Australia's energy transition stalled by stubbornly high demand

Northern Pass Project faces rejection by New Hampshire regulators, halting Hydro-Quebec clean energy transmission lines to Massachusetts; Eversource vows appeal as the Site Evaluation Committee cites development concerns and alternative routes through Vermont and Maine.

Key Points

A project to transmit Hydro-Quebec power to Massachusetts via New Hampshire, recently rejected by state regulators.

✅ New Hampshire SEC denied the transmission application

✅ Up to 9.45 TWh yearly from Hydro-Quebec to Massachusetts

✅ Eversource plans appeal; alternative routes via Vermont, Maine

Regulators in the state of New Hampshire on Thursday rejected a major electricity project being piloted by Quebec’s hydro utility and its American partner, Eversource.

Members of New Hampshire’s Site Evaluation Committee unanimously denied an application for the Northern Pass project a week after the state of Massachusetts green-lit the proposal.

Both states had to accept the project, as the transmission lines were to bring up to 9.45 terawatt hours of electricity per year from Quebec’s hydroelectric plants to Massachusetts as part of Hydro-Quebec’s export bid to New England, through New Hampshire.

The 20-year proposal was to be the biggest export contract in Hydro-Quebec’s history, in a region where Connecticut is leading a market overhaul that could affect pricing, and would generate up to $500 million in annual revenues for the provincial utility.

Hydro-Quebec’s U.S. partner, Eversource, said in a new release it was “shocked and outraged” by the New Hampshire regulators’ decision and suggested it would appeal.

“This decision sends a chilling message to any energy project contemplating development in the Granite State,” said Eversource. “We will be seeking reconsideration of the SEC’s decision, as well as reviewing all options for moving this critical clean energy project forward, including lessons from electricity corridor construction in Maine.”

The New Hampshire Union Leader reported Thursday the seven members of the evaluation committee said the project’s promoters couldn’t demonstrate the proposed energy transport lines wouldn’t interfere with the region’s orderly development.

Hydro-Quebec spokesman Serge Abergel said the decision wasn’t great news but it didn’t put a end to the negotiations between the company and the state of Massachusetts.

The hydro utility had proposed alternatives routes through Vermont and Maine amid a 145-mile transmission line debate over the corridor should the original plan fall through.

“There is a provision included in the process in the advent of an impasse, which allows Massachusetts to go back and choose the next candidate on the list,” Abergel said in an interview. “There are still cards left on the table.”

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Hourly Electricity Emissions Tracking maps grid balancing areas, embodied emissions, and imports/exports, revealing carbon intensity shifts across PJM, ERCOT, and California ISO, and clarifying renewable energy versus coal impacts on health and climate.

Key Points

An hourly method tracing generation, flows, and embodied emissions to quantify carbon intensity across US balancing areas.

✅ Hourly traces of imports/exports and generation mix

✅ Consumption-based carbon intensity by balancing area

✅ Policy insights for renewables, coal, health costs

In the United States, electricity generation accounts for nearly 30% of our carbon emissions. Some states have responded to that by setting aggressive renewable energy standards; others are hoping to see coal propped up even as its economics get worse. Complicating matters further is the fact that many regional grids are integrated, and as America goes electric the stakes grow, meaning power generated in one location may be exported and used in a different state entirely.

Tracking these electricity exports is critical for understanding how to lower our national carbon emissions. In addition, power from a dirty source like coal has health and environment impacts where it's produced, and the costs of these aren't always paid by the parties using the electricity. Unfortunately, getting reliable figures on how electricity is produced and where it's used is challenging, even for consumers trying to find where their electricity comes from in the first place, leaving some of the best estimates with a time resolution of only a month.

Now, three Stanford researchers—Jacques A. de Chalendar, John Taggart, and Sally M. Benson—have greatly improved on that standard, and they have managed to track power generation and use on an hourly basis. The researchers found that, of the 66 grid balancing areas within the United States, only three have carbon emissions equivalent to our national average, and they have found that imports and exports of electricity have both seasonal and daily changes. de Chalendar et al. discovered that the net results can be substantial, with imported electricity increasing California's emissions/power by 20%.

Hour by hour
To figure out the US energy trading landscape, the researchers obtained 2016 data for grid features called balancing areas. The continental US has 66 of these, providing much better spatial resolution on the data than the larger grid subdivisions. This doesn't cover everything—several balancing areas in Canada and Mexico are tied in to the US grid—and some of these balancing areas are much larger than others. The PJM grid, serving Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland, for example, is more than twice as large as Texas' ERCOT, in a state that produces and consumes the most electricity in the US.

