by jboullion | Feb 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
A new digester project is a great addition to Wisconsin’s renewable energy. This article comes from Thomas Content, and was originally posted on the Journal Sentinel on Feb. 18, 2013.
Byproducts of cheese production will be converted into electricity, heat and a fertilizer product in northwest Wisconsin, as part of a renewable energy project that is expected to be completed this summer.
Project developers say the anaerobic digester will be among the largest of its kind in the country. The project is moving forward after obtaining construction and long-term financing, GreenWhey Energy said.
GreenWhey is combining a wastewater treatment facility that will bring organic waste from cheese and dairy producers to a central facility to treat the waste and generate power.
The project, under construction in Turtle Lake, about 70 miles northwest of Eau Claire, will sell its electricity to Xcel Energy Inc. in Eau Claire.
Supporters of anaerobic digester projects for the food industry note that the projects derive multiple benefits, including reduced landspreading of waste that contributes to phosphorus runoff.
The project will provide 50 to 70 construction jobs as well as up to 13 full-time operating jobs.
The $28 million project is being financed through a combination of senior loan financing from Caterpillar Financial Services as well as new markets tax credit financing from CAP Services Inc. The project will also qualify for a federal grant once construction is completed, with bridge financing in turn supplied by the Wisconsin State Energy Program, which is administered by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
See the original posting of this article here.
by jboullion | Feb 8, 2013 | Uncategorized
Update: 2/14/13 Michael Vickerman was interviewed on this topic by Thomas Content of the Journal Sentinel. Read his comments here.
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This article by Richard Ryman in the Green Bay Press Gazette explains that area legislatures are trying to count nuclear energy as renewable energy… A truly unacceptable concept. Take action through Clean Wisconsin, and tell your legislator that this is wrong:
A bill to make nuclear energy produced in Wisconsin count toward the state’s renewable energy standard was written with Kewaunee Power Station in mind, but likely won’t keep that plant from closing this spring.
Dominion Resources Inc. has said it will shut down the one-reactor power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan in the spring because it could not sell it and cannot operate it profitably. Kewaunee’s power-purchase agreements with Wisconsin Public Service Corp. and Alliant Energy expire in December 2013, leaving the plant without a sure source of revenue.
A new agreement could not be reached because natural gas-generated electricity is cheaper than nuclear-generated power. The lack of an agreement made the plant unattractive to potential buyers.
Reps. Andre Jacque, R-De Pere, Garey Bies, R-Sister Bay, and Paul Tittl, R-Manitowoc, drafted the bill, called LRB-0527, and are seeking co-sponsors.
As written, the bill would apply only to Kewaunee Power Station now, though it could apply to Point Beach Nuclear Plant or a new nuclear plant — none are planned — in the future. Point Beach has contracts to sell electricity that expire in 2030 for Unit 1 and 2033 for Unit 2 and would be ineligible for the bill’s benefits until those contracts expire.
“It is forward looking,” Jacque said. “If we had passed this legislation five years ago, in my opinion, we wouldn’t be seeing Kewaunee close.”
As long as natural gas prices remain at historically low levels, the tradeable resource credits created by the bill would not be enough to make nuclear competitive. Also, most Wisconsin utilities are near or have met their renewable-energy requirements.
“With the current environment of inexpensive natural gas, even though well intentioned, this bill may not have much impact,” said Kerry Spees, spokesman for Wisconsin Public Service Corp. “However, the current environment could change. We support the bill’s efforts to create jobs.”
Jacque said natural gas likely will not always be so inexpensive.
“There is a whole lot of uncertainty regarding fracking. It depends on what the EPA decides to do,” he said. “(Natural gas) is a bubble, just like any number of bubbles can occur.”
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. Many environmental groups oppose fracking.
The bill does not reclassify nuclear power as renewable energy. It adds an “advanced energy” category to the ways in which utilities can meet their mandated requirements. Utilities are required to have 10 percent of their electricity generated by renewable sources by 2015.
Nuclear power was not included in the renewable energy standards originally, but Jacque said he’s heard no objections to his proposal so far from environmental groups.
