But it’s the type of thin-film solar panels and where the photovoltaic power plant will be built that foreshadows a potentially sizable business opportunity as well as a way to maximize renewable energy production.

Energy producer Invenergy will build the Grand Ridge Solar project in Illinois adjacent to its 210-megawatt wind farm. (Powered, not coincidentally, by GE wind turbines.)

By pairing wind and solar farms, Invenergy makes more efficient use of the transmission system, given that both sources of electricity are intermittent and tend to hit peak production at different times of day. That helps power grid operators balance supply and demand.

“You put those two together you have a much more dispatchable and local renewable system,” Victor Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business, told me Thursday. “We’ve built 30 gigawatts of wind farms so adding solar is a good utilization of assets.”

Abate says it’s too early to tell how big a market that could be but notes that installing solar at just 10% of those wind farm sites would sell out GE’s solar panel production for the next five or six years.

The company is building the U.S.’s largest solar panel factory in Colorado, which will annually manufacture 400 megawatts of cadmium-telluride thin-film photovoltaic panels. (That poses a competitive threat to First Solar, the industry leader that dominates the market for cadmium-telluride solar panels.)

But GE will be supplying a different type of thin-film solar panels made by Japan’s Solar Frontier to the Invenergy project in Illinois. It’s the second win this week for Solar Frontier’s CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) technology.

On Monday, renewable energy developer enXco announced that it would build a 150-megawatt solar farm in the Southern California desert using Solar Frontier panels near its wind farms in the Tehachapi Mountains. Those wind and solar farms will share a 4,500-megawatt renewable energy transmission line under construction in the Tehachapi.

That is by far the biggest deployment of CIGS technology, which a number of Silicon Valley startups have been working on for years to commercialize as it promises cheaper solar electricity through by lowering production costs.

Source: www.forbes.com

Groundhog Day may be the more apt analogy as this scenario repeats every year or two, unfolding in a ritual where green energy executives and their respective trade groups warn that the expiration of the incentive tax credit – used primarily by solar – and the production tax credit for wind will cost tens of thousands of jobs and slow the nation’s transition to carbon-free power. At the 11th hour or later, Congress invariably extends the tax incentives once again.

Except this year, renewable energy industry leaders may not be so much drama queens as Cassandra’s. In the midst of a presidential election year with Republicans riding the bankruptcy of solar panel maker Solyndra to slam the Obama administration’s green energy policies, Congress may well let the tax breaks die.

For the solar industry the issue is the inelegantly named 1603 Treasury Program. During the depths of the recession in 2009 the Obama administration gave renewable energy developers the option of taking a 30% tax credit in the form of cold hard cash as there weren’t many project financiers left with profits they needed to offset with tax credits. Wall Street’s collapse also dried up the pool of so-called tax equity investors. Congress at the end of 2010 extended the cash grant program for another year and now time’s up. (The investment tax credit itself doesn’t expire until the end of 2016.)

“The problem remains,” says Joe Desmond, senior vice president of communications and government affairs for BrightSource Energy, a California solar power plant builder. “There are tax equity investors out there. But it remains insufficient to serve the anticipated demand moving forward until the economy recovers.”

In other word, there are too many projects, like the multibillion-dollar solar thermal power stations BrightSource builds or the residential rooftop photovoltaic systems SolarCity leases, and too few investors able or willing to do tax equity deals. On the other hand, Desmond says, being able to dispense that tax credit in the form of cash allows developers to tap a larger pool of potential financiers.

The cash grant program “is a very effective tool and helped more deals get done in 2011, and the loss of 1603 would slow the pace of growth in the renewable energy space,” Jonathan Plowe, Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch’s head of new energy and infrastructure solutions, said in an e-mail. Plowe has worked with SolarCity to finance the Silicon Valley’s company’s initiative to install 120,000 solar arrays on military housing in 28 states.

The Solar Energy Industries Association commissioned a study that found that some 37,000 jobs would not be created in 2012 if the cash grant program expires at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

“More than 100,000 Americans work in the solar industry, double the number in 2009,” Rhone Resch, the chief executive of the solar trade group, said in a statement. “Solar is a proven job creator at a time when the unemployment rate for the country remains stubbornly high. The 1603 Treasury Program has been the single most effective policy driving renewable energy growth during the past two years.”

Desmond notes that two of BrightSource’s planned solar power plants will create $800 million in wages over their operating life with each employing more than a thousand workers at the peak of construction.

But won’t the solar industry just be back next year at this time, hat in hand, if the cash grant program is extended for another 12 months?

No, according to Desmond, as such an extension should bridge the gap between an improving economy and efforts to put in a place a permanent financing program for renewable energy projects.

“As soon as the economy recovers, it takes the burden off of having to request an extension,” he says.

Desmond wouldn’t comment on how the expiration of the cash grant program might affect the financing of BrightSource’s next two power plants, citing the Oakland, Calif. startup’s upcoming $250 million initial public offering. But he did allow that tax equity financing raises the cost of a project.

The American Wind Energy Association, meanwhile, on Monday released a study by Navigant Consulting that predicted that an extension of the production tax credit, or PTC, would create 54,000 jobs over the next four years.

If it expires, 37,000 jobs will be lost, the study found. Congress has typically authorized the credit, which pays wind energy producers 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, for two-year periods, creating something of a boom-and-bust cycle in the wind industry. (Wind developers also have been able to participate in the cash grant program in lieu of taking the production tax credit.)

