Morning Brief: Revenue streams of CAISO batteries, Entergy still on the gas, New Hampshire NEM

Also in the brief: EPA raises legal questions about California’s plan to ban new gas-powered cars starting in 2035

September 29, 2020 Eric Wesoff

GBGDPH Main Street, in downtown Concord, New Hampshire.

Image:Yankee Publishing

Entergy to rely on gas while claiming Net-Zero Emissions in 2050: Entergy joined other large utilities last week in announcing its intent to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050, but like its regional peers of Duke and Southern, the company is charting a course that will rely heavily on gas. Gas, which is a fossil fuel that contributes to climate change, will make up as much as a quarter of Entergy’s electric capacity by 2050, according to the plan. Entergy CEO Leo Denault told investors in February the company planned to build as much as 4 GW of new gas by 2030. Entergy’s net zero announcement, timed in advance of its “Virtual Analyst Day”, comes on the heels of Southern Company’s announcement that it too would rely on gas while still claiming net zero emissions. Entergy has repeatedly blocked action on climate at the operating company level; its New Orleans subsidiary threatened the City of New Orleans if the city proceeded with a plan that would force the utility to move toward clean energy as part of an effort to combat climate change. Source: Energy and Policy Institute

EnergyGPS recently examined the revenue streams available to CAISO batteries. As we all know, there is a slew of large new batteries coming down the pipe in California, the first of which hit the grid last month. The 250MW/250MWh Gateway Energy Storage facility, purportedly largest battery system in the world, roughly doubles the power capacity (though not the energy capacity) of the battery fleet in California. The fact that this battery has only one hour of energy storage capacity tells us that it was designed with ancillary services in mind. Only having one hour of energy storage is fine if you are mostly selling the availability of your capacity, rather than selling large quantities of energy. A battery which primarily participates in ancillary services is par for the course at the moment. Most batteries are happy to sit on the sideline and provide regulation services, rather than getting mixed up in the messy world of daily energy price spreads. Source: Energy GPS

New Hampshire House fails to override net metering veto: In March, the New Hampshire Senate had voted 17-7 to override the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 159, legislation that would have increased the state net metering limit from 1 to 5 MW. But on Sept. 16, the House failed to override the veto on a 207-130 vote. This is not the first year that Gov. Sununu has vetoed a net metering bill. He has said taxpayers would have to pay millions of dollars if the bill were to pass. Source: Daily Energy Insider

EPA raises legal questions about California’s plan to ban new gas-powered cars starting in 2035: The Environmental Protection Agency raised concerns about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to ban sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered passenger cars in the state by 2035, arguing that the mandate is impractical and possibly illegal. California’s rolling blackouts and requests for power from neighboring states “begs the question of how you expect to run an electric car fleet that will come with significant increases in electricity demand, when you can’t even keep the lights on today,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said today in a letter to Newsom. Wheeler also said the order likely would not be able to be implemented by the California Air Resources Board without approval from the EPA, pointing out that the Trump administration in 2019 took away the state’s power to set its own vehicle tailpipe emissions standards. Source: Wall St. Journal, Axios

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