Tag Archives: energy

RMI - Rocky Mountain Institute

COP28: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What Next?

The UN climate conference delivered more progress than many anticipated — on cutting methane, funding loss and damage, and tripling renewable energy — but it also neglected major priorities. RMI experts share their take.

Originally published on Dec. 21, 2023 at RMI.org: https://rmi.org/cop28-what-worked-what-didnt-and-what-next/

The 2023 UN climate summit, which wrapped on December 13, delivered progress across several critical global priorities and defied early prognostications that COP28 — hosted by Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters — would bog down in dissent.

On the conference’s first day came a surprise agreement to operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund, a long contentious issue between low-income, low-emissions countries, and wealthy heavy emitters. Soon thereafter came a spate of deals to rapidly lower the leakage of methane, a super-warming gas, from government, NGO, and corporate players.

And on the event’s final day came a historic, unanimous agreement on “transitioning [the world] away from fossil fuels in energy systems… in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Complementing that milestone: a commitment to triple the world’s capacity of wind, solar, and other renewable energy by 2030, concurrent with a doubling of the pace of energy efficiency gains.

“COP28 has clarified to everyone that the direction of the transition is clear,” said RMI CEO Jon Creyts. “The energy transition is unstoppable.”

Even as the clean energy shift gathers pace, COP28’s final statement also offered a stark reminder of the urgency for faster action. The “global stocktake,” the UN’s inventory of the world’s progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, concluded that we are well off track to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2100, as agreed to in Paris.

To limit warming to the Paris target, emissions would need to fall by 43 percent by 2030, and 60 percent by 2035, relative to 2019 levels. For now, emissions are on track to fall by just 5 percent come 2030, and only if every country’s commitment is met. Consequently, the world remains on a path to heat by up to 2.8°C by the turn of the century, almost twice the 1.5°C goal.

For RMI’s on-the-ground work, COP28’s complex climate diplomacy nets out as a cause for optimism. As never before, the agreement galvanized global governmental consensus in line with many of our long-standing goals, particularly around speeding the shift to cleaner, safer energy, reducing methane, and the just energy transition. At the same time, the agreement did not resolve pressing areas, such as financing, that will be essential to achieve its goals.

Below, RMI experts weigh in on the implications of the conference’s big advances, as well its less covered wins, along with a few misses.

Multiple methane wins

Over 80 times more potent near term than carbon dioxide (CO2) as a warming agent, methane offers huge potential to quickly cut global greenhouse gas emissions. And to keep 1.5. degrees within reach this decade, oil and gas methane leaks must go to near zero. What’s more, the technical solutions are here now, and the economics are highly favorable, with over half of the fixes yielding a profit or zero net cost. RMI Principal TJ Conway highlights COP28’s methane wins.

Oil and gas commitment. Heading into COP28, methane reductions ranked as a top prospect to deliver major progress on emissions reductions. One of the biggest wins in delivering on this promise came with the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC). Signatories committed to reaching “near zero” methane leakage and flaring by 2030, an ambitious goal under a tight timeline. Beyond its scale, this multistakeholder effort was notable for the buy-in of global oil giants such as BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell, along with national oil companies (NOCs), many of which are otherwise insulated from pressures to set climate goals. NOCs represented a remarkable 60 percent of participants. The US EPA also released stricter regulations on methane emissions.

Building accountability. The bulk of the methane discussions at COP28 focused on the need to accelerate implementation — namely, how to establish accountability mechanisms and metrics to ensure that companies credibly and rapidly meet their OGDC commitments. In coordination with OGDC — and together with Bloomberg Philanthropies, EDF, the IEA, and UNEP via the International Methane Observatory — RMI unveiled a new initiative that will help advance transparency and enforce accountability around claims of methane emissions reductions.

Financing methane reductions delivered another front of progress. The World Bank’s announcement of a new $255 million trust fund through the revamped Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership was welcomed, especially given that many NOCs need technical and financial support. As funding to reduce methane multiplies, financial institutions need more robust ways to track and validate carbon reductions in their lending portfolios;  stronger standards will unlock more funding for reductions. For a fuller explanation of RMI’s work to establish supporting standards for lenders, see “Carbon on balance sheets may go up before they can go down” below.

Curtailing waste methane. Progress on methane extended past the petroleum patch. The waste sector, including solid waste and wastewater, is the third largest contributor to methane emissions, responsible for almost 20 percent of the global total. And as part of COP28, RMI and Clean Air Task Force, with funding support from The Global Methane Hub and Google.org, unveiled the Methane Assessment Platform (WasteMAP), a new, open, online tool that aggregates and maps reported, modeled, and observed waste methane emissions data to help guide reductions.

Scaling green industry

Perfecting clean technologies — from lower-carbon recipes for steel to sustainable aviation fuels — isn’t enough. Industry must also change how it does business, such as developing better ways to finance, buy, and cultivate long-term demand for low-carbon solutions. RMI’s Charlotte Emerson discusses the major initiatives RMI took part in at COP28 to spur these sorts of market-based advances in strategic industries.

Hydrogen. Given its potential to help other heavy-emitting sectors — such as steel and shipping — decarbonize, green hydrogen is a top priority. The Green Hydrogen Catapult launched the report The Value of Green Hydrogen Trade for Europe, at the event Trading Green Hydrogen to Bolster Energy Security, which focused on the value of renewable hydrogen exports in promoting global energy security. The Green Hydrogen Catapult signed a joint declaration in partnership with UN High-Level Climate Champions on the Responsible Deployment of Renewables-Based Hydrogen, addressing the need for mutual recognition of a broad range of recommendations guiding the deployment of renewables-based hydrogen around the world.

Steel. RMI co-hosted an event with the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition and corporations across the industrial supply chain to speed the decarbonization of heavy industry. A centerpiece of this push, RMI’s Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform, demonstrates how connecting ambitious buyers and suppliers through demand-side measures can accelerate the shift to low-emissions steel. RMI also signed the Steel Standards Principles, an effort to harmonize the methodology and standards to define lower emissions steel.

Shipping. The UN High-Level Climate Champions and RMI’s Green Hydrogen Catapult facilitated the Green Hydrogen and Green Shipping Call to Action, committing 30 shipping sector actors to firm targets to use nearly 11 million tons of renewables-based hydrogen fuel adoption this decade — nearly 10 percent of all fuel consumption. A related event, Clearing the Last Mile: Opportunities for Supplying Zero-Emission Fuels at Ports, unveiled initial findings on the cost and ability of key ports to supply the zero-emission shipping fuels of the future by 2030 from a forthcoming study undertaken by RMI and Global Maritime Forum under the flag of the Zero-Emission Shipping Mission.

