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Archive for the ‘renewable energy’ Category

Utility chief: we want to fuel the auto industry

Posted in environment, green cars, green tech, PG&E, renewable energy, Think, Think Global, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 22, 2008| 2 Comments »

PASADENA, Calif. — If you wanted a snapshot of the emerging alliance between utilities and automakers, the car park of the Langham hotel here was the place to be Tuesday morning. There was the CEO of one of the largest utilities in the United States putting the pedal to the metal of the battery-powered Think City with Think Global CEO Jan-Olaf Willums riding shotgun.

“I liked it a lot,” PG&E (PCG) Chairman and CEO Peter Darbee told Green Wombat after a few spins around the hotel in the electric coupe. “The acceleration was fast, it handled well and it has a European feel.”

We had just finished a Fortune Brainstorm Green session on electric cars (along General Motors’ (GM) executive Beth Lowery), where Darbee declared, “We want to replace the oil industry” as the fuel supplier to the automakers. Fuel in this case is electricity, though unlike Big Oil, regulated utilities such as PG&E and Southern California Edison (EIX) will not make windfall profits no matter how many electrons they push into Chevy Volts.

The topic at hand was the potential for vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, if electric cars go mass market. The big idea: electric cars are essentially mobile generators and rolling energy storage devices. When hundreds of thousands of them are plugged in, they can not only download electricity but return power to the grid from their batteries, allowing utilities to meet peak demand without firing up expensive fossil fuel power plants that often sit idle until everyone cranks up their air conditioners.

PG&E is working with Google (GOOG) to develop technology to allow a smart power grid to detect where an electric car is plugged in so the owner can be charged or credited with consuming electricity or returning it to the grid. The smart grid would also be able to detect power demand spikes and then tap the appropriate number of car batteries to smooth out the electricity supply.

Utilities like PG&E are eager to forge alliances with electric carmakers for other reasons. In California, electric cars could be charged at night when greenhouse gas-free power sources like wind farms tend to produce the most electricity but when demand otherwise falls off. Utilities are also interested in buying used electric car batteries (which retain 80 percent of their capacity even after they’re no longer good for transportation) to store renewable energy that can be released when electricity demand spikes.

Lowery, GM’s vice president for environment, energy and safety policy, said such interest from utilities is prompting the automaker to think how electric cars could spawn new markets. “We’re definitely looking at different business models for batteries,” she said.

On Monday, Think Global and venture capital powerhouses Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Rockport Capital Partners announced the formation of Think North America as a joint venture between the Norwegian company and the VCs that will bring the Think City to California next year.

Rockport managing general partner and acting Think North America president Wilber James was at the panel and suggested Think supply some cars to PG&E. As the session ended, Darbee, James and Willums headed to the parking lot where Willums showed off the car’s Internet-enabled interactive features, including a video screen with a button already labeled “vehicle-to-grid.”

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eSolar scores $130 million from Google, other investors

Posted in environment, Google, green tech, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2008| 7 Comments »

PASADENA, Calif. — Solar power plant builder eSolar has raised $130 million from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, and other investors.

That was the headline news that eSolar chairman and Idealab founder Bill Gross slipped to Green Wombat during dinner Sunday night as Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference kicked off in Pasadena. The other investors include Idealab and Oak Investment Partners. Big numbers grab attention but the far more interesting angle is the technology that eSolar is developing. If it lives up to its claims, eSolar could help break the logjam that has put Big Solar on the slow track in California.

“We just completed tests at our test site this week and we will be able to produce electricity that is competitive with coal,” said an animated Gross Sunday evening.

That is the Holy Grail of renewable energy and the charge set out by Google (GOOG) founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they launched their green power initiative, RE<C (Renewable Energy less than Coal), in November. Google.org subsequently invested $10 million in Pasadena-based eSolar. (eSolar did not say how much of the $130 million Google.org ponied up in the latest round.)

eSolar has been operating in stealth mode but Gross shared details of the company’s technology and how it intends to produce greenhouse gas-free electricity so cheaply — a claim sure to be met with some skepticism by competitors like Ausra, BrightSource Energy and Solel.

