Tag Archives: wind turbines

Apex moves forward with Rocky Forge wind farm as the Clean Power Plan makes Virginia utilities look harder at renewables

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Wind turbines in the Poconos, Pennsylvania. Photo credit Mitchazenia/Wikimedia Commons.

Wind turbines in the Poconos, Pennsylvania. Photo credit Mitchazenia/Wikimedia Commons.

It had begun to look like no one would ever build a wind farm on land in Virginia. Appalachian Power Company (APCo) hasn’t shown interest since the State Corporation Commission bounced its proposal for West Virginia wind farms several years ago. Just this past November, Dominion Resources let it be known the company saw no future in land-based wind. One after the other, wind development companies put their Virginia plans on hold, citing permitting issues, anti-wind local ordinances, and—especially—a challenging policy environment.

But interest in Virginia wind never went away, and now Charlottesville-based Apex Clean Energy is pushing ahead with plans for up to 25 turbines on a tract of private land in Botetourt County, 30 miles north of Roanoke. Although development is still in the early stages, the company expects construction to take place in 2017, with electricity flowing that same year.

Apex has years of experience developing wind farms across the country, but this would be its first venture in its home state. The timing seems good; the EPA Clean Power Plan will make renewable energy more valuable to utilities and state officials, and wind energy costs have grown more competitive every year. And while previous wind farm proposals in Virginia have run into opposition from landowners and others, Botetourt County officials unanimously passed a wind ordinance that will allow the project to move forward, with public backing that included an endorsement from the Roanoke Group of the Sierra Club.

Yet anyone who has followed the fates of previous wind farm proposals has to wonder whether Apex can succeed where others have failed. With that in mind, I talked with Apex’s Tyson Utt, Director of Development for the Mid-Atlantic, to gage just how likely we are to see turbines up and running two years from now.

Utt explained that the project is still in the design phase, so a lot of the pieces still have to fall into place. Studies are ongoing to determine the optimal size, type and number of turbines. The project could be as large as 80 megawatts (MW), enough to power up to 20,000 homes, and would represent an investment of up to $150 million. A transmission line crosses the site, and Apex is working with Dominion to ensure grid access.

Apex has not lined up a buyer for the electricity at this stage. Utt said options would include a power purchase agreement (PPA) or sale of the completed project to a utility such as Dominion or APCo. Other possibilities include striking a deal with a corporation that wants to buy wind energy, as Apex has done with Ikea in Illinois and Texas.

Recent events suggest the utilities could be persuaded to take a close look. APCo’s 2015 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) lists wind energy as a low-cost option for complying with the Clean Power Plan. And Dominion, in spite of all-but-dismissing wind in its own IRP, is still pushing aggressively for the right to put turbines on land it owns in Tazewell County.

Apex is not alone in thinking this year could be a turning point for wind energy in our region. Just over the border in eastern North Carolina, the Spanish wind company Iberdrola will hold a groundbreaking ceremony this week on a $600 million, 102-turbine wind farm near Elizabeth City. That project has been in the works since 2011 and was once thought dead after utilities including Dominion and Duke Energy turned down opportunities to buy the power. There has been no word yet on who will buy the power from Iberdrola.*

Making the money work

The wind industry has been buffeted by the stop-start history of the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC). With the credit, the industry boomed. With each expiration, it tanked. Today most observers doubt it will be reauthorized. This isn’t fatal in parts of the country where flat land means low development costs. Wind remains the least-cost energy option in many states. But building wind farms in mountainous areas of the east is a more expensive proposition. (Consider the logistics of hauling hundred-foot-long turbine blades up winding mountain roads.)

So almost my first question to Utt was how he thought Rocky Forge could produce power at a competitive price. Utt acknowledged the challenge posed by the loss of the PTC but insisted that even in Virginia, wind power can be competitive so long as there is some mechanism that levels the playing field with fossil fuels. If it’s not the PTC, he said, perhaps it will be Master Limited Partnerships, which currently offer tax advantages for development of oil and gas but not for wind and solar. Sales of Renewable Energy Certificates will also help bridge the money gap.

