A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas in this September 2008 file photo. Besides becoming a net exporter for the first time in its history, the United States will also gradually shift from the use of coal to generate energy, to natural gas, according to Consumer Energy Report. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters/File)
Exxon: US energy production surge to continue
A new report released this week by fuel giant Exxon says the energy production revival in the United States will continue into the far future, confirming the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) prediction that the country will become a new exporter of energy by 2025.
The annual long-term energy report outlines Exxon’s view of the surging American energy sector, taking into account new production in both the U.S. and Canada, along with increased energy efficiency and expanded distribution networks, in determining the country’s energetic future, with the report also noting that generally flat demand around the developed world is expected over the next 10-15 years. (Read More: U.S. Energy Production to Hit Record Highs)
“This competitive energy supply provides a strong foundation for increased economic output in the U.S., opening up many new and valuable opportunities in many regions and sectors of the U.S. economy,” said William Colton, Exxon Mobil’s vice president of corporate planning. “This includes not only the energy sector, but also chemicals, steel and manufacturing.” ( Continue… )
In this November 2012 file photo, a National Grid crew repair power lines that were brought down from the effects of Superstorm Sandy, in Port Washington, N.Y. Utilities can leverage their unique position to accelerate and manage energy innovations, according to two associates from GreenOrder/Cleantech Group. (Kathy Kmonicek/AP/File)
Three ways utilities can lead energy innovation
The speed of innovation outside the walls of utilities outstrips the speed of innovation within. As new and disruptive vendors, technologies, and business models enter the market, many utilities have seemed unsure about what their role is or should be. In the third in our four-part series (See Part I by Mat McDermid, Finding the Regulated Utility Role in a Shifting Energy Landscape; and Part II by Sam Shrank, How Behavioral Science Can Increase Energy Efficiency Adoption), we discuss how utilities can and should leverage their unique position to accelerate and manage the deployment of innovations for the benefits of all customers.
Here are three roles utilities can play to better manage innovation in a changing market.
The ambassador: help customers understand the benefits of new innovations
Technology advancements are broadening customer access to a wide range of new energy services. But technology alone is never enough: customers must feel comfortable incorporating these advancements into their daily lives. Utilities are well-suited to providing customers with answers on a wide range of energy services and moving them up the adoption curve. They have already achieved significant success in areas such as energy efficiency, where the average cost per kWh saved through utility energy efficiency programs is just 2.5 cents. Areas such as electric vehicles are opportunities for utilities to build on this success as ambassadors for new energy services.
Many customers are already somewhat familiar with the host of benefits promised by electric vehicles, such as lower fuel costs, greater energy independence, and reduced emissions. However, as new charging technologies and batteries enter the market, customers have many questions about adoption expense, reliability, and technical feasibility. ( Continue… )
SolarCity Founder & COO Peter Rive and SolarCity Founder & CEO Lyndon Rive celebrate the company’s IPO at Nasdaq Thursday. The successful SolarCity IPO may indicate a proclivity towards investment in solar system installers over manufacturers. (Mark Von Holden/AP Images for SolarCity)
SolarCity IPO: How it beat the solar curse
A day after lowering expectations by cutting the price of its shares, SolarCity Corp. saw its initial public offering make a soaring Wall Street debut.
SolarCity's shares opened at $9.25 on Nasdaq, up 16 percent from its IPO price. By Thursday's close, it had gained $3.79 per share, a stunning rise of nearly 50 percent.
What a difference a day makes.
The change of fortune is a sign investors may be warming to the "buy side" of the solar industry. As an installer, SolarCity does not compete with the proliferation of cheap Chinese panels arriving on US shores. It instead capitalizes on the flooded market. ( Continue… )
Jose Zuinga, senior installer for SolarCity, prepares to install solar panels on the roof of a home in Palo Alto, Calif., in this 2011 file photo. SolarCity announced Wednesday Dec. 12, 2012, it will reduce the price of its IPO shares to $8 apiece, instead of an expected $13 to $15 per share. (Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor/File)
SolarCity IPO share price slashed. Cloudy skies ahead for solar?
