Solar Power Underfunded
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originally posted at :
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/business/16solar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
July 16, 2007
The Energy Challenge
Solar Power Wins Enthusiasts but Not Money
By ANDREW C. REVKIN and MATTHEW L. WALD
The trade association for the nuclear power industry recently asked 1,000 Americans what energy source they thought would be used most for generating electricity in 15 years. The top choice? Not nuclear plants, or coal or natural gas. The winner was the sun, cited by 27 percent of those polled.
It is no wonder solar power has captured the public imagination. Panels that convert sunlight to electricity are winning supporters around the world — from Europe, where gleaming arrays cloak skyscrapers and farmers’ fields, to Wall Street, where stock offerings for panel makers have had a great ride, to California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Million Solar Roofs” initiative is promoted as building a homegrown industry and fighting global warming.
But for all the enthusiasm about harvesting sunlight, some of the most ardent experts and investors say that moving this energy source from niche to mainstream — last year it provided less than 0.01 percent of the country’s electricity supply — is unlikely without significant technological breakthroughs. And given the current scale of research in private and government laboratories, that is not expected to happen anytime soon.
Even a quarter century from now, says the Energy Department official in charge of renewable energy, solar power might account for, at best, 2 or 3 percent of the grid electricity in the United States.
In the meantime, coal-burning power plants, the main source of smokestack emissions linked to global warming, are being built around the world at a rate of more than one a week.
Propelled by government incentives in Germany and Japan, as well as a growing number of American states, sales of solar panels made of silicon that convert sunlight directly into electricity, known as photovoltaic cells, have taken off, lowering manufacturing costs and leading to product refinements.
But Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur who focuses on energy, said the market-driven improvements were not happening fast enough to put solar technology beyond much more than a boutique investment.
“Most of the environmental stuff out there now is toys compared to the scale we need to really solve the planet’s problems,” Mr. Khosla said.
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Scientists long ago calculated that an hour’s worth of the sunlight bathing the planet held far more energy than humans worldwide could use in a year, and the first practical devices for converting light to electricity were designed more than half a century ago.
Yet research on solar power and methods for storing intermittent energy has long received less spending, both in the United States and in other industrialized countries, than energy options with more political support.
Indeed, there are few major programs looking for ways to drastically reduce the cost of converting sunlight to energy and — of equal if not more importance — of efficiently storing it for when the sun is not shining.
Scientists are hoping to expand the range of sunlight’s wavelengths that can be absorbed, and to cut the amount of energy the cells lose to heat. One goal is to make materials to force photons to ricochet around inside the silicon to give up more of their energy.
For decades, conventional nuclear power and nuclear fusion received dominant shares of government energy-research money. While venture capitalists often support the commercialization of new technologies, basic research money comes almost entirely from the federal government.
These days, a growing amount of government money is headed to the farm-state favorite, biofuels, and to research on burning coal while capturing the resulting carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping smokestack gas.
In the current fiscal year, the Energy Department plans to spend $159 million on solar research and development. It will spend nearly double, $303 million, on nuclear energy research and development, and nearly triple, $427 million, on coal, as well as $167 million on other fossil fuel research and development.
Raymond L. Orbach, the under secretary of energy for science, said the administration’s challenge was to spread a finite pot of money to all the technologies that will help supply energy without adding to global warming. “No one source of energy that we know of is going to solve it,” Dr. Orbach said. “This is about a portfolio.”
In the battle for money from Washington, solar lobbyists say they are outgunned by their counterparts representing coal, corn and the atom.
“Coal and nuclear count their lobbying budgets in the tens of millions,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “We count ours in the tens of thousands.”
Government spending on energy research has long been shaped by political constituencies. Nuclear power, for example, has enjoyed consistent support from the Senate Energy Committee no matter which party is in power — in large part because Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete V. Domenici, the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican, are both from New Mexico, home to Los Alamos National Laboratory and a branch of the Sandia National Laboratories.
Biofuels, mostly ethanol and biodiesel, have attracted lawmakers who support farm subsidies. Last year an impromptu coalition established a goal of producing 25 percent of the country’s energy, including vehicle fuel, from renewable sources by 2025. Legislation to that effect attracted 34 senators and 69 representatives as co-sponsors; the resolutions are pending in both houses. Most of the measure’s supporters are from agricultural areas.
For the moment, the strongest government support for solar power is coming from the states, not Washington. But there, too, the focus remains on stimulating markets, not laboratory research.
The federal government is proposing more spending on solar research now, but not enough to set off a large, sustained energy quest, many experts say.
