Extracts from the Sept-October 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

13. US News:

California’s Green Power retail market dies

Following the deregulation of the Californian electricity market, just over 2 % of customers switched suppliers and most of this group choose green energy suppliers. alternative providers, but the chaos that has engulfed the market over the last year has meant, after initially surviving quite well, the green power schemes have collapsed or been withdrawn, with some green power suppliers moving out of the state. As Heidi Anderson, from Frost and Sullivan, comments in ‘Green power turns brown in California’ on the Electricnet e- news service, ‘starting last fall, there has been a steady exodus of green power suppliers from the state’, with one of the key reasons being ‘the inability to acquire the credit necessary to purchase power at high supply prices’.

She reports that Go-Green.com has suspended operations and had returned 2,500 residential customers to their default utility. Similarly, Utility.com, an on-line company based in California, has returned 10,000 customers in California. Even more worrying, she notes that Green Mountain Energy, which is usually seen as the big success story in this area, has been ‘unable to remain in the California market. The company turned back nearly 50,000 California customers in February’, although ‘it retained about 8,000 customers in San Diego via fixed-rate 8.6 cents/kWh wholesale contracts’. It is however still operating successfully elsewhere - e.g. in Pennsylvania, and it has just received its Texas retail license. She also notes that ‘it was recently awarded one of the country’s largest aggregation contracts - 400,000 customers in Ohio’. So outside of California things are still moving.

And, within California, since grid power, whether green or brown, is increasingly unreliable and costly, concerned customers are beginning to resort to self-generation by adding PV to their own roof tops, with some of the more alert supply companies offering deals to pay for some of the cost, and taking any excess power generated in return. See below for the latest moves.

Andersons article is at: www.electricnet.com/read/nl20010420/420852

More Solar in California

Trying their best to avert further crises, municipal utilities in California have banded together to pool their demand for renewable energy. The Public Power Renewable Energy Action Team (PPREAT) has been established to aggregate the demand for renewable energy among public power utilities, and to move renewable energy into mainstream power planning processes.

Key supporters of the group include the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, City of Anaheim, Northern California Power Agency and other municipal utilities in the state. While the initial supporters for PRPEAT are based in California, the group hopes to expand and to work with public power agencies across the United States. Management and organisational responsibilities for the group have been assigned to the Center for Resource Solutions, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco.

The utilities are moving to support the use of renewable energy resources in the state because the current volatility in electricity markets has made renewable energy increasingly cost-effective.

The group of municipal utilities wants to deploy renewable resources as a means to ensure the continued competitiveness of public power. PRPEAT will also identify opportunities for public power joint-ownership of renewable energy projects, leverage federal and state renewable energy project development technical assistance, hedge against future volatile electricity prices, create a common public power branding strategy around renewable energy resources, and develop a replicable model for joint-ownership of renewable energy projects.

CRS will soon issue a Request For Proposals to seek partners in the renewable energy industry to collaborate with PPREAT in response to the PIER Renewable Energy Program Area Grant issued recently by the California Energy Commission.

See http://www.resource-solutions.org

US Green Power Drops 12%

The use of renewable energy for electricity generation in the USA dropped by almost 12 % last year. Renewables generated 358,606 million kilowatt-hours (net) in 2000, down from 406,322 in 1999, according to the Electric Power Monthly from the Energy Information Administration.

The big drop was from the largest source of renewables, hydroelectricity, which went from 319,484 million kWh to 274,600. Biomass dropped from 64,689 to 64,018, geothermal went from 16,813 to 14,197 and solar PV went from 848 to 844 million kWh. Wind was the only renewable energy to buck the decline, rising from 4,488 to 4,947 million kWh over the two years. http://www.eia.doe.gov

Worse to come: President Bush’s proposed 2002 budget cuts subsidies and research money for all renewable sectors by US$ 277m, as well as for most programmes seeking solutions to climate change, including the Energy department’s spending on researching and developing energy-efficient buildings and factories, more fuel-efficient automobiles, new appliance standards and more efficient lighting. Research into carbon sequestration is the only 'clean' technology that gets a 10% increase in funding in the President's proposed budget.

This despite a detailed report (see Renew 130), based on three years work by five national laboratories, completed just before the Bush administration took office, which said that a government led energy efficiency programme, emphasising research and incentives to adopt new technologies, could reduce the growth in electricity demand by 20 to 47 %, equivalent to the output of between 265 and 610 large 300-megawatt power plants.

The New York Times (May 6) seized on this study since it was clearly ‘at odds with the administration's repeated assertions in recent weeks that the nation needs to build a big new power plant every week for the next 20 years to keep up with the demand for electricity, and that big increases in production of coal and natural gas are needed to fuel those plants’, pointing out that Vice President Dick Cheney, had said that the USA would need at least 1,300 new power plants by 2020. The Times noted, ‘the Bush administration has not publicized these findings, relying instead primarily on advice from economists at the Energy Department's Energy Information Agency, who often take a skeptical view of projected efficiency gains and predict a much greater need for fossils fuel supplies’. It noted that Cheney had commented "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy".

Nevertheless, President Bush has announced emergency measures to conserve energy in federal buildings in California, saying he wanted "to be part of any solutions" to the energy crisis there.