Despite these limitations, it's possible to get hourly figures on how much electricity was generated, what was used to produce it, and whether it was used locally or exported to another balancing area. Information on the generating sources allowed the researchers to attach an emissions figure to each unit of electricity produced. Coal, for example, produces double the emissions of natural gas, which in turn produces more than an order of magnitude more carbon dioxide than the manufacturing of solar, wind, or hydro facilities. These figures were turned into what the authors call "embodied emissions" that can be traced to where they're eventually used.

Similar figures were also generated for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Released by the burning of fossil fuels, these can both influence the global climate and produce local health problems.

Huge variation
The results were striking. "The consumption-based carbon intensity of electricity varies by almost an order of magnitude across the different regions in the US electricity system," the authors conclude. The low is the Bonneville Power grid region, which is largely supplied by hydropower; it has typical emissions below 100kg of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour. The highest emissions come in the Ohio Valley Electric region, where emissions clear 900kg/MW-hr. Only three regional grids match the overall grid emissions intensity, although that includes the very large PJM (where capacity auction payouts recently fell), ERCOT, and Southern Co balancing areas.

Most of the low-emissions power that's exported comes from the Pacific Northwest's abundant hydropower, while the Rocky Mountains area exports electricity with the highest associated emissions. That leads to some striking asymmetries. Local generation in the hydro-rich Idaho Power Company has embodied emissions of only 71kg/MW-hr, while its imports, coming primarily from Rocky Mountain states, have a carbon content of 625kg/MW-hr.

The reliance on hydropower also makes the asymmetry seasonal. Local generation is highest in the spring as snow melts, but imports become a larger source outside this time of year. As solar and wind can also have pronounced seasonal shifts, similar changes will likely be seen as these become larger contributors to many of these regional grids. Similar things occur daily, as both demand and solar production (and, to a lesser extent, wind) have distinct daily profiles.

The Golden State
California's CISO provides another instructive case. Imports represent less than 30% of its total electric use in 2016, yet California electricity imports provided 40% of its embodied emissions. Some of these, however, come internally from California, provided by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The state itself, however, has only had limited tracking of imported emissions, lumping many of its sources as "other," and has been exporting its energy policies to Western states in ways that shape regional markets.

Overall, the 2016 inventory provides a narrow picture of the US grid, as plenty of trends are rapidly changing our country's emissions profile, including the rise of renewables and the widespread adoption of efficiency measures and other utility trends in 2017 that continue to evolve. The method developed here can, however, allow for annual updates, providing us with a much better picture of trends. That could be quite valuable to track things like how the rapid rise in solar power is altering the daily production of clean power.

More significantly, it provides a basis for more informed policymaking. States that wish to promote low-emissions power can use the information here to either alter the source of their imports or to encourage the sites where they're produced to adopt more renewable power. And those states that are exporting electricity produced primarily through fossil fuels could ensure that the locations where the power is used pay a price that includes the health costs of its production.

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California Renewable Energy Record highlights near-100% clean power as CAISO reports solar, wind, and storage meeting demand, with Interstate 10 arrays and distributed rooftop photovoltaics boosting the grid during Stagecoach, signaling progress toward 100%.

Key Points

CA Renewable Energy Record marks CAISO's peak when renewables nearly met total load, led by utility solar and storage.

✅ CAISO hit 99.87% renewables serving load at 2:50 p.m.

✅ Two-thirds of power came from utility-scale solar along I-10.

✅ Tariff inquiry delays solar-storage projects statewide.

Renewable electricity met just shy of 100% of California's demand for the first time on Saturday, officials said, much of it from large amounts of solar power, part of a California solar boom, produced along Interstate 10, an hour east of the Coachella Valley.

While partygoers celebrated in the blazing sunshine at the Stagecoach music festival,  "at 2:50 (p.m.), we reached 99.87 % of load served by all renewables, which broke the previous record," said Anna Gonzales, spokeswoman for California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit that oversees the state's bulk electric power system and transmission lines. Solar power provided two-thirds of the amount needed.

Environmentalists who've pushed for years for all of California's power to come from renewables and meet clean energy targets were jubilant as they watched the tracker edge to 100% and slightly beyond. 

"California busts past 100% on this historic day for clean energy!" Dan Jacobson, senior adviser to Environment California, tweeted.

