Solar parity in Maine -- already

Regular readers will know that I've been saying for many years that solar PV will soon achieve grid parity, and that when it does, we will then have a powerful tool to simultaneously reduce climate emissions and develop national and regional energy independence

For a few months now we've been hearing stories about new solar PV installations by our friends and colleagues at ReVision Energy in Liberty. Apparently these installations run on the leaseback/PPA model and, through creative financing, can undercut retail power costs by one or two cents per KWH.

I think this is a swell piece of news.

Better yet, now the college is considering a sizable installation too.

Not only do I get a great deal of pleasure in seeing grid parity achieved right here in Maine, but I'm a big supporter of this excellent company, where a lot of the employees are former students.

http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/21473/Default.aspx

Solar PV is clearly one of the solutions to climate change.  And I'm proud that our alumni are being part of the solution.

Not only can we reduce emissions, but we can also gain a great regional and local economic multiplier.

There's one caveat: The nature of grid balancing on our region is such that most of the ISO-New England emissions that will be offset by these panels will be peak emissions, and therefore most likely from peaking combined cycle natural gas plants, not coal plants.

But even if the impossible were to occur and someone invent a solar panel that worked during the night in Maine when the grid is off-peak, the "mix" of energy in New England is such that any emissions offset would most likely be from gas and not coal.

In other words, what we need next is solar parity in other states, especially those where the mix is coal-rich. That will take a little while yet. Maine has expensive power, about twice the cost of power in the cheapest states. If, ceteris paribus, all things were equal, then for other states, the price of an installation will have to drop by perhaps another fifty percent before parity can be achieved.

But all things are not equal. Other states have more sun, so that will help.

Rapture! The parity cometh

A recent article in Renewable Energy World charted the advance of solar retail price parity, the famous "crossover point."

This is the point at which it's cheaper for homeowners and other building operators to make their own power, rather than buy it from the grid.

Wind energy has been at parity for many years, when medium to large scale turbines are used on good sites to offset retail prices.

But solar has been too expensive, at least thus far.

I've been tracking solar pricing now for years, and am on record numerous times in various places drawing attention to the cross-over point. Lots of good things happen when that point is reached. In particular, the steel dagger of supply and demand gets driven deep into the heart of the dirty energy industry, and much of that industry then gets to simply go away.

Not all of it, unfortunately, because we will still need peaking and base load plants and we will still need coal and oil for industrial production. But enough of it to make me a very happy energy wonk.

There's also the small matter of potentially ending worries about climate change.

The REW article uses the current analogy of the "Rapture" to ironify their point. I thought that was funny.

But digging deeper into the comments, I found this web page here from SolarBuzz.com. Study their table. Apparently parity is already here for large scale commercial solar in sunny states.

I see the the Nanosolar business plan at work here. The new cheaper thin-film panels made by this company are available only for commercial-scale, power-plant scale, multi-megawatt operations. This seems like a self-denying ordinance on the part of the company but it will actually speed up roll-out. Only those installations that make purely commercial sense will go ahead. As a result, the company gains reputation and market clout, while minimizing client disappointment, and reducing client education costs.

That doesn't stop me wanting one for Unity College, though.

The penny -- or dollar -- drops

You can go through the pages of this blog all the way back to 2007, and here and there you'll find many, many hopeful references to parity -- the moment when solar PV and/or wind power becomes cheaper than fossil fuel.

I also argued that this time was close in other forums, particularly in comments on Revkin's blog. I got shot down by lots of denialists for my pains, and eventually gave up making such comments. Since I was convinced parity would arrive, there seemed no need to argue when I could just wait.

Parity has been here for a while now, and I've known it and my students have too, but it's also beginning to be discussed in the business news.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/27/ubs-investors-renewables-revolution

PS: The Guardian followed up the next day with this:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/28/renewable-energy-capacity-grows-fastest-ever-pace

Solar

Solar future brightens as oil soars

· World's biggest producer of panels doubles output
· Cost approaching parity with supply from grid

* Ashley Seager in Munich
* The Guardian,
* Monday June 16 2008

Solar job leaks

Photo: Not rocket science: Unity students assemble solar modules in class, using a "breadboard"-type experimental approach as used in old-fashioned electronics experiments. This allows students to deduct the proper association of series and parallel connectivity to produce a target voltage. This is basically all there is to making a poly- or monocrystalline solar module. This and a few choices of laminate and frame engineering. Safety note -- the over-eager student on the table was told to get down as soon as the picture was taken.

In my business, the news that Evergreen Solar, an important US-based manufacturer of polycrystalline solar modules, will move it's assembly operation to China at a cost of something like 800 jobs might be perceived like a big "hit" to advocates of growing the US "green" economy.

That would be the simple version.

But one source of the competition Evergreen has faced, and one reason it needed the cheaper labor costs offered by the move, is the rise in western-produced, amorphous-semiconductor based technology.

Amorphous or thin film technology requires much less human labor in assembly. I show students in my classes a YouTube video showing the Nanosolar factories in California and Germany, and ask them what they notice.

The first thing they notice is, there are very few people.

What you have to understand, to understand the situation, is that the Evergreen plant in Massachusetts was primarily an assembly plant putting together pre-assembled components made elsewhere, not a fabrication plant that used raw material inputs.

Polychrystalline technology has been superseded by amorphous technology, but it's not dead yet because it's still economically viable. But it won't be for the long haul. It requires too much energy and too much labor.

Sooner or later the cost of producing thin film will drop yet further, and when it does, the only way that polychrystalline technology will thrive is through continued subsidy. It makes sense for Evergreen to go to China where such subsidy will no doubt be forthcoming in all kinds of ways, lower or non-existent local taxes, free educational support, free buildings, high-priced government contracts for product and so on.

Not to mention labor at pay rates any self respecting American would consider penurious.

What we do need to do is to hold on to the thin-film technology for as long as we can, so that the democracies benefit politically. If technology like that owned by Nanosolar and its ilk goes to China, then we're in trouble.

I think it's a problem for the US and the west in general if we let all the polycrystalline assembly jobs go to China. There's probably room for improvement in the older technology still, and we don't know yet how long-lived the new amorphous-type panels will be. We should keep our hand in. But we shouldn't worry about the loss of Evergreen. Nothing is going to China that the Chinese don't already have.

What this example does show is the difficulty of governments picking winners in the solar business. The 30% technology-neutral tax subsidy that goes to householders and businesses (for a short while yet) is a much sounder proposition from a strategic viewpoint than the several kinds of hidden subsidies the Chinese are using, most of which require them to pick a bet on the technology. We should keep it in place for now.

How much longer will we need that subsidy? Not long, if prices drop below $1.50 a watt, which is close to parity with other electricity generation.

Cheap solar will make household scale wind power obsolete within two years. No-one will want to buy a Bergey or a Skystream when you can get a noise-free 6K solar array for less than a Skystream.

To some extent, cheap solar will eventually make wind farms obsolete too, but not as quickly, and not as absolutely, because to some extent the timing of wind generation over the day and year is an economic complement to the timing of solar generation, not a substitute. We're going to want some wind farms around, especially here in the frozen north.

(Anti-wind activists -- be careful not to misquote or selectively quote this last for your own purposes. Try to actually help the conversation along for once. Use the whole quote.)

So how long should we keep the subsidy in place?

About until Congress removes the subsidies on coal and oil.

Especially the mountain-top subsidy. the one that lets coal companies destroy whole mountaintops and the climate for free, when solar and wind are cheaply available.

That's a really bone-headed subsidy. But you don't see the Tea-Partiers wailing about that one, do you?

$1.50 a watt "not out of the question."

I've reported elsewhere on the grid parity achievement in CA.

This latest is a technologically and economically competent journalistic article about solar power -- an extreme rarity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/15/solar-powered-homes-us

Solar infographic? Info-what?

Newspeak is not only Orwellian, but tedious. I tend to think it results from the lack of a disciplined English teacher in one's life.

Since I had Mrs. Wagstaff and Mrs. Tucker of Lydgate Lane Primary and Tapton Secondary, Sheffield, England, respectively, I would never feel the need to coin any such phrase. I would actually feel the edge of Mrs Wagstaff's ruler on my hand, were I to even try.

However, when a commercial solar firm emailed me a bunch of their free so-called "infographics" on spec, I did take a look, just to see whether they were any good.

I quite liked this one. And it didn't have a commercial push that I could see.

As long as you don't click on it. In which case you'll be virtually kidnapped and taken to their web page.

Don't do it!

Wireless EV charging and solar hubris

The Guardian has an interesting new article on wireless vehicle charging systems, which reduce the need to plug in your EV.

This kind of new idea, and the massive drop in the price of PV these last two years, makes it seem pretty likely to me that the future of both transportation and diversified energy systems is PV/electric. If wireless power exchange can be made a two-way street, we will secure a major economy on power storage for base load, which makes PV that much more viable.

The average price of solar panels dropped by between 40 and 60% over the last three years. This is because of mass production. New high-tech factories, like the superb Nanosolar factory in California, are now able to crank out very cheap panels very quickly. There have been great economies found in the material inputs, as well as through mechanization of production.

It used to be the the solar cells had to be individually placed on the panel and soldered by a human technician. Now this can all be done by machine. In the case of Nanosolar, the amorphous semiconductor "ink" involved requires no soldering at all.

So, like the technogeek I am, indeed like the cheap Yorkshire-born technogeek I am, I keep checking and rechecking the price of panels online using Google shopper and the like, to see when I'm going to buy my household system.

This is an idea I had a few months ago in response to an online debate with an oil industry researcher, in which I held that PV and wind energy prices were beginning to approach a very general price parity with oil, and even coal, so that, some time in the very near future, the climate denier/fossil fuel industry apologist position that mitigation would be expensive would no longer hold water.

It would then be cheaper to begin to end our use of fossil fuels than to continue, even without considering the cost of climate change.

