by jboullion | Sep 11, 2012 | Uncategorized
More information
Don Wichert
Executive Director
608.255.4044, ext. 1
dwichert@renewwisconsin.org
Utilities Get C on Renewable Energy Report Card
No Wisconsin utility graded higher than a B/C on a report card issued by a renewable energy advocacy group, and C was the overall average for the state’s five major utilities.
We Energies, headquartered in Milwaukee, earned a C (2.4 out of 5) on the report card for its renewable energy efforts in 2011 and had the lowest score of all utilities graded. The state’s other major utilities received similar or slightly higher grades: Alliant (aka Wisconsin Power and Light), C (2.6); Madison Gas & Electric, B/C (3.0); Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, C (2.7); and Xcel Energy, B/C (3.0).
“2011 was a year in which Wisconsin’s investor owned utilities cut back on their previous good performance supporting renewable energy,” said Don Wichert, RENEW Wisconsin’s executive director and the report card director. “At this point in 2012, it appears that this poor performance trend continues.”
“It’s surprising because recent opinion surveys indicate that the vast majority of Wisconsin’s population, including utilities ratepayers and stockholders, prefer renewable energy,” according to Wichert.
RENEW graded utilities on six criteria: amount of renewable electricity sold; green energy purchasing programs; ease of connecting to the utility system; prices paid for renewable electricity; legislative activities; and other programs offered voluntarily to customers.
Wisconsin utilities performed best in meeting the state’s renewable electricity standard, the amount of renewable electricity sold to its customers. All of the utilities already meet or expect to meet the 10% standard by 2015, although some have the majority of the power coming from out of Wisconsin.
We Energies scored at the bottom, because it had “agreed with RENEW and other groups to spend $6 million/year over 10 years to encourage the use of renewable energy in its service area. As part of the program, over 100 nonprofit organizations installed renewable energy systems. In 2011, however, WE simply announced the end of the program after only five years,” said Wichert at a news conference in from of a Milwaukee church that had a solar electric system installed as party of We Energies now-discontinued program.
RENEW gave the state’s investor owned utilities the following grades: C Alliant, Madison; B/C Madison Gas & Electric, Madison; C We Energies, Milwaukee; C Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, Green Bay; B/C Xcel Energy, Eau Claire.
This was the first time RENEW conducted a grading system, but RENEW plans to continue the process in the future because people are interested in how well their utilities support renewable energy.
“The annual survey can be used by Wisconsin utilities and others to see which areas are lacking and how they can improve their grades. Adoption of renewable energy supports local jobs, lower emissions of pollutants, and energy security. These are attributes everybody wants. There is no reason that Wisconsin has to lag the rest of the country in clean energy,” said Wichert.
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RENEW Wisconsin is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that leads and represents businesses, organizations, and individuals who seek more clean renewable energy in Wisconsin. More information on RENEW’s Web site at www.renewwisconsin.org.
by jboullion | Aug 15, 2012 | Uncategorized
August 10, 2012
A commentary by Michael Vickerman, RENEW Wisconsin
Wholesale natural gas prices are once again flirting with the $3.00/MMBtu mark after the Energy Information Agency (EIA) reported this week that working gas in storage increased by 24 billion cubic feet (bcf) over last week’s totals. Compared with the five-year average of 45 bcf for the first week in August, the volume injected is modest. The August 9th report marks the 15th week in a row where the weekly injection volumes trailed the five-year average by a minimum of 20 bcf.
On the trading front, the trend this summer has been a steady upward drift punctuated by sharp sell-offs whenever gas prices momentarily settle above $3.00. The last week in July was a case in point. Though the reported number for that week (28 bcf) was only half the five-year average for that date, the announcement triggered a pullback of nearly 10% down to $2.80 from $3.10. It turns out that EIA’s number came in 5 bcf higher than the traders’ own estimate, triggering a wave of serious unloading of positions by those who had bet long.
Everyone in the energy industry, including the traders themselves, knows that $3.00/MMBtu is well below the cost of producing natural gas, and cannot support exploration and extraction activity at the level we saw in 2008 through 2010. Producing shale gas, the so-called “game-changer” that industry flacks contended would loosen King Coal’s grip on the electricity sector, is an even more expensive proposition. High-profile exploration and production (E&P) companies like Chesapeake Energy tried to maintain a jaunty look while wholesale prices were scraping along the $2.00 floor, but they can no longer conceal their distress. Consider the following developments that occurred over the last fortnight.
