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Introducing IBERDROLA RENEWABLES 5.13.08
NREL's Top Green Power Programs Announced 4.29.08
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6/19/08
T. Boone Pickens’ new book “The First Billion is the Hardest” is hitting bookstores soon. The book itself is not the news, but if you know nothing about Mr. Pickens, the title should tell you something. His name often appears in print preceded by terms like “tycoon”, “legendary oilman”, or “billionaire financier”. CNBC even coined the term “Oracle of Oil” to describe him. Financial World named him CEO of the Decade in 1989 and the Oil & Gas Journal listed him as one of the “100 Most Influential People of the Petroleum Century.” There is little question that this man has had an impact from oil fields to boardrooms, so it piqued my interest to hear about his interest in wind, his big interest in wind.
Mr. Pickens recently told the New York Times that he has “the same feelings about wind, as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” The 80-year old billionaire is putting his money where his mouth is.
Last summer, this fossil fuel luminary announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties. Currently, the largest project in the world is a 735 MW project near Abilene, Texas. Pickens and his company, Mesa Power, are shooting for their project to be over five times as large. The first stage of the project, scheduled for construction in 2011, will be 1,000 MW. Upon its projected completion in 2015, the project will be 4,000 MW, which will number around 2,700 turbines in total. For some perspective, the U.S. wind power industry set a record in 2007 by installing just over 5,200 MW.
“We are going to have to do something different in America. You can’t keep paying about $600 billion a year for oil” Pickens told CNN. In May, 2007 Mr. Pickens announced his initial order of 667 GE wind turbines, which cost about $2 billion.
Whatever your issues may be with regard to T. Boone Pickens, let us applaud his initiative. The industry is abuzz over how to propel ourselves forward and take the next big step – to 20% of our electricity generation (we currently stand around 1%). The challenges we face include government support, transmission infrastructure, and turbine supply chain issues. But commitments on this scale to communities, to farmers and ranchers, and to manufacturers are still vital to keep up our momentum.
When discussing the growth and success of the wind industry, I often cite the companies that are involved in the industry that weren’t when I started in wind about six years ago. Major international industrial companies like GE and Siemens, key U.S. electric companies like FPL Energy and MidAmerican Energy, giant international energy firms like BP and Shell, and familiar names like John Deere and JP Morgan Capital all have a relatively new or vastly higher profile in the wind business. Add to that list the transformational investment by Mr. Pickens, and the less familiar but well capitalized companies like the key European utilities E.On, Enel, and Iberdrola, and you have some convincing examples of a maturing, expanding global industry making strides – in Texas, across the U.S. and around the world.
As always, we want to hear from you. So please write to us at CommunityEnergy@newwindenergy.com.
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6/3/08
I am writing this week from the historic energy capital of the United States – Houston, Texas. Texas is also the current wind energy capital of the country, and with over 4,300 megawatts of installed capacity, they exceed the runner-up, California, by nearly 2,000 megawatts. I can’t resist the “everything is bigger in Texas” line.
The annual WINDPOWER Conference & Exhibition, hosted and organized by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), kicked off here this week (http://www.windpowerexpo.org/), and it once again shattered all previous records for attendees and exhibitors. A colleague of mine who develops wind projects in the upper Midwest reminisced last night about the WINDPOWER conference in 1993, which attracted about 225 people. Another industry vet remembers the eight tabletop exhibits from 1989. This year, the show floor is over a quarter mile long. Over 770 exhibitors have filled the exhibition hall, and 12,000 attendees, up from 7,000 just last year, are here to confer and learn about this rapidly growing industry.
While it is tempting to think that the protective cocoon of air conditioning in early-June Houston kept me inside for most of yesterday, the tremendous displays on the exhibit floor are also quite an attraction. Turbine manufacturers big and small have brought their technology for all to see, so you can walk inside a utility-scale nacelle (the school bus –sized housing for the gearbox at the top of a wind turbine), stand next to a pair of 70-meter-long wind turbine blades, or watch a residential scale roof-mounted system turn.
Community Energy played an important role in greening this conference. We partnered with AWEA to provide green travel opportunities, so that all online registrants had the opportunity to purchase renewable energy credits (RECs) to offset the environmental impact of their car and flight travel to the conference. Additionally, Community Energy donated RECs, sourced from Texas wind projects, to green the energy use at the George R. Brown Convention Center. If you’re also attending WINDPOWER this week, please feel free to drop by the IBERDROLA RENEWABLES booth, number 2335. We can tell you about how we aim to contribute to this white-hot growth, and send you home with some goodies.
