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Call it a tale of two renewable portfolio standards (RPS). North Carolina’s renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolio standard has just scored a major investment in solar power by the state’s major utility. But in Ohio, a new law freezing that state’s renewable energy standard has already put the local solar industry in a deep freeze.

Duke Energy announced on Monday that the utility would be investing $500 million in solar in North Carolina to meet the state’s requirements. The money would go toward building three new solar farms, as well as purchasing power from five other facilities being built by investors.

“That’s why we’re doing this, for renewable portfolio standard requirements,” said Rob Caldwell, Duke Energy’s vice president of renewable generation development. “One of the objectives of this [process] is to get as many megawatts as attractively priced as we can for our customers, since our customers are paying for this,” he said to Fox Business News. To Greentech Media, Caldwell put it somewhat differently: “Solar prices are coming down. We can make it work at an attractive price.”

While North Carolina’s RPS is bringing in major investment, Ohio has seen what happens when an RPS is stopped in its tracks. Earlier this year, Ohio’s state legislature pushed through a law that froze the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. The law went into effect last week, and it appears those chickens are already coming home to roost. As Midwest Energy News reports, Ohio’s market for solar energy credits (SRECs), which utilities have to buy from solar installation owners to meet their compliance obligations, has already tanked. As a result, projects have stalled and Ohio solar energy companies have started to look for opportunities elsewhere.

“Projects were put on hold almost immediately,” said Eric Scheier, a portfolio analyst with Sol Systems, a financing and investment firm in Washington, DC.

“Indianapolis, a city just two hours away in driving time from Columbus and Cincinnati, is one of the largest markets for solar,” said Steve Melink, whose Melink Corp. recently completed two projects there. “And here in Ohio we’re saying oh, we can’t do it,” said Melink, a board member of Ohio Advanced Energy Economy. “It shows, I think, that Ohio is heading backwards.”

Nationwide, however, new reports reveal solar energy is making competitive gains. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released three reports focused on solar energy this week, showing that the price of electricity from large-scale solar generators under long-term contracts has fallen by more than 70 percent since 2008. The reports also show that costs of residential solar are also down, falling 70 cents per watt in 2013 alone.

Prices of wind and solar are falling across the board, according to the Financial Times, becoming cost-competitive with more traditional fossil fuel-based power plants in many parts of the U.S. without government intervention. Falling costs and rising efficiency are increasingly making solar and wind energy sources a financially attractive model.

“We used to say some day solar and wind power would be competitive with conventional generation. Well, now it is some day,” said George Bilicic, global head of power, energy & infrastructure for Lazard, one of the world’s leading financial advisory and asset management firms.

Regulators in California this week approved another enormous solar thermal power plant, similar to Ivanpah. Developers BrightSource Energy and Abenoga Solar were seeking approval for two of the 750-foot-tall monoliths, but the California Energy Commission approved only one. The single approved tower could come online as soon as 2017.

Finally, two new electric vehicle concepts to keep an eye out for. Silicon Valley-based Motiv Power Systems announced that the company’s first fleet of all-electric garbage trucks had been delivered to Chicago and is now in use on city streets. The electric garbage truck not only saves fuel, it’s also incredibly quiet – which could come in handy on early morning trash rounds. And the market for electric motorcycles is heating up, with traditional bike-maker Harley Davidson entering the market. Harley is going toe-to-toe (or wheel-to-wheel) with newcomers like Zero Motorcycles and Mission Motors, both based out of California’s Bay Area. Bloomberg Businessweek says that Harley’s move into electric motorcycles lends credibility to what has been considered a niche market.

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Image courtesy of Harley Davidson.

The “sharing economy.” It’s the new, new thing (or, depending on your perspective, very, very old). Over the past five years, companies like Uber and Airbnb have attracted millions of dollars of venture capital and built a huge customer base. “Just as peer-to-peer businesses like eBay allow anyone to become a retailer,” The Economist writes, “sharing sites let individuals act as an ad hoc taxi service, car-hire firm or boutique hotel as and when it suits them.” The ability to share goods and services is having a disruptive impact across the economy. Can energy be far behind?

Since America electrified in the late 19^th Century, the solution for energy growth has been to “get bigger,” Hemant Taneja, venture capitalist and AEE co-founder, wrote in Tech Crunch. Economies of scale allowed utilities to provide power to more customers and increase profitability for themselves. But, Taneja argues, “the industry is starting to reach the limits of scale.” Could “unscaling” the industry by aggregating users onto platforms for sharing, like Airbnb and Uber, be the future of electricity?