- Chesapeake Energy announced plans to reduce domestic gas production in 2013 by 8%;
- BHP Billiton wrote down $2.84 billion on the value of Fayetteville shale gas assets it had acquired in 2011; and
- The most recent count of rigs drilling for natural gas in the United States is 498, nearly 70% off the levels seen in September 2008, when prices were above $10/MMBtu.
“Write down” is a fairly bloodless way to describe the loss of $3 billion; “carnage” is better at conveying the pain that now grips the natural gas sector. This begs the question: why do wholesale natural gas prices appear to be trapped for now at the $3.00/MMBtu level?
I believe that there are two reasons for this phenomenon. The first is that energy traders, like virtually everyone else in this country, are truly convinced that the U.S. is awash in shale gas. The industry-led campaign to persuade Congress, state legislatures, Wall Street, Big Media, utilities, and Joe Sixpack that the United States possesses a 100-year supply of natural gas has been a stunning success. Federal energy agencies like EIA have also bought into this view of the supply picture big-time, leaving little room for skeptics and agnostics to influence public perceptions.
This overaching belief has been unintentionally reinforced by local and regional controversies over the practice of hydraulic fracturing solid rock to obtain the shale gas trapped inside. Virtually unheard of four years ago, “fracking” has vaulted into the public consciousness, and in doing so, sustains the society-wide belief that natural gas can be accessed almost anywhere in the United States.
Ironically, the myth of abundance that E&P companies so carefully cultivated (and bankrolled) is now clearly working against their short-term interests.
The other factor that keeps prices so low is the traders’ fear of large demand swings. This is a more legitimate if somewhat overblown fear. The two main reference points for traders here is the demand destruction that occurred in 2008 from the one-two punch of double-digit gas prices and worldwide recession, and the abnormal bulge in storage volumes that occurred earlier this year.
Supply Overhang
As late as September 2011, natural gas inventories were tracking closely with the five-year average for storage volumes. Then came the phantom winter of 2011-2012, which brought us the usual dose of darkness but not the snowstorms and frigid air masses that make life in the Upper Midwest distinctly unpicniclike until April. In addition to disrupting seasonal cycles and ruining the maple syrup harvest, the extended stretches of anomalous warmth cut demand for heating fuel between 25% to 30%. Withdrawals of natural gas were substantially lower than the five-year averages during the heating season, creating a colossal bulge that briefly sent wholesale prices skidding below $2.00/MMBtu. By late April, the difference between 2012 storage volumes and the five-year average stood at 931bcf, about 60% larger than normal.
On May 1st, the pendulum started swinging the other way, whittling down the supply overhang to a more manageable 377 bcf compared with the five-year average for this week. Assuming present trends continue in future weekly storage reports, inventories should be in line with the five-year average by mid-December.
Traders attribute the ongoing reduction in inventories to a hotter than normal summer, prompting utilities to switch on more gas generators to meet system peaks. But weather isn’t the only thing that influences the storage picture; output does as well. But as long as traders and speculators subscribe to the myth of nearly limitless supply, they will discount the possibility that declining output is also responsible for lagging storage volumes. It is this mindset, coupled with the fear of weather-driven demand swings, that compels traders to focus on the supply overhang that remains, rather than gain a fuller appreciation of why it has shrunk so dramatically in only 15 weeks.
Old paradigms die hard. But in the not-very-distant future, the reality of reduced drilling activity and capital spending, along with rapid decline rates in shale gas plays, will bite deeply into the supply of natural gas and cause yet another overturning of expectations in this sector. Given the damage being inflicted on E&P companies as well as their renewable energy competitors, the intrusion of reality into this picture can’t happen soon enough.
Sources: Master Resource Report, Ravenna Capital Management http://www.ravennacapitalmanagement.com/mrr/
“Chesapeake to cut natural gas production,” NEWSOK, Adam Wilmoth, August 8, 2012. http://newsok.com/chesapeake-to-cut-natural-gas-production/article/3699062
“Billiton in $3.3 billion write-down as gas prices plunge,” BBC News. August 3, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19107135
Michael Vickerman is program and policy director of RENEW Wisconsin, a sustainable energy advocacy organization. For more information on the global and national petroleum and natural gas supply picture, visit “The End of Cheap Oil” section in RENEW Wisconsin’s web site: www.renewwisconsin.org. These commentaries also posted on RENEW’s blog: http://renewwisconsinblog.org and Madison Peak Oil Group’s blog: http://www.madisonpeakoil-blog.blogspot.com
by jboullion | Aug 13, 2012 | Uncategorized
From a story by Justin Guay, Sierra Club International Program:
Of course they still have to face the problems they have inherited from trying to copy/paste a centralized grid from the West. So what can they do to solve peak problems with the grid they already have in place? Deploy lots and lots of distributed solar and efficiency.