With Rocky Forge still in the early stages, and no nearby projects of its own to compare it to, Apex doesn’t yet know where the cost per kilowatt-hour will fall. But bottom line, said Utt, “We think we can be competitive with gas plants.”

These days, of course, solar energy dominates the news, with solar prices tumbling at a breathtaking rate. (Just this month we learned that First Solar Inc. has contracted to sell solar electricity to Nevada Power for 3.87 cents per kilowatt-hour, a new low price record for solar.)

Apex develops solar projects, too, said Utt. But wind and solar “are different,” and both will have roles to play under the Clean Power Plan, which he described as “a game-changer.”

“Millions of dollars in local economic benefit”

Clean energy is popular, but local economic benefits often carry more weight with county officials. Utt said the project will provide “millions of dollars in local economic benefit through tax revenues and local spending on goods and services over the 30 year life of the project.” It will also “create up to 100 full-time equivalent construction jobs and 5 to 10 long-term local operations jobs.”

It surely helps that Apex is itself based in Charlottesville, making it a known quantity. Utt said Apex “has a track record of hiring wind turbine technicians from local wind technician programs similar to the program at nearby Dabney Lancaster. At Dabney Lancaster, several local residents have completed the wind technician program,” but they have to seek jobs in other states.  “We would like to see those jobs stay in Virginia.”

For Utt, the jobs question is personal. “I was born and raised in Virginia and wanted to get into wind, and I had to leave the state,” he told me. “I spend most of my time driving to Maryland or North Carolina. We are a Virginia-based company and want to get this industry going here. We have a hundred-some people in Charlottesville, most of them working on projects in other states. We want this to set a precedent for other projects in the state.”

Birds, bats and neighbors

Public acceptance of wind energy can’t be taken for granted in Virginia, but the Rocky Forge site may be as good as it gets here. Much of the area where the turbines will go has been previously cleared, and the land is privately owned. The nearest home is a mile and a half away, and a high-voltage transmission line already crosses the property. No bald eagle nests have been found within a four-mile buffer area, and Utt said the company has had biologists on site every two weeks to study wildlife issues.

Nonetheless, a handful of opponents showed up at the county supervisors’ meeting, with one speaker reportedly comparing Apex building a wind farm to ISIS taking over the Middle East. (A certain level of anti-wind hysteria seems to be endemic to Roanoke. Just a few years ago the Roanoke Tea Party web site warned that renewable energy was part of a United Nations plot to make us all live sustainably, as un-American a concept as could be imagined.)

More seriously, opponents cite concerns about birds and bats. Studies have shown that wind turbines are a relatively minor cause of bird deaths compared to the other ways we humans kill birds (windows, wires, vehicles, pesticides and letting Kitty out the door), but bat mortality is a real concern in the Appalachian Mountains. Utt said he felt the wind industry has learned a great deal about building turbines in bat areas in recent years. Apex will include mitigation measures in its operating plan, such as shutting down the turbines at low wind speeds and during key migration times.

Apex’s proactive approach to wildlife issues, and its early engagement with local residents going back many months, helped it win over local officials and environmental activists. Dan Crawford, the chair of the Roanoke Group of the Sierra Club, invited Apex employees to give a presentation about the project in early May, and the group ended up endorsing the proposal.

The Sierra Club had supported a previous effort to build a wind farm on Poor Mountain, which stalled in 2012 when developer Invenergy gave up on Virginia. The Sierra Club supports appropriately-sited wind farms as part of America’s transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Crawford says he is hopeful now that the Apex project will move forward.

“Like a dance floor, someone has to be first. Rocky Forge will open the door for future wind power development in Virginia and the Allegheny Mountains of the Southeast.”

 

*Update: Later on July 13, the buyer was revealed to be Amazon Web Services. Anybody notice a trend?

Non-profits can go solar, save money under new Virginia law

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photo credit Dietrich Krieger

A church in Germany displays both its faith and its solar panels. Photo credit Dietrich Krieger.

