RE+ live blog: Tuesday (original) (raw)
RE+ kicks into full gear Tuesday, and there’s more happening in and around the Anaheim Convention Center than anyone could possibly cover- but I’m gonna get my steps in today for you, my dear Renewable Energy World reader.
This is my first time attending the largest clean energy event in North America. I’m posting daily musings disguised as a live blog each day, including a smattering of sights and sounds from Anaheim in addition to quick quips from clean energy professionals I’m meeting with during the event. If you missed Monday’s live blog, check it out here.
AES discusses the inevitable digitalization of the grid
I started my morning by having a 1-on-1 chat with Alexina Jackson, the vice president of strategic development at AES and GridTECH Connect Forum alum, who offered the following hope for interconnecting projects to the grid:
“I would love to see a process where interconnection is administrative, and I don’t mean that in terms of red tape. I mean that in terms of boring. Like, really boring interconnection would be fantastic.”
Jackson shared insight on grid innovations and highlighted the role of AI and machine learning in grid management, stressing the need for collaborative data sharing and the strategic placement of batteries to ease grid stress. As a leader in AES’ innovation business, New Energy Technologies, Jackson advocates for the transition to a digital grid, leveraging AI to optimize not only energy flow but also costs.
“I think there’s a lot of tension that we’re going to see in the next year,” Jackson warned, sharing concern that some grid operators will retrench into (and potentially even fast-tracking) thermal assets to meet increasing demand. “Is there a path to ongoing renewable and decarbonization within the U.S. grid while still ensuring we have a transition in mind? I think AES would say confidently, yes.”
Jackson emphasizes the need for “energy planning,” including collaborative planning around the retirement of thermal assets.
“There are a lot of incentives for moving to a digital grid and recognizing that the analog system we have in place is not unlike telephony, right? The Internet communications went through the same transition. We have cell phones here, not landlocked lines, because we accepted that transformation within our communication system… There are really strong analogies to be found.”
Do you know what’s really going on in your BESS?
In a chat with Arthur Claire and Niclas Weimar of quality assurance company Sinovoltaics, the duo focused on the need to thoroughly inspect battery energy storage systems as the BESS market rapidly grows.
In a recently published white paper, Claire digs into pilot projects in which Sinovoltaics discovered thermal issues.
“We find, unfortunately, many issues within BESS,” Claire said. “Battery modules hitting too much or having some capacity issues are the two main challenges we face quality-wise
The company also released a document explaining to potential developers and utilities the sort of contractual language they require in contracts to ensure they can deploy their BESS after proper quality inspections.
“In like 25% of the projects we inspect, we found at least one container with a fire safety system not working,” Claire revealed. “It’s like a $50 component. It doesn’t cost anything… And it may have a tremendous impact if we don’t check this.”
It’s not too late to join the trades
The Burns and McDonnell booth is my next stop. There I’m met by Josh Tucker, engineering manager for the company’s energy storage enterprise and Julian Hoover, project manager for their renewable energy business.
“It’s just exciting being in this market,” Tucker shared. “We’re seeing more and more growth, more and more projects are coming through, and our team continues to grow.”
“The IRA and things like that have (sparked) a renewed investment in our craft and our trade labor,” said Hoover. “I think that was much needed for the country. More and more, it’s been hard to find the skilled labor that we used to have.”
Hoover is encouraged in the recent influx of apprenticeship programs and the DOE investing in the next era of skilled tradespeople.
“I have seen a slow incline in general foreman level being younger and younger from when I started construction,” noticed Hoover. “Those were called the ‘gray hairs,’ they have the experience. And now kids are being called on sooner, like in their late 20’s, to take on leadership roles on site.”
SAVE THE DATE! GridTECH Connect is the interconnection event, offering electric utilities, grid operators, project developers, policymakers, and advocates a unique opportunity to join forces and improve the critical issue of interconnection. Register now for GridTECH Connect Northeast in Newport, Rhode Island, October 28-30, 2024!
The session Workforce constraints and their impact on interconnection timelines, taking place October 29 from 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM, will delve into workforce constraints across the renewable energy industry from manufacturers to project developers, utilities, and RTOs. Panelists will discuss workarounds and ways to maximize the limited manpower available.
“This is what I tell my kids,” Hoover added, offering a message to young people considering joining the trades. “If you’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you’re smart, you’re going to climb through the ranks really quickly.”
This Week in Cleantech… LIVE from RE+!
The PowerUp Live stage at RE+, presented by Wartsila in partnership with Suncast Media
Who needs lunch when you can snag a handful of bacon from the media room and do a lunchtime podcast instead?
I just wrapped up a half hour of live content with TigerComm’s Mike Casey. We did an interview with folks from Attala Steel, which makes structural steel beams for solar foundations. They shared how a totally domestic, in-house supply chain allows then to supply product with only a 6-8 week lead time, impressing clients. We talked about why the steel industry is often thought of as “dirty,” and why that’s really not as true as it used to be.
After that interview, Casey and I hosted the 50th episode of This Week in Cleantech, highlighting a few interesting clean energy stories from this week and sharing our thoughts on the bacchanalia of RE+. You can find our shows (and live streams from the event) at Suncast.live.
