Envisioning the Energy Future

Envisioning the Energy Future was an event held from 10 am to 4 pm on Tuesday, February 24, 2015 at the conference center of the Federal Reserve Bank across from South Station in Boston.  The conference was hosted by the Acadia Center, formerly ENE, Energy Northeast and brought together practitioners from Denmark and all over NE to share their expertise.

The morning panel was on  "Utility in the future," moderated by Abigail Anthony, Acadia Center 
Nathan Adams, Green Mountain Power
Tim Woolf, Synapse Energy Economics, Inc
Jonathan Schrag, Guarini Center (NY)
Peter Rothstein, New England Clean Energy Council

Jonathan Schrag - will distributed generation be as green as RGGI?  Market-based initiatives are driving the marketplace. They are looking at things like Priceline for an open marketplace structure, at least in NY.  Brooklyn doing an innovative demand management project.
Current state microgrid projects can drive grid and regulatory modernization.  Focus on what you want the grid to do rather than particular technologies.

Peter Rothstein - more than 10% of the largest cleantech companies in the world in MA, over 80,000 soon to be 100,000 people employed in the state in this sector.  More than 10% of ARPA-E grants in MA, many in storage. How do you get utilities to invest in new technologies, in an environment where they now spend .2% on R & D, about a tenth of what industry in general spends. RD&D - demonstrations to develop workable business models.  Third parties are going to be a major party to future developments.  Change the model to one more like telecom which anticipates the customers' next needs.  The innovations will need to serve both customers and provide value for the grid.

Tim Woolf - it may be harder to get the regulators to change than the utilities.  Performance based rate making - UK's RIO (sp?) is one example and require strict performance standards.  Demonstrates a shift to outcomes.  Performance based mechanisms are a way to proceed - track and report, target setting, rewards and penalties.  Each of these measures can stand alone or combined.  There are pitfalls in terms of uncertainty of outcomes and unintended consequences as well as gaming and manipulation.  Collecting data is a no regrets policy that can be implemented now.

Nathan Adams - changing grid model, customer value, use local resources.  Moving to a network leveraging distributed marginal pricing.  Most people don't want to deal with real time pricing but technology can do it for them.  Third parties to create value for utility, customers, and the third parties.  NY, CA, MA are now leading in policy reform.  Pilot microgrid project in Rutland to build the model - frequency regulation, solar ramp smoothing , islanding with automation to follow by Fall after summer installation.  Storage through a solar/battery -  battery 4MW - 2.5 MW solar.  Over 200 controllable water heaters.  Hardest challenge is to engage customer appliances without inconveniencing customers.  Change the utility capital model - cap revenue to drive efficiency;  turn grid into platform business so that the market creates prices not regulators.  Frequency regulation market ISO-NE is initiating is a good step forward.

Over lunch, Klaus Veslov, of Oestkraft (http://oestkraft.dk), the municipal utility on the Danish island of Bornholm spoke about "The Ecogrid EU Project in a Strategic Perspective" (http://ecogridbornholm.dk)

Danish is wind first with solar and biomass and a full electrification of infrastructure, exchanging energy with Sweden, Norway, and UK (UK connecting with Iceland).  Storage is a problem and they can't make a business case for hydrogen on any terms.  Danish political and social consensus is going to renewables quickly.
Bornholm - bright green island, 100% fossil free by 2025, as a business case.  80% renewables now with a lot of problems with solar intermittence balanced by coal and diesel.  Population is 45,000 and has become the national test site for new energy systems with municipalities, companies, and universities participating.  2000 households in the Ecogrid, about 4000 people, with lots of green building, energy efficiency, geothermal, and electric vehicles.  From consumers to prosumers.  First stage from 2011-2015 with a proposal for Ecogrid 2.0. Now there is overproduction of wind. Household investments in air to water heat pumps with district heating.  Reversing market system for peak shaving and educating customers to use energy when it is being produced, running demand backward - grid demands energy from distributed resources. Participants are not being motivated by money because there isn't much economic benefit yet.  Automating about 1200 households with energy controls. 2 hours of training per participant at their demonstration Villa Smart house but voluntary demand response lasts for only about 30 days.

