Celtic Solar

When I started this blog, I had no idea that there was a business in Launceston, Cornwall UK named Celtic Solar. This blog is not associated with the company at all, but as namesake spirits I thought it only appropriate to share a little about them with the video below.

If you are in the UK and looking for a better way to heat your swimming pool or hot water, give this a call.

Link:

Celtic Solar

Solar Bill of Rights

If you own your home, and you have good sun exposure and you can afford it (or have a clever lease), you should be able to put solar panels on your home. Unfortunately, site assessment and affordability are not the only hurdles that many home owners need to overcome.

Across the country, local zoning laws and homeowners' associations (HOA) govern the approved uses of a property. While these rules are often created to uphold a community's property values, they can also prohibit the installation of solar panels, solar water heaters or solar heating and cooling technologies.

The tide is recently shifting and zoning laws are now being used to protect a homeowner's right to solar access from California to Maryland. Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) aims to eliminate zoning laws and HOA rules that prohibit the installation of solar nationwide.

Recently the House-passed energy and climate bill included a provision which would direct the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to prohibit private covenants or homeowners associations from preventing the installation of solar systems through rules or excessive fees.

Related Legislation

• H.R. 2848 Solar Opportunity and Local Access Rights (SOLAR) Act
• S. 1016 Solar Opportunity and Local Access Rights (SOLAR) Act

To secure policies of solar freedom and to empower consumers, Rhone Resch, President and CEO of the SEIA, declared, on October 27, 2009, in the City of Anaheim, California, a Solar Bill of Rights:

"We seek no more than the freedom to compete on equal terms and no more than the liberty for people to choose the energy source they think best."

Here is the 8 point proposed Solar Bill of Rights.

1. Americans have the right to put solar on their homes or businesses. Restrictive covenants, onerous connection rules, and excessive permitting and inspections fees prevent too many American homes and businesses from going solar.
   
   
2. Americans have the right to connect their solar energy system to the grid with uniform national standards. This should be as simple as connecting a telephone or appliance. No matter where they live, consumers should expect a single standard for connecting their system to the electric grid.
   
   
3. Americans have the right to Net Meter and be compensated at the very least with full retail electricity rates. When customers generate excess solar power utilities should pay them consumer at least the retail value of that power.
   
   
4. The solar industry has the right to a fair competitive environment. The highly profitable fossil fuel industries have received tens of billions of dollars for decades. The solar energy expects a fair playing field, especially since the American public overwhelmingly supports the development and use of solar.
   
   
5. The solar industry has the right to equal access to public lands. America has the best solar resources in the world, yet solar companies have zero access to public lands compared to the 45 million acres used by oil and natural gas companies.
   
   
6. The solar industry has the right to interconnect and build new transmission lines. When America updates its electric grid, it must connect the vast solar resources in the Southwest to population centers across the nation.
   
   
7. Americans have the right to buy solar electricity from their utility. Consumers have no choice to buy clean, reliable solar energy from their utilities instead of the dirty fossil fuels of the past.
   
   
8. Americans have the right, and should expect, the highest ethical treatment from the solar industry. Consumers should expect the solar energy industry to minimize its environmental impact, provide systems that work better than advertised, and communicate incentives clearly and accurately.

Solar Energy Industries Association: Solar Bill of Rights

Solar Thermal Comes to the Rooftop

Solar concentrated thermal energy is a great technology to generate electricity. To understand the technology see this. However, it generally needs a large area to be effective. This has meant that it was only an option for electrical utilities. If you wanted solar electricity for your home or business, your only option was photovoltaic.

A small but growing Hawaiian company has just changed that!

The name of the company is Sopogy. Just like the company, their name is a mash-up of Solar Power & Technology.

Sopogy's rooftop solution, like many breakthroughs, seems to have been a happy accident. They had planned to supply the massive industrial solar thermal market, just like every other solar thermal electric tech company. As part of their development, they had made test troughs and put them on the roof of their headquarters. This allows them to test things like different tracking angles or mirror materials and quickly gather data. It also was a spot they could take potential investors, clients, or media to display the product.