"Once it hit 100%, we were very excited," said Laura Deehan, executive director for Environment California. She said the organization and others have worked for 20 years to push the Golden State to complete renewable power via a series of ever tougher mandates, even as solar and wind curtailments increase across the grid. "California solar plants play a really big role."

But Gonzales said CAISO double-checked the data Monday and had to adjust it slightly because of reserves and other resource needs, an example of rising curtailments in the state. 

Environment California pushed for 1 million solar rooftops statewide, which has been achieved, adding what some say is a more environmentally friendly form of solar power, though wildfire smoke can undermine gains, than the solar farms, which eat up large swaths of the Mojave desert and fragile landscapes.

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'Need to act with that same boldness':A record 10% of the world's power was generated by wind, solar methods in 2021

Deehan said in a statement that more needs to be done, especially at the federal level. "Despite incredible progress illustrated by the milestone this weekend, and the fact that U.S. renewable electricity surpassed coal in 2022, a baffling regulatory misstep by the Biden administration has advocates concerned about backsliding on California’s clean energy targets." 

Deehan said a Department of Commerce inquiry into tariffs on imported solar panels is delaying thousands of megawatts of solar-storage projects in California, even as U.S. renewable energy hit a record 28% in April across the grid.

Still, Deehan said, “California has shown that, for one brief and shining moment, we could do it! It's time to move to 100% clean energy, 100% of the time.”

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PJM and MISO Electricity-Market Reforms promise consumer savings by enabling renewables, wind, solar, and storage participation in wholesale markets, enhancing grid flexibility, reliability services, and real-time pricing across the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic.

Key Points

Market rule updates enabling renewables and storage, improving reliability and lowering consumer costs.

✅ Removes barriers to renewables, storage, demand response

✅ Improves intermarket links and real-time price signals

✅ Rewards flexible resources and reliability services

Electricity-market reforms to enable more renewables generation and storage in the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic could save consumers in the US and Canada more than $6.9 billion a year, according to a new report.

The findings may have major implications for consumer groups, large industrial companies, businesses, and homeowners in those regions, said the Wind-Solar Alliance, (WSA), which commissioned the Customer Focused and Clean report.

The WSA is a non-profit organisation supporting the growth of renewables. American Wind Energy Association CEO Tom Kiernan is listed as WSA secretary, amid ongoing debates about the US wind market today.

"Consumers are looking for clean energy, affordable and reliable energy that will keep their monthly electricity bills low," said Kristin Munsch, president of the Board of the Consumer Advocates of the PJM States, which represents over 65 million consumers in 13 states.

"There is great potential to achieve those goals with the cost-effective integration of wind, solar and battery storage plants into our wholesale power markets."

The report found the average residential customer in the PJM and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) regions, covering 29 US states and the Canadian province of Manitoba, could each save up to $48 a year as lower wholesale electricity prices materialize with significantly more wind, solar and storage on the grid.

The average annual home electricity, for example in New Jersey, in the PJM region, was just over $106 in 2018, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

The latest report quantifies the findings of a previous one for the WSA, published in November 2018, which found that outdated wholesale market rules in the US were preventing full participation by renewable energy, including wind power.

Outdated rules

"The existing wholesale power market rules were largely developed for slower-to-react conventional generators, such as coal and nuclear plants," said Michael Milligan, president of Milligan Grid Solutions and co-author of the new report.

"This report demonstrates the benefits of updating the rules to better accommodate the characteristics and potential contributions of wind and solar and other newer sources of low-cost generation."

With more renewables generation on the grid, customers would benefit the most from increasing power-system flexibility through market structures, the new report concluded. It called for the removal of artificial barriers preventing renewables, storage and demand response from participating in markets.

The report also advocated improving the connections between markets, thereby lowering transaction costs of imports and exports between neighbouring systems.

"There are currently artificial barriers that are preventing the full participation of renewables, storage and other new technologies in the PJM and MISO markets," said Michael Goggin, vice president of Grid Strategies and co-author of the report.

"Providing consumers with a real-time price signal that allows them to adjust their demand, rewarding flexible resources for their capabilities through improved market design, and allowing renewable and storage resources to participate in reliability-services markets would yield the greatest consumer benefits," he said.

PJM and MISO, which incorporate some of the windiest areas of the country, are currently reviewing their market designs as part of a broader grid overhaul underway.

