Category: Renewables

ENLARGE CEO Elon Musk unveils a suite of batteries at Tesla’s design studios in Hawthorne, Calif., on Thursday. Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images HAWTHORNE, Calif.— Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -2.75 % Chief Executive Elon Musk unveiled a line of home and industrial battery packs late Thursday, representing a strategic shift as his money-losing electric car company tries to break into a crowded energy storage market. More than just a splashy evening party in a giant hangar at Tesla’s Southern California design studios, the event was the 43-year-old billionaire’s attempt to bring attention to an alternative business unit that has long been under development. Mr. Musk says “power wall” batteries—ranging from a $3,000 7 kilowatt-hour wall-mounted unit to a $3,500 10 kwh unit—cost far less than the going rate for large-scale batteries and can be easier to install. Tesla aims to begin delivering units by the summer from its car factory […]

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Don’t hold your breath, but future historians may look back on 2015 as the year that the renewable energy ascendancy began, the moment when the world started to move decisively away from its reliance on fossil fuels. Those fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — will, of course, continue to dominate the energy landscape for years to come, adding billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon to the atmosphere.  For the first time, however, it appears that a shift to renewable energy sources is gaining momentum.  If sustained, it will have momentous implications for the world economy — as profound as the shift from wood to coal or coal to oil in previous centuries. Global economic growth has, of course, long been powered by an increasing supply of fossil fuels, especially petroleum. Beginning with the United States, countries that succeeded in mastering the extraction and utilization of oil gained […]

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Photographer: Daniel Acker The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there’s no going back.  The shift occurred in 2013, when the world added 143 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, compared with 141 gigawatts in new plants that burn fossil fuels, according to an analysis presented Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance annual summit in New York. The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added.  "The electricity system is shifting to clean,” Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF, said in his keynote address. "Despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas." The Beginning of the End Power […]

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Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Drought Monitor ; National Drought Mitigation Center Earlier this month, California Governor Jerry Brown enacted mandatory water restrictions for the first time in the state’s history. While the executive order doesn’t directly address hydropower generation and instead focuses on water use in cities and towns, the drought that began in 2011 has had a noticeable effect on hydropower . Furthermore, reduced levels of snowpack likely mean that hydropower output will be low throughout the summer. California’s drought caused a state of emergency to be declared in January 2014. Since then, the drought has worsened, and, as of March 31, 2015 , 41% of the state is now classified as experiencing exceptional drought, the most intense drought category. The drought has limited the state’s ability to generate electricity from its hydropower plants. For instance, the California Department of Water Resources reports that 2013-14 precipitation in […]

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Although pumped hydroelectric storage makes up most of the total electricity storage capacity in the United States, nonhydro storage has doubled in electric power sector capacity from 160 megawatts (MW) to nearly 350 MW over the past five years. About 98% of the U.S. electricity storage is pumped hydroelectric storage, where water is pumped to a higher-elevation reservoir during off-peak demand and then run back down through a turbine during peak demand. However, pumped storage facilities are expensive to build and have specific siting requirements , making additional capacity builds in pumped storage infrequent. Nonhydro storage systems, which include compressed air, batteries, and flywheels, can provide several ancillary services to the grid , including regulating the grid’s frequency on a second-to-second or minute-to-minute basis and fast-ramping capacity to cover sudden and unexpected gaps between electric demand and supply. The economic value of these services is beginning to be captured […]

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Elon Musk is about to announce a new product that’s not a car. He said so in a mysterious Tweet designed to induce the highest level of nail-biting suspense. But the Elon Musk of two months ago may have told us exactly what we should expect.  “We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon,” Musk said during an earnings conference call in February. He said the product unveiling would occur within the next month or two. Here’s his teaser from today, which drove up shares of Tesla 3.5 percent: Tesla is building the world’s biggest battery factory in Nevada — a $5 billion project that Musk says will reduce the price of battery storage by 30 percent. Combining solar panels with backup capacity could allow homeowners to avoid buying electricity from utilities. If the prices come […]

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