Tomorrow my daughter and I will spend the afternoon on a project for her science class at school: building a model house whose electrical power is delivered with solar photovoltaics.  I have a small solar panel that (I believe) will put out about 5 Watts in the full sun, and a couple of flashlight batteries of different types.  I think I’m going to have to experiment with series vs. parallel circuits, different bulbs, etc., before I get this right.  Should be fun.

I had a lovely phone chat last evening with a young lady, a high school senior who was working on a paper for school and wanted to ask a few questions about solar energy.  In particular, she wanted to know the cost of  converting her entire town (Arcadia, CA — 56,000 people, let’s say 20,000 households) to 100% solar.

Understandably, she hadn’t thought through some of the implications.  E.g., you’re contemplating cutting these homes off from the grid and replacing that service (the cost of which is quite low, as it’s shared across literally millions of homes) with the cost of individual PV arrays and battery storage that would provide each of these 20,000 homes with reliable power.

“OK,” I suggested, “Let’s do the math and answer your question.  Let’s assume these are your typically 2000 square foot homes; I would guess that the per-home cost for PV with full storage/back-up would be about $20,000. Times 20,000 homes is $400 million. That’s a lot of money for one small community.  Who’s going to pay for that?”

This is what you’d be forced to do  if you were building a house in the middle of nowhere, with no access to an electrical utility.  But since each of these houses is already grid-connected, a less radical approach would be adding PV for daytime use, selling excess power back to the grid, and using the grid for power at night.

I went on to explain that I view renewable energy as the “next best thing.”  The very best thing is not using the energy in the first place.  A staggering amount of electrical energy would be saved if everyone living in each of those 20,000 houses would wear sweaters in the winter instead of cranking up the heat, open the windows in the summer instead of blasting the air-conditioning, replace incandescent lights with CFLs (and turn them off when not in use), insulate pipes, ceilings and walls, etc.

She seemed to be absorbing this nicely.  I hope she did well on her paper.

Here’s a good article on the solar photovoltaics industry by consulting giant McKinsey and Company. Not to give anything away, but they share my belief that the PV industry is in a momentary lull, not a swan song. Best of all, they defend this belief in an extremely cogent and well-reasoned way. I hope you’ll check it out.

I just got an email from the Sierra Club, wanting me to get on board for a piece of environmentalism that goes like this:

This year, Assembly member Felipe Fuentes has a bill that would allow the Calico Solar Project, a solar project in California that will cover 4,613 acres—four times the size of the Golden Gate Park- within an area key to the survival of the desert tortoise- to bypass the environmental review process that almost all other projects are subject to.

I see no reason that anyone or anything should be exempt from the standard environmental review processes. Having said that, it’s always struck me as inflexible to refuse to make tough choices. Imagining 4,613 acres as all PV, we’d have about a gigawatt (after using a capacity factor of 0.2) , a replacement for a coal-fired power plant. I hate to sound insensitive, but considering the larger ecological and health-related issues of burning coal, I would think that the savings would justify exiling some desert tortoises.

When you are preparing to install a solar energy system, ensure that the power storing batteries are located nearby to the cells. This prevents power from getting lost in the cables. It also reduces shading of the solar shells. Shading reduces solar panel energy generation.

Replace any leaky windows with weather-sealed efficient ones. There are several benefits in using these windows, including a decrease in energy bills and less condensation on the windows.

If you use fuel oil to heat your home, ask a professional if you can use biodiesel. Many heating systems can be switched over to run on biodiesel without needing extra modifications or parts. Biodiesel is great because it is more efficient and produces less pollution that standard oil, which will reduce your carbon footprint.

A simple way to reduce the energy you use is to not use an automatic ice dispenser. Automatic ice makers are convenient, but they also use a ton of energy and aren’t very reliable. There are also prone to getting leaky seals, which ends up raising the temperature inside of your freezer. Make the ice yourself to avoid these issues.

You should always be using your ceiling fans, even in the winter. With a clockwise rotation, they can be used to circulate the air and help the warm air come down. This will help the room feel warmer and the heater will not be used as much. Running the heater less frequently will more than compensate for any electricity used by the fan.

Buy rechargeable batteries for your electronics. Traditional batteries end up in landfills. Rechargeable batteries are good for the environment and your wallet. Choosing rechargeable batteries over traditional types will save you a lot of money over time.

Avoid cranking the heat in your home unless it’s absolutely necessary. Put on a sweater and sweatpants when it’s cold. When heat is turned very high, vast amounts of energy are wasted.

Install a programmable thermostat. This can help save money and energy. You can pre-program the settings, so you can have a temperature that is constant. You can also set up your own programs to control the temperature during different times of day.