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Florida Solar for All Opt-Out highlights Gov. DeSantis rejecting EPA grant funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, limiting low-income households' access to solar panels, clean energy programs, and promised electricity savings across disadvantaged communities.

Key Points

Florida Solar for All Opt-Out is the state declining EPA grants, restricting low-income access to solar energy savings.

✅ EPA grant under IRA aimed at low-income solar

✅ Estimated 20% electricity bill savings missed

✅ Florida lacks PPAs and renewable standards

Florida has passed up on up to $400 million in federal money that would have helped low-income households install solar panels.

A $7 billion grant “competition” to promote clean energy in disadvantaged communities by providing low-income households with access to affordable solar energy was introduced by President Joe Biden earlier this year, and despite his climate law's mixed results in practice, none of that money will reach Florida households.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced the competition in June as part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. However, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to pass on the $400 million up for grabs by choosing to opt out of the opportunity.

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The program would have helped Florida households reduce their electricity costs by a minimum of 20% during a key time when Floridians are leaving in droves due to a rising cost of living associated with soaring insurance costs, inflation, and proposed FPL rate hikes statewide.

Florida was one of six other states that chose not to apply for the money.

President Joe Biden announced a $7 billion “competition” to promote clean energy in disadvantaged communities.

The opportunity, named “Solar for All,” was announced by the EPA in June and promised to provide up to $7 billion in grants to states, territories, tribal governments, municipalities, and nonprofits to expand the number of low-income and disadvantaged communities primed for residential solar investment — enabling millions of low-income households to access affordable, resilient and clean solar energy.

The grant is intended to help lower energy costs for families, create jobs and help reduce greenhouse effects that accelerate global climate change by providing financial support and incentives to communities that were previously locked out of investments.

How much money would Floridians save under the ‘Solar for All’ solar panel grant?

The program aims to reduce household electricity costs by at least 20%. Florida households paid an average of $154.51 per month for electricity in 2022, just over 14% of the national average of $135.25, and debates over hurricane rate surcharges continue to shape customer bills, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A 20% savings would drop those bills down to around $123 per month.

On the campaign trail, DeSantis has pledged to unravel Biden’s green energy agenda if elected president, amid escalating solar policy battles nationwide, slamming the Inflation Reduction Act and what he called “a concerted effort to ramp up the fear when it comes to things like global warming and climate change.”

His energy agenda includes ending Biden’s subsidies for electric cars while pushing policies that he says would ramp up domestic oil production.

“The subsidies are going to drive inflation higher,” DeSantis said at an event in September. “It’s not going to help with interest rates, and it is certainly not going to help with our unsustainable debt levels.”

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DeSantis’ plan to curb clean energy usage in Florida seems to be at odds with the state as a whole, and the region's evolving strategy for the South underscores why it has been ranked among the top three states to go solar since 2019, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

SEIA also shows, however, that Florida lags behind many other states when it comes to solar policies, as utilities tilt the solar market in ways that influence policy outcomes statewide. Florida, for instance, has no renewable energy standards, which are used to increase the use of renewable energy sources for electricity by requiring or encouraging suppliers to provide customers with a stated minimum share of electricity from eligible renewable resources, according to the EIA.

Power purchase agreements, which can help lower the cost of going solar through third-party financing, are also not allowed in Florida, with court rulings on monopolies reinforcing the existing market structure. And there have been other policies implemented that drove other potential solar investments to other states.

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US Electricity Demand Outlook examines EIA forecasts, GDP decoupling, energy efficiency, electrification, electric vehicles, grid load growth, and weather variability to frame long term demand trends and utility planning scenarios.

Key Points

An analysis of EIA projections showing demand decoupling from GDP, with EV adoption and efficiency shaping future grid load.

✅ EIA lowers load growth; demand decouples from GDP.

✅ Efficiency and sector shifts depress kWh sales.

✅ EV adoption could revive load and capacity needs.

Electricity producers and distributors are in an unusual business. The product they provide is available to all customers instantaneously, literally at the flip of a switch. But the large amount of equipment, both hardware and software to do this takes years to design, site and install.

From a long range planning perspective, just as important as a good engineering design is an accurate sales projections. For the US electric utility industry the most authoritative electricity demand projec-tions come from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA's compre-hensive reports combine econometric analysis with judgment calls on social and economic trends like the adoption rate of new technologies that could affect future electricity demand, things like LED light-ing and battery powered cars, and the rise of renewables overtaking coal in generation.