At first glance, there doesn’t seem much radically different about an eSolar solar thermal power plant — it’ll use fields of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on a tower containing a water-filled boiler. The resulting heat will create steam that will drive an electricity-generating turbine.

The tipping-point innovation, according to Gross, is the mirrors and the software that controls them as well as the modular design of the power plants.

While Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource is developing a similar system, Gross says eSolar is able to use smaller mirrors — called heliostats — that can be cheaply mass produced from off-the-shelf glass like that used in bathroom mirrors. Proprietary software developed by eSolar controls each sun-tracking mirror, increasing their efficiency to produce more electricity. “It’s all about the software,” Gross said.

Smaller more powerful solar fields means that eSolar can build power plants on far less land than competitors for less money, according to Gross. For instance, a 500-megawatt solar power plant can cost more than $1 billion to build and requires thousands of acres of land — which is why most will built in remote deserts. But eSolar plans to build modular, 33-megawatt power plants that can be constructed on a couple hundred acres and plugged into existing transmission lines near urban areas.

“We’ve already bought up rights to enough land to produce more than a gigawatt of electricity,” said Gross, showing Green Wombat a map of California polk-a-dotted with the locations of potential eSolar power plants. A gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes.

The small size of each power plant has another benefit — solar thermal power stations under 50 megawatts do not have to be licensed by the California Energy Commission. That means eSolar can cut at least a year or two off the process of getting a solar power plant online.

That will certainly be attractive to the Golden State’s big utilities — PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) — which face a mandate to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020.

Although all those utilities have signed massive megawatt deals with solar energy companies, no plant has been yet built.

Gross says that while eSolar has been talking to the utilities it’s not going to wait to have a power purchase agreement in hand before building its first plant.

“Sergey said to go for it and we are.”

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The Dell of solar energy

Posted in environment, green tech, renewable energy, solar energy on April 18, 2008| 11 Comments »

For longtime Australian Greenpeace activist Danny Kennedy, one of the environmental group’s more memorable moves was when the Sydney crew climbed the roof of the prime minister’s home and installed solar panels to protest the government’s preference for Big Coal over renewable energy. (Note: Do not try this on the White House.)

These days, there’s a new, greener PM in power and Kennedy is in California, running a solar startup that aims to minimize the time spent on rooftops by doing for the solar business what Dell did for personal computers: Digitizing the entire enterprise to cut costs and create a mass market.

Putting photovoltaic panels on residential rooftops remains largely a labor-­intensive cottage business, often involving multiple visits to a client’s home to make the sales pitch, measure the roof, and design a custom system. Sungevity, which officially launches Tuesday on Earth Day, takes all that online.

Enter your address on its website, and satellite-imaging software zooms in on your home, and Sungevity’s proprietary algorithm calculates the roof’s dimensions — the pitch and azimuth — selects appropriately sized solar arrays, and shows what they will look like installed — while computing your return on investment. Once the order is placed, one of five off-the-­shelf prepackaged solar arrays is shipped to the customer’s door, and an installation crew is dispatched. A database tracks local building and permit requirements, sending the necessary forms to the homeowner for their signature while beaming local regulations governing solar arrays to the installation crew.

“This changes the game,” says Kennedy, 37, who co-founded Sungevity last year after leaving Greenpeace and relocating from Sydney to Berkeley. (Full disclosure: Kennedy’s kids and Green Wombat’s son attend the same elementary school.)

Kennedy and his partners have raised $2.7 million from investors that include German solar giant Solon and actress Cate Blanchett. “Our technology allows us to size up an entire city remotely and work out what the solar potential of the roof space is,” adds Kennedy, who will be speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference on Monday. “This is the real secret sauce, the thing that rocks the house.”

Says Joe Kastner, an executive with solar financier MMA (MMA) Renewable Ventures: “If you do a lot of site visits, that can end up being a big portion of the cost. Anything that can make these projects more efficient and cut the costs on the front end is good.” He adds that Sungevity may appeal to potential customers accustomed to managing their lives online and who are loathe to hang out at home waiting for solar sales or service people to show up. “I would be interested in doing as much as possible over the Internet,” Kastner says. “There’s definitely a market for it.”

