Recently in the Solar Category
Aug 20 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Four teams from Switzerland, Germany, Australia and South Korea this week launched a solar-powered, emissions-free 80-day around-the-world race from Geneva to draw attention to electric vehicles. The 18,000-mile Zero Race will run through Moscow, Shanghai, Vancouver and San Francisco before stopping in Cancun, Mexico, for a United Nations Climate Conference, and then the vehicles will be shipped to Portugal and end the race in Geneva next January. Two vehicles are battery-powered scooters and the other two are custom sedans. The Zero Race is organized by Swiss adventurer Louis Palmer, the first person to go around the world in a solar-powered vehicle.
Iceland to become world leader in electric cars? A Forbes article suggests Iceland could be the first to make electric vehicles the default national transportation. Three quarters of the island nation's 317,000-plus population lives within 37 miles of the capital Reykjavik. Forbes says rural areas could probably be wired with just 15 fast-charging stations. "That, coupled with with the fact that 80 percent of Iceland's energy is cheaply produced renewable (from geothermal and hydro) should give you a good idea why this is the ideal test bed for electric vehicles," the article says. Iceland has an agreement with Mitsubishi to deliver i-MiEV all-electric cars to the island with a claimed range of 80 to 100 miles.
The greenest college in the land is small Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt., according to a survey by the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine. The college, with 820 undergrads, offers an extensive environmental studies program, burns wood chips and methane from cow manure for heat and electricity, and aims to become carbon neutral. The magazine sent an 11-page questionnaire to 900 colleges and universities to find the greenest institutions and received 162 responses. After Green Mountain, the top 10 colleges based on criteria from energy sources to financial investments included Dickinson College (Pennsylvania), Evergreen State College (Washington), University of Washington, Stanford University (California), University of California-Irvine, Northland College (Wisconsin), Harvard University (Massachusetts), College of the Atlantic (Maine), and Hampshire College (Massachusetts).
Aug 06 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
California raceways are attracting electric cars and motorcycles, and now the venerable Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania has launched a 25-acre solar energy farm to power the track and 1,000 nearby homes. Track CEO John "Doc" Mattioli claims 40-year-old Pocono Raceway is the world's largest solar-powered sports facility. The $16 million system was developed by enXco, a SanDiego-based renewable energy developer and a subsidiary of France's EDF Energies Nouvelles.
San Francisco may expand its plastic bag ban to all retail establishments. Under current city law, large supermarkets and chain drugstores can't provide plastic bags and paper bags must meet recyclable standards. Merchant groups seem resigned to a wider bag ban proposed by a city supervisor and backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom. "It's not going to be the end of the world. But I do think City Hall can get a little self-righteous and not always for the right reasons," said a merchant association president and cafe owner. A bill in the California Legislature that has the governor's support would ban plastic bags at food and convenience stores and set a minimum 5-cent charge for paper bags.
Geothermal projects underway in Nevada could add 3,000 megawatts to the state grid, according to the Geothermal Energy Association. Nevada doubled installed geothermal capacity to more than 400 MW from 2005 to 2010, and companies large and small are seeking more exploration wells. Companies include NV Energy, Calpine, CalEnergy Generation, a unit of Warren Buffet's MidAmerican Energy, Nevada Geothermal Power, and startups U.S. Geothermal and Ram Power. The industry has got a boost from Nevada's 25 percent renewable energy standard, tax incentives from the federal stimulus package, and federal government support of scientific and technical research at the University of Nevada-Reno.
Jul 14 2010
For the last week, temperatures in
But you’ve got to admit, the place is a natural for solar energy. In fact, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
More than a few big solar companies have already figured that out. In fact, the world’s largest producer of solar photovoltaic panels, First Solar, is based in
At today’s Intersolar conference in
As Barry Broome, president and CEO of the GPEC, ticked off the many subsidies (“incentives”) that Arizona offers solar, the strong university support for solar research, the state’s low costs, and the promise of speedy project permitting, I began to realize that
Broome boasted, “We will establish ourselves overwhelmingly as the national leader in this market.” That might prove to be hot air, but I don’t think government and industry officials in the
Besides more sun than it knows what to do with, Arizona has a long tradition of semiconductor manufacturing, dating back to Motorola’s operations in the 1950s. And
At least one solar developer, Tessera Solar North America, has said it plans to shift new jobs to Arizona because of the high cost of doing business in
But
A couple of weeks ago, one of Arizona’s two senators, Republican Jon Kyl, issued a report blasting the concentrating solar power industry—which focuses solar energy to run steam generators—for threatening to use too much of the state’s limited water supply. As one reporter noted, the report “stunned both the solar industry and policymakers” in the state.
