Sustainability

On March 19, Nucor, Microsoft and Google announced the Advanced Clean Electricity request for information, or RFI, a joint initiative to stimulate development and deployment of reliable, low- or zero-carbon electricity generation technologies like advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal and long-duration energy storage.

The initiative aims to aggregate the three companies’ demand for clean electricity in a way that “accelerate[s] the development of first-of-a-kind and early commercial projects,” the companies said in a news release provided by Nucor.

Eligible projects have until April 12 to respond to the RFI. The companies will notify selected projects of their intent to proceed by mid-June, with power purchase agreements to follow in early 2025, the news release said.

Each of the Advanced Clean Electricity partners aims to zero out its carbon-equivalent emissions by 2050 at the latest. 

Nucor is working toward its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 in part through a $15 million strategic investment in NuScale Power, which includes an agreement to supply low-emissions steel for NuScale projects and possible colocation of NuScale SMRs at Nucor steel mills.

Google’s and Microsoft’s emissions-reduction goals are more ambitious than Nucor’s. Google is aiming for net-zero emissions from company operations and a 50% reduction in Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions from a 2019 baseline by 2030. Microsoft aims to be “carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030,” to match 100% of its electricity generation at all times with zero-emissions resources by 2030 and to remove the equivalent of all its historical emissions by 2050, according to the Advanced Clean Electricity RFI’s website.

Though all three partner companies have invested heavily in building efficiency, solar panels and renewable energy power purchase agreements, those efforts may not be enough to achieve their sustainability goals. The 24/7 resources sought in the RFI can “fill gaps in wind and solar production and support grid reliability … needs that today are still being met by fossil fuel generation,” according to the RFI’s website.

The Advanced Clean Electricity initiative aims to spur the growth of new energy-generation technologies that might otherwise stall due to high upfront development costs and uncertain commercial demand. 

“We hope that our work will catalyze similar initiatives amongst other key offtakers in the energy market or inspire others to join us down the line,” the initiative’s representatives said in an email to Utility Dive.

The partner companies expect to sign offtake agreements for technologies that are not yet cost-competitive compared to existing commercial power sources, lobby policymakers and regulators for favorable “ecosystem improvements,” and partner with utilities and energy providers on supportive rate design, the news release said.

Those ecosystem improvements could include reforms to expand transmission and reduce interconnection bottlenecks, the initiative’s representatives told Utility Dive. 

“Interconnection delays could create a risk, but we are committed to working with all stakeholders, including utilities and [grid system operators], to maximize the odds of success and reduce system-level roadblocks,” the representatives said.

The initiative’s website cites 14 evaluation criteria for clean energy technologies, including maturation of technology, potential capacity factor above 50%, project capacity above 50 MW or the ability to aggregate smaller projects to achieve equivalent output, the ability to trace electricity output and produce hourly Energy Attribute Certificates, the potential to scale the technology’s total output beyond 100 GW by 2040, and a pathway to cost-competitiveness with existing generation technologies over a similar timeframe. Projects must be located in the U.S., “with a preference for projects in [the] PJM” region, according to the website.

“If there is a project or technology that can meet the criteria specified in the RFI to provide the clean, firm power we need, we are eager to hear from them,” the initiative’s representatives said

The Securities and Exchange Commission passed its highly anticipated climate disclosure rule March 6, nearly two years after the agency released its initial proposal. The final rule — a pared-down version of the original — scrapped scope 3 emissions disclosures entirely and scaled back scope 1 and scope 2 reporting requirements.

The regulation’s narrower parameters come against a backdrop of strong pushback from companies and mounting political criticism. The SEC said it received over 24,000 comments since releasing the rule in March 2022, including around 8,100 in the 72 hours leading up to the Macrh 6 open hearing, Chair Gary Gensler told reporters. The agency announced plans to vote on the rule last week, following reports of it dropping scope 3 requirements from the rule.

Though the climate rule was approved, it passed with a 3-2 vote count, with three Democrats — Gensler, Commissioners Caroline Crenshaw and Jaime Lizárraga — supporting it, and two Republicans — Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda — opposing it. Despite their party affiliations, Crenshaw was nominated by then-President Donald Trump and unanimously approved by the Senate in 2020, while President Joe Biden nominated Uyeda in 2022. The tight vote stood in contrast to the unanimous approval of the commission’s only other agenda item — amendments to the national market system stock order execution disclosure requirements.

The split vote hinged on the commissioners’ views on the SEC’s authority — or lack thereof — to probe companies for climate-related disclosures. Even the rule’s supporters argued the agency had not gone far enough, while its critics alleged the agency had gone too far.

The conflicting opinions from either side of the aisle set the stage for what followed soon after the 866-page rule was approved and made its way to the Federal Register. Environmental groups such as Sierra Club and Earth Justice said they were considering legally challenging the SEC’s “arbitrary removal of key provisions” from the final rule, while a coalition of 10 Republican states said they had launched a lawsuit in a U.S. federal appeals court to block the implementation of the climate disclosure rule. 