Before the Great Recession almost a decade ago, the EIA projected annual growth in US electricity production at roughly 1.5 percent per year. After the Great Recession began, the EIA lowered its projections of US electricity consumption growth to below 1 percent. Actual growth has been closer to zero. While the EIA did not antici-pate the last recession or its aftermath, we cannot fault them on that.

After the event, though, the EIA also trimmed its estimates of economic growth. For the 2015-2030 period it now predicts 2.1 percent economic and 0.3 percent electricity growth, down from previously projections of 2.7 percent and 1.3 percent respectively. (See Figures 1 and 2.)

Table 1. EIA electric generation projections by year of forecast (kWh billions)

Table 2. EIA forecast of GDP by year of forecast (billion 2009 $)

Back in 2007, the EIA figured that every one percent increase in economic activity required a 0.48 percent in-crease in electric generation to support it. By 2017, the EIA calculated that a 1 percent growth in economic activity now only required a 0.14 percent increase in electric output. What accounts for such a downgrade or disconnect between electricity usage and economic growth? And what factors might turn the numbers 
around?

First, the US economy lost energy intensive heavy industry like smelting, steel mills and refineries; patterns in China's electricity sector highlight how industrial shifts can reshape power demand. A more service oriented economy (think health care) relies more heavily on the movement of data or information and uses far less power than a manufacturing-oriented economy.

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Second, internet shopping has hurt so-called "brick and mortar" retailers. Despite the departure of heavy industry, in years past a burgeoning US commercial sector increased its demand and usage of electricity to offset the industrial decline. But not anymore. Energy efficiency measures as well as per-haps greater concern about global warming and greenhouse gas emissions and have cut into electricity sales. “Do more with less” has the right ring to it.

But there may be other components to the ongoing decline in electricity usage. Academic studies show that electricity usage seems to increase with income along an S curve, and flattens out after a certain income level. That is, if you earn $1 billion per year you do not (or cannot) use ten times a much electricity as someone earning only $100 million.

But people at typical, middle income levels increase or decrease electricity usage when incomes rise or fall. The squeeze on middle income families was discussed often in the late presidential campaign. In recent decades an increasing percentage of income has gone to a small percentage of the population at the top of the income scale. This trend probably accounts for some weakness in residential sales. This suggests that government policy addressing income inequality would also boost electricity sales.

Population growth affects demand for electricity as well as the economy as a whole. The EIA has made few changes in its projections, showing 0.7 percent per year population growth in 2015- 2030 in both the 2007 and 2017 forecasts. Recent studies, however, have shown a drop in the birth rate to record lows. More troubling, from a national health perspective is that the average age of death may have stopped rising. Those two factors point to lower population growth, especially if the government also restricts immi-gration. Thus, the US may be approaching a period of rather modest population growth.

All of the above factors point to minimal sales growth for electricity producers in the US--perhaps even lower than the seemingly conservative EIA estimates. But the cloud on the horizon has a silver lining in the shape of an electric car. Both the United Kingdom and France have set dates to end of production of automobiles with internal combustion engines. Several European car makers have declared that 20 percent of their output will be electric vehicles by the early 2020s. If we adopt automobiles powered by electricity and not gasoline or diesel, electricity sales would increase by one third. For the power indus-try, electric vehicles represent the next big thing.

We don’t pretend to know how electric car sales will progress. But assume vehicle turnover rates re-main at the current 7 percent per year and electric cars account for 5 percent of sales in the first five years (as op-posed to 1 percent now), 20 percent in the next five years and 50 percent in the third five year period. Wildly optimistic assumptions? Maybe. By 2030, electric cars would constitute 28 percent of the vehicle fleet. They would add about 10 percent to kilowatt hour sales by that date, assuming that battery efficiencies do not improved by then. Those added sales would require increased electric generation output, with low-emissions sources expected to cover almost all the growth globally. They would also raise long term growth rates for 2015-2030 from the present 0.3 percent to 1.0 percent. The slow upturn in demand should give the electric companies time to gear up so to speak.

In the meantime, weather will continue to play a big role in electricity consumption. Record heat-induced demand peaks are being set here in the US even as surging global demand puts power systems under strain worldwide.

Can we discern a pattern in weather conditions 15 years out? Maybe we can, but that is one topic we don’t expect a government agency to tackle in public right now. Meantime, weather will affect sales more than anything else and we cannot predict the weather. Or can we?

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