Jul 12 2010
Here’s another reason to support utility-scale solar energy, besides all the usual environment benefits: It will help balance the federal budget.
The best sites for capturing solar energy in the
BLM isn’t just giving away the public’s land to solar developers. It plans to charge them rent—high enough, in fact, to raise millions of dollars annually from larger projects.
The new rent schedule, which took effect last month, will charge developers anywhere from just under $16 an acre (
BLM also plans to charge annual capacity fees ranging from $5,256 to $7,884 per megawatt, depending on whether the project uses solar photovoltaic cells or solar-heated steam generators. (It takes roughly 10 acres to generate a megawatt of power.)
Compare that to the usual alternative—renting the land out to ranchers who graze cattle or sheep. BLM’s website says the agency charges ranchers all of $1.35 per cow per month for use of public lands. (The same money will buy you grazing rights to five sheep.)
The solar fees can add up to real money, much to the dismay of some developers. Energy Prospects estimates that Solar Millennium’s huge 484 MW solar thermal project in
BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah project in San Bernardino County, which will supply power to PG&E, will pay estimated fees of about $3 million a year.
BLM says it has about 23 million acres suitable for solar energy production and 200 project applications already in the hopper. If a significant number of those projects ever get built, the federal government could have a financial gusher on its hands.
Jul 09 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Employees planting tomatoes and squash on their break? Companies across the country are creating vegetable gardens, with employees taking home fresh produce, serving vegetables in the cafeteria, helping local food banks, and holding team-building activities in the gardens. Google and Yahoo in Silicon Valley put in gardens some time ago, and more companies are joining in. Kohl's department stores in Milwaukee provide vegetables from organic gardens for a food bank and a child care center. In New York, PepsiCo set up a large plot to grow peppers and tomatoes, while in Minneapolis a PR firm sponsored an employee garden and helped start a movement called Employee Sponsored gardens which have websites and information on other gardens.
Envision Solar, the leading U.S. developer of 1,000-square-foot solar carports generating energy from photovoltaic panels, aims to install solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. "Parking lots are this wasteland -- they're the last thing that gets attention," says Robert Noble, an architect specializing in sustainable design and founder of San Diego-based Envision Solar. "Here's a market the size of Alpha Centuri that's never been tapped." The company is working on a pilot project with the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab and also working with Coulomb Technologies, developer of charging stations.
More shareholders this year voted for proxy proposals encouraging U.S. companies to lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve disclosure of their carbon footprints, according to a survey by Ceres, an activist investor group. Of 42 climate-related resolutions voted on at 2010 shareholder meetings, 16 received 30 percent or more of the vote, compared with 6 of 28 that got that level of support in 2009. On average, the resolutions received 24.6 percent of shareholder votes, up from 21.7 percent in 009. "If our portfolio companies are to provide long-term shareholder value, they need to be proactive, not reactive, in addressing climate change and other ESG (environmental, social and governance) matters," says Jack Ehnes, CEO of No. 2 U.S. pension fund California State Teachers Retirement system.
Jul 02 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
San Francisco start-up SunRun Inc., the leading U.S. provider of home solar financing, has raised $55 million from investors led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, one of the largest rounds for a solar leasing firm and a sign that solar developers are eyeing expansion beyond California, the New York Times Green blog reports. The investment follows a $100 million tax equity project to fund SunRun's solar installations by Pacific Energy Capital II, LLC, a non-utility subsidiary of PG&E Corporation. "We're seeing early signs of an inflection point in the market where the cost of offering a solar solution is becoming cheaper than utility pricing," said Warren Hogarth, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "We're moving from people buying solar because it's a nice thing to do to buying solar because it makes economic sense."