Leveling the Playing Field for Distributed Energy Resources
Scudder Parker, VT Energy Investment Corp
Amy Boyd, Acadia Center
Fran Cummings, Peregrine Energy
Jim Grevatt, Energy Futures Group
Kerrick Johnson, VELCO

Amy Boyd - skyrocketing transmission costs in NE, higher than the rest of the US.  Define reliability needs rather than transmission needs to bring non-wire alternatives into the picture earlier.  Regional entities don't pay for non-wires, the states pay for it on their own.

Jim Grevatt -  NY case study for ConEd on energy efficiency as an alternative to transmission and distribution costs.  They realized they did not have to build the projects that were deferred through efficiency.  2013 heat wave spurred them to greater action.  Brooklyn Queens project is $200 (?) million, 85% residential.

Fran Cummings - RI National Grid on solar PV as a distributed resource in Tiverton and Little Compton.  Found that orienting solar to the west rather than due south for more value to the grid in peak shaving and distribution.  Solar is a better distribution resource than expected.
Pecan Street project in Austin, TX - a neighborhood energy initiative.

Kerrick Johnson - VT case study, a transmission company, 2010-2013 deferred $400 million transmission through alternatives. Only 4% of that benefit was to VT ratepayers as opposed to regional ratepayers. Transmission returns on a state by state level can benefit the state's ratepayers to the detriment of regional ratepayers.
NB:  IBM came up often in terms of data and controls both here and on Denmark.  Energy smart cities are halfway to smart cities.

The Role of Energy Efficiency and Demand Side Resources to Reduce Price Pressures in the Energy System
James Howland, Acadia Center
Jeremy Newberger, national Grid
Jeff Schlegel, Schlegel and Associates
Michael Stoddard, Efficiency Maine Trust
Eric Wilkinson, ISO-NE

Jeff Schlegel -  Energy efficiency as demand reduction, lowering price volatility but the multiple values of the efficiencies are disaggregated based upon the regulations and pricing. Adjust peak times closer to reality, now 11am to 3pm.  No longer any winter peak capacity numbers in ISO-NE.

NB:  Different peaks for different flows:  peak demand, peak solar and renewables supply, peak system efficiency

Eric Wilkinson - the vast majority of energy efficiency has been in lighting.  ISO-NE wants to see new interconnection standards so that a blip in transmission does not result in taking a large chunk of PV offline due to automatic shutdown.

Jeremy Newberger -  RI has an energy efficiency focus.

Michael Stoddard - ME energy efficiency through Efficiency Maine Trust statewide, about 2.7 cents per kWh (?) to save energy.  Boothbay project replaced about $16 million of transmission with $6 million of non transmission resources within six months. Boothbay is using some of the fishery industry freezers as energy storage.

Even MA, most efficient in the US for the last 5 years, lags in terms of energy efficiency compared to Europe.

The slides will be available.

Creating Renewables Micro-Utiliies

2/6/15
MIT
Justin Buck, Cambrian Innovation
jbuck@cambrianinnovation.com
http://www.cambrianinnovation.com

Modular, turn-key waste water to energy systems using electrically active microbes.  The amount of energy in waste water is proportional to the BOD level. 

Uses exo-electrogenic organisms like geobacter and shewanella.  Geobacter is efficient and shewanella can operate in a wider variety of circumstances (a generalist).
They can build microbial fuel cells using waste water as a fuel.

Cambrian is looking at water treatment, electricity generation, and information from the flow through the system.

Ecovolt - world's first bioelectrically enhanced waste water treatment system, a biogas producer which can remove more BOD from water than traditional methods and produce more biogas.  Does not yet deal with heavy metals and pollutants like benzene.  A primary treatment system that removes soluble BOD, provides heat through hot water, biogas, and electricity.  Payback from less than a year to three years.  20,000 gallons per day per module.  Working on a WEPA - water energy power agreement.  The electricity comes from burning methane.

Scaling is the most difficult thing.