Aviation. RMI, together with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA) launched the SAFc Registry, a not-for-profit sustainable aviation fuel certificate registry that will transparently and rigorously connect corporate aviation customers to clean fuel deployment, reducing emissions from air travel and air freight.

Aluminum. Financial institutions play an essential behind-the-scenes role in funding investment in greener options. Consider aluminum, which is playing a rising role in the energy transition as a lightweight, highly recyclable material in everything from wind turbine components to solar panel framing. To encourage a shift toward production of low-emissions aluminum, RMI unveiled the Sustainable Aluminum Finance Framework a tool for banks to benchmark their aluminum clients and collaboratively develop decarbonization pathways with industry.

Prioritizing, and funding, a just energy transition

The push to gather funding to compensate poor, low-emitting countries for harm they are experiencing from climate change has been contentious and opposed for 30 years at past COPs by heavy emitters, including the United States. COP28 delivered laudable progress in funding commitments. Above all, improved and expedited access to climate funds will be critical for the most vulnerable countries. For future COPs, the issue persists as one of the most urgent — and delicate — fronts. RMI Senior Principal Laetitia De Marez explains.

Loss and damage. The push to gather funding to compensate poor, low-emitting countries for harm they are experiencing from climate change has been contentious, opposed at past COPs by heavy emitters, including the United States. COP28 delivered laudable progress in funding commitments. Above all, improved and expedited access to climate funds will be critical for the most vulnerable countries. Many were surprised then, to see COP28’s first day deliver an agreement on the loss and damage fund, with funding and an agreement to house it at the World Bank. Pledges quickly stacked up: Over $700 million has been committed initially, including $17.5 million from Washington, a pledge which, while nominal, marks the end of US opposition. The tally remains far short of the $100 billion target requested by developing countries, but the establishment of a vehicle is a critical step to bring in ongoing funding and distribute it.

Reforming multilateral development banks. It’s a big step forward. But the financial gap remains considerable compared to the capital needed to fund a fast, yet just, transition. The reform of the multilateral development banks (MDBs, such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and others) must continue and deepen. They need to transition their portfolios, terms, conditions, and policies away from future fossil deals and fully switch to Paris-aligned investment priorities.

Public-private financial collaboration. The climate funds and the MDBs have a critical role to play in mobilizing international and national private sectors by de-risking and aggregating projects in the regions. The imperative is growing to blend public and private sources of capital — a shift that is underway but must be streamlined and scaled (more on this in the next section on global financiers).

Capacity building: Skills, workforce, regulations. International capacity-building support and technology transfer mechanisms to enable the energy transition remain underfunded and undersized. Transitioning energy systems cannot be achieved without a skilled workforce, trained energy leaders, regulators, innovators, and developers.

Defining a better transition. It remains unclear what a just and equitable transition means for different countries: What are the developmental, resilience, economic, and social progress elements of the just transition? Research and consultations are urgently needed to define and tailor strategies to each country’s circumstances and realities.

For global financiers, impact trumps pledges

Progress on loss and damage funding at COP28 is an important step forward. Yet it also reminds us that the wider scale of transitioning the entire global economy in line with climate goals will require massive capital investment — estimated at roughly $200 trillion to $275 trillion by 2050.

To hit that goal, the private sector must play a bigger role. And while green finance has already gained significant momentum, increasing 100-fold in the past decade, uncertainty still exists around the implementation of “transition finance” to decarbonize high-emitting and/or hard-to-abate sectors. Adapting today’s financial market practices to better accommodate the needs of transition finance can help unlock the flow of climate capital. RMI Managing Director Brian O’Hanlon sees these priorities:

Bridging the public-private financing gap. To deliver full-scale deployment of commercially proven clean energy technologies in Africa and throughout emerging markets, lenders and projects need to move beyond grant-funded demonstration projects, and de-risk portfolios of investments to better meet international financing requirements. These steps can help mobilize international private capital at scale, while ensuring that local project developers do the real work on the ground. With a project pipeline of $464 million in the Pacific, the Climate Finance Access Network (CFAN) offers a practical and actionable solution to developing countries facing capacity constraints in accessing climate finance.

Carbon on balance sheets may go up before they can go down. A key challenge of transition finance includes the risk of financial institutions divesting from high-emitting sectors on paper, but without delivering real reductions. This can happen when financial institutions sell their emitting assets, and can thus show decarbonization progress on their balance sheets. Yet the underlying assets and their related emissions haven’t changed however, only their owner has.

There are ways to overcome these barriers. At COP28, RMI created consensus on how to do so. For investors who have pledged to decarbonize their portfolios, more reliable ways to classify and track underlying emissions reductions is growing as initiatives such as the methane rules and agreements (see above) get traction. Investors need rules of engagement to clarify when financing methane abatement in fossil fuel progress results in overall emissions reductions or simply prolongs the life of emitting assets in ways that are incompatible with preventing disastrous temperature rise.

Climate impact from financial decisions. Shifting from past measures to future forecasts. Historically, investors and lenders have primarily looked at past emissions to assess progress toward climate goals — this method is essentially a look in the rear-view mirror. Now, regulators and climate experts are increasingly demanding forward-looking metrics that offer a more accurate assessment of future results by better modeling how financial decisions made today will affect the future trajectories of decarbonization and resilience of local economies. To support this shift, RMI leads the development of PACTA, a software application that predicts the climate impact of entire financial portfolios of investment and activities, often spanning multiple sectors and geographies.

Challenges ahead

As the world digests the implications of COP28’s agreements — and omissions — priorities for COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, are already becoming clear. Three are on our radar:

Renewables and the grid. The world has given itself just seven years to hit the ambitious goals of tripling renewable energy (3xRE) and doubling efficiency gains. This will require a steep ramp up in deployment in both developed and developing markets — including streamlined financing, quicker regulatory approvals, streamlining supply chains, and more rapid grid growth. Over the past decade, the average wait time to connect clean energy projects to the US grid has doubled to four years; in Europe and the United States delays to approve, build, and connect new clean energy projects can stack up to 10 years of more. Unlocking ways to upgrade and improve access to the grid are emerging as some of the toughest barriers to increasing renewables’ market share.

Carbon markets. In Dubai, negotiations around carbon markets (Article 6) collapsed and will need to be rebooted next year. Carbon markets remain a potentially powerful market solution to reduce emissions, yet voluntary markets faced multiple setbacks in 2023. RMI is working on multiple fronts to help mature these markets.

