People v. Government v. People v. Government v. People v. ………….
The USA’s photovoltaic solar energy industry (“solar”) is fragmented, is growing rapidly, is subject to suspicion, and ultimately demonstrates real future success for energy hungry users, investors, utilities and government. Confusing? Solar manufacturers’ standards are fragmented, solar installers are numerous and uncoordinated, power utilities are coming around toward acceptance, and government is, well, confused. The federal government especially reacts awkwardly due to political fractiousness after the Solyndra debacle, more on that below. The major solar panel manufacturers (Solar City in the USA; Trina Solar, Yingli Solar, JA Solar and others in China) each experiment with different technological methods to improve efficiencies and each uses inconsistent standards (see, for example, the International Code Council’s Evaluation Service (ICC-ES) reviewed and adopted ICC-ES Acceptance Criteria (AC428).
Among us, some public acceptance/some public rejection of solar without understanding much about any long term benefit is the norm. Among elected officials, they show reluctance and avoidance due to new regulatory volumes that must be written – and few of them know how to write the new laws and regulations.
Those who reject solar are not who you might think, viz., oil and gas vested interests. In fact, British Petroleum, (BP) through its subsidiary, Orion Renewable Energy Group, has built Pennsylvania’s largest solar farm at the best costs yet. The $2 per watt barrier will be bettered by this new solar farm in Pennsylvania’s Franklin County. Orion Renewable Energy Group has built a 14 megawatt, $25 million solar farm that will cost users just $1.80 per watt fully constructed. What that means is this solar farm can provide power to possibly one-thousand houses at prices that, though a bit higher than conventional sources, are modestly low multiples of current costs and shrinking.
The real solar rejecters seem to be poorly-educated people, superstitious people, elected officials beholden to lobbies, or watchers of cynical newscasters. Those who accept a future solar infrastructure are sometimes misinformed, too. The majority of rejecters, and some of the acceptors, do not visualize how the solar systems can work. Can we make a solar system as understandable as the Interstate Highway system? Yes, and herein is such an effort.
Most can understand that buying solar panels reduces the monthly electric bill of the individual household. For example, Solar City and others promise an individual that buying their solar panels will be financed in a truly genius manner – calculate the cost of buying and installing solar panels, look at your monthly bill, pay the solar company less than your monthly electric bill, say 15% less, for as many months necessary to pay off the purchase price, then thereafter, any electricity you produce is free – you get the electricity you need and pay no one. The local power company is just your back-up. Additionally, local power companies in many jurisdictions may purchase the individual’s surplus power. Though attractive to the consumer, this surplus-buyback is a regulatory nightmare just beginning to happen. (I sympathize with all sides in this legal fight.) But surplus electricity sold back to the local utility is not the only way to go. Tesla batteries (expensive) for the home are the latest innovation from Elon Musk’s bag of genius tricks.
Citizens and politicians seem aware of the benefits of solar power. However, persuading politicians to think about new ideas and new technologies is hard, especially in the areas of basic infrastructure, such as the power grid and therefore solar power. Despite a little bit of knowledge, state and local politicians mostly fear solar. Some of these elected officials may be beholden to their local constituent Com Ed or equivalent – OK, understood. Nobody sensible wishes to overthrow the power monopolies, legally formed and fundamentally important; rather, the conservative view should be to partner local government with the power monopolies and rising solar plants. Federal elected officials are too distant from local ideas and local needs to get it right, though, among those Feds who support solar power, to their credit, their approach seems to be the global evolution style of awareness of environment popularized by Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.
