Archive for year: 2015

The Department of Energy has awarded around a half-million dollars to New York, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts state organizations to cooperate on scaling up the offshore wind industry in the region. CESA will help coordinate the interstate project.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the commissioning of a solar+storage powered microgrid in Rutland, Vermont.

As community-shared solar has proliferated, a growing number of states have adopted community solar-enabling laws. This is clearly good news for solar, but one issue that has been less clear is whether an individual owner of solar panels installed in an offsite, community- shared array qualifies for one of the primary carrots offered to homeowners adopting solar—the 30% federal residential investment tax credit called the “residential ITC.”

Offshore wind excitement is growing in the Northeast with the recent arrival of foundations for Deepwater Wind’s Block Island offshore wind farm.

For the past year or two, there have been many stories in the press about how utilities view distributed generation and storage as a threat, rather than an opportunity. Now, there is evidence that this is starting to change.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the final version of its monumental Clean Power Plan last week – all 1,560 pages of it.

A lot of people are talking about energy storage these days, which is hardly surprising considering energy storage has often been idealized of as a kind of Holy Grail for the energy industry.

After an embarrassingly long time, it seems the US has finally stopped dithering at the starting line and entered a race that Europe and China have been running for years.

What role should utilities play in ownership of energy storage resources?

States have been using group purchasing and special marketing initiatives to bring down the cost of solar. A wide range of campaigns, each called Solarize, have been launched with leadership from state agencies in Oregon, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and other states.