As always, we want to hear from you. So please write to us at CommunityEnergy@newwindenergy.com.
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5/13/08
PPM. Often referred to as Peter, Paul, and Mary, to help articulate the name. The second largest wind developer in the US. On May 1, the company changed its name to IBERDROLA RENEWABLES, so that we are now operating as one company worldwide. But aren’t we Community Energy?
The corporate merger history is a bit lengthy, but on April 23, 2007, PPM Energy joined the IBERDROLA family of companies through the acquisition of their parent company, Scottish Power. Just as Community Energy had been acquired in June of 2006 by Iberdrola, only on a much larger scale. Later in 2007, Iberdrola brought together its renewable projects worldwide and created IBERDROLA RENEWABLES, which is the world’s largest provider of wind power with more than 7,800 MW in operation.
The transition is understandably emotional and difficult, as the PPM family grew from 12 people in 2001 to a large family in Portland, Houston, Calgary, Salt Lake City, and dozens of project sites and home offices.
So you might ask, what’s going to change? The simple and truthful answer is nothing, except the name. The CEI logo tagline now reads “an Iberdrola Renewables Company”. Our parent company has unified the different acquisitions under one name, with a bright, fresh look. We are still the same great people supplying the same great products and services as before.
I joined CEI in 2001, when we had no association with PPM or Iberdrola, or anyone else for that matter. We were five people then, including me. Four of those five people are still with this company today, either with CEI or some other IBERDROLA RENEWABLES capacity. Perhaps most importantly in a time of transition is that most of the talented, committed people who founded and launched the company are still working hard at our mission, to ignite the demand and build the supply of emission-free energy.
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4/29/08
Do you read and absorb lists as much as I do? Maybe growing up memorizing baseball standings and box scores every morning contributed to my current fascination for lists. Or David Letterman’s Top Ten. Or American Idol’s list of five remaining contestants.
We are proud to be a big part of some lists that the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced last week: they listed the most successful green power utility programs in the country. Four partners of Community Energy made the top ten in three of the lists: total renewable energy sales, total number of customer participants, and customer participation rate.
As a supplier or marketer to 17 different electric utility or competitive electric supplier programs, we serve over 130,000 clean energy customers around the country. NREL highlighted Community Energy-affiliated partnerships with PECO (the Philadelphia area), Naperville (a municipal utility in Illinois), Energy East (a combination of NYSEG and RG&E in upstate New York) and National Grid (with programs in New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island).
We are extremely excited by the recognition but mostly are grateful to our customers who made these programs so successful. A big thanks to all of you who help drive and expand this country’s supply of clean, homegrown energy supply. For more information on NREL and to view the complete lists and rankings visit: http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2008/348.html .
The PECO Wind Program in Pennsylvania
- 5th in total number of participants with 38,548
- 10th in total sales with 160 million kWh sold
The City of Naperville in Illinois
- 6th in customer participation rate 6.7 percent
National Grid’s GreenUp program in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts
- 9th in total sales with over 180 million kWh sold
- 7th in number of participants with 24,429
NYSEG and RG&E (Energy East) Catch the Wind program in New York
- 10th in total number of participants with 19,520
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- Bill Burke at the Maple Ridge Wind Farm
4/21/08
I had a unique opportunity to visit the Maple Ridge Wind Farm last week. The project, a joint venture between Horizon Wind Energy in Houston and PPM Energy (part of the Iberdrola Renewables family of companies), is one of the largest wind farms in the US, with 195 wind turbines. Located about 75 miles northeast of Syracuse, the project is hosted by around 100 landowners, many of whom are family farmers.
I toured the project with Bill Moore of PPM, Patrick Doyle of Horizon, and local landowner Bill Burke, who entertained a visitor producing a segment on the project for the Sundance Channel. This area is truly a beautiful part of the world, with barns, silos, livestock, ravines and rolling hills combining to create stunning scenery, even when the wind whips right through your numerous layers designed to keep out the cold.
Learning the lay of the land from that group provided insightful history to a project that traces its origin to Bill Moore knocking on doors in 1999. He came to the area asking whether people might be interested in hosting state-of-the-art wind turbines on their dairy farms. Today, after a multi-year construction process that created around 400 jobs brought around $35 million into the local economy, this project funnels a total of approximately $6 million annually to the local municipalities, county and school districts. It provides enough clean electricity to supply 160,000 average New York homes each year.