Pollster Peter Hart at Harvard 2/3/15

Pollster Peter Hart spoke at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on February 3, 2015 to a small group of people in the regular Tuesday noon conversation.  He brought slides from the recent NBC/WallStreetJournal poll done just prior to State of the Union

The major point was that the Michigan consumer index is well up over 85% and his own polling shows that people are more satisfied with the economy (45% to 55%) than they have been before. The recovery is still not complete but people seem to be feeling better about their economic future.

Creating jobs, defeating ISIS, reducing the deficit are the top three issues, in different order, for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents but people, in general, hate the government and, in particular, loathe Congress.

Hart related how in one a focus group, a Republican woman, Jenny, said the politician she'd most like to spend an hour with is Elizabeth Warren.  She was mad at Boehner because he said everyone who needs a job has one.  As her husband has been out of work and looking for 18 months, she knows that's not true.  She also feels caught since she went back to school for more training and to advance in her job.  Now she has student loans that amount to about $1300 a month, nearly twice her monthly rent.

He spent most of the hour answering questions.  Asked about polling now, he said it has nothing to do with what will happen in 2016.  One Republican candidate who stood out in his polling and focus groups is Rand Paul.  All the other Republican candidates had problems.  Hart advised us to look at who has a theme, who has something to say to the country.  He believed that Jeb Bush at least has a vision as does Paul.

As to what to run on, Hart said that candidates should run on safety and economic security, as always;  but it's no longer war, it's radical terrorism and how we get our sense of confidence back. Immigration remains a hot button issue while gay marriage seems to be settled and something the Republicans should avoid.

Hart's company now break out Republicans into Tea Party and not in all their polls.  I asked him about this after the session and he agreed that there are a number of different constituencies in the party today which may result in the Republican party becoming more like the Democratic party, a collection of competing interests.

When asked, he refused to name who were his picks for 2016 but gave betting odds that it would be Clinton and Bush.  The advantage goes to the Republicans given that the 6 year election results have been a historic indicator.

One major difference from previous years is that anger is closer to the surface now and there is a disconnect within the population with many not realizing how much of a struggle it is to get ahead or simply live now.

In discussing the idea of "voters voting against their own interests," he talked a little about West Virginia which voted for Dukakis in 1988 but is now a solid Republican state although there has been no real demographic changes within the population.  West Virginia changed from economic to social value voters over time.

On the issue of income equality, Hart says the debate is no longer supply side versus fairness but economic security.   He has not done any polling on the issue of inequality of opportunity.

He believes that Senatorial and Congressional choices are made from the head but Mayors, Governors, and Presidents are chosen on more intangible measures.  Who would you like to be in a car in the HOV lane with?

People are getting their information more and more from the Internet.  Fox and MSNBC viewers are like the fans of different teams.  But younger people follow a wider range of news sources than their elders.

He believes that voter participation will be up in 2016 but the African-American vote will be down unless there is someone on the ticket to energize them.  Voters under 30 have been turning out and their cohort will probably keep growing.

Both he and his Republican partner, Bob McInturff, felt that in 2012 there was a potential for a double digit third party and there still is potential for a Broom Party, clean sweep of the bums. (Obviously, he doesn't understand how difficult it is to get a third party on the ballot state by every 50 states.  It is probably too late already for such an enterprise to be successful for 2016.)

Asked whether the economy is as predictive an indicator as it was, he replied that the consumer index looks like it will go up but there may be "Democratic fatigue" as Obama builds his legacy, something that will be perceived as pushing the country to the left.

"Hillary's campaign will be bigger than life," Hart says but Elizabeth Warren is perfect on one issue for a lot of people.  She has the potentiality to be the Robert Kennedy of 2016.

I asked him about the concern about the deficit, whether he had done reality testing with the issue, letting people know that the deficit has decreasing rather than growing, cut in about a half since Obama took office.  Hart replied that people do not understand the economy and that he has not done any of what I would call reality polling, asking people their opinions on the deficit and then polling them again after they've seen what the numbers actually are.

