Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below — including a transcript and summary of the conversation.
For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell is joined by Dan Juhl, Partner at E2SG Partners. Juhl and his partners develop clean energy projects — in particular, integrated systems that combine solar, wind, and/or battery storage. He discusses how commercial-scale, hybrid solar and wind systems are a “real match” that can circumvent transmission system concerns.
The Electricity Transportation System is Failing
High-voltage transmission lines are overburdened, lack regulatory oversight, and as a result, are poorly planned. Accordingly, rural energy projects often come up against costly transmission upgrades to get their electricity to consumers. The alternative of building wind and solar farms closer to consumption, Dan Juhl explains, often comes up against resistance from the community.
Developers can work around the transmission system, but high-voltage lines are not the only problem. New York Times op-ed contributors Justin Gillis and Tyler H. Norris recently raised the issue of more local, 115,000 to 230,000 volt power lines — identifying them as “What Is Really Strangling the Energy Transition.” But what about even more localized power lines?
However, in his two decades of developing commercial-scale renewable power, Juhl has found that community-scale renewable energy systems actually relieve some of the stress of energy transmission.
How can we economically put commercial scale power into the system and do it in a more efficient way and not really tax the transmission system, but actually help it.
The Case for Generating Power Where It Is Consumed
Juhl explains how building smaller-scale, distributed energy generation systems that blend into the community is a win-win. When the project is close to the electricity consumers, it does not require an updated transmission line. Avoiding transmission also makes better use of the electricity, as transforming and carrying electricity incurs losses.
Projects located within the distribution network act more as a reduction of electricity load than as a generator, says Juhl. They free up space on existing transmission lines, as the community no longer needs to import the electricity they generate. Juhl stresses the importance of combating load as consumers electrify their cars and buildings. When it comes to solar’s often-raised intermittency issue, Juhl believes that pairing wind and solar together is especially effective.
For-profit electric utilities, in particular, are trying to sell the electricity that they generate. They earn a guaranteed rate of return when they build power plants, so they do not want to buy electricity from self-generators — even if that electricity is cheaper for their customers. This conflict of interest carries the most weight in regulated markets, where one utility controls electric generation and the distribution.
Developing renewable energy in rural electric cooperative territory has its own challenges, explains Juhl. Because of “all-requirements” contracts, distribution cooperatives must buy nearly all of their electricity from one wholesale provider.
Still, Juhl says utilities would be better off to embrace distributed generation. When utilities are refusing to interconnect customer-owned generation systems, customers will be pushed to pair their generation with storage. And on the combination of energy conservation, wind generation, solar generation, and battery storage? “That’s when the wire clipper comes out,” says Juhl.
Juhl believes that his “solar bank,” a battery storage and energy management system, can scale up and provide energy consumers with more options. If the utilities are concerned about their monopoly, they should be very concerned about the advent of distributed renewables with storage becoming a real problem.
For concrete examples of how towns and cities can take action toward gaining more control over their clean energy future, explore ILSR’s Community Power Toolkit. Explore local and state policies and programs that help advance clean energy goals across the country, using ILSR’s interactive Community Power Map.
By: Maria McCoy
Maria McCoy is a Researcher with the Energy Democracy Initiative. In this role, she contributes to blog posts, podcasts, video content, and interactive features.
ILSR posts about PURPA, the federal law that governs the rules and pricing connecting projects to the grid.
Episode 33 of local Energy Rules, where Ed Marston and John Farrell talk about a federal court ruling that laid the groundwork for projects like Dan’s Solar-Wind Hybrids.Read the New York Times opinion piece on
2021 Local Solar Developer Survey, which shows how electric utilities and policymakers are creating unexpected delays and added costs for solar projects.For more on the economic impact of community-owned generation facilities, read ILSR’s
For entrepreneurs still feeling the sting of global supply chain turbulence, there is a new tool coming to market. Amazon Web Services is delving into supply chain management with a new cloud-based application to help businesses manage their inventory and coordinate their networks of manufacturers, suppliers, distribution facilities, and transportation providers.
The machine learning-powered software, which is now available in preview, offers a real-time visual map of a company’s entire supply chain network and aggregates data from other enterprise applications and suppliers into a single system. Based on that information, the application offers automated alerts and recommendations about inventory rebalancing, lead times, and potential risks, such as backlogs or stocks that are running low.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced AWS Supply Chain during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week. “The past two years have highlighted the importance of supply chain resilience. From baby formula shortages to ships circling ports unable to unload, the disruptions have been widespread and deeply felt,” said Selipsky during his keynote speech. “AWS Supply Chain helps you mitigate risks and lower costs.”
