Peter Rothstein
Title: President, New England Clean Energy Council
Age: 61
Industry Experience: 20 years
As president of the New England Clean Energy Council, Peter Rothstein is responsible for helping the industry grow and advocating on its behalf to create regulatory environments that make renewable energy projects financially feasible. A veteran of the clean energy and software industries, Rothstein was an executive at Cambridge-based venture capital firm Flagship Ventures before joining the clean energy council in 2012.
Q:What are NECEC’s top issues at the state level this year?
A:One major one is in the solar area. We’ve hit the net metering cap in the National Grid territory. Projectsover a certain size aren’t able to move forward across half the state. That’s a major problem for us and our partners.
Q:What effect is that having on the industry?
A:We know several dozen of our member companies who’ve talked about projects on hold. There are 171 cities and towns that are part of National Grid territory. If that continues for several more months, I’m sure we will see layoffs or companies starting to shift into other territories. Many of the residential projects are moving forward because they are not affected by the net metered cap.
Part of what helps support solar is the federal investment tax credit, which is slated to be cut at the end of 2016. So we’re risking losing projects that would be able to bring federal dollars into the state.
Q:What types of renewable energy companies are growing the fastest in Massachusetts?
A: Solar companies are growing fastest and that’s where the most future potential there is for industry growth locally. Energy efficiency companies are going to continue to grow quickly. The Mass Save program brings together a strong network of energy auditing and retrofitting companies that can do those deployments. In energy storage, we’ve got a wide range of companies. When you’ve got solar and wind energy, you’ve got intermittent generation. You need to be able to combine that with energy storage so you’re able to use it when the greatest demand is out there.
Energy storage is growing very quickly, and there are a number of pilots being done around the region. That intersects with modernizing the grid. We’re two years into a planning effort with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to modernize the grid. This is so we wind up with an electric system that will be able to take advantage of all the smart distributed technology like solar on rooftop that the grid doesn’t know how to manage today, but will soon. That’s creating opportunities for companies to design microgrids at the neighborhood level.
Q:What are the barriers to entry for energy storage companies?
A: There are engineering issues and business and regulatory issues. If you want to put a fair amount of storage on your site and in a neighborhood, the grid isn’t really set up to connect it and manage it all that well. There are technical issues. There’s also the regulatory issue of what the value of that storage is. One time of the day it could be used to reduce demand, other times it may be load-shifting. It could give customers resiliency for when the grid goes down. Energy storage is one of these technologies that can be used for multiple things, and we haven’t figured out the regulatory structure for how a developer is going to get paid for providing those multiple benefits.
Q:What emerging technologies are getting the most attention in the industry?
A:There are half a dozen areas where we see a lot of research and development. We’re not done with solar. Solar’s gotten better and better, but the current generation is still 22 to 25 percent efficient. There’s research on next-generation materials that would bring costs down. Energy storage is an area where there’s a half a dozen different chemistries that might lead to different types of batteries.
When I talked about modernizing the grid, the electricity grid is still a one-way power flow network that does not have real-time sensors, doesn’t work the way a digital network like the Internet works. You see a lot of large companies like GE and Schneider Electric as well as start-ups who are developing the platform management systems for these smart grids that aren’t deployed yet. Those enable smarter buildings and applications that will be valuable. That’s going to be a transformative process over the next few years.
Favorite Classical Choral Works:
- Brahms Requiem
- Mahler 2nd Symphony
- Mahler 8th Symphony
- Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
- J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion
