E/lectrify’s Cool News on Clean Energy — the COP30 edition

This week, I’ve been thinking about the United Nations 21st Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP21) in 2015, when 195 countries came together to pass the Paris Climate Agreement, the legally binding treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. 

I was watching online from the East Coast and have a vivid memory of the conference leaders standing on the dais after the vote, holding hands, arms raised, while hundreds in the audience stood and cheered (see above). The moment felt truly historic, as individual nations appeared to put political and economic self-interest aside to work toward the higher purpose of turning back the existential threat of climate change.

Ten years on, my feelings about this year’s COP30 in Belem, Brazil are decidedly mixed. Greenhouse gas emissions are at record levels, and the absence of an official United States delegation and President Trump’s bullying of countries to promote the sale of U.S. fossil fuels and derail any climate agreements are disheartening in the extreme. At the same time, the American state, local and business organizations on the ground in Belem — and their ongoing commitment to the Paris Agreement — have provided some hope.

Then there’s Bill Gates’ infamous memo, with its false dichotomy of adaptation and emission reduction and, as Jigar Shah noted in his blistering takedown of Gates on the Open Circuit podcast, total disregard for the cheap, clean technologies available to cut emissions right now. 

All of which is why, once again, I’ve been collecting cool stories about clean energy — to refocus the narrative on the hopeful things that can happen when people make decisions and take actions that both cut emissions and benefit their communities. 

I’m going to start with news from South Korea, where they don’t worry about coming up with catchy names or acronyms for their laws. As reported in Asia Business Daily, the country recently issued an update to its Act on the Promotion of the Development, Use and Diffusion of New and Renewable Energy, requiring any parking lot with 80 spaces or more to install solar canopies. (Underground parking lots get a pass on this one.)

What’s particularly cool here is that the law applies to all parking lots, new or existing, private or publicly owned, and the government is promoting the initiative as a way for “the public sector to take the lead in implementing national tasks and [providing] tangible benefits to people's lives.”

A report in electrek extrapolates, in detail, on the practical benefits of solar parking canopies — beyond creating jobs and improving reliability and flexibility on local power lines. Parking lot solar can “[protect] vehicles from heavy rain, snow and the blistering summer sun — keeping interiors cooler, extending the life of plastics and upholstery, and even helping to preserve battery range in EVs and [plug-in hybrids] by reducing their AC loads (and, of course, provide charging while the cars are parked).”

Electrek points to projects in Arizona and New York where solar parking canopies have already been installed or are in progress and speculates on the potential impacts if slapping solar on parking lots of 80 spaces or more became a national priority. 

At least four parking lots within two miles of my apartment would qualify.

Now this is not exactly a new story, but it is definitely cool and fun and well worth an update.

New York City has been piloting curbside EV charging at more than 100 locations around the city for the past four years and just released a final report on the program (which you can download here). We’re talking very sharp, compact Level 2 chargers installed on sidewalks, so you can drive your EV right up, park and plug in. 

Con Edison, the city’s main utility, New York City’s Department of Transportation and Flo, which makes the chargers, collaborated on the pilot.

Daytime rates were set at $2.50 per hour, or about $0.35/kWh, with night time rates of $1 per hour or $0.14/kWh — all competitive with other public chargers, which had rates running between $0.27 and $0.75/kWh. Besides price, the chargers also had high uptime scores — 99% — meaning they were online and ready to charge whenever a driver pulled up. 

What’s particularly exciting here is that New York’s EV drivers have been using the curbside chargers three to six times more than expected; so, by the fourth year of the pilot, utilization was at 72% versus an original projection of 12%. The main things EV owners haven’t liked about the curbside chargers is that more aren’t available, and even when they are, chargers are often “ICE’d,” that is, blocked by cars with internal combustion engines. 