Read on…
Take action and email your legislatures through Clean Wisconsin.
by jboullion | Jan 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
Just before RENEW’s policy summit, the keynote speaker, former Governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, did an excellent interview on Milwaukee Public Radio. Listen to the interview below, or read the article “Colorado’s Renewable Energy Economy Offers Model for Wisconsin” with Susan Bence (attached below).
The Port of Milwaukee announced this week that the wind turbine that supplies energy to the port’s administration building has been paying dividends to the city. In less than a year of operation, the turbine shifted electrical costs at the port by almost $15,000 dollars. In fact, the electrical utility actually paid the port for the surplus energy it produced.
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| Bill Ritter, delivering the keynote at RENEW ‘s Summit |
This news is likely music to the ears of former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, who championed alternative sources of energy during his time in office. Ritter is now the Director for the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, where he is helping states across the country create plans to implement renewable energy economies. And he’s in Wisconsin this week as the keynote speaker at the RENEW’s Energy Policy Summit in Madison.
Aggressive renewable energy standards
Ritter says energy issues first emerged as a priority in his political career when he was campaigning for governor in 2005 and 2006. His campaign focused on renewable energy as a way to move Colorado forward and it became a pillar of his administration’s agenda. Once in office, he signed 57 clean energy bills.
Now Colorado is one of the leaders in the country when it comes to alternative energy. Ritter says the state is on the path to supplying 30 percent renewable energy by 2020, “one of the most aggressive renewable energy standards in America.”
Today, Wisconsin has a renewable energy standard of 10 percent by 2015, but Ritter says a lot of that power comes from outside the state, whereas Colorado’s is mostly in-state.
“Actually our cost of power relative to the rest of America has gotten cheaper as we’ve pushed this very aggressive clean energy agenda,” he says. “We had a day last April where our primary and best run utility got 57 percent of all its energy that it provided Colorado customers from wind alone.”
Building a ‘new energy economy’
Of course, the cost has gone down because of broad deployment of such methods. In building this “new energy economy,” Ritter says Colorado attracted manufacturing companies that focused on wind and solar energy, and promoted research and development among private companies and government entities.
“We really have this ecosystem built around advanced energy or clean energy, and really trying to say, ‘It could be domestic, it could be clean, it could help us create job and we can protect rate fares in the process,’” he says.
Facing challenges
But Ritter admits creating this “new energy economy” didn’t come without its hurdles. Some utilities and critics opposed the government creating a renewable energy standard, which at first was 10 percent by 2015.
“People say we don’t like standards because it’s a mandate,” Ritter says. “Quite frankly the entirely energy sector has been heavily regulated since it’s inception, and so to say something like renewable energy standards are a mandate and we should do away with it, I think it’s just wrong, because everything in energy is based on regulation. It is not the operation of free market and it’s that way by intention.”
So voters went to the ballot and passed the standard. Soon, after the state legislature put in a rate cap, the utilities were on board, approving of a doubling of the standard and eventually a tripling of it. Ritter says that’s because the utilities saw that they could make the benchmark, they could hold rates in check and get returns on their investment, and they could make customers happy.
“Actually our cost of power relative to the rest of America has gotten cheaper as we’ve pushed this very aggressive clean energy agenda.” -former Colorado governor Bill Ritter
Dealing with the utilities was not the only problem the state encountered in getting behind renewable energy. The coal industry, which provided many mining jobs in the state, felt their market share was being taken by renewable energy. A plan to pay residents who built their own system and put power back onto the grid required some finagling. And naturally, political adversaries made it difficult for the legislation to get to Ritter’s desk.
“I think the public liked it and got it, but I still had a difficult time politically with it, even with public support, because it doesn’t have the sort of intensity, the political intensity, that other issues might like the economy or job creation,” Ritter says.
He says his opponents claimed such an energy policy would lose jobs in the state, at a time when job creation was at a premium.
“That was really an awful thing to have said about you,” he says. “But our clean energy and clean tech sector wound up being the only sector that grew during the worst recession since the Great Depression in Colorado.”