How Western Civilization Collapses from Climate Change - a Future History

The idea of this short book is that the authors are looking back on the 20th and 21st century from the year 2393 in the Second People's Republic of China, explaining why the Western nations and the rest of the world did not respond to the climate crisis that they knew was rushing down upon them, upon us.

The actual authors are historians of science and previously wrote Merchants of Doubt:  How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org), a book that every talking head on the Tee and Vee would do well to read before inviting a climate change change skeptic or denier on to their program.

The Collapse of Western Civilization by Namoi Oreskes and Erik M Conway

NY:  Columbia University Press, 2014

ISBN 978-0-231-16954-7

(21)  By the mid-2010s, the Arctic summer sea had lost about 30 percent of its real extent [of ice] compared to 1979, when high-precision satellite measurements were first made;  the average loss was rather precisely measured at 13.7 percent per decade from 1979 to 2013.  When the areal extent to summer sea ice was compared to earlier periods using additional data from ships, buoys, and airplanes, the total summer loss was nearly 50 percent.

(38)  Market fundamentalism - and its various strands and interpretations known as free market fundamentaism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire economics, and laissez-faire capitalism - was a two-pronged ideological system.  The first prong held that societal needs were served most efficiently in a free market economic system.  Guided by the "invisible hand" of the marketplace, individuals would freely respond to each other's needs, establishing a net balance between solutions ("supply") and needs ("demand").  The second prong of the philosophy maintained that free markets were not merely a good or even the best manner of satisfying material wants:  they were the _only_ manner of doing so that did not threaten personal freedom.

(35-36)  The thesis of this analysis is that Western civilization became trapped in the grip of two inhibiting ideologies:  positivism and market fundamentalism.
Twentieth-century scientists saw themselves as the descendants of an empirical tradition often referred to as positivism - after the nineteenth-century French phiosopher, Auguest Comte, who developed the concept of "positive" knowledge (as in, "absolutely, positively true") - but the overall philosophy is more accurately known as Baconianism.  This philosophy held that through experiment, observation, and experiment, one could gather reliable knowledge about the natural world, and that this knowledge would empower its holder.  Experience justified the first part of the philosophy (we have recounted how twentieth-century scientists anticipated the consequences of climate change), but the second part - that this knowledge would translate into power - proved less accurate.  Although billions of dollars were spent on climate research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the resulting knowledge had little impact on the crucial economic and technological policies that drove the continued use of fossil fuels.

(46)  Social scientists introduced the concept of "late lessons from early warnings" to describe a growing tendency to neglect information.  As a remedy, they promoted a precautionary principle, whereby early action would prevent later damage.

(58)  human adaptive optimism (1)  The belief that there are no limits to human adaptability - that we can either adapt to any circumstances, or change them to suit ourselves.  Belief in geoengineeering as a climate "solution" was a subset of HAO.  (2)  The capacity of humans to remain optimistic and adapt to changed circumstances, even in the face of daunting difficultires, and even if the form of "adaptation" required is suffering.

(77)  Neoliberalism in its pure form fails to recognize external costs or to provide a mechanism for preventing future damage.  There's no market signal from the future, or from birds and bats and bees (until the damage is so great that we actually see it, for example, in the cost of honey, but even then, most consumers won't know why the cost of honey is rising.) 

Business and political leaders who have been swayed by the arguments for deregulation need to realize that while the basic idea of invoking competition to good ends is a powerful one, it only works in the full sense when tempered by the need to address market failure and external costs.  Neoliberalism is an ideology, and like most ideologies, it hits potholes and speed bumps when put into practice;  even Adam Smith recongized that you have to regulate the banks.   Climate change is a really, really big pothole.  But here's an interesting point to note:  von Hayek explicitly invoked pollution as an external cost that can legitimately justify government intervention in the marketplace.  I suppose that might by why some people on the right deny that CO2 is a pollutant... 

