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Archive for the ‘environment’ Category

California’s game-changing solar deal

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, endangered species, enviro startups, environment, First Solar, OptiSolar, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, SunPower, tagged , , , , , on August 14, 2008| 24 Comments »

photo: David Lena

In a move that could alter the economics of the global solar industry, California utility PG&E on Thursday announced that it will buy 800 megawatts of electricity produced from two massive photovoltaic power plants to be built in San Luis Obsipo County on the state’s central coast. The 550-megawatt thin-film plant from Bay Area startup OptiSolar and a 250-megawatt PV plant from Silicon Valley’s SunPower dwarf by orders of magnitude the five-to-15 megawatt photovoltaic power stations currently in operation around the world.

Most of the industrial-scale solar plants designed to replace fossil-fuel power use solar thermal technology, meaning they deploy mirrors to heat liquids to produce steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. Photovoltaic power plants essentially take the solar panels found on suburban rooftops and put them on the ground in gigantic arrays. How gigantic? OptiSolar’s Topaz Solar Farm will cover 9 1/2 square miles of ranch land with thin-film panels like the ones in the photo above. Combined, the two solar plants would produce enough electricity to power 239,000 California households, according to PG&E (PCG).

“Obviously this is huge and a bold move,” says Reese Tisdale, a senior analyst who studies the economics of solar power for Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s a pretty big jump in manufacturing capacity and a big opportunity for the PV industry, particularly for thin-film.”

If the power plants are ultimately built – and that’s a big if, given the challenges to get such facilities online – and other utilities follow PG&E’s lead, demand for solar modules could skyrocket. (Thin-film cells like those made by OptiSolar are deposited or printed in layers on glass or flexible metals. They are less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than standard solar modules but they use far less expensive polysilicon and can be produced much more cheaply.)

First Solar (FSLR), a leading thin-film maker, has an annual manufacturing capacity of around 275 megawatts – which will rise to a gigawatt by the end of 2009. (First Solar is building two small-scale solar power plants for Southern California Edison (EIX) and Sempra (SRE).) SunPower (SPWR) is expected to produce 250 megawatts worth of solar modules this year; its California Valley Solar Ranch project for PG&E alone will be consume 250 megawatts.

“If we were trying to do it this year, it would be all of our production,” says Julie Blunden, SunPower’s vice president for public policy. “SunPower is ramping very quickly. By 2010 our production will be at least 650 megawatts.” SunPower’s solar power plant is set to begin producing electricity in 2010.

The PG&E deal puts OptiSolar in the spotlight. Founded by veterans of the Canadian oil sands industry, the stealth Hayward, Calif., startup has kept its operations under cover, avoiding the media as it quietly set up a manufacturing plant in the East Bay and prepared to break ground on a million-square-foot factory in Sacramento.

OptiSolar CEO Randy Goldstein told Green Wombat that the company will have no problem producing enough solar cells to build Topaz, which is scheduled to go online in 2011, as well as fulfill contracts for some 20 small-scale power plants in Canada.

“Our plan has always been to produce solar energy on a very large scale to make it cost-competitive, even in a market like California,” Goldstein says.

The terms of utility power purchase agreements like the ones OptiSolar and SunPower have signed with PG&E are closely held secrets, but it has long been an open secret that building massive photovoltaic power plants was not economically viable. Last year when I attended the opening of an 11-megawatt PV power station in Portugal – which offers generous solar subsidies – that was built by SunPower’s PowerLight subsidiary, PowerLight’s CEO told me that pursuing such projects in the U.S. was not an attractive proposition due to market incentives and public policy.

So what has changed too make constructing gargantuan PV power plants profitable?

“Lots of things have changed,” says SunPower’s Blunden. “Power prices are going up and public policy is requiring utilities to have a portfolio of renewables.”  And after building some 40 megawatts of power plants in Spain, SunPower has been able to improve its manufacturing processes and cut costs, according to Blunden.  “We could see where the cost reductions were coming down and the benefits of scale,” she says. “We saw there was a way for us to be competitive with other renewables.”

Goldstein says OptiSolar’s business model of owning the supply chain – from building its own machines to make solar cells to constructing, owning and operating power plants – will allow it to reduce costs. “By taking control of the value chain from start to finish, by being vertically integrated and cutting out the middleman,” he says, “we can be competitive not only with other renewable energy but with conventional energy.”

Photovoltaic power plants do have certain advantages over their solar thermal cousins. They don’t need to be built in the desert, thus avoiding the land rush now underway in the Mojave. PV is a solid-state technology and with no moving parts – other than the sun tracking devices used in some plants – they make little noise and are relatively unobtrusive. Most importantly in drought-stricken California, they consume minimal water. And the modular nature of solar panels means that a power plant can start producing electricity in stages rather after the entire facility has been constructed.

“The economies of scale does make PV cost competitive with other renewable energy generating technologies, and wouldn’t be possible without advances that SunPower and OptiSolar have been working on,” says PG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Zerwer. “We take a stringent look at all technologies and we’re not wedded to a particular one.”

With the PV plants, PG&E now has contracts to obtain 24 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.

But contracts are no guarantee the even a watt will be generated. The Topaz and California Valley projects must overcome a number of obstacles, not the least of which is the U.S. Congress’ failure so far to extend a crucial 30 percent investment tax credit for solar projects that expires at the end of the year. SunPower’s Blunden acknowledges the PG&E project is contingent on the tax credit being renewed.