Now Colorado is second in the country for solar jobs and number one per capita for employment for clean energy jobs overall, Ritter says.
Pushing the agenda
Based on his experience in Colorado, Ritter has some advice for Wisconsin in committing to renewable energy, which he says works handily with a free market. Leasing solar installations on buildings is one way to start.
“Last year over 80 percent of the rooftops in Colorado that installed solar were leased systems, so it’s a great economic development driver,” he says, citing similar success in California and Arizona.
At the Center for the New Energy Economy, Ritter says he is trying to push this whole agenda forward at the state level, from the financing to the R&D on advanced energy technologies to the practical implementation.
“How do we push this whole agenda forward at the state level, so a state can look at their energy economy and say, ‘We’re really about the 21st century,” and we’re tying domestic energy use with environmental issues, (and) economic development,” he says.
See the original article here.
by jboullion | Jan 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
Just before RENEW’s policy summit, the keynote speaker, former Governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, did an excellent interview on Milwaukee Public Radio. Listen to the interview below, or read the article “Colorado’s Renewable Energy Economy Offers Model for Wisconsin” with Susan Bence (attached below).
The Port of Milwaukee announced this week that the wind turbine that supplies energy to the port’s administration building has been paying dividends to the city. In less than a year of operation, the turbine shifted electrical costs at the port by almost $15,000 dollars. In fact, the electrical utility actually paid the port for the surplus energy it produced.
|
| Bill Ritter, delivering the keynote at RENEW ‘s Summit |
This news is likely music to the ears of former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, who championed alternative sources of energy during his time in office. Ritter is now the Director for the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, where he is helping states across the country create plans to implement renewable energy economies. And he’s in Wisconsin this week as the keynote speaker at the RENEW’s Energy Policy Summit in Madison.
Aggressive renewable energy standards
Ritter says energy issues first emerged as a priority in his political career when he was campaigning for governor in 2005 and 2006. His campaign focused on renewable energy as a way to move Colorado forward and it became a pillar of his administration’s agenda. Once in office, he signed 57 clean energy bills.
Now Colorado is one of the leaders in the country when it comes to alternative energy. Ritter says the state is on the path to supplying 30 percent renewable energy by 2020, “one of the most aggressive renewable energy standards in America.”
Today, Wisconsin has a renewable energy standard of 10 percent by 2015, but Ritter says a lot of that power comes from outside the state, whereas Colorado’s is mostly in-state.
“Actually our cost of power relative to the rest of America has gotten cheaper as we’ve pushed this very aggressive clean energy agenda,” he says. “We had a day last April where our primary and best run utility got 57 percent of all its energy that it provided Colorado customers from wind alone.”
Building a ‘new energy economy’
Of course, the cost has gone down because of broad deployment of such methods. In building this “new energy economy,” Ritter says Colorado attracted manufacturing companies that focused on wind and solar energy, and promoted research and development among private companies and government entities.
“We really have this ecosystem built around advanced energy or clean energy, and really trying to say, ‘It could be domestic, it could be clean, it could help us create job and we can protect rate fares in the process,’” he says.
Facing challenges
But Ritter admits creating this “new energy economy” didn’t come without its hurdles. Some utilities and critics opposed the government creating a renewable energy standard, which at first was 10 percent by 2015.
“People say we don’t like standards because it’s a mandate,” Ritter says. “Quite frankly the entirely energy sector has been heavily regulated since it’s inception, and so to say something like renewable energy standards are a mandate and we should do away with it, I think it’s just wrong, because everything in energy is based on regulation. It is not the operation of free market and it’s that way by intention.”
So voters went to the ballot and passed the standard. Soon, after the state legislature put in a rate cap, the utilities were on board, approving of a doubling of the standard and eventually a tripling of it. Ritter says that’s because the utilities saw that they could make the benchmark, they could hold rates in check and get returns on their investment, and they could make customers happy.