You can increase the energy efficiency of your home with proper weatherization procedures. You can seal ducts, add in insulation, and put in new windows and cooling systems that are energy efficient so that you can reduce the energy it takes to operate your home. By making these changes, you will make your home more energy-efficient, thereby, saving money on your utility bills.

All of this article’s tips are easy and simple to do, so don’t permit excuses to distract you from using them. Using green energy will make you feel better and begin providing benefits quickly.

Information Gathered From Blog Earth 4 Energy

Here’s an article that gets to a couple of important points that are illustrative of where we are and where we’re going in clean energy.

• Financing solar photovoltaics. There is no doubt that homeowners would be more likely to invest in solar if the PV on their roofs could be integrated in their mortgage, just like their plumbing, HVAC, or electrical system.

• Integrating electric vehicles. My friend Paul Scott has enough PV on his roof that his Nissan LEAF very rarely has to plug in to the grid; thus the carbon footprint of his transportation is limited to the manufacturing of the vehicle (and the PV) itself. Not bad! Obviously, he’s an early adopter, but this concept is likely to go mainstream over the coming years.

Here’s an article on the creation of “biorock,” coral reefs that grow extra quickly when an electrical current, generated with photovoltaics on the ocean’s surface, is applied to steel girders on the seabed.

Proponents argue that the replacing of the huge number of reefs that have been damaged by pollution is an extremely important task. They note that more than a quarter of the world’s reefs have died in the past few decades and that at least another quarter will perish within the coming twenty years.

However, environmentalists are mixed on the idea. A reader from Costa Rica who wishes to develop an eco-friendly way to raise oysters writes: “scientists and ecologists here are too conservative and ambientalista (“environmentalist”) lobbyists are against it.”

When I was much younger I recall telling a friend that if I had to live the rest of my life on exactly three foodstuffs, I would select oysters, mangoes, and beer. Of course, that was before I developed a love for renewable energy.

Where could I possibly be going with this?

Check this out: a project submitted by Chris Rene, a terrific contributor to what we’re doing at 2GreenEnergy, that combines solar energy and shellfish farming, using solar energy to grow oyster seed that will then sequester ocean CO2.

That’s a lot of goodness rolled into one. Onshore, just add a few mango trees and a microbrewery, and I think you’ve nailed it.

Seriously, if anyone’s interested in speaking with Chris, please let me know and I’ll arrange a conversation.

More info here:

www.condofish.com
http://hermosa-bay-oyster.yolasite.com/links.php
http://condofish.wordpress.com/about-2/committee-members/
http://condofish.wordpress.com/

A reader from Savannah, GA and I spoke on the phone the other day and became fast friends. In response to my piece on subsidies for solar, he writes:

I keep going back and forth on this very difficult issue. On balance, I’m against photo-opp seeking politicians and their bureaucrats (pol-crats) picking winners and losers.

Still, the last decade’s big gush of subsidy bucks (grants, credits, feed-in-tariffs) may be cited as birthing a gold-rush style ramp-up of solar PV production that maybe would not have otherwise happened.

And sure, if all that leads to unsubsidized, $1/watt pricing and thus 100 million arrays erected, then I can see some substantial positive economic/ecologic impact resulting.

All of this analysis changes, by the way, once the Holy Grail (cost-feasible electricity storage) is invented.

Right.  There is no quantum shift from solar at an unacceptably high price to solar at sub-$1/Watt; rather, as R&D happens and manufacturing capacities scale, the price comes steadily down. And, of course, subsidies that are designed to make this process more attractive to early players facilitate the process.

Compare this to the subsidies for oil that were (legitimately, in my book) handed out 90 years ago. In their absence, oil exploration would not have happened, and the boom that we saw in the 20th Century would not have occurred.

Of course, here we are 90 years later, and, via corruption, we’re still shelling out subsidies to the most profitable industry on the planet, but that’s another matter.  They were, in my view, as correct actions in their day as are our subsidies for renewables today.

Here’s an interesting piece by super-blogger Marc Gunther, suggesting that subsidies for solar have been misapplied and have created weird market conditions. No argument from me there. Handing people money to do a certain thing is a guarantee that they’ll do exactly what you’ve asked them to do – and no more. Thus the imperative to be very sure you’ve been precise in that request. I’ll be the first to admit that, in the case of solar, we haven’t done that.

Simultaneously, the author discusses the need for innovations across a wide range of cleantech that needs to be rolled out over the coming 20 years, and suggests the need for a carbon tax.

Fair enough. But a stick with no carrot? Simply because our incentives have been applied imprecisely doesn’t mean the whole concept should be discarded. And if you honestly want to encourage innovation that takes decades to come to fruition, the dynamics of the “cash is king” market economy are not going to get the job done.