects to use made-in-Michigan equipment and hire Michigan residents. Some utilities have said the target would be unrealistic, but the campaign has support from several labor unions and manufacturers.
“It’s an interesting split of support and opposition,” says Zumski Finke, of Wind on the Wires.
Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Ray Franz has introduced a bill that would repeal Michigan’s RPS altogether, though observers don’t expect it to gain traction.
Minnesota
Is hydropower renewable or not? The answer depends on the state, we learned earlier this year.
In Minnesota, the state’s 25-percent-by-2025 renewable portfolio standard only counts hydropower from small facilities, those under 100 megawatts.
A freshman legislator, Republican Sen. Michelle Benson, introduced a bill this session that would scratch that limit and allow utilities to count all hydropower toward their renewable targets.
The distinction was put in place in part because Minnesota doesn’t have capacity for hydro facilities larger than 100 megawatts, says Zumski Finke. Canada does. Allowing utilities to count power from large hydro facilities would likely shift utility spending to Manitoba Hydro projects and away from local renewable energy projects, he says.
Republicans who were around when the original legislation was written seem to remember why the cap is there, and there aren’t any signs of the bill advancing.
Missouri
Missouri’s 15-percent-by-2021 renewable standard was born out of a successful ballot initiative four years ago.
The group behind that campaign, Renew Missouri, hopes to put the issue to voters again this fall with a measure to expand the standard to 25 percent by 2025.
While they collect signatures, the state’s legislature is considering a proposal that would significantly re-write the existing policy.
Sen. Brad Lager has introduced a bill that would let utilities meet the requirements with out-of-state renewable energy credits, which would take away incentive to develop renewable projects in Missouri, says Zumski Finke. It would also establish a cost cap on how much utilities could spend on compliance, and exempt utilities who couldn’t meet the mandate within that budget.
The Missouri Public Service Commission, meanwhile, announced a workshop on April 17 to discuss ideas for improving the rules for the renewable standard.
(Wind on the Wires and the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association are members of RE-AMP, which also funds Midwest Energy News)
Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.
This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
The chicken-and-egg challenge to scaling biomass
Harvesting switchgrass in Tennessee. (Photo by eXtension Ag Energy via Creative Commons)
Steve Flick is trying to solve one of the many chicken-and-egg problems facing renewable fuels.
Flick is founder of the Show Me Energy Cooperative in Centerview, Missouri. Since 2008, the company has been making biomass fuel pellets out of straw, corn stover and other agricultural leftovers.
There’s only so much of those materials to go around, though, and if Show Me is to grow, it’s going to need a dedicated crop of its own instead of relying on farmers’ table scraps.
But farmers are reluctant to plant the type of energy crops best suited for Show Me’s biorefinery because there isn’t an established market for them yet. Why would a farmer give up a known commodity for a chance to get in on a unproven industry?
“They have to have that safety net of understanding they’ve got a place to sell their product,” says Flick.
Show Me is prepared to pay for the bales of native grasses it needs, but most farmers — and their lenders — don’t want to risk committing land for an industry that’s still in start-up mode. And with commodity prices as high as they are, fledgling biomass producers can’t compete with what a farmer could otherwise earn growing corn, soybeans or wheat.
“It boils down to net income per acre,” says Flick.
Creating incentives
The solution, he hopes, might lay in the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, or BCAP. The federal program, which was created in the 2008 Farm Bill, pays farmers near biorefineries to grow dedicated crops for those facilities. It took the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) a few years — and missteps — to finalize the current rules, but last year it announced the first round of projects to be included.
BCAP offers annual payments to farmers for planting perennial biomass crops. It also provides matching payments up to $45 per ton for collecting, harvesting, storing and transporting biomass materials.
The program only supports farmers in designated project areas. The areas range in size from 1,000 to 50,000 acres and each center around a specific biomass production facility. So far, the USDA has approved nine project areas, three of which are in Missouri. Another straddles the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and the rest are located to the south or west.
The zone around Show Me’s biorefinery was the first project area approved under the program, says Flick. Over the next couple of months, farmers will begin planting native grasses on their marginal land (a requirement of the BCAP project). At the end of the year, they’ll harvest it, bale it, and deliver it to Show Me Energy, which will use it to increase its fuel pellet production.
“This is just a classic case where public policy can play a strong role in triggering a new industry,” says Andy Olsen, a senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
Program may be at risk
Before the first seeds have even sprouted, there’s already concern that Congress may cut or eliminate funding for the program. House and Senate leadership have signaled they may not fund the program beyond the current year, says Olson. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last month the administration would seek flexibility from Congress to use research and rural development funds to support bioenergy crops.
BCAP spending for fiscal year 2012 was capped at $17 million.
Olsen says biomass projects such as Show Me Energy serve multiple policy goals. They’re a source of cleaner-burning, homegrown energy, and the crops they use as feedstocks can help reduce soil erosion, improve air and water quality and conserve wildlife habitat.