This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.
It takes a community
DSD Renewables has got its eye on a few emerging community solar markets, says senior community solar manager Shea Williams, but the key to their success will be getting the programs right.
“New York is a model everyone talks about, and it’s a really good representation of how we want markets to go,” she told me. She highlighted how well the rate structure works, compensating customers in a “meaningful and fair” way. Williams also believes a consolidated billing process is helping New York’s community solar market thrive.
I asked Shea if she commonly encounters a misconception that limits the adoption of community solar.
“That it’s generally a complicated experience for the customer,” she offered. “And I think generally once a customer signs up, I don’t think they realize they really don’t have to do anything else and it’s really just like free discount, essentially.”
So a free lunch does exist?
“Exactly,” she confirms. “I think that’s where some hesitancies come in.”
Williams went on to tell me how excited she is about the engagement she’s seeing in low-to-middle-income communities right now.
“That can really make an impact on their annual energy bill,” she adds.
I concluded our interview by asking if having a big anchor subscriber (like Starbucks) on a community solar project taking up a big chunk of capacity is a good thing or a bad thing.
“It makes it sometimes easier to have a large portion allocated to an anchor customer,” she mused. “Those anchors are somewhat easier to manage… They’re nice to have and they’re pretty reliable, too, but they’re often on longer-term contracts… It’s more work on the front end in negotiation, but once we have those relationships, you can really scale to other projects.”
“I would like to see, ideally, a shift toward having more smaller customers on projects. But it’s still solar, it’s still renewable energy, and those corporations have a lot of interest right now because they’re all trying to meet their sustainability goals, so it’s important to have them on there too.”
We need more (virtual) power (plants)!
Sunnova executive vice president of government and regulatory affairs Meghan Nutting and I plopped down on an already-occupied couch outside the media room at RE+ to chat about virtual power plants. We may have slightly inconvenienced a nearby meeting, but I swear we tried our best to keep our voices down.
Nutting went into detail on her company’s disaster preparedness measures, including multiple daily meetings during disasters to ensure Sunnova customers will be able to keep the lights on even in hurricane-scale weather events.
“Right now, we’re monitoring something that was going to go toward Houston. We’re monitoring something that could hit Puerto Rico Saturday, and then Guam and Saipan,” she revealed, saying Sunnova learned valuable lessons via Irma and Maria.
“No one in the industry was prepared for hurricanes of those magnitudes back in 2017,” she said. “The grid was down for a year in some places, and those people didn’t have access to electricity. They were staring at solar panels on their roof with no access to electricity, and there was nothing we could do.”
Since those storms ravaged Puerto Rico, Nutting says battery attachment there is 100%. People know they need to have options off the grid.
Nutting told me she wants to see more standardization across the virtual power plant industry. She laments that most VPP programs don’t exist at the point of sale, eliminating VPPs as a potential incentive for people to go solar.
“We can’t say you’ll make $700 per year off your batter if you install,” she explained. “And then we’re like ‘Hey, you should opt into this system’ and people don’t open our emails.”
Scrap the whole system and start again?
I just had a fantastic conversation with Hala Ballouz, the CEO of consulting firm Electric Power Engineers. Born in Lebanon, Ballouz has been fascinated with energy since she was young, a trait passed down from her father. She was EPE’s first full-time employee when she joined the company, and now she owns the business. In our wide-ranging discussion, Ballouz said she’s about to publish a newsletter she actually wrote four years ago about redesigning the grid from scratch.
“The world wasn’t ready for it,” she laughed. “But it is ready now.”
“I’m not saying we can take down the lines,” Ballouz added. “But we need to design it as if there’s nothing there- put it on a wall like a North Star, and everything we do, we navigate towards it.”
“Otherwise, I kid you not, we’re really going to see things we don’t want to see and hear very soon in the U.S. in terms of reliability and cost of electricity, not to mention utilities and others not being able to say ‘Yes’ to load. And we’re not used to that.”
Look out for much more of my conversation with EPE CEP Hala Ballouz in a future article on Renewable Energy World.
Arevon plans to go all domestic
Developer Arevon Energy has accumulated an impressive 4 GW of operational capacity with another 2 GW in queue. Arevon’s portfolio consists of utility-scale solar, energy storage, and solar + storage hybrid projects, as well as select distributed generation solar assets. Over the last 12 months, the company has completed $3 billion in project financings for new projects that have initiated construction across the United States.
In a conversation with COO Justin Johnson, he told me Arevon is working toward having its entire supply chain sourced domestically.
“I would love that. That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “If we’re contracting with a utility or (Meta) or Amazon, the most important thing to them is that we’re going to do what we say we’re going to do, like how much it’s going to cost and when it’s going to be done and hitting that. And the best, least-risky way for me to do that is to have a domestic supply chain that I can rely on.”
Johnson says more than half of Arevon’s capacity is via First Solar panels, which are made in the U.S., but there was a recent “blip in time” where First Solar just didn’t have enough capacity, forcing Arevon to procure elsewhere.
“The idea is Cartersville (Qcells factory in Georgia) gets online, Qcells starts pumping them out and maybe adds one or two more facilities,” he explained. “I would love to do that. I want to.”