UMA Solar to Host Classes in Ohio

As appeared in Solar Industry Magazine

Close to 80% of the world's energy supply could be met by solar power and other forms of renewable energy by mid-century if deployment is backed by the right enabling public policies, according to a new report from researchers working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The findings also indicate that the rising penetration of renewable energies could lead to cumulative greenhouse gas savings equivalent to 220 to 560 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2050. The upper end of the scenarios assessed, representing a cut of around one-third in greenhouse gas emissions from business-as-usual projections, could assist in keeping concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million.

This change could contribute toward a goal of holding the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees C - an aim recognized in the United Nations Climate Convention's Cancun Agreements.

"The report shows that it is not the availability of the resource, but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades," says Ramon Pichs, co-chair of Working Group III. "Developing countries have an important stake in this future: This is where most of the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity live, yet also where some of the best conditions exist for renewable energy deployment."

The six renewable energy technologies reviewed in the report are bioenergy, direct solar energy (including photovoltaics and concentrating solar power), geothermal energy, hydropower, ocean energy and wind energy. More than 160 existing scientific scenarios on the possible penetration of renewables by 2050, alongside environmental and social implications, were reviewed, with four analyzed in depth, the IPCC says.

Although the scenarios arrive at a range of estimates, the overall conclusions are that renewables will take an increasing slice of the energy market. The most optimistic of the four in-depth scenarios projects renewable energy accounting for as much as 77% of the world's energy demand by 2050 - up from just under 13% of the total primary energy supply in 2008.

The report concludes that although the proportion of renewable energy will likely increase even without enabling policies, past experience has shown that the largest increases come with concerted policy efforts. For instance, if environmental impacts such as emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases were monetized and included in energy prices, more renewable energy technologies may become economically attractive.

Currently, direct solar contributes only a fraction of 1% to total global energy supply, the report adds. Potential deployment scenarios range from a marginal role of direct solar energy in 2050 to one of the major sources of energy supply. The actual deployment will depend on continued innovation, cost reductions and supportive public policies.

The full report is expected to be made available here after May 31.As appeared May 5, 2011 in SmartPlanet.

Heliocol Solar Pool Heaters Add Energy to Southern California

Article by Nan Sterman, as appeared in Angie’s List magazine

Gov. Jerry Brown recently set a goal for state utility companies to derive 33 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. Here in the land of sunshine, it just makes sense for homeowners to get a head start on the energy companies by finding opportunities to use solar energy now, especially outdoors.

Solar outdoor lights appeared on the market several years ago, offering "free lighting" that's a cinch to install. Simply put them in a sunny location, and they do their thing. No cords, no trenching, no inverters. And if you pick the wrong spot or find you need more light in a different location, just pick them up and move them.

Sounds perfect, and they would be if only they produced a quality light and had a long battery life. "There are no solar [lights] that are worth the dirt they are staked into," says Mark McAnelly, owner of highly rated Southwest Landscape in San Diego. McAnelly says the current generation of outdoor solar lights acts more like markers to illuminate a driveway like a runway.

On the other hand, solar pool heaters are impressive, says Steve Jacobs of highly rated Nature Designs Landscaping  in Vista, Calif. These simple systems pump water from the pool into solar panels, where the sun heats the water before it circulates back into the pool.

Jacobs likes Heliocol solar systems because of their reliability and low maintenance. The solar panels are best mounted on a south-facing roof or slope at ground level, providing there are no trees or nearby buildings to shade them.

As a rule of thumb, solar panels cover roughly the same square footage as the pool, though in cooler coastal areas, they might be 25 to 50 percent larger; in desert areas, 25 percent smaller.

Heating also determines the size. In Southern California, systems are typically designed to heat water to 85 degrees in summer, 65 degrees in winter. Warmer water requires more panels. Whatever the size, Jacobs says, they commonly install solar panels on roofs because of space. Most lots aren't big enough to put them at ground level. Weight isn't usually a problem for the roof, as a small volume of water moves through the panel at a time.

Tod Ellington, director of marketing at UMA Solar, Heliocol's parent company, says his systems can double the swim season. "In Southern California, you can get an additional six or seven months."

Solar heaters cost two or three times more than natural gas or propane with the average sized system priced around $5,000, but recouping the investment can take less than five years. "Some people can spend $800 a month trying to heat their pools with gas," Jacobs says. "At that rate, payback would only be only a year or two."

