The Current - November 2013
November 2013
MCEC News
- Save the Date! MCEC Plans Legislative Reception for January 14th
- MCEC Launches MCONNECT: A Series of Social Networking Events
- CETI Gathering to Explore Trends in the Clean Energy Sector
Industry News
- Wood Energy Proponents Advance Key Measures for Clean, Thermal Systems
- Community Sun Program Delivers Free, Clean Energy to Boonsboro Library
- Greenbelt Project Pioneers New Solar Thermal Technology and Seeks Insight on Optimal Solar System
- Arizona Solar Fee Fuels Calls for Holistic Review of Electricity Regulation
Clean Energy Briefs & Events
- Deadline Nearing for EmPowering Clean Energy Communities Applications
- IEC-Chesapeake Offers NEC Training
Save the date!
MCEC plans legislative reception for
January 14
Be part of the clean energy advocacy effort in 2014 as the General Assembly reconvenes in Annapolis to deliberate legislation that may impact the energy sector, the environment, and possibly the success of your business.
MCEC will host our annual Legislative Reception on January 14, 2014 and we want you to be involved. Plan to help spread the word about the benefits of creating jobs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Maryland.
We anticipate hosting more than 200 elected officials, aides, appointed officials, industry leaders, environmental advocates, and energy stakeholders.
MCEC Executive Director Kathy Magruder says the annual event is one of the most important the organization hosts and is calling on industry leaders, business owners and clean energy advocates to plan to attend.
"We want to be sure Maryland continues to have the policy and regulatory tools in place to facilitate our advanced energy economy,” Magruder said. “This event is a tremendous opportunity for the energy sector to interface with policymakers during session to underscore the value of the tax, employment, environmental and energy independence benefits that we are contributing to as we build the clean energy economy in the state.”
While planning for the General Assembly session is still in early stages, Magruder sees a few topics that will likely be priorities on the agenda this session, including potential revision of the Biomass RPS addressing the use of black liquor and woody feedstocks, the possible reintroduction of Community Energy/Net Metering legislation, and the allocation of Strategic Energy Investment Funds (SEIF) that are collected through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) auction and used to fund various energy efficiency and renewable energy advancement programs as well as the Maryland Energy Administration budget.
For more information or to become a sponsor of the 2014 MCEC Legislative Reception, contact us at 443-949-8505. To register, log onto our Legislative Reception website.
MCEC Launches MCONNECT: A
Series of Social Networking Events
Whiteford Taylor & Preston, LLP is
marquee sponsor!
Working closely with members of the Advisory Council Outreach & Education Committee, the Maryland Clean Energy Center will be hosting a series of after-hours gatherings to generate more networking opportunities as well as access to markets and partnerships for various stakeholders.
Trent Zivkovich who helped secure the overall series sponsorship from his firm Whiteford,Taylor & Preston, LLP, commented on their support: “A key selling point was that both MCEC and our firm saw the same need to help build a stronger clean energy community in Maryland and we both had the same ideas on how we might be able to make it happen.”
Events will be hosted by MCEC partner organizations and businesses across the state to help generate exposure, and will be focused on a particular target audience to build connections.
AGRICULTURE, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT is the first event theme scheduled on Sunday, December 8, 2013 from 5 to 7 PM at the Maryland Farm Bureau Conference at the Clarion Resort Fontainebleau Hotel, 10100 Coastal Highway, Ocean City, MD. The cocktail reception will be hosted by Planet Found, Triea and Mid-Atlantic Farm Credit.
“MCEC associated with this event specifically to connect farmers and producers with energy saving and generation opportunities,” said MCEC Executive Director Kathy Magruder.
She invites interested stakeholders to call and get on the guest list to attend.
Each event will have a limited number of reservation slots available. Event hosts and sponsors will get a table-top display and an opportunity to greet the audiences at the events. Upcoming MCONNECT events include:
FINANCING ENERGY INNOVATION / TUES. February 18, 2014
Connecting researchers, innovators and investors.
Host: Whiteford, Taylor & Preston, LLP- Baltimore City
Sponsors: TBD
ENERGY & IT/ TUES. March 18th
Connecting decision makers with cutting edge energy management technology.
Host:TBD
Sponsors: TBD
ENERGY INCENTIVES FOR SMALL BUSINESSES/ TUES. May 20, 2014
Connecting small business owners and operators with incentives and resources for energy related investments.
Host: Annapolis Economic Development Corporation – Annapolis, MD
Sponsors: TBD
ENERGY & RX/ TUES. July 15, 2014
Connecting contractors with facility managers for healthy energy efficient buildings and hospitals.
Host:TBD
Sponsors: TBD
RESOURCES FOR THE GROWING ENERGY WORKFORCE/ TUES. Sept 16, 2014
Connecting businesses with trained workforce and training resources.