Rather than employ its own installers, Sungevity will work with unions to train electricians and other contractors so that it can tap pools of green-­collar workers in local markets. “That’s probably long-term what’s most needed to achieve a million solar roofs,” says Kennedy, referring to California’s solar target. “[Solar panel] supply is not the big constraint. The real issue is labor — it’s the limiting factor in the growth of the industry.”

At the company’s Berkeley offices down the street from Chez Panisse, Kennedy and Andrew Birch, a board member and solar economics expert, run through a live demo of the Sungevity system. In about 15 minutes, a spokesmodel had walked a potential customer through the sales pitch and ordering process while on the backend a consultant is sizing up the roof with the software tools. Within a day or so an e-mail will be sent to the customer with different solar array options and the relative return on investment. “With a traditional solar installer, that would have been about a two week process,” says Kennedy.

Whether this all works so smoothly once volumes of real-life orders start coming over the transom remains to be seen, of course. And the limits of the system become apparent when Birch types in my Berkeley address and the picture shows a large Japanese maple overhanging my house, which would have ruled out a solar array except the tree had been removed a year and a half earlier. Kennedy acknowledges that leafy cities like Berkeley with its mishmash of architectural styles and every-which-way rooflines are problematic. Instead, Sungevity’s target market is middle-American suburbia, with its vast tracts of cookie-­cutter houses.

That’s just fine with potential rival SolarCity, the Foster City, Calif., solar installer backed by PayPal co-founder and Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk. “Their technology works very well for track homes — that’s maybe 2% of our business,” says SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive. “Our market is more retrofit homes, existing homes in well-established areas that are looking to go solar.”

“I like it when companies like Sungevity get into the market,” he adds. “They’re forcing innovation and the most important thing is the widespread adoption of solar.”

Sungevity’s launch comes as utilities like Southern California Edison (EIX) and PG&E (PCG) and tech giants like Google (GOOG) are pushing for a mass expansion of solar energy.

Nat Kreamer, president of San Francisco-based solar installer Sun Run, says Sungevity’s move to digitize the solar business is valuable but it will have to focus on the installation process to really get costs down. “Once you figure out how to size up someone’s system, the challenge is the speed you can get it built,” he says.

Installation costs account for roughly half of a solar system’s cost and solar installers like Akeena Solar have developed modular arrays containing wiring and other components to minimize the time spent on installation.

Sungevity will not focus on zeroing out customers’ electricity bills, but like Sun Run, will push the “hybrid home” – selling smaller, cheaper solar systems that will cover that portion of a home’s electricity use that is the most expensive to buy from a utility.

For instance, after rebates, a standardized Sungevity solar array for a four-bedroom home in Northern California will cost about $21,000 and deliver an estimated return on investment of 13% over the system’s 25-year life.

“We’re selling this as an economic asset,” says Kennedy, “not just as a way to go green.”

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Abu Dhabi: The capital of green energy?

Posted in climate change, environment, global warming, renewable energy, solar energy on February 27, 2008| 4 Comments »

masdar-city.jpg

While the United States Congress hems and haws over extending relatively modest tax incentives to encourage renewable energy development, Abu Dhabi is spending $15 billion in a drive to make the oil-rich emirate an epicenter of green technology. Called the Masdar Initiative, it’s best known for plans to build Masdar City, a “zero-carbon, zero-waste” urban center.

But Abu Dhabi’s ambitions extend far beyond making Masdar City a showcase for sustainable development, as Masdar Initiative CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber made clear when Green Wombat sat down with him on Tuesday when he was in San Francisco to accept the “Cleantech Leader of the Year” award at the annual Cleantech Forum. “We have decided to establish the Silicon Valley of renewables in Abu Dhabi,” says Al Jaber. “We want to cover the whole value chain – from research to labs to manufacturing to the deployment of technologies.”

To that end, Masdar is collaborating with European and U.S. universities – including MIT and Columbia – to develop a research institute. The Masdar Clean Tech Fund has invested $250 million in renewable energy ventures and Al Jaber, who will be speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm: Green conference in April, says a second fund is in the works. “We’ll invest wherever the opportunity goes,” he says. “We’re keen on developing renewable energy infrastructure in California; we’re just looking for the right opportunity.”

