New Energy Blog

China plans to more than double its installed capacity for solar electricity this year, a move that could breathe new life into Chinese solar manufacturers suffering heavy losses.

In a speech at China’s annual national energy work conference dated Monday and released on Tuesday, Liu Tienan, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning body, said China would add an additional 10 gigawatts of installed solar power capacity this year. Mr. Liu didn’t provide any specific details of how it would achieve this goal.

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Climate change is mentioned by Munich Re as a major culprit of increased weather-related losses, but lots o’ people say it is still a fringe, unproven myth.  Ahhhh, Americans–not all, but too many.  And, our presidential candidates did not mention it once in the debates, the first time since the early 80s that climate change has not come up at least once in the presidential debates.

Cue timely blog post from the New Yorker as New York is flooding…

Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change (New Yorker blog post)
Posted by Elizabeth Kolbert

A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.” According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The number of what Munich Re refers to as “weather-related loss events,” and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades. While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”

Munich Re’s report was aimed at the firm’s clients—other insurance companies—and does not make compelling reading for a general audience. But its appearance just two weeks ahead of Hurricane Sandy seems to lend it a peculiarly grisly relevance. Sandy has been called a “superstorm,” a “Frankenstorm,” a “freakish and unprecedented monster,” and possibly “unique in the annals of American weather history.” It has already killed sixty-five people in the Caribbean, and, although it’s too early to tell what its full impact will be as it churns up the East Coast, loss estimates are topping six billion dollars.

As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change. Just a few weeks before the Munich Re report appeared, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the apparent increase in extreme heat waves. Extreme summertime heat, which just a few decades ago affected much less than one per cent of the earth’s surface, “now typically covers about 10% of the land area,” the paper observed. “It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies”—i.e., heat waves—“such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.” It is worth noting that one of several forces fuelling Sandy is much-higher-than-average sea-surface temperatures along the East Coast.

Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. Pressed about this finally the other day on MTV, President Obama called climate change a “critical issue” that he was “surprised” hadn’t come up during any of the debates, a response that was at once completely accurate and totally disingenuous. (As one commentator pointed out, he might have brought up this “critical” issue on his own since “he is the friggin’ POTUS.”)

It is, at this point, impossible to say what it will take for American politics to catch up to the reality of North American climate change. More super-storms, more heat waves, more multi-billion-dollar “weather-related loss events”? The one thing that can be said is that, whether or not our elected officials choose to acknowledge the obvious, we can expect, “with a high degree of confidence,” that all of these are coming.

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Clean energy has become a dirty word in presidential politics. In their second debate, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama each tried to outdo the other’s love of fossil fuels: Obama extolling his record on oil and natural gas production, Romney vowing to take “advantage of the oil and coal we have here.” The Republican candidate has ridiculed the administration’s $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, the bankrupt California-based solar panel maker, and accused Obama of living “in an imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy.”

The candidates’ coolness to renewable energy comes at a time when the domestic supply of traditional energy sources, such as oil and natural gas, is at an all-time high. And yet this failure to make the promise of renewables a keynote in the debate is a huge missed opportunity. In particular, it ignores the dramatic reduction in the cost of photovoltaic solar power worldwide and the considerable benefits to U.S. consumers and the environment. The untold story of this campaign is that what killed Solyndra may turn out to be a boon for the nation. “Economically and technologically, the game is over,” says Bill Powers, a San Diego engineer and board member of Solar Done Right, a group that proselytizes for rooftop solar power. “The hangups in the U.S. are strictly political.”

Over the past five years the price of photovoltaic panels has plummeted 75 percent, due largely to a glut of Chinese-made panels. The fall in prices rendered technically advanced photovoltaic panels, like those produced by Solyndra and other U.S. companies, too expensive to compete. But cheap panels have been a godsend for consumers such as Powers. He recently took advantage of a sale at his local retail solar panel store and self-installed 1,000 watts of extra solar power on his roof at a cost of $2 a watt, including a 30 percent federal tax credit. Nationally, the average cost of residential installations—including hardware, permits, and labor—has plummeted from $9 a watt in 2006 to $5.46. Averaging in commercial industrial installations, the national installed price plummets to $3.45 a watt, says the Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington-based trade group.

The result is a burgeoning rooftop revolution. The SEIA says almost 52,000 residential rooftop systems were installed in the U.S. last year, up 30 percent from a year earlier. Total rooftop installations, including on commercial buildings, grew 109 percent from 2010 to 2011, according to SEIA data. Total photovoltaic installations are projected to grow an additional 71 percent this year from 2011 levels.

Worldwide, the picture is even more positive. Australia projects that 10 percent of its 8 million houses will have rooftop systems within the next 12 months—most of that growth coming in the past three years. European rooftop installations continue to outpace those in the U.S., even as some countries begin to pare subsidies that have helped spur a continental rooftop boom. Including residential, commercial, and industrial-scale projects, the world had installed about 67 gigawatts of photovoltaic power at the end of last year—up from just 1.5 gigawatts in 2000.