Finance. The New Collective Quantified Goal will take over from the rich world’s long-unfilled commitment to relay $100 billion per year to developing regions. This funding is growing in importance as renewables growth shifts into the Global South. Much of the world’s renewables growth (above) will be centered in the developing world, where most of the world’s economic growth, urbanization, and construction will unfold in coming decades. Many need help both building new clean energy systems, as well as aid in unwinding legacy fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure. Projects in poorer countries remain more expensive and harder to finance and build, compared to richer regions, given higher risk premiums. Closing this gulf will help unleash faster renewables growth.

GreenBiz

The challenges of building electrification — or, the parable of flameless wok hei | GreenBiz

By Adam Aston

Consider the humble wok. Little more than a wide metal bowl, a good wok can transmute high heat and simple ingredients into sublime flavors. Peek in the back of your favorite Chinese hole-in-the-wall and you may spy a chef calmly working the mix as flames engulf the wok and powerful jet burners roar below. A chef can spend years perfecting this fusion of fire and heat, oil and spice — or wok hei, the “breath of the wok.” 

Elemental as they may be to Chinese cuisine, gas-fired woks are wildly inefficient. More of their heat is wasted than is used. Harmful combustion byproducts, such as carbon monoxide, can spike to levels far higher than allowed by safety codes. And much of the excess cooking heat radiates beyond the kitchen, boosting costs to cool and vent neighboring spaces.

The tension between gas-fired woks’ unique capabilities and the challenge of finding a good substitute given their outsize climate footprint is evocative of the wider challenges to decarbonize commercial buildings. And the urgency to find workable solutions is rising. 

More regions are advancing plans to curtail natural gas, a powerful greenhouse gas. Since 2019, when Berkeley, California, became the first U.S. city to pass a ban to discourage the use of natural gas in new homes and buildings, big cities including Denver, New York, Seattle and San Francisco either have introduced or approved similar rules. 

Homes and businesses account for about 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with a large share of that coming directly from the combustion of natural gas to cook food, fire furnaces and heat water, as well as to wash and dry laundry. Methane — the main ingredient in natural gas which frequently leaks — traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Curtailing the installation of new natural gas capacity, let alone retrofitting the millions of buildings that rely on it today, amounts to a monumental challenge. 

But the consensus view from a group of building professionals who gathered virtually for VERGE Electrify last month reflected progress for electrification. Efforts are advancing, whether for new construction (easier), retrofits (harder) or even restaurant electrification (among the hardest) — including, yes, those woks. Here are some highlights:

Bigger, taller, better buildings. Just five or 10 years ago, green building pros frequently faced fundamental doubts about electrification, those “Can it be done?” sorts of questions. “We’ve passed that,” said Shawn Hesse, business development director at the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), a nonprofit that established the Living Building Challenge in 2007. “Today we get questions about scale and complexity.” From tens of thousands of square feet a few years ago, “We’re seeing projects come through that are a million square feet or more today.” 

Advancing ambitions. In that earlier era, advanced buildings often were at the bleeding edge of technology. Milestone net-zero energy projects helped to prove viability, refine learning and inspire further advances. “We’re not being guinea pigs anymore,” said Calina Ferraro, a principal at Integral Group’s San Diego office, “we’re building taller and more challenging facilities.” At one pioneering project, Seattle’s self-powered Bullitt Center, “Our main goal was to be a replicable model,” so others could follow in its footsteps, said Jim Hanford, a principal at Miller Hull, which designed the building. To boost its solar potential in cloudy Seattle, the center’s distinctive solar canopy cantilevers out beyond the building’s edges. 

Integration drives innovation. Early successes opened the door to more ambitious building system integration and higher overall performance goals, said John Elliott, chief sustainability officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). By setting whole-building performance targets — instead of just trying to beat energy codes — LBNL’s newest high-performance building achieves deep efficiency, using a little less than a third of the energy of the facility it replaced. “We integrate the building to a campus-wide operating system and build applications on top of that,” Elliott said. “We’re seeing a drastic increase in our ability to scale energy management and be much more innovative.”

Good enough can still be great. Keep in mind that not every project can hit the high bar of complete electrification — and that’s OK. Whether to score certification or hit a standard, a “kind of tunnel vision” can take over on some projects, Ferraro noted. “Some feel that if we can’t hit that, then we’re going to scrap it.” Such perfectionism can derail good-enough approaches that take a step in the right direction and set the stage for greater impact later. For example, quicker upgrades that reduce demand — such as lighting improvements — cut overall building demand load, making electrification easier when it happens.

Incrementalism accelerates retrofits. In fact, step-by-step incrementalism is often the only way existing facilities can be electrified. At San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the challenge of financing upfront conversion costs, questions about technology maturity and the staggered timeline of tenant lease renewals are just a few variables influencing the rollout of the airport’s complex electrification plans across a campus of 103 buildings, according to Amy Nagengast, energy program manager at SFO. 

An audit of its menagerie of hangers, mechanical facilities and passenger spaces is giving SFO a deeper understanding of the challenge ahead. Most of the airport’s energy (56 percent) already comes from electricity; natural gas supplies 44 percent. And of all the buildings using natural gas, four-fifths are tenant-occupied. “We’re really trying to figure out what equipment uses that natural gas,” said Nagengast, along with where it’s located, what electric alternatives are available and how best to finance a conversion. The audit is helping SFO sequence a conversion plan for both its own facilities and those occupied by tenants.

Electrifying restaurants is getting easier. SFO found that among its food and beverage tenants, natural gas consumption was concentrated in a short list of kitchen equipment: deep fryers, ovens and ranges. Swaying those restaurants to electrify is as much about education as it is about picking the best alternative gear. 

Once chefs start using electric induction ranges, they tend to like them, said Christopher Galarza, a pro chef who has electrified commercial kitchens and now runs Forward Dining Solutions. But preconceived beliefs can make conversion tough: “Chefs are, by nature, stubborn. We don’t like change.” Some of those doubts are founded on past experience, from underpowered ’50s-era electric coil stoves to vendors that can’t yet support the latest induction cooktops. 

But today, commercial kitchen suppliers have rolled out a full range of like-sized electric induction gear, which by many measures are better than their gas counterparts. Since electric induction cooktops are so efficient, much less energy is wasted. Food can cook more quickly and more consistently, thanks to more precise temperature control. And because kitchens are cooler overall, staff are less stressed and diners can be brought in closer to the cooking experience. Even skeptical kitchen vets are often “blown away by how this equipment can improve the restaurant experience,” Galarza said.

A CookTek commercial induction range. Via Cooktek.com.