PG&E executive Fong Wan said as much at a press conference Thursday afternoon: “That is a major hurdle. If the investment tax credit is not extended, I expect many of our projects will be delayed.”

Then there’s the question of how welcoming rural San Luis Obispo County residents will be to two massive solar power plants in the neighborhood. Along with a 177-megawatt solar thermal power plant being built by Silicon Valley startup Ausra for PG&E adjacent to the Topaz project, the county has become a solar hot spot. Ausra has run into some community opposition and state officials are growing concerned about the impact of the power plants on protected wildlife.

“The challenge is going to be the magnitude of these projects,” says Tisdale, the energy analyst. “Other projects are already facing opposition from the environmentalists.”

But for solar power companies like OptiSolar the impetus is to get big and get big fast. “I think it’s going to demonstrate that photovoltaics have the ability to be part of the energy mix,” says Goldstein of Topaz. “We can scale up and have a big impact. There’s not going to be a lot of room for niche players in the long run.”

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Ford exec jumps to Think Global

Posted in electric cars, environment, green cars, PG&E, plug-in electric hybrids, Southern California Edison, Think Global, tagged , , , , , on August 12, 2008| 3 Comments »

photo: Think Global

Norwegian electric carmaker Think Global, once owned by Ford, has tapped Ford executive Richard Canny as its new president and chief operating officer. Canny previously served as president of Ford South America, president of Ford Argentina and managing director of Ford Malaysia.

Think also announced Tuesday that it has hired a veteran of Volvo and Saab, Mikael Ekholm, as executive vice president for engineering and manufacturing. The appointment of the Australian-born Canny comes as the Oslo company ramps up production of the City, it’s Internet-enabled, battery-powered urban runabout.

Green Wombat chatted with Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums via e-mail Tuesday about the rollout of the City in Europe, its next model – an electric crossover SUV –  and the company’s plans for the United States market. (At Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference in April, Willums announced the formation of Think North America with marquee venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Rockport Capital Partners. Other investors in Think include General Electric (GE) )

“The factory completed its planned build of 100 cars for the local market prior to the Norwegian summer shutdown,” says Willums, a longtime entrepreneur and sustainability expert who made his fortune as a co-founder of Norweigan solar company REC Solar. “Of course, like any new vehicle launch we are having occasional new issues arise and teething problems to overcome.”

The cars are now on Oslo roads racking up high mileage under real-world conditions, he adds.

(You can still spot the previous generation of the City, built under Ford (F) ownership, tooling around Oslo, as I did when I visited in 2007 for a story I did on Think.)

Willums says Think will boost production in the second half of the year to support sales in Norway and elswhere in Scandinavia. “During 2009, we are planning a roll out to a number of other European markets with our plans for the major cities (Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Zurich, Basel) being the priority,” he says. The order of the rollout, he notes, will depend in part on where the government and private sector incentives for electric vehicles are strongest.

To that end, Willums says that the timing of the City’s debut in the United States will be determined in part by state incentives and the policy of the incoming administration in Washington.

Think is in a race to get its cars on the road as the big automakers accelerate their plans for plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars for the mass market. General Motors (GM) is hurrying to bring its Chevy Volt plug-in electric hybrid to showrooms while Toyota (TM) is working on a plug-in version of the Prius. Mitsubishi will supply its i MiEV electric car to California utilities PG&E (PCG) and Southern California Edison (EIX) for fleet testing.

Meanwhile, work continues on the Think Ox, the company’s planned five-seater crossover model. Think showed off a concept version of the electric car at the Geneva auto show earlier this year. The addition of Canny, Willums says, should help the company “grow and mature to a larger scale electric car producer.”

Along with gearing up production of the City, Think has been energizing its marketing efforts, judging by the slick promotional video it created for the Ox below. (For a higher-def version, go here.)

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Solar industry fights utility’s big solar project

Posted in alternative energy, climate change, energy, environment, First Solar, global warming, green tech, PG&E, renewable energy, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, SunPower, tagged , , , , , , , on August 12, 2008| 21 Comments »

photo: Southern California Edison

When Southern California Edison unveiled plans to install 250 megawatts’ worth of solar panels on warehouse roofs back in March, it was hailed as a ground-breaking move. In one fell swoop, the giant utility would cut the cost of photovoltaic power, expand the solar market and kick-start efforts to transform untold acres of sun-baked commercial roof space into mini-power plants.

There’s just one problem: the solar industry is fighting the billion-dollar plan. In briefs filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, solar companies, industry trade groups and consumer advocates argue that allowing a utility to own and operate such massive green megawattage will crowd out competitors who can’t hope to compete with a project financed by Edison’s ratepayers.  (In California, shareholders of investor-owned utilities are guaranteed a rate of return for approved projects, while utility customers bear a portion of the costs in the form of higher rates.)

The five-year plan “would establish SCE as the monopoly developer of commercial-scale distributed solar in its service territory,” wrote Arno Harris, CEO of Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco company that sells solar electricity to commercial customers. “This would irreparably impair the development of a competitive solar industry.”

