Apartnership of Turkish, Chinese and American firms are working on a project to build a 1000-megawatt (MW) pumped-storage hydro power plant in Isparta province, in the western Anatolian region of Turkey, General Electric (GE) General Manager for Hydroelectricity Dept. of GE in Turkey said on Thursday.
A pumped-storage hydro power plant generates power through potential gravitational energy, which is then utilized by an electric power system.
The project will be built in partnership with the Gezhouba Group from China, KAF Teknik Yapi from Turkey and General Electric from the U.S.
The partnership of these three companies are due to invest around $1.5 billion in the dam project in Isparta's Egirdir lake.
Commenting on the latest investment, GE General Manager, Marwan Al Roub said GE would provide 4,250 MW dual hydroelectricity turbines and equipment for the plant that is expected to start in January 2022.
"Turkey has ambitious plans for hydropower over the coming decade," the International Hydropower Association was quoted as saying.
According to the association, despite recent slowdowns, Turkey remains one of Europe’s leading markets for future hydropower development due to a combination of abundant resources, a supportive government, and favorable policy framework.
"The pumped-storage hydro power plant will provide important capacity towards Turkey's renewable energy potential," Al Roub stated.
The plant will be built in Egirdir Lake. With an area of 482 square kilometers it is the fourth largest lake in Turkey.
As a developing country, Turkey's electricity consumption continues to rise each year. Consequently, it aims to meet its increasing energy needs through domestic resources to alleviate dependency on foreign reserves.
The country aims to mark its 100th anniversary as a republic in 2023 with a total installed electric power capacity from renewables of 110 gigawatts (GW) – up from 32 GW in 2002 and 64 GW in 2014.
Source: AA
Turkey's leading energy companies, including Petrol Ofisi and the largest foreign investor SOCAR Turkey, announced that they will make no layoffs and work to secure employment during the country’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic, along with taking all necessary measures to protect the employees’ health.
According to an Anadolu Agency report published Thursday, the energy companies operating in different fields of the sector continue providing an uninterrupted energy supply while prioritizing securing employment rates as well as employees’ health. The report said some companies are thinking of increasing the employment rate this year. One of them – Turkey's largest natural gas distribution company Aksa Natural Gas – has announced that it aims to grow by 16% this year, providing 450 new jobs.
Electricity distribution companies Coruh EDAS and Firat EDAS officials stated that the current employment levels will be maintained. Meanwhile, Turkish conglomerate Limak Holding’s Limak Energy employs its staff alternately, and the company executives who took all precautions against the COVID-19 outbreak stated that they will maintain employment in this process.
The energy company Guris, which is considered to be one of Turkey's leading renewable energy-based power producers, along with the IC Ictas Enerji Yatirim Holding, said that there will be no decrease in employment as a result of the coronavirus outbreak,
SOCAR Turkey, the country’s largest foreign investor, also said there will be no change in the company’s employment policy. Having already taken measures to protect employee health, Shell Turkey is another one of the energy companies that will not cut any jobs in this process. The company said it will pay a premium to employees working on the front lines.
Turcas Petrol said a business model and capacity will be adapted according to changing conditions and sensitivity will be shown in the protection of employment.
Meanwhile, Zorlu Enerji, one of Turkey's pioneers in domestic and renewable energy, is applying a reverse quarantine method in its power plants. The power plant personnel work alternately in two-week periods. The teams in charge work for 14 days without leaving the power plants and are subject to health checks when the shift changes are made. In addition to meeting the basic needs of the teams within the plants, the company creates various entertainment activities to fill the spare time for the employees.
Fuel product distribution and lubricants company Petrol Ofisi announced previously that the company will not make any job cuts, as well.
Source: Daily Sabah
The fast-growing market for batteries to power buildings or the electric grid has been clipped by the coronavirus.
Nearly two-thirds of industry participants surveyed by the U.S. Energy Storage Association say they expect a drop in revenue in excess of 20% as states shutter huge swaths of their economies to slow the virus’s spread. The decline stems from customer delays or cancellations, challenges in obtaining parts and delays for permits and approvals.
Kelly Speakes-Backman, the association’s chief executive officer, said some developers have already cut their workforces by as much as 20%. But 75% of those surveyed said they didn’t plan to cut jobs. Since grid-scale battery projects often take a year or more to develop, she expects the industry slowdown to linger into next year, even after states lift their stay-at-home orders. And Speakes-Backman fears demand for home-based batteries, typically paired with a rooftop solar array, could remain depressed even longer, as job losses force homeowners to slash expenses.
“People just don’t want to pull the trigger on those investments right now, because they’re worried about their personal finances,” Speakes-Backman said. “Definitely, I think the impacts will be deeper and longer on the residential side than on the grid side.”