About those woks

For all the advantages electric induction offers, development of new cooking equipment has followed a familiar arc. Early commercial induction stovetops and ovens arrived at high prices, beset with occasional performance glitches. Increasing scale is helping suppliers to work out those kinks, improve reliability and drive down costs.

Today, you’ll still find more natural gas cookers in supplier catalogs, but electric induction options are multiplying as prices fall and more chefs and restaurant managers discover their sometimes surprising advantages. Electric induction deep fryers, for example, use about half the oil of gas-heated versions, and the oil can last days longer. 

Woks have been trickier to convert but are tracing a similar path. When placed on a flat induction surface, too little of the wok heats up. The solution? A design that nestles the wok in a concave induction cavity delivers all of the heat — if none of the flame — using a fraction of the energy.

A quick scan of commercial kitchen supply houses shows induction woks remain costly but the price tags are coming down — lately to around $2,000 per station, about twice the price of a conventional pro rig. 

What’s next?

Don’t worry — your favorite stir fry isn’t going away. The parable of the wok illuminates an uneven path ahead for wider electrification. Change is hard and will take time, but it is underway. The technology is increasingly ready, but it will be pricey at first, which can make convincing skeptical stakeholders — from wok hei masters to big property developers — that much tougher. 

For their part, property developers are finding that as the barriers to electrification shrink, priorities are changing. “I would frame it as: What’s the cost of not electrifying?” said Becca Rushin, vice president of sustainability and social responsibility at Jamestown, a global real estate investment and management company. “In the grand scheme, the increased costs of electrification ends up being incremental. And you’re insulating yourself from the transition risk of being unprepared when legislation is passed.”

Published at GreenBiz.com on June 7, 2021. See the original here: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/challenges-building-electrification-or-parable-flameless-wok-hei

GreenBiz

Jigar Shah Is Making the DOE’s loans office mighty again. Here’s how | GreenBiz

By Adam Aston

Maybe you first knew him as chief executive of the Carbon War Room or as the co-founder of Generate Capital. Or maybe you came across him as a LinkedIn mega-influencer, GreenBiz contributor or even as a former co-host of The Energy Gang podcast — he’s the one with the ready laugh and the sharp takes.

Chances are, you already know Jigar Shah. He’s spent the past two decades making a compelling case for the climate-fixing, profit-generating potential of clean energy, all the while batting down ill-informed skeptics and bad business models.

Now, as part of the Biden administration’s effort to jump-start economy-wide decarbonization, Shah has been granted more capital — and a bigger platform — than he might ever have thought possible. 

The total: $46 billion, according to Shah. That’s the lending capacity he can mobilize at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which he was appointed to oversee in March. 

To make the “once-mighty” office — as his boss, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, put it — mighty again, Shah faces big challenges. The office has been all but dormant for much of the past decade, due in part to Trump-era deprioritization but also hampered by a lingering reputation for bureaucratic dysfunction. 

Barely three months into his new role, Shah joined this week’s VERGE Electrify virtual event to kick off the conference and share his plans to get the loans flowing once again, in a keynote conversation with GreenBiz Group’s Senior Transportation Analyst Katie Fehrenbacher, who co-chaired the event. 

Re-booting the LPO. Following a decade of dormancy, the office has moved into a fast-forward mode, fueled by Biden’s climate agenda and Shah’s contacts — he’s reached out to over 100 CEOs since he joined. “People are starting to realize that we’re open for business,” he said. “If we got maybe three applications all of last year, we’ve gotten three a week recently. That comes from people trusting the program will be there for them.” 

A catalytic role. Deep as LPO’s loan pool may be, Shah sees his office’s role as narrowly targeted — providing catalytic funding at a key stage, before companies are able to access commercial debt. Consider the example of nuclear energy innovators such as Oklo, NuScale or Holtect. “Small modular reactors are going to be built across the country,” said Shah. But they’re not likely to be able to raise commercial debt until the technology is de-risked. Shah sees LPO’s role as building a bridge to bankability: “Then, we’re done.”

Streamlining the process. By pushing an easier, more user-friendly approach, Shah is tackling head-on the office’s lingering reputation for being too costly, too complex and too long-odds. “We’ve dropped all the application fees,” he said. “And we don’t charge any of the other fees that we used to until you’ve received the loan and started to draw it down.”

Energizing climate justice. Shah sees a space where the LPO has the potential to both modernize the grid and benefit historically disenfranchised communities. Virtual power plants offer an opportunity to advance grid-scale energy services while helping cities and communities upgrade energy infrastructure and cut energy costs. That could mean building solar with storage on low-income housing or affordably financing grid-responsive smart air conditioners or water heaters. Models such as these promise to “not only get essential appliances affordably into the hands of people who need them,” said Shah, “you’re also able to get higher utilization rates from the existing distribution infrastructure.” 

Swings at bat. To the vexing question of how to pick winners from among emerging technologies, Shah brings the perspective of a seasoned climate tech entrepreneur. “We have to take a lot of swings at bat,” said Shah, “and we are going to have misses.” But misses — with a nod to the failure of Solyndra, a Obama-era solar startup — can be offset by towering successes, such as Tesla, to which the DOE lent $465 million in 2010, a moment when the then-nascent EV maker was far closer to failure than world domination. Today, it’s the world’s most valuable carmaker and has sparked a competitive race to electrify the automotive industry. “That’s what the president has talked about,” said Shah. “We want to make sure from a technology standpoint, we’re leading the pack worldwide.”

Tips for loan candidates. “Don’t be scared! Come in early,” advised Shah. To be sure: There will be many forms, but Shah’s team is working to ensure that the process is easier to navigate than before. Over the past month, the office has added more than 10 people to escort applicants through the loan process. “We want every person who thinks they have a good idea that deserves funding to have a shot.”

If you’re one of those people, the initial review process takes six weeks, typically. Once qualified, getting the approval stage takes four to five months of diligence.

By that timeline, Shah’s office will announce the first batch of new loans under the Biden administration by autumn, if not sooner. 

Published May 28, 2021 at https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-jigar-shah-sees-making-energy-departments-loans-office-mighty-again.

CPP Investments, White papers

Hydrogen’s new moment | CPP Investments

A white paper on behalf of Thinking Ahead, a thought leadership platform at CPP Investments, a Canadian pension fund.

Challenge: Survey hydrogen’s enormous potential role in the energy transition across multiple sectors for an audience of non-energy experts.

Solution: A short white paper overviewing fast developing news in the hydrogen space, offset by classic data visualizations: call outs, tables and explainers for emphasis.

My roles: research, writing, data composition, chart design/recommendation, writing, copy editing, design/visual editing.

