The Innovation:

1. The most successful businesses offer multiple services: combining VPP with energy efficiency, management, and green electricity solutions.
2. This model is thriving, especially in China's rapidly growing zero-carbon industrial parks.

Challenges:

1. Even with policy support, VPP entrepreneurs struggle to make enough from VPP compensation alone.
2. Grid operators typically prioritize traditional power plants, since they’re seen as more reliable.
3. Integrating VPPs with grid dispatch systems can cost millions of yuan.

At the end of 2023, the central government introduced a problematic coal capacity payment mechanism, raising the risk of locking in coal capacity. In a new article, Max Dupuy and I look at developments in 2024 and the emerging reform to improve the mechanism to better support clean energy.

For the complete story, check out this post:

www1.islandfox.org/p/about-isla...

#nature #conservation #island_foxes #channel_islands

Lots of conservationists undertook years of dedicated efforts to restore the island foxes population:

- Reintroducing the bald eagles (now there are ~60 of them)
- Implementing captive breeding for island foxes
- relocate the golden eagles to Yosemite (I'd like that too)

When bald eagles were gone, the golden eagles saw an opportunity and swooped in. They started praying on the island foxes, driving them to near extinction.

Here is the gist: Bald eagles and island foxes once coexist on the Channel Islands. Since the bald eagles mostly eat fish, the foxes live on the islands without predators.

However, DDTs percolated up the food chain ended up eliminated bald eagles from the island by 1960.

Though the latest policy only partially covers fixed costs for plants satisfying efficiency and environmental standards, it still risks increased emissions and overinvestment in coal power. Dive deeper into the debate in our blog. bit.ly/4begk9m (5/5)

While a well-designed capacity market, open to transparent competition, could be a workable part of a broad power sector reform that creates viable business models for energy storage, demand response, and wind and solar generation, the current coal capacity payment falls short. (4/5)

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) sparked debates with its 2022 policy statement (Document 118) on power generation capacity. Fast forward to November 2023, and a coal-generator-only capacity payment is on the table. But there are pros and cons. (3/5)

How can China improve its current capacity mechanism to move toward cleaner energy? Short answer: a transparent and competitive capacity acquisition process, opens to a wider range of resources such as energy storage and demand response, which could meet demand with lower cost and emission. (2/5)