That’s because, unlike coal, solar for the most part is available when you need it – during peak hours. Which is why it’s great to see States like Gujarat taking the lead in roof top solar programs with the support of the IFC. And efficiency makes the peaks smaller so you need less power in the first place.
The irony here of course is that distributed generation has always been ignored as trivial compared to the real need for a large scale ‘modern grid.’ That’s because policymakers and commentators lack the imagination to understand the fact that when aggregated, small can be very, very big.
Take the hidden truth behind India’s modern grid (as my colleague Jigar Shah points out): it is actually already a distributed system that is largely powered by filthy, costly diesel gen sets. That’s because power outages are so frequent that businesses and wealthy individuals have been forced to pay for this backup generation to ensure power. This is a tremendous opportunity for companies seeking targeted diesel replacement strategies to save people and companies tremendous amounts of money, while providing reliable power.
by jboullion | Jul 26, 2012 | Uncategorized
From a commentary in the Fond du Lac Reporter by John Anderson, director of siting policy for the American Wind Energy Association:
Wisconsin State Sen. Frank Lasee’s recent statements regarding the potential health effects of wind turbines are not supported by numerous government and peer-reviewed studies in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and Massachusetts Department of Public Health recently published the “Wind Turbine Health Impact Study: Report of Independent Expert Panel.” Most notably, the authors of this report concluded:
• There is no evidence for a set of health effects from exposure to wind turbines that could be characterized as “Wind Turbine Syndrome.”
• Claims that infrasound from wind turbines directly impacts the vestibular system have not been demonstrated scientifically. Available evidence shows that the infrasound levels near wind turbines cannot impact the vestibular system.
• The strongest epidemiological study suggests that there is not an association between noise from wind turbines and measures of psychological distress or mental health.
• None of the limited epidemiological evidence reviewed suggests an association between noise from wind turbines and pain and stiffness, diabetes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, hearing impairment, cardiovascular disease, and headache/migraine.
• Scientific evidence suggests that shadow flicker does not pose a risk for eliciting seizures.
by jboullion | Jul 25, 2012 | Uncategorized
RENEW Wisconsin will continue to advocate for Focus on Energy to spend the $10 million per year allocated for renewable incentives.
We intend to keep a close watch on how the Focus administrators spend the money, and we told them so. These funds are being collected from rate payers this year, so Focus should spend as much of the money this year as possible. Simple!
RENEW effectively advocated for Focus on Energy (Focus) to reinstate incentives for distributed renewables since the non-residential incentives were suspended in July of 2011. RENEW organized members and other stakeholders to communicate this message to the Public Service Commission and Focus. RENEW’s advocacy led Focus to roll out the renewable programs in July.
Additionally RENEW solicited input from the renewable community, met with the Focus administrators, and provided suggestions in early June on how the Focus funds should best be used. Focus accepted and incorporated the majority of these suggestions in the Focus renewable programs that were launched in early July.
RENEW continues to advocate on behalf of the renewable energy community with the Focus administrators. We asked Focus to drop the need for installers to be licensed plumbers and electricians; to reconfigure the need for a building permit before installation; to clear up whether solar systems could be ground mounted; and, to reduce the minimum incentive for solar and wind installations in the Business Program RFP. Once again, Focus administrators accepted the majority of these suggestions.
Focus also addressed the questions received from RENEW and others in a list of frequently asked questions for residential systems at Focus FAQs.
Be aware that Focus has limited funds for residential solar projects. Focus will provide weekly updates on the level of funds available through the renewable energy program Web pages at Focus funding updates.
Business renewable projects will be considered for funding after a submission due date of August 29, 2012. FAQs on this RFP were issued on July 23, 2012.
Please continue to provide your comments and suggestions to RENEW and to Focus on how the renewable program should be managed within the budget constraints outlined by the PSC.
By working together, we can have the best program possible. Please support RENEW with a membership or donation at Join Today!