Masdar City will be a tax-free zone in a bid to lure makers of photovoltaic equipment and other green energy manufacturers. When Al Jaber says Abu Dhabi wants to own the whole supply chain, he means that literally, beginning with polysilicon, the basic building block of solar cells. “We’re looking at manufacturing polysilicon, thin-film for photovoltaics, wind energy components,” he says. “We’re no longer interested in only being a consumer of technology or an off-taker of specific equipment. We want to transform ourselves into a more knowledge-based economy. ”

He expects the renewable energy and waste-reduction technologies developed to build Masdar City – its expected population is 50,000 – to be exported to help retrofit existing cities. “A city of this size would require 820 megawatts of power, but we will reduce energy requirements to 220 megawatts from integrating new designs from day one.”

“This city is going to literally re-engineer urban planning,” he claims.

Abu Dhabi’s ambitions will create opportunities for U.S., European and Asian green tech firms and Al Jaber acknowledges that forming the right partnerships will be the biggest challenge in fulfilling the emirate’s green dreams.

But he says he sees no irony in one of the world’s biggest oil-exporting nations going green. The bottom line: it’s all about power and markets.

“Abu Dhabi recognizes that the global energy markets are evolving and are evolving with substantial growth in alternative energy,” Al Jaber says. “It’s only going to go up. Does that make it a threat or an opportunity? It’s a great opportunity if we invest in it now.”

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Arizona’s $4 billion solar deal

Posted in Abengoa Solar, climate change, environment, green collar jobs, green tech, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants on February 22, 2008| 8 Comments »

solana1.jpgArizona Public Service, Arizona’s largest utility, announced plans Thursday for a 280-megawatt solar power plant to be built 70 miles southwest of Phoenix by Spanish company Abengoa Solar. What’s striking about the deal is that it offers a rare glimpse inside the economics of Big Solar. And as the renewable energy industry pushes Congress to extend crucial green tax credits, the jobs that will be spawned by the Solana Generating Station and the economic ripple effect of the huge construction project is Exhibit A in why fighting global warming can be a win-win when it comes to the economy and the environment.

All the previous contracts for 100+ megawatt solar power plants have been in California, where utilities PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) have shrouded power purchase agreements in secrecy.

APS (PNW), on the other hand, has lifted the green veil a bit, giving some indication of the current cost of producing utility-scale solar electricity and the larger economic impact. According to APS, the utility will pay around $4 billion over 30 years for the greenhouse gas-free electricity generated by Solana that will light 70,000 homes. That comes to about $133 million a year for the life of the power purchase agreement.

Abengoa spokesman Peter Kelley told Green Wombat that the exact kilowatt per hour rate the company is paying APS is confidential. No doubt though that the utility will pay a premium per kilowatt/hour for its first large-scale solar energy deal compared to electricity produced by a coal or natural-gas fired power plant. That cost disparity is likely to evaporate when the United States moves to price carbon — either through a carbon tax (unlikely) or a cap-and-trade system that requires fossil-fuel power plants to pay if they exceed limits on CO2 emissions. And the cost of financing carbon-spewing power plants will grow in coming years as Wall Street shies way from projects that carry climate change risks. And as solar power plant components and systems go from being one-off prototypes to mass-produced commodities, the cost of solar electricity is expected to drop even further.

Abengoa and APS are not revealing the construction cost of Solana but solar power plants of that size can run half a billion dollars or more. Of course, once built their operating costs are significantly lower than conventional power plants; the fuel — the sun — after all is free.

In the meantime, the Solana Generation Station is expected to inject about $1 billion into the Arizona economy as Abengoa hired 1,500 workers to build the power station and 85 others to operate it, according to APS. The utility estimates that the ripple affect will create another 11,000 to 15,000 jobs.

Abengoa is using a solar trough design for the plant. A tried and true technology, solar trough plants deploy long rows of parabolic mirrors to heat liquid-filled tubes to produce steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. The Solana plant will also store heat in silos of molten salt. The heat can be released when the sun is not shining to run the turbines. “The molten storage will extend the operating hours of the plant both during cloud cover and when sun goes down,” Kelley says. That means Solana can continue to generate electricty as long as six hours after sunset.