“This is not an arena where private energy companies are likely to make the breakthrough,” said Nathan S. Lewis, head of a solar-research laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
Many environmental organizations are pushing for tax credits for people who buy solar equipment, which helps manufacturing but not research.
Still, some experts say government-financed research efforts often go awry. And several government officials defended the current effort, saying an outsize investment in solar research is not needed because the industry is already in high gear.
Bush administration officials say they are committed to making power from photovoltaic technology as well as “solar thermal” systems competitive with other sources by 2015.
Alexander Karsner, the lead Energy Department official for renewable energy technology and efficiency, said the expanded use of photovoltaic cells could have its greatest impact by substantially reducing the energy thirst of new buildings.
To be sure, there are some promising signs in solar energy.
Big arrays of mirrors that concentrate sunlight to run turbines, which first emerged in the early 1980s, are resurgent in sun-baked places like the American Southwest, Spain and Australia. Some developers say this solar thermal technology is competitive now with power generated by natural gas when demand, and prices, hit periodic peaks.
With more research, the solar thermal method might allow for storing energy. Currently, all solar power is hampered by a lack of storage capability.
“The scale on which things actually have to happen on energy is not fully either appreciated or transmitted to the public,” said Dr. Lewis of Caltech. “You have to find a really cheap way to capture that light, for the price of carpet or paint, and also convert it efficiently into something humans can use for energy.”
After more than two decades in which research on converting solar power to electricity largely lapsed, the Bush administration and lawmakers in Congress are now discussing more money for the field. Dr. Orbach said the Energy Department’s proposed research plan for 2008 to 2012 includes $1.1 billion for solar advances, more than the $896 million going toward fusion.
But many scientists, perhaps seasoned by past energy cycles, doubt that the new burst of interest is sufficient to lure the best young minds in chemistry and physics. After encouraging 346 research groups last year to seek grants for surmounting hurdles to harnessing solar power, the Energy Department this year ended up awarding $22.7 million over three years to 27 projects — hardly the stuff of an energy revolution, several scientists said.
“There is plenty of intellectual firepower in the U.S.,” said Prashant V. Kamat, an expert in the chemistry of solar cells at the University of Notre Dame, who has some Energy Department financing. “But there is limited encouragement to take up the challenge.”
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Regulations Against Solar Power
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originally posted at:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/jul2007/tc20070710_273201.htm
Congress Needs to Take a Shine to Solar
Momentum to create domestic sources of renewable energy is growing. But to make it catch fire nationwide, Washington must pass legislation
by Travis Bradford
Are traditional energy utilities casting a shadow on solar power? Nationwide, nearly one megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) of new solar energy capacity is being installed per business day. Yet it's not happening uniformly across the country, not even in many states where sunshine is abundant or where the nation's fastest population growth is driving more demand for all kinds of electricity.
Take Arizona. With nearly 300 days of sunshine a year, Arizona leaders put in place legislation that requires traditional utilities to generate 15% of their electricity from solar and other renewable energies. Despite such clear legislative mandates, the state's utility regulator, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), is considering rules that may stifle the deployment of solar systems in one of the nation's sunniest states. The ACC's proposed rules for supplying extra solar power to the local utility's electrical grid would effectively discourage a large retailer or even a smaller business from installing more than 100 kilowatts of solar panel capacity on its property. That's because there would be little payoff for that business in selling any more than 100 kilowatts of unused electricity produced during off-peak hours for that business. With such a cap, only businesses with very small physical buildings will consider deploying solar, and most of the effective solar demand will go unmet in Arizona.
Bogged Down by Rules
Why, despite its legislated goal to increase the use of renewable energy, would Arizona prevent its own solar industry from doing business within its borders? This is just one example of the exceedingly complex state-by-state rules governing not just interconnection, but the accounting for the electricity supplied to that grid by would-be solar producers and the rates they're paid for it. This complexity effectively deters businesses and home owners from installing solar power-generation systems. This, in turn, hurts demand for solar-energy service providers such as Sun Edison and solar panel makers such as BP Solar, First Solar (FSLR), and Evergreen Solar (ESLR).
In June, the U.S. Senate had a chance to speed the deployment of solar energy. Yet, in a surprising compromise on the federal energy bill, the Senate abandoned a provision to encourage nationwide deployment of most forms of renewable energy. Bowing to lobbying pressure and the political realities of compromise, the Senate jettisoned a comprehensive $32 billion package of incentives that would have dramatically improved the prospect of solving our nation's addiction to fossil fuels. These incentives for clean energy were to be paid for by reductions in subsidies given to oil producers.
