April 27, 2011
For once, we’re not being satirical with that headline. An excellent case of tax dollars being used for the benefit of us all can be found in the Department of Energy’s PV Technology Incubator program. This program dispenses relatively small amounts of funding to start-up companies with promising technologies, with the aim of finding breakthroughs that will dramatically lower the cost of solar installations. The program is a high-pressure one that expects recipients to show rapid progress toward meeting the Department’s SunShot Initiative goal: utility-scale solar costs in the order of $1/watt by 2020. (more…)
March 24, 2011
At Solar 2011, its National Solar Conference in Raleigh, NC in May, the American Solar Energy Society is offering one of industry’s most comprehensive and affordable training opportunities for solar installers.
In partnership with National Solar Trainers – a leading solar educator – ASES’s SOLAR AND YOU! training will provide installers and other interested participants exceptional skill development in advanced topics. These will include solar technology, business management, market trends, residential and commercial installation. The training sessions will take place at the beginning of the conference on May 16 and 17.
“If there were just one professional development event a person currently working in, or interested in working in, solar power should attend, this is it,” commented Mark Thornbloom of Florida’s Kelelo Engineering. “This is where people can develop in-demand skills, forge valuable new connections and advance their solar careers.”
Now in its 40th year, the National Solar Conference is the longest-running event for solar energy professionals in the U.S. The SOLAR 2011 program has been developed by solar energy experts in all topical areas – technology, buildings, policy, professional education, workforce development and consumer education. More than 5,000 attendees are expected.
“National Solar Trainers has trained thousands of people” explained Lars Rudstam, the company’s marketing manager. “This is the best program we’ve ever created.”
“We strongly encourage early registration for our SOLAR AND YOU! training, as we only have capacity for 350,” said Kate Hotchkiss of ASES, the National Solar Conference Director. “Training sessions we have offered with larger capacity at recent national conferences have sold out weeks before the conference started.”
The conference will also provide a “Green Career Resource Center”, staffed by the NC Capital Area Workforce Development Board’s JobLink Career Center at Raleigh. Green job seekers will find employment listings, resume and interview advice, and more.
Registration for SOLAR AND YOU! training begins soon. Starting March 28, click here to register.
March 23, 2011
Colorado’s recent experience highlights the uneven performance and attitudes among the nation’s electric utilities on the subject of promoting solar power in their service areas. For while Colorado is known to have one of the best net metering regimes in the country and a generally pro-renewables attitude in government, the state’s main investor-owned utility last month treated its own Solar*Rewards program like a diseased limb and cut it off peremptorily.
When Xcel Energy effectively and with virtually no warning suspended its solar program, under which solar array owners had been rebated $2.35 per watt, local solar industry groups protested, citing likely large-scale layoffs due to loss of business. The state public utilities commission gave both sides until mid-March to come to an acceptable agreement; the agreement reached shifts the emphasis of the program from rebates to performance-based payments in four steps. Rebates will decline from $1.75 per watt to zero, and performance-based incentives will ramp up from $0.04 to $0.14 per kW-hr (for residential systems) as capacity is added. When 60 megawatts of new capacity have been added under the plan, Xcel will have reached full compliance with the retail distributed generation standard through the year 2019 and the rebates will zero out.
Performance-based payments will also drive the incentive program for third-party owned ($0.16 per kW-hr.) and mid-sized systems ($0.15 per kW-hr.)
A Changed Paradigm
The shift to performance-based rather than upfront payments follows trends at work in other parts of the country, notably New Jersey, where the program for larger systems is entirely based on earned solar renewable energy certificates. This spreads the financial impact on ratepayers and taxpayers out over a longer period and is more responsive to market conditions. It’s difficult to fault the transition to a system that’s based on results rather than intent. The rate being offered by Excel is several times smaller than that in New Jersey, but the Colorado Utility is facing a shortfall of $100 million between collections and payments under its existing program, and needs to address both its financial situation and its obligations under the state’s renewable portfolio standard. (more…)
March 23, 2011
The further away one gets from the burning heat of the American southwest, the more one hears the complaint that this or that state isn’t suitable for solar power. Not enough sun. Not enough land to spare. Too cloudy. Too cold to go up on the roof. Huh?
We get tired of pointing out how bullish they are in Oregon and Washington on the subject of community solar, or how Germany, 500 miles further north than most of us, has more PV installed than anywhere else. So we’ll take a look at Ontario, Canada, a province that, according to ClearSky Advisors Inc., may become the #1 solar PV market on the North American continent this year. In raw figures, this means solar installations of up to 455 MW, nearly double the amount to be built in the U.S.’s largest market, California. But how sustainable will this be? (more…)
February 25, 2011
Mid-May in Raleigh, NC is the right time and place to learn about Solar, at America’s longest-running solar conference.
The American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Conference, now in its 40th year, takes place from May 17-21. Besides a bulging exhibit hall full of solar manufacturers, installers, trainers, financiers and others, the conference will feature tracks on:
- Advancing renewable energy technologies, including:
- Innovative solar applications
- Solar thermal systems
- Biofuels and hydrogen
- Concentrating technologies
- Solar air conditioning and storage
- Crafting effective policy and advocacy, including:
- Making innovative policies work
- Policy and market trends
- State leadership
- Getting consumers and communities on board
- Transforming the built environment
- Solar resource variability
- Short-term resource forecasting
- Next generation of training and education
- Small wind gaining speed
…and much more.
It’s also the right time and place, if you’re not already a member of ASES, to join up and get all the benefits of membership in the nation’s premier solar organization.
You can find out more here about the National Solar Conference, May 17-21, at the Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh NC.
To delve into detail about tracks on the conference schedule, you can go here.
And you can register for the full conference or any part of it right here.