Southern California Edison (EIX) is the first utility in the United States to propose such a “distributed generation” scheme and the dispute is being watched closely as a test case for the viability of producing renewable electicity from hundreds of millions of square feet of commercial rooftops. Such systems can be plugged directly into existing transmission lines and tend to generate the most solar power when electricity demand spikes – typically on summer afternoons when people crank their air conditioners. Having such green energy on tap would save utilities from having to build expensive and planet-warming fossil fuel-powered “peaker plants” that sit idle except when demand suddenly rises.

Even critics hail Edison’s move as “bold” and “visionary” and no one disputes that in California the development of big rooftop solar has lagged. For instance, the state’s $3.3 billion “million solar roofs” initiative is designed to put smaller-scale solar panels on homes and businesses and provides generous rebates for systems under 1 megawatt. At the other end of the scale, the state’s big utilities have been signing contracts to buy electricity from solar thermal power plants to be built in the desert. Left out of the subsidy game are incentives for the 1-to-2 megawatt arrays well-suited for commercial buildings.

Southern California Edison says it’s filling that gap and will energize the solar industry, not crush it. The utility plans to lease 65 million square feet of commercial rooftop space in the “Inland Empire” region of Southern California for solar arrays that would generate enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.

“SCE’s financial stability and business reputation will increase the probability that 250 MW of solar PV systems will be available to meet the state’s solar rooftop goals over the next five years,” the utility’s attorneys wrote in a brief filed with the utilities commission, which must approve the program. “In so doing, a solar PV program can improve efficiencies … to reduce costs and jump start the competitiveness of solar PV for widespread application on California roofs.”

There’s no doubt the program will be a boon for solar module makers. For instance, thin-film solar cell company First Solar (FSLR) is supplying 33,000 panels for the program’s first project, a 600,000-square-foot roof array in the inland city of Fontana. However, Southern California Edison intends to contract for union labor to install the solar systems and tap its own capital and a rate hike to finance the project. That won’t leave many opportunities for solar installers and financiers like SunPower (SPWR), SunEdison and MMA Renewable Ventures (MMA).

“Even though this program is kind of taking bread out of our own mouth, the demand for solar will keep going up,” says Mark McLanahan, senior vice president of corporate development at MMA Renewable Ventures, a San Francisco firm that finances commercial solar arrays.

“What they have announced is extremely visionary,” McLanahan tells Green Wombat. “It’s game changing and opens up whole new realms of what solar can do. That’s exciting.”  On the other hand, he says, “It’s certainly possible that a young, growing industry that is pretty fragmented could be hurt by this rather than helped.”

A solution advanced by some solar industry critics is for Southern California Edison to open up the entire program to competitive bidding, not just the procurement of solar panels. The utility vehemently opposes the idea, arguing it would work against the economies of scale it says it can bring to the program.

Whether regulators will approve Southern California Edison’s request for a rate hike to pay for the initiative – and at electricity rates that are significantly higher than those set for other solar programs – remains to be seen. The commission’s own ratepayer advocate has questioned whether utility customers will get their money’s worth.

The utilities commission is unlikely to issue a final decision until next year. In the meantime, you can bet the state’s other big utilities – PG&E (PCG) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) – and solar companies will be watching to see whether the sky’s the limit for big rooftop solar or whether a ceiling is about to be placed on the industry’s ambitions.

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Australia the next solar hot spot?

Posted in alternative energy, Australia, energy, environment, GE Energy Financial Services, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Sungevity, SunPower, tagged , , , , , on July 29, 2008| 1 Comment »

In late 2006, there was something of an exodus from Australia as solar startups decamped for California, frustrated by the long-entrenched conservative government’s tepid support for renewable energy. On one Sydney-to-San Francisco flight alone could be found David Mills, co-founder of solar power plant company Ausra, and Danny Kennedy, chief of solar installer startup Sungevity.

Flash forward 18 months and solar energy companies are beating a path back to Australia. Ausra recently opened up operations Down Under, and last week Silicon Valley solar company SunPower (SPWR) acquired an Australian solar installer called Solar Sales. So is Oz the next hot solar market? By all accounts, the sun-baked environmentally conscious country should be. But the move into the South Pacific is another example of how governments’ ever-morphing renewable energy policies are spurring solar companies to move operations around the globe.

“Obviously there’s a lot of sun in Australia but with the recent change in government there’s a policy environment that could be much more favorable for us,” Peter Aschenbrenner, SunPower’s vice president of corporate strategy, told Green Wombat. “We decided to get in now. It was a little opportunistic as the owners of  Solar Sales were looking to monetize their investment. It follows a model of a previous acquisition in Italy where we got in before the market headed north.”

Last November, a left-leaning Labor government took power in Australia, immediately signed the Kyoto Accord and expanded a national subsidy for rooftop solar panels. Meanwhile, individual Australian states, much like their American counterparts, have enacted their own incentives. Three states – Queensland, South Australia and Victoria – have adopted “feed-in-tariffs” that pay homeowners a premium for electricty produced from solar panels – up to four times the prevailing power rates. Solar homeowners that return  more electricity to the grid than they consume can zero out their power bill or even earn cash from their utility.

But the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has shown the same propensity to alter the rules of the game mid-stream as its predecessor, which wreaked havoc on the wind industry several years ago when it abruptly curtailed a renewable energy target. The Rudd government already has changed course on a national solar subsidy – which provides rebates up to $A8,000 for photovoltaic systems – to make it available only to households earning less than $A100,000 – which qualifies as middle middle-class in Australia’s big cities. Some of the states in turn have limited their subsidies. Victoria – Australia’s second-most populous state – will pay premium solar rates to only 100,000 households.

