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.

• 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.

Fighting Back

Behind the scenes, a lot of individuals and organizations quickly started working to restore this wildly popular program.*  Representative Mike Thompson (D-CA) tried to introduce a bill late last year to address FHFA’s concerns and kick-start PACE programs, but it became lost in the usual Congressional December maelstrom.  This year his bill, with key modifications,  has gathered strength and bipartisan support, and in a different form was introduced in Congress last week.

Characteristically, however, the Green Mountain State didn’t wait for Congress to get its act in gear.  During the legislative session that ended in late May, the Vermont legislature passed a bill that has apparently satisfied the FHFA’s concerns, and will become effective on January 1st next.  The new law establishes two funds to support PACE programs in the state, neither of which impacts the public purse.  One will be fed by a 2% fee that participating property owners must pay, while the other will be supported with money from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that originated as system benefit charges paid by ratepayers.  Since the law confirms that liens associated with PACE assessments will be secondary to those of FHFA-backed mortgages, the funds provide a large measure of security for investors in PACE programs.  It’s thought by Vermont lawmakers, with the agreement of FHFA, that these funds will be sufficient to guard against potential mortgage defaults;  this means that communities across the state can establish special tax districts within which PACE programs can be launched with the blessing of the federal government mortgage agencies.

Moving from Montpelier to Washington DC, we find a scintilla of hope in the successor to Thompson’s bill, the newly-introduced PACE Protection Act of 2011 (HR2599).  The bill, introduced by Representative Nan Hayworth of New York and co-sponsored by  Thompson, Dan Lungren and Lois Capps of California, has picked up another dozen truly bipartisan co-sponsors from across the country.  The bill would prevent the FHFA from adopting policies that work against local PACE laws, so long as certain provisions applied to applicants, e.g:

• the proposed energy efficiency or renewable energy installation could not cost more than 10% of the value of the property;
• the property owner had more than 15% equity in the property;
• PACE-financed projects have positive savings-to-investment ratios.

What’s not to like?

It’s too early to tell whether the bill has any chance of passage in the penumbral state of Congressional rationale that drives legislative debate today, but there should be enough points of illumination in it to find favor on both sides of the aisle.  PACE programs are not a burden to taxpayers or government budgets, they do not represent government mandates, and they don’t disadvantage any one group in favor of another.  They do, however, leverage private capital, create a continuing stream of local jobs, save homeowners money and reduce fossil fuel usage.  In short, they come dressed in a mantle of “what’s not to like?”

And that’s a question that must have been pointedly asked of FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco last year.  We expect it was, in effect, asked by the Department of Energy when they offered FHFA a loan guarantee reserve of $150 million to keep PACE programs alive.  Whatever answer DeMarco gave then, it was ephemeral, for only days later he issued his order to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that killed the programs dead.  Yet the answer, as we can see from the details of the Vermont and Congressional bills, was always simple and always within the power of the parties to propose and to accept – a full year ago.  There appears to have been no interest from FHFA’s side in doing either.

That we would do, we should do when we would…
Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. VII

It can be agreed that FHFA had legitimate concerns about lien priorities, especially during the current pandemic of mortgage defaults, and wanted to protect its agencies from excessive risk;  as Peter Adamczyk of the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation puts it: “PACE has been described as the best possible program introduced at the worst possible time.”  But by steadfastly refusing to countenance any negotiated remedy that would allow a program that was favored in most states of the Union to continue, FHFA was exhibiting a somewhat more disconcerting mindset:  that of not valuing, or even understanding, the importance of what it was killing.

To those of us with some level of understanding of the benefits of renewables, it’s natural to expect to make accommodations and adjustments if we want to see more of them deployed.  But if those benefits don’t resonate with you, if they don’t even rise over your visibility threshold, any concern expressed by others must qualify as Much Ado About Nothing. It must have been a lot simpler for FHFA management to take the bankers’ approach and see only the fiscal argument than to use a little imagination and accommodate the future.