Despite such breakthroughs, the U.S. economy is harnessing only a fraction of solar’s potential benefits. Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, about 100 million U.S. residential units could physically hold rooftop systems one day, generating by one estimate 3.75 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity a year. In 2011, total U.S. electrical generation from all sources was about 4 trillion kilowatt hours—42 percent of that from coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The trouble is, many of the big,investor-owned utilities that provide about 85 percent of America’s electricity see solar as both a technical challenge and a long-term threat to their 100-year-old profit models. And the lack of a national energy policy means regulation of solar is up to states, public service commissions, and a wealth of local governments and bureaucracies—many of whom have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The experience of Orrin Kohon, a Los Angeles resident with a second home in Hawaii, reflects the hurdles facing consumers hoping to join the rooftop movement. If all goes well, Kohon will soon receive local government approval to let workers mount an $18,000 leased solar power system on the roof of his Honolulu house. Monthly electric bills for his modest 1,750-square-foot abode run about $400—at 32.6¢ per kilowatt hour, the highest in the nation. With his rooftop system, installed by a third-party contractor, he’ll generate enough of his own power to lower that rate to 7.3¢ per kilowatt hour for the next 20 years. That’s a savings, he says, of $120,000 over that period. “It’s a hedge, like locking in $2-a-gallon gasoline,” says the 63-year-old owner of a Los Angeles career counseling service. “The thing is, I have to act now. If too many of my neighbors beat me to the punch, I won’t be able to connect.”

That’s because thousands of Hawaii residents have also realized that even the most elaborate systems, costing up to $55,000, can pay for themselves in as little as four years given current power rates and state and federal incentives that chop up to two-thirds off the installation price. This rooftop stampede is overwhelming the permit process—70 percent of all current permit applications in the state are for solar installations—and causing utilities to impose moratoriums in some areas on how much solar they are willing to accept to their power grids.

The rule of thumb had been that once rooftop installations made up 15 percent of the power on a given circuit, utilities could stay new connections until residents undertook an engineering study—costing as much as $50,000—that showed their addition wouldn’t destabilize the power grid. While that rule has been eased to 25 percent in Hawaii, the extra burden on consumers explains why “there are places on Maui where the saturation is such that we don’t even solicit for business there,” says Alex Tiller, chief executive officer of Sunetric, a Hawaii-based rooftop solar power installer.

The hidden costs of obtaining permits and regulators’ approval to install rooftop panels is a big reason the U.S. lags behind Germany, which leads the world in rooftop installations, with more than 1 million. The price of installed rooftop solar in Germany has fallen to $2.24 per watt. In fact, on a sunny day in May, rooftop provided all of Germany’s power needs for two hours. “This is a country on latitude with Maine,” says Dennis Wilson, president of the Mid-Atlantic Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar-installer trade group. “Germany is showing us what’s possible—if we can just get our act together.”

That’s easier said than done. Unlike the U.S., Germany has a national solar policy, a quick, inexpensive permitting process, and a national mandate that utilities sign up rooftop installations under what’s known as a feed-in tariff—essentially a long-term contract whereby the utilities agree not just to allow the solar on their grids but also to buy the excess power from consumers.

By contrast, the U.S. has more than 18,000 jurisdictions at the state and local level that have a say in how rooftop solar is rolled out, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. What’s more, electricity is supplied by investor-owned utilities, mostly state-regulated monopolies, which supply power from centralized hubs to captured consumers. Profit is in part tied to growth based on an ever-expanding demand as populations increase.

Rooftop solar poses a threat to that model by turning consumers into producers, thereby sapping utility revenue streams. It also diminishes the need to build expensive new plants and transmission lines. The saturation limits being imposed by utilities in places with booming rooftop demand “are a bit like speed bumps,” says Mark Duda of RevoluSun, Hawaii’s largest residential rooftop installer. “They want to slow things down out of fear of being overrun by PV.”

While some large utilities are embracing solar—California’s Pacific Gas Electric has 40,000 solar connections and an easy-to-follow guide encouraging consumers to sign up—many utilities and their political backers are standing in the way of changes that could boost U.S. energy independence, reduce carbon emissions, and save consumers billions. The U.S. needs more initiatives like the SunShot Rooftop Solar Challenge, launched by the Department of Energy to find ways to lower installation costs by cutting down permit times and removing siting restrictions in 19 states. The goal is get these so-called soft costs down to $1 a watt—which would make homegrown solar competitive with commercial power rates in many states.

Congress should also extend beyond 2016 the 30 percent federal solar tax credit for rooftop installation, then gradually phase it out. Five years from now, solar—without subsidies—will be competitive with conventional power prices in 17 states, and the credit could greatly increase that number. Rooftop solar “is a game changer,” says Powers. “And the game is already on.”

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