While congestion in the global supply chain has improved from the worst levels seen during the height of the pandemic, managing logistics remains a pressing problem facing entrepreneurs. In November, the global supply chain pressure index increased for the second straight month. The New York Federal Reserve, which calculates the measure, said that China was the biggest contributing factor.
The manufacturing superpower, which produces nearly 30 percent of products worldwide, spent much of the past month under strict Covid-19 lockdowns, and that nationwide halt has slowed the global supply chain’s march back to normal. Small-business owners have felt the impact. Nearly a third of business owners report that supply chain disruptions have had a significant impact on their business, according to the most recent monthly report from the National Federation of Independent Business.
Of those surveyed, only one out of 10 said that their business had not been impacted by recent supply chain disruptions. Fixing that pain point has become a major opportunity for the B2B market, and AWS is not the first company to make a leap into the sector. Logistics and supply chain management grew into a $20.24 billion industry this year, according to the research and consulting firm Gartner–making it the fastest-growing market within enterprise software applications.
Even Selipsky’s rollout at the AWS re:Invent conference came less than a month after Microsoft unveiled its own supply chain management platform in mid-November. Still, Amazon, which ships 1.6 million packages a day, could be uniquely situated to solve the supply chain crunch for other businesses, because the homegrown tool harnesses Amazon’s own expertise and data.
“It combines nearly three decades of Amazon.com’s innovation and learning and experience with its own supply chain as we’ve modeled and built it over the years,” said Tariq Choudry, manager of new products and strategy for AWS. He spoke during a breakout session at the conference that discussed applying machine learning to the supply chain and detailed more of the functionality of AWS Supply Chain.
Be warned: Business owners should prepare to keep dealing with logistical problems in the new year, because the AWS CEO made it clear that its foray into supply chain management is a long-term play. “This is just the beginning,” said Selipsky in his keynote speech. “We’re going to continue to invest here.”
This isn’t surprising as Sony has been a household name since the early ‘90s and their current position at the top is just Sony’s natural spot. The Japanese company is heavily invested in several new technologies including blockchain and AI, and the speed at which their testing and investments in the space are rolled out is remarkable.
Last week it was announced that Sony have developed a high-speed processing technology that facilitates data transactions for a new breed of database platform called Blockchain Common Database (BCDB). The work was done as part of a transportation-focused Mobility as a Service (MaaS) initiative led by the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management back in 2019.
What makes this technology interesting is that they have achieved successful execution and storage of seven million transactions per day, simulating a real-world scenario where buses, cars, bikes and taxis all share their location and other metrics.
Sony, through their investments arm Sony Financial Ventures (SFV), have participated in the latest funding round of the Securitize platform. This platform, which specializes in digital securities, has a strong connection to Japan and Asia but their roadmap is focused globally.
With all the work and investments they are putting into the enterprise blockchain space, Sony will be a strong contender for next year’s 2021 Blockchain 50 list. The list has already welcomed the presence of one of Sony’s competitors, Samsung.
Overall, Sony is showing a strong desire and willingness to innovate in using blockchain technology for supplementing their existing infrastructure and business use cases. From those efforts, the net winners will be their consumers and partners, who will benefit from access to better and faster services at an eventually optimized price.
I am a blockchain architect based in New York. I have deep technical expertise in digital assets, crypto and blockchain protocols, and systems. My coverage includes opinions and research pieces on the latest trends in the crypto world.
While Google Maps increasingly offers information on where bike lanes are, its routing algorithms don’t offer the same level of nuance that drivers enjoy. Google Maps has a suite of features to make driving easier. The app gives users options to avoid tolls and highways and even recommends low-emission routes where available.
Bikers using the app, though, have far fewer options, particularly when it comes to determining how safe a route is. Fixing that could get more people on bikes and e-bikes, two of the most accessible forms of no-carbon transit available today. Given that the transportation sector is the biggest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, encouraging the use of alternatives to driving — especially driving gas-powered cars — is more urgent than ever.
With its abundant data and mapping resources, Google Maps is well-poised to create a powerful tool that keeps people safe while navigating their city by bike. Doing so could encourage the use of one of the most reliable zero-emissions transportation technologies, a benefit that dovetails nicely with Google’s ambitious emissions reduction goals.
