Reaching 90% renewables can maintain stable electricity rates, Brattle finds
The grid operator Southwest Power Pool could achieve “high levels of decarbonization and electrification with minimal rate impacts,” says a study requested by SPP and prepared by The Brattle Group.
Federal regulator recommends using automation to speed interconnection
A FERC commissioner said that automation software took just ten days to reproduce an interconnection cluster study for renewables projects that had taken two years of human labor to complete. He said he hopes to meet soon with grid operators to discuss interconnection automation.
A federal grid planning authority could counter utility incentives to stall transmission
Utilities that own fossil generation can benefit from congested transmission that blocks renewables, an economics professor found. In related work, a law professor proposed a federal grid planning authority to cure transmission delays, as well as near-term measures in that direction.
Eliminating tax credits would reduce solar and wind deployment by half, says Brattle
“A wide array of resources is needed” to meet growing electricity demand, including hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind capacity that can be deployed quickly but would be reduced by half without tax credits, says a report prepared for ConservAmerica.
Massachusetts will pilot vehicle-grid integration statewide
Owners of an eligible electric vehicle, or school districts that own eligible electric school buses, could receive one of 100 free bidirectional chargers plus compensation for participating. The state plans to prepare a V2X guidebook aimed at scaling the pilot program.
Consumers will pay billions due to “very slow” interconnection in the PJM grid, study says
Faster interconnection of generating resources waiting in PJM’s queue, nearly all renewables, could have resulted in far lower capacity prices in PJM’s latest auction, but instead consumers will pay for PJM’s high capacity prices, says a study by Grid Strategies.
Solar-friendly policies that states can pursue to control the cost of electricity
Solar-friendly policies that include demand flexibility, advanced conductors and virtual power plants, as well as lesser-known approaches, can help control the cost of electricity, says RMI.
States that adopt recent building energy efficiency codes save more energy
A report highlights the increasing benefits of building energy efficiency codes, and maps the states that are adopting them. Building energy efficiency is a key element of a least-cost 100% renewables grid, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has found.
Invenergy CEO and spouse give $100 million to advance the energy transition
The World Resources Institute and the University of Chicago are creating new programs with the funding.
Enhanced geothermal projects could scale greatly as costs decline
A team of researchers and industry participants predict a significant near-term energy contribution from enhanced geothermal projects, saying in a journal article that the technology could provide “stable baseload and potentially dispatchable electricity.”
