How solar and EVs will kill the last of the industry dinosaurs: game over for traditional utilities

[bananas]

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/how-solar-and-evs-will-kill-the-last-of-the-industry-dinosaurs-86893

How solar and EVs will kill the last of the industry dinosaurs

By Giles Parkinson on 23 August 2013

(Editor’s note: We’ve followed this story with another one – Solar Storage means “game over” for traditional utilities - quoting the head of the US utilities commission and the former Energy Secretary).

Several years ago, Tony Seba, an energy expert from Stanford University, published a book called Solar Trillions, predicting how solar technologies would redefine the world’s energy markets and create an investment opportunity worth tens of trillions of dollars.

Most people looked at him, he says, as if he had three heads. That was possibly because the book was written before the recent plunge in the cost of solar modules had taken effect, and before most incumbent utilities had woken up to the fact that solar – even with minor penetration levels – was turning their business models upside down.

Seba is now working on a new book, with even more dramatic forecasts than his first. His new prediction is that by 2030, solar will make the fossil fuel industry more or less redundant. Even more striking is his forecast that electric vehicles will do the same thing to the oil industry by around the same date.

<snip>

“I am incredibly optimistic that by 2030, nuclear, coal, gas, big hydro, and oil will be all but obsolete,” Seba told RenewEconomy in an interview in San Francisco last month. “The world will be mostly powered by solar and wind, and most new vehicles will be electric. The architecture of energy markets is going from centralized to distributed – in liquids and the electric market.”

<snip>

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/solar-storage-means-game-traditional-utilities-10680

Solar and storage means “game over” for traditional utilities

By Giles Parkinson on 26 August 2013

Last Friday’s story about the predictions of Stanford University energy expert Tony Seba that solar would displace fossil fuels by 2030 – and how electric vehicles would do the same to liquid fuels – certainly generated a lot of readership, and a big response.

Some questioned whether we should be taking the opinion of just one academic at his word. So we’ve followed up with some quotes from two of the most senior energy chiefs in the US, the world’s biggest electricity market. And the predictions are just as striking.

Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates utilities in the US, said in an interview last week that solar will “overtake everything”, and said that once storage is brought in to the equation it is pretty much “game over” for traditional forms of generation.

<snip>

Wellinghoff’s comments follow a recent interview with the recently retired US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, who also said that uilities would have to develop a new business model, one modeled around solar and storage, rather than the traditional model of centralised generation.

<snip>

[Esse Quam Videri]

1. Hoping that this is true

Would be great if we could get off of fossils within the next few decades.

[BillyRibs]

2. Yeah Right,

And Where is my flying car like the Jetson's had!?

[Igel]

5. We were supposed to have fully functioning fusion in 30 years.

That was 40 years ago. I was 14. I remember being all excited and bouncing off the wall at the prospect of fusion power. Yes. I understood what fusion power was at 14.

Now, at 54, it's hard to tell when I'm excited, and instead of bouncing off the walls things just tend to bounce off my flab as I excitedly lay there pondering whether to move or let the day just sort of wander on by, undisturbed by my interference.

Yeah. Solar. Extinct dinosaurs of power companies. By 2030. Will probably live long enough to see it not happen. If I'm lucky somebody will remember the prediction and ridicule it; probably not. Oh, there'll be more solar power, but there's that little problem of having batteries enough to keep all the electronics and AC going all night long--especially for aluminum companies and other energy pigs. Not to mention all that wind infrastructure that we're so hep on building. And the mess that silicon makes, unless we devise niftier polymers that solar radiation frees electrons in.

[kristopher]

9. "Yes. I understood what fusion power was at 14" - I don't think so.

If you had truly understood "what fusion power was" when you were 14 you wouldn't have been bouncing off the walls.

Just like you apparently fail to understand today what is actually happening with solar power and the utilities.

IF, and I repeat, IF you had an actual appreciation of either of these undertakings you would have had a better appreciation for the challenges facing actual deployment of fusion vs the hype; and you would today understand that the process described in the OP with solar's effect on utilities is an economic one that is currently underway.

You would therefore realize how inappropriate it is to draw the type of comparison you've presented.

[awoke_in_2003]

7. People can't drive worth a damn...

in two axes- let's not add a third.

[bemildred]

3. A decentraized energy network will be more robust.

Fewer bottlenecks and single points of failure.

[cprise]

6. It could also give us back our democracy.

Fewer "single points of failure" in the corporate "too big to fail" department.

[bemildred]

8. And that notion applies in many places.

It is no accident that our rulers are fond of the large and centralized and have little use for the small and distributed, even when it is clear that the small and distributed is cheaper and better. Small and distributed systems are not a source of political power, they "just work", and in fact they make the population freer and more independent, and we can't have that.

Have you ever considered why they hate small farms, distributed agriculture, so much, and so favor ADM and Monsanto? That's why, there is money and power for them in that, pernicious though it is for us.

[cprise]

10. I may quote you in the E/E forum :)

I have considered the small/large dilemma in the political economy. I'll grant, however, that large is sometimes more efficient from the standpoint of physics. The problem comes when trust disappears within a society (replaced with that one sliver of a social contract that's left--money), then the large become despotic.

[bemildred]

11. Be my guest.

A book: http://www.amazon.com/Human-Scale-Kirkpatrick-Sale/dp/1897408064

[kristopher]

4. The utilities know it too.

Battle brewing over future of rooftop solar in Colorado
By Mark Jaffe
The Denver Post

...

It's not just a Colorado fight — the battle is being waged at utility commissions from Georgia to Louisiana to California.

"We see utilities in state after state fighting," said Carrie Hitt, vice president for state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.

Because rooftop solar cuts demand and puts kilowatt-hours on the grid, it undermines the utility's business model, Hitt said.

"Rooftop solar doesn't amount to a lot now," she said. "They are worried about the future."

...

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_23986721/battle-brewing-over-future-rooftop-solar-colorado