The Solar Panel Marketplace
Solyndra is both proof of concept and proof of any nascent marketplace prone to failure. Solyndra was a California company successfully selling its proprietary photovoltaic solar panels (cylindrical panels instead of flat panels that improved efficiency of converting sunlight to electricity) for commercial power stations. The idea and science was right, the marketplace appeared accepting and growing, and the social consciousness to move from fossil fuels to alternatives was becoming more mainstream culture. Investors were interested, and the US government guaranteed a loan in excess of ½ a billion dollars expecting a return. So, what went wrong? Ordinary marketplace factors! Costs of manufacturing ordinary flat solar panels fell. Conventional flat panels were cheap all of a sudden. No need to obtain a little more efficiency for a lot more money as offered by Solyndra. The investors (very sophisticated fund managers) eventually saw the only real value of the company going forward was not adapting to the evolving marketplace, but rather was going to be preservation of tax losses to be used against their other investment gains, a tax plan which was confirmed by the Bankruptcy judge. As a result, Solyndra’s solar debacle negatively influenced the marketplace’s acceptance of solar. Solar is misunderstood as a bad idea, such as fracking (hydraulic fracturing of rock formations to release embedded minerals) is misunderstood. Among other misperceptions, it looked like solar would go the way of the rapid-though-partial obsolescence of the fax machine. Misunderstanding, unfortunately, results in consumer-avoidance reasoning: don’t buy it if you don’t have to; something better will come along soon; or, let’s not lay a marketplace wager on solar infrastructure yet let’s keep some solar infrastructure around because it has some limited utility. Despite resistance, real traction and expansion in solar power are manifest. Utility scale solar plants are springing up, and the energy consuming public is buying more solar while the misunderstanding is declining.
While US congressmen and senators in Washington DC are distant from their constituencies, motivated by general concerns and not individual concerns, federal government oversight of energy is an essential element of commerce both at the national scale and at the local scale. But so far, local government looks most attractive to regulate solar infrastructure because local government is best suited to be responsive to local citizens and land users. Let’s decrease federal government involvement for a great many reasons, not least of which is its bad track record with solar. Make local government the best governing authority for solar infrastructure. Solar arrays at a local scale with minimal distance for distribution to users are efficient and environmentally sound. Municipal government may regulate and simultaneously may promote solar because municipal government is closest to the people – municipal government may be a little like the ancient Athenians’ form of direct-to-the-people government.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure, on any scale in any industry, works best by those who use it and who are bound to it geographically. A small scale solar power plant operated and regulated and paid for by the population directly “in view”, that is, a community of a size from 6-600 houses, of the solar plant that supplies their energy is a proposed new model. When a suburban home development is proposed to be built, the developer can apply to local government for an additional license to build solar infrastructure and a power plant proportionate to the size of the development. This license application can be as easy as any other application for a building permit. Unfortunately, few municipal governments have considered solar for discussion, let alone draft a local municipal code for routine review of solar applications. Persuading politicians to move forward on infrastructure issues is hard to do, see reasons, above.
Fairness is another issue. The power company monopolies built and paid for the major power generation plants and the distribution grid in the USA; however, some power utility monopolies must “buy” the electricity generated by a solar household whereas other monopolies state-by-state do not have to buy home-generated electricity. Power companies sense being taken advantage of by upstarts.
The power transportation grid is a common carrier that from the start was paid for by the utility monopolies according to fair regulations and is now watched over by local government oversight committees. Must utilities now allow other, even very small, power producers to coattail on the infrastructure they built and maintain? Solutions include minimizing use of any of Com Ed’s and others’ infrastructure, establishing regulated rates for grid access, geographically re-mapping the grid to accommodate solar, and re-drafting municipal codes. The existing power monopolies and the new, ill-defined solar generators must embrace each other for the benefit of their constituencies and neighborhoods, for more and cheaper energy, and, ultimately, for the health of the globe.
The federal government promotes new solar technology with tax credits. At the federal level the available investment tax credit (“ITC”) is 30%, meaning every dollar spent on solar generates a $0.30 credit against income taxes. The 30% ITC will remain in effect through Dec 31, 2016, unless extended. Beginning 2017, the solar tax credit becomes 10%. Companies in the solar industry shall utilize the 30% ITC by building inventories, and expanding storage capacity and infrastructure until the end of 2016. Thereafter, accounting benefits and production efficiencies will continue to grow these companies and their profitability.
