Jigar Shah has stepped down from his role as CEO at greentech think tank Carbon War Room. José María Figueres Olsen, the former president of Costa Rica, is now the President of Sir Richard Branson's Carbon War Room, which looks to accelerate profitable climate-change solutions.

The other ego has left the building

Kevin Surace, the man who since 2008 has led Serious on an ever-changing set of business strategies — green building materials, energy efficiency software, project financing — is no longer CEO. He lost the job in February, and is now listed as chairman and co-founder, while Marc Porat, co-founder of Serious and a handful of other Silicon Valley green startups, has taken the helm.

From today's Term Sheet by Dan Primack

Brian Walsh has stepped down as a principal with energy-focused VC firm Nth Power, in order to join Nth Power portfolio company Tempronics as a vice president. He’s the second Nth Power principal to leave in recent months (Matt Price departed last October).

Babcock & Wilcox

Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) (NYSE: BWC) has appointed E. James (Jim) Ferland as President and CEO of the 150-year-old energy engineering firm with conventional, nuclear, and renewable energy divisions. Ferland was most recently the President of the Americas division at Westinghouse Electric Company. 

Liquid-filled LED bulbs replace incandescents

Switch Lighting, funded by VantagePoint Capital, builds LED bulbs and just added five people to its executive ranks, including new CFO Daniel Macsherry and new EVP of Business Development Bill Lenihan. 

Electric Vehicles for Police Forces

T3 Motion (NYSE AMEX:TTTM), a very small-cap builder of specialty electric vehicles for police and law enforcement fleets, appointed Rod Keller, Jr. as CEO.

Go Green

Jigar Shah has stepped down from his role as CEO at greentech think tank Carbon War Room. José María Figueres Olsen, the former president of Costa Rica, is now the President of Sir Richard Branson's Carbon War Room, which looks to accelerate profitable climate-change solutions.

The other ego has left the building

Kevin Surace, the man who since 2008 has led Serious on an ever-changing set of business strategies — green building materials, energy efficiency software, project financing — is no longer CEO. He lost the job in February, and is now listed as chairman and co-founder, while Marc Porat, co-founder of Serious and a handful of other Silicon Valley green startups, has taken the helm.

From today's Term Sheet by Dan Primack

Brian Walsh has stepped down as a principal with energy-focused VC firm Nth Power, in order to join Nth Power portfolio company Tempronics as a vice president. He’s the second Nth Power principal to leave in recent months (Matt Price departed last October).

Babcock & Wilcox

Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) (NYSE: BWC) has appointed E. James (Jim) Ferland as President and CEO of the 150-year-old energy engineering firm with conventional, nuclear, and renewable energy divisions. Ferland was most recently the President of the Americas division at Westinghouse Electric Company. 

Liquid-filled LED bulbs replace incandescents

Switch Lighting, funded by VantagePoint Capital, builds LED bulbs and just added five people to its executive ranks, including new CFO Daniel Macsherry and new EVP of Business Development Bill Lenihan. 

Electric Vehicles for Police Forces

T3 Motion (NYSE AMEX:TTTM), a very small-cap builder of specialty electric vehicles for police and law enforcement fleets, appointed Rod Keller, Jr. as CEO.

Go Green

Jigar Shah has stepped down from his role as CEO at greentech think tank Carbon War Room. José María Figueres Olsen, the former President of Costa Rica, is now the President of Sir Richard Branson's Carbon War Room which looks to accelerate profitable climate-change solutions.

The other ego has left the building

Kevin Surace, the man who since 2008 has led Serious on an ever-changing set of business strategies — green building materials, energy efficiency software, project financing — is no longer CEO. He lost the job in February, and is now listed as chairman and co-founder, while Marc Porat, co-founder of Serious and a handful of other Silicon Valley green startups, has taken the helm.

From today's Term Sheet by Dan Primack

Brian Walsh has stepped down as a principal with energy-focused VC firm Nth Power, in order to join Nth Power portfolio company Tempronics as a vice president. He’s the second Nth Power principal to leave in recent months (Matt Price departed last October).

Babcock & Wilcox

Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) (NYSE: BWC) has appointed E. James (Jim) Ferland as President and CEO of the 150-year-old energy engineering firm with conventional, nuclear, and renewable energy divisions. Ferland was most recently the President of the Americas division at Westinghouse Electric Company. 