By doing so, the agency even misread the fiscal argument.  The rate of defaults on homes with PACE assessments is less than .08%, about one-thirtieth of the national rate.  Efficiency upgrades and solar installations lower the cost of living, making owners less, rather than more, likely to default.  Put another way, as conventional energy sources become increasingly expensive, homeowners may be put in the position of choosing between making their mortgage payments or avoiding freezing in winter.  With ‘strategic mortgage defaults’ becoming more and more a budget management technique of underwater mortgagors, one would think the body responsible for the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would itself have been a little more responsible.

And meanwhile, the PACE Assessment Protection Act of 2011 has at least made it into the House of Representatives and been referred to the Committee on Financial Services.  Watch this space;  we can only hope!

*e.g., the PACENOW campaign.  You can find out more on this site about PACE, how it works, and its benefits to the nation, property owners, lenders and local governments.  You can also send a message to your Congressperson from this site, calling for a positive vote on HR2599.

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.

Solar Today connects you to the leading solar energy experts, tells you what’s going on in solar development today, and keeps you up-to-date on policy, technical, business and legislative issues concerning solar.  Every October there’s a ‘Getting Started’ edition full of tips for anyone looking to use solar power for the first time.  You can find up-to-the-minute news on-line, and link to the digital edition of the magazine, here.

Solar Today is one of many ASES membership benefits.  You can get it by going here and joining ASES today.

Last year there were tours in every single state, and more than 160,000 interested people paid visits to solar homes and businesses.

Would you like to be a host this year?  Tours will take place (in most areas) on October 1, and you can register as a host by going here.

Share the solar wealth!

According to top solar executives in Stephen’s story:  “solar PV is no longer a fringe, cost-prohibitive technology – but, rather, a near-commodity that is quickly becoming competitive with new nuclear, new natural gas, and, soon, new coal.”

From time to time in Solar Citizen, we’ve brought to your attention indications that solar PV is getting ever closer to traditional energy sources in cost per unit of energy…

February 2011: Solar Gaining on Natural Gas

January 2011: Renewable Energy Head-to-Head with Nuclear

November 2010: Solar Heading for Grid Parity

July 2010: Solar Cheaper than Nukes

…but it’s noteworthy to read in the Climate Progress report that, long before the decade is out, reductions in materials costs can even bring solar PV into serious competition with newly constructed coal plants.  And that’s a comparison with coal as it’s actually priced, not the full cost accounting price of the stuff, which, as Scott Malone of Reuters points out, can be three times what the industry charges.

Reinforcement for these stories can be found in a report on the UK’s energy future released recently by the independent consulting firm Ernst & Young.  According to their report, the price of solar modules should fall to $1/Watt by 2013 (half of the 2009 figure), due to continuing reductions in the cost of materials and improvements in efficiency. So this energy source that has been decried for so long by the coal industry as too expensive (and by no less an energy expert than Bill Gates as ‘cute’) is heading fast for grid parity.  The question is now not if, but how soon.

And as for the coal industry, perhaps it’s just as well that so many proposals for new coal plants have been rejected of late.  If built, they’d be white elephants–or at least very grubby ones.

No, thought leaders in the renewables industries have not spent years baffled by what detractors portray as an insoluble problem.  They do actually know that the wind does not blow constantly, that clouds have been known to hide the sun, and that nightfall happens on average every evening in tropical and temperate latitudes.  And they know that there are solutions aplenty.

Non-storage Solution

Mostly, these solutions involve storage of electricity generated by renewables, but one at least seeks to produce constant electrical output from a sympathetic mix of renewable and conventional generation.  GE Energy’s new FlexEfficiency 50 combined cycle gas turbine is designed to be able to ramp power output up and down much more quickly than today’s turbines, so when combined with electricity of more variable origin – solar, wind, etc. – it can put a more constant aggregate power level onto the transmission system.