“While the final decision is more watered-down than we initially anticipated, it’s important to note it was a bill designed to get a yes vote, which it ultimately did,” Alyssa Rade, chief sustainability officer at supply chain decarbonization platform Sustain.Life, said in an email to ESG Dive.

The SEC is overextending its authority

Peirce, the longest-tenured commissioner, said during her testimony that though the agency had dropped scope 3 reporting requirements and put forward a proposal that was different from the original, it still sought to “spam investors with details” about climate.

“These changes do not alter the rules’ fundamental flaw: its insistence that climate issues deserve special treatment and disproportionate space in commission disclosures and managers’ and directors’ brain space,” Peirce said. 

She said she did not support the rule because the commission failed to justify this “disparate treatment,” and such climate-related disclosures would “overwhelm investors, not inform them.” Peirce also said the commission could “trigger a hodgepodge of requirements tailored to meet the demands of a fast and ever-expanding panoply of special interests” that could include stances on abortion, cannabis or even war.

Peirce further questioned the SEC’s authority to demand such disclosures, and said the agency wasn’t created to satisfy the wants of every investor, but to serve the “interest of the objectively reasonable investor seeking a return on her capital.”

“We lacked the expertise to oversee these special interest disclosures and only a mandate from Congress should put us in the business of facilitating the disclosure of information not directly related to financial returns,” Peirce said.

Uyeda’s testimony mirrored Peirce’s criticisms. He said the commission had “ventured outside of its lane and set a precedent for using its disclosure regime as a means for driving social change.” He added that if it remained unchecked, there was potential for “further misuse of the commission's rules for political and social issues and an erosion of [the] agency's reputation as an independent financial regulator.

Peirce and Uyeda both opined that the rule could have been re-proposed rather than approved. Gensler later told reporters that re-proposals are a process the agency has not used “in decades,” and he is confident the agency followed all requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“I think this final climate risk disclosure role is well within the agency's mandate,” Gensler said. “It's solely focused on disclosures to investors [and] it’s grounded in materiality.”

The SEC “is doing what it was designed to do”

Crenshaw delivered the commission’s most pointed criticism of the rule’s absence of scope 3 reporting. While she supported the approval of the rule, she told the agency it had a remit to go much further, including maintaining the proposed rules scope 3 requirements and broader scope 1 and scope 2 reporting requirements. Crenshaw said that, while the finalized rule “is better for investors than no rule at all,” it “adopts an unnecessarily limited version of [climate-related] disclosures.”

“The Commission has clear authority under the Securities Act and the Exchange Act to require disclosures that are in the public interest and for the protection of investors, as today's rule is,” she said. “This well-established authority has been consistently relied upon and affirmed and reaffirmed across dozens of disclosure rulemakings over multiple decades. And this authority would have supported a more robust rule.”

Before the vote commenced, Gensler said that the “SEC has no role as to climate risk itself,” but the agency did have a role with regard to disclosures. However, during a media roundtable after the vote, he noted that the final version of the rule was “responsive to the various comments [made] by investors and issuers.”

Lizárraga, who cast the final deciding vote, said that the climate-related disclosures proposed by the commission were “no different from many of the commission’s existing disclosure requirements,” and responded to “investor demand for standardized and comparable information on climate related risks and impacts.”

He added that the rule should also prevent greenwashing, as it holds registrants liable for any materially false or misleading statements regarding climate risk.

Lizárraga said the commission was well within its authority to propose climate disclosure rules because climate risks can be material to investments and voting decisions, and these risks, ultimately, can have a material impact on a company’s bottom line.

“The commission is doing what it was designed to do: Protect investors and foster transparent capital markets by improving the reliability, consistency and comparability and material climate risk disclosures for investors,” Lizárraga said.

The climate disclosure rule will go into effect 60 days after it is entered into the Federal Register, which it still has not been as of press time.

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By IFS

It's more important than ever for energy and utility organizations to focus on achieving sustainability goals. This article identifies three strategic themes where enterprise technology plays a critical role.

1. Reinvention

The industry is already reinventing itself, leveraging innovations and existing technology to transition to an environmentally sustainable business model rapidly. According to the experts at IDC, in 2024, 80% of electric, gas and water companies will have implemented sustainable business models by accelerating digital transformation and rearchitecting the core business. Governments and businesses are working together to achieve sustainability objectives. For example, the £420m Charging Infrastructure Investment Fund (CIIF) was established in the UK to accelerate the deployment of electric vehicle charging infrastructure throughout the country. As of October 2023, there were 51,516 electric vehicle charging points across the UK, across 30,360 charging locations. This is a 45% increase in the total number of charging devices since October 2022. The US government signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021. The act includes funding for broadband access, clean water and electric grid renewal for approximately $1.2 trillion in spending. $7.5 billion was earmarked to build a national network of electric vehicle chargers. Such diversification and innovation depend on creating new business models that align closely with ESG and other key performance indicators. To thrive, new business collaborations and joint ventures must develop at pace, unencumbered by restrictive legacy technology. Companies in this sector benefit from unparalleled flexibility, visibility and control by relying on agile enterprise technology to manage new ventures, enabling them to make real-time informed decisions to expedite work.

