A recent report identified San Diego as having the most rooftop solar installations in the state. To ensure this continued success, CleanTECH San Diego and the Solar Electric Power Association are offering a half-day Solar Energy Symposium on March 6 at the University of San Diego to discuss the future of solar energy in the region. Experts will share information about the expansion of solar energy in San Diego, discuss its benefits, address misconceptions and identify ways to build a foundation for long-term solar growth.

This event will feature keynote speaker, Michael Picker, Senior Advisor to the Governor for Renewable Energy Facilities. Introductory and transitional addresses will be made by Jim Waring, President & CEO of CleanTECH San Diego, Bob Gibson, Vice President – Market Intelligence of SEPA and Morten Lund, Partner – Energy Development at Stoel Rives.

PANEL 1: Solar Energy – Today’s Trends and Challenges with moderator Scott Anders Director, University of San Diego Energy Policy Initiatives Center (EPIC) featuring panelists Cecilia Aguillon (Kyocera Solar), John Bumgarner (REC Solar), Thomas Noelle (Xtreme Power Solutions) and Byron Washom (UC San Diego).

PANEL 2: Solar in San Diego by 2020 – A Vision for Growth with moderator Andrew McAllister (California Center for Sustainable Energy) featuring panelists Tom Brill (SDG&E), Clark Crawford (Soitec) and Ted Ko (Clean Coalition).

Tuesday March 6, 2012 at 1:00 – 4:30 PM

University of San Diego
Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice
Reception to follow from 4:30 – 6:30 PM

Register at: www.sdsolarenergysymposium2012.eventbrite.com

By Guest Author Lee Barken, CPA, LEED-AP 

In January 2012, research group Environment California released a report highlighting the phenomenal growth of solar energy in the state of California.  California, which is leading the nation in deployments, has installed just over 1,000 megawatts (mW) of solar power through 2011.  While California is the standard-bearer for solar energy in the U.S., countries such as Germany have installed 17 times that amount, with 4,000 mW deployed in the month of December 2011 alone.

The good news is that, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), California has just begun to tap its potential for renewable energy.  It estimates that existing buildings have the capacity to support up to 80,000 mW of rooftop solar systems.  With ample rooftop space and surging energy demands, the potential to grow solar in California and beyond is significant.  The question remains, how do we get there from here?

No roof?  No worries.

Financial innovations such as commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) and expanded residential leasing options can help make solar more affordable for people who own their roof.  For everybody else, a new kind of solar model is emerging: Solar Hosting.
 
Solar hosting provides another option for renters who don’t own a roof as well as property owners with rooftops that aren’t ideal for solar due to technical limitations such as excess shading, the lack of a proper southern orientation or having an uncertain roof replacement time horizon.  Solar hosting also solves a problem for people reluctant to make long-term financial investments or individuals living or working in high density multi-story buildings that simply don’t have enough rooftop space to hold enough panels for everybody.

How does it work? 

Solar hosting is a lot like web server hosting.  If you don’t want to run your own server, you keep it in a co-location facility (sometimes called “the cloud”) and let somebody else take care of the network infrastructure and physical location management.  Solar hosting works the same way.  It lets you enjoy the benefit of solar panels, without having them physically located on your roof.

A variety of underlying business models can be supported with solar hosting.  One size will likely not fit all needs and several approaches and pricing models are expected to emerge in this growing marketplace.  Solar can be sold as a “service”, which would be structured as a subscription.  For example, you might “rent” a panel or purchase a block of kilowatt hours.  Alternatively, it could involve a fractional ownership model structured as a co-op where the members have an ownership stake in an entity that owns the land and produces power.  Another possibility is an allocation as part of a larger property deed similar to how some condominiums include title to a detached parking space.  The condo complex or master planned community of the future could include a small plot of land to host your own solar panels as part of your ownership deed. 

Policy to the Rescue

In California, a bill has been proposed (SB843) to help unleash the potential of this new solar deployment framework.  This policy innovation would allow individuals to subscribe to or own solar generation assets on non-contiguous parcels and credit them back to their own utility bill.  Details of the billing mechanism have not yet been finalized, such as and the price at which the solar generation credit is applied back to an individual’s utility bill.  However, the potential to open up the solar market to both renters and rooftop owners with an “inhospitable environment” is certainly tantalizing.

Meanwhile, Colorado has already passed a solar hosting law and is in the early phases of a 6 megawatt pilot project; San Diego Gas and Electric has proposed a 10 megawatt pilot project to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC); and the state of Maryland has introduced its own solar hosting legislation (SB595).

Solar Everywhere

Rather than simply build out each traditional solar installation to meet only the needs of that particular site’s electricity consumption, what if property owners were actually incentivized to utilize 100% of their physical space capacity for solar and sell the excess power to other people?  If California establishes the proper financial incentive structures, it could give Germany a run for its money.  Countless jobs and economic development opportunities hang in the balance.

