Working together can lower renewables’ cost

Sometimes public-private partnerships work.

This week, the Business Report details how Fort-Collins-based Advanced Energy is smack dab in the middle of a federal pilot program that is paving the way for everyone to put more solar power onto our aging electrical grid and, in so doing, lowering the cost all of us will pay for renewable power.

For more than 30 years, since the late 1970s when Golden’s National Renewable Energy Lab was known as the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), people have either waxed poetic over the benefits of renewable energy or cursed the government regulations that forced it onto our utilities.

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Alas, the nation’s move toward energy independence and a low-carbon-emission world means that renewables are here to stay. Love them or hate them.

The question now is how are we going to pay for them?

The answer: By reducing the cost of the infrastructure required to integrate variable renewable supplies – variable because they rely on changeable winds and the sun – into an electrical grid accustomed only to using very predictable supplies generated from coal and natural gas.

One reason solar has not been cost-competitive until very recently is because it requires a lot of fancy, expensive footwork to deploy on the national power grid.

Advanced Energy has created a way to re-operate its solar inverters via new software, stabilizing the dips and spikes that typically are found in solar power flows. This means ratepayers no longer will have to ante up for the heavy-duty equipment that protects the grid from these jolts, helping lower the overall cost of the power.

According to federal researchers, utility-scale solar installations that cost $3.80 per watt three years ago now cost just $2.27 per watt. The SunShot Initiative, with which Advanced Energy is working, believes it can further reduce those costs to $1 per watt by 2020.

That’s not only good news, it’s good hometown news.