Utility Perspectives on Using Renewable Power

By Angela Neville, JD

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Dealing with State Renewable Portfolio Standards

“One of Constellation’s biggest questions is, how do we comply with state renewable energy portfolio standards [RPS] in the most cost-effective manner?” Smith said. “We’ve determined that fuel mix diversity will help us get to a sustainable future.”

“State RPSs allow a market approach that can drive down technology costs. My mantra is that markets work,” he said. “In contrast, feed-in tariffs provide no incentives to bring down costs.”

Smith also emphasized that regulators need to set rules and keep them stable. Then utilities can start to take more decisive actions to incorporate renewable energy into their operations.

On the other hand, Austin Energy is not guided by a state RPS, according to Kapner. “We have our own renewable goals: 35% by 2020 and 200 MW of solar by 2020,” he said. “We’re not sure that a national RPS is a good idea or a bad idea. Some regions of the country are clearly far more blessed with renewable resources than others; why should the areas that are deficient in the resources be penalized?”

The PV Technology Market

In her presentation, Kurtz primarily focused on the developing solar photovoltaic (PV) market. She pointed out that in the past the U.S. has mainly had a distributed market with little utility involvement. In contrast, Portuguese and South Korean utilities are very involved in using PV for electrical generation (Figure 1). Nonetheless, she emphasized that many predict that U.S. utilities are poised for large PV growth in the future.

1. Worldwide use of PV. The Jan. 2010 Solar Technologies Market Report shows that the countries on the right side of this graph have the highest percentages of grid-connected solar PV power. Source: U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office

Recently, solar PV systems have undergone important increases in the following areas, according to Kurtz: