Solar Surge

Contrary to appearances, your Minor Heretic has neither fallen down a hole, nor lapsed into a coma. My recent post-vacation-post silence is the result of a full schedule. That schedule includes two concurrent solar installations, finishing the curriculum for a two-day solar workshop for electricians, delivering said curriculum, plus creating and presenting two other renewable energy workshops for homeowners. Plus life in general.

The renewable energy business seems to be the only one holding its own in this recession. Solar and wind power aren’t experiencing the same geometric increase that they were a couple of years ago, but things are still moving along.

The sign-up for the photovoltaic portion of the Act 45 queue here in Vermont filled the same day it opened on October 19th. To refresh, Act 45 will allow providers of renewable energy to contract with utilities at a fixed rate for 20 years, that rate being sufficient to make as good a return as any existing generator. The limit on the entire program is 50 megawatts, and no single technology is allowed more than 25% of that, meaning 12.5 megawatts. There was a subscription of 176 megawatts of PV on the opening day, meaning that there had to be a lottery to see who would get a piece of that 12.5 MW.  Nothing like a 14:1 over-subscription to show the level of interest.

Even outside of Act 45 things are doing well. One of our local utilities, Green Mountain Power (GMP), had a sudden flash of brilliance about spot market power prices. Many states have a net metering program, where a homeowner or business can install a photovoltaic system and feed excess electricity back into the utility grid, racking up credits against future electric bills. GMP has gone one better, offering an extra 6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for solar production.  Are they insane?

Crazy like a fox. During summer peak demand GMP might have to buy power on the New England spot market for as high as a buck a kWh. Of course, it is during the middle of those long, hot, sunny summer days when photovoltaic systems are pumping out the most power. Nineteen cents per kWh looks cheap during those times. GMP did the math and offers a price that encourages solar but still let’s them come out ahead. Why the other utilities aren’t doing the same, I don’t know.

There’s an added benefit for the utilities from solar. I take anything Amory Lovins says with a grain of salt, but he did a very interesting set of calculations about the life span of transformers. You have probably seen a utility substation – a fenced-in array of huge gray objects with cooling fins and ribbed insulators, power lines converging on them. The transformers drop the high voltage of transmission lines down to the medium voltage of your local distribution lines. The key thing to understand about the life span of these transformers is that they do 90% of their aging during 5% of their operating life. That 5% is when they are running at high temperature during peak load times in the summer. That is exactly when solar arrays are pumping out the most power and reducing the amount of power that needs to go through those substation transformers. The more power generated downstream of the transformers, the less they heat up and the longer they last. Lovins calculated that even at the prices of five years ago utilities could save money by installing solar downstream of their substations and delaying the replacement of their transformers. Considering that the price of solar modules has dropped by half since then, I’d say it’s a viable option for a forward thinking utility.

I was talking with my elected representative today and he said that the important factor in shutting down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in 2012 is replacing the 600 jobs and the tax revenue. I offered that renewable energy was the only business actually expanding in this economy, and that energy efficiency work is labor intensive and pays back better than 5:1 on the initial investment. The renewable energy and efficiency path offers lower risk and higher local job creation per dollar invested than the dinosaur energy sources.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: We are heading towards a geologically inevitable end state. That is a time when the fuels we get out of the ground are so scarce and difficult to extract that they are impractical and too expensive to use. The earth stopped making oil and natural gas millions of years ago and coal hundreds of millions of years ago. It had some amount of uranium when it formed, and that was that. There is less of all these every day, and over time new discoveries get smaller, lower quality, and more difficult to extract. Someday this state, this nation, this planet will run on renewable energy. We can argue about the timing, but geology won’t change to meet our desires.

Given the inevitability of this, and especially given the unpredictability of the timing, we should be gearing up for renewable energy as fast as we can. I have used the analogy of a skydiver free-falling through clouds. If you don’t know how far away the ground is, and you don’t know how far from the ground you will find out, your best bet is to pull the ripcord now. Otherwise you may be rewarded with just enough time to say “Oh sh-“ after the clouds part.

The good news is that we can do it. The New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, just updated a study on local renewable power production. Their research indicates that many states could produce most of their power locally. Some, such as Maine, could produce far more than their local needs, mostly through a combination of wind power and energy efficiency. Maine could produce six times its need with commercially viable onshore wind power. North Dakota tops the wind potential list at 140 times demand.

Let’s look at just their numbers for Vermont. The percentage of demand that could be met by various renewables and efficiency is as follows:

Onshore Wind: 111%

Rooftop PV: 18%

Percentage of land area required for 100% PV: 0.16%

Untapped Combined Heat and Power: 8%

Untapped Small and Micro-Hydro: 15%

Matching California’s Energy Efficiency: 38%

Combined Renewables: 152%

If we pursued California-style energy efficiency it would give us plenty of leeway in rejecting renewable energy projects that were unsuitable for our communities.

One of their startling conclusions is that maximizing renewable energy use in Vermont would cost something on the order of 5.7 cents per kWh at a wholesale level. That beats Vermont Yankee by a mile.

Of course, that’s just electricity. We still have to heat our houses and get to work. We waste a huge amount of energy in those sectors, basically because we can.

It is not impossible to cut the heating load of an average house in half with serious weatherization. A friend of mine in the weatherization business says, “I talk to people about energy efficiency and they say that they have done all they can. Then we work on their house and cut their energy use by another 30%.” Likewise, there is a lot of waste in our transportation system. We still drive huge, inefficient vehicles, alone, a lot. The solution to that problem is a combination of zoning, gas mileage standards, public transportation, and, sadly, really expensive gasoline. Some people won’t do jack until they can’t afford to drive.

Let’s remember the geological imperative – the problem will solve itself, but not in a nice way. The alternative is for us to start the transition away from non-renewable fuels now, before we have an emergency. Is that possible with our political structure and our present mindset? No. Which is why we need to focus on our educational system and the way we elect our local and national representatives . The ground is down there, through the clouds somewhere, and it isn’t getting farther away.
 

Ancient and Modern

Your lucky Minor Heretic just returned from two weeks in Greece, mostly on the island of Kefalonia. There’s nothing like travel for perspective on your home, and Greece has contrasts aplenty. Some thoughts, in no particular order:

Our country is an infant. I visited an archaeological excavation near the town of Poros on Kefalonia that had uncovered layer upon layer of burials going back at least 3,000 years. I held in my hand a coin that had been placed in the mouth of a deceased Greek 2,600 years ago. The ancient Greeks believed that a dead person’s soul had to pay Charon, the ferryman, in order to get across the river Styx to the realm of the dead. One of the problems of construction in Greece is that excavating for a foundation anywhere near an inhabited area will generally expose some structure that is at least 1,500 years old. Buildings from the era of Venetian dominance (1400’s to the 1700’s) are characterized as “modern.” The Athenian city-state was holding town meetings 2,400 years ago, and attendance was mandatory.

On that final point: My beach reading for Greece was I.F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates.” My opinion of Socrates has fallen as I read it – he wanted an oligarchy and sandbagged people in debate without proposing much himself. One of the asides that interested me was the origin of the word “idiot.” The ancient Greeks used the word “idiotes” to describe a private person, that is, someone who shunned public political life. They considered it a serious character flaw to avoid political participation.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Greece. Most people I met didn’t have a land line phone, including a number of small businesses. At the archaeological excavation I visited, halfway up a mountain near a village of a few hundred people on an isolated island, cellular reception was fine. If a mountainous, rural island off the coast of Greece can have universal cellular coverage, why can’t Vermont?

The Greeks don’t seem to expect flawless produce in their grocery stores. A few dings are no big deal as long as the stuff is fresh. Food is expensive, though. Greece experienced some brutal inflation when it switched to the Euro.

