This past week at the Blaine County Commissioners’ meeting, the Commissioners voted to dust off their 2008 resolution on county sustainability and relook at it. Wow! They haven’t thought about updating this plan for 12 years? With the pace of clean-energy technology change and the exponential price drops over this time period, 12 years ago in clean-energy-dog-years is like going back to a time when we didn’t have cellphones!
Lithium ion batteries that cost $1,183 per kWh in 2010 dropped to a cost of $156 per kWh in 2019.
Due to utility scale solar costs falling exponentially since 2008, solar has been installed in America and globally at a blistering pace. The U.S. Department of Energy reports on their website that “Solar power is more affordable, accessible, and prevalent in the United States than ever before. Since 2008, U.S. installations have grown 35-fold to an estimated 62.5 gigawatts (GW) (2018). This is enough capacity to power the equivalent of 12 million average American homes1. Since the beginning of 2014, the average cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels has dropped nearly 50 percent2.[1] Look at this graph of utility solar installations growing from virtually nothing in 2007.
Look at what other communities have been doing,
But, unfortunately, look at how far Idaho is behind. This Lawrence Berkeley National Lab chart shows that the rest of the country is rapidly installing battery energy storage, but not us.
“Fast-acting battery technology performs many roles: frequency regulation, capacity, deferral of wires upgrades, resilience, firming renewable generation and more. It does not rely on a geographically specific weather pattern or any one set of state policies to become valuable, and it’s already asserting itself across the U.S., said Daniel Finn-Foley, energy storage director at Wood Mackenzie, speaking Tuesday at GTM’s Energy Storage Summit in Denver.”[1]
Yes, it is more than time that our county dusts off the old sustainability plan and looks at what we can do now with cheap solar and battery storage prices and new technology. This is why I got into this race for County Commissioner—to seize this 100-year-decision-moment-in-time when we can take a new direction for a truly sustainable future for our county. Let’s do this!
1 National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Solar Industry Update Q4 2018/Q1 2019.
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-second-largest-ferry-operator-switching-from-diesel-to-batteries
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_utility_scale_solar_2018_edition_report.pdf Authors: Mark Bolinger, Joachim Seel Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/energy-storage-summit-growth-trajectory