View the full report at CPP Investments or download here:

2021-03 Hydrogen’s new moment Download

GARP, White papers

The Energy Transition: Risks and Opportunities | GARP

GARP-Energy-Risk-White-Paper-2021

  • This white paper surveys changes sweeping the global energy industry as net-zero carbon policy and alternative technologies begin to displace fossil fuels.
  • Researched and wrote 5,000-word report, drawing on primary research, press coverage and subject matter interviews; researched and designed data visualizations.
  • Target audience: Finance, traders and risk professionals in the finance, oil/gas, utility and renewables sectors.
  • On behalf of the Global Assn of Risk Professionals.  Published February 2021. 
  • Download the full report here or at garp.org.

GreenBiz

How tenants continue to press for greener commercial buildings, despite COVID-19 | GreenBiz

Manhattan’s once incandescent skyline is still dimmed, its office buildings emptied of workers. And Silicon Valley’s corporate campuses remain islanded, surrounded by seas of empty parking lots, as a nation of commuters continues to log in from home. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered office life — and the commercial building sector — in ways few could have dreamt of just a year ago. Yet as companies begin to map out tentative plans for a post-pandemic return to cubicles, the emphasis on greening those buildings hasn’t receded.

If anything, industry leaders say, COVID-19 has intensified the urgency of making buildings more energy efficient and healthy for workers. 

For Workday, with some 12,300 employees worldwide, decisions are still being made of how and when to return to its mix of owned and leased office spaces. But this hasn’t diminished the software company’s plans to add onsite solar panels and battery storage at its headquarters in the Bay Area in California.COVID-19 has intensified the urgency of making buildings more energy efficient and healthy for workers.

“Our focus on sustainability in our office buildings has remained strong. Leadership agreed we should be making this a priority and gave us their full support to make our buildings more environmentally friendly,” said Erik Hansen, Workday’s director of sustainability at a breakout session during GreenBiz Group’s clean economy conference last week, VERGE 20.

Landlords are seeing similar trends. “My tenants are very concerned about the erosion of environmental gains because of COVID,” said Sara Neff, senior vice president of sustainability at Kilroy Realty Corp., a Los Angeles-based landlord and developer with properties in San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest. 

It’s not just renewable energy anymore

Tenant concerns go well beyond energy issues. “Tenants are worried about things like, ‘What happens to our scope 3 emissions when nobody takes public transit? What happens to building energy consumption if we are constantly running the ventilation systems? What happens when our waste diversion numbers tank because we’re throwing away so much PPE and are back to single-use plastics in our kitchens?’” Neff added, referring to recent client conversations. 

“But nobody has backed off,” she added. “We’ve had [tenant] companies make new commitments since COVID began.”

As more companies engage in this process, they’re learning that making green upgrades can be more complicated when they lease, rather than own. Historically, inflexible, standard lease terms can make it difficult for a tenant to influence green building factors such as the kind of energy their landlord taps into, or even accessing detailed data on resource consumption. Workday has found that when setting up offices in multi-tenant buildings, negotiating technical lease terms early offers the best opportunity for success.

Workday has found that when setting up offices in multi-tenant buildings, negotiating technical lease terms early offers the best opportunity for success. “It’s best to have a dialogue with the landlord early on — while the lease is being negotiated — so that key language about procuring renewable energy can make it into the contract,” said Hansen.

The more tenants push, the more landlords can begin to drive change. “When a tenant asks about [things such as renewable energy or energy performance data] that’s when landlords start hiring people to run sustainability programs. Investments start getting made,” said Neff. “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of asking these questions and getting key terms into the lease.”

Rising expectations

Sure enough, tenants are beginning to do so. Momentum for change has been building since before COVID-19. “Starting 12 or 18 months ago, we started to see tenants really push us, and to collaborate on environmental projects, which has been great,” said Neff. 

As she sees it, tenants’ expectations have increased as more companies staff up to support their sustainability commitments. “Some of our big tenants are just now starting to hire heads of sustainability, so their sophistication is rising. Tenants who have been on the sidelines are now in the game,” she explained.

With tenants such as Workday and landlords such as Kilroy getting smarter about green building upgrades, gains can compound as trust deepens. “There tends to be more transparency and collaboration with landlord-tenant green building transactions,” said Rob Federighi, vice president of sales at Edison Energy, a global energy advisor based in Newport Beach, California. 

In practice, to make green building investments succeed, landlords need the right tenant, and vice versa. Tenant commitment can help landlords finance the investment necessary for major upgrades, such as solar plus storage. Tenants, meanwhile, need landlord support to achieve the sorts of zero-carbon energy goals more and more are committing to, Federighi added. 

Resources to help you green your lease

For both tenants and landlords exploring greener leases, libraries of standard lease terms have been developed and refined to help avoid common pitfalls. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” said Neff. The panelists recommended these resources: 

And as more players steer into this space, Neff emphasizes that climate urgency dictates pragmatism. For instance, green project developers should not shy away from offsite renewables. There can be a bias towards doing as much onsite efficiency investment as possible, followed by as much onsite renewable as possible, but off-site renewable energy is sometimes regarded as less impactful.

“We have nine years to solve climate change,” Neff said. “Let’s first get fossil fuels off the grid.’”

View the original story at Greenbiz.com here.

GreenBiz

How to value solar plus storage | GREENBIZ

In the wake of California’s summer of wildfires, blackouts and planned outages, many consumers and businesses are clamoring for more resilient options. The crisis has turbocharged interest in systems that deliver power even when the grid is down. Solar plus storage is fast emerging as a top choice, both at scale on the grid and also “behind the meter,” installed in a home, apartment or commercial building. 

“Solar plus battery storage can provide value in two ways: first, energy reliability for customers during emergency power outages, and second, during non-emergencies, to help the grid balance demand and generation,” said Dawn Weisz, chief executive of California utility MCE, during a breakout session at last week’s virtual VERGE 20 event. 

Founded in 2008 as California’s first not-for-profit, community choice aggregation program, MCE today serves over 1 million residents and businesses in four San Francisco Bay area counties: Contra Costa; Marin; Napa; and Solano.

When it comes to reliability, solar-with-storage systems offer the ability to charge a battery that can keep the power on during an outage. “It’s worth a lot to know you can keep your power on, especially for customers that have medical needs that rely on electricity,” Weisz said. “And those that need electricity for heating, cooling, and to keep food fresh.” 

Solar plus storage also helps the wider grid and environment by letting consumers shift the time when they consume solar power: by storing solar energy when it’s abundant during the day, and using it at night, in place of power generated from fossil fuels.