Lords of Creation

_Lords of Creation_ by Frederick Lewis Allen

NY:  Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1935

(2)  The amiable William McKinley sat in the White House;  Senator Mark Hanna, to whom the welfare of big business and the welfare of the country were almost indistinguishable, stood behind McKinley, ready with encouragement and advice;  business men felt sure that the affairs of the United States would be managed with a conservative regard for the rights and privileges of property.

(8)  [NJ Governor James B.] Dill suggested passing a law which would permit companies incorporated in New Jersey to hold the stock of other corporations.  Such a law was duly passed, to the immense benefit of the state treasury, which fattened - as other state treasuries were later to fatten - on the fees resulting from an extension of the privileges of property.

NB:  The birth of the holding company

(65)  The one sure victor in the battle [over railroads between Harriman and Morgan] - a battle which from any broad social point of view, considering the railroads as public carriers rather than as pawns in a game of grab, appeared almost completely senseless - was the principle of consolidation and concentration of capital.   

(84)  After all, there are few things as dull as greed.

(95-96)  The earliest Americans had fled from Europe to escape governmental pressure;  the pioneer had been perforce a rugged individualist;  the belief had almost inevitably grown up that govenrment interference with private business was the beginning of tyranny, and that to resist the intrusions of government into economic operations was to play the part of a conserver of American liberties.  The law of supply and demand offered all the regulation which an American would tolerate.  One's business was one's private affair, like one's diet or one's underclothes.  A strange idea, it may seem, in view of the fact that great concentrations of capital could take into their own hands the administration of the law of supply and demand, and that what these men considered their private business intimately affected the lives of millions of men and women.  Yet emotionally it was a potent idea.  (To some, it still is.)

(117)  Presently he [Charles W. Morse] went into banking, for he too had discovered that it is convenient for a speculator and promoter to have access to depositors' funds.  He borrowed large sums through "dummies" to finance his private operations;  at one time, for example, his bank lent him a hundred thousand dollars in his stenographer's name.  And he had made the further discovery that it was possible through a succession of borrowings to gain control of bank after bank.  The Morse technic was simple:  borrow money and buy the controlling shares in a bank;  then put up these shares as collateral against another loan of money, with which you buy another bank, and so on.  As soon as you control the bank it becomes quite simple to have such loans to yourself approved - and other loans, too, with which you may promote other coampanies and play the market.

(168)  ...all drastic reform is deflationary.

(174)  The way in which an affiliate was organized was a beautiful example of the legerdemain fo the corporation lawyer.  Suppose the national bank which found the legal limitations of national banking cumbersome was fortunate enough to have built up a huge surplus, as were Baker's First National and Stillman's National City Bank.  Out of this surplus it now declared a huge dividence to its stockholders, proposing that the money (which now technically belonged to the stockholders) be straightway invested in a new company, the affiliate.  This new company would have the same directors as the bank;  it would have the same officers;  it would occupy the same quarters;  its stock would not be salable except along with the stock of the bank - and yet it would not be a national bank, but a corporation empowered by state charter to embark in almost any business it chose!  It might hold the stock of other banks, it might speculate, and the Comptroller of the Treasury could not object.  It was outside his jurisdiction.

(195)  [July 1914 on the beginning of WWI] The New York Stock Exchange was closed at once, to remain closed for months;  if it had not been, the rush of European investors to convert their American securities into money against the unpredictable emergencies of war financing would have knocked prices down to the bottom, undermined bank loans, and imperiled the whole financial structure.

(196)  ...not until the first of April, 1915, a full eight months after the invasions of Belgium by the Germans, was it considered to open the New York Stock Exchange to unrestricted trading.

(213)  There is no surer engine of inflation than war.

(237)  If we accept the careful estimates in _Recent Economics Changes_, we may say that during the 1922-27 period, while the output of each factory worker was increasing by 3.5 per cent a year, his earnings were increasing by 2.4 per cent a year.  A considerable increase;  but not quite enough - if these estimates are accurate - to give him the ful benefit of the improvements in technique, especially as the cost of living rose slightly in the interval.  And it is interesting to note that during the 1923-27 period the profits of industrial corporations increased by as much as 9 per cent a year, which suggests that part of the benefit of these improvements was being drawn off at the top in ellarged dividends.  Apparently, too, the drawing-off process was accentuated in 1928-29.