This is, of course, a turn of events that both OPEC and the Russians do not wish to see occur, but that we should. The strategic gains for the west would be massive.

In the 1970s, after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt and Syria, when OPEC was in the sway of Arab nationalism and anti-Israeli sentiment, it was diversification of the US and UK energy portfolio, including the first Carter-era efficiency gains with North Sea and Alaskan production, that dropped the price of a barrel of oil down to where some OPEC producers really were feeling the pinch.

And, of course, they let go. The embargo was lifted.

This of course led to a recovery of the US and UK positions in the global economy after the former era of "stagflation," and $11/barrel oil fueled the decade of prosperity and high employment we enjoyed in the 1990s and up through 9/11. More recently the pendulum has swung the other way, and the current price of oil gives disproportionate power to countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Venezuala, and their ilk.

All good friends of the west and democracy.

Right...

My own idea, my next big project after switching 90% of our home heat to home-grown biomass and super-insulating, another small contribution to the recovery of the west and the triumph of democracy over dictatorship (!), was to fit a solar PV system to our house that would be cheaper than my power bill, reduce fossil fuel consumption, and of course, to geek-up the process, documenting it, and the costs, here.

Since I plan to install this system myself, with one or two students to help or look on for the education value, there's a major saving over the cost to most other American families.

But other than that, I think this a useful test.

Of course, it gets a little complicated. For one thing, electrical power in Maine has very little energy content from OPEC, the Russians, and the other Petrostate dictators whose teeth I wish to see bite the dust.

So the concept is flawed from the get-go.

That's what I get for being an armchair energy geo-strategist.

But bear with me. The price of oil is definitely conditioned by the availability of energy alternatives, and if, eventually, my solar plans turn out as planned, if millions of Americans do the same (as hundreds of thousands of Britons already are thanks to their feed-in tariffs), and, if as is also expected, electric vehicles become cheaper and more easily available and are used for night-time storage, then we'd be able to produce most of our energy using renewables, and then we'd have some leverage, wouldn't we?

Paradoxically, the faster oil prices rise, the sooner we get to deploy this great western-owned technology, reduce our dependence, and get our leverage and geopolitical position back. Ivan knows this too, of course. But he's just about as feckless and stupid as we are when it comes to choosing the right geo-strategic energy policy, so he won't be able to take much comfort in this knowledge.

But back to my micro-scale experiment:

The power supply for our little farmhouse comes from Central Maine Power and costs between 15¢ and 16¢ a kilowatt-hour (counting both the per-KWH delivery and per-KWH energy charges that would be offset, were we to produce our own solar power).

The best solar deals I've found recently involve the purchase of panel/inverter combination kits. These are packaged for contractors, but I can do all the work required myself. My father was a UK electrician. He trained me while I was quite young, and I worked for an US electrical contractor while getting though grad school. I wired this house we live in myself, and I've built several other solar power systems as well.

One such deal currently offered includes six 170 watt panels and an inverter for $8,000.

Getting there, price-wise....

In Maine, on our house, on average for the year, these would produce

6 X 170W x 365 days x 4.5 hours/day = 1,675,350 WH or 1675 KWH

Maine's net metering regulation allows you to credit all this power against your power bill. Our house has a south-facing roof that is a perfect solar site, which would allow almost all of the 4.5 hours/day of sunlight to be converted to electrical energy.

The value of this power to me is therefore 1,675 KWH x 15¢/KWH = $251/year or $21/month.

The cost of the $8,000 solar power system is reduced by the $2,000 or 30% federal tax break.

There's also a state-level rebate of about the same magnitude that would very likely expire in a few months if the most conservative of the candidates currently running for the Governor's Office in Maine were elected.

I can't afford to plonk down even $4,000 cash on such a system, so I'd need a loan. $4,000 on a cheap loan, such as a home equity loan or a secured consumer credit loan, would be about $60/month. On a more expensive loan, such as a credit card, it would be about $100/month. The $21 bucks I would get from net-metering don't begin to pay for the system.

So we're not there yet. Solar PV has to come down by yet another two thirds in price or electrical power go up by two thirds in price, or some combination, before I can realize my ambition.

But we are within the same order of magnitude. And I do think we'll see the price drop/price rise combination over my lifetime, and likely we'll see the solar prices drop a good deal more over the next decade, especially with government help in key places.

I'd be willing to bet on another 50% drop in five years.

My earlier insulation and biomass fuel efforts, on the other hand, have already begun to be paid off by the reduction in energy costs of this house, and have already helped wean the west off oil. The previous occupants used to burn 10 cords of wood and 700 gallons of heat oil a year. Last year we burned 4 cords and less than 50 gallons. Our local forests are burgeoning in biomass, so we don't really worry about adding to carbon in the atmosphere by burning this wood.

So at least one form of solar power, native Maine biomass, is cheap, viable, carbon-neutral, and geo-politically helpful.

That woodsmoke from our chimney is the pure smell of freedom, folks.

Up yours, Vladimir!

I guess I'd better go start the durn thing up, hadn't I?