The longevity of solar systems is also impressive. Heliocol's warranty is 12 years, including labor, mounting hardware and panel connections with some systems working well past 20 years, according to Ellington.

Nan Sterman is author of "California Gardener's Guide Volume II." She's a gardening expert, communicator and designer who has long grown an organic garden of plants that both feed her family and beautify her yard.

Renewable Energy Could Meet 80% of Global Energy Supply Needs

As appeared in Solar Industry Magazine

Close to 80% of the world's energy supply could be met by solar power and other forms of renewable energy by mid-century if deployment is backed by the right enabling public policies, according to a new report from researchers working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The findings also indicate that the rising penetration of renewable energies could lead to cumulative greenhouse gas savings equivalent to 220 to 560 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2050. The upper end of the scenarios assessed, representing a cut of around one-third in greenhouse gas emissions from business-as-usual projections, could assist in keeping concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million.

This change could contribute toward a goal of holding the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees C - an aim recognized in the United Nations Climate Convention's Cancun Agreements.

"The report shows that it is not the availability of the resource, but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades," says Ramon Pichs, co-chair of Working Group III. "Developing countries have an important stake in this future: This is where most of the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity live, yet also where some of the best conditions exist for renewable energy deployment."

The six renewable energy technologies reviewed in the report are bioenergy, direct solar energy (including photovoltaics and concentrating solar power), geothermal energy, hydropower, ocean energy and wind energy. More than 160 existing scientific scenarios on the possible penetration of renewables by 2050, alongside environmental and social implications, were reviewed, with four analyzed in depth, the IPCC says.

Although the scenarios arrive at a range of estimates, the overall conclusions are that renewables will take an increasing slice of the energy market. The most optimistic of the four in-depth scenarios projects renewable energy accounting for as much as 77% of the world's energy demand by 2050 - up from just under 13% of the total primary energy supply in 2008.

The report concludes that although the proportion of renewable energy will likely increase even without enabling policies, past experience has shown that the largest increases come with concerted policy efforts. For instance, if environmental impacts such as emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases were monetized and included in energy prices, more renewable energy technologies may become economically attractive.

Currently, direct solar contributes only a fraction of 1% to total global energy supply, the report adds. Potential deployment scenarios range from a marginal role of direct solar energy in 2050 to one of the major sources of energy supply. The actual deployment will depend on continued innovation, cost reductions and supportive public policies.

The full report is expected to be made available here after May 31.As appeared May 5, 2011 in SmartPlanet.

Avoiding Silent Failure in Solar Installations

As appeared May 5, 2011 in SmartPlanet.

By Andrew Nusca

SunReports is a San Francisco, Calif.-based company that manufactures monitoring systems for solar energy installations.

SmartPlanet caught up with chief executive Tom Dinkel to discuss why this part of our smart energy infrastructure is surprisingly off-grid — and why an unmonitored installation can actually use more power than it generates.

SP: Tell us about SunReports’ market.

TD: SunReports serves the broad solar market in two halves: solar photovoltaic, which is small and sexy, and solar hot water, which is not-so-sexy but the larger of the two.

We focus on the residential level. There are 66,000 systems installed in California in PV; less than five percent are monitored, which is just nuts. Traditional monitoring companies are too costly and too complex [for the average homeowner], so they just don’t have traction in the residential space. I know this from first-hand experience, because I was at [renewable energy management company] Fat Spaniel.

It has to be incredibly simple and incredibly easy to install for installers. The price point has to be low enough so that an installer won’t even consider doing a system without having monitoring on it. We’re well under the $1,000 mark now.

The PV market, we estimate there are about a million installed systems around the world. The hot water markets we estimate about 45 million systems around the world. Most are in China.

It’s interesting that the person who is most interested in energy is least served by the smart grid. In California, they use net metering for measuring the solar arrays on the roof. The smart grid doesn’t touch the net meters. The person who is most interested is unable to see what’s going on. There is no data.

SolarCity has their own monitoring thing; SunRun has their own monitoring thing. But they have not optimized theirs, and I’d be happy to talk to them about it.

The hot water space is completely underserved by monitors. We’ve spent most of our energy serving this market, and have established distribution in the space.

Our efforts so far have been to touch as few people as possible to get the very maximum reach we can obtain. Mostly OEMs.

SP: What happens when we don’t monitor solar installations?