The Greeks aren’t as particular as we are about guardrails. When driving, sometimes the only thing between you and a 500-foot drop is a tuft of grass. The same goes for walkways and various kinds of drop-offs. Passers by are expected to watch where they are going and not fall off. I would prefer a little more attention to railings, but their attitude towards liability is refreshing.

In Greece gasoline costs about 1.2 Euros a liter, or $6.72 a gallon. They still drive, but most of their cars are tiny by our standards. You just won’t see SUVs or large pickup trucks over there. Traffic in Athens is brutal, but a lot of it is taxis and maniacs on small motorbikes. Out on Kefalonia I saw a local grocer deliver two 50-pound sacks of potatoes by slinging them in front of him on his motorcycle.

As far as I can tell from casual observation, about one out of every four houses in Greece has a solar hot water collector on the roof. Some houses just have a black water tank on the roof, which is sufficient most of the time in that climate. On the downside, in many places they haven’t figured out the efficacy of attaching the showerhead to the wall.

Up until very recently Greece had nothing like our system of credit. If a family wanted to build a house they saved up money and then started one. If they ran out they stopped construction and saved more. The result is that Greece is dotted with unfinished buildings of all kinds. It is also covered with abandoned and collapsed buildings. I walked up streets where brand-new buildings alternated with weathered, half-completed shells and collapsed 18th century mansions. Sometimes one building would be half-occupied and half-abandoned. Now that the Greeks have access to credit there is a saying: “A Greek family has two houses, two big screen TVs, two cars, and two Euros in its pockets.”

There is a locally distilled liquor called tsipouro, made from the residue left over from crushing grapes for wine. Avoid it. Really.


 

A Wind Turbine Up Close

I was travelling across northern New York last week and went through the town of Chateaugay. A prominent feature just east of the village is the 103 megawatt wind farm spread across the countryside. The turbines are an industry standard size and type – General Electric 1.5 megawatt units, standing 80 meters (about 262 feet) tall at the hub, with a 77 meter blade diameter. The wind project is spread out enough that from one vantage point the most distant turbines have to be carefully picked out along the horizon.

My travelling companion and I stopped in the breakdown lane of Route 11 next to a recently mown hayfield with a turbine standing at the back end, about 750 feet away. We took a stroll up to the base of the turbine. I took some video clips with my admittedly low-resolution pocket camera. What struck us was that the turbine was inaudible at the road, and produced a gentle wuff-wuff-wuff noise when we were standing right under it. Ordinary conversation drowned it out. At a few hundred feet away the noise from the road completely overwhelmed it. It wasn’t an extremely windy day, but the turbines were producing. See the assembled clips below and make your own judgment.

I emailed a friend of mine in the industry and got the information on the turbines and the wind farm. I asked him if this was typical. He noted that the turbines do make more noise in higher winds, but that the ventilation fans in the nacelle are the real problem. They tend to come on during hot days with relatively low winds. He wrote that in his latest project they were installing extra sound attenuation on the nacelles to quiet the fans. The main point, in his opinion, was getting the spacing of the turbines and the distance from residences correct. I take this to mean that the right distance for one turbine is less than the right distance for the combined effect of two or three. His most telling comment was that the people who have the turbines on their land and get lease payments don’t seem to find the noise level a problem. It is the folks who didn’t get the payday who complain. I guess when that distant wuff-wuff is the sound of the cash register ringing it is music.

The dairy farmer accepts the smell of manure. So too, does the chicken farmer, who also tolerates the early morning rooster. Their neighbors, less so. To someone living next to a busy road, the noise of cars fades into the back of their consciousness. To someone like me, who lives in the boonies, the endless white noise of a city is oppressive. The endless fluting of a mourning dove is charming background music. I started my work career as a blacksmith, so the smell of coal smoke and the clang of the hammer fill me with joy. I like the look of wind turbines, but find concrete farm silos, those ones that show up in Vermont Life Magazine, appallingly ugly.