2. Resilience

One of the biggest sustainability challenges is achieving business and supply capacity resilience. Resilience is imperative for transmission system operators as they accommodate wholescale change. For example, grids currently support power entry from a few locations, while the new model must serve diverse, distributed sources. As consumers and suppliers invest in distributed energy resources such as domestic solar and wind, additional infrastructure must be implemented to manage a two-way power exchange, excess capacity and other requirements. Using distributed energy resources (DERs) from renewables to supply the grid will result in many OEM relationships that require data sharing across systems. In these scenarios, energy companies must monitor, maintain and manage complex assets, infrastructure and projects, often spanning multiple partners within the network. Customers in this industry rely on advanced cloud solutions to seamlessly manage, control and improve performance across complex business structures. With instant access to real-time data, decision-makers maintain oversight of the entire operation, increasing efficiencies while reducing costs. These cloud platforms bridge current and new infrastructure, which is especially vital as existing assets integrate within new sustainability models.

Hafslund Oslo Celsio, Norway’s largest district heating and cooling provider, selected IFS to help it reach its climate goals. IFS Cloud will drive efficiencies across the company’s green energy production processes, develop carbon capture and storage capabilities, and reduce waste.

3. Responsibility

Energy companies must be internally and externally responsible for sustainability, ensuring that every employee understands the goals of lowering carbon emissions and tackling the climate crisis enterprise technology can deliver real-time visibility across the enterprise, providing a clear line of sight to how the business is performing, with the ability to take immediate action if improvements are required. Østfold Energi in Norway relies on enterprise technology to provide the visibility and data needed to analyze the operation in real time. Østfold Energi actively pursues business development projects in part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the company's long-term value. Soleie, a new joint venture between Østfold Energi and Akershus Energi, offers financing and rental of photovoltaic systems to private and public companies with larger buildings, providing access to self-produced green electricity without the need for a significant capital investment. Other projects include battery production and carbon capture for heat and power generation facilities.

Torresol Energy builds concentrated solar power (CSP) systems that produce electrical power when concentrated solar radiation heats a fluid. The company relies on a single, integrated system that supports asset lifecycles—from design and development through operations and maintenance.

Conclusion

Every business has a critical role in advancing sustainability, with enterprise software at the forefront of this mission. Notably, cloud deployments of IFS showcase remarkable energy efficiency—52%-79% more than traditional data center computing solutions and 71%-79% more efficient in storage compared to traditional enterprise data centers. This highlights the significant sustainability benefits that modern enterprise solutions bring to the table.

Further enhancing sustainability, these platforms often feature modules designed to help organizations monitor, manage and report on their environmental goals. Some providers go further by allocating a portion of module revenue to support clean energy initiatives, underlining their commitment to embedding sustainability into every aspect of their service. For those interested in deep-diving into these sustainability efforts and understanding the comprehensive benefits, additional details can be found on the respective websites of such enterprise software providers.

 

Amid a sustainability push from regulators and investors, just one-fifth of organizations say they’re meeting or exceeding their decarbonization goals, according to a new study from French multinational utility provider Engie. The study’s findings are based on responses received by 515 senior decision makers across industries during the third quarter of 2023.

Although two thirds of surveyed organizations said they put in place some form of carbon reduction commitment, the lack of coherent focus, internal governance bottlenecks, budgetary constraints and data challenges are impeding progress, Engie reported.

“A lot of roadblocks to achieving goals are really cross-functional and can’t be solved by one group or team alone,” Abby Davidson, managing director of strategy and implementation at Engie Impact, a consulting subsidiary of the company, told ESG Dive. “Ultimately, decarbonization is a business transformation,” requiring alignment across business units, she said.

Decarbonization efforts have gathered momentum across companies as laws and regulations — including the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the passage of two California climate disclosure bills in October, and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate reporting proposal — add pressure on leaders to show results.

However, despite this increase in demand for transparency, corporations have struggled to implement their sustainability initiatives and decarbonization solutions. The report identified five major roadblocks to execution: Multiple business priorities; governance and decision-making complexity; limited budgets; technology and tracking impediments; and a lack of internal skill sets.

A key problem is programs are often implemented in a piecemeal way, according to Davidson.

Engie’s research found many organizations take a “siloed approach” to decarbonization and treat it like any other corporate initiative. As a result, they fail to tap into the benefits that come from a more holistic way of advancing decarbonization strategy, one which requires organizations to acknowledge the complexity of meeting long-term carbon reduction goals and recognizes the scale of the effort. Such an approach also entails a coordinated approach across the organization, where all business units are able to help advance a common set of objectives.

More than one-third of respondents said their organization takes a hands-off approach to decarbonization, deeming it low priority or as an isolated approach with minimal cross-fertilization. Further, 1 in 5 organizations surveyed said their business model is not compatible with long-term decarbonization commitments.

“Executives who embrace a holistic approach do so knowing it necessitates a fundamental reassessment of how their business functions,” the study noted.

