Blog

Joni Mitchell take heed…there’s a silver lining to parking lots after all.   Turns out they’re a great place to put solar panels.  Any carport or parking lot can be transformed into a solar paradise that generates power for nearby buildings, provides shade for the cars and mitigates the nasty “heat island’ effect that all that asphalt generates in urban areas.

The carport concept could be helpful for homeowners who want to go solar but have roofs with too much shade.  But the real impact will be in office parks and shopping centers with those giant lots that bake in the sun.  Next time you get into your 120 degree car/sauna, just imagine if all that heat were channeled into electricity.

And speaking of cars, tune in next week for a special driver’s ed crash course on how to drive for maximum fuel efficiency. Even if you’ve got a Prius, there are still a surprising number of techniques that can dramatically improve your gas mileage.

–Erica Etelson

The sun is a useful star.  When it comes to powering our homes and creating the foundation for life on this planet, the sun can’t be beat.  Now, scientists are discovering another awesome little trick the sun can perform—simply throw a few million microbes into the mix and…presto, solar energy can be converted into chemicals. The process, called electrosynthesis, mimicks photosynthesis but, instead of changing sunlight into energy, the microbes feed on electrons and change sunlight into chemicals.

If you’re like me, it’s all pretty incomprehensible, but the point is this:  If chemicals can be made from electrosynthesis, we won’t have need for all the nasty petrochemcials that are poisoning everything from drinking water and farm produce to frogs and songbirds.  When chemical pesticides came into widespread use in the 1940s, the so-called “Green Revolution” was on.  Decades later, our planet’s life support systems are suffering the unintended consequences of “better living through chemistry.”  We’re now seeing the true “Green Revolution” gather steam with the birth of the green chemistry movement that strives to find less harmful alternatives to deadly petrochemicals.

It’s likely to be years until solar-powered chemicals are commercially available. In the meantime, minimize your petrochemical footprint by avoiding bottled water and other disposable plastic items, eating organic food, buying natural cleansers and cosmetics and using non-chemical pest control methods in your home and garden.  Your endocrine system, along with the planet, thank you in advance.

–Erica Etels0n

Stanley Dudley, Ellensburg solar investor

What would you do if you were passionate about solar energy but couldn’t afford to buy panels for your house?  You would lease panels from Sungevity, of course, but let’s say you rent your home or live in a state not served by Sungevity.  If you’re like 90 residents (1% of all homeowners) of Ellensburg, Washington, you would pony up a few thousand dollars to invest in a community solar project.

That’s right, the tiny city of Ellensburg owns its own solar power generating station that powers 25 nearby homes.  The station already generates 58 kw of solar electricity and is in the process of adding another 24 kw.  Investors are paid back quarterly over a 20-year period.

Ellensburg’s solar power array by itself is small fry.  But it’s a testament to the power of innovation and dedication demonstrated by the project’s architects and investors. Undaunted by naysayers, these folks cared enough about our energy and climate future to do their bit.  Imagine if 1% of the population of NYC or Los Angeles did the same.

–Erica Etelson

It seems like everyone I know is off to Italy this summer to enjoy its pastoral beauty, Slow Food and romantic gondola rides.  Who doesn’t love Italy–the language, the food, the mountains, the 720 megawatts of solar power installed last year.

Italy has surpassed the United States to become the largest residential solar market in the world (next to Germany).  With only one-fifth the population of the United States, Italy owes its solar joyride to the implementation of a Feed-in-Tariff in 2007 (heads up Los Angeles, this could be you)!

But you need not travel all the way to Italy to gawk in awe at all those gleaming rooftop solar arrays and snow-capped mountains.  Look no further than Colorado (gondola rides and Slow Food not included),  which passed a law earlier this year requiring the state to generate 30% of its electricity from renewables by 2020, a standard second only to California’s target of 33% by 2020.  Because of this law, the state anticipates 100,000 new rooftop solar panels by 2020.  With the state’s two biggest utilities offering big solar rebates and the sun shining bright 300 days a year, Colorado’s Solar Century has begun.  Now all Colorado and the rest of the United States needs is a feed-in-tariff, and we’ll be back to Number 1 in short order.

–Erica Etelson

Americans like big things–big cars, big houses, Big Macs.  And the conventional wisdom around electricity transmission is that we have to spend trillions of dollars revamping the national grid so that it can carry intermittent wind and solar energy more efficiently.  Another supersized (and super-expensive) idea and one that has held back investment in renewables for fear that our poor ole’ grid can’t handle it.

Two new studies challenge the immediate necessity of a national supersmartgrid.  The National Renewable Energy Lab announced in May that the power grid in Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and Nevada could carry 35% renewable energy by 2017 without any substantial new infrastructure.  If even 27% of the WestConnect grid is powered by renewables, this would reduce carbon emissions by 25-45%.