Liquid-filled LED bulbs replace incandescents

Switch Lighting, funded by VantagePoint Capital, builds LED bulbs and just added five people to its executive ranks including new CFO Daniel Macsherry and new EVP of Business Development Bill Lenihan. 

Electric Vehicles for Police Forces

T3 Motion (NYSE AMEX:TTTM), a very small-cap builder of specialty electric vehicles for police and law enforcement fleets appointed Rod Keller, Jr. as CEO.

Go Green

That’s the premise behind a fascinating project underway at China’s Xiamen University that’s using DC power to connect rooftop solar panels to lights, HVAC systems, data centers and plug-in vehicle chargers. Nextek Power Systems is providing the solar-to-building DC power technology, China-based Canadian Solar provides the solar panels, and Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup People Power will provide the cloud-based software platform to connect it to people in the building.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will provide “algorithms for the optimal equipment choice and operation of direct-current microgrids.” LBNL hosts the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, part of the joint U.S.-Chinese smart grid partnership formed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009. Intel is providing “technical expertise and advice,” and has been working on DC power research at an Intel Labs energy research facility in New Mexico.

Overall, shifting power loads to DC can improve building energy efficiency by 25 percent to 35 percent, said John Teeter, People Power’s chief scientist. Mainly, that’s achieved by cutting power conversion losses:  “We’re looking at a general loss of about 15 percent to 20 percent on each transition” from DC to AC and back again, he said.

That’s a general figure — next-generation power electronics systems can cut conversion losses down to the low single digits. But direct DC power cuts that down to zero.

Buildings still have to convert DC to different voltages, of course, depending on the application. The EMerge Alliance, a DC building power consortium of big names in the electronics and buildings fields, has set a 380-volt standard for powering data centers, and a 24-volt standard for its “occupied spaces” category, which includes offices and anywhere else people roam freely.

That’s where People Power comes in. The startup, founded by former Bitfone and Computer Motion CEO Gene Wang, has taken a winding path through various smart-energy plans, from building its own chipsets for in-home networked devices to creating the cloud-based software management platform that runs them in unison. It is working with Texas Instruments, Ricoh, Blue Line Innovations and others, though it hasn’t claimed any big deployments yet.

In the case of Xiamen, People Power will run the system that lets people interact with building energy use, setting office cubicles to turn off when they’re not being used, powering data centers up and down to meet IT demand, and the like. The startup wants to embed its operating system in office equipment, lights, power strips and anything else that can connect to the internet.

Data centers have been a major focus for DC building power, with companies like ABB, General Electric and Emerson getting involved. Facebook’s super-efficient Oregon data center runs on DC power, and using LEDs instead of fluorescent lights also benefits from the fact that LEDs run on direct current. As for the solar connection, AMD, HP and others are looking at ways to tap wind and solar power directly to feed servers, though of course, they all need steady backup power to keep humming.

While the Xiamen project isn’t taking on direct-to-the-desktop DC power, the EMerge Alliance has launched a task force to work on the idea of powering computers, printers and other plug-in office gear without those pesky, wasteful converters on every power cord. Of course, that also means switching out all the outlets in the office with a DC equivalent of some kind, which limits its potential as a retrofit technology.

Xiamen, one of China’s main energy technology R&D hubs, plans to outfit three buildings with the technology by summer, Teeter said. Monday’s press release said the work should serve as a “global showcase for distributed direct-current microgrid innovation and commercialization,” with an emphasis on the last word in that sentence.

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Dr. Walker, an energy advisor in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was appointed to the California Energy Commission during the first Brown gubernatorial tenure and helped pioneer the utility-scale wind industry. Former CEO and current Board Vice Chair of wind and solar giant enXco, he was President of the American Wind Energy Association and worked in the geothermal and energy efficiency industries.

A renewables advocate, Walker nevertheless sees the need for a “portfolio” energy policy. “The utility industry and government tend to have these monomanias,” he said. "[But] if we keep wind, solar, natural gas, nuclear and strengthen the grid,” he explained, “that would be a pretty good electricity system.”

There is a place for nuclear but not coal, according to Walker. “You’d want to keep the nukes,” he said, “but you’re going to have a hard time keeping the nuke output where it is. Coal is going to be gradually phased out. I don’t see the breakthroughs coming in CCS (carbon sequestration) that you see in gas and wind and solar.”

