May 29, 2014

This week, the City of Eugene did what no one else has been able to do since the Kyoto Protocol expired: they voted to take the first step in making their greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets legally binding. Yes, you read that correctly - the city council voted 7 - 1 in favor of drafting an ordinance setting community GHG reductions and codifying their goal of 50% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2030.

Eugene is the first city in the United States to have taken this step and joins a small group of countries and regions that also have legally binding targets. Climate Access’ Amy Huva spoke with Matt McRae about action on climate in Eugene.

Matt McRae knows that for most people, climate change is not a front-of-mind issue. Speak to most people on the streets of Eugene, Oregon where he’s the city’s Climate and Energy Analyst and they wouldn’t be able to tell you about the Climate Action Plan that’s being implemented or reporting on greenhouse gas reduction targets.

But whether people here know it or not, Eugene is tackling climate disruption head-on. Eugene has the highest per-capital density of hybrid cars in the US and household-level activities like recycling, composting and biking to work are increasingly popular. McRae says residents are hugely supportive of local and community gardens because people feel like they don’t have influence on their food systems and want nourishment grown closer to home.

Eugene is also recognizing that systemic or institutional shifts play a key role in climate progress. The city has an impressive target of reducing fossil fuel use by 50 percent by 2030. The city of Eugene has entered the ‘getting off our fossil fuel addiction’ program.

The city’s completed to-do list is already impressive: Eugene Water and Electric Board’s local energy retrofit program has been linked to low and no-interest loans for households to undertake energy saving retrofits; the city also undertook 20-minute Neighborhood Assessments where each area was rated for walkability and bikeability and local residents were engaged on how their neighborhoods could be improved with better access to services. Eugene is also thinking about more integrated approaches to building resiliency to climate change – for the Hazard Mitigation Plan update, for example, officials are asking experts from sectors like transportation, electricity, water and housing what their weak points would be in a natural disaster.

Together, these activities are making a difference. Since 2006, (the year they had best data for) fossil fuel use has decreased by 2.5 per cent each year. Electricity use is down 15 per cent from 2000 levels and natural gas consumption is down 12 per cent since 2006. All of this adds up to Eugene being on track to meet its 2030 target.

There’s only one kicker - no one is sure precisely what caused the turning point in fossil fuel use. It could be one policy, two policies together or the sum of all the parts. This is a question McRae wants to answer. With the help of occasional interns at the Oregon Department of Energy and Transportation, he’s going through a list of ‘suspects’ to try and identify exactly how and why change is happening (which sounds to me like a PhD topic waiting to happen).

Regardless of how Eugene is doing it, McRae firmly believes changing our systems will have the biggest impact. He’s trying to make sure that people who are taking steps in their daily lives to deal with climate change connect the dots between local and state policies and energy choices and costs, in the hopes of raising a voice for long-term thinking when decisions are being made. His goal is to make sure climate change is a consideration in all things the city does.

For instance, the Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan needs to be updated every five years in order to get access to FEMA funding, so he wants to make sure the update covers heatwaves as well as the usual flood, fire and earthquake risks.
It’s no small task.

But once McRae’s figured out the solution, he’ll be sure to let us know so we can all get started on it.

image: Sean McGrath vis cc flickr

This story was taken from ClimateAccess.org. For more information click here.

Administration seeks to cut carbon emissions from power plants by up to 30 percent by 2030

Federal plans for new carbon emission cuts — reportedly by up to 30 percent from 2005 levels — could spark a rapid expansion in the renewables sector, environmental groups predicted Sunday ahead of the unveiling of a new government blueprint on clean energy.

This story is reprinted from america.aljazeera.com. To see the full report, click here

The proper management of existing power grids and the maintenance of more efficient balance between load and generation on the grid are challenging issues for developed nations with mature economies active in the microgrid space. Developed nations located within the Asia Pacific region are actively pursuing community-based and commercial/industrial microgrid developments. Some demonstration projects focused on integrating renewable resources are being tested and developed with the goal to deliver multiple applications to the end user. Specifically, Japan and South Korea aim to export microgrid business models and systems and then capture a larger share of global supply chain opportunities in global markets. 

