Posted By Birdman on 01 May 2015 09:08 PM
Nope. Dana is right. Deepwater Wind is going ahead and has start construction on the turbine foundations. Scheduled to "flip the switch" in late 2016 as the first offshore wind farm in the US. Cape Wind, however is dead as a mackerel. The bad news is that much is still up in the air as far as us island rate payers go post 2016. Best info is we will have a power cost reduction of about 40% So $0.58 down to the $0.38 to $0.40 range - better, but nowhere near mainland so electricity is still an issue. It is also VERY unclear what the status of net metering will be post cable to the mainland. Currently, Block Island Power Co. is exempt from having to provide net metering. As BIPCo will remain the power distributor (but not the generator) it is unclear what will happen there - stay tuned. In any event the smallest town in the smallest state is about to break the seal on US offshore wind power. Kinda cool. By the way Dana - good memory!!
Note, in the RMI analysis of several months ago, 38-40 cents is the price point at which battery + PV had economic legs even BEFORE Tesla set a price point on the battery end of it that undercut the industry by 2/3. That moves you quite a bit to the rigth on that graph I posted.
In an interview over the weekend Lyndon Rive of SolarCity let slip that by 2016 in Hawaii SolarCity will be offering
$0 down lease options with PV + Tesla batteries in 2016 that will beat the utility retail prices. In the same interview he talked about having he hooks that would let the utility control the battery for grid stability, paying the PV + battery owner for that use, which would make it an even better deal for other ratepayers as well as the owner, but would also have the capability of unplugging.
This is a direct shot across the bow of the distributed utilities that would penalize PV owners with connection fees, etc., since the clear threat is that if the utility demands are abusive of the distributed power asset owners, people have the option of outright grid defection.
The retail cost of grid power in Hawaii right now is about 31 cents,
about half the going rate on Block Island, and still well below the projected
price point after the offshore wind project is completed. It would take about 2x the amount of PV in RI to defect from the grid than in HI, but the size of the battery requirements wouldn't have the same multiplier. Short of grid defection, the size of the resources to get pretty close to net-zero while remaining hooked up to BIPCo is even smaller, and financed over 20 years would be cheaper than paying BIPCo monthly (at either the current or projected rates.) It's possible that BIPCo would hang some ridiculous connection charges on you if you're hooked up but using only 10s of kwh/month, and never exporting power to their grid, but they also might not. It's worth starting the dialog with SolarCity (provided they'll talk to you just yet)- they're betting they can beat 58 cents by better than half if they can afford to lease systems and beat Hawaii's grid price with a large enough margin to attract customers.
It might even be worth trying to get the attention of someone within the
electricity policy group at RMI, since island grids serving fairly well-off population that has good credit/deep-pockets can be a good test-bed for distributed micro-grids. They might be able to steer you to other resources. The arbitrage between sub-30 cent LCOE distributed PV + battery power and 38-58 cent grid power could be pretty attractive to micro-grid developers, even if it is the smallest town in Rhode Island.