Just like web servers enabled the transformational model of “cloud computing,” solar hosting opens up an entirely new market for renewable energy.  While many people will continue to put panels on their own facilities, solar hosting becomes a new option for people who want to “go solar”… just not on their own roof.  Why not give those people a chance to participate and expand solar access for everybody?  Solar hosting opens those doors.

Lee Barken, CPA, LEED-AP is the Energy and Cleantech practice leader at Haskell & White, LLP and serves on the board of directors of CleanTECH San Diego and as Vice-Chair of the WREGIS Stakeholder Advisory Committee.  Lee writes and speaks on the topics of renewable energy project finance, green building, IT audit compliance and wireless LAN technology.  You can reach him at 858-350-4215 or lbarken@hwcpa.com.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.  His blog, Do the Math, takes an astrophysicist’s-eye view of societal issues relating to energy production, climate change, and economic growth.

Breathe, Neo. I’ve been running a marathon lately to cover all the major players that may provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels this century. Even though I have not exhausted all possibilities, or covered each topic exhaustively, I am exhausted. So in this post, I will provide a recap of all the schemes discussed thus far, in matrix form. Then Do the Math will shift its focus to more of the “what next” part of the message.

The primary “mission” of late has been to sort possible future energy resources into boxes labeled “abundant,” “potent” (able to support something like a quarter of our present demand if fully developed), and “niche,” which is a polite way to say puny. In the process, I have clarified in my mind that a significant contributor to my concerns about future energy scarcity is not the simple quantitative scorecard. After all, if it were that easy, we’d be rocking along with a collective consensus about our path forward. Some comments have asked: “If we forget about trying to meet our total demand with one source, could we meet our demand if we add them all up?” Absolutely. In fact, the abundant sources technically need no other complement. So on the abundance score alone, we’re done at solar, for instance. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. While the quantitative abundance of a resource is key, many other practical concerns enter the fray when trying to anticipate long-term prospects and challenges—usually making up the bulk of the words in prior posts.

For example, it does not much matter that Titan has enormous pools of methane unprotected by any army (that we know of!). The gigantic scale of this resource makes our Earthly fossil fuel allocation a mere speck. But so what? Practical considerations mean we will never grab this energy store. Likewise, some of our terrestrial sources of energy are super-abundant, but just a pain in the butt to access or put to practical use.

In this post, we will summarize the ins and outs of the various prospects. Interpretation will come later. For now, let’s just wrap it all up together.

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UC San Diego History and Science Studies Professor, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming was recently featured on the OpEd page of the Los Angeles Times.  “The verdict is in on climate change” is a logical and articulate presentation why, in this case, the seemingly reasonable act of maintaining an open mind is, in fact, unreasonable.  Click here to get the full impact in her words.

In Merchants of Doubt, Dr. Oreskes describes how denial-for-hire “experts” have been involved in a continuum of anti-science campaigns stretching back over 50 years to a time when cigarettes were supposedly healthy.  Their tactics have centered on nurturing doubt to forestall action.  The jury is still out; two sides to every story; don’t rush to judgment are their common themes.

The remarkable scientific advances of the past two centuries are based upon a process of research, followed by scientific writing, followed by peer review.  Modern scientific truths are not based on opinion polls or the forcefully stated positions of hired guns from unrelated fields.  The fact that not every scientist within a given field is in agreement does not negate the validity of the peer reviewed conclusions held by the vast majority.  Imagine that you had a child with a life-threating medical condition.  Your doctors agree on the recommended course of action.  In doing so they reveal that their conclusions are held by 90% of the physicians in their specialty.  Would you not take action because their conclusions were not universally held?  Would tell your child, “The jury is still out?”  Would you wait?

Click here for my 2010 review of Merchants of Doubt.  Buy a copy for yourself and for all of your smart friends who read.  

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.  His blog, Do the Math, takes an astrophysicist’s-eye view of societal issues relating to energy production, climate change, and economic growth.

With the exception of tidal energy, our focus thus far has been on land-based energy sources. Meanwhile, the ocean absorbs a prodigious fraction of the Sun’s incident energy, creating thermal gradients, currents, and waves whipped up by winds. Let’s put some scales on the energetics of these sources and see if we may turn to them for help. We’ve got our three boxes ready: abundant, potent, and niche (puny). Time to do some sorting!

Thermal Gradients

Wherever there is a thermal gradient, our eyes light up because we can create a heat flow across the gradient and capture some fraction of the energy flow to do useful work. This is called a heat engine, the efficiency of which is capped by the theoretical maximum (T_h − T_c)/T_h, where “h” and “c” subscripts refer to absolute temperatures of the hot and cold reservoirs, respectively. In the ocean, we are rather limited in how much gradient is available. The surface does not tend to exceed 30°C (303 K), while the depths cannot get much cooler than 0°C (273 K; pressure and salinity allow it to go a few degrees negative). The maximum thermodynamic efficiency therefore tops out at 10%, and in practice we might get half of this in a real application. The general scheme of producing energy from thermal gradients in the ocean is called ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

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