Flick is scheduled to speak in Washington, D.C., today at a pair of legislative briefings to highlight BCAP’s importance. He doesn’t think the business model will depend on BCAP payments forever, but convincing a farmer to go from soybeans to switchgrass today requires extra incentive, along with education. The goal: to show farmers they can make money growing energy crops.
“If he’s making money, he’s going to keep doing it,” says Flick. “That’s real life.”
Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.
Groups lock horns over Missouri’s renewable future
>> St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Renewable energy advocates and utilities are squaring off to establish how much of Missouri’s electricity is derived from renewable resources — with the cost to consumers in the balance.
Kansas City Power & Light files plan to sell less electricity
>> The Kansas City Star
Kansas City Power & Light, in a historic shift for the utility, filed plans Thursday with Missouri regulators to sell less electricity. The plan takes advantage of new Missouri regulations that make it possible for utilities to curb consumption and not be penalized financially.
Army Corps under fire over Missouri River floods
>> E&E Daily
House lawmakers took their turn blasting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week for what they said were mistakes managing Missouri River dams through this year’s epic flood, which overtopped levees and inundated communities and farms.
How Minnesota’s old mining pits could boost wind power
>> Midwest Energy News
An abandoned open pit iron ore mine in Virginia, Minn. Photo by Roy Luck via Flickr (Creative Commons).
November 22, 2011
By Dan Haugen
Minnesota researchers may have unearthed a new use for abandoned mining pits on the state’s Iron Range: Wind power storage.
A team at the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute spent the past year studying whether former open-pit mines might be repurposed as storage facilities for off-peak wind energy. The results appear to be promising, they said.
The concept has the interest and backing of two Minnesota utilities, which helped fund the research. The utilities hope it could someday help them get more value from wind investments as they work toward meeting higher targets for the state’s renewable portfolio standard.
“It’s very difficult to manage [wind] without some kind of storage capability, and that’s where this type of project fits in,” says Don Fosnacht, the study’s lead investigator and director of the institute’s Center for Applied Research and Technology Development.
New interest in old technology
The report specifically looks at using iron ore mining pits for pumped storage hydropower. It’s one of the oldest and most widely used methods for storing energy. Cheap or excess electricity, such as nighttime wind power, is used to pump water uphill from a lake or reservoir into a higher-elevation holding pond. When electricity demand is higher, the energy is recaptured by reversing the flow and sending water through hydro turbines on its way back down.
(Source: USGS)
The earliest pumped-hydro systems were built in Italy and Switzerland in the 1890s. Today, there’s 125 gigawatts of pumped-hydro capacity worldwide, a little less than one-fifth of which is in the United States.
Most of the 40 or so U.S. pumped-hydro facilities were built over the course of a few decades beginning in the 1960s to help coal or nuclear plants run at a constant rate, which is more efficient, rather than ramping up and down to meet demand.
There’s now renewed interest in it as a solution for managing the variability of wind and solar power. In September, federal energy officials announced $17 million in research and development funding for hydropower, including $6.8 million for pumped storage hydropower. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued preliminary permits for nearly 32,000 megawatts worth of proposed new pumped-hydro capacity, including projects in Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota.
“The driver is wind integration,” said Rick Miller, who leads the hydropower practice for Omaha-based engineering consulting firm HDR. Wind often picks up at night, when electricity demand is lower. Pumped-hydro would allow utilities to store that energy until the next day, when more customers need it and it’s less likely to go to waste.
‘Potential is certainly there’
As part of the study, University of Minnesota researchers visited one of the nearest pumped-hydro facilities, the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant on Lake Michigan. Consumers Energy and Detroit Edison built the plant to balance loads from nearby nuclear power plants. When it was completed in 1973, it was the world’s largest pumped-storage hydropower plant, holding 27 billion gallons of water and generating up to 1,872 megawatts.
Missouri has three smaller hydro-storage plants operated by Ameren and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But pumped-hydro isn’t found in most of the Midwest, in part because the steep elevation changes that are necessary are harder to find on the plains.
On the Iron Range, “the potential is certainly there, based on our study,” Fosnacht said. The Laurentian continental divide crosses the region, which slopes down from there several hundred feet to Lake Superior. Its topography is also pocked by just over 100 iron ore pits that were mined to varying degrees during the last century. Some are still used in taconite mining operations, but many are abandoned and have since filled with rain water.
A pumped-hydro energy storage system is basically two reservoirs with pumping and generation equipment and an elevation change in between. An abandoned mining pit next to a cliff or ridge would, in a sense, be partially built already, which could lower the construction costs. The projects would involved excavating a second holding pond, likely above an existing mining pit reservoir.
Besides cost savings, Fosnacht said another potential advantage to using abandoned mining pits is that it may lessen environmental opposition, which has gotten in the way of other pumped-hydro projects. The pits are on land that’s already been altered by decades of mining. Mineral erosion is a risk, but a closed-loop system could be achieved with the right design, he said.