“Actually our cost of power relative to the rest of America has gotten cheaper as we’ve pushed this very aggressive clean energy agenda.” -former Colorado governor Bill Ritter
Dealing with the utilities was not the only problem the state encountered in getting behind renewable energy. The coal industry, which provided many mining jobs in the state, felt their market share was being taken by renewable energy. A plan to pay residents who built their own system and put power back onto the grid required some finagling. And naturally, political adversaries made it difficult for the legislation to get to Ritter’s desk.
“I think the public liked it and got it, but I still had a difficult time politically with it, even with public support, because it doesn’t have the sort of intensity, the political intensity, that other issues might like the economy or job creation,” Ritter says.
He says his opponents claimed such an energy policy would lose jobs in the state, at a time when job creation was at a premium.
“That was really an awful thing to have said about you,” he says. “But our clean energy and clean tech sector wound up being the only sector that grew during the worst recession since the Great Depression in Colorado.”
Now Colorado is second in the country for solar jobs and number one per capita for employment for clean energy jobs overall, Ritter says.
Pushing the agenda
Based on his experience in Colorado, Ritter has some advice for Wisconsin in committing to renewable energy, which he says works handily with a free market. Leasing solar installations on buildings is one way to start.
“Last year over 80 percent of the rooftops in Colorado that installed solar were leased systems, so it’s a great economic development driver,” he says, citing similar success in California and Arizona.
At the Center for the New Energy Economy, Ritter says he is trying to push this whole agenda forward at the state level, from the financing to the R&D on advanced energy technologies to the practical implementation.
“How do we push this whole agenda forward at the state level, so a state can look at their energy economy and say, ‘We’re really about the 21st century,” and we’re tying domestic energy use with environmental issues, (and) economic development,” he says.
See the original article here.
by jboullion | Dec 7, 2012 | Uncategorized
Michael Vickerman’s commentary in Midwest Energy News on the recent changes in WI renewable energy. Find the original post here.
Commentary: How Wisconsin regulators ‘tax’ renewable energy
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| RENEW Wisconsin’s Michael Vickerman |
Starting next January, the price of purchasing renewable energy voluntarily through monthly utility bills will spike to all-time highs, thanks to recent decisions rendered by the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSCW) on two popular “green pricing” programs.
The thousands of Madison Gas & Electric (MGE) customers participating in the utility’s Green Power Tomorrow program will see their premiums jump from 2.5 cents/kWh to 4 cents/kWh. That’s an increase of 60 percent. To translate this into dollars and cents, an average MGE customer consuming 500 kWh of electricity per month and subscribing at the 100 percent level will pay $90 more in 2013 for the same amount of renewable kWh sold this year.
Residential customers of Milwaukee-based We Energies (WE) will see an even larger percentage increase next year. In that utility’s rate case, the PSCW jacked up the premium paid by Energy for Tomorrow subscribers by nearly 73 percent, from 1.39 cents to 2.4 cents/kWh. Energy for Tomorrow has more than 20,000 subscribers.
Back in 1999, the year both programs were launched, MGE and WE customers paid an extra 3.33 cents and 2.04 cents/kWh, respectively, for the renewable energy they sponsored. Come January 1st, MGE and WE will likely share the dubious distinction of being the only utilities in the country offering renewable energy at a higher rate than they did in the 1990’s. So much for progress.
Adding insult to injury, renewable program subscribers will be subject to general rate increases approved by the PSCW this November. The utilities sought higher rates to recover the costs of retrofitting older coal-fired power stations with modern pollution controls. The fact that the renewable generators leveraged by program participants will never need pollution control retrofits is wholly disregarded in determining the size of the premium.
This is unquestionably a subsidy that flows from program participants to all ratepayers.
How did this happen?
Since 1999, renewable generation costs have tumbled, while productivity has improved.
A frustrated program subscriber might well ask: If base utility rates are going up, and the cost of renewable electricity is declining, why are premiums going up instead of down?
The short answer is that wholesale electricity prices have sagged in recent years, owing to a combination of unsustainably low natural gas prices, stagnant demand, and rapid expansion of wind power displacing higher-cost generation. In contrast, the price of renewable energy procured under long-term contracts held steady. When prices dropped in the wholesale market beginning in late 2008, the gap between system energy and renewable sources widened.
