Public Power - July/August 2008 - (Page 20)

Solar Energy Rising all doubled their annual installations, compared to 2006. Retailers such as Best Buy, Safeway, Costco, Home Depot, Staples, Target and Macy’s are installing photovoltaics, in some cases on fleets of buildings. Walmart installed a 624 kW system on one store and announced a pilot program involving 22 locations in California and Hawaii. Kohl’s will add solar panels at 64 of its 80 California stores, starting with an initial purchase that will generate 35 million kWh and offset 14,000 tons of greenhouse gases. Although growth in 2007 encompassed all market segments—residential, commercial and industrial—the fastest was in larger installations. Of the on-grid capacity, almost a third came from 30 installations of 500-kV or more, including a 14-MW project built on a landfill at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base and an 8-MW facility built for Xcel Energy in Colorado. The trend toward larger installations has been accompanied by the increased use of power purchase agreements. GreenTech Media reported nearly half of the 70 MW of non-residential photovoltaic installations during 2007 were under power purchase agreements, compared to virtually none prior to 2005. It projects 90 percent will be Co. and Nevada Power Co. under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Fifteen concentrating solar power plants with a total of nearly 4,000 MW are in the pipeline, most slated for the South- Because it can be dispatched more readily, “storage is the technology that can make solar thermal very valuable.” under power purchase agreements by 2009. “Whoever figures out how to make power purchase agreements work in the residential sector will be rich!” said National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Margolis. The nation has also seen growth in the low-temperature solar heating system sector. Nearly 111 million square feet of solar thermal collectors were shipped domestically during the 10 years through 2006, including 19.5 million square feet in 2006—2.5 times the 7.8 million square feet shipped in 1997. Solar Energy Industries Association said building heating and cooling, which had stagnated at annual installation levels totaling less than 40 MW—half of it in Hawaii—exploded after passage of the investment tax credit to the equivalent of about 90 MW annually in Florida, California, New York, Arizona, Colorado, Puerto Rico and Illinois. Pool heating, which does not qualify for the investment tax credit, has nonetheless been thriving at an average rate of 8 percent, with two thirds of the market in California and Florida. However, the biggest future growth may be in utility-scale concentrating solar power projects. Advocates note solar plants have their highest output on bright sunny days when electric usage—and spot prices—are highest. Consequently, there are some areas of the country where concentrating solar power can already compete during peak periods. Acciona’s 64-MW Nevada Solar One, near Las Vegas, the largest concentrating solar power project built in the U.S. during the past 17 years, went on line in June 2007. Output is sold to Sierra Pacific Power west. The Prometheus Institute believes concentrating solar power and the hybrid concentrating photovoltaic, jointly known as concentrating solar thermal (CST), could become a $200 billion market through 2020. Global CST announcements in the six months prior to April 2008 were worth $30 billion. The Southwest is the best place to build concentrating solar power plants. Concentrating solar power plants require about five acres of land per MW. American Solar Energy Society said even after filtering out terrain issues like ownership, insolation levels and slope, 7 terrawatts of solar capacity exist in the Southwest, which is seven times the total existing U.S. generating capacity. Since utility-scale concentrating solar power plants take four to six years to negotiate and build, the long-term extension of the investment tax credit is critical. DOE and the Bureau of Land Management, which administers significant acres of prime concentrating solar power land, have begun work on a programmatic environmental impact statement to analyze land-use plans and shorten the development timeline for new concentrating solar power projects. Meanwhile, the Western Governors’ Association has, among other things, recommended eliminating property taxes, identifying “solar zones” and developing a transmission infrastructure plan. 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Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - July/August 2008

Public Power- July/August 2008 Contents Perspective 10 Questions Solar Energy Rising Sacramento's Solar Shares Gainesville Crowns a Conservation Idol By the Numbers Curbing Costs of Outages Reliability Green Energy Hometown Connections Customer Service Parting Shot

Public Power - July/August 2008

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