Tilting at Windfarms: Clearing up Clean Energy Myths
Many students around the world are opting out of school Friday to demand that action be taken on the world’s pressing and overarching crisis –– climate change. It’s an enormous, impressive, and attention-grabbing display. Meanwhile, however, some of their elders clearly need some schooling in the same arena.
President Trump, for example, had some fun at the expense of the renewable energy industry recently. “When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric” he intoned during a speech at an annual gathering of conservatives, who apparently enjoyed his mocking of the Green New Deal. “Darling — darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ No, but it’s true.”
No, and not surprisingly, it isn’t true. Trump clearly wanted his audience to believe that embracing a transition to renewable energy will signal the end of everyday creature comforts, like reliably turning on a light, or tuning into a favorite news program, among others. Of course, it’s not a huge surprise that the President is not up to date on the capabilities of renewable energy and is instead ready to perpetuate an outdated myth. His allegiance is to the status quo and keeping our energy production and distribution functioning along with its current top-down centralized fossil fuel model.
But Trump is not alone in believing (and in this case promoting) a common misconception about the unreliability of renewable energy. In fact, renewable energy sources, when properly managed and paired with energy storage, can provide an uninterruptible source of power. The seemingly simple fact -- that energy storage, or batteries, is a place to park the output of energy generated by renewables until it’s needed, is still not widely understood. As our transition to renewable energy accelerates, however, this connection will only become more apparent. Along the way, however, those of us in the energy storage field have some significant work to do so that renewable energy proponents and naysayers alike are properly educated.
Already, batteries are taking the intermittency out of utility transmission during blackouts as back-up power. Homes, businesses, and communities, without renewable generation (sun and wind) are more secure with the use of energy storage. Even the grid is stabilized by and in need of storage -- in California particularly as the utilities preemptively shut down power during times of high winds to avoid more fires from downed power lines.
It is heartening to see that on both the residential and commercial sides of the business, energy storage deployments are now rapidly accelerating, which is allowing good energy storage stories to be told. A recent report released by the research firm Wood Mackenzie along with the industry trade group the Energy Storage Association underlines a strong growth in the energy storage space in 2018 - an 80% increase over 2017 in this country, but more importantly, predictions for a doubling of energy storage in 2019 and a tripling in 2020. This makes sense when considering the critical role batteries play in creating energy security during blackouts for grid-tied systems, even without renewables.
And public awareness is increasing. The results of a 2018 survey of residential solar installers conducted and released by Energy Sage and NABCEP indicated that fully one-third of customers who were investigating installing a solar system also requested energy storage. They need to. Without energy storage, grid-tied PV systems feed electricity to the grid, not the home. Batteries allow a homeowner to take control of their own energy.
Educating the public as well as the media remains an important part of our business model. Many customers automatically believe installing solar panels means they’ll be safe from power interruptions. The mainstream press is on a learning curve with energy storage too. Recently veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien made a return visit to Puerto Rico 18 months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island for her show Matter of Fact. In talking with some residents who had lost power for months and had since installed a solar system for future resilience, O’Brien indicated that with the panels in place, the residents would now be safe from power outages going forward. While it’s certainly possible that batteries had been installed as well, the report focused on the panels as the sole feature needed for providing energy security.
Recently, though, there have been some great examples of those outside the trade press catching on. In a recent series on the future of energy in California, the online news site CalMatters reporter Julie Cart declared that “energy storage is the holy grail.” With prices coming down, adoption increasing, and policymakers catching on, this is a message that will only gain greater traction. We shouldn't be surprised if the President doesn’t help to get the word out. That’s up to the rest of us, and it’s likely that the youngest among us will lead the way.
I wrote this piece for a clean energy company that was a client of mine in 2018-2019. It was published on LinkedIn.