Walker said wind and natural gas will lead because they are economically competitive. But with Congress denying the domestic wind industry an extension of its vital production tax credit (PTC), much new wind development will go abroad in the near term.

Withholding the PTC, Walker said, is a mistake, because “it’s a perfect example of a federal policy that you know works. You turn the switch on, as Congress did in 2001, 2003 and 2005, [and] you go to a three-billion-dollar wind industry. You turn the switch off, as Congress did in 2002 and 2004, you get a half-billion-dollar or less industry. You don’t have that in drug policy, in foreign policy. It absolutely works.”

Without the PTC, the U.S. wind industry will see “a major collapse” in 2013. “The sad part of it is, this is after four or five years of pretty steady growth in which we have attracted investments in the manufacturing sector.” Companies that “get burned” will say, “‘Listen, we better not go back into that U.S. market.’”

Modern wind technology “is good enough and universally available enough so that there is going to be a series of countries that open up,” according to Walker, who pioneered development in Turkey, Greece and Mexico. “You have to have all the pieces in place to attract international capital.” Turkey, Brazil and South Africa, he said, are ready to “take off.”

“Every utility has resistance to a supply they don’t control,” he said. “And you can’t control wind. They go through certain stages of denial,” he recalled, until “they gradually learn” that, with planning and upgraded systems, “integrating two or three percent wind is easy, 10 percent is quite doable, and you can get up to 20 percent or 30 percent.”

When grid operators get used to wind’s “zero fuel cost,” it becomes the first energy supply they load in, Walker said. “It’s not baseload in fact, but it’s your base load.”

In the U.S., natural gas has become too cheap to resist as the result of its decoupling from the price of oil.

“That’s a very significant development in the last couple of years. For a very long time, there was a close correlation in price,” he recalled. Now, “you have oil going from $ 147 down to $ 30 and back up to $ 120 and gas prices are flat.”

The emerging consensus, Walker said, is that “technological breakthroughs in methods of getting natural gas out of shale deposits make it look like there will be a very low long-term price for natural gas in North America.” This, he pointed out, will give the U.S. “an international competitive advantage because China does not have a source of domestic natural gas.”

Natural gas does have challenges. “The environmental consequences will increasingly be taken seriously,” Walker said. Hydrofracking must be done better. “The other problem with natural gas is that it’s twice as clean as coal at the burner tip, but methane is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide,” so “gas might be dirtier than coal.”

But, Walker said, “natural gas, at $ 2.50 per MMBTU, is probably four cents a kilowatt-hour” and “it is something utilities love. They can turn it off and on and it appears to be greener than coal, certainly to the utility. And it doesn’t have the criteria pollutants and the mercury and all the stuff that coal plants do have.”

Prices for wind and solar have dropped significantly, too, Walker said, due to breakthroughs in technology. (Recent GTM reports put the levelized cost of both at or near grid parity.)

“The one public number,” Walker said, “is that Xcel Energy signed a power contract with NextEra Energy for 2.7 cents per kilowatt-hour plus some escalation that would bring the levelized cost to ratepayers to maybe 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If you levelize the 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour PTC over twenty years, it is about 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, so that’s about five cents per kilowatt-hour unsubsidized."

“The portfolio of the future,” Walker concluded, “is efficiency, gas, wind and solar. All of which we can scale. If somebody was the master resource planner for the country, that would be the plan.”

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The Oak Ridge Siting Analysis for power Generation Expansion (OR-SAGE) tool assimilated “industry-accepted approaches and/or develop appropriate criteria” and applied “an array of geographic information systems (GIS) data sources.” The result was a database of “candidate areas” for power generation technologies.

The study was undertaken to identify sites for nuclear energy facilities. In conjunction with staff from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a similar database was built for advanced coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), concentrating solar power (CSP) plants, and compressed air energy storage (CAES). Wind generation was not included, perhaps because the wind industry’s American Wind Wildlife Institute (AWWI) is creating its own very similar tool.

The tool divided the continental U.S. into 700 million 100-meter by 100-meter (one hectare) squares (cells). Environmental, regulatory, and land-use constraints and proximity to hazardous operations were primary factors in the site selection and evaluation criteria (SSEC) that eliminated cells from consideration as potential power generation sites.

Other key assumptions in the assessment addressed adequate cooling water supplies, especially for thermoelectric power plants. Water for power plant cooling is a rising concern, as indicated by California’s mandate requiring the closing of gas-fired power plants that use environmentally sensitive water sources for power plant cooling by 2017.

