The hop notes are pine and citrus, chased by toasted malt and a finish of lithium-ion.
That’s right, one of the iconic American pale ales is now officially produced with the help of advanced energy storage technology. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company has installed 500 kilowatts/1 megawatt-hour of Tesla Powerpack batteries at its Chico, California brewery. From humble roots as a West Coast craft brewery, Sierra Nevada has gone national in a big way, and can now brew 1.4 million gallons of beer onsite at a time.
That brewing generates frequent but predictable peaks in the company’s demand, which translate into hefty demand charges on the monthly electricity bill. In 2016, Sierra Nevada paid more for demand charges than for actual electricity, said Sustainability Manager Cheri Chastain.
By discharging power from the Powerpack bank at times of peak consumption, Sierra Nevada can avoid the worst of these charges, reducing the cost of doing business and also relieving some stress on the grid.
This deployment marks an early entry in the beer-making industry’s relationship with advanced energy storage. It’s a conceptually resonant pairing, as beer represents, among other things, energy contained inside a metal vessel for discharge at a later time. The Maui Brewing Company has also installed Powerpack batteries, said Tesla spokesperson Alexis Georgeson.
Michigan passed the legislation for a Commercial PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) program in 2010. Businesses and commercial properties in participating municipalties can retrofit their buildings with renewable energy and energy efficient systems by borrowing money from a private lender, and repay the loan via a special assessment on their local property tax. It has taken longer for municipalities to opt in, and consequently, the state’s PACE programs didn’t really get started until 2016. Tommy Deavenport, Chief Operating Officer of Petros PACE Finance, explained how commercial PACE came to Michigan.
“Petros PACE Finance, LLC has completed a $718,000 Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) transaction with a Michigan property owner that will fund significant energy efficiency upgrades to a 36-year-old commercial facility.
Property owner Delta Business Center, LLC plans to install a new HVAC system, LED lighting, high-efficiency fans, modern building automation system and skylights in its Delta Business Center, a 93,000 square foot light industrial building that previously housed the Lansing State Journal printing and distribution facility.
The investment is expected generate more than $1.8 million in energy savings over the 20-year life of the loan. The project will be financed without any out-of-pocket expense to Delta Business Center, LLC through the Lean & Green Michigan PACE program.”
Deavenport added, “A total of six projects have been funded in Michigan to date, with five of those funded in 2016 by Petros PACE Finance. We believe the number of projects funded by Michigan’s PACE program is going to grow rapidly in in 2017 and beyond. Our pipeline certainly continues to grow.”
North Carolina renewable energy and energy efficiency businesses have created the equivalent of 34,000 full-time jobs and generate $6.4 billion a year in revenue, an industry group says.
Energy efficiency led the way, the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association said in an annual report, accounting for about half the jobs and $2.5 billion of revenue in 2016. The solar sector ranked second-highest in earnings, with $1.4 billion in revenue.
Since 2007, “the clean energy industry has been one of the few sectors to achieve double-digit job growth throughout the recession and each year since, while steadily reducing costs and slowing the rise in the rates charged by our state’s electric utilities,” said executive director Ivan Urlaub.
The association has produced the report each year since 2008, a year after North Carolina’s legislature ordered electric utilities to include renewable energy and energy efficiency in their mixes of power generation. That law, coupled with now-expired state tax credits and continuing federal credits, launched the industry in the state.
A mark of the industry’s resilience, the association said, is that it has continued to grow despite uncertainty such as conservative political opposition to the policies that launched it.
rid modernization investments are creating a construction boom across America — largely driven by the deployment of solar.
According to the Department of Energy’s latest report on jobs in the energy sector, employment in the electric power sector rose 13 percent in 2016 as utilities and developers built new power plants, replaced aging equipment, and invested in new technologies to manage an increasingly complicated distribution grid.
There are now 860,869 people employed in the electric power sector, an increase of more than 101,000 jobs from 2015. Workers in the construction industry building solar, natural gas and wind power plants accounted for most of the increase, reported DOE. The coming year will likely bring a 7 percent bump in employment across power generation.
Coal has long been the dominant fuel for America’s electric grid, but no longer.Utilities are burning less of it, and miners are digging less of it. Many politicians — including the incoming president — believe the decline of coal is wreckingAmerica’s economy.
But the opposite is happening. Jobs are being created in new areas of the economy.
There were 26,000 megawatts of new power plant capacity installed last year in the U.S. Wind provided 6,800 megawatts of new capacity, natural gas provided 8,000 megawatts, and solar provided 9,500 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Chalk up a big win for the Free State! A first-of-its-kind, just-released American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) study shows that the state’s energy efficiency investment portfolio, dubbed EmPOWER Maryland, will save us $4 billion on our electricity bills. These savings accrue thanks to programs delivering solid, tested energy efficiency measures (e.g., more efficient heating and cooling technology, better insulation, less wasteful light bulbs, etc.).
All told the return on investment is almost two dollars for every one dollar invested, as you can see in the summary table below.
From ACEEE report
While the numbers are impressive, the stories behind them are even better.
North Carolina renewable energy and energy efficiency businesses have created the equivalent of 34,000 full-time jobs and generate $6.4 billion a year in revenue, an industry group says.
Energy efficiency led the way, the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association said in an annual report, accounting for about half the jobs and $2.5 billion of revenue in 2016. The solar sector ranked second-highest in earnings, with $1.4 billion in revenue.