The investment drum was also pounding this week with shares of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. surging more than 40 percent on its initial public offering of stock on the Nasdaq exchange. Tesla's closing share price of $23.89 pegged its market capitalization at $2.22 billion on its first day of trading. So far, Tesla has sold more than 1,000 of its $109,000 electric Roadster and plans to introduce a $50,000 four-door electric sedan for sale in 2012. But Tesla may run into stiff competition from Nissan's electric car, the Leaf, priced at $25,000 after tax credits, and the $35,000 Chevy Volt to go on sale by the end of this year. Tesla doesn't expect to see a profit for at least two years.
Electric cars may turn up en masse in Paris next year if Mayor Bertrand Delanoe can launch a car-sharing program available at 1,000 locations in the city and suburbs. The plan, said to be the largest in the world since Amsterdam scrubbed a car-share project in the 1980s, would offer 3,000 plug-in vehicles. Four companies are bidding to run the program, and the French automaker Renault may offer its first electric cars, the Fluence Z.E. and Kangoo Express Z.E. models expected to go into production next year.
Jun 23 2010
In its brand new quarterly report on the status of renewable energy in our fair state, the California Public Utilities Commission cites as one of the highlights of Q2 its authorization of a five-year plan by PG&E to foster the development of up to 500 megawatts of medium-sized solar photovoltaic projects in its service area.
The timing of the report was good, because PG&E today celebrated completion of a 2-MW pilot project near
Under appropriately bright, sunny skies, senior PG&E executives, the president of the CPUC, a renewable energy adviser to Gov. Schwarzenegger and project contractors spoke to a group of about 100 attendees, who included labor groups, suppliers, local residents and media.
A key focus for many speakers was praise for the project’s diverse suppliers and for the labor unions that helped build the facility in only four months from the time shovels hit the ground. (The entire project took about 10 months from start to finish.)
Besides helping
Said Governor Schwarzenegger in a prepared statement, “This project will help us meet our long-term energy goals while creating jobs and keeping
Though the pilot plant is small in comparison to some of the multi-hundred-megawatt solar plants proposed by some renewable developers, it’s one of only a tiny handful of utility-scale PV projects actually delivering power in
More important, it proved the concept of PG&E’s larger program, namely that modest-sized projects, under 20 MW in size, can be sited, approved and built much faster than some of the mega-projects now on the drawing boards. And it paves the way for successful realization of that program.
Said PG&E President Chris Johns, “The success of the Vaca-Dixon Solar Station pilot project has provided PG&E with the tools and know-how to develop similar facilities in our service area and the ability to turn our clean energy vision into reality.”
Interested developers and suppliers can check out PG&E's website for more information.
Jun 10 2010
One of the most promising sources of clean, renewable energy in
Some of the larger companies in this space are relatively well established, including BrightSource, NextEra and Abengoa Solar. Many smaller developers, however, face a frustrating chicken-and-egg problem: they need lots of money to build their projects, but they can’t get contracts or financing until they prove their technology is cost-effective.
Unlike photovoltaic cells, which can be tested in a laboratory, CSP technology needs relatively large and costly installations out in the desert to prove its merit. Many good ideas may be languishing because developers don’t have the resources to cross the treacherous threshhold from design to commercialization.
The Department of Energy hopes to break that vicious circle by announcing a new “funding opportunity” this month that will give promising solar developers critical help in mounting pilot projects that will accelerate their progress toward commercialization.
The DOE’s Solar Demonstration Zone Project aims to identify a suitable sunny site, somewhere in the Southwest, with help from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management. DOE will then make it ready for developers by doing basic environmental assessments and building basic infrastructure: roads, fences, water supplies and power grid connections.
If Congress approves funding, which is still uncertain, DOE would also share 50 percent of the project costs with each approved developer.
While DOE won’t prescribe any particular technologies, its original announcement suggests that promising candidates might include high-temperature troughs, thermal storage, low-water applications suitable for the desert, and low-cost reflectors, concentrators or solar-tracking devices. (DOE may also consider specialized kinds of photovoltaic applications, which uses lenses to focus light on high-efficiency solar cells.)
