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Biomass US Renewable Electricity Generation - Sept 2014 2

Published on December 5th, 2014 | by Zachary Shahan

17

Solar PV Generation Doubles (Monthly US Electricity Generation Report)

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December 5th, 2014 by Zachary Shahan 

Following up on my first monthly report on US electricity generation by source, here’s the next one. Electricity generation data takes longer to gather than capacity data, so the EIA’s electricity generation information is always from a couple of months prior. In this case, we now have data from September. Check out the charts and a bit of commentary below (be sure to click through to YTD, YTD 2013, and Rolling 12 Months via the tabs near the top of the charts).


 

Something I noticed last month but forgot to mention was brought up by a commenter: Utility-scale solar PV generation for “YTD” in August was twice what YTD in 2013 was. The same point held true after September’s generation numbers were in, as you can see in the charts above.

As Jake aptly commented via rhetorical question over on Solar Love: “Did you hear that the amount of electricity produced by utility-scale solar had doubled in one year? Is the national mainstream media covering these achievements by the solar power industry?” Indeed, you won’t see this news in the mainstream media, not even the outlets that were so fond of talking about Solyndra!

“12,303 GWh were sent to the U.S. grid by utility-scale solar in 2014 through the month of September. For the same period in 2013, that number was 6,048 GWh. The larger figure is only about 0.4 percent of the total amount of America’s electricity, though about 1.5 million US homes could be powered with the 12,303 GWh,” Jake added.

For the most part, monthly generation across the United States doesn’t change a ton from month to month. (The monthly capacity addition report is more interesting in that regard.) Though, renewables have their seasonal shifts. Wind was up approximately 1.3 TWh, giving it 3.38% of the electricity market rather than 2.65%. Hydro, on the other hand, was down nearly 4 TWh, moving it from 5.15% of the market to 4.68%. Nuclear and fossil fuels were also down quite a bit, though, presumably because of cooler temperatures and lower electricity demand.

For the year through September, renewables were up to 13% of the electricity market, and 6.6% if you exclude hydro. The same period last year also saw the renewables total at 13%, but hydro was a bigger share — without hydro, the percentage in 2013 was 6.1%. In other words, wind and solar grew their market share approximately 0.5% in one year. Slow and steady… is not what we need to address global warming and climate change, but I’m hopeful wind and solar will increase at a faster and faster pace in the coming years.

For more number crunching, here are some tables:

US Renewable Electricity Generation - Sept 2014 1

US Renewable Electricity Generation - Sept 2014 2

And, as shared by a reader last month, here’s a graph showing a broader view, followed by another one from a reader shared after publishing this article:

US electricity generation sources

 

electricity change US

Data Source: EIA

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About the Author

spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.


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  • Poechewe

    I have a question. In fact, I would like to see a full article on the issue: How well do wind and solar handle bad weather?

    I’m talking about all the forms of bad weather from icing to tornadoes to hurricanes to weeks of fog or still wind to six foot snow storms (I haven’t seen too many pictures of low lying wind turbines and solar panels, and assume offshore wind turbines are designed to handle the worse).

    I advocate a lot for alternative energy and I peddle the ideas of redundancy and energy storage when I find myself not fully informed. But it would be nice to have some of the answers on these issues.

    To be honest, I’ve never seen a news article on weather related accidents concerning wind and solar, though periodically we all see articles on downed power lines whether they come from coal plants or wind turbines.

    • Bob_Wallace

      There’s a video on line of an EF3 tornado ripping through a wind farm. One turbine gets hit pretty much dead on and loses its blades. The other turbines on each side look undamaged.

      A couple turbines at a training college were in an EF5 and apparently suffered no damage.

      http://www.evwind.es/2013/06/06/wind-turbines-withstand-tornado-with-nearly-300-mph-winds/33454

      Wiki says –

      The survival speed of commercial wind turbines is in the range of 40 m/s(144 km/h, 89 MPH) to 72 m/s (259 km/h, 161 MPH).

      But I’ve read something about one company that builds to a higher standard.

      I haven’t seen anyone pull everything together for turbines.

      There is some issue with blade icing and I think someone was killed when a chunk of ice fell from a blade. There’s some technology that’s either being tested or put into use to deal with the icing problem.

      Snow. Can’t see an issue. Other than the icing stuff.

      Panels are likely to hold up in bad weather until your roof blows away. Here’s a site that has some videos of “panel abuse”.

      http://southcoastsolar.com/news/article/how-do-solar-panels-hold-up-to-wind-and-hail

      I think there are events in which panels were wrecked by hail. But it was the sort of hail that smashes in car roofs.

      I’ve had my ground-mounted panels covered by snow several times and iced over many times. One time I walked over the top of my panels in snow shoes while I was going out to shovel them out. Didn’t realize I was a bit too far to the east.

      If you want to dig around on the web to see if you can find anything else post it. I’ll see if I can find some more.

      • Ronald Brakels

        Nice video showing the sort of punishment solar panels can take. I have lived through one hailstorm where fist sized hail punched through the roof and ceiling. I’m pretty sure that would break solar panels, but on the bright side solar panels should protect the area of roof under them. So if you are unlucky enough to have hail start coming through your roof, seek shelter in a room under the panels. Also, the hail that punches through roofs is not normal hail, it’s a group of smaller hailstones that have fused together to make a clump. So even if there are clumps like this falling, they aren’t that common and your rooftop solar might only take one or two hits, so you should then only have to replace one or two panels. And you’ll have one or two fewer holes smashed through your roof.

