On-site renewable energy trends for the Asian power market

Renewable energy attracted over $250 billion in global private sector investment in 2011 according to the United Nation’s REN21 report by the World Resources Institute as well as by a separate analysis by Bloomberg Energy.

While most of the media attention has been on utility-scale electric generation projects, some of the most interesting growth has been on hybrid-renewable energy generation tied to critical public infrastructure and critical loads in facilities and buildings.

Critical public infrastructure includes distributed electric generation along electric transmission lines for line voltage augmentation and utility SCADA systems.

Municipal water and sewage systems also utilize on-sight generation (including photovoltaics, small wind, biogas, and in-stream (freeflow) hydropower) for sensing and driving pipeline pumps.

Oil pipelines are also incorporating distributed generation for cathodic protection (rust prevention), safety and protection systems. And municipal governments are more rapidly relying on these renewable energy systems to power biological and nuclear sensors, surveillance, and traffic cameras.

Cellular companies are integrating renewable generation to increase diesel generator life and a few are moving to dedicated renewable energy systems to power their towers.

Corporate and government facilities with campuses composed of many buildings are the next trends for insight power. Primarily corporations are looking for higher power quality to obviate the need for back-up diesel generation which includes not only the cap[ital costs but the monthly testing and the diesel fuel replacements, and to provide electric power quality reducing electric surges (over-voltages), sages (under-voltages), and transients (spurts of electrons), all which harm digital equipment.

In countries with higher electric rates, many of the renewable systems are not only more cost effective than diesel-electric generation but also with grid electricity costs, if unsubsidized. Renewable generation has more predictable costs, and predictability during these unpredictable times has higher market appreciation.

The final trend that is driving global use of on-site electric and thermal generation (industrial process heat, water and space heating, and cooling) are concerns about intense weather and geological events and terrorism, and also water impacts. Traditional thermal-steam-to-electric generation competes head-to-head with agriculture and industrialization.

The “energy/water nexus” is being addressed by many countries in Asia and throughout the globe. Distributive, renewable energy generation is as disruptive as cellular an the Internet have been to communications and information respectively.

Recent advances in solid-state lighting, inverters, and storage (batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels, compressed storage, hydrogen, and pumped hydropower, etc.) are also creating flexibility in power and load management. These aforementioned technologies are all now manufactured in Asia and are also being utilized within the Asian power markets.

I am often asked, “so when will renewable energy be mainstream?” and I respond that it is now – actually ubiquitous throughout our existing infrastructure.

But this portfolio of new technologies in renewable energy, advanced storage, and high-value energy efficiency have just begun to “scale” in manufacturing and are just at the start of becoming integrated in standardized systems with standardized financing and maintenance formats.

These new industries have yet to move into the merger and acquisition phase, which should begin in the following decade, and will signal the step from childhood to adolescence. This trend is following the exact same growth curves with their fits-and-starts as did cellular and computing. Asia will be in the forefront of both manufacturing and utilization.

Scott Sklar, The Stella Group, Ltd.