Energy Storage eFeature |January 2015
California Grids for Electricity Woes, “many of the solar and wind sources added in recent years have made the system more fragile, because they provide power intermittently"
• Hawaii: because island utility power is invariably diesel-generated, it is very expensive as that fuel must be transported to local power plants. After years of providing incentives for solar electricity, the utilities are beginning to pull back on them, fearing the much-publicized “death spiral” where more solar users means that utilities must pass on their fixed electricity generation costs to fewer customers. This results in higher prices and creates even more “grid defectors” as the utility’s remaining customers discover that even with limited or no incentives, solar for self-consumption is a financially-attractive option. This, in turn, raises electricity prices even more and encourages more defectors, exacerbating the effect.
• Germany: as the most solarized country in the world, Germany is now faced with mitigating against potential “grid collapse” under the right conditions. As former U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary David Garman and Samuel Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project noted in a recent article, “the strain is beginning to show…there are increasing reports of challenges resulting from wind and solar across the grid, including frequency fluctuations, voltage issues…anxious operators are concerned about potential blackouts.”* To address the problem, the International Energy Agency estimates that Germany will need to invest nearly $100 billion in power transmission and distribution upgrades over the next decade.
• New Jersey: with some of the most generous solar incentives in the U.S. in place to achieve the state-mandated goal of supplying 3 percent of its electricity by 2017, New Jersey has the second-largest number of residential solar installations in the country, behind California. It also has one thing the west coast doesn’t: hurricanes. So when Superstorm Sandy, the most disruptive storm to hit the Atlantic seaboard in a century, struck the region in 2012, many solar-equipped homeowners who expected to remain powered during the outages learned first-hand about a big shortcoming of grid-tied systems: that they must disconnect from the grid when the grid is not present, for safety reasons per the UL 1741 standard. During the protracted power outages following Sandy, many hundreds of kilowatts of solar electricity were literally left “up on the roof,” unusable to the storm-affected residents struggling down below.