That’s not to say it’s a cut-and-dried task, though. The puzzle of how to set up a mapping algorithm for driving is relatively simple compared to doing so for biking. Estimating roughly how long it will take to drive somewhere requires little more than knowing speed limits and whether or not intersections have stop signs or stop lights. For biking, though, finding the “right” route is a lot more qualitative.
Often, safety trumps speed. A quiet residential road with speed bumps but without a bike lane can feel more comfortable for bikers — especially new bikers — than a busy thoroughfare with a painted-on bike lane where delivery trucks tend to idle.
While Google Maps and other mapping apps increasingly offer information on where bike lanes are, its routing algorithms don’t offer the same level of nuance that drivers enjoy. Routing options for bikers, whose goals range from commuting to exercising, are largely missing from the platform. As a consequence, bikers have tended to rely more on crowdsourcing, either via the rider-to-rider grapevine or a patchwork of tech-focused alternatives that vary by country and city.
But the lack of a single, comprehensive bike-routing app represents an opportunity for tech companies like Google and Apple, especially given that the pandemic-related boom in biking seems to have staying power. Both companies have rolled out new features to flesh out their bike mapping features in the last year and have plans to continue improving them, but there’s still a long way to go before the mapping apps serve as a reliable alternative to crowdsourcing.
The status quo of simplistic routing options on the most popular mapping apps, said Warren Wells, the policy and planning director of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, represents a barrier to entry for new riders. He worries that first-time riders will rely on Google Maps in the same way they do for driving and follow a route blindly; even if they use Google’s bike lane layer, it is not clear which bike lanes are fully protected by a physical barrier and which are simply painted onto the shoulder of a busy road.
“For 100 years, we have engineered every street to work fine for driving, more or less,” said Wells. “We have put just so little effort into making every street easy to bike on.”
If a new biker ends up on one of these many high-capacity roads that happen to have an often unprotected bike lane, they are liable to arrive at their destination scared or jaded and never get on a bike again. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1,000 bicyclists are killed and over 130,000 are injured in the U.S. each year.
Some biking groups have stepped in to fill the route-mapping void, creating their own apps for cyclists. In the Netherlands, for instance, the national cyclists union, Fietsersbond, created its own mapping software that gives users qualitative options for their journeys. While the interface is not nearly as advanced as Google’s — Wells compared it to the early 2000s version of MapQuest — the app offers bikers many more ways to explore routes, including options like “easy,” “car-free,” “shortest” or “nature” routes.
Google Maps usually offers bikers three options for a biking journey, but it is generally not clear what distinguishes one from another, especially for someone new to a city or new to a bike. In 2018, the Chicago Reader’s John Greenfield created a guide to the city’s lowest-stress bike routes, dubbed the Mellow Chicago Bike Map, which incorporated the opinions of riders in a biking community forum online. (It was later updated as biking interest swelled mid-pandemic.)
Jean Cochrane, a Chicago-based civic technologist and casual biker, stumbled upon the map and turned it into a website with routing capacity, primarily for her own use. However, it has become widely used by others looking to get around Chicago.
“I think that has really been its own huge sea change in the way that I experienced biking,” Cochrane said, “where I do bike much further distances in the city between neighborhoods in a way that I never really have before because I feel like I have a way of accessing other neighborhoods safely.”
The website distinguishes between off-street bike paths, mellow streets (which are largely residential and often have infrastructure like speed bumps or traffic circles to slow down cars), main streets (which usually have bike lanes) and other streets. The simple routing software that Cochrane incorporates into the site prioritizes bike paths and mellow streets in suggesting routes to users.
Demand is high for this kind of resource. Cochrane said people have reached out to her about creating a version of the same webpage for other U.S. cities, but absent the crowdsourcing that Greenfield did initially for Chicago’s “mellow” streets, redoing the project from scratch is a heavy lift. This is in part because determining which streets are “mellow” is harder than it might appear: Cochrane characterized it as a “data problem.”
At least in Chicago, installing infrastructure to slow traffic is a largely decentralized process, and public data is hard to find. The open-source project OpenStreetMap has some of that information, Cochrane said, but it’s incomplete and user-generated, and thus difficult for her to rely upon.
“I know exactly what I would build, if I could know where every speed bump is in the city of Chicago,” she said. “I would love to be able to restrict my directions to residential streets or to streets with traffic-calming infrastructure.”