Of course, this could be considered a backward step – combining renewables with fossil fuels to produce electricity – but it could also be seen as a stopgap measure until truly commercial storage solutions become common.

The Needs of the Grid

It’s worth noting, at this point, that conventional energy sources are not excused from the need for storage.  Energy is typically stored in oil and gas tanks, pipelines, coal piles, and reservoirs, before its transformation into electricity;  nuclear energy’s storage burden, of course, comes after the fuel is used.  But in terms of effectively matching renewables’ promise with the needs of the grid, there is a pressing need to show that cost-efficient storage methods can be developed that can give us what we expect of the grid – reliable, dispatchable power.

On the residential solar side, we see storage as a bank of batteries taking power from our rooftop array whenever it’s producing it, and keeping it until we need it – quite likely during less productive hours.  And that’s a reasonable analogue of the grid-size process, but in the grid case there are many more options than batteries in your basement.  None, however, have reached anything like the level of penetration needed to allow accurate assessment of their likely efficiency at scale.  But as with all technologies, development and deployment will tend to generate improvements and produce winners.

Batteries

Vanadium battery schematic; credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

For storage and discharge of power over relatively long periods, some kinds of batteries have shown promise, e.g. sodium-sulfur, sodium-nickel chloride, vanadium redox and zinc-bromine. These are not your average car-size batteries;  a vanadium battery built by VRB Power Systems for a plant in Utah that can supply 250 kW for eight hours takes up an entire building.  And currently, applying such battery solutions at utility scale can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  So batteries have a long way to go, but much effort is being devoted to finding design breakthroughs that will make them feasible.

Pumped Hydro Storage

Pumped hydro storage (PHS), in which water is pumped uphill to the upper reservoir of a hydroelectric site for release when power is needed, is deployed worldwide at a greater scale than any other large-scale storage technique.  The pumping element of PHS can ideally benefit from wind-produced electricity, since this often peaks during low-use nighttime hours.  The technique has been in use for many years, costs are relatively low, and storage times exceed ten hours at many sites.  It is, of course, practically limited to sites that are home, or could be home, to significant hydroelectric plants.

Compressed Air Energy Storage

With compressed air energy storage, renewable power sources are used to compress air in underground caverns.  When power needs to be produced, the air is released, heated, mixed with fuel, burnt and passed through a turbine (in essence, the same compression-heating-expansion/acceleration process that gives a jet engine its power).

There are obvious limitations and disadvantages to the method:  a suitable underground cavern is needed, and fossil fuel has to be introduced to drive the turbine and its electric generator.  In future, artificial containment vessels may be used instead of caverns, and turbines may be designed that will operate with just the expanding air, without needing to burn fuel.

Thermal Storage

When you use your PV panels’ output to heat water, which is then stored until bath-time, you’re using thermal storage;  (a more direct path would be via a solar hot water array).  At the concentrating solar power plant scale, thermal storage can account for significant amounts of potential energy.  Trough-type mirror arrays can be focused on pipes carrying a heat transfer fluid, which is stored at high temperature before being used to power a steam turbine.  Fields of heliostats can be trained on a ‘power tower’ containing water or, if temperatures in excess of 400 degrees C can be achieved, a medium such as molten salt.  The latter is known to maintain its temperature for long periods with only marginal losses, enabling it to provide fuel for a steam turbine for many hours.

It was only last month that the world’s first utility-scale commercial baseload solar power plant, using a power tower loaded with molten salt, began operation in Andalusia, Spain.  Torresol Energy’s Gemasolar plant is a 20-MW plant comprising 2650 heliostats (flat mirrors) that reflect the heat of the sun onto a molten salt chamber high in a tower.  The heat energy thus produced and stored allows up to 15 hours of electrical generation, even in the dead of night.  This amounts to 6,500 hours of output per year, capable of powering 25,000 homes with a reduction in CO2 of more than 30,000 tons.  Gemasolar is truly a twenty-four-hour baseload plant, not limited by hours of sunlight or the presence of wind.