Faith communities, colleges, schools, local governments and non-profits will find it easier to “go solar” under a law that takes effect in Virginia on July 1. Eligible customers will be able to install solar panels or wind turbines with little or no upfront cost, paying only for the electricity the systems provide. This arrangement, known as a third-party power purchase agreement (PPA), has been the driver for most of the solar projects in the U.S. in recent years, but prior to this year utilities had blocked its use in most of Virginia.

The new law creates a two-year pilot program allowing customers of Dominion Virginia Power to install projects as large as 1 megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) using PPAs financed by private companies. Projects must have a minimum size of 50 kilowatts, so the program can be used by many commercial customers but excludes homeowners, whose solar PV systems more typically fall in the 4-to-8 kilowatt size.

Importantly, however, the 50-kilowatt minimum does not apply to tax-exempt entities. PPAs are one of the only ways available for tax-exempt entities to benefit from the federal 30% tax credit for renewable energy systems; a tax-paying investor actually owns the system and uses the credits, passing along the savings to the customer. Thus the program could open up a new solar market in Virginia focused on what might be considered a natural vanguard for renewable energy: houses of worship, colleges, schools and nonprofits.

PPAs also offer an advantage over buying solar panels outright: even though the solar system is on the customer’s roof, someone else actually installs, owns and maintains it. That means less hassle for the customer and no upfront capital cost. The customer only has to pay for the solar power that’s produced. With prices for solar systems having fallen dramatically in recent years, customers will generally be able to buy solar energy under a PPA for no more than they now pay for power from non-renewable sources.

In states with incentive programs, including Maryland and DC, customers actually save money on their utility bills with solar PPAs. Virginia customers may not save money at first. Depending on the contract terms, however, customers may save money in future years, and can end up owning the solar system outright eventually, which will allow them to save quite a bit of money on electricity in the long run.

PPAs are the most common financing method for rooftop solar systems across the country. Companies like Solar City and Sungevity have created a profitable business model around financing and owning solar systems on customers’ property. Given the lack of state incentives in Virginia, Solar City isn’t expected to enter the market here. Financing PPAs in Virginia can still be profitable, but it presents challenges. Still, for people with cash sitting in CDs and bank accounts earning less than 1% interest, financing a solar project at their neighborhood church or school can be rewarding financially as well as spiritually.

One of the few companies with experience in Virginia PPAs is Secure Futures, LLC of Staunton, Virginia. CEO Tony Smith says his company’s business model is to “work with tax exempt entities to met their environmental, educational and thought leadership goals through solar installations that we own and operate in ways that deliver immediate operational savings and solid long term returns.”

The new law will involve rulemaking by Virginia’s regulatory body, the State Corporation Commission, to settle the details–including how the pilot program is tracked and how a qualifying customer applies for the limited kilowatts available over the two-year period. The SCC should be issuing a docket for a public hearing in the near future.  Since many customers need months of lead-time, it’s not too soon to start the planning process.

Free workshops will offer information about solar PPAs beginning in June

On June 23 at 7 p.m., Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light (GWIPL) and the Sierra Club will hold a free workshop for faith congregations at Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in Alexandria, one of the first Virginia churches to install solar panels. Representatives of solar companies including Secure Futures and Abakus Solar of Richmond, Virginia will be on hand to answer questions.

GWIPL has worked extensively with DC and Maryland congregations on similar solar projects and has compiled an informative booklet that can be downloaded from the gwipl.org website.

The Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club supported the solar industry in its quest to open up the Virginia market for solar PPAs and believes churches and other faith communities can play a big role in making the benefits of renewable energy available to everyone.

Sierra Club and Virginia Interfaith Power and Light are also planning a June workshop for Richmond-area congregations. Similarly, Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, which has been working with community colleges on “green campus” projects, are planning a workshop designed especially for colleges and universities.

In addition to their target audiences, all workshops will be open to anyone who wants to learn more about the solar opportunity. For information, contact corrinabeall@sierraclub.org.

New law an imperfect compromise

The PPA legislation was a compromise between the solar industry and Dominion Power, which had sparred over the question of whether PPAs are legal in Virginia. When Secure Futures tried to install a system at Washington & Lee University in 2011 under a PPA, Dominion sent cease and desist letters claiming the arrangement was illegal. Eventually Secure Futures and the university used a different financing approach so the project could move forward.

