SENTIENT TIMES April/May 2006

One Roof at a Time

By Bill McKibben

With no help from the Bush administration—but plenty from Europe, Japan, New York, and California—solar power is edging into the mainstream.

The pressure for such programs is increasing as the news about climate change becomes more urgent—in August, a study in Science reported that solar technology was developed enough to play a major role in fending off global warming, but only if we increased its use 700-fold in the next half-century. That sounds impossible—but it’s only a 14 percent annual increase, less than half the current global rate.

“It was about three years ago that solar started to go into an overdrive growth rate worldwide,” says Christopher Flavin, director of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington environmental monitoring group. More solar power has been harnessed on the world’s rooftops in the last two years than in all of previous history. And now Americans are stepping up to the plate in rapidly increasing numbers. One solar panel manufacturer calculates that the domestic PV market is growing as fast as 60 percent a year, fast enough that within a decade, California alone should have more solar panels than any single nation.

“The global installed capacity will hit a gigawatt this year,” says Randy Udall, head of the solar program in Aspen, Colorado, one of the nation’s most advanced solar cities. On the one hand, that’s barely more than two big coal-fired power plants. Still, it’s enough to encourage an industry: The world spent $20.3 billion on development of solar and wind power in 2003, one-sixth of the total global investment in power-generation equipment. Notes Udall, “This is not a children’s crusade any more.”

The subsidy for renewable energy doesn’t come close to matching the billions in government support for fossil fuels, which includes everything from the oil-depletion allowance to the endless federal largesse for “clean coal” research. Still, the government help, almost all of it from states instead of the federal government, is crucial. “Absent that, I couldn’t have done it,” says Grieco, who took advantage of New York’s law to cut his costs in half. “I didn’t have $31,000, but I did have $15,000.” At that rate, he’ll have a 20-year payback on his investment, and the panels should last another 20 years after that.

Dori Wolfe’s company, Global Resource Options, installs systems across the Northeast. They did $1.3 million in sales last year. This year, thanks to the rebate laws, they were closing in on $3 million by September. Some states, like Vermont, consistently max out the government funding pool— “as soon as a customer commits,” says Wolfe, “I get the paperwork to the state capitol so they don’t miss out.”

In a perfect world, people would buy clean power even without subsidies, simply because they wanted to help clean the atmosphere. But, as Udall points out, much as Thomas Jefferson mystifyingly managed to overlook the fact that he owned slaves, we now collectively overlook our production of 45,000 pounds of greenhouse gases per family per year—enough to fill two Goodyear blimps. Surely our descendants will wonder why we didn’t notice, why we did nothing.

But instead of waiting for people to give up their slaves, the program Udall runs in Aspen will buy them back. Launched in 1994, it’s one of the most innovative and successful solar-subsidy operations in the country: When some movie exec builds a 10,000-square-foot palace in Aspen, he must either pay to install a large solar system on his roof, or write a check for $10,000 to the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, which uses it to underwrite zero-interest loans for other homeowners going solar. There are now solar mobile-home parks in the Mojave Desert and solar public schools in Massachusetts; the University of California at Berkeley has 312 panels atop the student union.

You’d kind of expect solar panels in Berkeley. But maybe not in Placer County, on the California-Nevada border, where a developer named US Homes is planning a new 917-unit solar housing development. A smaller builder, Clarum Homes, has been building “zero-energy” houses in places like Watsonville, in California’s Central Valley. “Our goal is to bring green energy to entry-level home buyers,” Clarum cofounder John Suppes said earlier this year.

Not all of those panels are in places we think of as sunny. “If you look at a solar map of the United States,” says Wolfe, “down in Florida they get four hours of sun on an average day. In Vermont, it’s three. But of course, they need more electricity because everyone has air conditioning. It all evens out.” In fact, the map of installed solar capacity in the United States follows much more closely the map of rebates and tax credits—and the map of high electricity prices.
To really understand the math, consider Japan. It gets half the sunshine of California, but it has three times the installed photovoltaic capacity of the United States.

