Homeowners may lease solar equipment

American Solar Electric, a Scottsdale-based installer of solar photovoltaic systems, and SunRun, a California company that leases solar equipment, are offering a program that allows homeowners to get solar electricity in Arizona without high up-front costs.

Under the program, the two companies will install a PV system on the homeowner’s roof for as little as $1,000 down. SunRun leases the system to the homeowner, allowing immediate savings on the homeowner’s monthly electric bill without the large up-front cost involved in purchasing the system, the companies said.

SunRun said it provides maintenance, repairs, insurance and performance guarantees for the PV system.

Customers who sign up for the lease agreement by April 30 will receive the first three months of their electricity free, the companies said.

FOX FYI: Solar Power

Solar power: it's green, cheap and good for the planet. But some environmentalists are fighting a plan to build solar energy plants in the southwest desert.

FOX 10's Linda Williams has a closer look at both sides of the issue.

"There's this false sense of urgency to install these facilities as fast as possible and it's being pushed under the premise that we have to do this quickly."

Jim Harvey loves the planet, but hates the Administration's aggressive embrace of solar power farms.

"When it comes to renewable energy, I don't think we have to be followers; I think it's time for us to lead."

Trying to double America's renewable energy supply in three years, the administration targeted billions in stimulus money for solar projects.

"There is this sense of urgency because we do have global climate change and we need to do something about that soon." says Jim Baak.

Developers have plans for dozens of plants in southern Nevada and California, but critics call big solar plants destructive, bulldozing thousands of acres of pristine desert to install mirrors and photovoltaic panels.

Then there's the water.

The National Park Service says it is "not in the public interest" to approve concentrated solar plants in the southwest desert because they require 16 billion gallons of groundwater per year, threatening the endangered desert pupfish.

"They are trying to sell us they are trying to greenwash the scraping of thousands and thousands of acres, destroying ecosystems all under the name of or under the banner of saving ecosystems and this is just wrong says Harvey.

The clock is ticking on the debate over whether to spend years studying the full environmental impact of large-scale solar power or get these plants built. The deadline to qualify for stimulus money is 19 months away.

The argument against solar plants in the desert is not falling on deaf ears. California Senator Diane Feinstein says she will block development in the Mojave Desert if the ecosystem is not properly protected.

Solar Power from Space

Living on Earth is an independent media program and relies entirely on contributions from listeners and institutions supporting public service. Please donate now to preserve an independent environmental voice.

For information on how to listen to audio on our website, click here. Air Date: Week of April 24, 2009

The proposed satellite would be about half a mile wide and create a beam of energy four miles wide by the time it reaches the earth. (Courtesy of: Engadget)

California utility PG&E plans to start receiving renewable energy from space by 2016. A satellite will collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth where it will be used for electricity. John Mankins is a former manager of NASA's space solar power studies. He tells host Jeff Young that such a system could provide baseload solar energy, 24 hours a day. YOUNG: Well, the climate change bill before Congress aims to push renewable energy sources to new heights.

Here's a project that takes that concept quite literally. California energy utility PG&E has contracted with the private company Solaren to put solar panels in space—and beam the power back to earth. Solaren hopes to start commercial operation by 2016, pulling 200 megawatts from orbit—that's about half what an average coal fired power plant generates.

John Mankins managed NASA's space solar power studies before starting his own company, Managed Energy Technologies. Mankins says a solar satellite is no small undertaking.

MANKINS: It's about a half a mile across for the transmitter and it's on the order of ten thousand tons or approximately twenty international space stations. It would collect the sunlight and convert it into electromagnetic radiation into a beam of energy and then send it to some other locations such as a receiver on the earth.

YOUNG: Now I'm envisioning this giant laser beam of concentrated solar power shooting down to the planet, but that's not quite right.