TD: The failure of the system is very quiet. There’s no smoke, klaxon horn, no flashing lights.

The problem is that you still have power — for hot water, you still are taking warm showers — but your solar generation system could be down weeks or months before you notice. That’s not a very good return on investment; that would be zero.

The homeowner gets a bill. They might notice that their first bill is a little higher than normal, but they pay it. The second month that it’s out of whack, it’s “Honey, why is this bill so high?” You’ve just wasted more energy than the thing costs.

We know for sure that over the course of the system — these panels live 25 years plus, inverters live maybe 8 or 10 years — you’re going to have one, probably two inverter failures. I would want to know when my inverter has pooped out.

It’s ironic: you’ve spent more on your solar array than your [Toyota] Prius, but there’s no dashboard on it.

Installers in California are required to provide a 10-year warranty on these systems. But they have no risk mitigation strategy. So we give them one dashboard, one Google Maps-based portal, where they can see their entire installed base. They can manage their entire installed base by exception.

It’s a really useful tool.

SP: How do you get installers to bite?

TD: It hasn’t been particularly hard. The hardest thing has been getting word out that the technology exists. Traditional monitoring has a power supply, web server and data logger that all have to get pinned together. The typical installer does not know what a subnet mask is.

We’ve designed a plug-in process. Our most common call from the field is, “I just did this really quickly, did I miss a step?”

The solar hot water guys have never thought of solar monitoring. The solar panel guys generally don’t unless they’re vertically aligned. It’s the inverter guys that have baked-in solutions. Where it falls down is when the customer calls. A visit by a repairman costs more than my product does.

SP: You attended a solar conference in January in New Jersey. Tell us about it.

TD: It was called Networked Solar, which is cute, because solar is about the least-networked thing on the planet.

Utility representatives were concerned that there were things on their distribution grid that were not in their control. For a utility to not have command-and-control is pretty terrifying. It goes against their grain. The information we get from the inverter is one-way, but it’s a two-way pipe.

This was the first conference I’ve heard of or attended where this was actually a topic.

The smart grid is more than just automating meter reading. It should be about managing your own power, especially for people who care.

There are two huge gravitational pulls that we experience on a daily basis: the smart grid and the home automation network. We can operate with both, but we’re not reliant upon either.

It’s sort of a hole in other people’s strategy. I think that we will be acquired by a larger player in either of these markets. Somebody will have to own that. It could be an existing player or someone who sees that we have a chip on a board that looks like a networked device and maybe it’s a Cisco or an Intel. I expect that we’ll get gobbled up before we’re too long down the road.

SP: What’s next?

TD: Software and hardware. We get asked all the time, “I can see my PV system, but what’s my load in the home? I know what I’m generating, but I want to know what I’m consuming.” Innovating to see consumption in the space. I don’t see many products I like in the home energy monitoring space.

The home energy guys are trying to satisfy a market that nobody cares about yet. The average energy bill in this country is $3 a day. Nobody’s going to save $1.30 a day. It’s just not compelling.

If installers were able to better demonstrate the performance of these panels, the decision will be less scary.

I’m currently batting .400. We’re just taking the installation business to the next level.

SP: What’s your ratio of residential to commercial customers?

TD: For numbers of installs, it’s 80 percent residential. In terms of megawatts…

SP: But you make your money on the number of installs, not megawatts.

TD: Exactly.

Solar Thermal Rebates in Nevada

Tens of thousands of Facebook users recently established a new Guiness World Record for the most comments to a Facebook post in 24 hours. The eco-conscious commenters joined with Greenpeace to call on the social network to begin powering services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.

The numerous comments will be displayed on an LED screen outside Facebook's California office, encouraging the company to meet Greenpeace's Earth Day challenge to announce a plan to phase out its use of coal power over the next decade.

Facebook Users Push for Renewable Energy

Tens of thousands of Facebook users recently established a new Guiness World Record for the most comments to a Facebook post in 24 hours. The eco-conscious commenters joined with Greenpeace to call on the social network to begin powering services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.

The numerous comments will be displayed on an LED screen outside Facebook's California office, encouraging the company to meet Greenpeace's Earth Day challenge to announce a plan to phase out its use of coal power over the next decade.

Wall Street Journal Poll

The Wall Street Journal wants to know: What should happen with U.S. government subsidies of renewable energy development? Share your opinion by submitting an answer to this poll at  http://ow.ly/4xVtW.