(244)  Holding companies were legion now;  indeed, to a large extent the economic history of the nineteen-twenties is the history of the holding company....

The most extraordinary device of all for achieving concentration was an extension of the holding-company device:  what became known as "pyramiding" - namely, the organizing of holding comapnies to control holding compnaies which in turn controlled other holding compnaies - and so on almost ad infinitum.

(266)  NB:  Samuel Insull as a scapegoat the way Bernie Madoff is a scapegoat for much wider and wilder machinations.

(306)  And so the process [of credit inflation] continues;  not to the bitter end, of course, for each time you or I draw a check we thereby reduce the total amount of money which the bank can lend;  but far enough to make the amount of check money in the country from five to ten times as great as the amount of currency.

(306-307)  To hear some people discuss inflation, one might suppose that the only possible kind of inflation were that which can be brought about by the government through the use of the printing press, printing greenbacks;  but banking or credit inflation of the sort described above has been a normal financial process for a very long time and has come about as the joint result of innumerable acts of judgment on the part of thousands of individual bankers as they received deposits and made loans.

(328)  ....the speculative spirit of the nineteen-twenties saw its most dazzling future in raising the standard of living, not of the poor, but of the rich, by providing for them loftier and more luxurious offices and more lordly dwellings.

NB:  Them that got shall get....

(354)  John T Flynn's Security Speculation

(366)  ...a banker's name does not become a household word in America until he is investigated.

(395)  America was beginning to pay the inevitable price for a long chain of events:  the general acceptance of the theory that the way to prosperity was through having as many people as possible buy securities which could be converted into cash at short notice;  the acceptance of the theory that the way to make such instant conversion possible was through encouraging margin speculation;  the widespread craze for common stocks as the cream of investments - and of vehicles for margin speculation;  and the consequent conversion of the market for common stocks into a great gambling casino.

NB:  ESOTs and 2008 housing collapse

(399)  In order to scatter prosperity about once more, Hoover asked Congress to cut the income tax.  He also advocated a public-works campaign to take up any possible slack in employment, thus taking a leaf out of a different book of economics.

(405)  Even in the terrific year of 1932, when the corporations of the country were collectively more than five and a half billion dollars in the red, they were still paying dividends to the extent of more than four billion dollars;  and of these four billions, over a billion and a half was paid by companies which were actually losing money.

(408)  According to the estimates of Berle and Pederson, the total of liquid claims in the United States had never amounted to more than 20 per cent of the national wealth until 1912;  between 1912 and 1922 it had gone up to about 25 per cent;  by 1930 it had shot up to 40 per cent.  A liquid investment had its advantages for the individual:  he felt safer if at any moment he could turn his holdings into money.  But the existence of a large proportion of liquid investments enornously increased the chances of panic.

(414)  The situation [in 1931] which thus arose contained, perhaps, a certain element of ironic humor.  Now financial magnates who still cried out for "less government in business" and inveighed against "the dole" could go, hat in hand, to Washington and get the government to put itself into business by giving a dole of credit to their banks or their railroads.  The apostle of rugged individualism had taken the longest step in American history toward state socialism - though it was state socialism of a very special sort.

NB:  Socialism for the rich, laissez-faire for the poor

(439)  If the people at Washington wanted men to do business, why pester and frighten them with investigations, regulations, and prohibitions?  The principal reason, of course, was that the people at Washington knew that reform was long overdue (indeed, it is interesting to note that some of the changes brought about in 1933 and 1934 had been recommended by the Pujo committee twenty years earlier!)...

(443)  In the second place, the Roosevelt program involved a deliberate recogntion of the end of laissez-faire.  For the first time in American history, the government definitely assumed responsibility for the functioning of the American economy.  The measures which Roosevelt put into effect were not by any means revolutionary;  this assumption was.