See you in Raleigh!
February 24, 2011
Writing in energybiz this month, Ken Silverstein reports that the European Commission is confident of meeting its goal of obtaining 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2020. If this happens, the EU expects to save some 10 billion Euros (~$14 billion) per year.
The EU’s progress is being fueled by grants, loans and feed-in tariffs, and while the Commission recognizes management issues in need of improvement in many projects, the overall optimistic tone of the report is borne out by its 2010 statistics:
- renewable production increased by 8.3% over the previous year;
- coal production fell by 16.3%;
- renewables accounted for 18.4% of all energy production, almost twice the figure for coal.
A Predilection for Action
We’re sure that the corridors of power in European government bodies fill up, at least some of the time, with voices as contentious as those to be heard on Capitol Hill. But those government bodies ‘over there’, whatever their internal differences, seem to be doing something that so far has escaped our own: in the spheres of energy and climate action, they are getting on with it.
So far as we know, no leading European politician has identified climate change mitigation efforts as a post-Communist attempt by Government to exercise despotic control over its people. Nor has anyone in politics there echoed Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma in his apparent belief that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. And unlike our own House of Representatives, no other popularly elected chamber has started its current session by voting to make massive cuts in job-creating clean energy programs. (more…)
January 24, 2011
This year’s ASES National Solar Conference in Raleigh, NC in May is shaping up to be the busiest ever, with exhibitors overflowing the exhibit hall, technical sessions that anyone invested in renewable energy will want to attend, and plenary speakers well worth hearing.
It’s also an ideal time, if you aren’t already a member of the American Solar Energy Society, to join up and get more of what the country’s premier solar organization has to offer.
If you register for the full conference, for example, you’ll get a FREE professional ASES membership, worth $89.
Now in its 40th year, the Conference will include sessions on technology, buildings, policy, professional education, workforce development and consumer education. Many sessions will offer continuing education credits for architects, installers, engineers and more.
Find out more here about the National Solar Conference, May 17-21, at the Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh NC.
January 24, 2011
Most of us are aware of the phenomenon of the Homeowners’ Association (HOA) in the American real estate market. It’s that animal that springs fully formed into life the moment a developer sells the first house in a new development. And paradoxically, it is generally run by the developer, not the homeowner, until most or all the houses in the subdivision have been sold.
Dickens might well have used his classic opening ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ to describe life in an HOA. Originally and ostensibly, the HOA was established to maintain the quality of the environment, and thus the value of the homes, in a development. The HOA contract, binding upon all residents, provides for funds to be collected to maintain and beautify the development; it will usually also prevent residents from taking actions or making changes to their homes that could be considered detrimental to that beauty. The various downsides of this, as can be imagined, can include having to accept prohibitions on the slightest change in appearance in your own property, having to abide by the subjective judgments of the HOA board, and having to risk the board putting a lien on your property for alleged violations of the contract. (more…)
January 24, 2011
In last month’s newsletter, we reported on what Washington Council Ernst & Young predicted the country could expect from the 112th Congress.
The Congressional experts used a rather somber palette to paint a picture of the Republican-dominated House agenda as it appears from a renewable energy viewpoint. But this month, with the release of a document from the House Energy and Commerce Committee detailing that agenda, it appears that those darker tones are unpleasantly true to life.
The document, Backgrounders: Key Issues before the Committee on Energy and Commerce, characterizes the change in the committee’s complexion occasioned by last November’s Congressional elections. As of this month, the chairmanship switches from Henry Waxman (D-CA) to Fred Upton (R-MI), and the committee’s published agenda switches away from working for the promotion of renewable energy and environmental protection. Highlights (lowlights?) include:
EPA Regulatory Chokehold: Under this tendentious heading, the reshaped committee accuses the EPA of regulating “too much too fast” without fully analyzing the feasibility and economic and job impacts of the new (carbon emissions) rules. The backgrounder document gives notice that Congress will reassert its oversight function of the EPA to ensure that sufficient analysis supports the new rules, and that jobs and economic impacts are fully considered in the decision-making process. It does not take much analysis of this language to understand that the actual implementation of EPA rules to protect the environment (as ordered by the Supreme Court) under this committee’s jurisdiction could be delayed until the next Administration. (more…)
January 24, 2011
Last July we wrote about the North Carolina study that showed solar power to be cheaper than power promised by planned nuclear construction in that state.
It now seems that, on the national scale, renewable energy production has practically caught up with nuclear. The December 2010 Monthly Energy Review, published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, shows that each of these power sources was responsible for some 11% of primary energy production during the first nine months of 2010. The Review also shows that, while nuclear output dropped during this period, non-hydro renewables increased their output by over 11%.
U.S. Primary Energy Production, Jan-Sep 2010
renewables*…..10.9%
nuclear……………11.4%
fossil fuels………77.7%
*biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro and wind
Renewable Energy Production by Type, Jan-Sep 2010
biomass/biofuels….51.95%
hydro…………………….31.5 %
wind……………………..10.52%
geothermal…………….4.65%
solar……………………….1.38%
Change in Energy Production, Jan-Sep 2010 vs. Jan-Sep 2009
nuclear………………-0.5%
renewables………+5.7%
(non-hydro renewables +11.5%)
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wind………………………+26.7%
biomass/biofuels……..+10%
solar………………………..+2.4%
geothermal………………+1.8%
hydro………………………..-5.2%
In light of figures like these, it should be increasingly difficult for politicians tethered to the illusion of ‘nuclear renaissance’ to justify their position. Renewables are marching ahead, attracting levels of private investment commensurate with the support provided by (mainly) local and state governments. And the nuclear industry knows full well that it can only attract such investment by persuading the federal government to have taxpayers underwrite the massive loans it will need for any kind of growth.
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