Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
We need to change the way we count clean energy (G)
What will the US do with a glut of solar modules? (LM)
Big Meat is lying about sustainability (H)
The GreendicatorÂ
Top Deals of the Week
Chinese state-owned EV maker IM Motors raised a $1.1B Series B (RT)Â
Sunfire, a German electrolyzer manufacturer, raised a $234M Series E led by LGT Private Banking, GIC, Ahren Innovation Capital, and Carbon Equity (FN)
RapidSOS, a five-year-old New York startup that uses AI to help emergency response teams, raised a $75 million Series D extension round. BlackRock was the deal lead (BBG)
Geopura, a five-year-old UK startup that sells green hydrogen fuel cells and services to the events, industry, and transport sectors, raised a $70.9 million round. Investors included the UK Infrastructure Bank (ESGT)
Anthro Energy, a startup providing lithium-ion batteries, raised a $20M Series A led by Collaborative Fund (FN)
HData, a startup helping the US energy industry file and analyze regulatory data, raised a $10M Series A led by Buoyant Ventures (PRN)
Glacier, a startup building recycling robotics, raised a $7.7M round led by NEA and Amazon (FN)
Cyclize, a German climate tech startup (it converts recyclable plastics into synthetic oil) raised a $5.3M seed round led by UVC Partners (FN)
Clean energy software startup Gridcog (it helps customers get a holistic view of their energy resources’ performances) raised $4.3M in funding led by AlbionVC (FN)
Atmio, a one-year-old Hamburg, Germany, startup that develops technology to help natural gas operators easily identify and repair methane leaks, raised a $1.4 million round. Investors included HCVC (TEU)
Esper, an Australian startup that is launching a satellite to provide hyperspectral imaging of Earth for applications in agriculture, mining, and environmental monitoring, raised $1 million from Stellar Ventures and others (TC)
Green Theory
Wasting California Sunshine
What would you do with an extra 2.5 terawatt hours per year? Power 380,000 California homes? How about 580,000 electric cars?Â
Around the world, demand for energy is soaring, yet in sun-drenched, solar PV-forward California, we are capturing more free energy than we can put to good use.Â
This mismatch leads to curtailment: when grid operators get rid of energy that they can’t distribute to consumers.Â
What’s stopping us from unleashing this renewable energy? And what are energy grid planners going to do about it?
Curtailifornia
Curtailment is a natural consequence of using intermittent energy sources to generate electricity. Even though we can’t perfectly predict the availability of wind and solar energy, it grows and weakens at fairly consistent times of day, and times of the year. Similarly, our energy demand fluctuates over the course of the day, week, and year.
Unfortunately, the abundant periods of electricity supply often don’t match times of high electricity demand. Zooming out to an annual scale, the imbalance is exacerbated, with renewable power far outstripping the grid’s use of it in the California spring.Â
There are two main categories of curtailment causes, tracked by the California grid operators:Â
Congestion: inability to route electricity supply to the demand
Oversupply: more electricity supply than the demand
Congestion represents a far larger portion of California’s squandered energy, but oversupply offers compelling business cases for energy storage, and creative uses of free, highly variable energy.Â
We couldn’t flip a switch and use this 2.5 tWh per year to power 3% of California households. On the scale of a single solar farm, factory, community, or city, however, untapped value could hide in a small project to access excess clean energy.Â
Seeing like a grid
Over the course of your day, how many appliances do you plug in or unplug? What about switch on or off? Power up or down?Â
To your electrical utility, all of these nuances of your household just look like one number coming out of one device: how much total electricity was demanded by your meter over time? To them, we’re all just a bunch of meters. Until now.
If the challenge of supplying the perfect amount of electricity to meet demand wasn’t hard enough already, households’ electrical needs are expected to grow dramatically to meet climate goals. On top of that, many retail energy consumers are now also becoming sophisticated producers, too, with the rise of residential solar, compounded by home (and potentially EV) battery storage.Â
To make the most of our renewable energy assets, the grid will need new ways to both sense and smooth our electricity demand.Â
Grid planners have a few strategies for using more of our captured energy, and reducing curtailment, as renewables scale. Specifically in California, grid operators outlined 8 solutions, ranging from changing when we use energy, to getting more nimble with how we distribute it.Â
Entire clean tech sub-sectors are forming around each of these solutions, anchored by utilities, electricity networks, and energy retailers, who all have pressing needs to adapt to dramatic paradigm shifts.Â
Happy Hour
On the demand-shifting side, programs such as demand response and time of use rate plans help grid operators smooth out peaks by convincing us to use electricity at times that are easier on the grid. You can think of these solutions as happy hours or surge pricing, broadly speaking.
In demand response, the utility gets some limited control of one or more of your electrical devices, or offers you savings on a day-to-day basis. For instance, the utility company may start heating your home before others in your neighborhood catch on to a cold snap, and then lower your bill for providing the grid more demand flexibility. In other programs, they may simply offer you the chance to opt into the savings event the day or hour before it occurs.Â
Time of use utility rates provide fixed prices depending on when you consume energy. Knowing the daily rate schedule, we can save money by running our appliances off-peak. These programs have had mixed success, with many consumers ignoring or not comprehending the chance for savings.
Aside from taxing predictable peak demand for energy, what else can grids do?
Decongestants
Improving the flexibility of supply and distribution lets utilities reduce curtailment without pushing around our regular demand patterns. Aside from energy storage (batteries), which also help reduce minimum operating levels for existing fossil fuel plants, the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM) is expanding to improve our utilization of captured renewable energy.Â
WEIM allows electrical networks outside California’s Independent Service Operators (CAISO) to smooth mismatches by buying and selling energy. This revolutionary flexibility market prevented 10% of California’s renewable energy from going to waste in 2022, according to grid operators. By 2025, the market will be able to handle transactions up to a day in advance of energy events, further increasing reliability.Â
On the infrastructure side, good old transmission capacity is one of the largest bottlenecks leading to congestion-induced curtailment, so CAISO has dozens of new transmission projects planned. Partly via WEIM—but also in new standards for building renewable projects—improving geographic diversity of solar and wind infrastructure also helps smooth out electricity supply. Ultimately, however, most curtailment solutions rest on the hardware need for battery storage, whether utility scale or at home.Â
Uncurtailing Clean Power
To make serious progress on the energy transition, we can’t neglect the aging power grid or legacy utility-consumer relationships, as we build more and more renewables.
To be sure, we’d rather have an overabundance of clean energy that goes to waste, than a lack that leads to more-polluting energy. Further, as soon as flexibility resources and programs come online, this built capacity gets put to use. Curtailment in California presents, according to a global team of researchers, not only ‘No alarms’ but also ‘no surprises’.Â
That being said, even as we get better at utilizing clean energy, the absolute amount of wasted energy could still grow in volume, as total production increases. It’s not a problem unique to California: as more economies electrify, the waste of curtailment will resonate with more communities.Â
Do you have a creative solution for putting these extra electrons to work? What about a program to help households take advantage of off-peak energy?Â
Curtailment may be a predictable side effect of California’s renewable leadership, but we’ll need more robust solutions to curtail global curtailment, on the path to electrify everything.
The Closer
A hummingbird tongue captured by Dmitri S.