MANKINS: [laughing] Hopefully, no one would ever actually build such a system. The beam when it's up in space would start out at about a half a mile across and then it would spread and be on the ground – and again everything depends on the details of the engineering – but it would spread to be approximately four miles across. You'd certainly want to take the right precautions, keep the energy density, the amount of power that's in a square meter of the beam low enough to be safe. You'd want to geographically isolate the receiver so it wasn't in a populated area. And you'd want to have safe guards so that planes would, for example, not be allowed normally to fly through the beam and in the event that one did inadvertently or deliberately try to fly through the beam, you'd have to be able to cut it off in a timely way so that – a sort of belt and suspenders and buttons approach - so that it was safe to start with, it's remote, and you turn it off just in case.

John Mankins is co-founder and chief operating officer of Manged Energy Technologies and former manager of NASA's space solar power studies andtechnology research and development. (Courtesy of NASA) YOUNG: And then, what's the collection system like? How do you get the energy on the surface of the planet?

MANKINS: Very, very elegantly. There's basically a simple antenna with a diode in the middle of it, and it takes incoming radio waves and converts it at very, very high efficiency, maybe 80% or 85% efficiency into voltage. Mechanically, it would look a great deal like chicken wire, like a mesh, and so even though you had this large antenna collecting energy from the solar power satellite above you, below the ground itself would still receive something like 80 percent of normal sunlight, the rain would pass though, it would not have any kind of significant impact on the sort of the ecosystem, whether it was farms or natural land beneath it.

YOUNG: So, the solar power is collected on these satellites, which is orbiting, and obviously the solar energy up there is much stronger than it is here on earth, right?

MANKINS: So up in space the average sunlight passing the earth from the sun is about 1,400 watts per square meter. And on the earth at mid summer, mid day in the desert, it's about 1,000 watts per square meter. And on the earth, of course, you add the additional factors of normal atmospheric absorption, you add weather, you add nighttime and the overall average sunlight which is available per square meter up in space is significantly greater than that which could ever be collected on the earth.

The proposed satellite would be about half a mile wide and create a beam ofenergy four miles wide by the time it reaches the earth. (Courtesy of: Engadget)

YOUNG: Now, wouldn't the satellite also be in the shadow of the earth at some point or can you position it so that it gets sunlight all the time?

MANKINS: A lot of different cases have been looked at. The one that looks the most promising is to place these solar power satellites in what's called a geostationary earth orbit – that's the same orbit that used for example by broadcast satellite radio or by broadcast TV satellites. Its high above the earth, about twenty three thousand miles up, and it has an usual property - that the time it takes for a satellite to go around the earth at this particular distance is just at 24 hours. If you use the right kind of transmission technologies, this is basically solid state arrays, you could deliver power from one satellite to New York in the morning to Dallas at midday and to Los Angeles in the afternoon.

YOUNG: Is it going to be worth the investment, though?

MANKINS: If you can solve the engineering problems, if you can get solar energy from space, for on the order of ten cents a kilowatt-hour, which is highly competitive with terrestrial energy sources, space solar power has the potential to provide absolutely carbon neutral energy to billions of people 24/7. So those would be problems definitely worth addressing.

YOUNG: John Mankins is an expert in space based solar power. He's with Managed Energy Technologies. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

MANKINS: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

Nobel-winner has vision of affordable solar power

A thin plastic film coated with tiny solar cells that looks something like a color transparency would absorb enough energy to provide power, Heeger said, but would cost five to 10 times less than traditional solar power.

"I have solar on my roof, and it is wonderful to wake up in the morning and see the power meter running backwards," Heeger said. "My electric bill averages zero ...but it will require 10 to 12 years of use before I earn back the capital cost. It is like having an S-class Mercedes on my roof."

"The goal is to try to make that capital cost significantly less," he said. "If people could have a payback for installation in two years, then it would be everywhere."

Heeger, a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2000, was the speaker for the Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce's 15th an nual Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture last week at the Woodrow Wil son School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

More than 150 members of the business community, university and public attended his lecture, titled "Turning the Dream of Low Cost Plastic Solar Cells into a Reality."

"We are finally seeing some real momentum in this country for the use of wind, solar, and even wave energy," Heeger said. "The fundamental point here as far as solar is concerned is that we receive on the Earth in one hour enough energy to take care of the needs of the planet for a year. The issue is how to use that, how to convert that into electricity."