Renewables Changing the Electrical Grid

One of the possibilities I see in Hubevents and Hubeventsnotes is that more people than just me would go to public lectures and share their notes.  My friend Ambrose Spencer has made that possibility a reality with this report on the way the electrical is changing under the onslaught of renewables.

"From a letter to a policy analyst at the state level. 

"Last month BASEA (http://www.basea.org) highlighted community solar with speakers from Harvard, from Next Step and from the new net metering task force http://www.mass.gov/eea/energy-utilities-clean-tech/nms-taskforce/renamed the Net metering and Solar task force.  

"Yesterday I went to hear Francesco Starace, CEO and general manager, Enel Group.  

ENEL is one of the largest owners of electricity system infrastructure in the world.   

Meeting Tomorrow’s Energy Challenges: Why Technology will Define our Energy Future (Mr. Francesco Starace)He said that Italy has gone a long way to the smart grid. 
For 10 years Italy has had smart meters. 
They have been building their smart grid for more than 10 years.
And now they have real time pricing for all commercial and residential customers.
And such a blessing.  People are actually cutting back when the price of electricity is high. 
Another thing he showed is that, in the summer when the sun is shining, the solar installed, about 15 percent of the connected generation, 
has been able to bring down the daytime peak for conventional generation to within just several percentage points of what it is is at 1 am in the middle of the night.. 
I should add that the real time pricing plays a large part of this.  
"But the reason I write is this.   

"REAL TIME PRICING IS NEEDED
First, it will be very important for the work of the task force when they begin to consider the alternatives to net metering, especially virtual net metering for community solar, in an effort to rationalize the pricing of the primary and ancillary services provided by the transmission grid and by the distribution grid, that the task force be sure to consider the options in the context of real time pricing for all customers.   

"A few months ago I wrote about distributed generation in the northern part of Jutland in Denmark, where a district heating plant of several Megawatts, is providing ancillary services that include balancing on pricing signals, and also grid stability, specifically voltage and frequency control.  Denmark knows that their future, which includes a lot of distributed generation, both district heating CHP and micro CHP, and they know wind will be able to carry the whole load at times and the district heating assets will be able to carry almost all of the electrical load when the renewables are unavailable.  And so logically they know that they will need to balance the grid and control it with wind or CHP and other distributed resources; large plants will be in decline as a share of the resources until there is not a large enough resource in the large plants to do the grid stability in the conventional manner.   

"THE FIRST SERVICE OF BATTERIES MAY BE TO PROVIDE SHORT TERM BALANCING AND TO PROVIDE VOLTAGE AND FREQUENCY CONTROL. 
Batteries have been seen as the future for incorporating larger and larger fractions of fluctuating renewables into the grid.   

"Simulation modeling for engineering design and for economic feasibility in Denmark and in Germany show that this not true beyond a day or two, or the weekend at the very most.   

"Wind lulls there are as long as 5 days and sometimes 12 days.   

"ENEL sees that a much more valuable service, in the beginning, will be for batteries to play a major role in balancing services and in voltage and frequency control.
 
"If ENEL is correct about this, in Denmark they will not have to install voltage and frequency control and automatic dispatch into as much of their distributed generation;   some of this can be done manually or conventionally by treating aggregates of resources the way large sources provide for stability today; and letting batteries do a lot of the work.   

"Denmark may choose to continue on their path and Italy on theirs.  

"Another benefit from using batteries is that it reduces the amount of needed spinning reserve.  

"And further this use of batteries will make microgrid and cellular grid and other islanding options much easier. Back up generation does not respond instantly.  Electronic controls for governing the flow of current into and out of a battery can happen instantaneously and with great precision.   

"Even if the present government in Washington does not choose to take up a worthy future for our posterity, the rest of the world is providing some of the lessons that will be needed.  

"Starace from ENEL said that much of the grid will need to become bidirectional.  In a question afterwards, I gave the situation of a valley and uplands.  the population and the district heating are mostly in the valley and the wind mostly in the uplands,   Clearly some of the grid will need to be bidirectional.   

"Francesco Starace spoke at the Shorenstein center of the JFK School at Harvard.  It was sponsored jointly by The Harvard Environmental Economics Program with the Consortium for Energy Policy Research at Harvard University. 

