Electricity transformation

As the world energy consumption continues to rise every year, the portion of energy generated from renewable sources is finally also increasing in a measurable way. For example, in 2012 over 28% of electricity produced in the EU was sourced from Renewables (with Norway producing 98% of their electricity in a clean way from large hydro!).

So slowly, but surely the mix of primary energy sources consumed to generate electricity in the grid is shifting more towards renewables. What implications could that have? One aspect to think about is the role of utility companies. Large electricity companies are operating coal, gas or nuclear power plants and sell their electricity on the market. But these old-school sources are now no longer competitive with electricity from renewable sources. German energy giant RWE admitted that in 2013 and started shutting down a good amount of its capacity. In fact, in a recent global PWC study 94% of utility company expect a complete transformation of the utility business model. Mostly decentralised, mid-scale renewable electricity could ultimately become the predominant grid source and utility companies would take the role of a safety net in case of peak demand. For this, they could charge an 'insurance fee' or as recently stated by a utility CEO "you don't pay the firemen for the water they use, but for being there when it burns".

But will it burn? Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute recently released a study on the potential of 'grid defection'. With local battery capacity on the rise and distributed roof top solar being widely available, they calculated when this system could reach economic electric grid parity and make it possible for customer to defect the grid entirely. 

Overall, it seems clear that the times of centrally produced, large scale dirty energy are economically over. The new normal will be a distributed system of clean energy sources as outlined by Hermann Scheer in his book "the energy imperative". What lies ahead is a difficult uphill road to get us there against the current status quo, but it is the only game in town.  


Other helpful resources on clean energy:

• Environmental Protection Agency
• U.S Energy Information Agency
• Institute for Energy Research
• Rocky Mountain Institute

Apple secretly builds out massive clean power facilities

While Google has over the years invested over a billion dollars in renewable energy projects and is a very public force-for-good in this sector, Apple has so far not made any visible moves to cleanly source the energy needs of its data centers. This is now changing. Over the last several years, Apple has built up two massive solar farms in North Caroline next to their newly build data center. Build by SunPower, these 20 MW solar farms plus their new 10 MW Bloom Energy fuel cell farm produce more energy than they consume in total.

The extent of the investment is staggering and it begins an era where large internet companies are actively playing in the energy market and changing the landscape of it in the process. Amazon is even building its own substations now and has engineers re-write old code to increase energy efficiency. At this scale, it makes sense. Very interesting moves by the big players...

Reinventing fire

Watch Amory Lovins give an information-packed talk on how we can go from the current gridlock mess to a bright future of energy independency. In in the meantime savings trillions of dollar and providing lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.



A must see! Then go visit Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" site to learn more about this can be done in this graphic.

The green button

The White House effort to make energy usage data more transparent to end users has yielded first results. Along with other major California utility companies Pacific Gas and Electric has announced their support for the "Green Button". The initiative drives utility companies to offer energy usage data for homeowners in a standard format to download from their website at any time. Based on this format, other vendors such as Tendril or oPower can provide applications to monitor your energy usage realtime and take action directly from mobile devices at any time. This can lead to significant energy savings in a short amount of time.

If you have a smart meter installed at your home, try it out and see what unleashed data in standard formats can do. This is a great initiave by Aneesh Chopra, The United States CTO.

First Green Conference for Internet Tech

In March '09, San Francisco hosted an interesting conference on Green Internet Technologies called Green:Net 09. This conference had lots of interesting talks, most of which you can view for free on YouTube.

Start with this panel talk and hunt for related videos from there. Lots of cool stuff going on out there...

Get smart!

One of the much needed effort in green technology is to unify the US power grid as well as to make it smart. In recent post you have seen what the underlying issues of the grid are, but now with stimulus money flowing in, here is another view by InfoWorld on why the smart grid matters.

Why the smart grid matters so much

If we want to increase the percentage of renewable energy in the US power mix in any meaningful way, we first need to dramatically overhaul the US power grid and turn it into a "smart grid". I found this fantastic article that outlines the problematic and challenge at hand in very easy words.

A must read for anyone who wants to understand the path to a cleaner energy future.