Converting sunlight to energy is a three-step process, Heeger said. First a material must absorb the photons emitted by the sun, then a photo induced charge separation must occur, and finally the charges need to be collected at electrodes.

A new class of plastic polymers containing metals can be poured on a surface, where they dry into a thin film. This film can be printed as ink on a thin plastic sheet at a relatively low cost. "The dream is to be able to do something like that," Heeger said. "A kind of functional ink containing plastic solar cells."

The trick is to find a way the cells would emit enough energy to meet power needs. Right now the thin plastic coated film does not produce enough energy to make it viable for solar power, but in the future, Heeger believes it will. Scientists are working to create more advanced polymers that will absorb a broader spectrum of light and produce enough energy for solar power.

"We are trying to increase the efficiency," he said. "The efficiency is critically important ... A new class of polymers has recently emerged and this is coming together ... it is not yet good enough, but we are getting some real tools in our tool box. There is a clear vision of technology that will get us to low cost plastic solar cells."

The implications of such technological advances would be monumental, Heeger said.
"In the hand of a family in India or Africa living off the grid, it will change their lives," he said. "They can have lights at night and watch television."

Solar-cell firm focuses on the future

=Solar-cell manufacturer Suniva’s plant in Norcross could be something right out of an ad for the Obama administration’s green jobs revolution.

Workers in lab coats quietly scuttle back and forth, adjusting whisper quiet, bright-white machines, checking readings and inspecting newly manufactured solar cells that will one day power homes and businesses in India, Europe and, someday, the U.S.

The plant’s 75 to 80 employees even include a few refugees from Atlanta’s shuttered auto manufacturing sector —- iconic symbols of transformation from old, heavy, energy-intensive manufacturing to the new, clean, energy-producing manufacturing on which President Barack Obama is staking his green-energy policies.

As a U.S.-based manufacturer, Suniva CEO John Baumstark said his company hopes to capture a share of the $150 billion in alternative energy investments promised by the Obama administration over the next 10 years. The company is especially interested in relaxed rules for federal loan guarantees for large-scale alternative energy investments.

What could that mean specifically for the nearly 2-year-old company? A new plant that would more than double Suniva’s current manufacturing capability, Baumstark said. Could the plant end up in Georgia? Maybe.

“We’d love to stay in the U.S.,” he said.

Suniva was founded by Georgia Tech professor Ajeet Rohatgi, who was recently honored by the Environmental Protection Agency for helping protect the world’s climate. He serves as the company’s chief technology officer and sits on the board of directors.

The company opened its Norcross plant amid much fanfare in December. Gov. Sonny Perdue said the plant was the opening salvo in Georgia’s effort to attract a share of the 440,000 new jobs and $325 billion in investment the Solar Energy Industries Association expects the field to produce over the next eight years.

The state and local governments gave Suniva millions of dollars in incentives to locate in Gwinnett County, and Baumstark said the company would very much like to build its second plant in the U.S.

But some analysts caution that as a startup, Suniva could be treading on dangerous ground in trying to get out from under the shadow of larger, more experienced manufacturers, such as California-based SunPower.

“Suniva has high efficiencies, but SunPower has been doing the same thing for four or five years,” said Ted Sullivan, a senior analyst with Lux Research Inc., who follows the solar industry and is predicting a significant shakeout among competitors as the market continues to be glutted with oversupply of solar cell ingredients and products.

“In this environment, I question startup companies with very similar technologies to what’s already out there building new capacity.”

Baumstark says what sets Suniva apart is its ability to create high-efficiency solar cells at a lower cost than its competitors. And he said quick contracts with big module assemblers in India and Europe prove the company’s appeal. More deals are on the way, he said.

Now, with increasing emphasis on alternative energy projects emanating from Washington, Suniva officials say they’re seeing an uptick in interest domestically.

“Made in the U.S., we’re getting a lot of play off that,” Baumstark said.