Wind projects require road building, excavation, concrete, and have all the impacts of any large construction job. They do produce noise and alter the appearance of the landscape. There are important, legitimate questions for a community to ask and standards that an installer must meet.

And yet, some of the opposition I hear has a flavor of emotional desperation to it, an intensity out of scale to the debate. I suppose it is ungenerous of me, but I wonder how much of the opposition to wind power is based on a gut reaction to change, or resentment at being left out of the payday. We have emotional reactions to the sights, sounds, and smells of our environment that depend on our experiences and beliefs. We tend to enjoy the familiar, and the novel sensation pleases us only when it associates with an existing positive category in our minds. The tricky thing with judging the merits of a commercial wind farm is to separate the legitimate concerns from our preconceptions and our emotional comfort zone. That principle applies to both the nearby homeowner and the engineer with the wind development company.
 

Nanosolar Goes Live

I have been watching a company called Nanosolar for some time now. They came up with a novel and disruptive technology for producing photovoltaic (solar electric, PV) panels.

The usual method for making PV panels is to grow crystals of purified silicon and shape them into cells. Some companies grow big sausage shaped crystals and saw them into discs, like high-tech pepperoni. Others grow them in thin sheets or hollow octagonal tubes. All these methods require melting silicon (sand, essentially), growing the crystals, and then treating them with minute quantities of chemicals to make them photoreactive. It all takes a lot of energy and time.

Nanosolar’s innovation is to make a nanomolecular ink. That is, a fluid that has sub-microscopic particles in it. It is made up of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, hence the acronym CIGS. They spray this ink on metal foil from a roll and voila, instant solar material at room temperature. The ink film is extremely thin, so very little of the rare elements gets used. The foil is cut into cells and those cells are sandwiched between two sheets of tempered glass to make a module.

They just fired up a highly robotic factory in Germany with a capability of 640 megawatts a year. Compare that to perhaps 150 megawatts of annual production in the U.S. right now. The video of the factory is entertaining, awkward engineer talking heads aside.



Those of you not in the solar business can go get a doughnut or something, because I am going to write about specifications for a bit. Nanosolar doesn’t give dimensions in its promotional material, but from the photos the module appears to be about one meter by a little over two. They specify a power range of 160 to 220 watts at 6 amps, so the operating voltage is roughly that of a standard 24 volt module, 26 to 36 volts. They say that they sort and bin the cells by voltage off the line, so it seems that they have a slightly broader than voltage spread than is usual for crystalline silicon cells. They claim a cell efficiency in the mid-teens, but given my size estimate the functional module efficiency works out around 10%. The modules dispense with the usual deep aluminum frame and rely on the sandwich of tempered glass for strength. This bodes well for longevity. The only other module out there with double glass is the ASE-300, which seems to have a very low rate of degradation. Much of the deterioration I have seen in conventional modules has been related to the failure of the plastic back sheet.

The ultimate point of these modules is the potential for low energy, low cost manufacturing. Nanosolar has hinted at a cost of a dollar a watt, the Holy Grail of the PV industry. Looking at their methods and product, I can believe it. Such a price would reduce the raw cost of residential solar to the range of $4.50 to $5.00 a watt. That translates into a per kilowatt-hour price of around 15 cents, in the range of what a lot of Americans are paying now. Subtract the 30% federal tax credit and the amortized price per kilowatt-hour drops to around 11 cents. In Vermont, with its $1.75 a watt cash incentive, it would make residential PV a no-brainer at 5 cents. (I’m not even considering Vermont’s Act 45 feed-in tariff.) That kind of pricing is the disruptive factor.

Don’t expect to see these modules on your neighbor’s house any time soon, though. Nanosolar has pursued a policy of megawatt-scale sales to major installers for industrial arrays. It’s a smart move in terms of controlling the rollout of their product and minimizing sales effort and customer service costs. I understand the reasoning, but I still wish I could get my hands on a few.
 