Host: Baltimore Center for Green Careers- Baltimore City
Sponsors: Maryland Workforce Development Corporation, plus 2 more TBA.
Mark your calendar and plan to participate!
Contact the MCEC office at 443-949-8505 for more information or to get on the guest list.
CETI GATHERING TO EXPLORE TRENDS IN THE CLEAN ENERGY SECTOR
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Join a diverse and dynamic collection of entrepreneurs from the clean energy, sustainability and environmental sectors December 4 for an investigation of market trends, challenges and opportunities as we head into a new year.
2013 produced significant changes - good and bad - in the opportunities facing clean energy startups.
Continued growth in the shale gas sector, for example, has greatly influenced energy prices and contributed to the retirement of 150 coal-fired power plants in the past five years. At the same time, both wind and solar energy are now close to grid parity in some parts of the country. Consequently, the U.S. is almost on track to meet President Barrack Obama’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent (compared to 2005 levels) by 2020.
The number of clean energy companies at the Clean Energy Technology Incubator (CETI), however, has fallen, many small clean energy companies are struggling and registrations for some clean energy conferences have dropped.
As we approach the end of 2013, CETI is hosting a discussion about where entrepreneurs in the trenches of the clean energy economy are heading.
During an afternoon gathering, we will explore myriad topics, including:
- Opportunities and challenges facing solar companies due to market growth, shrinking subsidies, changes in SREC prices and other factors;
- Whether offshore wind energy development will be a boon to Maryland entrepreneurs;
- The status and outlook of the biofuels, waste-to-energy, energy efficiency and electric vehicle sectors; and
- Opportunities and obstacles to smart grid and microgrid developments.
Sponsored by the Baltimore County Department of Economic Development, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, Whiteford Taylor Preston, and SB & Company, the December 4th session will take place at University of Maryland Baltimore County Tech Center.
Please RSVP to Bjorn Frogner, CETI Entrepreneur in Residence, at bjorn.frogner@umbc.edu.
Wood energy proponents advance key measures for clean, thermal systems
On the heels of a break-through year, members of the wood energy industry gathered in Annapolis this fall to assess their next steps in making clean woody biomass systems a more common and officially supported component of the energy sector.
“We have made significant progress in an incredibly short period of time,” Abigail Ross Hopper, Director of the Maryland Energy Administration, told attendees at the second annual conference of the Maryland Wood Energy Coalition.
“The last year was a break-through year for wood energy in Maryland - new projects, new policies, new organizational development, new regulations,” Hopper said. “We can continue to build on these achievements, to showcase the economic and environmental attributes to wood thermal technologies. From the foresters to the developers, loggers to facilities managers, the opportunities are unlimited.”
Following its first conference a year ago, the Maryland Wood Energy Coalition presented the MEA with a list of priority items that needed to be addressed in order to advance wood energy adoption in the state. Hopper said that clear and consensus-driven message helped state officials focus their efforts.
In the following year, wood energy advocates say they saw progress on several fronts.
- Governor Martin O’Malley appointed a Thermal Renewable Energy Task Force to investigate options for including thermal energy from woody biomass systems in Maryland’s Renewable Portfolio Standard.
- The MEA increased incentives for clean-burning wood and pellet stoves.
- The MEA and the Maryland Department of Environment began working together to develop performance standards and emissions limits for clean, wood energy systems. State officials are currently finalizing those standards.
- Officials from Maryland’s Department of General Services began studying the coalition’s request that the state consider woody biomass technologies when replacing boilers in state-owned buildings.
“This state is being recognized nationally for its leadership on wood energy issues,” said Joseph Seymour, Executive Director of the national Biomass Thermal Energy Council (BTEC).
Maryland’s consideration of adding wood energy systems to its RPS and creating Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) for the thermal energy produced by those systems could play a key role in advancing clean wood heat across the country, Seymour said.
BTEC is currently working to pass the federal Biomass Thermal Equalization Act which would provide federal clean energy tax incentives to residential and commercial/industrial high-efficiency, biomass thermal systems.
“We are looking to states like New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maryland to shape the thermal REC discussion and show people this can work,” he said. “Thermal energy needs to be part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. It needs to be part of federal agency procurement.”
In Maryland, clean use of wood resources is slated to play a key role in the Governor’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan.
“Biomass-for-energy production will contribute a 330,000-metric-ton reduction annually,” Hopper said. “Responsible forest management and biomass energy production will prevent more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the Earth’s atmosphere before 2020.”
Community Sun program delivers free, clean energy to Boonsboro Library
Think of it as the "no roof left behind" campaign.