“Behind-the-meter storage lets you optimize solar consumption, taking up excess output during the day, and discharging it in the evening, when demand spikes,” explained Michael Norbeck, director of grid services business development at Sunrun, a San Francisco-based provider of residential solar systems and services. 

Indeed, absent storage, too much solar can become a challenge, when supply exceeds demand. In California, “We started to see so much solar going onto the grid that our ability to use it was diminishing,” Weisz said. 

In extreme cases, that can mean curtailing output: switching off the excess power flowing from solar farms. Storage can put that excess output to good use, flowing it back onto the grid when needed. “It’s in California’s best interest to be sure we’re using as much of those electrons as we can,” she said. “More batteries will help eliminate curtailment.” 

It’s no secret that the cost of solar energy has plummeted. In an October analysis of the levelized cost of energy — a measure that blends the full cost to finance, build and fuel an energy system over time — investment bank Lazard calculated that large-scale grid solar beats all fossil fuel options on cost, even absent any subsidies. Even rooftop solar, installed on homes or commercial buildings, is close to par with power from conventional sources such as natural gas peaker plants, coal and nuclear. 

Meanwhile, battery costs have followed a similar downward path. Average market prices for battery packs plunged by 87 percent in real terms in the decade to 2019, reports Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

MCE commercial battery storage project in partnership with Tesla and the College of Marin. The installation is estimated to save the college $10,000 per month on electricity bills. Courtesy of MCE.

Yet even as prices continue to fall, making these systems accessible to more consumers and businesses, concerns persist about equal access. Weisz noted that even as prices for combined systems fall, the market is following in the footsteps of early solar, when panels were installed first by wealthy customers but lower-income customers couldn’t afford the systems. 

As a not-for-profit dedicated to community energy services, MCE has tapped state subsidy programs, grants and other funding sources to extend the benefit of solar plus storage. “We don’t want to replicate the same patterns of disenfranchising our lower-income customers,” Weisz said. 

For its part, Sunrun has pioneered a pricing strategy that often results in power prices below the grid average, thereby reducing customers’ long-term costs. For instance, to minimize both installation costs and monthly fees, Sunrun’s most popular plan, BrightSave Monthly, leases panels to homeowners for $0 down, paid for via a long-term, stable price. 

With wildfires emerging as a nearly year-round threat to western states, the resilience that solar plus storage offers is growing in importance. Sunrun’s systems have grown increasingly responsive to remote management. When grid conditions grow unstable, Sunrun’s systems can island themselves and call on a reserve portion of the battery to support critical needs. 

Panels recharge batteries during the day, which can then discharge at night, even when blackouts can stretch from hours to days or even weeks. “During the wildfires last year, we had a customer on uninterrupted power for over 142 consecutive hours,” or nearly six days, Norbeck said. 

—

Originally published in Greenbiz.com.

GreenBiz

Sports sustainability gurus share their all-star plays | GreenBiz

Back in 2008, when the US Tennis Association launched an ambitious effort to lower the environmental impact of its mammoth US Open event, it turned out to be nearly impossible to find a vendor to supply enough recycled paper napkins, greener plates, cups and flatware. Niche suppliers existed, to be sure, but few were big enough to handle the two-week long event’s 700,000 guests.

In the world of greener sports events, those take-what-you-can-get early days are long gone. At the Green Sports Alliance’s third annual summit in Brooklyn this week, visitors could sample a dizzying array of recycled, recyclable, carbon neutral or compostable alternatives from vendors on hand, including bamboo plates, plant starch utensils, sugar-cane clamshells and even bioplastic sushi containers.

Tennis ball recycling at the US Open (Credit: US Open)

After holding its previous two summits in the green-friendly Pacific Northwest, the GSA shifted its summit to New York City this year.

“This is where the big leagues are,” Darby Hoover, NRDC senior resource specialist, told me. She meant that literally. The four largest pro leagues are headquartered within a few blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL).

From 11 teams and venues in 2011, when it debuted nationally, the alliance now boasts 180 from 16 pro and college leagues, along with concert-promoter and venue-giant AEG.“Competition absolutely raises the bar,” said Bob Nutting, Pittsburgh Pirates‘ chairman of the board. “There are a lot of competitive personalities in sports. Say you’re No. 3 in [recycling] diversion rates in the Major League. You can be sure we want to move to No. 2 or No. 1.”

The growing cadre of green-focused teams means that it’s rare these days to run into shortages of eco-supplies or services. Venue-focused efforts are de rigueur. Building LEED certified facilities, deploying aggressive recycling and food waste composting, installing low water bathrooms and high-efficiency lighting retrofits, along with renewable energy commitments and on-site installations, have all become standard operating procedure.

Job done? Hardly. That’s the easy stuff. It saves money by cutting waste, energy and resource use, said a senior sustainability executive who oversees scores of sporting venues and asked not to be named. But deep skepticism persists. There’s still an assumption that these are costly steps, although the industry has overcome the assumption that such options are impossible.

That’s mirrored in the share of teams that haven’t yet come on board. In baseball, for instance, 17 of 30 teams are GSA members. Just 12 of 32 NFL teams and a mere seven of 32 NBA teams are on board. Penetration into college level sports remains even thinner.

Click for full image (Credit: EPA)

To help the eco-laggards get with the game, here are seven tips from team owners and sustainability gurus.

Play the long game. “Everyone loves sustainability when it goes perfectly,” said Nutting. “In Pittsburgh, when I took over the team, it was in a losing cycle. So I got some unpleasant letters saying that we were valuing green priorities more than on-field experience.” The team fixed that in two ways. First, by winning: the Pirates are neck-and-neck with the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first divisional title in 21 years. And second, “by sticking to the priority through thick and thin.”

Moderate the message. Now in its sixth year of promoting green programs, the USTA is finding that less messaging can be more effective. “In the first year, we used the PA system with constant announcements and signage everywhere to remind visitors to recycle,” said Lauren Kittelstad Tracy, USTA’s senior manager of strategic initiatives. A survey revealed that it was too much. “Our guests know that recycling is important,” she said. “It’s more important to make it easy for them to do so than to remind them to do it.”

Tap into “jewel” events. Playoffs, championships and all-star games are emerging as high-visibility stages that leagues can use to extend the visibility of their green efforts into communities, the media and other franchises. Baseball has made its All-Star Games a prime focus for these efforts in recent years. At the 2013 game, the MLB deployed green teams to roam up and down the stadium, like vendors, to collect cups, cans and plastic. The effort helped achieve record rates of waste diverted from land fills, said Paul Hanlon, director of facility operations, MLB. To cut food waste, the event pushed beyond composting, by donating unsold foods to a charity.