The Senate's failure to truly support solar is highly disappointing. Yet the momentum toward creating cheaper, cleaner, and domestic sources of vital energy from renewable sources continues to grow. The prospect—and demand—for future renewable energy legislation still exists. However, the raw political power displayed by fossil fuel producers during the energy bill debate adds new urgency to the discussion of how to create rules and incentives that strengthen the commercialization of renewable energy. Those decisions will define our future as we grapple with accelerating energy, economic, security, and environmental challenges.
Monopoly-as-Usual?
The best way to create cheaper and cleaner domestic power is to facilitate competition from renewable energy sources. To do this, we must address some structural issues revealed during the energy bill debate. For starters, we need to decide who should be allowed to provide renewable energy solutions to U.S. citizens and businesses. The current setup threatens to enable only traditional utilities to deploy new technologies rather than opening the way for new providers and even users themselves to become power suppliers. Are we interested in creating energy competition, or are we satisfied with monopoly-as-usual?
In the failed Senate bill, Congress was on the verge of putting real meaning to renewable energy competition with the proposed extension of the federal tax incentives for solar energy. Set to expire at the end of 2008, the 30% tax credit would have been extended to the end of 2016 and modified to allow electric utilities themselves to claim the credit, opening the door for them to participate in the commercial deployment of solar energy.
Best Practices
Yet even if it had passed into law, that provision would not have been sufficient to break down barriers to creating real market competition from solar energy. The reason: Today, many traditional utilities would still be able to exploit regulatory and structural obstacles that slow or block third-party providers of solar energy from selling their excess electricity. These include inconsistent, state-by-state rules governing how solar producers can connect to the traditional grid, as well as the varying limits on the solar capacity. The result is that Staples (SPLS), Wal-Mart (WMT), and other companies are deploying solar rooftop systems in California and New Jersey, where the rules are favorable, but won't do the same in Arizona.
In other words, when a state gives its traditional utilities an unambiguous signal about the need for more solar energy, such as it has in California and Colorado, the result is aggressive deployment. In such states, traditional energy providers are setting a strong example by adopting best practices for interconnection and metering with solar energy. Notably, by 2008, Xcel Energy will actually purchase power from an 8.22-megawatt solar plant being built in Alamosa, Colo.
But when the rules are not clear, as in Arizona and even Florida (the Sunshine State), very little solar generating capacity is deployed. Should utilities be allowed to take advantage of tax credits for deploying their own solar capacity while this regulatory patchwork remains in place, the effect would be to empower them to capture market share with one hand while keeping competition out with the other.
To avert such an outcome, Congress needs to adopt national best practices for interconnection, metering, and rates similar to those implemented in Colorado, New Jersey, Maryland, and California. In short, if utilities are going to be allowed federal tax incentives to enter the solar market, then that market should be open to anyone else wanting to serve it. Let's get on with using this moment in history to create an energy policy that promotes competition and speeds the deployment of clean, cheap, local sources of energy rather than encouraging more of the same from last century's lobbyists.
Travis Bradford, author of Solar Revolution (MIT Press, 2006), is the founder and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass
==================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/jul2007/tc20070710_273201.htm
Congress Needs to Take a Shine to Solar
Momentum to create domestic sources of renewable energy is growing. But to make it catch fire nationwide, Washington must pass legislation
by Travis Bradford
Are traditional energy utilities casting a shadow on solar power? Nationwide, nearly one megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) of new solar energy capacity is being installed per business day. Yet it's not happening uniformly across the country, not even in many states where sunshine is abundant or where the nation's fastest population growth is driving more demand for all kinds of electricity.
Take Arizona. With nearly 300 days of sunshine a year, Arizona leaders put in place legislation that requires traditional utilities to generate 15% of their electricity from solar and other renewable energies. Despite such clear legislative mandates, the state's utility regulator, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), is considering rules that may stifle the deployment of solar systems in one of the nation's sunniest states. The ACC's proposed rules for supplying extra solar power to the local utility's electrical grid would effectively discourage a large retailer or even a smaller business from installing more than 100 kilowatts of solar panel capacity on its property. That's because there would be little payoff for that business in selling any more than 100 kilowatts of unused electricity produced during off-peak hours for that business. With such a cap, only businesses with very small physical buildings will consider deploying solar, and most of the effective solar demand will go unmet in Arizona.