You can see the company founder in the bottom video explain to one reporter that they are not intending these for rooftop use. After explaining many times that these rooftop systems were not the intended use, they looked at the data and said 'why not?'. Their troughs were small enough for many business rooftops and were cheaper per kilowatt-hour than photovoltaic. Recent advances allowed generators to be used with lower temperatures. The company has now created a new niche.

Electricity is just one option for these rooftop systems; you can even use them to power a cooling system.

More about the Sopogy company and technology in this second video below:

Solar Power At Night!

One of the, often sited, drawbacks of solar energy is that it does not produce power at night. A new solar plant in the Arizona desert is about to change that.

It is named "Starwood Solar One" and it will be located 75 miles west of Phoenix in the Harquahala Valley.

When complete in 2013, the 290 MW solar thermal power plant will cover 1900 acres of desert and be the largest dispatchable solar power plant in the world. A "dispatchable" plant is one that can be tapped for electricity whenever needed, such as peak demand periods day or night.

'How is that possible?', you might ask.

Mirrored troughs concentrate the sun to heat liquids, that are piped into giant insulated tanks of molten salt. The tanks are heated to over 700 degrees Fahrenheit. With an insulated thermal mass this large, the tanks can maintain their temperature for weeks with very little degradation. This means that they can be used to generate steam and drive turbines whenever needed, day or night and even during cloudy weather.

Simple temperature monitors can be used to estimate production capacity currently stored in the tanks. This makes the plant output highly predictable and dependable; something photovoltaic and wind cannot do currently. It would take weeks of "solar drought" in Arizona before the plant would not be able to produce at full capacity.

It will produce enough power for ~73,000 customers. The construction will also create 7700 jobs and have a price tag of $2.7B. With no ongoing fuel costs, it will pay for itself and then some; all while not polluting and no miners need to die and no mountain tops need to be removed to feed it.

This type of solar thermal energy as well as geothermal energy are demand-response sources that can be used to supply the base load. This also allows them to adjust to the fluctuations that wind and photovoltaic can produce. Together these can make a complementary portfolio of renewable energy production.

UPDATE: Despite all the contracts signed in May, on October 1st, this project was, sadly, canceled. I hope Starwood can find someplace more dedicated to renewable energy to build.

Links:
Huffington Post
Green Energy News
EcoGeek

DSIRE Launches Solar Site

DSIRE is the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency. It is a large database with incentives for each US state and territory for everything from Appliances to Wind. It is a comprehensive list, but if you are looking for solar information only, it can be overwhelming to comb through heat pumps and front loading washing machines.

Since there is so much solar related information the DSIRE team has now launched the DSIRE Solar site. It includes an interactive US map. You can select PV or solar thermal incentives when using the state-by-state map.

Link: DSIRE Solar

Oregon's Power Potential (3/8) Solar

Solar

The University of Oregon Solar Energy Center reports that solar energy is, by a substantial margin, Oregon’s most abundant energy resource. Some solar advocates claim that solar's capability to produce electricity, heat and light exceeds that of all other energy resources in Oregon - including hydro and wind. This seems to ignore factors of collection and transmission. Even if it is hyperbole, it does make the point that the rainy Oregon has a massive potential for solar power that is often overlooked.

When most people think of Or-e-gone, they think about rain. That impression comes from the heavily populated NW corner (my corner) of the state. Approximately 60 percent of Oregon is desert, receiving less than seven inches of rain annually. The picture to the right is a solar energy resource map for state for the month of July. While this picture is a little less sunny in December, the state boasts annual solar energy exceeding most of Europe, Japan, New England, the Middle Atlantic States south to Virginia, and the upper Midwest. Solar is clearly an option for Oregon. Some large projects have been proposed for the Eastern desert areas.