Poor data management stalls execution

Ineffective data management can stand in the way of decarbonization implementation, a challenge identified by a large swath of survey respondents. Two thirds of respondents said meeting long-term decarbonization commitments would require a complete transformation or significant change in how their organizations manage technology and data. Only 40% of organizations said they have a centralized repository for decarbonization data, or what researchers called a “single source of truth for decarbonization data” in their organizations.

“You can't make progress or monitor what you can't measure, and so I think companies aren't set up to measure emissions data … this is a transformation [needed] in how they gather data and measure data,” Davidson said.

The top three metrics used by organizations to measure success included the overall reduction in scope 1 and scope 2 emissions; long-term financial return on investment; and impact on brand perception and value.

In resource-constrained times — budget and investment constraints were the top inhibitor to implementation, according to respondents — Davidson stressed the importance of a long-term view when assessing the impact of decarbonization initiatives.

“What we encourage companies to look at … a total cost of ownership model, so looking at a broader perspective on the variables that go into owning a particular asset and looking at the holistic picture over time,” she said.

Companies, she added, also need to be open to new ways to finance decarbonization efforts, especially among firms that can’t allocate capital expenditures for the transformation of manufacturing facilities.

“Engie and others have models in the market [that bring] energy savings as-a-service where we will own the asset and the company will pay it back through energy savings and keep the capital expenditure off their books,” Davidson said.

Getting buy-in at the top

The study said progress on decarbonization should be championed at the executive and board levels, but only  one-third of executives surveyed described their board as “decarbonization champions.”

“Boards are under increasing pressure to have people on the board of directors who understand and can effectively govern decarbonization strategy for the business,” Davidson said. “It’s very important for the board to oversee and be able to govern decarbonization as they would any business transformation.”

Engie commissioned research firm Meridian West to conduct its survey.

The 12 largest U.S. electric utility companies have lobbied unevenly for climate policy aligned with the goals in the Paris Agreement — sometimes working against their own interests, says a January report from corporate sustainability group Ceres.

“We've seen a number of examples across Fortune 500 companies and in the utility world where companies are taking strong steps to decarbonize, but their lobbying is not aligned,” said Ceres managing director and report co-author Steven Rothstein. “They say they're for a policy, and then they advocate against it.”

This disconnect is sometimes the result of companies failing to align internally on strategy, and sometimes the result of their membership in a trade association that opposes policies supported by the utility, Rothstein said in an interview.

Of the 12 electric utility companies the report examined, Ceres found that all had advocated for Paris-aligned climate policies in the last three years, but all had also opposed Paris-aligned climate policies in the same timeframe.

“If a company is advocating for something, but then they join a trade association that advocates against it — that's hurting their strategic plans,” Rothstein said. “But the answer isn't always to leave a trade group — though that may be appropriate in some cases.”

In one recent example, investor-owned utility Eversource parted ways with the American Gas Association last August over AGA’s lobbying against electrification.

Dan Bakal, Ceres’ senior program director of climate and energy, said this was a “significant development” for a “fairly sizable company.”

The utility companies studied by Ceres were American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Exelon, FirstEnergy, National Grid, NextEra Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Sempra Energy, Southern Company, WEC Energy Group, and Xcel Energy.

“For these companies that are primarily electric utilities, they do also have some gas distribution business, but a lot of them are choosing now to focus on the electric side of their business because they recognize that that's what's going to expand two to three-fold over the next couple of decades — whereas gas has a much more questionable, to declining, future,” said Bakal.

Bakal said that it was encouraging to see American Electric Power address this misalignment in an internal assessment, where AEP rated whether or not trade associations it belongs to are aligned with it on policy positions, partially aligned, or misaligned and “undermining AEP’s pursuit of its clean energy strategy,” the assessment said.

Ceres analyzed industry associations that included the AGA as well as the Edison Electric Institute and American Clean Power Association. In a comment, EEI spokesperson Sarah Durdaller said the group and its member companies have been the “strongest supporters” of the clean energy provisions in recent legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act.

“Already, 50 EEI member companies have set ambitious forward-looking carbon emission reduction goals, 40 of which are aiming for net-zero or equivalent by 2050 or sooner,” Durdaller said. “As the owners and operators of the energy grid, we also are making the investments needed to deliver resilient clean energy to sectors across the economy.”

While the report indicated “substantial inconsistencies” in the climate lobbying of utilities, Bakal said he thought it was encouraging that utilities have overall been “very supportive” of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We do recognize that policies, sometimes at the state level, can be challenging — and we can't expect every company to just support every policy if it might not be a well-designed one, so there can be some disconnects,” he said. “But we do expect companies to be as transparent as possible, and be transparent about why a specific policy proposal might not work for them.”

AES, Constellation, Google and Microsoft have joined forces with energy marketplace administrator LevelTen Energy to create the Granular Certificate Trading Alliance and design a new marketplace for trading time- and location-specific renewable energy certificates, according to a Dec. 14 announcement.

