Community Solar: A Smart Approach to Bolstering the Renewables Market

A session at the World Renewable Energy Forumon Community Solar Energy Development was full of informative presentations on how to think outside the box a bit to help make solar PV and wind energy more prevalent in our world. Traditional solar applications tend to focus on a small slice of individual homes, which have south facing roofs unencumbered by shading. Financing for a solar array is often difficult to obtain and buying outright is difficult for many homeowners. This session provided innovative methods on how to provide solar to the many instead of the few.

Photo Credit: Akhil Jariwala, Creative Commons

• Clean Energy Collective presented and mentioned that their goal was to have community solar farms which create a win-win for the utility and its customers. Solar farms have a few benefits for customers including accessibility to as many utility customers as possible with very small minimums. Also, another benefit is of extending rooftop solar incentives that would be normally declined to the homeowner because of poor rooftop solar access. Utilities can benefit from community solar farms by the provision of automated monthly bill credit information from the solar developer without any burden to the utility and real-time telemetry monitoring to adequately track and schedule facility production.

• FLS Energy presented next and started off saying that their goal is to provide solar energy to everyone. The way they do this is to own the solar assets whether they be PV or solar thermal and then provide a power purchase agreement. This model works for a business or community that lacks the upfront funding, for non-profits, or for groups that want long-term maintenance and performance guarantees. FLS Energy works on Section 8 housing to provide tenants with low-cost solar thermal units and recently offered a solar thermal power agreement to a university because this university wasn’t allowed to take advantage of the tax incentives.

• Regenesis Solar Power in Fort Myers, Florida provides solar thermal to a community through the local gas or electric utility. They act on behalf of the utility and go door-to-door offering solar thermal for no upfront costs, just a $34.95 monthly fee on their utility bill for 20 years. The utility can expand their renewable energy offerings with no effort as well as accelerate efficiency and demand reduction initiatives.

• Solar City leases solar modules to customers for a monthly fee. They are evolving into the community solar arena by working to install arrays on military housing at cheaper rates than the utility can provide and is working to install more solar on affordable housing. They are also proponents of “virtual net metering.”

With these innovative community leasing strategies, solar for everybody is no longer a distant pipe-dream. What are you folks doing to bring solar to your community?

Cross-posted at the 2012 World Renewable Energy Forum blog.

New Solar Modules Blossomed Despite a Tough Year for the Industry

From the NY Times Green Blog we have a bit of good news. Despite all of the doom of gloom that some would have you believe, the solar industry doubled its solar capacity from 887 to 1855 megawatts of sweet clean and free solar energy. I think the solar industry shows a surprising resilience and will continue to in the future. And the steep plummet in solar PV prices is beginning to raise the eyebrows of the most cost conscious among us. So, congratulations to all of the solar installers across the United States for your hard work doubling our solar capacity. The planet thanks you.

GE Combines Natural Gas, Wind, and Solar

Credit: GE via Technology Review

First off, I must say that I have a minor addiction to MIT's Technology Review. The writers render hyper-techie information into a digestible format that even grandpa can understand. Ok, cool science magazine plug out of the way, we have interesting news from GE. They've created this hybrid solar thermal/wind/natural gas plant. They say that a solar thermal and natural gas combo is nothing new, but the additional element of wind is something new. I think all three of those elements working in conjunction is fascinating. The plant uses renewable solar thermal to help heat the water to create steam to turn the turbine. In addition, the plant uses natural gas to do essentially the same thing when the sun is not shining, and the new element is the use of a wind turbine to supplement electricity generation. As we've discussed before natural gas is a better fuel than coal for use with the variability of wind. This trifecta of fuel for a power plant (two renewable fuels and one fossil fuel) will be a great way to reduce the overall amount of natural gas. GE has announced that they will implement this new technology at a power plant in Turkey by 2015. I can't wait to see the numbers once this thing comes online.

Sen. Sanders Introduces 10 Million Solar Home Initiative

This is an interesting way to go about encouraging commercial and residential property owners to install either solar PV or solar thermal on their rooftops (in addition to propping up the solar industry). Senator Sanders' (I-VT) bill would like to see 10 million solar installations completed within a decade.

I hope that there is a provision in this bill that requires an energy audit by a certified professional (see RESNET) and subsequent mitigation (insulation, caulking, new windows, etc.) before the installation of a solar system and acquisition of a tax credit. In other words, it is always necessary to weatherize and make your home or building energy efficient before spending any money on a solar system. In particular with respect to solar PV, pinpointing your exact yearly electricity consumption helps to size the solar PV system. For example, if you are already using (and wasting) more energy because of a leaky home with no installation, the kilowatt output of your PV array will be sized much larger (which is more expensive) than what you would need if your home was weatherized and altered to consume less electricity. So get that energy audit first and save yourself some money upfront and by then hopefully Senator Sanders' bill will become law.

Colorado Solar Power Outshining State's Gas Industry

The solar industry is growing here, slowly but surely. And with 300 sunny days a year, I don't see why we can't have solar PV and thermal panels on the houses and buildings all over the state. Couple that with geothermal and also concentrated solar power plants in the San Luis Valley and we will be extremely close to running our entire state on clean, renewable energy. Our elected officials are working hard to create Colorado as the renewable energy hub in thought leadership, investment, education, and science for the country if not the world. Good things are going to happen to this state in the next decade. In addition, investment in clean energy helps to diversify our economy and prevent the boom and bust cycle Colorado is so well known for. And as we can see, natural gas and coal are not long for our future world.

