Solar Panels Sound Death Knell for U.S. Utilities

Energy supply and demand has been the dominating mechanism controlling prices in the public utility sector for a century and that model is threatened by the rise in solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies, writes David Roberts in this Grist article. Reducing energy demand and improving energy efficiency are anathema to the utilities, by their own admission, as Roberts explains. 

The "money quote" in the article, taken from an Edison Energy Institute (EEI) report, states: 

The financial implications of these threats are fairly evident. Start with the increased cost of supporting a network capable of managing and integrating distributed generation sources. Next, under most rate structures, add the decline in revenues attributed to revenues lost from sales foregone. These forces lead to increased revenues required from remaining customers … and sought through rate increases. The result of higher electricity prices and competitive threats will encourage a higher rate of DER additions, or will promote greater use of efficiency or demand-side solutions. 

Increased uncertainty and risk will not be welcomed by investors, who will seek a higher return on investment and force defensive-minded investors to reduce exposure to the sector. These competitive and financial risks would likely erode credit quality. The decline in credit quality will lead to a higher cost of capital, putting further pressure on customer rates. Ultimately, capital availability will be reduced, and this will affect future investment plans. The cycle of decline has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines). 

The bottom line is: don't expect the public utilities to be leaders in the shift to renewable energy. It's clearly not in their financial interests to do so. 

Creative Commons photo from USFWS Mountain Prairie. 

Houston embraces renewable energy

Houston serves as an excellent model for moving away from fossil fuels and nuclear power to a genuinely clean, infinitely renewable approach to meeting a major city's energy needs.

Let there be light (and heat)

A new process developed by Stanford engineers--photon-enhanced thermionic emission (PETE, for short)--promises to boost solar power considerably, bringing it within a range to compete with oil.

"This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak," said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group. "It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy."

Watch and judge for yourself.

Solar Energy Scales to New Levels

The 14-megawatt solar power installation (shown in the photo) that operates at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada is about to be upstaged by a planned installation in California with an 800-megawatt capacity.

As the New York Times reports in Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California, the two photovoltaic installations, now being planned for central California, will produce power at a scale equivalent to a small nuclear power plant when the sun is shining brightly. The scale of this project is a clear indication that solar power has reached a new milestone. Pacific Gas & Electric will purchase the power from the two companies behind the installations: Optisolar and SunPower Corporation.

The companies said they were forbidden by contract terms to talk about price, and a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric said her company was trying to obtain the best possible deal for ratepayers by not telling other suppliers of renewable energy what it was willing to pay.

But all three companies said the costs would be much lower than photovoltaic installations of the past.

To some degree, these two installations are driven by recent mandates legislated in California, requiring energy producers to reach a level of 20 percent renewables by 2010. But, they also serve as a proof-of-concept that solar can generate power at a vastly larger scale than in the past using the latest technologies.

Storing Solar Energy the Way Plants Do

One of the chief complaints about the practicality of solar energy has been: what do you do when the sun isn't shining? MIT researchers have come up with an answer: using a technique similar to that used by plants during photosynthesis. The development of a new catalyst to produce oxygen when an electrical current is passed through water, working in combination with another catalyst that produces hydrogen gas, becomes a powerful mechanism for charging fuel cells. This stored energy can be released as needed, a virtually carbon-free source of electricity that is available day or night.



As quoted in an article for the MIT News by Anne Trafton, Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, who has co-authored a paper on this discovery for the July 31, 2008 issue of Science, sees this as a landmark advance in energy production.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

Nocera also points out that the amount of sunlight that strikes the Earth in one hour is sufficient to supply the energy needs of the entire planet for a year.

In a video post on the MIT site, Nocera talks more about the potential of this new process.

Japan's Many Examples of Energy Efficiency

One smart solution to our energy problems is to make due with less. Since the early 1970's, Japan, the world's second largest economy, has become skilled at that practice, adapting to the fact the country has a small land area and few natural resources. This hasn't stopped them from applying innovative energy saving techniques, particularly in the manufacturing sector, as discussed in a New York Times article, Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways. Journalist Martin Fackler noted:

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

The photo at the top of this post, by Ko Sasaki for The New York Times, shows a view through a window looking onto a commercial complex in Chiba, Japan, that uses transparent solar panels on window glass to generate power.

And the Winning Photovoltaic Is...

In an effort to quantify the efficiency, related emissions, and the hidden energy costs of the leading photovoltaic technologies, the Brookhaven National Laboratory and Columbia University recently conducted an extensive life-cycle assessment. Comparing data from companies that make single-crystal, multicrystal, ribbon silicon solar cells, as well as the thin-film CdTe photovoltaic systems just introduced to the market, the study, described in an Environmental Science and Technology article, produced a clear winner.

The analysis took into account frames, cables, and other necessary support materials, as well as the energy required for manufacturing under three scenarios, each with a different proportion of electricity coming from coal, natural gas, or other sources. The team based their assumptions on ground-mounted systems under southern European light conditions, over 30-year lifetimes.

In the end, the CdTe photovoltaics came out on top. With more efficient energy conversion and the lowest cost, the technology used less energy and had fewer emissions overall, despite some Cd emissions during the manufacturing process. However, emissions from fossil-fuel-powered electricity dwarfed those Cd emissions by orders of magnitude.

For access to the complete manuscript, Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles, click here.