Since 2007, “the clean energy industry has been one of the few sectors to achieve double-digit job growth throughout the recession and each year since, while steadily reducing costs and slowing the rise in the rates charged by our state’s electric utilities,” said executive director Ivan Urlaub.
The association has produced the report each year since 2008, a year after North Carolina’s legislature ordered electric utilities to include renewable energy and energy efficiency in their mixes of power generation. That law, coupled with now-expired state tax credits and continuing federal credits, launched the industry in the state.
As we look ahead to the swearing in of President-elect Donald Trump next week, we pause to reflect on the accomplishments of the last eight years under President Obama in continuing a bipartisan tradition of supporting energy efficiency through smart federal policy. Dating back to President Ronald Reagan, who signed the first efficiency standards into law in 1987, every administration – Democrat and Republican – has supported efficiency, including major gains under President George W. Bush. Like his predecessor, President Obama has been a champion of energy efficiency, and as he prepares to leave the White House, we extend our gratitude for the significant progress we’ve made under his tenure. Here are some highlights:
1. Appliance and equipment standards
The Obama administration completed a total of 45 appliance, equipment and lighting efficiency standards that will deliver the following benefits:
● Save 44 quads of energy through 2030, enough to power 1.2 billion homes for a year
● Save consumers and businesses $540 billion on their utility bills through 2030
● Reduce harmful and costly pollution, including CO2 emissions by about 180 million metric tons in 2025
In 2008 Maryland passed an energy efficiency resource standard requiring the state to reduce per capita energy consumption by 10% by 2015. In this report we review the costs and benefits of Maryland’s EERS policy with a focus on statewide benefits from utility-sector programs. We discuss and quantify several key benefits including avoided utility infrastructure, reduced harmful air emissions from power plants, increased statewide jobs and gross state product, and wholesale market price reductions caused by reduced demand. We also consider total costs as we draw conclusions on the merits of the statewide program.
2016 was a big year for progress in the U.S. power sector. Renewable energy sources provided 16.9 percent of the country’s electricity in the first half of 2016, up from 13.7 percent for all of 2015. The country’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Rhode Island. Most importantly, carbon emissions from the power sector are projected to continue to decline and hit levels not seen since 1992.
Strong leadership by forward-thinking governors, policymakers, and power company executives who recognize the imperative of lower-carbon generation and the promise of clean energy, powerful market forces intensifying the push to lower-carbon resources, and the critical federal regulatory overlay of the Clean Power Plan — which has made clear that unlimited carbon pollution is a thing of the past — have all combined to deepen a trend towards cleaner electricity production at this dynamic moment in time.
Even with any possible political maneuverings in Washington, D.C. to reverse clean energy and climate progress, it is clear that the transition to a low-carbon future is well under way.
States and power companies are surging ahead — and given the favorable economics of clean energy and the urgent need to reduce climate-destabilizing pollution it would be foolish to turn back.
More than 21 gigawatts of wind and solar power (utility-scale and rooftop) are projected to have been installed in 2016, accounting for 68 percent of new U.S. capacity additions. That’s according to analyses by FERC, SNL Energy, EIA, and SEIA/GTM Research.
Some of the country’s oldest and least efficient power plants were scheduled to close in 2016, transitioning 5.3 gigawatts of capacity, in no small part due to increasingly favorable economics for low-carbon generation.
Since 2014, solar installation has created more jobs than oil and gas pipeline construction and crude petroleum and natural gas extraction combined. According to recent reports, there are now more than 400,000 jobs in renewable energy.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office next week, he will be looking to make good on his campaign promise to create jobs and strengthen the economy. He needs look no further than energy efficiency. A new report shows it’s already supporting at least 1.9 million US jobs.
The energy efficiency industry has a remarkably diverse workforce in the United States, ranging from appliance manufacturers and home retrofitters to cloud-based energy management service providers. But since energy efficiency involves so many sectors of the economy, the government can’t collect statistics on it the way it can for the banking or auto industries. This makes it extremely difficult to quantify how many people are employed in energy efficiency-related businesses, because it’s not as clear as counting the number of people who work in a car factory.
Last month, however, E4TheFuture and Environmental Entrepreneurs released a report that does the best job I’ve seen yet of providing a reliable answer. Using a methodology similar to the one the government uses to produce its official statistics, they found that about 1.9 million people worked full- or part-time on energy efficiency in 2015. They found that total was set to increase by almost a quarter of a million last year, making energy efficiency the largest industry in the clean energy economy. It employs about twice as many workers as the auto industry (including auto parts manufacturers), and almost 10 times as many workers as the oil and gas extraction industry. It’s a big number.
Figuring this out is neither easy nor straightforward (which is why we’ve needed a study like this), and there are some drawbacks to doing it. First, the methodology includes every worker who spent any fraction of time working on energy efficiency. It’s the same standard that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate employment by industry, and while about 890,000 workers spend at least half their time on energy efficiency, the number will necessarily include a fair number of workers who spent less. By the very nature of the question it’s trying to answer, the number has to be an estimate. Of all the attempts I’ve seen to get at this answer, however, this one is clearly the best, and it gives us a good number to work with. In addition, the report provides results at the state level, giving us an even clearer look at the efficiency industry.