The study found sites for the placement of an estimated 515 gigawatts of large nuclear reactors. “The OR-SAGE plant capacity estimate indicates that states in a significant portion of the country can support siting at least 10 gigawatts (estimated) in large reactor facilities with no siting challenges.”

There are also sites available to support:

• An estimated 201 gigawatts of small nuclear reactors
• An estimated gross capacity of 216 gigawatts for CCS, and the report added that “with a parasitic load for scrubbing and carbon capture, this represents a net capacity of approximately 158 gigawatts”
• An estimated 18 gigawatts of water-cooled concentrating solar power (CSP) and at least 60 gigawatts of dry-cooled CSP
• An estimated 645 million acres of CAES plant siting opportunities, “based on all geological storage methods”

Those estimates total 958 gigawatts. The nameplate electricity generation capacity of the U.S. is generally estimated to be around 1,000GW.

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MiaSolé appointed Richard (Rich) Hossfeld as Vice President of Global Business Development and Sales following the recent appointment of new CEO, John Carrington. Both Hossfeld and Carrington have worked at First Solar. MiaSolé, a CIGS thin-film PV manufacturing startup, placed third in CIGS panel production in 2011 behind Solar Frontier (at 577 megawatts) and Solibro (at 95 megawatts), according to GTM Research. The firm just announced a 17.3-percent-efficient champion device, while the "manufacturing process for 14 percent efficiency is now in production," according to the firm.
 

Oasys Water of Boston, Mass. added Bob Muscat as its new CEO. Oasys develops forward-osmosis-based water treatment technologies, as well as desalination technology. Muscat was previously the general manager of GE Energy’s Environmental Services business. 

Lumenergi, a maker of networked lighting energy management technology, added an entire new leadership staff headed by Barry Weinbaum as CEO. The CEO and many of the other senior-level hires hail from Acuity Brands.

Ascent Solar (NASDAQ:ASTI), a manufacturer of flexible CIGS solar panels, appointed Victor Lee, Director of TFG Radiant and Ascent’s largest shareholder, as President and CEO of the troubled solar company. Ron Eller, the former CEO, was wished "the best in his future endeavors.”

John Rayfield, longtime employee at Nanosolar, is no longer with the firm. Rayfield was VP of Worldwide Marketing and joins CEO Geoff Tate and VP Brian Stone as recent former Nanosolar employees — coinciding with the arrival of Eugenia Corrales as the new CEO of the firm.

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Innovations in rooftop solar system financing may be driving the growth of solar more than anything except, possibly, Chinese government subsidies. But China’s subsidies are unsustainable, if not illegal, while financing advances like the just-announced Clean Power Finance (CPF) partnership with Vivint Solar are transforming the industry.

The basic idea behind CPF, explained CEO Nat Kreamer, is “to connect the capital market with the solar market.”

Backed by a group of the biggest names in greentech venture capital, including Kleiner Perkins and Google, CPF is a business-to-business service in the form of a software tool that allows solar installers to make financing available to system buyers.

“We started selling financing for solar systems in April 2011,” Kreamer said, "and by August 2011, we were financing more than a million dollars a day of residential power purchase agreements and leases.”

By adding Vivint Solar as a partner, CPF took another step forward. “It shows how this market is advancing very quickly that you’re having players like Vivint come into it,” Kreamer said. “This is a trend of companies that have been very successful in other markets that are bringing that success to the solar market.”

Vivint began as APX Alarm Security Solutions Inc. in 1999 and expanded into home energy management automation, and then, six months ago, into solar installations.

“Vivint has built a tremendous base of something like 600,000 customers,” Kreamer said. CPF’s part of the deal, he added, "is to provide them with a variety of finance products that they can use to sell more solar.”

In the short time that Vivint has been in the solar installation business, it has won $ 75 million in financing from U.S. Bancorp and made itself, Kreamer said, “one of the largest U.S. providers of solar.”

In Vivint’s first six months, “our run rate is ramping toward 3,000 to 5,000 installations per year,” said Vivint Solar President Tanguy Serra. Based on its current annual 150,000 home system installations, Serra said, Vivint’s goal is 150,000 yearly solar installations. “But that level of financing for solar doesn’t yet exist,” he explained. “That’s why we’re partnering with CPF.”