The new trading platform, which is expected to go live next year, will be designed to facilitate purchases by corporate and utility energy buyers who are looking to meet 100% of their energy needs with clean energy on an hourly, 24-7 basis, according to LevelTen chief operating officer Jason Tundermann.

A transparent, easily accessible energy marketplace should send more accurate signals to renewable energy developers about where projects are most needed, Tundermann said.

Some of the same companies that pioneered the concepts behind today's power purchase agreements, known as PPAs, are now leading the development of “granular certificates,” a new energy product for the next generation of clean energy ambitions, Tundermann said.

Like renewable energy certificates, or  RECs, granular certificates can be sold by renewable energy generators to corporations or utilities looking to make verifiable claims about the amount of clean energy that powers their operations. But unlike most of today's RECs, Tundermann explained, granular certificates include information about when and where the power was generated — attributes of interest to organizations hoping to verify that they source clean energy 24-7, 365 days of the year.

Although Constellation has already facilitated 24-7 energy contracts for a handful of customers, the data needed to execute these deals is still hard to come by, said Mason Emnett, senior vice president for public policy at Constellation. Registries that document the output of energy projects don't typically track data on an hourly basis, he said. Nor is there a simple means of locating projects or developers who can meet specific needs for buyers looking to fill difficult gaps when renewable generation is scarce, Emnett said.

And as a provider of clean energy, he said, “we need all that data to stand behind the claim we are making to the customer.”

LevelTen doesn't see granular certificates replacing power purchase agreements, which will likely remain the more affordable option for long-term power procurement, Tundermann said. Instead, he envisions a future scenario where a clean energy buyer might enter into a PPA or series of PPAs to cover the bulk of its energy needs, using granular certificates to cover times when contracted wind or solar plants aren’t generating.

LevelTen intends to launch a platform creating both a forward market that would allow buyers and sellers to trade granular certificates based on the anticipated availability of clean energy at a specific point in the future, as well as a spot market where trading takes place on a more immediate basis if, for example, expected generation falls short of demand.

Emnett agreed with Tundermann that the creation of a marketplace for granular certificates could impact future renewable energy development, and siting in particular.

“The intent of the structure is to inform the development of resources by identifying where is the relative value,” he said. But he said Constellation also hopes that the marketplace will drive greater demand for granular certificates and 24-7 energy projects by making these options more easily accessible to companies that can't afford to hire an entire team of people dedicated to energy procurement.

Amazon has begun work to convert the site of a former coal mine in Garret County, Maryland, into a 300,000-panel solar farm.

The company now owns 479 wind and solar projects globally, making it the world's largest buyer of clean energy, with a portfolio comparable to that of NextEra Energy, according to Bloomberg BNEF.

Amazon is on track to reach its 100% renewable energy target five years ahead of schedule. Unconventional projects such as the coal mine conversion and projects in new markets have helped Amazon keep pace, according to Nat Sahlstrom, head of energy, water and sustainability at Amazon Web Services.

Developing renewable energy projects isn't getting any easier. But Amazon hasn't slowed its progress toward its clean energy goals — and doesn't intend to, Sahlstrom said.

The company expects to power its operations, including its data centers, fulfillment centers and physical stores, with 100% renewable energy by 2025, Sahlstrom said — five years ahead of its initial 2030 goal. The company has added 78 new wind and solar projects so far this year, including the Maryland coal site project, and now has renewable energy projects operating in 26 countries and 21 U.S. states. Amazon has also invested in utility-scale battery storage, Sahlstrom said.

One of the biggest challenges the company currently faces, Sahlstrom said, is deploying renewable energy in regions of the world where corporate procurement of renewable energy is less common. Amazon announced its first projects in South Korea and Greece this year, and has helped to negotiate new energy tariffs in countries like South Africa, which previously lacked provisions for corporate renewable energy procurement.

“We're seeing more demand for renewable energy, and one of the things we're most proud of is our work to open up markets and accelerate the development of new projects,” Sahlstrom said.

The new Maryland project also represents a first for Amazon. The 45-acre site is considered a brownfield — that is, land where development, reuse or expansion is complicated by existing or potential contamination. Amazon hasn't adopted a strategic focus on brownfield sites, Sahlstrom said. But the site did come with some advantages that will help the company fast-track its solar farm, including existing connections to critical infrastructure. Brownfields are often located near power lines and public roads, making it easier to connect a project to the grid, according to Amazon, which notes that the EPA estimates there are more than 450,000 brownfields in the U.S.

Amazon doesn't have an exact date set for when the Maryland site will begin operations, but expects it will come online within the next few years, Sahlstrom said.

As solar energy booms in the U.S. with record investments and installations, a wave of technological advancements is set to transform the amount of energy solar can produce, where it can be deployed, and how long it can last.

“It seems like when there’s a good idea, it can very rapidly get rolled out through the whole industry,” said Chris Deline, a research engineer who leads the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s photovoltaic field performance group.

Over the last five years, Deline said, the industry “entirely switched over” from aluminum back surface field solar, or Al-BSF, cells to passivated emitter rear contact, or PERC, cells. “And it seems like there are new emerging entrants within n-type silicon that are poised to do the same thing,” taking over from PERC, he said.