Another report focuses on the potential for microgrids (aka “distributed generation”) to replace the massive regional power plants that currently supply most of our electricity.  Distributed generation is a series of small generation facilities each of which serves one building or cluster of buildings.  If you’ve got solar panels on your roof, you my friend are the proud owner of a microgrid.  But there are larger applications too–think apartment buildings, medical centers, shopping malls, office parks or even residential neighborhoods or small towns.  It costs much less to build a bunch of microgrids than it does to build a centralized mega-power plant and transmit that power across hundreds of miles of transmission lines.  The longer the transmission line, the more power is lost, meaning higher costs and more carbon emissions.

Colorado gets the picture:  A law passed earlier this year requires that 3% of utilities’ sales be from electricity generated via microgrids.  And in North Carolina, Duke Energy is spending $50 million to rent solar PV systems on residential and commercial rooftops in order to create a distributed energy system for other homes in North Carolina.  Now that’s what I’d call a Smart Grid.

–Erica Etelson

Working in the solar industry, we’re used to hearing the classic naysayers’ refrain which goes something like this: “Solar is a feel-good fantasy that will never really catch on because it’s too expensive.”  We’ve been trying to disprove this myth for quite a while (except for the feel-good part–that’s true!).  But don’t take it from us, listen to what the über-authoriative International Energy Agency (IEA) has to say about solar’s future in its May 2010 Technology Roadmap: 25% of global electricity by 2050 and “grid parity” by 2020.  (Grid parity means solar costs the same as conventional electricity).  To achieve grid parity, we’ll of course have to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $557 billion a year globally, which will require the kind of political backbone I’ve yet to see in my 40-something lifetime.

But the renewable energy optimism award surely goes to the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) which, in conjunction with Greenpeace, released a report last week concluding that renewables can supply 95% of the world’s electricity by 2050, creating 8.5 million jobs along the way.  In the EREC scenario, solar would comprise 30% of the renewable energy feeding the grid.  Notice that the EIA and EREC evaluations of solar potential are nearly identical–25% or 30%.  When two independent analytical powerhouses reach the same conclusion, odds are they’re spot on.  As the fossilized business-as usual-model fades into oblivion, the next bull in the china shop is solar.

–Erica Etelson

As we worry about a double-dip and where the jobs are going to come from if we have a sustained recovery, we should pay attention to the jobs potential of renewable energy. In a new report by Greenpeace International and the European Renewable Energy Council it is clear that clean energy is better than business as usual from a jobs perspective.

Read more of Danny’s latest on SFGate’s City Brights: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dkennedy/index?#ixzz0qNd1A57i

We were pleased to learn a few days ago that, of the ten utilities ranked highest for use of solar power, five are in Sungevity’s service area–PG&E, SMUD, LADWP, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.  The other five are Arizona’s Salt River Project, Arizona Public Service Co., Florida Power & Light, Public Service Electric & Gas (NJ), and Public Service Co. of CO-Xcel Energy (CO).

The rankings are based on the total amount of solar energy in each utility’s portfolio, which includes solar power generated by grid-tied residences with rooftop solar arrays.  In other words, there are quite a few Sungevity customers out there whose solar systems helped these utilities increase the share of solar power in their energy mix.  In 2009, while overall demand for electricity was down, these ten utilities increased their solar power integration by 66%.

Though the trajectory is positive, there is still a long way to go, even for PG&E, the number one ranked solar utility.  There are 85.2 megawatts of solar energy in PG&E’s grid, that sounds like a lot (whatever a megawatt is anyway), but it’s actually only….drum roll please–.14% of PG&E power mix.  (Note the decimal point–it’s not 14%, it’s .14%.  We need to break the whole number threshold and turn .14% into 14% tout suite.

–Erica Etelson

Kaiser Medical Center in Santa Clara

Two corporate giants have announced substantial investments in renewable energy.  Google invested $39 million in a North Dakota wind farm.  Google.org has, in the past, invested in solar thermal and geothermal, but this is the first (though surely not the last) time the company is making a direct renewable energy investment out of its corporate treasury.

Meanwhile, HMO giant Kaiser Permanente is installing solar panels on 15 of its California facilities in pursuit of its goal of obtaining 25% of its power from renewable sources by 2020.  Kaiser expects that the $96 million power purchase agreeement will, ultimately, cost less than what the company would otherwise pay for electricity over the life of the contract.

When name-brand, highly profitable businesses like Google and Kaiser invest in renewable energy, their motivations are financial, not philanthropic.  These companies are among the first to recognize what Sungevity customers already know–switching over to renewable energy is a wise financial strategy that benefits the bottom-line just as much as it benefits the planet.  It’s not about greenwashing, it’s about preparing for a post-carbon economy.  Now that’s what I’m talking about.

–Erica Etelson

Two news stories came to my attention this week, one good and one bad.

The first was a great report from the Solar Energy Industries Association on green job creation in this space…

Continue reading Danny K’s latest on SF Gate’s City Brights.