“To them, 150,000 customers doesn’t sound like a lot,” Kreamer said. “To the rest of the solar industry, it does. But it shouldn’t. That’s what Clean Power Finance is all about.”

Because of the specific federal, state and local incentives that apply to solar financing, the CPF backing will not be used in Vivint’s other businesses. Although such a convergence will likely come eventually, Kreamer said, “You can’t blend the two products right now.”

But in building the kind of customer base Vivint has, Kreamer said, “you learn something about how to do high-quality installations fast. Vivint has taken all of that knowledge, those same systems and technology, and applied it to solar.”

Vivint Solar uses Enphase Energy microinverters and Zep Solar mounting systems, but it is not rapid construction at which Vivint excels. “One of the holy grails when you think about consumers,” said Kreamer “is instant gratification. They figured out that instant gratification is getting to that install as quickly as possible.”

Because CPF’s software tool was built to be flexible, Kreamer said, Vivint will be able to use the CPF white label software for the solar part of its business while maintaining its own IT systems for security and energy management.

Serra echoed Kreamer. “We have invested $ 40 million in the last 10 years in IT systems,” he said. “The relationship is around integrating our work flow into their financing process.”

Estimating an install at roughly $ 35,000, Kreamer said, the lowest projected Vivint volume of 3,000 installs per year would require $ 105 million per year. That would be in addition to the $ 1 million per day, or $ 300 million per year, of its funders’ money CPF is already putting into solar.

“We have enough capital to meet our customers’ present demand and their future demand for some time,” Kreamer said. Investors “want to put their money to work and this is a great asset class so we have a lot of capital interested in working with us,” he explained. “People who own homes pay their electricity bills,” Kreamer said, which means “there is low likelihood of default, and investors like that.” Default rates, he said, are lower than default rates on AAA bonds.

Rooftop solar, Kreamer said, is a low-risk, high-reward investment in what is essentially a long-term asset. In addition, with the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) available through 2016, as much as 45 percent of an investor’s capital outlay comes back as a tax benefit in the first year of the loan. And the overall return on investment in residential solar is “anywhere from the high single digits to the mid-teens.”

CPF, Kreamer said, has ample capital, and adding a customer like Vivint means there is “deal flow” for the capital. Then, alluding to “good news coming” that he could not yet talk about that will expand CPF’s resources, Kreamer simply said, “we’re not throttling back on our deal flow,” adding that Vivint is ”ramping its business at the same time we’re ramping our capital.”

“We’re seeing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars come at this sector,” Kreaemer said, “and a partnership like this one just makes it more attractive.”

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The 540-foot structure stands in Tonopah, Nevada at the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Power Plant. Construction began in September 2011 and the process has been operating 24/7 in the last few months in order to get the tower completed before winter. I spoke with CEO Kevin Smith this morning.

The project will eventually use 10,000 "billboard-size" mirrors, called heliostats, to focus sunlight at a boiler, which will work in conjunction with a molten salt energy storage system that provides something that photovoltaic solar systems don't: power when the sun goes down. The mirrors will start to go in the ground in summer 2012. The molten salt receiver target will be added later this year and add 100 feet to the height of the tower.
 
SolarReserve of Santa Monica, California closed a $ 140 million venture round in 2008 and has a $ 737 million loan guarantee from the DOE for the 110-megawatt molten salt storage power tower with 10 hours of thermal energy storage. This will be the tallest molten salt tower in the world, according to the DOE website. The firm licenses the molten salt power tower solar technology from Rocketdyne, a division of Hamilton Sundstrand. Investors in SolarReserve include U.S. Renewables Group, Citi Alternative Investments, Sustainable Development Investments, Good Energies, and Credit Suisse. The project is owned by SolarReserve, ACS Cobra (a power plant engineering and construction firm), and Santander, a financial services and banking firm.

SolarReserve has a power purchase agreement (PPA) with NV Energy for this project, which is built on BLM land and is slated to be operational and generating power in 2013.

Molten salt energy storage allows the solar system to behave a bit more like a natural gas power plant and a bit less like a field of heliostats or PV solar panels. In a press release, Kevin Smith, CEO of Solar Reserve, said, "We can deliver electricity ‘on demand’ the same way a coal, natural gas or nuclear fueled plant does, but without emitting any harmful pollution or hazardous materials, providing a genuine alternative to conventional power generation."

Once working, the power plant will generate more than $ 10 million per year in salaries and operating costs, along with generating millions in tax revenues, according to the company. 
 
