Last Thursday, May 10, the Geothermal Energy Association hosted a Geothermal Financing Workshop. In a full day, the audience was exposed to policy, regulation, financing, and project development topics presented by industry experts. There are any number of highlights that could be selected to discuss in this entry, but the one we’ll focus on is the renewable portfolio standard.

The Union of Concerned Scientists have created a great resource in the form of the Electricity Standards Toolkit, a comprehensive listing of the renewable portfolio standards state by state in a handy online database. John Galloway, a Senior Energy Analyst, gave a very interesting talk about RPS and its impact.

One of the more interesting tidbits gleaned from the talk was that in California, the 20% RPS by 2010 standard is in reach. As of 2006, 14% of California’s energy is coming from renewable sources. This is the optimistic view of progress against RPS. The counter position is that renewable electricity generation and distribution needs to grow at 1.5% per year to meet the 20% goal by 2010, and much of the new power under contract or shortlist has yet to be constructed.

Of the 3 power providing entities in California, investor owned utilities (IOUs,) municipal utilities, and electricity service providers (ESPs,) the group with the most opportunity for improvement is the ESPs who presently provide only 1% of power to their customers from renewable resources as of 2006.

Over the next few entries, we’ll look at other portions of the conference as well. Overall, it was a good event that was well attended with a bunch of salient information.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 7:36 am and is filed under Business, Geothermal.