NYT | (Solar) Power to the People Is Not So Easily Achieved

[Boris2k7]

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Solar panels on the garage roof of this apartment building in Washington Heights gather sunlight from dawn to dusk. Here, the the streets were bathed in orange hues from streetlights.


About New York
(Solar) Power to the People Is Not So Easily Achieved

January 23, 2008
By JIM DWYER

One day nearly four years ago, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to give solar electricity a try at home — home, for me, being an apartment house in Washington Heights, alias upstate Manhattan. The price of electricity was climbing. A war was being fought, if not over oil, then certainly over the ground the oil was in. Solar technology had proven that it could generate real power.

And while the building may not have been in the eternal sunshine of Arizona, it does stand on one of the highest spots in Manhattan. The first rays of the morning come blazing into the windows on its east side, and the last tangle of daylight bounces off the west side. The roof bakes in the sun all day. As far as I could tell, our building needed only one star aligned in its favor, and we happened to be locked in at just the right spot.

Oh blissed ignorance.

So now, a few lessons from a private co-op apartment building that is getting enough solar power, during daylight hours, to run the elevators, the laundry room, and the hall lights.

Crowded as New York is at ground level, it is the Great Plains of roofs, with acres and acres of sunny, open space. Anyone so inclined can write a big check and probably get electricity from solar panels in a few months.

If, on the other hand, you want the panels to make a semblance of economic sense — if, for instance, you live in a 50-year-old building that has bills to pay — the path becomes serpentine and the pace drops to a crawl.

New Yorkers pay a small monthly fee on their utility bills that goes toward a fund for energy improvements, administered by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, the main wrangler of incentives for alternative energy. (www.nyserda.org)

Four solar companies gave us proposals. All of them said that since the building had a one-story garage, it would be much less expensive to put the panels on that low roof rather than on the building’s roof, saving the cost of about 170 feet of cable and conduit. The lowest price, after negotiation, was $370,000 from Altpower of Manhattan for a 50-kilowatt system, about 25 percent less than the average cost per watt in the state. It was still a ton of money, considering how much electricity the system would provide.

We gathered capital from state grants and tax credits amounting to $265,000, and financed the balance with a low-interest 10-year loan. Over that decade, the residents will pay roughly the same amount for the solar loan as they would have paid for commercial electricity distributed by Con Edison. After that, the panels are guaranteed to run for another 15 years, cranking out electricity at very low cost.

Having been raised in the city, I believe that apartment life is humankind’s natural state, but in the course of this project I discovered, to my amazement, that not everyone thinks so. Many state and federal incentives are geared to single-family houses and simply don’t work for New York co-ops. The trail of blind alleys is mapped out in detail in a report by the City University of New York’s Center for Sustainable Energy.

Two people from the building managed to fix one of those problems. New York State gave a tax credit for 25 percent of the installation cost — but capped it at photovoltaic systems of 10 kilowatts, not nearly enough for our array, which would be five times larger. Laura Hembree and Gene Bernstein, who serve on the building’s co-op board (as do I) explained the situation to Herman D. Farrell, a Democratic Assembly member, and Dean Skelos, a Republican state senator. They sponsored legislation that changed the tax credit so it could be used by apartment houses, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed it into law on July 3.

At the end of November, the panels were hoisted onto the garage roof. We will get to this stirring moment. First, though, one final lesson, that comes with a warning: this part is so boring that it turns strong people into stones. But it is the crux of how the financing works, of what makes it all possible.

The solar power from our roof has to be segregated from the power supplied by Con Ed. All the electricity delivered by Con Edison runs through a new master meter, and the solar power is fed separately into the building supply. The master Con Edison bill is paid by the co-op. The residents in each of the 217 apartments pay the co-op at regular retail rates for any electricity they use, whether it comes from Con Edison or from the solar panels. This provides the revenue to pay the monthly loan.

The 266 panels form an elegantly simple jigsaw puzzle, linked to each other across the garage roof and connecting the cosmos to our refrigerators. They were nearly four years coming, and one day in arriving. That great thinker, Kermit the Frog, was right: It ain’t easy being green.

But no one had said how beautiful the panels would be, the deep indigo blue framed with a border of white stone ballast that keeps them earthbound. A blind woman in Seamus Heaney’s poem “At the Wellhead,” tells of a revelation at the moment she realized there was something besides water in a well: “I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.”


E-Mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[Boris2k7]

An article that runs almost in opposition to to the sentiments of the last one...



Noah Berger for The New York Times

Peter Rive of SolarCity, an installer of rooftop solar cells in California.


A Green Energy Industry Takes Root in California

February 1, 2008
By MATT RICHTEL and JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — The sun is starting to grow jobs.

While interest in alternative energy is climbing across the United States, solar power especially is rising in California, the product of billions of dollars in investment and mountains of enthusiasm.

In recent months, the industry has added several thousand jobs in the production of solar energy cells and installation of solar panels on roofs. A spate of investment has also aimed at making solar power more efficient and less costly than natural gas and coal.

Entrepreneurs, academics and policy makers say this era’s solar industry is different from what was tried in the 1970s, when Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, invited derision for envisioning a future fueled by alternative energy.