Home
Compare the passive solar industry, mainly for hot water applications, with today’s sloar photovoltaic industry. The passive solar industry has been around for a long time (think tens of thousands of years) and became popular again during the fad of solar iced tea – place water and tea bags in a glass pitcher, set it in bright sun for a couple of hours, then add ice, voila! Actually, solar water heaters always have been used by ancient and modern societies. Configuring rooms in a home (or cave) so that rooms with solar gain create convection currents to pull cool air from cool spaces within the home were understood by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Home construction designs have used convection features for eons. The modern passive solar industry did not harm nor corrupt the plumbing or HVAC industry. Likewise, the solar photovoltaic power industry neither will harm nor corrupt our lawful power monopolies.
Using kWh as the standard old method of measuring household power consumption is still useful, though it is outdated because it does not include all the variables. A solar infrastructure’s power delivery and consumption are best measured by use of newer, more complete and convenient metrics to gauge utility, savings and return on investment. The new metrics must measure a complete solar infrastructure: the photovoltaic modules including their costs of manufacture and transportation; the local distribution grid; sunlight efficiencies; cost of local array; peak demand factors; maintenance, labor; useful life and disposal and more. Cost per kWh is a bit of a misleading measurement albeit it is the measurement we all are used to because our current electric bills reflect upon the fuel used to create a watt and the utility’s facilities costs and not much more. Rather, a total cost to operate per yielded watt including the metrics named above can provide meaningful, newly formulated units of measurement such as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Energy engineers are collaborating to make international codes for solar more coherent and adopted.
- The Math Proves It
The practical home installation models are not complicated. Ordinary algebra illumines the design. Start with a location (see Where In The USA, below) of average days of sunshine, say, 250 days per year of sunshine with an average of 8 hours per day, which results in 2000 hours of direct sun per year. The kilowatt-hour (symbolized kWh) is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt (1 kW) of power expended for one hour. At current efficiencies, a 1 square meter photovoltaic panel currently puts out about .2 kWh. Multiply the variables and the result is 1 square meter panel x .2 kw x 2000 hours yields 400 kWh per year, give or take.
Then, estimate the electrical demands of average houses by size, say, for example, let’s calculate for a 500 square meter (1640 sq ft) house, and a 1000 square meter (3281 sq ft) house. Look at your electric bill – it’ll show your annual consumption. How big is your house? If we assume a 500 square meter house uses 8000 kWh of electricity per year, then that house needs 20 square meters (66 sq ft) or so of solar panels. A 1000 square meter house using 16,000 kWh of electricity per year needs 40 square meters (132 sq ft) or so of solar panels.
What if we have a small community of, say, 40 houses? Can we centralize the solar array and achieve greater efficiency of scale? Can the community distribute the electricity to 40 houses cheaper than if the 40 houses each does it itself? Unknown. Certain cost differences are known such as the costs for wiring a house. However, scaling efficiencies have not much been tested and published.
What about storage? Well, broadly, the local power utility provides all our individual storage needs. And now, new, home-scale batteries are available. But, historically, before power utilities, energy was stored in nature – the water wheel turned all the energy stored in the moving river, the wood or dung stored the energy until a flame ignited it. Today at the home scale, we enjoy electrical energy more than wood- or dung-combustible energy because electrical energy is way more efficient and cleaner. On a big scale, we especially want a well-maintained national grid because it provides our “on demand” electric resource, this thanks to the historical concept of nation, that is, a national enjoyment and cooperation among our power companies, government, investors that built our infrastructure, and us the consuming public.
- Where In The USA?