Dominion also blocked a 2012 bill in the General Assembly that would have expressly allowed PPAs; that bill would have included private homes and smaller commercial systems. The issue was popular with legislators and the public and became a priority for many local governments during the 2013 legislative session.

Eventually this year Dominion agreed to a narrower bill as a temporary pilot project. In exchange, the bill gives Dominion legal certainty by prohibiting PPAs in its territory that fall outside the pilot project.

Other Virginia utilities refused to participate in the pilot program. As a result, the program and its rules apply only in Dominion Virginia Power’s service territory.

The pilot project will run for two years, after which Virginia regulators will evaluate it to determine whether it should be continued and expanded. The total size of all the systems installed under the legislation is capped at 50 megawatts. Although this is a tiny amount compared to states like New Jersey, which already has more than 1,000 megawatts of solar installed, it would mark a significant step forward for Virginia, which to date has installed less than 10 megawatts.

In addition to the 50 megawatts that can be installed under PPAs, another 30 megawatts of solar will be installed by Dominion itself under a program it refers to, somewhat confusingly, as “community solar.” Under that program, the utility plans to install and own solar systems on leased rooftops in select locations. The program includes no provision for selling the solar output to the building owners.

Wind systems also covered

The pilot project includes wind turbines as well as solar systems. Dominion’s service territory includes relatively few areas with wind resources good enough to make wind power economically attractive, but the Virginia Wind Center at James Madison University has been evaluating the possibilities under the pilot program and believes it may be useful for some customers interested in installing wind turbines.

Renewable energy makes small gains in Virginia’s 2013 legislative session

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The Virginia General Assembly will soon wrap up its work on the 2013 legislative session. Renewable energy advocates began the session with high hopes for a series of bills that promised to reform our renewable energy law, expand net-metering, and open up new opportunities for financing solar systems and small wind turbines.

So how did we do? Well, this is Virginia. Progress is slow, the utilities are powerful, and half the legislature doesn’t believe in climate change. On the other hand, they do believe in business. Under the circumstances, we did okay.

Renewable Portfolio Standards: bye-bye, bonuses

Readers of this blog already know the long, miserable tale of Virginia’s weak and ineffective, voluntary renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which has enriched utilities with tens of millions of dollars in incentives without bringing any new renewable energy projects to Virginia. This year the legislature went halfway to fixing the problem. Legislation negotiated between the office of the Attorney General and the utilities will deprive utilities of future ill-gotten gains for meeting the RPS law, but won’t change the pathetic nature of the law itself.

Stripping out the RPS incentives was only part of a bigger, more complex bill that sweetens the deal for utilities in other ways, so it’s hard to judge whether the legislation as a whole marks a victory for consumers. Skeptics will note that Dominion’s stock price has actually gone up several percentage points since the deal was announced, which you wouldn’t expect if the AG were correct that the bill will save consumers close to a billion dollars over time.

What is clear is that the RPS remains as voluntary and as crummy as it ever was, but the utilities can no longer use it to rip off ratepayers while pretending to be good citizens. Some environmental groups consider stripping out the incentives a bad thing, on the theory that only by giving utilities a bonus can we expect them to meet the goals. Other groups (including the Sierra Club) believe Dominion, at least, will want to maintain its greenwashed public image by continuing to meet the RPS goals, and that ending the consumer rip-off is worth celebrating.

Sure, if the goals had brought wind and solar to Virginia, the Sierra Club would have considered the incentives a tolerable price to pay. As it happened, Dominion and the other utilities continuously rebuffed efforts over the years to improve the RPS. Had Dominion approached the RPS as an opportunity to bring real renewable energy to Virginia rather than as a cash cow to be milked for its own advantage, the company would have saved itself a public relations fiasco and likely kept its bonuses, too. Surely, someone at HQ should be out of a job right now.

Taking the long view, it is also worth noting that getting rid of the free money is a necessary first step towards a mandatory RPS in Virginia, which would unleash market forces for renewable energy that don’t emerge with a voluntary law. Utilities would oppose such a move more vigorously if they still had incentives to protect that were available only under the voluntary program.