What’s the Rush?

It’s true that wind and solar have not achieved, to date, sufficient penetration of the grid to justify large expenditures on storage.  But power quality and reliability of supply are essential characteristics of the grid.  If renewable sources are to take over a significant portion of our electricity supply, displacing more dispatchable forms of power such as coal, they will eventually have to be able to provide predictable levels of power, either by some sort of marriage with conventional sources or through cost-effective storage.  So this is not, in fact, a task distant in time for renewables.  It’s one that needs to be investigated today, for renewables to achieve utility levels tomorrow.

Further reading on energy storage:

The Role of Energy Storage with Renewable Electricity Generation (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Modeling the Benefits of Storage Technologies to Wind Power (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

There’s an obvious parallel between that experience and that of advocacy groups operating at the national level, trying to draw the attention of federal legislators away from those whose contribution to the debate is expressed in dollar signs.

It’s a tough and sometimes dispiriting race.  But for those of us pleading the case of renewable energy, it’s not a race we can afford to give up – not if we want truly clean energy and a stabilized climate to characterize our age and future ages.

So we still find ourselves fighting entrenched interests for whom energy and climate considerations come a very distant second to quarterly profits and re-election.  Solar Nation monitors activities and developments both in Congress and at state level to find suitable openings for advocacy actions on energy and climate bills.  It’s at the state level where many renewable portfolio standards and emissions limits first become law, and also where some of the fiercest fights to advance clean energy occur.

We know that timely, focused action at this level can reap great rewards.  In the last six months:

• We fought to have Congress extend the Treasury Grant Program, which provides cash grants in lieu of tax credits for commercial solar installations;  the program was extended for a full year in December;
• We focused attention on those U.S. House members co-sponsoring a series of bills to strip funding from the Environmental Protection Agency;  that fight is still ongoing;
• We protested the decision of Department of the Interior to relocate the Solar Decathlon from the National Mall;  it was subsequently restored to the National Mall (albeit a somewhat remote section of it, but certainly less remote than an inaccessible marina in Maryland);
• We supported Kentucky’s Clean Energy Opportunity Act;  the bill moved quickly to the energy committee;
• We fought against the cutting from the federal budget of the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program, which underwrites many large-scale renewable projects, opening up the purses of private investors;  the program survived the Congressional budget process in a straitened form;
• We protested the actions of Colorado’s Xcel Energy, which had peremptorily shut down its solar rebate program;  the Utility responded with a program whose incentives rewarded performance rather than investment;
• We objected to a proposed bill in Florida that would have arrogated all solar development to the state’s largest utilities, disenfranchising independent solar developers;  this bill was rejected by the state senate.

But the good guys still need some help to keep going and keep the bad guys off-balance. Can you make a donation to help us help America to become a solar nation? It’s tax-deductible, and easy to do. When you click on the DONATE button, you’ll be directed to our secure giving site, and your donation will keep us working for America’s future.

With thanks, from Solar Nation.

Devil in the Details

One of the most egregiously additive balance-of-system line items in a typical installation bill covers permitting costs.  These are the direct and indirect charges related to the local jurisdiction signing off on a solar installation, and include fees levied by the city, county or state for the all-important piece of paper headed ‘permit’, not to mention the costs passed on by your installer for time spent pacing the corridors of power while waiting for that permit.

Permitting fees have become a significant component of total solar installations costs (up to 5% – 10%, depending on location) for several reasons.  Typically, local jurisdictions are responsible for setting permitting requirements, which means that the officials charged with doing so are often unfamiliar with the technology and its requirements.  The result can be permitting procedures that are not only unnecessarily complex but also inconsistent with those of neighboring jurisdictions, adding to the administrative burden borne by the solar installer operating in multiple areas.  Within a local government operation, moreover, multiple departments may be required to review an application, stretching out that timeline and adding to total costs.  And yet, a typical PV system in Albany is not so dissimilar from one in Wichita that a national standard for permitting practices could not be employed in both places.