The big “if” for Solana is the 30 percent investment tax credit that expires at the end of 2008. If Congress fails to extend the credit, the cost of such solar power plants will jump, jeopardizing their economic viability

Solana is likely to be just the first big solar power plant in Arizona. Utilities there must obtain 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025 and with little wind or geothermal available in Arizona, the state is likely to place a big bet on Big Solar.

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A green-collar recession?

Posted in green collar jobs, green policy, investment tax credit, renewable energy on February 19, 2008| 9 Comments »

solar_panels_2ce03.jpgIt’s all about the green economy, stupid.

The United States could lose more than 116,000 green collar jobs and forgo $19 billion in green tech investment in 2009 if Congress fails to extend two tax credits crucial to the renewable energy industry, according to a new study.

One red flag about this report: It was commissioned by the American Wind Energy Association and released by the Solar Energy Industries Association — two trade groups pressing for extension of the investment tax credit and the production tax credit. Green Wombat tends to look askance at studies paid for by business and whose conclusions support the sponsors’ political agenda. But a review of the research conducted by Navigant Consulting indicates that it is solid, based on federal labor data and employment models as well as Navigant’s own market analysis.

Some background. The ITC provides a 30 percent tax credit for the installation of solar arrays and other equipment. Homeowners can claim the tax credit up to a maximum of $2,000 for residential solar arrays. There’s no cap for commercial solar arrays and the tax credit has been a key to attracting financing for large solar installations that can cost millions of dollars. (Several states, most notably California, offer even more lucrative incentives, which should help prop up demand.) The production tax credit provides a subsidy for the generation of electricity by solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy systems and has driven the construction of massive megawatt wind farms.

Both credits expire at the end of 2008 and the renewable energy industry and their allies in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street are pressing Congress for a long-term extension — five to eight years — to provide a stable investment climate for green projects. (Last week, executives from Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Applied Materials (AMAT) and Credit Suisse (CS) were among those that signed a letter urging Congress to take action by March 1.)

The Navigant study projects that without the investment tax credit installations of solar arrays will fall from a projected 790 megawatts to 325 megawatts in 2009, eliminating 39,400 potential new jobs.

A couple of points to consider about those numbers. Navigant only considered the impact on the photovoltaic industry that manufactures and installs rooftop solar arrays. It did not calculate the consequences for the solar thermal business, which builds large-scale solar power plants that use mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on liquid-filled tubes or boilers to create steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. The solar thermal industry is in its infancy but utilities like PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) have signed several contracts for solar power plants and negotiations for gigawatts more of solar electricity are ongoing.

The first solar power plants in California won’t go online until around 2010 but the construction and operation of those projects are expected to create thousands of jobs. Like the PV industry, solar thermal companies are dependent on the investment tax credit to attract the big money it takes to finance the construction of billion-dollar power plants. The loss of the investment tax credit would hit California particularly hard.

While rooftop solar companies worry about losing business in the future if the investment tax credit is not renewed, the more immediate concern among solar execs Green Wombat has talked to recently is finding enough workers to keep up with demand, especially in California.

Navigant projects an even bigger crash for the wind industry should the production tax credit expire, with installations falling from 6,500 megawatts to 500 megawatts in 2009 with the lose of 76,800 jobs. The wind industry has been continuously buffeted in recent years as Congress has allowed the production tax credit to expire repeatedly only to resuscitate it. In the past, the expiration of the tax credit has resulted in a 73% to 93% drop in the wind market, according to Navigant.

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Tech giants back green investment tax credit

Posted in Google, green collar jobs, green policy, investment tax credit, renewable energy, solar energy on February 14, 2008| 2 Comments »

Twice now the renewable energy industry has narrowly lost votes in Congress to extend an investment tax credit crucial to jump-starting the market for large-scale projects like solar power plants. In December, Big Oil outmaneuvered green energy advocates and their Congressional supporters by claiming that rescinding huge tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry to pay for renewables would cost consumers at the pump. A more recent attempt to revive the tax credit also failed.

