ASES National Solar Energy Conference 2012: Call for Papers and Participation

Do you work in, or have dealings with, a renewable energy industry?  Are you working as an engineer, scientist, policy executive, advocate, or manager in this field?

If so, now’s the time to be thinking of whether you can submit a paper to, or participate in, next year’s ASES National Solar Energy Conference. You can find the Call for Participation and Papers here.

Next year’s Conference is going to be very different from recent ones.  It will be colocated with the biennial World Renewable Energy Congress under the umbrella heading of the World Renewable Energy Forum (WREF).  It will take place in the LEED silver-certified Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, CO, from May 13 – May 18.

The theme of WREF 2012 will be EmPowering the World with Renewable Energy.  It will look not only at how renewable energy technologies can address the environmental and energy crisis from an international perspective but also what it will take to integrate renewables into the world’s infrastructure on a very large scale.  To accomplish this energy transition, it will not be enough simply to power our electric grids with renewable energy;  we need also to empower people to play active roles in our energy transition, especially in developing nations.

We’ll be bringing you more information about WREF 2012 in Solar Citizen each month from now until next May, but you can check out the Call for Participation and Papers right here and now.

PACE – Not Dead, Just Sleeping

Regular readers of this newsletter must be well aware of the fraught history of Property-assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs. We’ve been writing about this excellent new way of financing small-scale solar installations since January 2009, not long after the first PACE program was instituted in Berkeley, California.  Following Berkeley’s success, twenty-seven states rushed to pass PACE-enabling legislation, clearing the way for local governments to create programs in which:

• The government entity raises funds, ideally from tax-free clean energy bonds;
• Homeowners and business owners can apply to use those funds for renewable energy or energy efficiency installations;
• The solar arrays (for example) are installed at no cost to the owner;
• The owner repays the lending agency through regular property tax assessments over an extended period, e.g., 20 years;
• Should the owner sell the property before the installation is paid for, the balance of the tax assessment is applied to the new owner.

Graphic courtesy of PACENOW campaign (www.PACENOW.org)

Of course, for every idea that catches fire there’s someone waiting with a bucket of water, and in this case it was the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), the overlord of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  FHFA considered the financial arrangement not a tax assessment but a loan, and thus could not stomach the notion that its mortgage operations would lose their senior lien position to a local authority.  Last summer, then, FHFA instructed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not to underwrite mortgages for properties with a PACE assessment.  Given the large number of home mortgages that end up being sold to these government mortgage agencies, FHFA’s action effectively killed the entire PACE movement.
(more…)

U.S. Solar Industry Grows 66% Q1/10 – Q1/11

In what continues to be an era of slow growth for the U.S. economy, the domestic solar industry continued its impressive growth rate into the first quarter of 2011, according to a report released last month by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research.

Compared to the first quarter of 2010, the industry grew 66%, while domestic manufacturing of PV equipment grew at 31%.  2010 itself was an outstanding year;  with 887 megawatts installed, it more than doubled the total for the year before, and the Q1 2011 figure represents over 28% of that 2010 annual figure.

This is not data to take to an international conference, however.  Solar growth overseas has been accelerating even faster than at home, with the result that U.S. global market share has decreased since 2009 from 6% to 5.1%.

There is better news on the utility-scale front, however, where the U.S. could actually achieve world leadership.  Some 1100 MW of concentrating solar and concentrating PV power is currently under construction, with eight times that much in the planning stage.

The report also shows that 88% of this year’s solar installations were in just seven states: California, New Jersey, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New York and Massachusetts, a 12% increase on 2010′s figure.  It appears that those states already leading the pack are finding reasons to increase their solar investment.

The full U.S. Solar Market Insight (TM) report can be found here.