The business outlook for SolarCity Corp. dimmed this week.
The installer of residential solar systems postponed its much-anticipated announcement of its initial public offering Tuesday, only to sharply reduce its share price in announcing its IPO the following day.
Instead of the $13 to $15 per share price it previously expected, SolarCity now says it will sell its IPO shares at $8 apiece, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday. The San Mateo, Calif.,-based company also announced it would offer 11.5 million shares of stock, up from 10.1 million shares. The IPO could be floated later this week.
The price reduction cuts the company's previously estimated value of nearly $1 billion almost in half, to about $584.6 million. ( Continue… )
A storage tank looms over a freeway at the Enbridge Edmonton terminal in Edmonton in this August 2012 file photo. Enbridge's latest investment will allow the energy company to increase fuel access by 400,000 barrels per day of light oil to markets in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, according to Consumer Energy Report (Dan Riedlhuber/Reuters/File )
Enbridge set to invest $6.28 billion in oil pipeline
Energy firm Enbridge has announced that it has received support from shippers and will go ahead with its investment of $6.28 billion in expanding the system of pipelines that transport crude from locations in Canada and the United States around North America.
The project, dubbed the Light Oil Market Access Program, will see improvements made to several pipeline systems spanning the continent in order to boost their capacity, including the North Dakota regional system, the United States mainline system, and the Canadian mainline terminal capability system.
This expanded ability to move light crude around the continent will have benefits for many refineries, notably those on the east coast, allowing Enbridge to increase fuel access by 400,000 barrels per day of light oil to markets in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as many areas in the midwestern United States. (Read More: Obama Under Increasing Pressure to Make Keystone XL Decision)
The announcement comes as Enbridge works to improve its penetration in delivering crude to North American markets, beginning with the launch of the so-called Eastern Access Program announced in May 2012, and a similar program intended to help ship oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico; all money invested so far has improved the mainlines that ship oil throughout the continent. ( Continue… )
In this 2009 file photo, an A123 Systems Inc. high power lithium ion cell for electric vehicles is displayed in Livonia, Mich. When the bankrupt battery maker announced Sunday that it would sell its assets to China's Wanxiang Group, critics have warned about US security threats from the pending sale. (Paul Sancya/AP/File)
A123 sale to China: threat to US security?
The auction sale to a Chinese company of bankrupt advanced battery maker A123 Systems, which received millions in US taxpayer support, is drawing heavy fire for both national and economic security concerns.
On Sunday, the US-based auto parts subsidiary of China's Wanxiang Group, outbid US-based Johnson Controls, Japan's NEC, and Germany's Siemens by paying $256.6 million for the assets of the company. A Delaware bankruptcy court was weighing the deal Tuesday.
If approved by the bankruptcy judge, the sale of A123 still must go through one more hoop. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a federal advisory group led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, still must approve any sale of a US business to a foreign company.
Under normal circumstances, sale of assets of a bankrupt auto-parts supplier would draw little attention. Not so for Waltham, Mass.-based A123, which makes lithium-ion batteries for next-generation plug-in hybrid and all-electric battery-powered cars. The reason: its $249 million clean-energy grant from the Obama administration. ( Continue… )
The Chicago skyline is seen in this June 2012 file photo. The US Department of Energy awarded the Argonne National Laboratory a $120 million grant over 5 years, alongside a $35 million commitment for a new 45,000 square foot facility from the State of Illinois, Stuebi writes. (Carolyn Kaster/AP/File)
Is Chicago a new cleantech hub?
At the end of November, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it had selected Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago to host the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), and bestowed upon it a $120 million grant over 5 years, alongside a $35 million commitment for a new 45,000 square foot facility from the State of Illinois.
As noted in this article in the Chicago Tribune, the goal for the JCESR is to improve battery technologies by a factor of five — five times cheaper, with five times higher performance — within five years.