Given that solar is a game that moves as you play and the relatively small size of the Australian market (population: 20 million) Kennedy for one is cautious about doing business in his homeland.

“I think that it’s potentially a good market in the future,” says Kennedy, a former longtime Greenpeace activist who’s close to Australia’s environment minister and other government officials. “But it’s not living up to its potential because there’s a set of mixed signals from the federal and state governments and no certainty from one year to the next.”

Just how quickly the market can change has been illustrated by Spain, a solar hotspot that has attracted SunPower and other solar power plant builders as well as financiers like GE Energy Financial Services (GE)  with its lucrative premium rates for green electricity. But now the Spanish government is considering cutting its feed-in-tariff and limiting it to an annual 300 megawatts of installed solar, 100 megawatts of which must be rooftop photovoltaic systems. By contrast, some 1,100 megawatts of solar were expected to be installed this year. That would dramatically change the economics for solar energy companies that have moved into the Spanish market.

“This is something we’ve been preparing for,” says Aschenbrenner of SunPower, which has focused on building photovoltaic power plants in Spain. “With our global footprint, we are well placed to move allocation around as these markets wax and wane. In Spain, we’ve been working on building a dealer network to focus on the residential and small commercial markets.”

In Australia, SunPower will need to ramp up its new acquisition since Solar Sales operates on the country’s isolated West Coast while most of the country’s population is concentrated on the eastern seaboard. About half of Solar Sales business has been building off-the-grid power systems for Outback communities that rely on diesel generators for power. Aschenbrenner says he expects that business to continue but the focus will switch to residential solar.

photos: Todd Woody

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First Solar’s power-plant building boom

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, First Solar, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , on July 24, 2008| 2 Comments »

Thin is in when it comes to solar power plants.

First Solar, the Walton family-backed (WMT) maker of thin-film photovoltaic modules, on Thursday announced its second solar power plant. The latest project is a 10-megawatt photovoltaic power station to be built for Sempra Generation (SRE) in Nevada. Two weeks ago, California regulators approved a 7.5-megawatt – expandable to 21 megawatts – First Solar (FSLR) power plant to be constructed in the Mojave to generate electricity for utility Southern California Edison (EIX). Thin-film solar technology layers solar cells on plates of glass or flexible materials, a process that lowers production costs with the trade-off being lower efficiency at converting sunlight into electricity.

What’s notable about the Nevada First Solar project is that it will be constructed adjacent to a Sempra natural gas-fired power plant near Boulder City, Nev. That will allow the solar station to share transmission lines and other infrastructure and minimize land use. Those are no small considerations these days as the solar land rush continues in the Mojave and environmentalists grow uneasy over the impact of industrializing the desert.

Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar has already broken ground on the project with completion expected by the end of the year. That’s record time, given that solar thermal power plants – which tend to be larger by orders of magnitude – can take years to receive regulatory approval and build. Also of note: The solar modules for the project will be manufactured at First Solar’s Ohio factory, one of only two commercially operating  thin-film manufacturing facilities in the United States. (The other is Energy Conversion Devices’ thin-film factory in Michigan.)

Sempra Generation, a division of utility giant Sempra, will own and operate the First Solar plant, which will supply electricity to Nevada and California.

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Brainstorm Tech tackles Al Gore’s energy challenge

Posted in alternative energy, energy, energy efficiency, environment, eSolar, Google, green policy, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, tagged , , , , on July 23, 2008| 21 Comments »

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Green Wombat has been at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference the past few days, the highlight of which for me was leading a session on energy with Vint Cerf. Known as the “father of the Internet” for his role in co-creating its underlying technology, Cerf is now a Google (GOOG) vice president and its chief Internet evangelist.

The idea: Brainstorm with 40 high-powered participants – everyone from Idealab’s Bill Gross (chairman of solar power plant company eSolar) to Stan Williams of Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) Quantum Systems Labs to venture capitalist Richard Wong of Accel Partners. The task we set out: Devise solutions to Al Gore’s challenge last week for the United States to obtain 100% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2018. Piece of cake.

Sorry, Al, we didn’t come up with a 12-step plan to kick America’s addiction to the black stuff – oil and coal. But the wide-ranging discussion underscored the complexity of the challenge and the fact that a solar-power-plant and wind-farm building boom is but one part of the big fix.

First, said one participant, we must create the “energy Internet.” In other words, a smart transmission grid that can get electricity generated from desert solar power stations and High Plains wind farms to other regions of the country as well as manage “distributed energy” from such things as rooftop solar panels. Another technological challenge that must be overcome: energy storage to capture electricity produced by solar and wind power stations for use when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

For many in the room, just as critical is the need to reduce energy demand, increase public awareness and devise the right economic incentives to promote green power and lower electricity consumption. As more than a few participants noted, Americans use more than twice as much electricity per capita as Europeans.

Gross suggests establishing a floor on electricity prices – say 10 cents/kilowatt hour – to allow renewable energy companies to get up and running and achieve economies of scale to compete against coal and natural gas.