Bogged Down by Rules
Why, despite its legislated goal to increase the use of renewable energy, would Arizona prevent its own solar industry from doing business within its borders? This is just one example of the exceedingly complex state-by-state rules governing not just interconnection, but the accounting for the electricity supplied to that grid by would-be solar producers and the rates they're paid for it. This complexity effectively deters businesses and home owners from installing solar power-generation systems. This, in turn, hurts demand for solar-energy service providers such as Sun Edison and solar panel makers such as BP Solar, First Solar (FSLR), and Evergreen Solar (ESLR).
In June, the U.S. Senate had a chance to speed the deployment of solar energy. Yet, in a surprising compromise on the federal energy bill, the Senate abandoned a provision to encourage nationwide deployment of most forms of renewable energy. Bowing to lobbying pressure and the political realities of compromise, the Senate jettisoned a comprehensive $32 billion package of incentives that would have dramatically improved the prospect of solving our nation's addiction to fossil fuels. These incentives for clean energy were to be paid for by reductions in subsidies given to oil producers.
The Senate's failure to truly support solar is highly disappointing. Yet the momentum toward creating cheaper, cleaner, and domestic sources of vital energy from renewable sources continues to grow. The prospect—and demand—for future renewable energy legislation still exists. However, the raw political power displayed by fossil fuel producers during the energy bill debate adds new urgency to the discussion of how to create rules and incentives that strengthen the commercialization of renewable energy. Those decisions will define our future as we grapple with accelerating energy, economic, security, and environmental challenges.
Monopoly-as-Usual?
The best way to create cheaper and cleaner domestic power is to facilitate competition from renewable energy sources. To do this, we must address some structural issues revealed during the energy bill debate. For starters, we need to decide who should be allowed to provide renewable energy solutions to U.S. citizens and businesses. The current setup threatens to enable only traditional utilities to deploy new technologies rather than opening the way for new providers and even users themselves to become power suppliers. Are we interested in creating energy competition, or are we satisfied with monopoly-as-usual?
In the failed Senate bill, Congress was on the verge of putting real meaning to renewable energy competition with the proposed extension of the federal tax incentives for solar energy. Set to expire at the end of 2008, the 30% tax credit would have been extended to the end of 2016 and modified to allow electric utilities themselves to claim the credit, opening the door for them to participate in the commercial deployment of solar energy.
Best Practices
Yet even if it had passed into law, that provision would not have been sufficient to break down barriers to creating real market competition from solar energy. The reason: Today, many traditional utilities would still be able to exploit regulatory and structural obstacles that slow or block third-party providers of solar energy from selling their excess electricity. These include inconsistent, state-by-state rules governing how solar producers can connect to the traditional grid, as well as the varying limits on the solar capacity. The result is that Staples (SPLS), Wal-Mart (WMT), and other companies are deploying solar rooftop systems in California and New Jersey, where the rules are favorable, but won't do the same in Arizona.
In other words, when a state gives its traditional utilities an unambiguous signal about the need for more solar energy, such as it has in California and Colorado, the result is aggressive deployment. In such states, traditional energy providers are setting a strong example by adopting best practices for interconnection and metering with solar energy. Notably, by 2008, Xcel Energy will actually purchase power from an 8.22-megawatt solar plant being built in Alamosa, Colo.
But when the rules are not clear, as in Arizona and even Florida (the Sunshine State), very little solar generating capacity is deployed. Should utilities be allowed to take advantage of tax credits for deploying their own solar capacity while this regulatory patchwork remains in place, the effect would be to empower them to capture market share with one hand while keeping competition out with the other.
To avert such an outcome, Congress needs to adopt national best practices for interconnection, metering, and rates similar to those implemented in Colorado, New Jersey, Maryland, and California. In short, if utilities are going to be allowed federal tax incentives to enter the solar market, then that market should be open to anyone else wanting to serve it. Let's get on with using this moment in history to create an energy policy that promotes competition and speeds the deployment of clean, cheap, local sources of energy rather than encouraging more of the same from last century's lobbyists.
Travis Bradford, author of Solar Revolution (MIT Press, 2006), is the founder and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass
Returnable Bottles Cost-Benefit Analysis
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originally posted at: www.grrn.org/beverage/refillables/ecologic.html
Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) takes LCA a step further by assigning monetary values to the environmental impacts and natural resource demands of beverage packaging systems. While the assignment of these values has many methodological limitations [CBA, pp. 17-20][LEVY, pp. 79-81], its ethical limitations probably draw the most vociferous criticism. Many critics of CBA argue that the environment is something on which you cannot place a monetary value.