For example, the solar industry is now beginning to make a switch from p-type PERC to n-type tunnel oxide passivated contact, or TOPCon, cells. N-type cells have their wafers doped negatively using chemicals like phosphorus, while p-type cells are doped positively. Doping is the process of adding an impurity to the semiconductor to increase its ability to conduct electricity.

In the early days of solar technology, installations were limited to space applications like satellites, and p-type cells proved more resistant to radiation and degradation in space than n-type cells. This allowed p-type technology to stake out a larger market share early on, and this domination continued after terrestrial solar installations began — though n-type cells are more efficient and resilient for utility and other applications outside of space.

Now, n-type cells are gaining ground.

“That's going to be a big transition,” Deline said. “It’s like Moore's Law of faster and faster computer processors that allows them to keep going to higher and higher efficiencies.”

PERC continued to dominate the solar panel market in 2022, but experts predict the technology will go the way of its predecessor, Al-BSF. The German industrial association VDMA said in an April report that it projects TOPCon’s market share will increase from around 10% in 2022 to as much as 60% globally within the next decade, and become the dominating cell type after 2025.

“It is a generally accepted view that TOPCon will ramp up relatively quickly in market share and likely dominate crystalline silicon solar technology in the not-so-distant future,” said First Solar's Chief Technology Officer Markus Gloeckler.

Across all panel types, the average dollars-per-kilowatt cost of solar construction has fallen by a few thousand dollars since 2013, and fell 6% to $1,561 per kW in 2021, the Energy Information Administration said in an October analysis.

What makes up a solar cell?

While Gloeckler sees a bright future for TOPCon, he says First Solar is “confident” in its commitment to thin film technology in the form of cadmium telluride, or CdTe, which is the most popular panel technology for utility-scale deployments — while crystalline silicon panels like TOPCon continue to dominate overall. 

The company is set to deploy production of its proprietary copper reduction technology CuRe in the second half of 2024, which Gloeckler said the company expects “will be able to compete very well with TOPCon” due to its “anticipated lower degradation rate” when exposed to high temperatures and humidity.

Gloeckler said the company is also optimistic about its ability to harness the potential of perovskite solar cells, which are “fundamentally thin film semiconductors.”

Perovskite cells have made recent leaps in efficiency, but remain tricky to deploy at commercial scale due to the chemistry presenting stability issues.

In comparison to silicon, perovskite is “relatively inexpensive,” Deline said. “Fundamentally, though, the fact that it's so easy to make may be part of why it's so hard to get it to be stable.”

First Solar and its competitor Hanwha Qcells both made investments this year in perovskite-based tandem cell technology. First Solar acquired Evolar, a Swedish start-up focused on tandem cells, and Qcells announced a $100 million investment in a tandem-cell production line.

Tandem-junction cells offer “a path toward higher module efficiencies over single-junction designs,” according to NREL. Multiple junctions — or boundaries between layers of semiconducting materials — allow solar cells to break through the Shockley–Queisser limit, a theoretical limit which prevents single-junction cells from absorbing more than 30% of the solar energy that shines on them.

But researchers are still pursuing higher efficiencies with single-junction cells.

NREL announced a single-junction efficiency breakthrough on Oct. 25, reaching an efficiency of 27% with a gallium arsenide cell. In a release, the lab said researchers optimized the doping and structure of the top layer of the cell to minimize the negative impacts of defects.

Bifaciality, or the ability of a solar cell to produce energy when illuminated from either side, is another cutting-edge innovation. One significant trend Deline sees across the solar industry is “bigger and bigger modules,” which make it easier to reap the efficiency gains of bifaciality.

“You can buy a 630, 650 watt module now, and that's just because [the module] is massive,” he said. “In a lot of cases, these include two layers of glass on the front and the back,” increasing bifacial gain on the back side of the panel where there is “clear glass instead of a white polymer sheet.”

Garrett Nilsen, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, said other areas for innovation in solar panel manufacturing and deployment include different ingot and wafer types, wafering techniques and cell structures, or module architectures, along with cheaper, simpler and more resilient racking systems.

“This is a great time to be involved with solar technology,” Deline said. “There's a lot of innovation going on, and there's a lot of new investments.”

Where can solar panels deploy?

As the technology behind solar cells undergoes rapid innovation, researchers are also working to expand how and where installations are deployed.

DOE projects that the U.S. will need to install 1 TW of solar capacity by 2035 to meet its decarbonization goals, which will require “more diversity of siting configurations,” the department says. 

Floating solar is relatively common in Southeast Asia and Europe, but so far has only been deployed at a small scale in the U.S., said Juan Gallego-Calderon, a clean energy engineer at Idaho National Laboratory, or INL. These deployments have been limited in size to around 10 MW, and sited in manmade water bodies that aren’t federally regulated.

Gallego-Calderon is working on an INL project to accelerate the deployment of floating PV in reservoirs that are controlled by federal entities like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“The reason why there hasn't been any deployment in those is just because the regulations are not in place,” he said. “So we are investigating the regulatory and environmental pathways, and we’re producing a techno-economic assessment tool that also includes environmental modeling.”