Given the techie crowd –  Silicon Valley is just over the hill from Half Moon Bay – some of the more interesting ideas were about how to use software and Web  2.0 tools to change consumer behavior and awareness about energy consumption. For the home there needs to be an energy meter that provides constant feedback on the electricity usage – and the charges incurred –  of individual appliances and gadgets, like that laptop you left plugged in. Your mobile GPS-enabled phone could monitor your driving habits, suggesting ways to consolidate trips, report your fuel efficiency and ping you about your home energy use. Another idea;  Embed carbon footprint data in individual products, so that consumers can scan them with their phones when making purchasing decisions.

(Another provocative idea that Cerf discussed with me before the session: How to re-architect the suburbs when the aging baby boom generation begins to abandon their McMansions in search of housing and a lifestyle less isolated and closer to shops and services.)

Beyond technological innovation, the overriding sentiment was that the president and Congress must show leadership in establishing a national renewable energy policy that commits the resources and sense of urgency of a 21st century Manhattan project.

Coincidentally, the day before the session I moderated a panel at Google on renewable energy sponsored by the California Clean Tech Open, a contest that provides seed capital and services to incubate green startups with promising business plans. This year’s finalists, announced Tuesday, include several companies developing software and services to monitor and cut home and business energy consumption. Judging by the overflow crowd – some 350 people with a line out the door – there’s no shortage of talent in the Valley interested in green tech.

Among those present was Bob Cart, CEO of San Francisco-based Green Volts, which is developing concentrating photovoltaic power plants. Green Volts was a 2006 Clean Tech Open winner and Cart told Green Wombat that less than two years later the company is breaking ground this week on its first power plant, which will generate two megawatts of electricity for utility PG&E (PCG).

Green tech innovation can come from some improbable places. Rock star and home-brew technologist Neil Young closed out Brainstorm Tech on Wednesday by taking the stage for an interview with Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey.  Young has been working with a far-flung group of technologists and auto enthusiasts to convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV into a 100-mpg, Internet-enabled bio-electric-hybrid. He told Huey the Continental is just one of several green car projects he has under way.

“We have an onboard fuel creation device on an Envoy in Adelaide, Australia,” Young said. That prompted Cerf to ask from the audience, “You mentioned onboard fuel production. This car doesn’t happen to run on piss, does it?”  Young laughed, “It could.”

The songwriter and political provocateur said he was focusing on land yachts  – the Continental stretches to 19.5 feet.  “Americans, a lot of them are big, and they like big cars and long highways.”

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The solar land rush

Posted in Abengoa Solar, alternative energy, Ausra, BrightSource Energy, climate change, endangered species, environment, global warming, OptiSolar, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Solel, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 15, 2008| 2 Comments »

For those readers who missed Green Wombat’s feature story on the solar land rush in the July 21 issue of Fortune – available here at Fortune.com – I reprint below.

The Southwest desert’s real estate boom

From California to Arizona, demand for sites for solar power projects has ignited a land grab.

By Todd Woody, senior editor

(Fortune Magazine) — Doug Buchanan grins with relief when he sees the carcasses. He has just driven up a steep dirt road onto a vast, sunbaked mesa overlooking the Mojave Desert in western Nevada. There, a few feet from the trail, lie the corpses of two steers. A raven perches on one, the only object more than three feet above the ground on this pancake-flat plateau. Cattle, dead or alive, qualify as good news in Buchanan’s line of work. If cattle are present, that means grazing is permitted, and that in turn means that this land is most likely not protected habitat for the desert tortoise.

Buchanan, 53, is scouting sites for a solar power company called BrightSource Energy, an Oakland-based startup backed by Google and Morgan Stanley. The blunt, fifth-generation Californian, who used to survey the same area for natural-gas power sites, knows that the presence of an endangered species such as the tortoise could derail BrightSource’s plans to build a multibillion-dollar solar energy plant on the mesa.

BrightSource badly wants these 20 square miles of federal land on what is called Mormon Mesa. The company was in such a hurry to stake its claim with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that it applied for a lease sight unseen. That’s an expensive gamble for a startup, given that application fees alone run in the six figures. “I usually like to go out and kick the tires before filing a claim,” Buchanan says, “but there’s a lot of competitive pressure these days to move fast.”

That’s putting it mildly. A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators – all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants.

The race has barely begun – finished plants are years away – but it’s blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world’s best solar real estate right next to the nation’s biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.)

It’s not just a federal-land grab either. Buyers are also vying for private property. Some are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500.

No doubt the prospect of potential riches is overheating expectations. But California and surrounding states have mandated massive increases in renewable energy in the next few years. That has led some experts at Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., to predict that Big Solar could be a $45 billion market by 2020.

Meanwhile, the land rush is setting the stage for a showdown between solar investors and those who want to protect a fragile environment that is home to the desert tortoise and other rare critters. The Southwest is on the cusp of what could be a green revolution. And the biggest obstacle of all may be … environmentalists.

***

Over the past year a parade of executives bearing land claims have made the trek to a stucco BLM office just off the interstate in the dusty city of Needles, Calif., a 110-mile drive south from Las Vegas. (It’s the town where the late “Peanuts” cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz, briefly lived as a boy; in the comic strip, Snoopy’s brother Spike is a resident.) The Bush administration has instructed the BLM to facilitate renewable-energy projects (along with nonrenewable ones). But Sterling White, the BLM’s earnest Needles field manager, is also concerned about what could happen if they transform the Mojave into a collection of giant power stations. “One of our biggest challenges is the cumulative impact of these projects,” he says.