Solar power charges Amdavadis

Imagine a house running only on solar energy. From water heater to every light bulb. This thought could turn into a reality soon, with a sharp rise in number of takers for this alternative and green power source.

Advanced solar appliances have become popular among educational institutes and corporate houses to generate thermal and electric energy.

School of Solar Energy, a constituent of Pandit Deen Dayal Petroleum University in Gandhinagar is researching photovoltaic cell - a device that directly converts sunlight into electricity which could bring down the cost of using solar energy. They are not alone. Indian Institute of Management in city (IIM-A )has installed solar street lights in the campus, Intas Biopharma has started with a borocell solar heating panel for their kitchen facilities and even Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has plans for solar powered street lights in AMC gardens.

General Manager (projects- engineering) of Intas Biopharma, Satish Kolte says, "Not only is solar energy an environment-friendly option, it also cuts on costs in the long run. We started with this solar prototype two months ago in our kitchen and so far, it has given good results."
"We will be using solar energy in all our upcoming plants. We believe industries can tap into this freely available large source of energy," adds Kolte.

Recently, Gujarat government also announced Solar Power Policy, 2009, to promote solar power generation as an alternative source of energy.

Satish Deshpande, a solar power expert, has been using solar energy in his home since the last 12 years and now prefers to cook his lunch in his solar concentrator. Deshapande says, "It makes economic sense to embrace it."

Akshat Khare, a young entrepreneur has started a solar-based lighting system to promote the use of solar energy. "We have installed solar streetlights at IIM-A, SEWA and at other organisations in city," he says.

Applications keep coming for the FPL Solar Power facility in Western Martin County

Applications keep coming for the FPL Solar Power facility in Western Martin County
INDIANTOWN — Another 3,500 job applications were taken Saturday at Timer Powers Park in Indiantown on the last day of a two-day job fair to recruit workers for the Florida Power &Light Co. Solar Power facility in western Martin County.
In all, 8,000 applied for some 1,100 jobs the project is expected to bring to the area before construction closes at the end of next year.
“That’s a fair but maybe conservative number,” said John Dinger of Workforce Solutions, which collected the applications and will immediately begin prescreening them.
To accommodate early arrivals, fair organizers once again opened the lines prior to the planned 10 a.m. start time. Friday, unofficial reports from volunteers indicated job seekers began arriving Thursday evening and in the predawn hours Friday to be at the head of the line.
“We probably got started about 9:15 this morning,” Dinger said. “We made an absolute commitment to the community that we would be there until 4 p.m. to take applications and we were there until 4 p.m.”
Those unable to apply in person at the fair still have an opportunity to submit applications.
“You can go to the local Workforce Solutions office in your area and fill out an application and, beginning next week, you can go online at yourworkforcesolutions.com to apply,” Dinger said.
Despite the large turnout — organizers originally anticipated receiving approximately 3,000 applications in total — Dinger said the resumes and applications should be screened and forwarded to project contractor Lauren Engineers & Contractors within two weeks.
“Lauren has let us know what keywords and qualifications they’re looking for. Each county (office) will do its own applications sorted by positions, so we should have the screening completed in about 10 to 14 days,” he said.
Though the final tally by county was not yet in Saturday evening, Dinger said St. Lucie County, hampered with a 12.8 percent unemployment rate, appeared to lead area counties on Friday.
“I think St. Lucie County was running ahead of Martin County yesterday, but I believe it began to even out today,” he said.
At least 1,000 Palm Beach County residents also submitted applications at the fair, and Saturday saw hopefuls arriving from as far away as Tennessee and California, Dinger said.
Despite the multitudes, the two-day event went off completely without incident.
“Once again people came prepared, and we had a little more crew today,” Dinger said. “It was wonderful. With that many people over two days we didn’t have one incident with law enforcement.”
Scores of volunteers from the Indiantown Western Martin County Chamber of Commerce and Indiantown Nonprofit Housing Inc. assisted with the fair directing traffic, parking cars, manning booths and providing information.
“This type of event in no way goes this seamlessly without the support of the whole community. We are so grateful,” Dinger said.