The largest floating solar installation in the U.S. is an 8.9-MW array in the Canoe Brook reservoir in Short Hills, New Jersey, which is owned and operated by the utility New Jersey Resources. 

Floating solar in federal reservoirs can help avoid conflicts over land use — such as opposition to solar installations as “eyesores” — and siting it in a hydroelectric reservoir to create a hybrid system can reduce solar curtailment, NREL found in a 2022 report. 

“We're looking at a proposed pumped storage hydro facility where they’re actually working with a company to design a floating PV system to put in the upper reservoir to operate in conjunction with the pumped storage hydro,” Gallego-Calderon said. “And they're working on the license right now to submit to FERC, so things are happening.”

Is sustainable recycling possible?

The INL and First Solar are also collaborating to develop a more sustainable recycling process for CdTe panels, participating in a project led by the University of Kansas. 

“About half of the utility-scale solar projects are using these tellurium-based thin film solar panels,” said Daniel Ginosar, group leader of the chemical systems group at INL. “The lifespan of those [is] typically twenty years until they start losing efficiency.”

There are also supply chain considerations. As the U.S. aims to deploy massive amounts of renewable energy, the Biden administration has announced a goal of reducing reliance on China for critical minerals, including tellurium. 

“We wanted to understand how we can recover the tellurium to reuse it in new solar panels, and at the same time reduce the amount of waste that's going to be generated by the systems coming out of use at end of life,” Ginosar said. Currently, recycling CdTe panels is “not a complete process.”

The existing technique involves trying to break the polymer bonds in panels by crushing them into powder and attempting to leach the cadmium and tellurium from that powder. 

The researchers came up with an alternate process of using an ultrasonic mixer to enable fluids like liquid butane to melt the polymer bond, which makes it easier to retrieve the cadmium and tellurium.

Ginosar estimates a “tremendous” buildout of solar capacity over the next 10 to 20 years, though between now and then, solar panels won’t be coming out of service quickly enough to supply materials for the new panels being made.

“But by 2050, those [new] panels will be reaching their end of life, and that's when we can really make a big difference with recycling,” he said. 

This particular project is only focused on CdTe panels, Ginosar said, but the researchers are looking to expand the method to “all different types” of solar panels, both thin film and silicon-based.

“We’re just barely getting started, the funding has only just shown up,” he said. “In the short term, it's hard to recycle your way out of the problem. But in the long term, we can be relatively sustainable and be able to recover the tellurium effectively, and completely eliminate the need for mining it from China.”

B2U Storage Solutions, an energy storage developer that specializes in using second-life electric vehicle batteries, has kicked off operations at its second grid-connected hybrid storage facility in Santa Barbara County, California, near New Cuyama, the company said Nov. 14.

The 3 MW/12 MWh facility uses hundreds of repurposed EV batteries from Honda, and charges from 1.5 MW of solar generation, according to B2U. The project is interconnected into Pacific Gas & Electric’s distribution system, and sells electricity and services into the California Independent System Operator market.

The second-life EV battery market is forecast to reach $7 billion in value by 2033, according to a March report from market research firm IDTechEx. Most EVs use lithium-ion batteries that can’t continue to be used in vehicles after roughly eight to ten years. However, depending on their residual capacity and “state of health” — which concerns their cell aging — they can be used in less strenuous ways, like stationary energy storage, according to the report.

B2U’s Cuyama project is the second of its kind, the company said. In February, B2U launched a 28 MWh facility in Lancaster, California, which includes 1,300 EV battery packs from different automotive manufacturers. That project is the largest operational energy storage site in the world that uses second-life EV batteries, according to the company. 

B2U uses a technology it calls ‘EV Pack Storage,’ which it says allows it to use old EV battery packs for new purposes in a plug-and-play fashion, with virtually no repurposing costs. 

The Cuyama hybrid facility, along with the hybrid facility in Lancaster, are the first large-scale storage facilities using EV battery packs deployed in a plug-and-play fashion, that sell power and grid services directly into the grid, Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solutions, said in an email. 

“To our knowledge, these facilities are the first of their kind anywhere,” Hall added.

Experts have been eyeing the potential of deriving second uses out of end-of-life EV batteries for a while. In 2019, a McKinsey article estimated that stationary energy storage powered by used EV batteries could exceed 200 GWh by 2030. That paper pointed to three applications for used EV batteries — providing reserve energy capacity to ensure grid reliability, deferring investments in the transmission and distribution system, and power arbitrage. 

Repurposing old EV batteries as different forms of energy storage, like with microgrid systems, can help extend their lifespans and more broadly can help make the electrification of the transportation sector more sustainable, a July report from the Natural Resources Defense Council found.

Batteries’ capacities decline over their lifetime and after a certain point — say when they get to 70% or 80% of their original capacity — they may not be useful in EVs, according to Jordan Brinn, author of the report and an advocate with NRDC.