Phil Kelly - a Hagerstown entrepreneur and founder of Millennial 3 Energy - was troubled by a gap in the development of distributed solar PV systems around Maryland. Tax credits, other incentives and steadily improving prices have made commercial installations increasingly more attractive. Leasing options have fueled growth in residential systems. And institutional investors have shown growing interest in large and grid-scale deployments.
“But a lot of the nicer buildings that would be great for solar are being ignored because they are nonprofit or government buildings and those organizations can’t take advantage of the tax incentives,” Kelly said. “Our country has a weird approach to incentivizing people to do the right thing. It is always too complicated and it always leaves some people out.”
Determined to find some way to develop “these really great rooftops,” Kelly created the Millennial 3 Energy Community Sun program. It pairs a nonprofit with a philanthropic investor in a solar PV development. The nonprofit provides the attractive rooftop in return for clean, inexpensive energy. The investor finances the installation, retains ownership of the system and collects the benefits of tax incentives, depreciation schedules, SREC sales and electricity sales.
The model is getting attention and Millennial 3 Energy will throw the switch on its first Community Sun project within weeks.
A 192-panel array on the roof of the Boonsboro Library will generate about 60,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually, about 60 percent of the library’s annual consumption.
The project was financed by A Wilder Project LLC - a creation of local author Nora Roberts and her husband, photographer Bruce Wilder. The couple had helped finance the construction of the Boonsboro Library a few years ago and jumped at the chance to provide a new form of assistance to the library. Preferring to not bother with issuing monthly electricity bills to the library, the couple opted to donate the array’s production - about $6,000 of electricity annually - to the library, Kelly said.
“If somebody has a favorite nonprofit, this is a new way you can support them,” he said. “Instead of writing a check, you give them free or inexpensive kilowatt hours.”
Community Sun projects, he said, can be tailored to the nonprofit’s and investor’s desires. Investors, for example, can tailor their electricity sales and other financials so that the investment is paid back within a desired number of years.
“When I started putting the Community Sun concept on paper, I realized that the nonprofits would make out because they save money on energy, the investor would make out because they get their money back and support their favorite nonprofit, and I would make out because I get projects,” Kelly said. “It’s one of those scenarios where you think, ‘Gee, why didn’t we do this before?’”
Greenbelt project pioneers new solar thermal technology and seeks insights on optimal solar system design
On a rooftop in Greenbelt, Skyline Innovations is working to formulate new guidelines on how to design and size solar hot water systems to optimize performance and profits.
The installation of a 59-collector, solar thermal system on the roof of Greenbriar Condominiums is one of the Game Changer clean energy projects funded by the Maryland Energy Administration.
The venture breaks new ground for the industry in several ways.
First, the Greenbriar installation utilizes solar technology never before deployed in Maryland. Rather than using conventional collectors made from glass, copper and aluminum, the system employs light-weight, low-cost collectors that are coated with a special polymer glaze. The units’ weight - 1 pound per square foot compared to 5-6 pounds for conventional collectors - makes the technology desirable on buildings that have structural considerations, according to Skyline Innovations. The units lie flat on the roof, making them less susceptible to wind damage, easier to install and easier to remove should a building owner need to repair or replace the roof.
The technology, however, has primarily been used in Florida to date. Consequently, Skyline Innovations couldn’t guarantee its performance in a more northerly setting and needed to train crews on this unfamiliar product in order to proceed with the project.
The Game Changer grant of $176,000 offset 13.2 percent of the total $1.3-million project cost.
“That investment by the State of Maryland enabled us to implement the new technology and de-risk the investment,” said Sandra Lee, spokesperson for Skyline Innovations.
The project, however, doesn’t focus on technology alone.
One challenge facing the solar thermal industry, Lee said, involves properly sizing systems to fully satisfy clients’ hot water needs while avoiding installing excess equipment that lowers the clients’ savings and the developers’ profit margins.
“With photo voltaic systems, you can push excess energy back to the grid,” she said. “There is no grid for heat. It can only be used on site so you have to optimize the sizing to ensure the system is not too large or too small.”
As part of its Game Changer project, Skyline Innovations is engaging in a two-year effort to develop a formula for that optimization. Using the company’s patent-pending technology platform, Skyline is conducting continuous, real-time monitoring of the system’s performance as well hot water usage by Greenbriar residents. Further, Skyline is conducting the same kind of monitoring on two other multi-family residential complexes in Maryland, which the company has outfitted with two different, conventional, solar thermal system.
Data from the three systems, Lee said, will enable Skyline Innovations to thoroughly assess the performance of the polymer-glazed solar collectors at Greenbriar compared to conventional systems. It will also provide Skyline with the data needed to craft rigorous guidelines on how to optimally design and size solar thermal systems.
