April 27, 2011
Do you want to do your part to move the solar needle forward in your community? You can do that by being part of the largest grass roots solar event in America: the ASES National Solar Tour.
The 15th Annual National Solar Tour is already in the planning stage. Commercial and residential owners of solar systems are now signing up to host visitors interested in learning about real-life experiences with renewable energy use. It’s a great opportunity to spread the word to your neighbors about the economics and the practicalities of going solar.
Last year, for the first time, there were solar tours in every single state in the Union, with participation by 160,000 solar enthusiasts. This year even more are expected. In most locations, the Tour will take place on Saturday, October 1.
You can find out more about the National Solar Tour here, or by contacting Richard Burns, Tour Manager.
April 27, 2011
Our thanks to those of you who communicated your displeasure to the U.S. Congress over the very real danger that the Department of Energy’s Section 1705 Loan Guarantee Program would be a casualty of the Congressional budget process. We sent out our Action Alert at the height of the Capitol Hill donnybrook, and the news floating to earth along with the dust it aroused is that the program has actually survived intact.
The Loan Guarantee Program provides underwriting guarantees to private investors to enable them to fund renewable energy projects. As of this year, the program has allowed more than twenty large projects, representing some $40 billion in private investment, to proceed. Continuation of the program will enable a further $35 billion of private investment to be committed, creating more than 80,000 jobs.
This is a classic example of where not to cut government spending, i.e., where it attracts more investment than it actually pays for, not to mention that it increases renewable energy deployment in typically large packages, and creates good green jobs. It seems that some sanity crept back into the stridently doctrinaire debate in Congress, for which we’re grateful.
We’re also grateful for your contribution to the argument. Now, back to the barricades….
April 27, 2011
The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has published research showing that Californian homes with PV systems installed sell for a premium over homes without such systems.
“We find compelling evidence that solar PV systems in California have boosted home sales prices,” says the lead author Ben Hoen, a researcher at Berkeley Lab. “These average sales price premiums appear to be comparable with the average investment that homeowners have made to install PV systems in California, and of course homeowners also benefit from energy bill savings after PV system installation and prior to home sale.”
The premium has amounted to between $3.90 and $6.40 per watt installed, or approximately $17,000 for a 3.1-kW PV system. (more…)
April 27, 2011
We often find ourselves having to temper people’s expectations about newly announced advances and breakthroughs in solar power. New materials, processes and efficiencies discovered in the laboratory often won’t, realistically, be seen outside the lab. for a couple of years, while others don’t translate into commercially realistic products at all.
That’s no reason, however, for us to shy away from passing on news of exciting discoveries in research labs., because those discoveries may, in the fullness of time, change the way we build houses, derive our electrical power and live our daily lives. We’d just like to see these products fulfill their promise and be on the market now, rather than when our grandchildren are of homebuying age.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time…
Notwithstanding, the news coming out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology qualifies as exciting, and we look forward to it living up to its promise for the way it could transform the built environment. (more…)
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…)
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