Also exciting and significant, those high utilization rates are being driven by two different sets of EV owners: ride-share drivers and apartment dwellers. New York City is in the midst of converting its ride-share fleet — Ubers, Lyfts and taxis — to zero-emission vehicles. Under its Green Rides program, all ride-share vehicles and taxis in the city will have to be either ZEVs or wheelchair-accessible by 2030. 

The first wave of Green Rides EV adopters are using the curbside chargers in a big way, as are apartment dwellers, with equally high utilization rates in both upper- and lower-income neighborhoods. In some instances, the availability of affordable curbside charging has been a key factor in people’s decisions to buy an EV.

Whether curbside charging can be a sustainable business in large cities like New York remains an open question. At present, the report says, some subsidies or incentives are still needed to offset the upfront costs and maintenance.

But, again, let’s think national. What the pilot shows is that when chargers are available and integrated into the urban landscape, the EVs will come. 

And speaking of very cool, off-grid, solar-powered EV chargers — yes, a bit of a mouthful — a Vermont-based company, Solaflect Energy, has been rolling out its first models, with installations in New England and California.

Definitely not for curbsides, this baby has 6.88 kW of solar on a dual-axis tracker, which means it moves with the sun, so you get maximum amounts of electricity. The system also has an 8 kW battery and four charging plugs.

According to a report in pv magazine, what is super cool about this charger, besides those elegant tracking solar panels, is that it does not have to be connected to the local grid, which means no waiting on utilities for approvals and no expensive system upgrades. 

The company is targeting the commercial market, in particular, companies that want to provide their employees with workplace charging, to top up their EVs while they are at the office, without putting undue strain on the grid. 

The unit weighs in at about 2,000 pounds and can be assembled and ready to install in a day. It doesn’t need to take up any parking spaces and can provide about 250 miles of range per day, 64,000 miles per year — the annual average commuting needs for 15 to 20 EVs — at a cost of $0.10/kWh.  

On the downside, it does need a rather large and heavy (12,000 pounds) concrete base.  

While office charging is Solaflect’s primary market at present, the company has some nifty ideas for other off-grid uses, such as providing charging at remote trailheads along the Appalachian Trail. 

I’m going to end with a couple items from Europe, beginning with a very cool solar project in Belgium, billed as the world’s first to include hydrogen-producing solar panels.

The write-up in pv mag says, the panels, from a company called Solhyd, can produce “hydrogen directly from sunlight and air, without requiring liquid water, rare materials or heavy grid connection. It is said to be capable of producing 250 liters of hydrogen per day.”

Obviously, we’ve got a potential game-changer here. The hydrogen-producing panels — about 50 kW — will be part of a 2 MW solar and storage project expected to go online next year. 

“We are proving that green hydrogen can be approached in a pragmatic and scalable way,” said Jan Rongé, CEO of Solhyd. “By harnessing the sun directly, we lower costs and drastically simplify the system.”

The company aims to keep increasing the percentage of its hydrogen-producing panels in future projects, with the goal of a 2 MW, all-Solhyd solar farm by 2028. 

The next item, also from pv mag, is a bit wonky but really important and cool. In the near future, any new generation going onto the European grid will have to have “grid-forming” capabilities. What this means is that any new solar and storage project coming online will have to be able to provide the same kind of grid support services as a natural gas plant to keep the lights on in an emergency or extreme weather event that could cause an outage.

The main grid operator in Europe — the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity — has released a technical report on the requirements, which will apply to all new renewable and storage projects of 1 MW or more.

Each European country will have to adopt the new standards through its own regulatory process, so transition periods are expected. But renewable and storage companies could start incorporating the requirements into their products and projects as soon as possible to be ready. . 

The potential impact is huge. If renewables can provide the same grid-forming services as natural gas, the traditional arguments about the need for fossil-fueled generation, with its spinning reserves and inertia, are no longer valid. (See my Energy Literacy post on inertia here.)

In other words, we don’t need new natural gas plants to power data centers, just more renewables and storage with grid-forming capabilities. Now that would be historic.