. . . but reform efforts fail again

These views all assume the legislature will someday pass a bill to improve the goals and bring wind and solar projects to Virginia, without which the RPS is meaningless anyway. Surely legislators must recognize how pointless it is to have an RPS that can be met with out-of-state, pre-World War II hydro, plus some trash and wood-burning and a few assorted projects that put no power on the grid. (Even without the performance incentives, utilities remain entitled to pass along to customers the cost of meeting the RPS goals.)

Bills to improve the goals should have passed the legislature this year as part of the reform package. HB 1946 (Lopez) and SB 1269  (McEachin) even received the support of Dominion Power for provisions that would limit most future purchases for the RPS to high-quality projects like wind and solar. What killed the bills seems to have been a combination of opposition from vested interests and sheer cussedness on the part of some Republicans, who were engaged in partisan maneuvers that had nothing at all to do with renewable energy.

As usual, we are left hoping for better luck next year.  Meanwhile, however, a couple of other RPS bills made incremental progress. Most notably, HB 1917 (Surovell) adds solar thermal energy to the definition of renewable energy; as of this writing it has passed the House and is on the Senate floor.

A loss for more honest competition among fuels

There are more ways to support renewable energy than through an RPS, of course. One of my favorite bills would have required utilities and the State Corporation Commission to consider the long-term price stability of fuels used in electric power generation. HB 1943 (Lopez) would have helped price-stable wind and solar compete against notoriously price-volatile natural gas. It’s an idea that should appeal to fair-minded conservatives, so it’s a shame it hasn’t gained traction since first being introduced in 2012. However, it died in committee in the face of opposition from Dominion Power, which doesn’t want any interference with its plans for new natural gas plants.

Power Purchase Agreements get a “pilot”

Two bills passed the legislature to allow some third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) for wind and solar within Dominion’s territory. Under a PPA, an installer retains ownership of the solar equipment, with the customer buying the electricity that is generated. This arrangement has two primary advantages: the customer can “go solar” with no money down and no responsibility for the equipment; and in the case of a tax-exempt entity like a church or a university, it provides a way to access federal tax credits worth 30% of the system cost.

The bills were designed to prevent a recurrence of a dispute that erupted in 2011 when a Staunton-based solar company, Secure Futures, installed a large solar system at Washington & Lee University under a PPA. Dominion issued “cease and desist” letters insisting that only it could sell electricity in its assigned territory. Although Virginia law is unclear on this point, the university and the solar company capitulated in the face of massive litigation costs. Since then Dominion’s army of lawyers has proven as effective as any statute in stopping further efforts to use PPAs in Virginia.

This year’s bills, SB 1023 (Edwards) and HB 2334 (Yancey), were originally written to allow third-party PPAs wherever customers can currently install renewable energy systems that they own themselves. They were significantly scaled back to win acceptance from Dominion Power. (AEP and the coops wouldn’t play at all, so legal ambiguity remains the rule in their territories.)

The bills allow up to 50 megawatts’ worth of solar and wind installations using PPAs, in Dominion territory only, as a pilot program.  Whether net-metered or not, they will be counted against the current net-metering cap of 1% of the utility’s generation. Tax-exempt entities can have a facility of any size up to 1 megawatt (500 kW if they net meter); taxable entities must have a minimum size of at least 50 kW (so no homeowner need apply). PPAs that do not meet the requirements are expressly prohibited in Dominion territory.

Agricultural net metering, yes; community net metering, no

A bill to allow agricultural net metering also passed this year. HB 1695 (Minchew) allows the electricity from a single solar, wind, or digester gas facility to be attributed to two or more electricity meters as long as they are all on the same property and have the same owner. Thus, for example, a farmhouse, barn and other out-buildings can all share in the benefits of solar panels on one of the buildings, even if each building is separately metered.

Originally the bill would also have enabled community net metering, sometimes known as solar gardens, but the utilities opposed it. Bowing to political reality, Delegate Minchew scaled it back. The bill is notable, however, for making progress without including any provisions that seem capable of doing mischief.

