Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015 | 2 a.m.
The eighth National Clean Energy Summit recently convened in Las Vegas, and with each passing year, its organizer, Sen. Harry Reid, keeps pouring on more heat for things to get done. This year, President Barack Obama — the first standing president to speak at the event — took the podium to lean in with his own expectations.
In its early years, the gathering at Mandalay Bay was a chance to motivate industry insiders to pursue clean-energy strategies. Soon enough, it began attracting government policymakers and other movers and shakers, and today — with marquee speakers — it is getting national press and the public’s attention. All the while, it has given Reid opportunities to heap scorn upon coal-fired power plants and to plug away for a cleaner, healthier world.
This year’s summit again was at Mandalay Bay, where a rooftop 20-acre solar panel array — the second-largest in the country — is being expanded by eight acres to eventually meet 26 percent of the resort’s power demand. This year’s summit speakers were equally ambitious in their goals for the power industry.
“Clean power from the sun is cheaper than conventional power from the utility,” Obama said. “It is impossible to overstate what this means. For decades, we’ve been told that it’s not possible to switch to renewable energy. Today, that is no longer true.”
Reid recapped the progress made through the years in pursuit of clean energy but bemoaned that “in many respects, we are still stuck in the 19th century.” He noted that power grids — networks of power lines to distribute electricity — were conceived by Thomas Edison in the 1880s. At the time it made sense, but no longer, Reid said.
“Electric utilities never imagined that families and businesses would be able to generate energy for the same price as utility power plants,” he said.
NV Energy CEO Paul Caudill seemed to bristle a bit when he took the podium, noting that about 20 percent of the utility’s electricity is generated with renewable energy and that the utility’s parent company has invested more than $16 billion in solar projects.
“This is not your grandfather’s utility business,” he told the audience, trying to rebuke Reid’s remarks.
But Caudill missed the point a bit. We are encountering an opportunity, if not the necessity, for a sea change in our approach to meeting energy needs.
About 4.3 percent of NV Energy’s power production is from solar power. Part of what’s getting in the way of greater use of solar power has been the economics of generating and distributing it. The generation side of the equation is resolving itself with increasingly less expensive solar panels. The tricky part is the distribution network and how to avoid the cost of a cumbersome, old-fashioned grid.
To that end, utilities must explore new distribution concepts that still provide them some profit. Consumers deserve the option of generating their own solar power and cutting free of the power grid — an option that will become more realistic when household-scale batteries become affordable.
We are heartened that in addition to NV Energy’s sun-fired projects, solar power is finding footholds in rural Nevada. The Lincoln County Power District built a 90-kilowatt solar facility, and near Pahrump, the Valley Electric Association is developing a 54,000-panel, 15-megawatt solar power plant so its members can sign purchase agreements for cheaper, solar-generated electricity.
NV Energy must innovate as never before to capture and efficiently distribute our cleanest and most ubiquitous resource. It may be time for a new paradigm in energy production and distribution, where we toss out the old business models in favor of ones where consumers are rewarded, not penalized, for tapping the sun.
