Tag Archives: rooftop

A grid with a million solar rooftops



Bill McKibben wrote for Rolling Stone 11 April 2013,

The Fossil Fuel Resistance,

A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet
than ConEd; it’s a farmers market in electrons, with the local
control that it implies.

Distributed solar power is
exactly what electric utilities fear.
There’s a reason why

Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning
consistently ranks “renewables” as his second-to-last power
source;
the only thing worse for big baseload utilities is his last one:
efficiency, which could remove all demand for additional electrical supply in Georgia.

How big of an opportunity for the rest of us is this threat to the
cozy business model of big baseload utilities? Continue reading →

IKEA biggest solar in Georgia



The biggest solar rooftop installation in Georgia?
Not by mighty Georgia Power, not by an EMC, not even by GaSU:
it’s IKEA’s distribution center in Chatham County.
Chatham is also trailing only Atlanta in solar installations in general.

Mary Landers wrote for Savannahnow.com 7 January 2013,

New solar adds to Chatham’s growing inventory,

Just in time for the new year, and for a tax break for the old one,
Consolidated Utilities began producing electricity from solar panels
at its water treatment plant in west Chatham County on the afternoon
of New Year’s Eve.

“When I left on Monday the meter was receiving power,”
said Tony Abbott, president of Consolidated Utilities, a private
local water company.

The 416-panel, 100-kilowatt system is big enough to power about 10
average homes for 25 years, said Julian Smith, of SolarSmith, which
installed the system. At the water treatment site, however, solar
will instead power the blowers that keep the sewage ponds aerated.
The panels occupy previously useless property in a flood zone, Smith
noted.

OK, the
Wiregrass Solar installation at Valdosta’s Mud Creek Wastewater
Treatment Plant is larger, and the Valdosta City Council recently
voted to expand it further.
Go Valdosta!

But what about IKEA?

It’s not the largest solar installation in the county. That honor
still goes to the IKEA distribution center, which in October plugged
in its 1,460-kilowatt solar array on the roof of its distribution
center. That IKEA installation is in fact the largest in the state.

Back in July I mentioned that

IKEA was going to build that array,
and IKEA was building almost as much solar as all of Georgia Power’s
parent Southern Company.
BusinessWire reported 9 Oct 2012

IKEA Plugs-In Georgia’s Largest Private Solar Rooftop Array on Savannah Distribution Center: Surpasses 75% U.S. Solar Presence.

This installation represents the 34th
completed solar project for IKEA in the U.S., with five more
locations underway, making the eventual U.S. solar presence of IKEA
nearly 89% of its U.S. locations, generating with a total 38 MW.
IKEA owns and operates each of its solar PV energy systems atop its
buildings — as opposed to a solar lease or PPA (power purchase
agreement) — and globally has allocated €590 million to
invest in renewable energy, focusing on solar and wind during the
coming three years. This investment reinforces the long-term
commitment of IKEA to sustainability and confidence in photovoltaic
(PV) technology. More than 250,000 solar panels have been installed
on IKEA stores and buildings across the world. The company also owns
and/or operates approximately 110 wind turbines in Europe.

The Savannahnow article mentions something
happening in Chatham County but not so much yet in Lowndes County:

“What’s really going on in Chatham is that lots of homeowners
put solar on their rooftops,” Arora said. “The
excitement exists in Chatham for solar.”

-jsq

Renewable energy much needed in Georgia —John S. Quarterman

My op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.



Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River
permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money
on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late
nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for
jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of
clean water.

February 2013:

Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear
reactor

(Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013),
160 miles south of us, because

nobody wants to pay to fix it:
between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion,
plus what it costs to buy power to replace
what Crystal River would have produced while it is
being repaired”

[Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].
November 2012:

NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3

(NRC 1 Nov 2012)
after

Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high
and creates too much risk for Constellation”

[Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].

Continue reading →

Rooftop solar: the most direct route to clean energy industries


Austin vs. San Antonio in solar power
Around here I hear local leaders say “we’ll never be Austin.”
Well, Austin may be letting San Antonio pass Austin as far as rooftop solar
and the jobs that generates.
It’s not a matter of size or pre-existing advantages.
It’s a matter of political will.
Do we have that will here?

TexasVox
wrote a white paper in February 2012,

Solar Austin: Rooftop Solar & Job Creation,

…the most direct route to attracting and encouraging the
development of clean energy industries is through the


the scale of future development will be orders of
magnitude greater than what has occurred to date.

mass deployment of local rooftop solar, which is probably why solar has
by far the most significant presence of any clean energy generation
technology in Austin.

But the paper’s point is that Austin is falling short.
Look at the graph:
Austin seems to have settled for linear growth in solar power,
while San Antonio gets it about
compound growth.
As San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro
said in 2011, solar power is in

Continue reading →

Industrial Authority working for solar in south Georgia @ VLCIA 2012-12-18

The

Industrial Authority
is working to find locations for some of the
210 MW Georgia Power got the PSC to shift
from biomass to solar back in September.
That’s a good next step.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT 23 Dec 2012,

Solar power push has Authority working to establish connections,

Since the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) approved Georgia

Allan Ricketts, Projects and Existing Industry Manager, VLCIA, 2012-12-18
Power Company’s plan Nov. 20 to add 210 megawatts of solar power to
its electrical grid, the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial
Authority has been devising strategies to draw solar energy
producers to South Georgia.

Georgia Power will issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) from solar
energy collection and production companies in early 2013, according
to the PSC, and the company will contract with the lowest bidders to
purchase their energy and place it on the Georgia Power electrical
grid for public consumption.

Georgia Power plans to add 90 megawatts to its grid from distributed
generation (small companies producing between 100 kilowatts and 1
megawatt), and 120 megawatts of large utility-scale projects
producing up to 20 megawatts each. The company plans to price the
solar energy at $0.13 per kWh for distributed generation and up to
$0.12 per kWh for utility-scale projects, according to the PSC.

This government-approved commercial push for solar energy could be a
boon to sunny South Georgia as well as the greater Valdosta area
specifically, and the Authority is prepared to accommodate the solar
energy producers they expect.


Andrew Schruijer, Executive Director, VLCIA, 2012-12-18
“I think there’s a very good possibility of solar energy
coming to South Georgia,” Executive Director Andrea Schruijer
said. “Possibly in the near future.”

There’s more in the VDT story.
It’s pretty much what
Col. Ricketts also told me after the VLCIA meeting Tuesday a week ago.
He asked me if I knew what “distributed” meant.
I pointed out Georgia Power’s version of distributed was actually not
very distributed, compared to

Continue reading →

U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere —Jennifer DeCesaro of DoE



Jennifer DeCesaro of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)
said she liked showing a map of U.S. insolation
outside the U.S. southwest because
then she could point out that
Spain has not as good resources and a larger solar market,
while Germany, the world leader in deployed solar,
has solar resources like the state of Alaska.


So the U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere.

She made a few other comparisons between U.S. and Germany.
U.S.: 30% investment tax credit.
Germany: National Feed-in Tariff.

She talked about

SunShot: the Apollo mission of our time.
It aims to reduce solar costs by 75% by the end of the decade,
making solar cost-competitive with fossil fuels without subsidy.

Actual panels cost about the same in U.S. and Germany,
but the rest

Continue reading →