Keep It Simple

It was the need for such a national standard that led the Solar America Board for Codes and Standards (Solar ABCS)* to  produce, in 2009, their Expedited Permit Process for PV Systems — A Standardized Process for the Review of Small-Scale PV Systems.  To quote from the summary of the report:

The term “expedited permit process” refers to an organized permitting process by which a majority of small PV systems can be permitted quickly and easily.  It is not intended to apply to all types of PV systems. The primary need and use for this process is for systems of less than 15kW maximum power output.  The expedited permit process is intended to simplify the structural and electrical review of a small PV system project and minimize the need for detailed engineering studies and unnecessary delays.

The majority of PV systems installed in the U.S. meet the elegibility requirements outlined in this process and will benefit from the requirements outlined in this process and will benefit from the ease of using a one-page expedited permit form.  Using one standard permitting process will also eliminate confusion and conflicts, and reduce the time required to issue the permit.

Who’s Included?

The criteria used by the report writers for PV systems to be eligible for expedited permitting include:

• Structural:  the array to be mounted on a code-compliant structure with an engineered mounting system, the array having a distributed weight <5 lbs/sq. ft. and <45 lbs per attachment;
• Electrical:
  • The system to be described by a standard electrical diagram, with all products listed and identified;
  • The array to be composed of 4 series strings or less and 15 kW STC or less;
  • The inverter output to be 13.44 kW or less, connected on the load side of the service disconnect.**

For systems meeting these basic criteria, Solar ABCS recommends that local jurisdictions use the Expedited Permit Process in its entirety.  The Process document provides applicants with standardized forms and diagrams that simplify and streamline the application procedure, including standard electrical diagrams,  structural and electrical review forms, information sheets for inverters, modules and arrays, and fill-in forms for wiring, overcurrent protection and grounding.

Addressing the actual dollar amounts charged for permit issuance, the report does not follow completely the ‘flat fee’ approach endorsed by many in the industry (see this month’s news from the Colorado legislature), but comes out strongly against the practice of using the PV permit process as a revenue-gathering exercise.  It suggest a fee schedule of $75-$200 for systems up to 4 kW, $150-$400 up to 10 kW, and a per-kW charge of $15-$40 for systems between 10 kW and 50 kW.

Adoption of the Report

So how has the Solar ABCS report been received by local governments across the country?  According to Larry Sherwood, the Solar ABCS Project Administrator, some administrations are using the recommendations, while others have modeled their own permitting policies partly on the material and criteria provided in the report.  (For an up-to-date summary of those states that have addressed the need to simplify permitting processes and costs, see here).  Most importantly, Solar ABCS’ sponsor, the U.S. Department of Energy, has decided to put its faith in the Expedited Permit Process by pursuing a much more aggressive marketing campaign for it, urging local jurisdictions to adopt the uniform, streamlined steps it advocates.

You can find a summary of the Solar ABCS report here and the full report here.

Why Permit at all?

The State of Vermont has taken a different approach, replacing permitting with a simpler process called registration.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has signed Bill H.56 into law, establishing a replacement registration mechanism for solar systems 5 kW and smaller.   It allows solar customers to install a system ten days after completing a registration form, during which time any interconnection issues the electric utility has must be raised.   The process will go into effect in January 2012.

*The Solar America Board for Codes and Standards (Solar ABCs) is a collaborative effort among experts to formally gather and prioritize input from the broad spectrum of solar photovoltaic stakeholders including policy makers, manufacturers, installers, and consumers resulting in coordinated recommendations to codes and standards making bodies for existing and new solar technologies. The U.S. Department of Energy funds Solar ABCs as part of its commitment to facilitate wide-spread adoption of safe, reliable, and cost-effective solar technologies.

**A revision of the original report is due to be released this year, and among its changes will be the inclusion of microinverters as qualifying criteria.

You can read about his company, and how it might affect you, in this Forbes Magazine article.