October 18, 2013
By Scott Miller
smiller@scbiznews.com
Regulators and utilities should move cautiously toward a plan that incorporates renewable energies, particularly solar power, into the mix of electricity delivered to consumers without raising costs, an executive with Duke Energy said Thursday.
“Getting the rules right, now,
allows the economic impacts of solar to spread throughout the Carolinas. No
final set of rules is going to make everyone happy, including the utilities,
but doing something sooner rather than later is better,” said Lee Mazzocchi, Duke’s senior vice president and
chief integration and innovation officer.smiller@scbiznews.com
Regulators and utilities should move cautiously toward a plan that incorporates renewable energies, particularly solar power, into the mix of electricity delivered to consumers without raising costs, an executive with Duke Energy said Thursday.
Of the utility’s 7 million customers
in the Southeast and Midwest, only about 3,000 use solar power, he said.
“Yet in my typical day, solar creeps
into every conversation,” he said. “The big reason: solar’s got a ton of
momentum behind it.”
“When the casinos are betting on
solar, you better pay attention,” said Mazzocchi, who served as the keynote
speaker at Thursday’s Energy Summit in Greenville, dedicating his
20-minute presentation to the push for solar energy.
Growth in the use of solar energy is
expected to reach 50% this year nationally, he said.
“A solar panel gets installed every
four minutes in this country,” Mazzocchi said.
Increasing the use of solar power
will present opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate new technologies for
its generation, delivery and use, he said.
Duke is embracing renewables,
Mazzocchi said, investing around $3 billion since 2007 in renewable energy
projects, including wind and solar. The push to add solar, however, must be done
without affecting electricity costs, Mazzocchi said.
Utilities need to advance the
renewable energy conversation with regulators, he said, and adopt new ways to
charge for electricity beyond just the kilowatt-hour, ways to price energy
products differently.
“The current regulations, mindset
and business model were designed for a different era,” Mazzocchi said.
In states with a higher use of
renewable energies, customers that do not use solar power subsidize the higher
costs for those that do, he said.
He pointed to service disruptions in
California, Arizona and Germany related to renewable energy. In Germany, where
the use of renewable energy is high, electricity cost is triple what Duke’s
South Carolina customers pay, Mazzocchi said.
South Carolina regulators have long
resisted the adoption of a renewable energy portfolio standard that other
states have used as a way to jump-start the use of renewable energies and the
development of related technologies.
North Carolina regulators, for
example, adopted a portfolio standard in 2007, calling for investor-owned
utilities to meet up to 12.5% of their energy needs through renewable energy
resources or energy efficiency measures. Rural electric cooperatives and
municipal electric suppliers are subject to a 10% renewable energy requirement
in North Carolina.
South Carolina is one of only 13
states without some form of voluntary or mandatory portfolio standard, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The U.S. does not have a federal standard, though efforts have been introduced
in Congress.+(124x76).jpg)
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