This week, the Rocky Mountain Institute published a blog post titled “An Airbnb or Uber for the Electricity Grid?” For more than a century, RMI writes, the nation’s grid has relied on centralized generation and one-way distribution to customers. But, as distributed energy resources become more available and affordable, we may be on the cusp of a shift toward a more democratic structure, where consumers hold the resources – advanced energy resources – and share them to meet each other’s needs.

“Energy efficiency, demand response, distributed generation such as rooftop solar, distributed storage such as batteries, smart thermostats, and more are poised to become the front lines of a sharing economy revolution for the grid,” RMI states.

Two major barriers stand in the way of Uber for kilowatt-hours. The first is supply. As Taneja points out, many of us “already have a car or an extra bedroom,” but spare generators are hard to come by. That is changing, as rooftop solar and small-scale wind become more prevalent. More distributed generation could inspire more ways to distribute that generation.

The second obstacle is the lack of a system that allows for sharing. A shared grid needs to be more nimble than today’s grid, which “can’t easily handle the diverse and intermittent energy sources that come from small-scale generators,” Taneja writes. But we are seeing movement on that front as well: Systems are being implemented across the country to allow for distribution of electricity generated everywhere from rooftops (with net metering of electricity taken from and provided to the grid) to community solar gardens.

Finally, a key component to the success of services like Airbnb and Uber is a trusted third party that can handle instant transactions. In energy, there’s no app for that…yet.

A shared electricity future is still that: the future. But it’s not necessarily so futuristic. A shared economy in energy is looking less like The Jetsons than something that’s just around the corner. Companies like Mosaic and SunShare already allow consumers to collaborate on solar installations within a community. I bet we’ll be ubering up kilowatt-hours before long – and before we get into a flying car.

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The June 2 release of EPA’s proposed rule to reduce carbon emissions, with its approval of a range of advanced energy technologies for compliance, has raised all sorts of questions. In an examination of what it all means for energy efficiency and demand response, Utility Dive talked to Malcolm Woolf, SVP of policy and government affairs at AEE, who described some of the ways these advanced energy technologies can tap new economic value under EPA’s draft rule.

“Investments in efficiency lengthen your other investments,” Woolf said. Energy efficiency and demand response are products “that the grid does not yet really monetize, but that we can monetize, and I think this EPA rule will help us do that.”

Solar energy technologies made headlines this week for the value they provide, both theoretical and practical. First up is solar thermal. A paper published this week in the journal Nature Climate Changesimulates solar thermal plants incorporating thermal storage, and demonstrates their ability to “satisfy a set of realistic demand scenarios.” The authors of the paper looked at three scenarios: a flat power demand, demand based on data from the European Union (where heating on winter evenings constitute peak demand), and one based on California, where power needs peak during summer afternoon hours. The paper concludes that solar thermal plants could provide adequate baseload power under all three circumstances.

Then there’s solar PV, which is stampeding through the real-world marketplace. El Paso Electric announced this week that it has already more than doubled its utility-scale solar portfolio in the past year and will eliminate coal from its portfolio within two years. El Paso Electric has signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) with several solar energy facilities, including the 50 MW Macho Springs facility now under construction and a planned 10 MW facility in Northeast El Paso.

"We continue to look for opportunities to add cost-effective solar energy technologies as the price of solar energy becomes more competitive," said Tom Shockley, CEO of El Paso Electric.

In Utah, solar energy is doing exactly that. In a state with no renewable portfolio standard, regional utility Rocky Mountain Power is signing PPAs to buy energy from solar energy producers. One of them, First Wind (which has expanded its portfolio beyond its name), has a number of solar power facilities in the region, including the 320 MW Four Beavers plant and the 20 MW Seven Sisters project.

Cory Honeyman, an analyst with GTM Research, notes that Utah, which currently has no installed utility-scale solar capacity, has suddenly become a solar development hotbed. “In the past six months, nearly 550 MW have received PPAs from 12 individual projects in Utah,” he writes.  

Meanwhile, in California, solar energy is breaking generation records too quickly to keep track. According to Utility Dive, California’s Independent System Operator (CAISO), will only be announcing new solar records in 500 MW increments. CAISO did report a record-breaking start to the summer months when, on June 1, the state generated an hourly peak output of 4,767 MW. In May 2014, solar provided 14 percent of the state’s power, which is more than double the 6 percent it provided in May 2013.

It was a big news week for AEE as well! AEE released PowerSuite, a new set of online tools that will allow you and your team to track energy legislation and regulatory dockets across 50 states in one seamless system. Click below to check it out for yourself and start a free two-week trial.