Intermittency Of Renewables?… Not So Much [View all]

[jpak]

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/21/intermittency-of-renewable-energy/

Below was a great summary (if a bit simplified in parts) comment from one of our readers on one of our posts last week. I thought it deserved a few more eyes. Also, I happened to go back to a roundtable discussion of utility CEOs today that supports the overall “the ‘intermittency’ of renewable energy issue is overhyped” argument. More on that below the reader comment.

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First, the then CEO and President of Florida Power & Light, Armando Olivera, chimed in. “I spent a lot of time in operations in our company. Of all the things that I worry about, regulating using solar, or renewables, really doesn’t worry me. I think you gotta be at a really huge scale of solar before that becomes an issue. And in the meantime, we’ve got a lot of enabling technology going into these grids… about half of the meters at FPL are already automated devices. We are learning a huge… we’re seeing benefits that we didn’t fully anticipate in terms of managing the grid. We’re also putting in a lot of smart technology that can adjust at a very local level whenever there’s a problem. So, you know, I think there’s a huge foundation that’s being laid out today that will facilitate all of these technologies….”

Doyle Beneby, President & CEO of CPS Energy, backed him up. ”Yeah, I would agree with Armando, I don’t worry about that at all…. Generally, if you’ve got automated meters, if you’ve got the means for a home area network, I think you can easily reduce demand to follow — I call it load-following — for solar. What we found, also, is that there are a very discreet set of customers out there who would volunteer to have their load reduced to follow the drop in output for solar…. So I think that’s a big opportunity out (there) for us. I really think concerns about the grid, so to speak, and even to a degree intermittency, should not at all impede the progress of solar.”

Robert Powers, President of AEP Utilities, also chimed in and said, “I agree with my colleague that near-term there’s no, no issue with grid stability with deploying solar.”

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