Nearly 80% of the land that White’s office oversees is federally protected wilderness or endangered-species habitat. That leaves about 700,000 acres for solar power plants, only some of which are near transmission lines. Land leases are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis, but White is also supposed to weed out speculators from genuine solar developers based on loose criteria such as who is negotiating with utilities and who is applying for state power licenses. White has yet to approve a single lease, but he has summarily rejected four because they lie in protected-species habitat.

***

Solar prospectors tend to be as secretive about their land as forty-niners were about the veins of gold they discovered. Most bids are placed by limited-liability corporations with opaque names that conceal their ownership. And no one has been as quick to move into the Mojave – or as tightlipped about it – as Solar Investments.

That entity, it turns out, is Goldman Sachs’s solar subsidiary. The investment bank’s designs on the desert are a topic of intense interest and speculation. Goldman declined to comment. But here’s what we know:

Solar Investments filed its first land claim in December 2006 and within a month had applied for more than 125,000 acres for power plants that would produce ten gigawatts of electricity. Many of the sites lie close to the transmission lines that connect the desert to coastal cities. (Goldman has also staked claims on 40,000 acres of the Nevada desert.)

Nobody expects Goldman to begin operating solar plants. It will probably either partner with another developer or sell its limited-liability company (and its leases) outright. The firm has been making the rounds of solar developers. “The conversation’s been pretty wide-ranging, primarily as an investor interested in financing deals,” says one solar energy executive approached by Goldman. “But there’s clearly an element of interest in our technology.” Goldman has requested permission to install meteorological equipment on its sites and is evaluating “competing technologies, including solar dish systems, power towers, and large-scale photovoltaic arrays,” according to a letter Goldman sent to the BLM in August 2007.

Competitors are lining up behind Goldman, staking claims on some of the same sites in hopes the bank will abandon them. PG&E and FPL, for instance, are in the queue after Goldman on one site. Solel, an Israeli solar company that last year scored a contract to deliver 553 megawatts to PG&E, is third in line behind Goldman on another.

“I view Goldman as a very interesting indicator of things to come,” says Brian McDonald, PG&E’s director of renewable-resource development. “They’re usually ahead of the curve – you can extract a huge amount of value if you get in early.” There’s other smart money here too. A Palo Alto startup called Ausra received $40 million from the elite green venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Ausra has signed a deal with PG&E and announced its intention to construct a gigawatt’s worth of projects a year.

Most of the power production contemplated for the Mojave will rely on solar thermal technology – the common approach in large-scale generation projects – in which arrays of mirrors heat liquids to produce steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. But a secretive Hayward, Calif., startup called OptiSolar has filed claims on 105,300 acres to build nine gigawatts’ worth of photovoltaic power plants, which employ solar panels similar to those found on residential rooftops. (The company also has applied for leases on 21,800 acres in Arizona and Nevada.) To put those ambitions in context, the biggest photovoltaic power plant operating today produces 15 megawatts. Says OptiSolar executive vice president Phil Rettger: “We have a proprietary technology and a business approach that we’re convinced will let us deploy PV at large scale and be competitive with other forms of renewable energy.”

***

With the prime BLM sites quickly being snapped up – recently the agency temporarily stopped accepting new land claims while it develops a desertwide solar policy – competition is growing for private land. Here, too, the emphasis on secrecy borders on the obsessive. A request to view a piece of desert that is up for sale is treated as if I had asked to visit Area 51.

Waiting outside a roadside diner in southwestern Arizona – I’ve promised not to say where – with BrightSource senior vice president Tom Doyle, I expect to see a weather-beaten farmer come chugging up in a battered pickup. Instead, a pale-green Volvo SUV driven by a physician glides into the parking lot. The doctor, who wishes to remain anonymous, acquired the land two years ago as the renewable-energy boom got underway. “We thought we’d put solar on it – that’s the reason we bought it,” the doctor says as we pile into the Volvo and head into the desert to visit the site. After about five miles we turn off the road and come to a stop in a rocky patch of desert framed by low-slung mountains and buttes. Doyle quizzes the physician about water rights, endangered species, and access to transmission lines before moving out of earshot to talk dollars. The whole process takes only about 20 minutes – the two sides ultimately decide not to do a deal – and then Doyle is on to visit the next potential property.

Such is the land frenzy that farmers in Arizona were paid $45 million for 1,920 acres by Spanish solar company Abengoa so that it could build a 280-megawatt power plant; the land had an assessed value of a few hundred thousand dollars. The company also plunked down $30 million for 3,000 acres in the California Mojave that had traded hands for $1.25 million nine years earlier. That prompted developer Scott Martin to put his adjacent 300-acre parcel – land he had bought only a few months earlier for $457,500 – on the market for $3 million. Also for sale: a $15 million, 3,000-acre tract near Palm Springs, which Martin began shopping around to solar executives like Ausra’s Perry Fontana. When I join Fontana to check out the site, a onetime World War II air base outside the Mojave ghost town of Rice, he says, “I probably get three calls a day from brokers or landowners.” As if on cue, his Bluetooth earpiece lights up with a cold call from a broker peddling some land near Needles.