DOE Budget Lifts Renewables, Cuts Nuclear and Coal

Actions speak louder than words. Earlier I had suspicions that our Secretary of Energy was giving just a little too much love to the coal industry. Perhaps, I am not a savvy enough politician to recognize lip service when I see it. Now since then I've learned, from people like Dr. Kutscher at NREL, that it is unwise to take anything off the table, including carbon capture and sequestration or nuclear, because the reality is that after permits and legal wrangling a new nuclear plant won't be up and running for about 10-15 years from today. In addition, carbon capture and sequestration technology is 10 years away. However, renewable energies like concentrated solar power (CSP) and photovoltaics (PV), solar thermal, and wind are ready to be implemented today on homes and on land throughout this country (remember we need just 2% of the land mass in the San Luis Valley, Colorado for CSP plants to generate all of Colorado's electricity needs!). They are clean and the energy source is free for the foreseeable future (who knows what the price of coal will be in ten years?) And what's the most important thing we can do to reduce all of our demand-side energy consumption while we try to get these supply-side energy sources online? Weatherize our homes to make them more energy efficient (I just had an energy audit on mine this week!).

Well, now we see that the Secretary of Energy is gradually shifting money to renewable energy in next year's Department of Energy budget. The momentum is shifting. We can do this with some education and some effort. Are you on board?

New Solar Power Plant in San Luis Valley

I know it's only a press release from the Governor Ritter's office, but there is exciting news in the San Luis Valley. Xcel Energy and SunPower Corp. are going to build what is North America's second-largest high-efficiency photovoltaic solar plant. It'll be 17 megawatts of pure photovoltaic love. And there is already a solar thermal plant down there. Good work Xcel and SunPower.

Let The Sunshine In: Solar Energy’s Not Light Years Away

Great, in-depth article on solar power (PV and thermal) from the Washington Park Profile with a few local examples of families and businesses that have taken advantage of the rebates and have seen a dramatic decline in their utility bills.

A Solar Boost for the Sunshine State

Looks like Florida is going to get their first concentrated solar plant (CSP) soon. And this plant will use natural gas to provide base load power when the sun isn't shining. If you need a CSP primer check this blog post out. Congrats to Florida for getting their very own CSP plant.

Solar Pioneer Uses His Noodle to Reduce His Heating Bill

This is a great article on what a little hard work and ingenuity can do to reduce some heating bills. A gentleman in Michigan was frustrated at his rising heating bills back in the early 80's and as the article says:

"After taking a solar energy class at a community college, he cobbled together a concept and some wholesale equipment to create a large solar collector on the south side of his Lewis Avenue home."

He built a solar collector from scratch after having taken one class! He said that his house can reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of a freezing Michigan winter and that his monthly heating bill rarely exceeds 40 bucks. Imagine the possibilities and the ideas that will come about if we could retrain some of the U.S. workforce for clean tech jobs. How long do we need to remain at the mercy of rising natural gas bills?

Solar Thermal Energy Coming to a Boil - Peak Oil

Great overview about concentrated solar power (CSP) from the North Denver News. This is our best hope for providing maximum power (more so than PV) that is clean and renewable. Also check out my older post titled, "Heat Is Much Easier to Store Than Electricity, Dreaming of a Low-Carbon Economy" for more on the phenomenal benefits of CSP.

DOE Report: Wind Could Power 20 Percent of US Grid by 2030

"A new report from the Department of Energy claims that wind turbines could generate 300 gigawatts by 2030, which would power about 20 percent of the US electrical grid."

20% is huge. It'll take a lot of work and investment. However, from the same article this little tidbit...

"Yet among the current renewable options, wind and solar thermal appear to be the only technologies that could produce power at the utility-scale."

Solar thermal is it. The quiet magic bullet. Remember this post?

"Heat Is Much Easier to Store than Electricity": Dreaming of a Low-carbon Economy

You must read this article if it's the only thing you do this year! It gives the reader a little bit of everything (science, history, economics, politics, etc.) with respect to solar electric thermal or concentrated solar power (CSP). I've written about this with respect to Abengoa Solar's CSP plant in the Arizona desert, here and here. Basically, there are a bunch of mirrors in a sunny place concentrating the solar rays on a tube of liquid. This liquid boils, turns into steam, and then rotates a turbine, which produces an electric current. Pretty simple eh?

From the article, one line in particular caught my eye:

"Heat is much easier to store than electricity, a fact that gives CSP a crucial -- maybe the crucial -- advantage over wind and solar photovoltaics."

That is critical. In order to take advantage of the electricity from wind and photovoltaics at night we would have to store it in batteries, which is expensive. Storing the heat generated from the CSP plant is easier and cheaper to do than storing electricity.

So whadda ya' says folks? Concentrated solar power plants all over the southwest? It'll be cheaper and quicker than building a nuclear plant. It's a no-brainer to me.

It's Time to Get Serious About Solar Energy

At least that's what Bill Boyne says in his opinion piece in the Post-Bulletin, and I tend to agree with him. He also mentions that we could stand to use more solar thermal plants in the southwest.

More on Solar Thermal Power

MIT's Technology Review, "Solar Without the Panels", discusses generating electricity from the sun without photovoltaics. It also speaks to the recently announced solar plant project in Arizona by Abengoa Solar. This is interesting technology and is worth checking out.