Source: Bloomberg
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has required governments to focus virtually all their efforts and resources on protecting the health and well-being of their citizens. Rightly so: health is the first and most immediate priority. At the same time, leaders are also facing the economic impact of the crisis and thinking ahead to strategies for stimulating their economies once the pandemic is brought under control and activity can ramp back up.
For these strategies, governments will be looking at the very immediate future: how to create jobs and boost economies now. There have been many calls to make clean energy technologies a key part of stimulus packages. This makes complete sense. Stimulus goals align very well with wider clean energy goals, and investment in all fields of clean energy can deliver great opportunities to increase employment and economic activity.
Energy efficiency offers many win-win opportunities – labour-intensive projects that start quickly and are rooted in local supply chains such as construction and manufacturing. Putting such projects in stimulus programmes can support existing workforces and create new jobs. Energy efficiency brings other major benefits: it improves the economic competitiveness of countries and businesses, makes energy more affordable for consumers – and, of course, reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
The buildings and construction sector – covering everything from houses and apartments to offices, hospitals and factories – represents a key opportunity to rapidly create new jobs and reinvigorate local businesses. This can take the form of incentives for new construction projects or upgrades of existing buildings. When homes are upgraded to higher efficiency standards, more than half of the total investment typically goes directly to labour.
Governments can lead the way in boosting energy efficiency investments by channelling them into public buildings, such as social housing, schools, healthcare facilities and government offices. Funding can be provided to build new schools or hospitals, or to upgrade existing homes to higher levels of efficiency, all creating far-reaching positive impacts. A number of stimulus programmes following the global financial crisis in 2008 did exactly this, including a US programme that created over 200,000 jobs.
Technology upgrades and infrastructure projects across different parts of the economy can also bring about rapid benefits. Appliance replacement programmes, like “cash for clunkers” initiatives, provide incentives from governments directly to consumers to replace old, poorly performing products with new, more efficient models. Well known examples include programmes to replace cars, refrigerators and other appliances. These need to take care to avoid unwanted environmental effects, and to avoid funding purchases that would have happened anyway.
The issue of supply chains and capacity will be crucial. If new programmes quickly increase demand, can the market respond? Are good products available? Are installers ready to meet demand at sufficient levels of quality and safety? Governments in a hurry to generate activity can be tempted to lessen the focus on technical standards or required efficiency levels, but this can be a false economy in the longer term. Standardization can help: off-the-shelf designs and contracts can simplify transactions, and lists of ‘approved’ solutions and technologies can reduce ambiguity and risk.
While the focus is rightly on short-term stimulus impacts, well-designed programmes will maximise the long-term benefits by raising efficiency standards and developing new markets. Building new infrastructure will enable further efficiency improvements by allowing recent, smarter technology to be deployed – and greater scale will bring costs down. Whether governments invest in hospitals or schools, streetlights or smart grids, housing or infrastructure, stimulus programmes can incorporate ambitious, cost-effective energy efficiency elements for little additional effort or cost. An efficient home built today will produce less than half the emissions and energy bills that would be locked-in to an inefficient one for decades to come.
Unprecedented challenges call for unprecedented responses, and decisions must be made amid great uncertainty. Will behaviours and social norms permanently shift after the current phase of new ways of working and living? How will societies’ short-term focus affect longer-term imperatives? Recognizing how many unknowns there are, this is a time to be ambitious and innovative, and to keep a firm eye on our clean energy and climate goals.
There is much to learn from previous experience, and many of the policy questions faced by governments are the same across the world. A collective effort to marry the pressing goals of stimulus with the longer-term aims of clean and efficient energy transitions can only bring benefits to all.
Source: IEA
What happens to an office building’s electricity demand when almost everyone who works there is stuck at home?
The coronavirus pandemic has forced broad swaths of the economy to shut down, as state after state forced nonessential businesses to close. The result has been significant drops in electricity demand in big commercial centers like New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area and forecasts that commercial energy usage across the country will decline by 4.7 percent this year.
Just because a building is almost empty of people doesn’t mean that its energy use drops to nothing. Shutting down key building systems like heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) can lead to unhealthy air or corrosion in boilers and chillers. Emergency lighting and elevators must remain on, as must the servers running the business tasks being carried out by employees at home. Any equipment that was left plugged in when the office closed down will still be using standby power.
Office building energy consumption fell steadily through March and into early April, but it did not fall off a cliff, according to Hatch Data, which monitors 400 million square feet of commercial real estate for more than 250 clients. If anything, it's surprising that the drop-off was not steeper, Ben Mendelson, chief commercial officer and co-founder, said in an interview last week. Compared to the first week of March, office building energy consumption fell 5 percent the next week, continued to drop from there, and was 25 percent lower by the first week of April, as the chart below shows.
Hatch believes its data is representative of the country's office building stock as a whole. The San Francisco-based company was formed in January as a carve-out of the energy intelligence services branch of demand response provider EnerNOC, which was acquired by Enel in 2017. Some slight regional variations show up in the data, with the Northeast's demand falling earlier and faster, and the Midwest's later and more slowly.