        • http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan

          Indeed. The Perovo Solar Farm built in 2010 or so that I visited had hail storms with similarly sized hail and no damage.

    • Offgridman

      Just letting you know that my experience is about the same as Bob’s, snow and ice is just a pain to clear off at times. Got spooked the first year the panels were up by a freak hailstorm, golf ball size ones put dimples in the car that was out and just bounced off the panels (think the angle helps) while building a layer of ice along the bottom. That was in June, so it really was a freak storm that hasn’t reoccured in nine years.
      Seven years with a residential turbine and a couple of near misses with tornadoes (few miles off) and still haven’t needed to use the replacement blades, but it did top off the batteries very nicely. Never have had icing problems with the turbine, that could be design (taper out to thin ends), or because it is spinning and the blades flexing whenever that type of weather comes through. It rotates faster than commercial types too so that could help.
      I think that most decent brand name equipment has been built to a standard where weather is not going to be an issue, unless like your home it was to take a direct hit from a twister. A relatively new industry giving 20-25 year warranties doesn’t want issues like that.

  • Doug Pearson

    You said, ‘“12,303 GWh were sent to the U.S. grid
    by utility-scale solar in 2014 through the month of September. … [About] 1.5 million US homes could be powered with the 12,303 GWh,”
    Jake added.’

    I seem to recall Arnold Schwarznegger, as governor of California, targeting 1 million homes with solar PV power. If that actually happened, the EIA’s practice of ignoring residential distributed solar PV is missing a lot more than a rounding error. Do they also ignore commercial distributed installations that don’t qualify as utility grade?

    • Bob_Wallace

      The EIA includes end-user capacity in their reports but does not estimate end-user production.

      The NREL (another part of the DOE) does estimate end-user production.

  • JamesWimberley

    The complete absence of growth in geothermal in the YTD comparison is disappointing. In the USA, it suffers more even than wind from Congress’ stop-go incentives. Projects take 5 years or so and the policy uncertainty is crippling. The worldwide growth is a decent if not explosive 4%-5% a year, concentrated in poor countries; East Africa, Central America, East Asia. That’s still without the potentially game-changing EGS.

    Terminological proposal: hydro is a renewable source of energy, full stop. It has to be isolated to look at growth rates, but being despatchable, it fills a very important slot in the sustainable energy portfolio. The crucial distinction for the future is not between old and new renewables, but between despatchables (hydro, geothermal, biomass) and variables (wind and solar). Tidal is the one that straddles the divide, as it’s 100% reliable but not 100% despatchable, but is clearly closer to the first group.

    • http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan

      Yes, geothermal has been shafted. Not sure if that will ever change, but it should, and I think the now-much-larger wind and solar industries should help to get it growing, as the dispatchable supply will be very useful to them down the road. Someone recently noted in a comment here (or maybe that was the Twitter #SolarChat) that it’s high time we have an overarching National Renewable Energy Association. i’m not sure about that or not, but SEIA and AWEA should team up with GEA more.

      Hydro: yeah, there are a few factors to consider here. 1) when trying to identify growth, hydro muddies the water. solar and wind are growing fast, hydro isn’t, but it’s much larger, so including it hides their growth a bit. 2) new hydro isn’t particularly green. (i’ve even heard small hydro is just as bad as large hydro… just, naturally, on a smaller scale. but haven’t dug into the matter in depth.) and not only is it not very green, a number of studies have found it can be horrible for the climate (depending on certain factors). 3) but all that said, it is a renewable, it is dispatchable, and existing hydro is a great help. my understanding is that it has dropped off a lot because of drought. and who knows what’s causing that (jk), but my guess is it’ll only get worse as time marches on… a bit of a challenge many of us would rather not think about.

      • RobS

        I’m not a climatologist but as an Australian I would say that long term trends not withstanding droughts will always come and go, they may become more frequent but the current one will break and then we will see the US’s renewable generation soar as hydro returns to its long term average whilst solar continues to grow at 100%+ and wind 20%+ annually. When that happens coals true collapse will occur.

  • Eric Gerber

    Anyone know why the coal to natural gas ratio moved in favor of coal this year? I thought coal was declining on cheap natural gas. Any estimates for how much sub 5MW solar systems are contributing? Renewables still have a long way to go…

    • Bob_Wallace

      Increase in NG prices. We’ve burned our way through the supply glut of a couple years back and the price of NG rose. Plus some cold winter weather drop use up a bit.

      We should see a move the other way now as we close coal plants.

      Renewables are starting to count coup….

      • http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan

        Did you create that? Would like to throw it into the article as well, but says 2004 instead of 2014, and would be nice if it went through September. Email me if it’s your handiwork and you could update it. :D

      • Bob_Wallace

        No, 2000-2004 is the baseline range I used. The data lines start in 2005 when wind and solar started making their debut.

        (Don’t cha like my color choices? ;o)

    • David in Bushwick

      But it looks like September had NG usage up a larger percentage over coal. I can’t find an article that pointed out several dirty coal plants are to be shut down in the coming year. It’s probably too late for the new Republican Congress to stop the closures. But status quo is their game so at least the PTC is probably safe for just another short year.

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