Two CBA studies are considered here. The tallies of LCA results use some of the findings from a CBA study that was completed for the Austrian Ministry of the Environment in 2000 [GUA]. In 2001, the consulting firms RDC-Environment and Pira International completed a CBA study for the European Commission (EC), who intended to use the findings to set new recovery targets for the EC Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste. This study compared 330-ml refillable glass bottles with one-way glass bottles of the same size by investigating the container manufacturing, filling, distribution, and waste management processes under the following assumptions [CBA].
* The return rate for the refillable bottles is 100 percent.
* All bottle losses occur during washing and refilling.
* The round-trip distance from the warehouse to the store is 100 Km.
* Consumers recycle their commingled bottles and other containers only at drop-off centers. Industry bears all of the costs of recycling.
* The portion of one-way bottles that are not recycled is split equally between landfilling and incineration.
The study concluded that refillable glass bottles cost less environmentally than one-way glass bottles do whenever the distance from the bottling plant to the warehouse is less than 3,500 Km with 20 trips for the refillable bottle and a 91 percent recycling rate for the one-way bottle; less than 4,200 Km with 20 trips and a 42 percent recycling rate; less than 2,300 Km with 5 trips and a 91 percent recycling rate; and less than 3,000 Km with 5 trips and a 42 percent recycling rate. The RDC-Pira study also attempted a similar comparison for PET bottles, but it apparently omitted the costs of washing bottles.
===================================================================================
originally posted at: www.grrn.org/beverage/refillables/ecologic.html
Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) takes LCA a step further by assigning monetary values to the environmental impacts and natural resource demands of beverage packaging systems. While the assignment of these values has many methodological limitations [CBA, pp. 17-20][LEVY, pp. 79-81], its ethical limitations probably draw the most vociferous criticism. Many critics of CBA argue that the environment is something on which you cannot place a monetary value.
Two CBA studies are considered here. The tallies of LCA results use some of the findings from a CBA study that was completed for the Austrian Ministry of the Environment in 2000 [GUA]. In 2001, the consulting firms RDC-Environment and Pira International completed a CBA study for the European Commission (EC), who intended to use the findings to set new recovery targets for the EC Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste. This study compared 330-ml refillable glass bottles with one-way glass bottles of the same size by investigating the container manufacturing, filling, distribution, and waste management processes under the following assumptions [CBA].
* The return rate for the refillable bottles is 100 percent.
* All bottle losses occur during washing and refilling.
* The round-trip distance from the warehouse to the store is 100 Km.
* Consumers recycle their commingled bottles and other containers only at drop-off centers. Industry bears all of the costs of recycling.
* The portion of one-way bottles that are not recycled is split equally between landfilling and incineration.
The study concluded that refillable glass bottles cost less environmentally than one-way glass bottles do whenever the distance from the bottling plant to the warehouse is less than 3,500 Km with 20 trips for the refillable bottle and a 91 percent recycling rate for the one-way bottle; less than 4,200 Km with 20 trips and a 42 percent recycling rate; less than 2,300 Km with 5 trips and a 91 percent recycling rate; and less than 3,000 Km with 5 trips and a 42 percent recycling rate. The RDC-Pira study also attempted a similar comparison for PET bottles, but it apparently omitted the costs of washing bottles.
Solar Ovens, Dual Flush Toilets, and Watering Trees Right
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Save water with dual flush toilets. Using the same amount every time doesn't make sense. One button uses 1.6 gallons, a typical "low-flow" amount, but the other button uses 0.8 gallons.
They are made by Caroma (http://www.caromausa.com/products/toilets.htm) and you can buy them at Ferguson's in Rockville at 800-A East Gude Drive/ (301) 424-1393.
If you want to use even less water, is a composting toilet for you? Check them out at:
http://www.envirolet.com/prices.html
Green Democrats Do It Yourself Corner.
Make a solar powered Oven: http://solarcookers.org/
Water Your Trees Effectively: http://www.caseytrees.org/stew07basics.pdf (Thanks to Kathleen Michels)
=======================================================================================
Save water with dual flush toilets. Using the same amount every time doesn't make sense. One button uses 1.6 gallons, a typical "low-flow" amount, but the other button uses 0.8 gallons.
They are made by Caroma (http://www.caromausa.com/products/toilets.htm) and you can buy them at Ferguson's in Rockville at 800-A East Gude Drive/ (301) 424-1393.
If you want to use even less water, is a composting toilet for you? Check them out at:
http://www.envirolet.com/prices.html
Green Democrats Do It Yourself Corner.
Make a solar powered Oven: http://solarcookers.org/
Water Your Trees Effectively: http://www.caseytrees.org/stew07basics.pdf (Thanks to Kathleen Michels)
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