Localize efforts, geographically and digitally. Asked if a fear of offending conservative voters might slow green initiatives in conservative areas, panels agreed hesitatingly. “If we put those messages [about carbon reduction] on Chevy’s Facebook [page], we get a ton of negative messages from deniers,” said David Tulauskas, director of sustainability at General Motors, which sponsors IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro. “On Twitter, there’s not so much of a problem, though.” Meanwhile, at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack near Austin, Tex., Formula One and other race events must be conducted under strict carbon emission and other eco rules set out as city law, explained Edgar Farrera, COTA’s director of sustainability.

Solar panel installation at St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium (Credit: Microgrid Solar)

Do more with sponsorship. Progress is slow in linking sponsorships to sustainability goals, said Justin Zeulner, senior director of sustainability and public affairs for the Portland Trail Blazers. Globally, some $14 billion in sponsorship funding is poured into sports deals, ranging from players’ shoe contracts to venue-naming rights. Yet while venues are working hard to green their operations, the link with sponsors is weak at best. There’s a disconnect between the strategic decision to sponsor a venue which is made at a very high level, GM’s Tulauskas explained, based on a given market age, gender mix, ethnicity, geography and other demographic factors. But the sustainability messaging happens locally, only once the agreement has been set, he added.

Put an (athlete’s) face on green goals. As yet, there is no Michael Jordan of sports sustainability. This is a problem, said Greg Busch, executive vice president of GMR Marketing, an event promotional agency, because as successful as any team may be in pushing greener practices, a celebrity athlete can reach a broader audience. “The athletes give you a face and a voice. That allows you to really communicate with kids, moms, fans in general,” he explained. Athletes remain apprehensive because green is such a broad platform, unlike many products or charities they commonly back.

Resources. As part of the event, the EPA announced its Green Sports Resource Directory, thick with advice on greening efforts, as well as a scorecard of leading efforts. NRDC debuted a guide focused on college efforts. The report, “Collegiate Game Changer,” complements the NRDC’s reference work for pro teams, “Game Changer,” published in November.

Image of astroturf by narokzaad via Shutterstock. Photo of solar panels atop the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium via Microgrid Solar.

~

Check out the original story at:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/08/29/pro-sports-sustainability-gurus-share-their-all-star-plays

Corporate Knights

American Water: How energy shifting earns profits for a water utility | Corporate Knights

If they ever think of water works, most people imagine pipes and pumps – more Victorian age than high tech. After all, in most cities, the big facilities that filter our drinking water and process our waste are out of sight, out of mind. But ask Ron Dizy, president and chief executive of Enbala Power Networks, about North America’s thousands of water works, and he’ll tell you they represent an enormous reservoir of untapped, low-cost energy services potential.

Connected to Enbala’s smart-grid systems, water works is just the first category of big energy consumers that, by rapidly shifting when and how they use electricity, have the ability to help smooth out micro-fluctuations in the grid’s energy flows, displacing the fossil-fuelled generators that now perform this service. What’s more, Enbala’s software could boost renewable energy, too. It provides the kind of grid stabilization needed to help manage the variability of solar and wind energy as these sources make up more of the power mix.

Dizy’s vision is taking shape at a pumping station in Shire Oaks, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s where American Water, the largest publicly-traded water and wastewater utility in the United States, is collaborating with Toronto-based Enbala. American Water has connected the pumps and compressors at its facility to Enbala’s smart-grid software, which can remotely turn the machines up or down to help keep supply and demand of electricity on the regional grid in constant balance. In the industry, this is called frequency regulation.

“Think of frequency regulation as a cruise control for the electric system,” explains Scott Baker, an analyst at PJM Interconnection, which manages a section of the U.S. grid spanning 13 states, plus the nation’s capital. To go a steady 60 mph, your cruise control imperceptibly adjusts gas and brakes to keep your speed constant. “Regulation services do the same thing, adding or reducing power on the grid to keep its frequency in balance,” says Baker. And like cruise control, which adds only spurts of gas or taps the brakes to control speed, regulation services require relatively small adjustments to do their job, with tiny doses of power added or consumed to stabilize frequency.

Conventionally, grid operators such as PJM have paid specialized generators to provide these balancing services. Because frequency regulation must be supplied in real time, all the time, these plants must be designed to be extra rugged, able to ramp up or down very quickly.

To be clear, regulation services are different from the so-called demand response. “You might call them distant cousins,” says Dizy. Demand response works when big energy consumers agree to switch off big users of power, with advance notice, for a few hours, a few times a year, when demand on the grid is greatest. On the other hand, regulation services are delivered on smaller scales, but are required 24 hours a day, every day, for minutes rather than hours, he explains.

Enbala’s solution turns the conventional approach on its head. Its software eliminates the need to generate electricity to balance the grid. It performs the same trick by managing electricity demand in real time. As such, the process can behave like a battery, Dizy notes. Rather than store energy in chemical form, as in a battery, Enbala describes its approach as “process storage,” where mechanical processes – such as filtering water – can be banked in advance of their use.

When, for instance, PJM needs a tiny increase in power use, Enbala requests that the pumps at American Water’s facility boost the flow of water into a holding tank by a few per cent. Or, if PJM needs power use to fall by a fraction, massive air pumps at the facility used to aerate wastewater treatment can be turned down. The adjustments are small – a few per cent up or down, for only a few minutes.

Enbala’s remote tweaking is designed to have no net effect on the water works’ processes. “At the end of the day, we’re just shifting when we use the power,” says Paul Gagliardo, manager of innovation development at American Water. Yet both companies earn a steady stream of payments from PJM for supplying the frequency regulation service.

The benefits for American Water have tallied up quickly. After less than a year working with Enbala, the water company reports that its total energy bill at the facility has fallen by two to three per cent. Happy with the outcome, it is now rolling out the system to 20 or so of its facilities.

Dizy’s company has identified many other industries that can provide regulation services by turning their processes up or down on the fly. “We’re just beginning to scratch the surface,” PJM’s Baker says.

See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/american-water?page=show

GreenBiz

How to jump-start the vehicle-based smart grid | GreenBiz

The triple tragedy that struck Japan in March 2011 is already remaking global energy markets. In the wake of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, public outrage over the meltdown delayed or derailed nuclear energy’s promised renaissance in many markets.

Yet if Japan’s tragedy hastened the demise of one energy technology, it may have jumpstarted another. In the year since, as Japan struggled to cope with crippling shortages of electric capacity, a handful of automakers have brought to market appliances that convert electric vehicle batteries into systems that can provide backup power to homes and help support the teetering grid.