It’s also a relatively efficient technology, Fosnacht said. For every 100 megawatts used in pumping water uphill, a plant can generate about 85 megawatts from releasing the same flow back downhill. And because they can be turned on in a matter of minutes, they give grid operators an alternative to firing up dirty and expensive oil or gas peaking plants.
Interest from local utilities
Minnesota Power and Great River Energy have spent millions purchasing wind power contracts in recent years. The problem is that when they sell that energy onto the grid on windy nights, they often get only a fraction of what they paid for it. They’re interested in ways to store that off-peak power until it’s in greater demand and they can get a better rate, making wind power more economical.
“We started to ask the question whether there are any synergies we could leverage in our region,” says Al Rudeck, vice president of strategy, planning and asset optimization for Minnesota Power. The utility is the largest hydropower operator in the state, and its largest customers are mining companies, which lead to the question: “Could we marry mining and pump storage with the idea of storing wind?”
Minnesota Power approached Great River Energy and then the Natural Resources Research Institute about collaborating on a study. The University’s Institute on the Environment also helped fund the $250,000, one-year project looking at the policy, topography and environmental considerations. The final report is expected to be published this month.
One concern the report will point out is the importance of finding a site where mining isn’t likely to reoccur in the future. Renewed interest in mining caused by the rise in certain commodity prices might mean mineral rights could get in the way.
While the study found about half a dozen sites that seem to have the right physical conditions for developing pumped-hydro energy storage, economics will ultimately determine whether the idea advances.
Miller, of HDR, said financing, along with misunderstanding about the environmental impact, are the two biggest barriers for pumped hydro projects. A 1,000-megawatt plant, in general, can cost around $2 billion to build. Starting with existing pits will lower costs, but “there’s still a lot of money in the equipment and drilling your tunnels,” Miller said.
Fosnacht said he thinks a 100-megawatt mining-pit system could be built be built for around $120 million, although that is just a rough estimate.
An important factor for financing the project would be price differential between daytime and nighttime electricity. The larger that spread, the more value the utilities would get from building storage capacity. Officials with both companies said it’s too soon to say whether or when they will pursue a project, though Rudeck said it would likely not be until after 2020.
“We’re definitely very anxious to see the results of the study,” Rudeck said. “The technology is there. It’s just a question whether the right site is there and the right economics for it to make sense.”
Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.
This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
What’s Best Buy doing at a utility conference?
The national association for utility regulators is holding its annual meeting this week in St. Louis, where members are hearing sessions on everything from fuel hedges and pipeline safety to smart grids and cyber security.
Perhaps the most surprising speaker: Kris Bowring, a senior business team leader for Best Buy.
What is someone from an electronics retailer doing addressing a gathering of public utility commissioners?
Bowring spoke Sunday on a panel billed: “Empowering the Consumer: What Does It Mean? How Do You Achieve It?” Those are questions Best Buy has put a lot of thought and research into as it prepares to enter the home energy market.
Best Buy rolled out new home energy departments this month in three test stores in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco. They feature gadgets and systems to help customers monitor and fine tune their home energy use, such as smart thermostats or apps that can control lights, locks and appliances.
“We’ve asked a lot of questions about energy efficiency and what consumers want, how they want it, and what’s confusing about it,” Bowring said in an interview last week.
One of the key takeaways: “It has to be about more than just energy efficiency.”
Bowring shares a story about being at the San Francisco airport recently and using a smartphone app to check the current energy usage at his home back in Minnesota. He noticed a light had been left on in the garage, and he was able to remotely switch it off with just a couple of taps on his phone.
It’s that kind of wonder and convenience that’s going to inspire more people to begin paying attention to their energy use. “Once you understand your consumption, you typically reduce it, or at least make the effort,” Bowring said.
In order to make those energy conservation efforts stick, consumers also need clear information about the impact of their changes — something that’s often not easy to decipher from looking at an energy bill. “They’re not sure of the benefits and they’re not quite clear if it’s actually helping,” he said.
The company’s research suggests that even people who are interested in doing the right thing don’t know where to start, and that they want someone to talk to, “and that’s clearly where Best Buy fits,” Bowring said.
“This whole department is there to help people learn and play with the technology; to see how it works and how it might look in your home, and then be able to talk with someone who’s going to be knowledgable about the technology,” Bowring said.
Best Buy has also partnered with local utilities in each of its three test markets (Constellation Energy in Chicago, Reliant Energy in Houston, and Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco) to connect customers with rebates and other incentives.
Products the departments are carrying include home automation components from Smarthome, energy monitoring software from Check-It, and the much buzzed-about Nest thermostat, designed by a former Apple iPod designer.
The new departments have been open less than two weeks. It’s too soon to speculate on when a broader roll-out might happen, said Bowring. Best Buy also added a Home Energy store section to its website that includes energy savings calculators, links to local rebates and product descriptions.
The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners annual meeting continues through Wednesday.
