Clean Energy Finance Forum

The country’s foremost utility geeks descended on San Antonio to let their inner wonks run wild. The conference, DistribuTech International, featured the nation’s largest utilities mingling with service providers demonstrating their latest technologies and offerings on impressively large screens and surprisingly intricate displays.

Researchers have looked at historical buying patterns across multiple countries and U.S. states, and found that starting near $1,000/kW of net present value broader uptake of residential solar begins, at $3,000/kW the market is really overheating, and at $7,000/kW it’s projected that 50% of viable home owners would be financially motivated to adopt solar power.

Now, in states from New York to California, the focus of the conversation has moved from: How can utilities weather the shift toward distributed energy without suffering big losses? to: How can utilities, their customers and the electric grid as a whole best harness the benefits of distributed energy resources?

This report synthesizes available analyses on the role and potential of mini-grids in Kenya and explores how this technology can help the country attain its goal of universal electrification by 2022 and also contribute to the achievement of other related development objectives.

Early this month, three community-choice aggregators and one municipal utility serving much of California’s San Francisco Bay Area launched a 30-megawatt distributed energy storage-plus-solar solicitation. It breaks ground on multiple fronts.

A study by Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance identified two ways distributed energy resources can reduce costs: act as non-wires alternatives to avoid investment in tranmission and distribution ($2.45 billion over ten years), and decrease peak energy costs in the wholesale market which is worth $3.01 billion.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) shows how through cost reductions, rural mini-grids can quickly scale as a commercially viable business model to provide access to millions of people and businesses across sub-Saharan Africa.

To better prepare for future disruptions, state and local governments are reducing the electric demand of their critical operations through energy efficiency, as well as making new investments in microgrids with distributed generation to ensure continuous electric supply during extended grid outages to power critical facilities.