Act 45 takes a Step Forward

(From page 46 of the Public Service Board’s Interim Price Order, Docket #7523)


VIII. ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED by the Public Service Board of the
State of Vermont that:

1. Based on the foregoing discussion, we conclude that the interim price levels that apply
under the standard offer program to qualifying Sustainably Priced Energy Enterprise
Development (SPEED) resources are as follows:

(a) for landfill methane projects, 12 cents/kWh;
(b) for farm methane projects, 16 cents/kWh;
(c) for wind projects (15 kW or less) , 20 cents/kWh;
(d) for wind projects (over 15 kW), 12.5 cents/kWh;
(e) for solar PV projects, 30 cents/kWh;
(f) for hydroelectric projects, 12.5 cents/kWh;
(g) for biomass projects, 12.5 cents/kWh.

2. This Docket shall be closed.

Dated at Montpelier, Vermont, this 15th day of September , 2009.

s/James Volz
s/David C. Coen
s/John D. Burke
PUBLIC SERVICE BOARD OF VERMONT

OFFICE OF THE CLERK
FILED: September 15, 2009
ATTEST: s/Susan M. Hudson
Clerk of the Board

This is the first outcome of Act 45, which establishes a special feed-in tariff for renewable energy. The other rules of the game won’t appear till September 30th,, though we know that there will be a 50 megawatt cap on the program. That means that by its conclusion Vermont will have about 5% of its peak electrical load supplied by renewables.

Just to recap, what Act 45 said was that we will need renewables in the future so we should promote renewables now by making sure that they are as profitable as other methods of electrical generation. This is the energy planning equivalent of putting on your parachute before jumping out of the airplane. If we wait till fossil fuel and nuclear energy are expensive before developing renewables then we’ll have to suffer for a long time while we try to catch up.

The bill set some preliminary prices and required the Public Service Board to evaluate and firmly set prices by September 15th. The prices will be adjusted in January 2010 and every two years after that. The standard is that a renewable energy generator (such as a wind turbine, a set of solar panels, or a farm methane installation) should make as good a return on equity (ROE) as the highest return of any existing generator. That turns out to be a local hydro company in Proctor churning out electrons at 10 or 12 percent ROE, depending on how you figure it.
 
And therein lies the problem. I attended the first meeting held by the PSB to solicit opinions on the subjects of price, eligibility, permitting, and so on. The room was filled mostly with utility lawyers, with a sprinkling of renewable energy people and private citizens. The discussion became arcane almost immediately. I have been on the email list for the process and as a result I have plowed through dozens of documents advocating this or that number for interest rates, capacity factors, and system size cutoffs. Committees are still working on how the 50-megawatt queue will be allocated, the permit process, and transmission and interconnection issues. The utilities would be happy to encourage fewer, larger systems. The renewable energy community and others are interested in a range of sizes. The utilities want to offload as much of the administrative work and cost on the installers as possible, and the installers vice versa.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the civil tone of the whole process, and the general use of facts, logic, and mathematics in the debate.

The prices listed above are an overall victory for the renewable energy industry. Northern Power Systems, a company that manufactures a 100-kilowatt wind turbine in Barre, may find the price point a bit awkward for their product. A 100 kW unit lacks the economies of scale of the 1000 kW units that are now the norm in the commercial wind industry. Residential scale wind and PV have scored a big victory and larger scale PV a reasonable win as well. With PV module prices dropping the feed-in price will lag on the high side of profitability. I don’t know enough about the economics of landfill gas or biomass generation to judge the effect on those technologies, but the price is well above usual market rates. Farm methane projects below the net metering threshold of 125 kW may find it almost as good just to net meter in certain utility areas. I’d call it a win for hydroelectric except that permitting for that technology is nearly impossible under present law.

So, there’s a bright spot in the news. On September 30th we’ll find out what difficulties await aspiring renewable energy installers in terms of permitting and fees. Stay tuned.