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Good morning and happy Friday,
Just two weeks after Hurricane Helene sent the southeastern U.S. reeling, Hurricane Milton blasted Florida, leaving 3.4 million utility customers without power and claiming at least twelve lives. In addition to terrible devastation, these events have spawned wild conspiracy theories promoted by former President Trump, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says “they” are controlling the weather.
On a more positive note, DNV projects global energy-related CO2 emissions are set to peak this year, and the IEA says the growth of renewables is set to surge by 2030. However, the EIA forecasts that U.S. power use will reach record
highs in 2024 and 2025.
And, ACP announced that the U.S. energy storage market set a Q2 record in 2024, with 3,000+ MW of storage installed, a 74% increase from Q2 2023; costs declined 4% from Q1 to Q2 2024 and 34% from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024.
But let’s get real: when it comes to energy storage, the (huge) paws-down winner is clearly Grazer, who won Alaska’s Fat Bear Contest for the second year in a row.
Read on for more.
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Three’s Company in PJM
PJM’s Regional Transmission Expansion Plan (RTEP) is designed to identify needed upgrades to the transmission system. The planning process includes competitive solicitations, and the most recent round yielded some interesting results – here are some soundbites:
Although the listed proposals are redacted, Dominion Energy, American Electric Power, and FirstEnergy announced this week that they had entered into a joint
planning agreement to propose regional transmission projects across PJM’s footprint.
While the companies declined to discuss specifics, Utility Dive reports that among 18 proposed projects that cross the footprint served by all three, six projects are listed as joint efforts.
- In a presentation on the most recent RTEP, PJM said “the need for additional West-East reinforcement on PJM’s transmission system is materializing earlier than anticipated due to higher load growth in the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia areas.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Wait and see. Screening and evaluation of the proposals is underway. Based on the outcome of this process, PJM staff will develop a transmission plan that addresses its current needs. A short list is expected next month, and scenario evaluations will continue through November. Following that, the “proposed RTEP will be reviewed by the Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee at December and January meetings,” with the goal of sending “a proposed RTEP to [PJM’s] board in the first quarter next year.”
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Pricey Swiss Army Knife
Climate activists and renewable energy developers alike are interested in the potential for green hydrogen to slash fossil fuel emissions and create new sources of demand for renewable energy. But a paper published this week by Harvard may dampen some of this enthusiasm. Here are some points to ponder:
In a nutshell, the Harvard study finds that for the foreseeable future, green hydrogen will remain a “prohibitively expensive strategy to reduce emissions, often exceeding the costs of directly removing CO2 from the atmosphere.”
The problem isn’t production costs – it’s the cost of storage and distribution. As a result, while hydrogen will still have a role in a low-carbon energy future, “the opportunities...may be narrower than previously thought.”
- In the U.S., one issue stymieing advances with green hydrogen is the lack of certainty around tax credits, which is unlikely to be resolved until after the election. In the meantime, “blue hydrogen” – that is, hydrogen produced using fossil fuels, the emissions from which are subsequently captured – is “marching ahead.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Not cutting it. It’s popular to refer to green hydrogen as “a Swiss Army knife for clean energy production” because it can theoretically be used for so many hard-to-abate industries, from manufacturing steel and cement to transportation. But in its 2024 Global Hydrogen Review, the IEA notes that what’s needed “for the full project pipeline to materialize” is growth “at an
unprecedented compound annual growth rate of over 90% from 2024 until 2030, well above the growth experienced by solar PV during its fastest expansion phases.”
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Space Solar Is Back (in the News)
BDD readers may recall that we’ve told you about the idea of getting solar power from space. Well, this week that idea was back in the news – with a twist.
What kicked everything off was a Medium post from Baiju Bhatt, who helped co-found Robinhood in 2013, in which he announced the launch of a space solar power company called Aetherflux.
As CleanTechnica notes, the space solar field is (ironically) already crowded; in contrast to its competitors, which are focused on mounting giant solar panels on geostationary satellites, Aetherflux’s tack “is not your grandpa’s space solar power approach.”
Instead, the company plans to “build a massive constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, each equipped with a solar array, a battery, and a near-optical infrared laser to transmit the power down to the ground.”
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Much remains to be seen – while the potential market “could be massive,” the company has to first demonstrate the idea is even possible. “Bhatt admits that space-based solar is entirely theoretical right now,” but the company plans to launch its first satellite by early 2026.
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