By contrast, developing nations in the region face more urgent issues related to power supply. Low electrification, an underdeveloped power grid infrastructure, and a lack of capital to underwrite new technologies to advance power grid services are key challenges that developing Asia Pacific nations face. In a region where simply providing sufficient electricity is challenging, governments and utilities are struggling to establish efficient ways to supply power to rural villages and remote islands. 

Microgrids are critical to advancing greater reliance on various forms of distributed generation , advanced energy storage, and demand response . Yet, the introduction of microgrids is not a simple issue. Microgrids require the coordinated operation of the power storage system and renewable distributed energy generation and maintenance of power grid supply and demand imbalances, as well as robust RDEG controls and enabling technologies. 

From a macro view, however, all of the parties making policy in the Asia Pacific region agree that microgrids should be the ultimate goal for providing electricity and achieving greater energy efficiency. The individual governments and market stakeholders in Asia Pacific aim to solve their current shortage of reliable energy by launching various initiatives, policies, support programs, and test trials. The focus areas of these microgrid initiatives are related to increasing power capacity at the test sites and then allowing industry (including utilities) to take the next steps forward.  Read More

This was reprinted from Microgrid News. For more information on the report, click here

“A group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources (DER) within clearly defined electrical boundaries that act as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. A microgrid can connect and disconnect from the grid to enable it to operate in both grid-connected and island-mode.”

Navigant Research has broadened this widely accepted definition of a microgrid to include remote systems in its analysis. Remote microgrids are networks that are not typically interconnected with any utility grid or may interconnect with a highly unreliable grid; therefore, they operate in island mode for a majority of the time. It was these remote, off-grid systems that were first called microgrids decades ago. 

The research firm recently published its latest Microgrid Deployment Tracker, the seventh edition of its microgrid database that is updated biannually and now covers six microgrid market segments and six principal geographies, dividing the previous Rest of World geographic segment into Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, and Antarctica. It lists operating, planned/under development, and proposed microgrids, as well as selected projects that lay the foundation for viable microgrids over the next 3 to 5 years. 

New Findings and Insights.

Many new microgrids are still under the radar and, consequently, have not yet made it into Navigant’s database. Some vendors claim to have large project portfolios, but due to client sensitivity and a desire to remain opaque in business development efforts, did not reveal project details for publication in this report. Many microgrid developers/integrators have nondisclosure agreements in place. Nevertheless, seeds have already been planted for the next update to this Tracker, given the long lead time required to collect sensitive project data.

Navigant primarily focused on the remote microgrid segment in this update, a reflection of recent research activity in the segment that has historically been underrepresented. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this segment features the largest increase: the addition of 155 new projects representing 60 MW of additional capacity.

The vast majority of the new project entries (135) were in the Asia Pacific region, concentrated in India, which is the global leader in terms of numbers of deployed microgrids to date. The largest source of new capacity is the community/utility segment, with an addition of 154 MW. In the remote segment, the largest number of new project entries from a single vendor came from Optimal Power Solutions. The leading vendor in grid-tied microgrid markets was Tecogen with its modular combined heat and power (CHP) technology. 

This seventh edition of the Microgrid Deployment Tracker is current as of March 2014. The result is a much more robust microgrid market than in 2009, when Navigant first began to develop the world’s only database and commercial analysis of this corner of the smart grid movement. New vendors continue to enter this space and previously undiscovered projects keep coming to the fore. As of this update, Navigant has identified a total of 4,393 MW of total microgrid capacity throughout the world, up from 4,148 MW in the previous update in 4Q 2013.

This current edition of the Tracker again reinforces the premise long held by the research firm that North America is the world’s most fertile environment for microgrids due to the declining reliability of its distribution grid. As a region, North America is still the world’s leading market for microgrids with a planned, proposed, and deployed capacity of 2,874 MW, which represents roughly 66% of the global microgrid market. North America also leads the world in terms of microgrids currently under development or in the proposal process with a capacity market share of 67%. Of the total North American microgrid capacity, 1,542 MW is currently online and more than 1,363 MW is in the planned/under development or proposed phase.

This was reprinted with permission from Migrogrid News. For more information on the report, click here