Now the American Council on Renewable Energy is bringing out its big green guns. Representatives from Silicon Valley tech giants, Wall Street investment banks and utilities signed a letter sent to the congressional leadership late Wednesday urging the long-term extension of the 30 percent investment tax credit as well as the production tax credit for the electricity produced by solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy systems. Among the signers urging action by March 1 are executives from )Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Applied Materials (AMAT), Credit Suisse (CS), Wells Fargo (WFC), venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and utility San Diego Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of energy giant Sempra (SRE).

Interestingly, the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” never appear in the letter. In a savvy move, the council has forsaken doom and gloom for a purely economic message: American jobs, competitiveness and innovation are at stake, the signers argue, and the tax incentive will spark a green tech boom at relatively little cost to the taxpayers. It’s a Silicon Valley mindset and its no surprise that while the signers represent companies from all over the United States, most hail from California.

The tax credits expire at the end of 2008 and proponents argue that a five-to-eight year extension is needed to create a stable investment climate, given that it can take three to five years for a large solar power plant to be permitted and built.

“The United States is in a historic position to lead in innovation and competitiveness in the renewable energy sector,” wrote the council’s three co-chairs, which include Dan Reicher, Google.org’s director of climate and energy initiatives. “As with all energy markets and in plans for growth in any businesses, certainty and continuity in public policy provides the confidence needed for stability in investments. We must ensure we are not creating an environment for boom and bust cycles in renewable energy and that we are not tying the hands of business owners in the sector looking to scale their technologies to meet demand and price points.”

Without an extension of the tax credits, the council warns that renewable energy projects in the pipeline that would produce 42 gigawatts of greenhouse-gas free electricity — enough to power tens of millions of homes — could grind to a halt, giving competitors in Europe and Asia the upper hand when it comes to green tech innovation.

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Texas: A red state that’s the next green frontier

Posted in Ausra, climate change, environment, global warming, renewable energy, solar energy on February 12, 2008| 4 Comments »

For a state steeped in the mythology of Big Oil, Big Coal (plants) and well, big everything, Texas does not necessarily come to mind when you think of Big Green.

It’s a reputation somewhat undeserved, given the Texas-sized wind farms sprawling across the hundreds of thousands of acres of the state’s ranch lands. Now there are signs that California’s solar boom is spreading eastward. One leading indicator: Silicon Valley solar power plant startup Ausra is opening an outpost in the Lone Star State and hiring an executive to “lead the development of stand-alone solar thermal power projects in Texas using Ausra’s proprietary Compact Linear Fresnel reflector technology and the sale of solar field to utility scale customers,” according to a job description posted last week at the Berkeley Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley.

Like a growing number of states, Texas has a so-called renewable energy portfolio standard that mandates a certain portion of its electricity supply come from green sources. (Unlike most other states that require utilities to obtain a set percentage of electricity from renewable sources, Texas sets a total green energy target and ups the ante every two years. For instance, the 2009 target of 3,272 megawatts rises to 5,880 megawatts in 2011. Texas utilities are allocated a share of those megawatts based on their sales.)

But if you want to sell solar to Texans you have to be in Texas. That’s because when it comes to electricity, Texas is literally a country onto itself: the Texas power grid is not connected to the rest of the country (except for some outbound transmission lines) and all renewable energy must be generated within the state. (Unlike, say, California, which can buy electricity produced by solar power plants in neighboring Nevada or Arizona.)

“Texas is another California-sized market that’s growing rapidly and seeking clean options in the portfolio,” Ausra executive vice president John O’Donnell tells Green Wombat. “While solar resources are somewhat lower than the Mojave, west Texas is a very good solar region and we see major opportunities going forward.”

O’Donnell wouldn’t reveal details about Ausra’s Texas plans (though the job posting says Ausra aims to build 1-to-2 gigawatts worth of solar power plants a year). But Texas clearly is in the market for green energy. Utility TXU’s (TXU) cancellation of several massive megawatt coal-fired plants (and Wall Street’s growing aversion to such projects) along with the ratcheting up of renewable energy mandates means the state will increasingly be looking to solar and wind to fill the void.