***

Green energy is not about to get a green light from all environmentalists. “We’re going to challenge these big solar projects, and there’s going to be tremendous environmental battles,” says veteran California activist Phil Klasky, a member of several green groups who helped lead a campaign in the 1990s that scuttled a radioactive-waste dump planned in tortoise territory in the Mojave. “Large solar arrays will have an impact on surrounding critical habitat for the desert tortoise and other threatened species. We have to fight global warming, but just because it’s solar doesn’t make it right.”

The developers are worried about resistance. “I remember the spotted owl,” says Fred Morse, a former Department of Energy official who is a senior advisor to Abengoa’s U.S. operations. The widespread logging of ancient forests, home to the northern spotted owl, set off epic environmental fights in the 1980s and ’90s. As Morse puts it, “The Mohave ground squirrel or the desert tortoise – any one of them could become a cause.”

Solar energy companies may make for less tempting targets than timber barons, but development of the desert has never been attempted on such a scale. The result is that some environmentalists find themselves anguished over which side to take. “We’ve had our share of conflicts over endangered species in this state, no doubt about it,” says Kevin Hunting, a biologist and a deputy director of the California Department of Fish and Game, which enforces the state endangered-species laws. “We’re actively looking to strike that critical balance between the state’s renewable-energy goals and conserving species that are vulnerable. It’s challenging.”

California wildlife regulators, for instance, have peppered Ausra with requests for more biological surveys on the site of a 177-megawatt solar power plant to be built in San Luis Obispo County. The feds could also require Ausra to prepare a plan to protect the San Joaquin kit fox, a process that could take years and shred the project’s economic viability.

Worse for developers, state and federal law require wildlife officials to consider the total impact of multiple projects when weighing whether to approve any individual facility. Next door to Ausra’s solar farm, for example, is OptiSolar’s planned 550-megawatt power plant, which would cover 9 1/2 square miles of potential endangered-species habitat with solar panels. Will the regulators approve one? Both? Nobody knows.

In the meantime, the solar land rush is unlikely to cool down. Which is why Morse wants to keep quiet Abengoa’s $30 million real estate deal. The company is applying to build a 250-megawatt solar power plant on the site, and it may be in the market for more land. “We don’t want to publicize that purchase,” he says, “as the speculators will be coming out of the woodwork.”

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First Solar jumps into the utility business

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, First Solar, OptiSolar, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , , , on July 11, 2008| 8 Comments »

When it comes to solar companies, First Solar is the Google of renewable energy. The Tempe, Ariz.-based solar cell maker backed by the Wal-Mart (WMT)’s Walton family has seen its stock skyrocket over the past year, hitting a high of $317 on May 14. (It was trading at $275 Friday.) Now First Solar, which makes “thin film” solar modules, is getting into the utility business, winning approval Thursday from California regulators to build the state’s first thin-film photovoltaic solar power plant. The 7.5 megawatt project – expandable to 21 megawatts – will sell electricity to Southern California Edison (EIX) under a 20-year contract.

While First Solar (FSLR) supplies solar modules to power plant builders in Europe, this is apparently the first time it has acted as a utility-scale solar developer itself. First Solar tends to keep quiet about its projects and did not return a request for comment. But a troll through the public records reveals some details of what is called the FSE Blythe project. The solar farm will be built in the Mojave Desert town of Blythe by a First Solar subsidiary, First Solar Electric. The company paid $350,000 in January for 120 acres of agricultural land in Blythe, providing a tidy profit for the seller, which had purchased the property for $60,000 in June 1999.

Approval of the contract by the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday came on the same day that SunPower (SPWR) announced a deal to build two photovoltaic power plants – a 25-megawatt one and a 10-megawatt version – in Florida for utility Florida Power & Light (FPL). PV plants are essentially supersized versions of rooftop solar panel systems found on homes and businesses. Thin-film solar prints solar cells on flexible material or glass and typically uses little or no expensive (and in short supply) polysilicon, the key material of conventional solar cells.

Most large-scale solar power plants being developed in the United States use solar thermal technology that relies on huge arrays of mirrors to heat liquids to create steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. In fact, there is a solar land rush underway in the desert Southwest as solar developers, investment banks like Goldman Sachs (GS), utilities and speculators of every stripe scramble to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land for solar power plants. (See Green Wombat’s feature story on the solar land rush in the July 21 issue of Fortune.)

PV power plants, on the other hand, have not been cost-competitive with solar thermal and have been most popular in countries like Germany, Spain and Portugal, where generous subsidies guarantee solar developers a high rate for the electricity they produce. The situation in the U.S. seems to be changing, though, judging by the deals utilties are striking with companies like First Solar and SunPower. Meanwhile, thin-film startup OptiSolar is moving to build a gigantic 550-megawatt thin-film solar power plant on California’s central coast but has yet to sign a power purchase agreement with a utility.

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News of Big Solar’s death premature

Posted in alternative energy, BrightSource Energy, energy, environment, investment tax credit, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, tagged , , , , on July 2, 2008| 9 Comments »

In a sign that solar industry and its political allies are starting to flex some real power, the federal government reversed course Wednesday and announced it would continue to accept new applications to build solar power plants on government land while developing an environmental policy for assessing the projects.

Green Wombat had been off the grid on holiday the past week and so was surprised to log back on to find the mainstream media and blogosphere ablaze over the Bush administration’s supposed move last month to halt big solar power plant projects in California’s Mojave Desert and elsewhere.

“Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects,” read the headline on The New York Times story about the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to temporarily stop accepting new applications for solar power plants until it studies the environmental impact of industrializing the desert. “How to strangle an industry,” proclaimed Grist, a respected green policy blog about the move. Solar executives and politicians meanwhile slammed the BLM and predicted dark days for renewable energy. “This could completely stunt the growth of the industry,” the Times quoted Ausra exec Holly Gordon.

Problem is, those stories were dead wrong: The feds did not freeze a single solar power plant project currently under review. What was left unsaid, or just briefly mentioned, was the fact that the BLM is continuing to process the 125 solar power plant proposals already in the hopper. Those lease applications cover nearly a million acres for solar power plants that would produce 60 gigawatts of electricity if all are built, which they won’t be. Those projects alone will keep companies like Ausra, BrightSource Energy, FPL (FPL) and PG&E (PCG) busy for years to come, moratorium or not.

“We don’t even like to call it a moratorium,” says Alan Stein, a deputy district manager for the BLM in California. Stein called me on my mobile just as I was about to step into a kayak at Elkhorn Slough near Big Sur. I had spent several months talking to Stein and other BLM officials while criss-crossing the Mojave with solar energy executives for a forthcoming Fortune story and he seemed taken aback by the tone of the media coverage.

But the higher-ups in Washington got the message. “We heard the concerns expressed during the scoping period about waiting to consider new applications, and we are taking action,” said BLM Director James Caswell in a statement. “By continuing to accept and process new applications for solar energy projects, we will aggressively help meet growing interest in renewable energy sources while ensuring environmental protections.”

The head of the solar industry’s trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, declared victory. But SEIA president Rhone Resch complained in a statement that, “BLM has only resolved half the problem. They have yet to approve a single solar energy project. Expediting the permitting process is the next step in developing solar energy projects on federal lands.”

He’s right that the process – which is intertwined with California’s extensive environmental review of projects in that part of the Mojave – takes far too long. But developing a desert-wide environmental policy is absolutely essential for huge power plants that in total would cover hundreds of square miles of a fragile landscape home to protected wildlife and rare plants. Otherwise, watch each individual project get bogged down in endless environmental challenges.

What really threatens the nascent solar industry right now is not the BLM. Rather it’s the imminent expiration of the 30 percent investment tax credit that all these solar energy startups and their investors – which include companies such as Google (GOOG) and Morgan Stanley (MS) – are depending on make Big Solar economically viable. Congress has failed several times in recent months to extend the tax credit, which expires at the end of the year. If only solar energy execs and their supporters in Washington could exert the same influence on recalcitrant Republicans as they have on the BLM.

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First U.S. solar power plant factory goes online

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, energy, environment, PG&E, solar energy, solar power plants, tagged , , , , , on June 30, 2008| 15 Comments »

LAS VEGAS – Hard by the Las Vegas airport, the industrial infrastructure of the solar economy is rising in a former furniture factory. Phalanxes of orange robots swivel and dip as they practice assembling components for solar power plants to be built by Silicon Valley startup Ausra.

It’s North America’s first solar power plant factory and it went online Monday when Ausra CEO Robert Fishman and U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, flipped the switch to start the production line. Ausra’s automated 130,000-square-foot factory is key to the Palo Alto company’s aim of cutting manufacturing costs to make solar energy competitive with fossil fuels.

A large robot picks up 78-square-foot pieces of glass and places them on a conveyor belt so a machine can apply strips of adhesive. Other robots transfer the glass to another line where a dozen bots weld together 53-foot-long steel frames. The completed solar arrays will be trucked to California where Ausra is building a 177-megawatt solar power station for utility PG&E (PCG) on 640 acres of agricultural land in San Luis Obispo County. (To see a video of the robots in action, click here.)

The arrays focus sunlight on water-filled tubes to create steam to drive a turbine. Ausra manufacturing exec David McKay points to where standard-issue boiler pipe will be fed into a machine and treated with a proprietary coating that transforms it into a solar receiver. At peak production the plant will churn out more than 700 megawatts’ worth of equipment year to keep 1,400 solar power plant construction workers employed. “We can produce a lot faster than what we can install,” says McKay.

However, the future of those jobs – and billions in future investments in renewable energy – hangs on whether Congress extends a crucial investment tax credit that the solar industry and utilities are relying on to make large-scale solar power plants competitive with the carbon-spewing variety. The investment tax credit expires at the end of the year and several attempts to pass legislation extending the ITC have failed despite support on both sides of the aisle.

Green Wombat met with the chairman of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Chris O’Brien, last week when he was in San Francisco to get an update on the ITC’s chances. “It’s an election year and it has become part of the political stalemate,” says O’Brien, who heads North America market development and government relations for Swiss-based solar cell equipment maker Oerlikon Solar. “I don’t see an imminent breakthrough.”

The pending demise of the tax credit is “having a significant effect on the development of new business,” according to O’Brien. Solar energy executives, of course, are reluctant to admit that deals are getting dashed, but there’s no doubt the loss of a 30 percent tax credit gives financiers and utilities pause when considering whether to green-light solar power plants that can cost a billion or two to construct.

O’Brien thinks the best-case scenario for the long-term extension of the ITC will come after the presidential election during the lame-duck session of Congress. Otherwise, he says, don’t expect action until around September 2009.

In the meantime, Ausra will keep its robots busy cranking out components for its first California power plant, which is scheduled to start producing green electricity in 2010.

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