One of the nation’s Energy Innovation Hubs just being launched, the JCESR has an impressive list of collaborators. In addition to Argonne, four other national laboratories – Lawrence Berkeley, Pacific Northwest, Sandia and SLAC National Accelerator – will also conduct research under the JCESR umbrella. University research partners include Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and theUniversity of Michigan. A long list of the leading venture capital firms active in the cleantech arena – including ARCH Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Technology Partners and Venrock – will serve on an advisory panel to help focus the research on commercially-interesting opportunities. Corporate titans Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT), Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW)and Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) have loaned their names to the effort. ( Continue… )
In this March 2012 file photo, PetroChina oil rigs are seen near the banks of a snow-covered lake in Daqing in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province. Because of the cost issue, a transition away from oil will likely require very long time, up to 50 years, Tverberg writes. (AP/File)
Leveraging energy: why China succeeds where the US fails
If an employer wants to maximize profits, it will want to leverage its use of high-priced energy sources. From an employer’s point of view, there are basically three kinds of energy, from most to least expensive:
- Human energy
- Petroleum energy
- Everything else
If an employer wants to keep its costs low, it needs to minimize its use of expensive energy sources. The primary way it does this is by leveraging expensive energy sources with cheaper energy sources that help keep overall energy costs in line with what competitors (including overseas competitors) are paying. Thus, employers will want to use as little human and petroleum energy as possible, instead using cheap energy to substitute.
Human Energy
Human energy is the most expensive form of energy. It is very expensive because an employer needs to pay the employee enough to live on. This amount includes the cost of energy to fulfill the human’s needs, plus enough extra to cover taxes to cover the cost of energy for those who for some reason cannot work, plus taxes for maintenance of public infrastructure. An employer can keep his cost of human energy low by ( Continue… )
A heating oil delivery truck drives through Alexandria, Va., in this 2010 file photo. Of all four fuels, oil is the most costly way to heat a home this winter, according to the EIA. (Molly Riley/Reuters/File)
Heating oil: a last stand in the Northeast?
It’s getting hard to justify using oil heat, even in the Northeast, where the fossil fuel is making its last stand in the home-heating market.
The gap between heating oil and natural gas prices has grown so large – the biggest in at least a decade – that the incentive to convert to cheaper natural gas keeps growing. While it can cost $10,000 or more for a homeowner to make the switch, conversions appear to be on the rise. Some states are trying to make it easier for homeowners to convert, touting efficiency gains and emissions reductions. But the oil-heat industry isn't giving up without a fight.
The latest battleground is Connecticut. Gov. Dannel Malloy wants to extend gas lines to provide more than 300,000 customers the option to stick with oil or switch to natural gas, which would more than halve winter heating costs. Oil service companies, often small family-owned concerns, call his plan favoritism.
"They're using state resources to eliminate jobs, delivery drivers, customer service representatives," Stephen G. Rosentel, head of a family-owned home heating business in Danbury, told the Associated Press. "These are real jobs and real people, and they matter." ( Continue… )
The number of homes relying on wood-burning as a primary heat source is projected to rise 3 percent this winter. (Pat Wellenbach/AP/File)
Fighting winter with fire? Wood-burning on the rise.
Americans are warming to an old-fashioned technology to heat their homes: wood-burning stoves.
Some people are looking for cheap heat. Others prefer wood because it can free them from the energy grid. Wood consumption for home heating has risen steadily over the past decade in the United States, reversing a decline in the 1980s and '90s, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The number of homes using wood as a primary heat source has risen 24 percent since 2006, and is projected to rise another 3 percent this winter.
But just as wood is going mainstream, its growth as a heating source is under threat. Environmental groups point to troublesome airborne particulates created by burning wood. Several groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Clean Air Watch, sent a letter this month to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking that federal wood-burning standards, set in 1988, be made more stringent.
"[T]he stuff we've learned about particles since the 1990s is voluminous," says Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of national policy at the American Lung Association in Washington. "We have had thousands of studies since then that are not addressed in the evidence the EPA has on the requirement book because they simply didn't exist." ( Continue… )
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