A DOE source tells me that the whole review process could take 6 to 12 months. I imagine it could take longer still for developers to do final environmental reviews and install their pilot facilities, so don’t expect any immediate breakthroughs. But since DOE has operated a similar program for several years on behalf of biofuels developers, I’m hopeful that lessons learned there should help this program work relatively smoothly.
May 18 2010
On April 5, a multi-million dollar communications satellite broadcasting television signals to
In a warning issued when the event was first detected, NASA reported that “The source of the storming is an Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejection associated with a weak solar flare . . . Systems that can be affected include electric power systems, spacecraft operations, high-frequency communications, GPS, and other navigation systems.”
This event could be a harbinger of the sun awakening from its long and quiet slumber—with potentially dangerous implications.
From 2004 until recently, the sun has been mostly a blank ball, with as low a level of sunspot and magnetic activity as anytime in a century. But as Ian O’Neill remarked last year,
Although there is a possibility this solar minimum may continue, it is just as likely the sun is just being lazy, waiting to surprise us with a stealthy explosion of magnetic fury. The sun could erupt with a rash of sunspots as the internal magnetic field becomes so stressed it rises through the solar photosphere, tearing apart the uppermost layers of hot plasma, creating dark patches of sunspot swarms. If this is the case, we can expect violent knots of magnetism to funnel multi-million degree plasma from the inner sun, high into the corona (the sun's atmosphere), creating arcades of bright coronal loops. When this happens, the scene is set for the biggest explosions in our Solar System: flares and coronal mass ejections -- both of which can be very bad for planet Earth.
Just how bad? As previously discussed in NEXT100, a really big geomagnetic storm, the size of one that struck in 1921, could overload power transformers in much of
Prevention is the answer. With enough warning, grid operators can shut down sensitive circuits in time to proect them. But that's an extremely costly step, not to be taken lightly. In fact, grid operators failed to heed warnings of a solar storm in 1989 that took out most of
Fortunately, scientists just gained an important new tool for predicting solar weather. In February, NASA launced the Solar Dynamics Observatory, with four telescopes that permit unprecedented scrutiny of our neighboring star.
"SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in 
Lika Guhathakurta, NASA program scientist, told me that the instrument calibration on the satellite will be complete this week and the first true science based on its data will begin.
Guhathakurta said the data will help scientists understand the physics of the sun and thus the causes of coronal mass ejections and solar flares that cause such disruption on Earth.
"Space weather prediction today is where terrestrial weather prediction was 40 to 50 years ago," she said. "This mission’s [high-resolution] images are already showing us things we have never seen before. SDO is going to help us understand the sources of these blasts and help us predict them. If you can do good forecasting two to three days ahead of time, that gives you much better ability to take mitigating steps."
May 14 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
The first zero-emissions motorcycle race in the U.S. debuts on Sunday at the West Co
ast Moto Jam at Infineon Raceway north of San Francisco. The Time Trial Xtreme Grand Prix U.S. Championship is an all-electric 11-lap, 25-mile race with no roar and no emissions but riders say there is plenty of speed. "I felt I was going just as fast as on a gas bike," says Shawn Higbee. Electric motorcycles cost 30-40 percent more than gas bikes but cheaper in the long run, says Raul Inarritu, an executive for electricmotorsport.com. "They need a lot less service. The only moving parts are two bearings and a chain."
New York City is developing a "solar map" to determine its solar energy potential. An airplane equipped with a laser system called Lidar for light detection and ranging takes pictures of the surface terrain and structures. The images help planners figure how much solar power can be produced on each roof, says the New York Times' Green blog. Solar arrays could generate an estimated one-fifth of the electricity consumed by the city's 8 million residents. San Francisco and Boston also have online tools to measure buildings' potentials for solar energy.
Hospitals are energy hogs, consuming 2 1/2 times the energy in a similar-sized commercial building, but they're taking steps to go green. Rush University Medical Center in Chicago is one of only four U.S. hospitals that are Gold LEED certified and fewer than 100 hospitals have LEED certification. The Rush hospital says it has launched a number of green initiatives including a strong recycling program -- for paper, glass, plastic and cans -- and it also converts kitchen grease to biodiesel fuel, vehicle and machine oil back to fuel products, and buys electronics from a supplier that includes recycling services. Last year, the hospital diverted 898 tons of materials from landfills, Reuters reports.