A note about all the bills: In Virginia, the governor can sign a bill, veto it, or send it back to the legislature with amendments of his own, so none of these bills are final as of this writing.

For electric power generation, the end of fossil fuels is in sight

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The rap on renewable energy is that it’s too variable to meet society’s demand for a constant supply of electricity. The answer to the problem turns out to be: More renewables.

111022-N-OH262-322Climate change is acting like an ever-tightening vise on our energy options. Each year that passes without dramatic decreases in our use of carbon-emitting fuels means the cuts we have to make simply get more drastic. By 2030, say experts, we must entirely replace coal with efficiency and renewable energy, or fry. Even the most intrepid environmentalists wonder if it can be done without huge price hikes and wholesale changes in how we live and use energy–changes that society may not accept.

A new study out of the University of Delaware shows it is possible to power the grid 99.9% of the time with only solar and wind energy, at a cost comparable to what we are paying today. This counters the conventional wisdom that we will always need large amounts of fossil fuel as a backup when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It also means the goal of getting largely beyond fossil fuels by 2030 is not just achievable, but practical.

The study focused on a regional transmission grid known as PJM, which encompasses parts or all of fourteen states, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic. Researchers ran 28 billion computer simulations to find the most cost-effective combinations of wind and solar that could power the entire grid, at the least possible cost and with minimal amounts of energy storage. The winning combination relied on natural gas turbines for backup on only five days out of the four years modeled.

The study authors looked for the least cost taking account of carbon and other external costs of fossil fuels, which are not being accounted for today, but they also assumed no technology improvements over time, making their cost estimates conservative overall. All the least-cost combinations used much more storage than we have today, but needed it for only 9 to 72 hours to get through the entire four years modeled.

The secret to dealing with the inherent variability of wind and solar, it turns out, is to build even more wind and solar. One wind turbine is unreliable, but tens of thousands spread across a dozen states greatly reduces the variability problem, and tens of thousands of wind turbines balanced with millions of solar panels is better still. To get to 99.9% renewables, you keep adding wind turbines and solar panels until you are producing three times the electricity that you actually need to meet demand. To power the grid with renewables just 90% of the time, you would have to produce “only” 1.8 times the electricity needed. (And yes, we have the windy sites and the sunny places to support all those projects.)

While it may sound strange to build more generation than you need, that is already the way grid operators ensure reliability. To take one example, if you were in Virginia when the “Big One” struck in 2011, you will recall that the earthquake caused the North Anna nuclear plant to shut down for four months. Nuclear energy provides a third of the electricity in Dominion Virginia Power’s service territory, and yet the lights stayed on. That’s because the grid wizards at PJM simply called on other power sources that had been idle or that had spare capacity.

The other component of reliability is the ability to match demand for power, which rises and falls with the time of day, weather, and other factors. So-called “baseload” plants like nuclear, coal, and some natural gas turbines don’t offer that flexibility and must be supplemented with other sources or stored energy. PJM currently uses more than 1,300 different generating sources, as well as about 4% storage in the form of pumped hydro. The right combination of other sources can replace baseload plants entirely.

wind turbine-wikimedia

Pairing wind and solar improves their ability to meet demand reliably. Onshore wind tends to blow most strongly at night, while solar energy provides power during the peak demand times of the day. Offshore wind power is also expected to match demand well. Combining them all reduces the need for back-up power.

But until now policy makers have assumed that solar and wind won’t be able to power the grid reliably, even when combined and spread out over PJM’s more than 200,000 square miles, and with the addition of wind farms off the coast. Critics have insisted that renewable energy requires lots of back-up generating capacity, especially from some natural gas turbines that can ramp up and down quickly. New gas turbines have even been designed specifically to integrate with renewables in anticipation of increasing amounts of wind and solar coming onto the grid.

This makes the work of the U. Delaware researchers a game-changer by showing that wind and solar can be backed up primarily by more wind and solar. And so we can begin planning for a future entirely without fossil fuels, knowing that when we get there, the lights will still be on.