Last week, I was in the Tehachapi Mountains, where a wind-farm building boom has been under way for the past two years, to do some reporting for a forthcoming Forbes magazine story. On the site of one planned wind farm, a veteran wind executive took the long view of the industry’s ups and downs.

“Even though the economics of wind are a bit uncertain due to the uncertainty of the PTC and the unstable policy environment that creates, we’re still betting that policy stability will return,” the executive said.

The question is, does Congress have the will to extend the tax credit and make that stability last more than two years?

Source: www.forbes.com

Currently, we are solely reliant on corporations or utilities for power. With what result? Oil speculators make millions of dollars off of manipulating the price of oil. Big oil companies made over $32 billion in profit just in the third quarter. Connecticut’s utility company took over ten days to restore power to hundreds of thousands of home and businesses after the last snowstorm. For the average consumer, this translates into higher energy costs and less reliable service.

But, what if we decided to stop empowering these institutions and become individually energy independent? Instead of big oil companies receiving record profits, individuals could generate their own energy and pocket the savings. Instead of relying on government utilities for power, individuals could generate their own power. This vision is possible through renewable energy. Individuals would have a difficult, if not impossible, time becoming energy independent through traditional fossil fuel means. An oil or gas well costs around $400,000 to drill. The average cost of a solar system for a three-bedroom house, on the other hand, is $16,500—a hefty sum, for sure, but cost savings will pay for the installation in less than seven years, or sooner if homeowners are able to sell any surplus energy back into the grid. As electric cars become widely available, this energy can also help meet people’s transportation needs.

Individuals are already reclaiming their energy independence all over the world. Sales of small-scale wind turbines are increasing and are expected to continue to increase. Advances and adaptations in technology will only increase these numbers. And, Gainsville, Florida generates more solar power per capita than California, Japan, France and the rest of the U.S. Through a program called feed in tariffs, individuals and businesses can sell surplus electricity back into the grid. The program is so successful that Gainsville residents will be generating 1.5 million kWh (kilo-watt hours) by the end of the year.

Gainsville is an example of the need for uniform federal policy to level the playing field in all states. If a national feed-in-tarrif were adopted, the market would dictate which companies and efforts were successful and offer a stable business environment for investors and entreupreneurs. In fact, the current tax break and incentive structure puts renewable energy at a marked disadvantage compared with big oil and distorts the market viability of fossil fuels. The tax breaks and incentives for big oil are written into the tax code, which means they will be available until Congress acts to specifically repeal them. Most renewable energy incentives, on the other hand, have to be reauthorizied every year leading to market and demand uncertainty.

And yet, even with these disadvantages, renewable energy production is increasing. The U.S. is set to break its record on solar panel installations this year alone. Can you imagine how much renewable energy we could produce if we actually had a market-based economy?

Source: www.policyshop.net

Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates. President Obama and several members of Congress have supported one at the federal level. Polls routinely show strong support among voters for renewable energy projects — as long as they don’t cost too much.

But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.

Consider California’s new mandate. The state’s peak electricity demand is about 52,000 megawatts. Meeting the one-third target will require (if you oversimplify a bit) about 17,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. Let’s assume that California will get half of that capacity from solar and half from wind. Most of its large-scale solar electricity production will presumably come from projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California. When completed, Ivanpah, which aims to provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, will cover 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management ordered a halt to construction on part of the facility out of concern for the desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.

Industrial solar and wind projects also require long swaths of land for power lines. Last year, despite opposition from environmental groups, San Diego Gas & Electric started construction on the 117-mile Sunrise Powerlink, which will carry electricity from solar, wind and geothermal projects located in Imperial County, Calif., to customers in and around San Diego. In January, environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the $1.9 billion line from cutting through a nearby national forest.

Not all environmentalists ignore renewable energy’s land requirements. The Nature Conservancy has coined the term “energy sprawl” to describe it. Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.

Consider the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel. By contrast, a typical natural gas turbine can produce nearly 43 megawatts while weighing only 9 tons. Thus, each megawatt of capacity requires less than a quarter of a ton of steel.

Obviously these are ballpark figures, but however you crunch the numbers, the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude.

Such profligate use of resources is the antithesis of the environmental ideal. Nearly four decades ago, the economist E. F. Schumacher distilled the essence of environmental protection down to three words: “Small is beautiful.” In the rush to do something — anything — to deal with the intractable problem of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups and policy makers have determined that renewable energy is the answer. But in doing so they’ve tossed Schumacher’s dictum into the ditch.

All energy and power systems exact a toll. If we are to take Schumacher’s phrase to heart while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions, we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources — natural gas and, yes, nuclear — that have smaller footprints.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Former Mayor Gavin Newsom said of their program: “GoSolarSF has more than doubled the number of solar installations in our City and created dozens of jobs. This program is literally transforming how our homes and businesses generate and consume electricity rooftop by rooftop.” (Source: getsolar.com)

Actually, it was Newsom who first put forth the goal of 100 percent renewable energy in San Francisco by 2020. One source said that in 2006, San Francisco was only at about 12 percent renewable energy, and that rate put them easily in the top ten U.S. cities for clean energy. Currently San Francisco receives a significant amount of its electricity from the Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric powerplant. It was recently reported that the city had failed to find a competitor to their main supplier, Pacific Gas and Electricity, who can deliver power from 51 percent renewable sources.

Some say the 100 percent renewable goal by 2020 is not feasible, but the director of the city’s Environment Department said the city had actually exceeded their very ambitious recycling goal of 75 percent diversion from the waste stream, so a very aggressive energy goal might be beneficial.

Source: www.care2.com