Solar can be harvested either as solar-thermal or as photovoltaic. Solar-thermal uses mirrored troughs to heat oil or salt brine. Another uses concentrating mirrors to a tower. This is then used to boil water. Once heated the thermal mass of the brine means that passing clouds do not cause power spikes and power can often be generated 5-6 hours after the sun goes down.

The drawback for solar is that the population centers are in the NW corner of the state, the one area where solar is the least abundant.

Part 4 Wave >>

The Future or the Past

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
~Albert Einstein

We, America, have a problem. Oil! Our economy and transportation are currently dependant on it. There is a limited supply, most of it is in countries that want to kill us and our way of life.

What thinking should we use to get out of this problem? 'Drill, baby drill' is the same thinking that got into the problem. As Amory Lovins put it, Oil is the only addiction where some people think the cure is more supply.

The cheese has moved and we must adapt.

My daughter stumbled on an old pac-man game of mine. "Daddy, what is this?", she asked.

"That is a game from the 19 hundreds", I replied.

Our current fossil fuel based economy is also from the 1900s. And unlike video games, it has not evolved. We have a choice to make. The way things have been or something else. I propose the Renewable Electron Economy.

The Renewable Electron Economy includes 3 primary components:

1. A robust coast to coast smart grid that can quickly direct renewable power to where it is needed
   
2. A diversified portfolio of renewable energy including geothermal, solar, wind, & wave
3. A disbursed energy storage system that buffers demand and generation
   

#1 on this list allows wind power generated in South Dakota to be delivered to delivered to population centers such as Chicago. It also has the ability to inform geothermal and hydro plants to increase or decrease their production at a moment's notice; small quick adjustments to adapt to demands and variability in other supplies. It also has the ability to let all consumers know the state of the supply. So things like your refrigerator, air conditioner, furnace or water heater that are turning on and off all day can shift their demand by a minute or two when demand spikes or supplies momentarily dip.

#2 Solar & Wind power are highly predictable on a annual basis. This is why their investment returns are highly predictable. But on a moment to moment basis, they are at the whim of the weather. Just as it is smart to diversify your investment portfolio with non-correlated funds, it is also smart to have a variety of renewable energy production. When the sun is not out, it is usually windy. Use a variety of locations to cancel out micro-climate impacts.

We can have solar across the southern & southwest states, wind from Texas to Canada (T Boone had that part right), on the coast lines, wave power and wind. The Pacific coast is on the "Ring of Fire" and can provide geothermal, especially with recent geothermal breakthroughs backed by google.org. All of these add up to a lot of potential renewable energy across our country that is diverse and plentiful.

#3 on the list is a relatively new idea to me. Since many of the renewable power sources are intermittent, they need to be buffered with an energy storage system. For example, with solar thermal power production, a salty brine is heated and can be used to provide power for up to six hours after the sun sets. With this system, passing clouds do not cause production blips.

Similar to how the cache on your hard drive speeds it up without increasing its storage, energy storage can allow the grid to respond faster without increasing its capacity. Another non-exclusive option is to include an energy storage system in the producer itself. For example, an ultra-capacitor included in a wind turbine. The wind turbine charges the capacitor and power is drawn from the capacitor. This again means that gusts and moments or dead air do not result in production blips. Monitoring the storage totals informs the power company of their reserves.

V2G (or vehicle-to-grid) is one option for disbursed power storage that the grid could call on when needed. This idea is eloquent in that plug-in cars become a benefit to the grid rather than a burden. However, it is not yet worked out and standardized. And some auto manufacturers are reluctant to support it because of the additional demand it will place on the vehicle's batteries.

Another idea is for power companies to create their own power storage warehouses. This could be done by buying batteries on the cheap after their vehicle usable life is over. With the increase in hybrids and plug-ins, this is one way to reuse the batteries.

This is a vision of an achievable renewable powered future. You can be part of making it happen. The answers are simple, but that does not mean that they will be easy.

We don't have an energy crisis, we have only a crisis in education.
~R. Buckminster Fuller