"The meetings of the Electricity Restructuring Roundtable in Boston are archived;  The archives are for speakers who have given presentations in the past.  Some of them have spoken on one of these subjects. I have written to a couple of engineers who have been involved in development of distributed generation resources; and I to stay in touch with these subjects and the decision that  are being made."
Ambrose R Spencer. 

_The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV__ by WH Lewis

_The Splendid Century_ by Warren Hamilton Lewis [brother of CS Lewis]

Garden City, NY:  Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953

(15)  She [Henriette Anne, sister of  Charles II of England and wife of Philippe, brother of Louis XIV] had indeed learnt in the expressive phrase of the time, how steep are the stairs of the charitable.

(33)  cunctations - from cunctari to hesitate, delaying actions

(43)  kibes - A chapped or inflamed area on the skin, especially on the heel, resulting from exposure to cold; an ulcerated chillblain. [Middle English kybe.

(51)  pantler - The servant or officer, in a great family, who has charge of the bread and the pantry. 

(111)  delations - (Law) (formerly) to bring a charge against; denounce; impeach. 2. (Law) to report (an offence, etc). 3. (Broadcasting) to make known or public.  

Chiefly Scot. to inform against; denounce or accuse. 2. Archaic. to relate; report: to delate an offense. Origin Expand. Latin. 1505-1515. 1505-15; < Latin dēlātus

(126)  peculator - to steal or take dishonestly (money, especially public funds, or property entrusted to one's care); embezzle

pecūlātor (“embezzler”), from Latin pecūlor (“I embezzle”), from Latin pecūlium (“private property”). 

(136)  And again [Louis XIV] to Beaufort in the same year:  “I want to know if Captain Laurier leaves a wife and children, so that I may do something for them, being anxious that people shall see that those who die in my service continue to live in my memory.”

(137)  But the radical unsoundness of the [military field] hospital organization engendered constant abuses, which could be checked, but not eradicated;  for the hospitals were let out to contractors at a fixed rate per patient, and a dishonest contractor had therefore every inducement to spend as little as possible on the unfortunates in his charge.  But with Louvois as Secretary of War, he did so at considerable risk;  in 1683 the Secretary detects frauds being perpetrated by the hospital contractor of Alsace, and gives judgement in  letter to the Intendant.  The offending contractor is to be led by the common hangman through every hospital ward in the province, wearing sandwich boards with the legend _fripon public_ [public knave/rogue/fraud], after which he is to be banished for life.

If Louvois did not entirely succeed in his struggle to stamp out indiscipline, he at any rate never relaxed his efforts to do so;  but circumstances, the whole tone of society, were against him.  And, oddly enough, it was Louvois who was responsible for much of the indiscipline against which he himself strove.  With a naiveté  remarkable in so able a man, he imagined that it was feasible to incite French armies to commit murder, rape, robbery, and arson for so long as it suited his strategical objective, and that then, on the word “halt,” the troops would once more become models of soldierly discipline.  It is some little consolation for the atrocities committed by Louvois’ orders in Holland in 1672 and in Germany in 1689 to know that the damage thereby done to French morale was a major factor in bringing about the ultimate ruin of his master’s plans.

(162)  Fire brigades did not exist before 1699, and, somehow or other, the Capuchins had become expert firefighters;  in emergencies, in which the modern Londoner dials “fire,” the seventeenth-century householder sent for the Capuchins.

(182)  …whilst St. Ambrose watched over the bees.

(216)  [Evelyn in 1644 on the galley convicts/slaves]  Their rising and falling back at their oare is a miserable spectacle, and the noise of their chains with the roaring of the beaten waters has something of strange and fearful to one unaccustomed to it.  They are rul’d and chastiz’d by strokes on their backs and soles of their feete on the least disorder and without the least humanity;  yet they are cherefull and full of knavery.

(277)  Boileau was much given to dining out, and set much store by the virtue of punctuality - “A man’s faults, sir, are always brought up when he keeps the company waiting."