But they could still make a lot of sense for stationary storage, since you can combine lots of batteries together to create an outage management system for the grid, she added.

“So, essentially, when you reuse these batteries, you’re getting more life out of that battery, which inherently reduces the life cycle impact of manufacturing that battery,” she said.

EV batteries contain minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, which can be associated with pollution and health impacts in the areas around them, the NRDC report noted. In that context, second-life applications for EV batteries can reduce the amount of materials that need to be mined for the sector. Depending on the condition of the second-life battery, it can be used to provide energy storage for up to 15 years after it can no longer be used in an EV, according to the report. 

Google has used its carbon-intelligent computing platform, built to shift energy use at its data centers to times when clean energy is more readily available, to respond to energy crises around the world, according to an October blog post by the company.

The tech giant plans to continue piloting the software as a demand response mechanism in partnership with grid operators, said Savannah Goodman, data and software climate solutions lead for Google.

Demand management and other efforts to improve energy efficiency at data centers could have a significant impact on the grid, according to Baosen Zhang, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington.

Google's efforts to achieve 24/7 clean energy could have benefits beyond its goal of eliminating carbon emissions from its operations, according to the company's latest dispatch.

Google reports that it used its carbon-intelligent computing platform to respond to extreme weather events in Oregon, Nebraska and in the Southeastern U.S. in collaboration with utility partners in those areas. The company also used the software to reduce electrical demand and support energy security in Europe by reducing its power consumption from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. during Europe's December 2022 to March 2023 energy crisis.

Developed in 2020, Google's carbon-intelligent computing platform allows the company to direct its data centers to perform non-urgent computing tasks when renewable energy resources are more widely available to reduce its carbon footprint. But as demonstrated over the past year, the platform can also be used to respond to local grid events to maintain reliability, the company said.

“The demand response capability leverages the technical foundations of this platform to deliver targeted energy reductions at specific data centers based on an event request from a local grid partner — typically during the system wide peak load,” Goodman said. “In other words, demand response is a new capability that leverages existing technical infrastructure to serve a new set of use cases and objectives.”

Google continues to work with grid operators to test and expand its demand response capabilities, Goodman said.

Google isn't the only large tech company testing demand response initiatives, Zhang said. With more utilities implementing rate structures that penalize power use during peak hours and reward customers for having more flexible power needs, data centers have begun to optimize their operations in response.

And while it can be difficult to calculate exactly what this will mean in terms of carbon emissions — a question that multiple companies are tackling — Zhang said he sees significant potential in demand management programs and other initiatives to reduce electrical use at data centers.

Data centers may represent a mere fraction of the nation's total energy use, he said, but energy use by data centers is growing rapidly while demand from the rest of the economy remains relatively flat. And data centers typically have more flexibility in terms of when they need energy compared to other large, industrial customers, Zhang said.

A coalition of major companies launched the Clean Energy Procurement Academy last week, which aims to curb supply chain emissions by providing businesses with the technical skills and knowledge required to transition toward clean energy.

Apple and Nike are spearheading the project with the Clean Energy Buyers Institute, or CEBI, a nonprofit focused on solving market and policy barriers to achieve carbon-free energy systems. Amazon, Meta, PepsiCo and REI Co-op are also founding members of the new academy.

The goal of the new initiative is to rapidly advance clean energy procurement, address scope 3 emissions and decarbonize global supply chains through the collaborative efforts of these corporations and suppliers.

The coalition of companies launched the academy to help build the “capacity of select supply chain partners in energy markets that contribute material volumes of greenhouse gas emissions,” according to an Oct. 25 press release from CEBI. The founding organizations will pool their collective expertise and internal training resources to design a shared training curriculum and delivery processes that “enable trainees to rapidly mature as clean energy customers.”

“The Clean Energy Procurement Academy is key to breaking down barriers to clean energy adoption, while also helping us demonstrate demand and advocate for clean energy solutions in essential regions,” Nike’s chief sustainability officer, Noel Kinder, said in a press release. “Collaborating cross-industry helps us tackle systemic challenges together.”  

Apple’s vice president of environment and supply chain innovation, Sarah Chandler, echoed Kinder and said businesses “need to act quickly to expand access to clean energy around the world” to address the climate crisis. Chandler said Apple would continue to work closely with its global suppliers to support their transition to renewable energy.

The curriculum for the new academy will include in-person and online training, in addition to comprehensive educational sources. The academy will give supply chain companies increased data accessibility and encourage them to escalate their renewable energy goals and commitments to boost their capacity to invest in renewable energy. 

The group also said the effort aims to build collaboration among different industries tackling the same challenges with their supply chain and establish new communities that buy renewable energy within certain manufacturing regions.

The Clean Energy Procurement Academy is also supported by the climate-focused We Mean Business Coalition, which recently sponsored a “Fossil to Clean” letter signed by 131 companies urging governments to phase out burning fossil fuels and scale up the production of clean energy ahead of the COP28 climate change summit. The letter was backed by businesses generating nearly $1 trillion in global annual revenue collectively, including Nestlé, Ikea, eBay, Unilever and Volvo Cars.