“Electricity in Japan costs 20 cents a kilowatt-hour,” roughly four times the US average, notes Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute. “They don’t have their own cheap fuel—they have nuclear plants, they have imported liquefied natural gas.” So they were open to the idea of solar panels, and in the early ‘90s the Japanese government started offering subsidies for installations. After the country hosted the Kyoto conference on global warming in 1997, efforts increased: a “70,000 Roofs” program drew massive national publicity, and as of last year, the actual number of PV installations had reached more than twice that goal. That’s created enough momentum to drop the price of solar installations by as much as 80 percent since 1993—and move most of the world’s panel factories to Japan. The result: Rooftop power now costs the Japanese, on average, between 11 and 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, well below the price of conventional juice. As Worldwatch researcher Janet Sawin detailed in a report last May, things have gone so well that government subsidies are now being phased out and it’s not making a difference: The market is expected to grow 20 percent a year even without the extra support.

Much the same has happened in Germany, where a 1991 law forced utilities to buy any renewable power that anyone generated, and at a generous price. Since then, the country’s solar capacity has been growing almost 50 percent annually. Germany has topped its “100,000 Rooftops” goal and is now aiming for a million; it already produces more energy from the sun than any nation except Japan. “It’s amazing to see,” says Sawin, who recently returned from an international conference on renewables in Germany. “You go up into the hills, into the Black Forest, and you can see where one house or one barn put up solar panels, and then it just swept through the community. You have whole swaths where all the south-facing roofs have panels.” You also have 10,000 people working in the solar industry.

Yet with the exception of BP, which is the world’s largest maker of solar panels, big energy still doesn’t take the new renewables seriously, says Sawin—after all, wind and sun still represent less than 1 percent of the world’s electric generation. “It mirrors the attitude of IBM toward Microsoft in the early 1980s,” she says. But the growth rates for solar power—22 percent annually for a decade—are like those for personal computers or cell phones in their early years, fast enough, Sawin says, to “rapidly vault a new industry from insignificance to market dominance.”

Bill McKibben, an accomplished and popular ecological author, is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. His latest book is Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape. Reprinted with permission from the author. Photo credit: Chris Nelder, Cooperative Community Energy

Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles

Mass-marketed gasoline-electric hybrids autos use an electric motor under the hood next to the gas engine to create fuel economy by kicking into use during idling, backing up, slow traffic, and to maintain speed after the gas engine has been employed for acceleration. The on-board electric battery is constantly being charged by the gas engine and by the motion of the wheels and the brakes.

Plug-in hybrids, now in prototype stages of devel-opment, take this technology a step further. By adding the ability to charge up from a standard household outlet, typically overnight, such cars relegate the gas engine to back-up status and instead let the electric motor do most of the work.

Proponents claim that such “gas-optional” cars can be twice as fuel efficient as hybrids, which already get double the gas mileage of traditional vehicles, if you don’t take long trips and thus rely entirely on the electric motor. Additionally, they say, powering up plug-in hybrids with wall sockets results in far less pollution (from the power plants providing the electricity) than an equivalent gasoline-powered car spews out its tailpipe. Meanwhile, plug-in hybrids recharged from rooftop solar power systems might approach being the world’s first mass-market “zero emission” vehicles, requiring no power from the grid at all.

While the experimental electric vehicles of a decade ago and older required re-charging every 25-50 miles, rendering them useless for anything but short trips, the new plug-in hybrids solve this problem by employing much more sophisticated battery technology while still keeping the insurance of gasoline (and a gas engine) on-board.

The California Cars Initiative (CalCars, www.calcars.org) is lobbying the world’s major automakers to introduce plug-in options on future hybrid models, and has built showcase examples themselves that achieve 100 miles per gallon using Toyota’s Prius. Meanwhile, a growing list of state and local governments say they would seriously consider converting their fleets to plug-in hybrids if such vehicles became available.

The website www.HybridCars.com reports that DaimlerChrysler has built a handful of prototypes based on its 15-passenger Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van. And analysts believe Toyota already has the technology in place but may be waiting to gauge consumer demand before making any production commitments.

From EarthTalk, E/The Environmental Magazine. Read past columns at www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.