In the meantime, the Greenbriar system is already generating savings, Lee said. Following its standard financing model, Skyline Innovations paid the full capital cost of installing the system and now acts as a “rooftop utility,” charging Greenbriar only for the hot water it uses. Skyline, Lee said, charges its clients hot water rates that typically run 15-40 percent below the cost of heating water with a conventional utility.
Arizona solar fee fuels calls for holistic review of electricity regulation
A decision by Arizona authorities to become the first state in the nation to levy a monthly charge on solar PV systems to offset grid operation costs has some members of Maryland’s solar industry talking about modernizing regulatory structures.
Earlier this month, the Arizona Corporation Commission voted 3-2 to allow state utility, Arizona Public Service, to impose a $0.70 per kW charge on customers installing new solar PV systems. On average, the fee would cost customers $5 per month. The utility had argued that such a charge was needed to ensure that solar PV owners covered a fair share of the costs of grid infrastructure supporting their net-metered systems.
Rick Peters, President of the Maryland D.C. Virginia Solar Energy Industries Association (MDV-SEIA) and President of Pro-Solar Energy Service, said such “standby charges are a concern for the industry.”
“While I think standby charges may be appropriate in some situations, they are not appropriate everywhere,” Peters said. “There needs to be a larger discussion of the value of distributed solar to the grid and how we quantify costs and benefits inside various markets.”
Francis Hodsoll, Treasurer of MDV-SEIA and President of E&E Frontiers, echoed the call for a more holistic review of the electricity regulatory system.
“Today’s regulatory construct is more than 100 years old and has no bearing on the way we are interfacing with energy today,” Hodsoll said. “The issue of what is the right structure when it comes to rates and charges and who bears what cost is much more complex than whether there should be a standby charge on generation. Maryland has been a leader on some of these issues and it would be great if Maryland would stand up and say, ‘How do we want to do this going forward so that we efficiently and effectively interact with energy?’”
Distributed solar generation has been identified by the Edison Electric Institute and numerous industry watchers as a disruptive challenge to utilities’ traditional business model. In some states, that challenge has sparked utility opposition to distributed solar and proposals to levy fees on rooftop solar arrays.
Maryland solar professionals say local utilities, such as Washington Gas, have been more accepting of distributed solar generation than have utilities in Arizona, Virginia and multiple other states. Furthermore, Maryland officials have adopted more progressive approaches to the changing energy sector.
“When this issue comes up in Maryland, I am willing to bet the Maryland PSC will do a more reasonable job at fully assessing costs and benefits of distributed solar,” said Tony Clifford, Chief Executive Office of Standard Solar. “I will give credit to the politicians and regulators in Maryland who are interested in promoting new ideas.”
Distributed solar, Clifford added, has been gaining greater acceptance among the American public, politicians and regulators. An appreciation for the value of solar even seemed evident in the Arizona case. Arizona Public Service, he noted, spent $3.7 million campaigning for the standby fee while the Edison Electric Institute spent another $500,000 supporting the campaign. Despite that effort, the Arizona Corporation Commission approved fees amounting to just 5 percent of what Arizona Public Service requested.
CLEAN ENERGY BRIEFS
Deadline nearing for EmPowering Clean Energy Communities applications
The Maryland Energy Administration (MEA) has opened the 2014 EmPOWERing Clean Energy Communities Low-to-Moderate Income Grant Program with up to $9 million available through competitive grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations. The program is designed to help governments and nonprofits fund energy efficiency projects that benefit low-to-moderate income Marylanders.
Over the past few years, more than 200 grants have been awarded in each of Maryland’s counties, helping more than 9,000 households, two homeless shelters and over 30 homes for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities save energy and money.
Each county in Maryland has been appropriated an allocation of EmPOWERing Clean Energy Communities grant funds based on the number of low-to-moderate income households in the county.
For fiscal year 2014, the Maryland Energy Administration anticipates offering two platforms of funding:
- The “traditional” program that has been available since 2009; and
- A new, competitive program that seeks innovative ideas and solutions for buildings, communities, or neighborhoods.
Grant applications, as well as a detailed grant instruction documents, are available on MEA’s website at http://energy.maryland.gov/Govt/empowercleanenergycommunities.html. Applications are due to MEA by Saturday, November 30, 2013.
IEC-Chesapeake offers NEC training
IEC Chesapeake will offer a one-day “PV Systems and the NEC” training session December 11.
The session covers the National Electrical Code (NEC) requirements for designing and installing PV systems. Conductor selection, ampacity calculations, overcurrent devices and disconnects will be covered. The session’s focus will be on utility-interactive systems.
The course is ideally suited for electricians, electrical inspectors and PV installers. PV installers will receive six hours of NABCEP continuing education credits for the course.
For more information or to register, visit http://www.iec-chesapeake.com/ or contact Alice Haines at 301-621-9545, ext. 104.