As I reported this week in The Times, many homeowners with solar panels on their roofs found themselves without electricity along with their conventionally powered neighbors when Hurricane Sandy knocked out power along the coasts of New Jersey, Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island. But in Bayonne, N.J., a school with an unusual coupling of a solar array and a backup diesel generator found itself chugging along through the storm and its aftermath, allowing more than 50 residents to spend the night that Sandy hit on cots in a heated, dry and well-lighted community room.
At the heart of the system, designed and installed by Advanced Solar Products at the Midtown Community School, a designated evacuation center, is a special inverter with software that allows electricity from the panels to stop flowing out into the grid when it goes down.
It?s a standard safety mechanism that protects line workers from electrocution during repairs. But in this case, the electricity goes to fuel critical systems in the building. The inverter keeps the emergency generator humming at a much lower level while the sun is shining and brings it back up to the necessary level when it is too cloudy or when night falls.
The set-up has its own vulnerability in that if the generator runs out of diesel, the whole system shuts down, a weakness that the company is addressing with a new design that incorporates batteries as well.
?We already have residential-sized solar systems that can incorporate solar panels, batteries and generators, all in a single inverter, but that has not existed in commercial-sized systems until now,? said Lyle Rawlings, chief executive of the company, based in Flemington, N.J..
That approach, one of many that various designers and companies are pursuing, is helping to light a path toward a more resilient energy future, one in which relationships between consumers and the grid are more dynamic. My own house, a tiny bungalow built in the 1910s near the ocean in Rockaway Beach, took a beating along with the rest of my neighborhood, where many of us were flooded and are still without power.
But we were lucky on my block to get a solar charging station in the community garden through Solar One, a nonprofit and educational group, and Power Rockaways Resilience, a group that is raising money to bring more mobile solar generation to the area.
I was curious to learn more about how people in the Northeast and elsewhere in the United States might be better prepared for disasters like Sandy ? or run-of-the-mill summer blackouts. I asked Mr. Rawlings to explain how new and developing technologies, especially batteries and inverters, are being put to use and how they might help ease growing strains on the grid going forward. Following are excerpts from our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
Q.
What kind of solar system might homeowners want to install if they were clobbered by Sandy and are thinking, ?I don?t ever want that to happen to me again??
A.
If you?re building PV [photovoltaics] for the first time, it?s pretty simple: you choose an inverter that?s capable of working with batteries and you?re putting in the batteries. And you would take your critical loads and put them in a separate panel, an emergency panel. The bad news is that this is fairly costly ? anywhere from $7,000 to $12,000, and that?s a very rough estimate. That?s on top of the cost of a typical PV system, which is probably at this time maybe $22,000 to $30,000. It?s quite an add-on.
But, on the other hand, that?s going to operate reliably and silently during a storm. People aren?t going to have to wait in line to fill up their gas cans and listen to a generator all night, and the cost of an automatic permanently installed generator is probably as much or more than that. It might cost a bit more to do it as a retrofit, but it should be close to the same.
Q.
What are some of the newer technologies that are making this possible?
A.
Battery technology is advancing, and the inverters that can work with those batteries are becoming commercially available. Interestingly enough, the main motivation that?s bringing this to market is not emergency power, it?s a different issue altogether. We?ve got to start thinking now of how our electric grid is going to handle higher penetration of renewable resources that are intermittent ? sun and wind.
You?ve got to ask what happens when the clouds roll over or when the winds stop blowing, and part of the answer to that is battery storage so that you don?t get sudden changes that overwhelm the capability of controlling the grid and start to get the grid destabilizing and have blackouts or brownouts. Another important thing that the batteries can do is help control the frequency of the electric power.
So frequency regulation is a service that solar power systems can start to offer to the grid and actually get paid for it by PJM, which is the independent system operator in this region. So that economic incentive is getting people to install these battery-scale inverters.
Q.
What has happened in the world of batteries that?s allowing this suddenly to go forward?
A.
It?s driven by that perception that solar is coming and wind is coming ? they?re getting larger and larger ? and apart from renewables, the grid needs stabilization. We?ve seen the fragility of the grid in this storm, in the Northeast ice storm, and in Irene and in the snowstorm of Halloween last year. At the same time, the need for electric cars has been driving battery research, and so all these things have gone together and big companies have been pouring money into it.
Q.
What do you think could be a kind of game changer for a place like New York, to make us a little more resilient?
A.
The incentives that exist in New Jersey for batteries connected to PJM ? those kind of frequency-regulating services ? those don?t exist in N.Y.I.S.O., the grid operator in New York. So that should be instituted as quickly as possible. A smart thing to do would be for New York State to have some incentive for batteries because of this recognition that they?re not just helping people with emergency power but they can do a lot of other things.
They?ll be vital once we get to the point where the penetration of PV and wind in the grid are higher. The future of energy is going to be more complicated than in the past ? it?s going to have wind, it?s going to have solar, it?s going to have demand-side management and energy efficiency, and the people trying to keep the lights on, the grid operators, are going to need to think differently and batteries are going to be a big part of that change.
Q.
New Jersey seems to be pretty far ahead in laying the groundwork for this very complicated energy future that you?re talking about.
A.
New Jersey is by a lot of measures the leading state in the nation in developing solar power: it?s the fastest-growing solar market, in absolute size it?s second only to California, and it?s catching up. Just three or four years ago, California was about six to seven times the size of the Jersey market, but last year New Jersey was 60 percent the size of the California market, even though California is four and a half times the size of New Jersey population-wise.
And sometimes it?s ahead in making the mistakes that other states can learn from. We?re leading the way in terms of lessons learned, and what not to do as well.
Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/after-the-storm-a-solar-reckoning/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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