Utility El Paso (EE) is accepting bids to supply for 300-megawatts of green energy while Austin Energy is committed to obtaining at least 100 megawatts of solar energy under the city’s goal of going carbon neutral by 2020.

With wide open spaces and plenty of sunshine and flat land, look for other solar power plant players to beat a path to Texas in the coming months.

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Another solar power plant play for Khosla, Idealab

Posted in climate change, environment, global warming, Infinia, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Stirling Energy Systems on February 11, 2008| 1 Comment »

infinia-stirling-dish.jpgA passel of high-profile high-tech investors  — including Khosla Ventures, Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Bill Gross’ Idealab — are backing yet another new player in the increasingly hot market for large-scale solar power, pumping $50 million into Infinia, a Kennewick, Wash., company manufacturing a Stirling solar dish.

The Stirling dish has a storied — if unfulfilled – history in the annals of solar energy. It marries a Stirling heat engine, 17th-century invention, with a mirrored dish that looks like a super-sized version of a home satellite receiver. The solar dish focuses the sun’s rays on the Stirling engine, heating a gas inside that drives pistons to generate electricity. Stirling dishes are much more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than solar thermal technologies that use mirrors to heat liquid-filled tubes to create steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. But while solar thermal plants exist today, the Stirling solar dish has never been deployed on a large scale since work on the technology began in earnest following the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Stirling Energy Systems of Phoenix in 2005 signed contracts with utilities Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) to build up to build tens of thousands of Stirling dishes to produce up to 1.75 gigawatts of greenhouse gas-free electricity. Though the company operates a six dishes in a prototype power plant at Sandia National Laboratories New Mexico, it is still working to get production costs down and rivals have questioned whether Stirling Energy Systems will be able to fulfill its deals. (See Green Wombat’s 2007 Business 2.0 magazine article on Stirling Energy Systems here. )

infinia-stirling-engine.jpgBut Infinia CEO J.D. Sitton tells Green Wombat that his company has perfected the Stirling dish to make it competitive with large-scale solar thermal as well as new photovoltaic technologies like thin-film solar. Infinia aims to deploy its Stirling dishes in smaller configurations so that solar power plants can be located near cities and at other sites that don’t require vast stretches of desert land where solar thermal plants are typically built. Each 21-foot-high, 15-foot-wide solar dish can generate 3-kilowatts (compared to 25 kilowatts for Stirling Energy Systems’ dish).

Infinia won’t itself become a solar developer but will provide its dishes to for power plants that range in size from 1 megawatt to 150 megawatts or more. In contrast, most solar thermal power plants now being planned are in the 400-500 megawatt range.

“We fly in the face of what has been the conventional wisdom in the solar thermal field that to be competitive you have to have a very large system,” says Sitton. “We can be deployed within city limits and be connected to existing transmission systems. No additional transmission capacity is required.”

“Our approach is that the winning solutions will be those that generate for most kilowatts for the least cost,” he adds. “This is a game about capital efficiency.”

That, of course, has been the mantra of leading green tech investor Vinod Khosla, who has disparaged photovolatic solar systems as too expensive to displace fossil-fuel generated power. Khosla also is backing Palo Alto solar thermal startup Ausra, which last year signed a deal to supply solar electricity to California’s largest utility, PG&E (PCG). Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross’ Idealab is funding solar thermal startup eSolar, which also is being backed by Google (GOOG).

Infinia contends the design of its Stirling dish system makes it competitive with solar thermal technologies. First, the Stirling engine uses helium rather than hydrogen, which typically must be periodically replenished. “We have no lubrication inside the machine and it needs no maintenance,” Sitton says. “We use helium in a hermetically sealed system.”

Second, he says the Infinia dish is made of six panels of glass rather than the 76 panels on the Stirling Energy Systems dish. “That gives us lower production costs and lower capital costs,” says Sitton. “We brought in large-scale manufacturer from the beginning. It’s not like we built a prototype and now have to reduce the cost to produce it.”