The landowners continue to use their land for pastures, timberland, farming, and leisure activities. It is their early embrace of this project, years before global warming had seized the headlines, which cemented its future success. What grew out of the fields of Lewis County is now a striking example of clean, homegrown energy.
My sincere thanks go out to Bill, Patrick and Bill, who generously contributed their time on a cold, blustery day. Of course, we like blustery.
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3/4/08
We often have the opportunity to educate people about wind energy. The market and the technology have come a long way, and its increased and visible presence creates curiosity.
We often address questions about how we “sell” the wind to our customers, whether in partnership with an electric utility, or directly to a customer. We sell “Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)”, a widely recognized mechanism to purchase wind energy at your home or business, without building a wind turbine.
Some confusion about RECs occasionally pops up in the media. We felt a recent example misrepresented the REC and created an inaccurate portrait of our customers. We sent this response in an effort to set the record straight:
We were surprised at the confusion included in your recent article on wind power credits (Wind ‘credits’ not as green as they seem, 2/18).
All renewable grid-connected power, including the proposed offshore Delaware wind project, track energy deliveries into the grid through the same certificates. As customers, we all draw our power from that same electric grid, which includes a mix of all types of power generation. Without a customer agreeing to pay the higher cost of wind generation, which is tracked by the certificate, there isn’t sufficient revenue to finance the wind farms. This is true for the proposed Delaware offshore wind project, and for any proposed onshore project as well.
Locally produced clean power brings environmental and economic benefits to the region. Both the proposed Delaware offshore project and the Pennsylvania wind generation supplying PECO Wind Customers accomplish that.
Wind project developers depend on credit revenue to build a project, and a vibrant voluntary market is vital to create those opportunities. Customer demand from the PECO Wind program and commercial purchases like the Philadelphia Airport purchase have directly driven new wind project development in the Mid-Atlantic states. Every new wind project includes the credit revenue stream in its financial plan; it’s not simply a “Wall Street certificate”, as the article suggests.
The National Association of Attorneys General recognized almost ten years ago that credits are the only vehicle available for the purchase of renewable energy from grid-connected projects and should therefore be considered the equivalent of the actual electricity.
Paul Copleman
Community Energy, Inc.
We'd like to hear your thoughts on this subject. Email us at CommunityEnergy@NewWindEnergy.com
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2/25/08
I read somewhere that you are always supposed to start a blog posting with either a question or an anecdote, thus drawing in the reader. But what if I don’t have any readers yet?
This addition to the Community Energy webpage is a new endeavor for us, though hardly a new format for the new media-savvy among us. Allow me to briefly introduce myself, the goals of this adventurously named blog (maybe we’ll transition to “Shooting the Breeze”, “As the Blades Turn”, or another punny derivative) and invite you to join us in this ongoing conversation. We hope this format will attract readers who, like me, are fascinated by day-ahead transmission constraints in regional transmission organizations.
Actually, I came to this business, and this company, over six years ago with a deep interest in environmental issues. At that time, Community Energy consisted of six people, and was pioneering a new and unique business model aimed at growing the availability of wind-generated electricity. That model continues to serve as our backbone, and has led to exciting growth. As witness and contributor to that growth, my colleagues and co-workers seem to think I may have some insight that is worth sharing with a larger audience, and I am excited to do so.
Among the many tasks I handled at the beginning included creating and mailing our first invoice to a customer, Carnegie Mellon University (they are still a customer, by the way). Now, our finance and accounting department consists of staff on both coasts, and we serve over 115,000 customers nationwide. We used to only sell Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) generated at two wind farms in Pennsylvania. Now, we have built our own wind farms in multiple states, source from dozens of new projects around the country, and are part of the world’s largest wind power company by installed capacity.
This blog is admittedly still a technical work in progress. Currently, it allows us to post content, and receive reader emails. We are working on enhancing these capabilities to include functionality such as an interactive reader-posting format, along with other tools we hope you will enjoy and use.
We want to hear from you. We hope to address your questions, tackle issues we hear about in the media, discuss important subjects facing our industry, and generally make this format as useful to our readers as possible. So please write to us at CommunityEnergy@newwindenergy.com.
We thank you in advance for taking part in this with us, and look forward to a fun, fruitful discussion.