They point to companies like SolarCity, an installer of rooftop solar cells based in Foster City. Since its founding in 2006, it has grown to 215 workers and $29 million in annual sales. “It is hard to find installers,” said Lyndon Rive, the chief executive. “We’re at the stage where if we continue to grow at this pace, we won’t be able to sustain the growth.”

SunPower, which makes the silicon-based cells that turn sunlight into electricity, reported 2007 revenue of more than $775 million, more than triple its 2006 revenue. The company expects sales to top $1 billion this year. SunPower, based in San Jose, said its stock price grew 251 percent in 2007, faster than any other Silicon Valley company, including Apple and Google.

Not coincidentally, three-quarters of the nation’s demand for solar comes from residents and companies in California. “There is a real economy — multiple companies, all of which have the chance to be billion-dollar operators,” said Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California, Berkeley. California, he says, is poised to be both the world’s next big solar market and its entrepreneurial center.

The question, Professor Kammen says, is: “How can we make sure it’s not just green elite or green chic, and make it the basis for the economy?”

There also are huge challenges ahead, not the least of which is the continued dominance of fossil fuels. Solar represents less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $3 trillion global energy market, leading some critics to suggest that the state is getting ahead of itself, as it did during the 1970s.

The optimists say a crucial difference this time is the participation of private-sector investors and innovators and emerging technologies. Eight of more than a dozen of the nation’s companies developing photovoltaic cells are based in California, and seven of those are in Silicon Valley.

Among the companies that academics and entrepreneurs believe could take the industry to a new level is Nanosolar, which recently started making photovoltaic cells in a 200,000-square-foot factory in San Jose. The company said the first 18 months of its capacity has already been booked for sales in Germany.

“They could absolutely transform the market if they make good on even a fraction of their goal for next year,” Professor Kammen said. “They’re not just a new entrant, but one of the biggest producers in the world.”

Many of the California companies are start-ups exploring exotic materials like copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS, an alternative to the conventional crystalline silicon that is now the dominant technology.

The newcomers hope that CIGS, while less efficient than silicon, can be made far more cheaply than silicon-based cells. Indeed, the Nanosolar factory looks more like a newspaper plant than a chip-making factory. The CIGS material is sprayed onto giant rolls of aluminum foil and then cut into pieces the size of solar panels.

Another example is Integrated Solar, based in Los Angeles, which has developed a low-cost approach to integrating photovoltaic panels directly into the roofs of commercial buildings.

In 2007, 100 megawatts of solar generating capacity was installed in California, about a 50 percent increase over 2006, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.

That growth rate is likely to increase, in part because of ambitious new projects like the 177-megawatt solar thermal plant that Pacific Gas and Electric said last November it would build in San Luis Obispo.

The plant, which will generate power for more than 120,000 homes beginning in 2010, will be built by Ausra, a Palo Alto start-up backed by the investor Vinod Khosla and his former venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The industry in California is also helped by state and local governments’ substantial subsidies to stimulate demand. The state has earmarked $3.2 billion to subsidize solar installation, with the goal of putting solar cells on one million rooftops. The state Assembly passed a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, which could spur alternatives like solar.

Additional incentives have come from a small but growing number of municipalities. The city of Berkeley will pay the upfront costs for a resident’s solar installation and recoup the money over 20 years through additional property taxes on a resident’s home. San Francisco is preparing to adopt its own subsidy that would range from $3,000 for a home installation to as much as $10,000 for a business.

The subsidies have prompted a surge in private investment, led by venture capitalists. In 2007, these seed investors put $654 million in 33 solar-related deals in California, up from $253 million in 16 deals in 2006, according to the Cleantech Group, which tracks investments in alternative energy. California received roughly half of all solar power venture investments made in 2007 in the United States.

“We’re just starting to see successful companies come out through the other end of that process,” said Nancy C. Floyd, managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm that focuses on alternative energy. “And through innovation and volume, prices are coming down.”

Whether any of this investment pays off depends, as it did in previous eras, on reaching the point at which solar cells produce electricity as inexpensively as fossil fuels. The cost of solar energy is projected to fall steeply as cheaper new technology reaches economies of scale. Optimists believe that some regions in California could reach that point in half a decade.

At present, solar power is three to five times as expensive as coal, depending on the technology used, said Dan Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, the philanthropic division of the Internet company. Among its investments, Google says, is $10 million in financing for eSolar, a company in Pasadena that builds systems that concentrate sunlight from reflecting mirrors.

“We’re at the dawn of a revolution that could be as powerful as the Internet revolution,” Mr. Reicher said. The problem is, he said, “renewable energy simply costs too much.”

At a conference of alternative energy companies in San Francisco last month, to discuss how to encourage the industry’s growth, Mr. Brown, the former governor, joked that if the participants wanted to make real headway selling alternative energy, they should try not to come off as flaky. “Don’t get too far ahead of yourselves,” said Mr. Brown, now the state’s attorney general. “You will be stigmatized. Don’t use too many big words and make it all sound like yesterday.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company