The first prototype went online last October and Sitton says Infinia is building a second at Sandia. Field tests will be conducted later this year in California and Nevada. He says Infinia is currently negotiating with solar developers and full-scale production is set to begin in November. Infinia has been in business since the 1980s, building Stirling engines for other applications. But the green tech boom and demands from utilities for renewable energy led the company to focus on solar.

Whether Infinia beats Stirling Energy Systems to market remains to be seen but look for the deals it signs with solar developers for a good indication of just how viable its technology is likely to be.

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Clock ticking on crucial solar investment tax credit

Posted in Ausra, BrightSource Energy, climate change, environment, GE Energy Financial Services, global warming, green financing, green tech, investment tax credit, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants on January 22, 2008| 11 Comments »

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When President Bush signed the energy bill into law last month, much was made of the legislation’s mandate that automakers dramatically boost the fuel efficiency of their fleets. Less noticed was that the bill dropped a provision that would have extended the solar investment tax credit — a measure viewed as essential to transforming solar energy from a niche business into a multi billion-dollar industry that can generate gigawatts of greenhouse gas-free electricity.

The timing couldn’t be worse. With the current solar credit set to sunset, as it were, at the end of 2008, Big Solar is at at a tipping point: Utilities and renewable energy companies are in the midst of negotiating massive megawatt power purchase deals whose financing depends on the 30 percent investment tax credit, or ITC.

“I think there is a major concern that this will stall all the beneficiaries of the ITC,” said Joshua Bar-Lev, vice president for regulatory affairs for solar power plant developer BrightSource Energy. The Oakland, Calif.-based startup is negotiating a 500-megawatt agreement with California utility PG&E and is proceeding with plans to build a 400-megawatt solar thermal power station on the Nevada border (artist rendering above).

Solar energy companies, utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Edison International (EIX) as well as financiers such as Morgan Stanley (MS) and GE Energy Financial Services (GE), had pushed for an eight-year extension of the investment tax credit to give Big Solar projects enough time to get off the ground and start to achieve economies of scale. The provision also would have allowed utilities to claim the credit for solar projects they build. The measure drew support from both sides of the aisle in Congress but died — by one vote in the Senate — when Bush threatened to veto the energy bill because the solar tax credit would be financed by repealing previous tax breaks given to Big Oil.

“The Congressional leadership is very strong in their support of the ITC; they will put this on the table In 2008,” said Chris O’Brien, a Sharp Solar executive and chairman of the Solar Energy Industries Association, in an e-mail. “The solar industry will continue to contact legislators in key states.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in the Senate have pledged to re-introduce renewable energy tax credit legislation this session. “Speaker Pelosi has said repeatedly that she hopes to address that this year,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, told Green Wombat. “We’re just getting started but there’s bipartisan support for the tax credit.”

Publicly, at least, no one in the solar industry will say that the uncertainty over the tax credit is affecting planned projects. “Our expectation is that there will be another tax bill that will address this issue,” said Kevin Walsh, managing director of the renewable energy group at GE Energy Financial Services. “We’re working on a number of [solar thermal] deals but it’s too early to disclose them.”

In recent months, PG&E has signed deals for more than a gigawatt of electricity — enough to light more than 750,000 homes — with solar power plant developers. Such power purchase agreements can take more than a year to hammer out and the permitting and construction of a solar power station can take another three to five years.

“We’re continuing to move forward with negotiations and with contracts that have already been signed, but certainly the absence of the ITC could potentially impact future projects,” said PG&E spokesman Keely Wachs. “Without the credit, it does increase the cost of that energy and of course it also sends a very clear market signal as to our country’s energy priorities.”

Silicon Valley solar startup Ausra is building a 177-megawatt solar power plant on the Central California coast to supply electricity to PG&E and is pursuing deals with Florida’s FPL (FPL) and other utilities.

“Just like any business, the solar industry prefers a predictable system for the future,” wrote Holly Gordon, Ausra’s director of regulatory and legislative affairs, in an e-mail. “It will be more difficult to plan for our projects while the situation remains uncertain. While we are currently seeing excellent demand for solar energy at market prices, we need a long term extension of the renewable energy tax credits to ensure market stability and investor confidence as the market continues to grow.”

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