Not everywhere suits solar. Efficiencies are different depending on weather and geography. Many charts are available through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (“NOAA”) website, www.noaa.gov, demonstrating geographical distribution of cloudy and sunny days, strength of sun, hours of usable sunshine, and other variables. One typical chart, copied below, lists cities in the USA with their respective solar efficiencies:
| Average annual sunshine
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| % Sun | City | Total Hours | Clear Days | |||
| 60 | Atlanta, Georgia | 2738 | 110 | |||
| 60 | Austin, Texas | 2644 | 115 | |||
| 57 | Baltimore, Maryland | 2582 | 105 | |||
| 58 | Birmingham, Alabama | 2641 | 99 | |||
| 58 | Boston, Massachusetts | 2634 | 98 | |||
| 48 | Buffalo, New York | 2207 | 54 | |||
| 62 | Charlotte, North Carolina | 2821 | 109 | |||
| 54 | Chicago, Illinois | 2508 | 84 | |||
| 50 | Cincinnati, Ohio | 2335 | 81 | |||
| 49 | Cleveland, Ohio | 2280 | 66 | |||
| 50 | Columbus, Ohio | 2183 | 72 | |||
| 61 | Dallas, Texas | 2850 | 135 | |||
| 69 | Denver, Colorado | 3107 | 115 | |||
| 53 | Detroit, Michigan | 2436 | 75 | |||
| 56 | Hartford, Connecticut | 2585 | 82 | |||
| 59 | Houston, Texas | 2578 | 90 | |||
| 55 | Indianapolis, Indiana | 2440 | 88 | |||
| 63 | Jacksonville, Florida | 2880 | 94 | |||
| 60 | Kansas City, Missouri | 2810 | 120 | |||
| 85 | Las Vegas, Nevada | 3825 | 210 | |||
| 73 | Los Angeles, California | – | 147 | |||
| 56 | Louisville, Kentucky | 2514 | 93 | |||
| 64 | Memphis, Tennessee | 2888 | 118 | |||
| 70 | Miami, Florida | 3154 | 74 | |||
| 54 | Milwaukee, Wisconsin | 2484 | 90 | |||
| 58 | Minneapolis, Minnesota | 2711 | 95 | |||
| 56 | Nashville, Tennessee | 2510 | 102 | |||
| 57 | New Orleans, Louisiana | 2649 | 101 | |||
| 58 | New York, New York | 2535 | 107 | |||
| 68 | Oklahoma City, Oklahoma | 3089 | 139 | |||
| 56 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 2498 | 93 | |||
| 85 | Phoenix, Arizona | 3872 | 211 | |||
| 45 | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 2021 | 59 | |||
| 48 | Portland, Oregon | 2341 | 68 | |||
| 58 | Providence, Rhode Island | 2606 | 98 | |||
| 58 | Raleigh, North Carolina | 2606 | 111 | |||
| 63 | Richmond, Virginia | 2829 | 100 | |||
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| 51 | Rochester, New York | 2298 | 61 | |||
| 78 | Sacramento, California | 3608 | 188 | |||
| 66 | Salt Lake City, Utah | 3029 | 125 | |||
| 60 | San Antonio, Texas | 2629 | 105 | |||
| 68 | San Diego, California | 3055 | 146 | |||
| 66 | San Francisco, California | – | 160 | |||
| 47 | Seattle, Washington | 2170 | 58 | |||
| 57 | St. Louis, Missouri | 2594 | 101 | |||
| 66 | Tampa, Florida | 2927 | 101 | |||
| 60 | Virginia Beach, Virginia | 2695 | 106 | |||
| 56 | Washington, DC | 2528 | 96 | |||
Reference
National Climatic Data Center. Comparative Climatic Data.
World Data Center for Meteorology. Climate of the World.
When aliens from other solar systems finally visit earth, they’re going to say, “What the heck!? You got this powerful sun to provide endless energy, but you burn stuff instead!!??”
In the next installment, this author discusses solar power around the globe, in particular, other countries that do it well, that is, make an on-going investment in solar – China and Germany are preeminent examples.
Immediate best ideas for the USA are to joint-venture: USA’s and China’s solar manufacturers can joint-venture with, say, ExxonMobil and Com Ed and local governments. Solar joint ventures boast a broader appeal than just energy innovation. As currently stated by two American luminous thinkers, joint ventures can help on the broader economic/diplomatic fronts. Please see the Atlantic Monthly, June 2015, article authored by two former US Secretaries of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., and Robert E. Rubin, THE BLAME TRAP, Why the U.S. and China need to act on each other’s economic critiques. Excerpt: Chinese investors could help the United States speed growth now without worsening its long-term debt problem. The U.S. has vast infrastructure needs and a paucity of public capital.