Though accurate, the above explanation is deeply unsatisfying, because the wholesale “market” is concerned about one thing only: the marginal cost of producing electricity into the grid. Nothing else matters, including the expenditures approved by the PSCW to reduce emissions from older generators. Even though retail customers wind up footing the bill for those upgrades, the wholesale market does not treat pollution control retrofits as marginal costs. Not one cent paid by ratepayers for these expenditures is reflected in the prices that renewable generators compete against.
The net effect of this disconnect is to artificially suppress the price of electricity from older and dirtier generators relative to newer and cleaner electricity producers. Real markets factor in the cost of upgrading and replacing capital equipment that manufacture the product bought by customers. What we have instead is an artificial contrivance that sacrifices long-term considerations like clean air, resource diversity and regulatory risk for the short-term reward of low prices.
Indeed, it would be difficult to design a more punitive market structure for renewables than the one we have at present.
‘Swimming up a waterfall’
Pricing renewable energy against a market operating in real time also undermines a valuable attribute of renewable energy, namely its inherent price stability. In this environment, the only way a customer can directly benefit from a fixed-price energy source like solar is to self-generate at his or her premises to reduce consumption of grid-supplied electricity.
In setting the premium size, the PSCW relied on pricing data at a time when the regional wholesale market was near its cyclical bottom. Electricity prices are now edging upward as forward prices of natural gas have rebounded from historic lows earlier this year. It’s a safe bet that wholesale electricity prices will continue to increase in 2013.
This sets up the very real possibility that WE and MGE will collect more revenue than is necessary to cover the cost spread between system energy and the renewable energy supplies servicing their customers. Unfortunately, the next time the base premium for each utility can be adjusted is January 1, 2015.
For at least a century now, fossil fuels have been the default resource option for most utilities. Against this institutional bias, switching to renewable energy is akin to swimming upstream. But given how far backward the PSCW bent to accommodate utilities’ continued reliance on coal and natural gas, quite a few renewable energy subscribers may balk at the prospect of swimming up a waterfall.
In fairness to MGE and WE, the price hikes approved by the PSCW went well beyond the incremental increases proposed by the two utilities. That’s because the agency relies solely on the wholesale “market” metric described above that filters out all societal benefits from the equation. To the agency, renewables are another source of electrons that deserve no special consideration. And, in reaching its decision, the PSCW disregarded the potential impact that abrupt price hikes might have on customer participation.
Programs outliving their usefulness?
A significant loss in subscribership would be a regrettable outcome if the programs were still viable vehicles for leveraging new sources of renewable energy. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Earlier this decade, WE and MGE pulled the plug on a popular feature of their programs, specifically the special solar energy buyback rates that were funded with participant dollars. This innovation, which spurred the installation of hundreds of solar electric systems in their territories, succeeded in elevating MGE and WE’s stature while achieving the aims of their participating customers. However, when the utilities eliminated their solar incentives, they also removed the principal rationale for subscribing to their programs.
It seems quite clear that the current crop of voluntary renewable energy programs have outlived their usefulness. They are stagnating under a market structure that distorts and amplifies their true costs as well as a regulatory climate that greatly discounts their benefits to ratepayers. What were once dynamic vehicles for increasing supplies of renewable energy are now little more than feel-good marketing exercises running on autopilot. The value proposition to customers just isn’t there anymore.
There is nothing out there to prevent utilities from revitalizing their green pricing programs and making them useful once again. Such an undertaking, however, would require them to do something they haven’t done before: present an affirmative case for adding more renewables into their energy mix.
To do that effectively, utilities would need to recognize that the fossil energy path leads to a dead-end and that renewables ought to be the default resource option going forward. From that starting point, designing a program in which modest customer premiums actually result in additional supplies of renewable energy should be a simple and straightforward exercise.
It’s the very least a responsible utility should do to reduce the impact of generating electricity on the one planet we are privileged to call home.
Michael Vickerman is program and policy director of RENEW Wisconsin, a sustainable energy advocacy organization. RENEW Wisconsin is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News.
Find the original article post here.