But, Cochrane said, if anyone is able to cobble together the data that’s relevant to bikers, it’s Google, which she described as a “data leviathan.” The company confirmed that it uses a combination of imagery and data from both government authorities and community contributions, and has partnerships with more than 10,000 local governments, transit agencies and other organizations globally. Google also has access to data on road type and quality, stairs, hills, and elevation.
“The value proposition of Google is that they have this omniscient understanding of all of the streets and businesses in so many different places in the U.S.,” Cochrane said.
In July, the company outlined plans to offer more bike route information. The routing sample included in the post illustrates a detailed breakdown of the type of road bikers encounter, from major thoroughfares to shared paths, and gives riders choices between routes with descriptors like “more bike lanes” and “less turns.” This functionality is slated to roll out “soon” in cities where Google Maps already offers biking directions, including New York, London and Tokyo; the company did not respond to questions from Protocol about a more precise timeline, though.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report emphasizes that walkable communities — including protected pedestrian and bike pathways — can help cities reduce their emissions by encouraging low- or no-emission transportation options. With a user base that is more than 1 billion strong, Google Maps is uniquely positioned to effect a virtuous cycle: If more people are comfortable navigating their city by bike, that’s more people with a stake in improving low- and no-carbon infrastructure for getting around.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B — and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built.
It’s the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or “Ground Truth,” actually works. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for.
Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple’s iOS. And for good reason. If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.
“If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,” Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. “Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”
This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you’re at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).
Google is locked in a battle with the world’s largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple’s strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google’s most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data — and the apps built to use it — are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn’t matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple’s created its own service.
How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars. But that would entail actually building a better map. The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you’d expect, but it’s still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs.
I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who’d spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an “operator” who actually massages map data. “So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners.
You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.” This is what they started out with, the TIGER data from the US Census Bureau (though the base layer could and does come from a variety of sources in different countries).
An electric warehouse forklift uses Plug Power's fuel cell system. Plug Power
Plug Power, which supplies fuel cells for electric forklifts used by Amazon and other companies, said the retail giant plans to buy thousands of tons of carbon-free “green” hydrogen from it per year in a deal that also includes an option to acquire a stake in the company worth up to $2.1 billion.
Under the agreement Plug will begin providing Amazon with 10,950 tons of liquified hydrogen per year that will be used to fuel transportation and building operations, starting in 2025. It’s the biggest such deal to date for the Latham, New York-based company, which expects to hit an annual revenue target of $3 billion by 2025 as a result.
“It’s a huge deal … it’s a huge deal for the (hydrogen) industry,” Andy Marsh, Plug Power’s CEO, tells Forbes. Along with fuel for forklifts, Amazon may also use hydrogen to power a range of vehicles used in delivery operations, including long-haul trucks, he said. “It’s the first, much larger-scale hydrogen ecosystem for Amazon where they’re really thinking about all the applications they can use hydrogen in.”
Hydrogen is expected to become a major source of electric power, along with batteries, for both vehicle propulsion, as well as an option for stationary power generation and storage. While most industrial hydrogen that’s used for oil refining, food processing and the chemical industry is currently made by extracting the element from natural gas, that method emits carbon dioxide.
Companies including Plug, Cummins, Nikola, Nel Hydrogen and many others are shifting to a new technique using electrolyzers that can make a “green” form of the fuel from electricity–ideally from renewable sources–and water that has no climate-harming carbon emissions.
Hydrogen also gets a boost from the new Inflation Reduction Act signed into law this month by President Joe Biden, which includes a production tax credit for green hydrogen worth $3 per kilogram of carbon-free fuel.
Plug, which will benefit from that credit, has sold Amazon fuel cells for its warehouse forklifts since 2016, and estimates it’s provided more than 15,000 units to date. The company aims to expand its hydrogen fuel supply business and is adding production capacity to do that. Plug has said it will be able to make 500 tons of green hydrogen per day at facilities in North America by 2025, up from a goal of 70 tons per day by the end of this year.
By 2028, it hopes to produce 1,000 tons of hydrogen per day. Amazon said the deal is part of efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all its operations by 2040. It believes “scaling the supply and demand for green hydrogen, such as through this agreement with Plug Power, will play a key role in helping us achieve our goals,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of sustainability at Amazon, said in a statement.
As part of the deal, Plug granted Amazon a warrant to acquire up to 16 million shares, with an exercise price of $22.98 for the first 9 million. It vests in full after Amazon spends $2.1 billion on Plug products over the seven-year term of the deal.Shares of Plug Power rose 9% to close at $30 in Nasdaq trading on Thursday.