That’s largely attributable to the staggered implementation of stay-at-home orders in different states and regions, Mendelson said. With almost the entire country now under restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus, “it’s going to continue to come down" from the early April figures.
At the same time, “it was a bit surprising, looking at the data, that these reductions weren’t larger,” Mendelson said — at least at first glance. The graph below shows one of the office buildings managed by Hatch Data, which has seen energy use decline by an average of 20 percent over the month of March. That includes relatively small reductions in the early weeks, with only the final week seeing weekday working-hours usage falling to what one might consider minimum operating levels.
To understand why, Mendelson pointed to the underlying nature of office building electricity use, which is not nearly as flexible as most casual observers might imagine.
“Just because we’re in this period of reduced occupancy doesn’t mean that buildings are mothballed,” he said. “By and large, buildings are still running, and they’re preparing for re-occupancy to ensure that when people come back to work, they’re coming back to a healthy working environment.”
The easiest load to manage is lighting, Hatch Data CEO and co-founder Zach Robin said. “You can turn it off anywhere [that] it’s not emergency lighting” or would otherwise violate safety codes. But lighting typically accounts for only 15 to 20 percent of a building’s energy use.
HVAC accounts for a far greater portion of energy use, about a third or more for most buildings, and it can’t be shut off completely. “Many of these systems circulate water, and if they’re left off for too long there can be corrosion and other damage,” Robin said. Shutting off air circulation systems air can violate rules for maintaining healthy air quality and endanger the few people who are still coming into the building on a regular basis.
That limits most HVAC energy-saving efforts to reducing run times, adjusting equipment sequencing, reducing static air pressure settings and other nonessential tweaks, Mendelson said. “Certainly, when you’re working with building controls, it’s not a quick fix. You’re working with third parties, with vendors. In this economic climate, it’s important to squeeze every last dollar they can. But that does not come before the health and safety of tenants.”
Then there are the “plug loads,” or the computers, servers, printers and everything that’s plugged into wall sockets. There’s little that building operators can do about those unless they can get the building’s tenants to engage in unplugging all nonessential equipment, Robin said. Looking at the sample building graphed above, “that’s down to little less than half its load. The other half is probably split in half between plug load and HVAC.”
Hatch Data's software helps customers reconfigure building control systems, invest in efficiency upgrades and take other actions that shave between 15 and 30 percent from their energy bills on average, Robin said.
That’s on par with typical efficiency gains driven by companies working in the space such as Carbon Lighthouse Engie Insight and Centrica Business Solutions, as well as the building management offerings from big equipment vendors like Siemens, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Trane and Schneider Electric.
But in the past few weeks, customers have been logging in far more often than usual, Mendelson said. That’s particularly true for those buying electricity on competitive energy markets who need to understand how their long-term contracts deal with the unexpected contingency of using far less electricity than predicted.
Those contracts can include “bandwidth” or “material-change” provisions, which allow electricity suppliers to shift customers from locked-in energy prices to the hour-by-hour prices set on wholesale energy markets — and those energy markets are becoming far more volatile with the demand disruptions that are being caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Source: Greentechmedia
Wood Mackenzie predicts the ongoing COVID-19 crisis could negatively impact on US utility-scale solar projects even into 2021.
According to the findings of the Coronavirus: US Solar PV Supply Chain and Utility-Scale Market Risk report, the US utility-scale solar projects market could see up to four weeks of supply delays affecting a few hundred MWs of modules and inverters.
Combined with construction disruptions, it could translate into as much as 2 GWdc of project development delays in 2020.
The solar module supply to the US market faces four sources of risk including:
- Potential production shutdown in South-east Asia;
- Domestic US production shutdown;
- International shipping and logistics delays;
- Module bill of materials (BOM) shortage.
US utility solar projects face four primary sources of project development risks:
- Shipping delays from the potential closing of US ports;
- Supply delays of products;
- Travel delays limiting or delaying project milestones;
- Site shutdowns due to “shelter in place” orders or onsite COVID-19 infections.
Ravi Manghani, co-author of the report, said: “The worst-case scenario, which sees every step of the supply chain and project development come to a complete halt for several weeks, could see upwards of 5 GWdc of US utility-scale market pushed back to the second half of this year and perhaps into 2021.”
Assuming disruptions halt by the end of the third quarter of 2021, solar manufacturers that have geographically diverse supply chains, and downstream players that have development pipelines in very early stage (or nearing completion), are the best positioned to ride the tide.
Source: Power International Engineering
Energy Efficiency and Economic Stimulus
Energy efficiency actions can support the goals of economic stimulus programmes by supporting existing workforces and creating new jobs, boosting economic activity in key labour-intensive sectors, and delivering longer-term benefits such as increased competitiveness, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, improved energy affordability and lower bills.
Please click here to read the full report.