The massive scale and scope of the project can be better appreciated from the construction videos found here.

GTM Research has looked at the LCOE of various solar technologies, with and without storage, and SolarReserve fares rather well in those comparisons. (See chart below.) The CEO confirmed that they expect an LCOE in the $ 0.116 range, which puts the CSP firm in striking distance of a combined-cycle natural gas power plant — but without the emissions.

Here's CEO Kevin Smith pleading his case on Fox News:

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Ron Nichols was brought in as DWP’s manager a year ago to turn that around. The prospect of facilitating change in a utility caught in a web woven by politicians, unions and ratepayers is, Nichols said, “daunting.” Yet, “this is the most exciting time to be providing electric service since Edison invented the light bulb,” Nichols told an audience of greentech stakeholders at the 2012 VerdeXchange.

The transition LADWP must make in order to comply with California’s 33 percent renewables by 2020 mandate — which was just extended to municipal utilities by Governor Brown this year — is “a phenomenol opportunity.” With the 33 percent mandate, he said, “We don’t debate this anymore, we just get it done.”

Or do they?

Nichols said he has fought to implement DWP’s mandated elimination of the coal it imports from Arizona and Utah for 40 percent of its electricity — a process he describes as making him feel “like I have a target on my back.” Still, the utility will make it happen, he said, “as quickly as we can.”

Of the utility’s mandate to implement 10 percent Energy Efficiency (EE) by 2020, Nichols said, “we welcome the opportunity,” though he then went on to note that DWP recently reduced its 2020 EE target to 8.5 percent.

Every year through 2029, Nichols said, the utility must close and replace or retrofit a conventional coastal power plant to eliminate the use of ocean water for cooling. That will cost $ 2.2 billion.

“On top of that, we have very specific state and local solar mandates,” he added. “Every one of these, individually, would be an interesting challenge. Collectively, it’s a lot.”

Those, and other mandates, Nichols explained, constitute the obligations DWP must meet in order to comply with AB 32, California’s landmark climate change law. “If we meet those obligations,” Nichols began, and then interrupted himself to say it is his job “to see that we do.”

Returning to the EE target reduction from 10 to 8.5 percent, Nichols said DWP’s board “took about as big a step as they think they can take right now.” It’s inadequate, and he's "not satisfied, but every time we haven’t had sufficient rates in our budget, the first thing that we cut is energy efficiency. We do it because we have so few degrees of freedom,” he said.

Of the latest budget, he said determinedly, “We are going to spend $ 1.25 billion per year between now and 2020 to get there. We should be spending more, we should be getting more, and I hope that we do.”

Nichols produced a graph of, he said, “how we’re going to get to 33 percent by 2020.” It projected growth in wind, biogas, solar (“a major piece of what we’re doing”) and geothermal.

“But the reality is, every one of these requires dozens and dozens of contracts and commitments to projects that make our life a lot less predictable,” Nichols said. “Replacing 1,600 megawatts of coal, replacing a couple of plants with dozens of other actions,” he explained, is not easy. Plus, “there’s a lot of different pieces to solar,” he added, mentioning California’s many programs and incentives. “I’m not complaining about it; it’s just a reality.”

LADWP will replace its coal with renewables, EE and natural gas, Nichols said. “And let’s be clear: we’re going to go to about 47 percent natural gas,” he said, but “if we didn’t have renewable energy, we would be at over 80 percent natural gas.”

The transition will have other costs, as well, he warned. “We’re spending $ 800 million per year — the biggest capital investment we’re going to make in the next decade — replacing aged infrastructure that we should have been replacing years ago. We’re playing catch-up.”

“I’m not going to sit here right now and say exactly what our future rates are going to be, but if everything went fantastically,” he said, “we’d be at about a 4.5 percent per year rate increase for the rest of this decade. Do I think that’s likely? No, I don’t.” A more likely average rate increase, Nichols said, is 6.5 percent per year.

“Is that something we can’t sustain? I don’t think so. I think we can live within this,” Nichols said. “No one wants to see rates go up, but we will be cheaper than our neighbors.” And, he said, “if we do it right, we can provide jobs to our local economy.”

He added two thoughts in conclusion. First, “I hope I can get everyone’s support.” Second, the state has to be very careful about “anything more from a mandate perspective that gets layered on,” because “we have a lot on our plate — and I hope we can digest it.”

Go Green