In April, Mitsubishi Motors unveiled a portable adaptor, the MiEV power Box. For roughly $1,800, the appliance lets owners of MiEV electric cars plug in, and draw up to 1.5 kilowatts. A month later, Nissan followed suit with its Leaf to Home, a $7,000 device that, drawing power from a Leaf EV, can power a typical Japanese home for up to two days. Toyota too is demonstrating a similar system linked to its plug-in Prius hybrid in 10 homes and plans to launch a commercial version next year, if all goes well.

For the thousands of Americans suffering through power problems this summer—due to a punishing heat wave and storms in the mid-Atlantic—the appeal of these technologies is surely tantalizing. The case for EVs would sure seem more compelling if consumers knew the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf in their garage could also power their homes during an outage.

In fact, vehicle to grid, or V2G, has emerged as a sort of holy green grail. All manner of energy gurus — from Google.org to Rocky Mountain Institute-founder Amory Lovins to the DOE to Wired magazine — have recognized V2G as a grand solution to many of the problems that bedevil our grid and transportation fleet.

The promised benefits go well beyond household backup. As consumers buy more EVs, the combined stock of batteries offers utilities a low-cost path to grid-scale storage—why pay for grid batteries, if utilities can “borrow” EVs to perform the same trick? In turn, cheaper storage capacity paves the way for more solar panels and windmills by making it easier to store their notoriously variable output. And since utilities today pay for the sorts of storage services EVs might deliver, V2G systems could earn cash payments for EV owners, thereby lowering the cost of EVs and boosting their sales.

Yet despite Japan’s new systems, a comprehensive V2G solution remains years off. “[They are] a good first step, but they essentially turn the car into an expensive backup generator. There’s still a big leap to V2G,” says Ted Hesser, Energy Smart Technologies analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

In Japan, those new systems can support the grid indirectly, by feeding power back to the households and reducing their pull from the grid. But for now, they cannot link to the grid: by regulation, they’re strictly vehicle-to-home, or V2H, Ali Izadinajafabadi, a Tokyo-based analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance wrote in an email.

To make the leap from V2H to V2G will require navigating a thicket of barriers, including funding investment needs, upgrades to grid software, and creating cooperation between industry players who, so far, haven’t been eager to play.

The first of these barriers is a simple lack of standardization for two-way EV connections. It took big automakers years to agree on technical standards on how one-way charging plugs would be built. The effort didn’t account for two-way flow of power. Already dogged by high-costs and reliability concerns over EVs, carmakers are wary of imperiling warranty terms, or adding to the material and engineering costs to create two-way plugs that might not ever be used.

“It’s not that it can’t be done,” says Mark Duvall, Director of Transportation Research at EPRI, the utility industry’s policy research arm. “The automakers, utilities and the others involved have had a lot of other challenges to solve first.”

The Japan solution, Duvall explains, cleverly works around this barrier by offloading the technology necessary to manage the power flow out of the car into a standalone device. Both the Nissan and Mitsubishi systems tap into the EV batteries through high-power, 440-volt direct-current connections, which remain rare in the U.S.

Then there’s the closely related problem of the lack of a smart grid. For V2G networks to deliver grid-scale benefits, they will have to be connected into advanced systems able to communicate to vast numbers of EVs, in real time, to orchestrate hundreds of small power sources so that they behave as a single sizeable resource that can be tapped by grid mangers such as PJM. Those systems are taking shape, “But they’re not there yet,” says Bloomberg’s Hesser.

Another scale problem: there aren’t yet enough EVs on the market to make big V2G plays of interest to utilities. Sales have been steady, but slow. Pike Research recently postponed until 2018 the year in which it projects EVs will hit 1 million in the U.S. Until they reach a critical number, they’re too thinly dispersed, and too few in number to provide megawatt-scale storage and other power services that interest utilities, adds Hesser.

Lastly, however appealing they look on paper, the economics of V2G networks remain less than compelling for EV owners, especially if early systems run as high as Nissan’s $7,000 unit in Japan.

Last year, NRG Energy unveiled a pilot program called eV2g. Targeting commercial fleets, the company estimates that each vehicle would net $440 per year, Erica Gieswrites in Forbes.com.

A 2010 study by CMU looked at consumer (not fleet) V2G. The researchers used market information on the value of the sorts of near-, medium-, and long-term energy storage services V2G networks could provide and estimated the total annual value for an individual EV owner at not more than $250.

These guesses also underestimate the costs utilities face to market these programs as well. “You have to convince consumers to adopt this very new way of owning a vehicle,” says Hesser. As we’ve seen with EVs, “That takes a massive amount of marketing and education.”

What then will it take to get V2G off the ground here? Progress will continue, to be sure. Writing in the New York Times Wheels blog, green car guru Jim Motavalli reports that Nissan and Mitsubishi are both evaluating the option of adapting their V2H systems to the U.S. Meanwhile, pilot scale V2G efforts, run by the DOE, NRG and others are ongoing — but they involve only tens or hundreds of vehicles.

Such projects won’t get to commercial scale anytime soon. For V2G to link up millions of vehicles, and fulfill its green promise, Hesser believes the industry will have to push the technology, rather than wait for consumers to pull it. “For V2G to work, it means lining up the interests of vehicle owners, carmakers, smart grid players,” he says. “There’s just too many players for this to happen anytime soon on its own.”

He likens the challenge to the conundrum facing energy-efficient appliances. In that market, the value of energy savings were too low, or spread out, to motivate consumers. So the DOE stepped in to establish efficiency and technology standards that have delivered huge aggregate energy savings.

Specialized commercial fleets also show early V2G promise. An MIT study cited by CleanTechnica.com suggests that fleets may offer a sweeter spot for V2G deployments, at least early on. Trucks or buses, after all, require bigger battery packs. And because they park in the same area, they offer big battery capacity in a single location, making them easier to orchestrate. The study estimates earnings potential of up to $1,700 per truck.

Very high prices for energy could jump start V2G, too. Consider Nuvve — to date, the leading commercial scale V2G effort in the world. Started in 2011, the company is based in Denmark where, importantly, electricity rates are roughly four times higher than in the U.S. Plus, a third of electric power comes from variable renewable sources such as wind, so storage services are paid at a high rate.

Based on business plans mapped out by Zachary Shahan at CleanTechnica.com, EV owners in Nuvve’s network will be able to rake in up to $10,000 from V2G services over a vehicle’s lifetime.Finally, there’s the hard-to-price appeal of backup for blackouts. The U.S., luckily, hasn’t faced power problems as dire as Japan’s. But if blackouts multiply, necessity may spur V2G invention here too.