Can threatened tortoises and utility-scale solar plants coexist in the California desert? Since the solar rush began a few years ago, results have been discouraging. But an ambitious new plan aims to strike a long-lasting compromise. Northern Californians get a chance to weigh in on the process at a public meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, September 5.

BrightSource Energy

The sprawling Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is scheduled to go online next year.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan — just call it the DRECP — is designed to establish habitat protection guidelines for dozens of species, not just the elusive desert tortoise, across an incredible 22.5 million acres of desert caught in the crossfire between conservation and clean energy.

It’s already being called the nation’s largest-ever Habitat Conservation Plan (a tool created by the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973), and the first to be framed around renewable-energy development. Habitat conservation plans work by addressing mitigation and conservation needs up front and requiring developers to pay into them — rather than the scattershot, reactionary approach employed in the desert to date.

No matter how the DRECP turns out, its implications are likely to be enormous — even beyond California, where it could set an example for other states pursuing large-scale clean-energy development in remote areas.

And yet the plan has flown quietly under the radar since the planning process began in March 2009 with a diverse, often contentious group of stakeholders. But next week at the California Energy Commission’s offices in Sacramento, members of the public can listen in and offer comment as state and local government agencies, renewable-energy developers, environmental groups, and land-use attorneys debate the ins and outs of habitat conservation on public land. The federal Bureau of Land Management owns more than 11 million acres in the California desert.

According to DRECP Director Dave Harlow, the plan relies on sophisticated, state-of-the-art species-distribution models and tools to account for a wide variety of desert plant and animal species, including 36 plants, 20 birds, ten mammals, seven amphibians and reptiles, and even four fish.

But April Sall of Southern California environmental group The Wildlands Conservancy, one of the numerous stakeholders, is worried that everything may not come together as planned. She claims that industry representatives have been lobbying to keep land open for development, and the project’s rapid timeline — a final draft is due next spring — may not allow sufficient time to fill in knowledge gaps about habitat and species distribution in certain areas of the desert.

“I’m hopeful that this will work, but at this time I have a bit of concern,” she said. “It’s kind of our only chance for the desert at this point.”

Barbara Boyle, the Sierra Club’s senior lead for energy issues, who has also been participating in the planning process, shared Sall’s concerns. “They are moving it pretty quickly, and that makes us nervous. They are on a very fast track.”

In addition to conservation considerations, the DRECP will also help determine how many new transmission lines can be built in the California desert, Boyle said, and ultimately how much the state will rely on remote, large-scale renewable energy to meet its Renewable Portfolio Standard. “There are some really important policy choices here that are being made that are going to affect things over the long-term,” she said. “These are huge policy issues that are all wrapped up this in plan.”

A draft version of the DRECP will arrive in December.

Craig Miller

Most Californians rely on electricity from distant sources.

By Thibault Worth

California’s mandated goal of 33% renewable energy by 2020 may be bold and ambitious. But there’s room to raise the bar still higher, say proponents of local renewable power.

A report commissioned by Governor Jerry Brown last year — and released this week by Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) — lays out a plan for developing 12,000 Megawatts of renewable power generation close to homes and workplaces by 2020.

It’s an ambitious goal – three times the capacity of California’s two nuclear power plants.  But it’s attainable, say co-authors Jeffrey Russell and Steven Weissman, who examine barriers to local renewable energy production — from grid planning and financing to fire safety and building permits — and provide a step-by-step guide to overcoming them.

“Developing renewable energy in urban areas will create jobs, help the environment, and give communities more control over where their energy comes from and how much they pay for it,” says Russell, a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law School.

But the biggest challenge to the plan may be political. The electrical grid is currently designed to take energy from a small number of discrete power sources located far from urban centers.  The priority of the California Independent System Operator, which manages 80% of California’s electric grid, is to forecast demand and reduce uncertainty in supply. Vastly increasing the number of inputs through local renewable generation complicates matters.

“The plan is controversial because it is changing the business model that utilities that have been used to for some time,” says Russell. “It’s decentralizing the generation of power.”

Localization has its benefits too. In addition to giving end-users more control, it would also help address the problem of line loss, by which about seven percent of electricity generated in the U.S. dissipates during transmission over long-distance power lines.  Local micro-grids would also help reduce congestion on the main grid during peak demand periods.

“The report is a blueprint for California, and it also offers a model for the rest of the country,” said report co-author Steven Weissman, director of the energy program at Berkeley Law School.

The report’s recommendations reflect discussions at the Governor’s Conference on Local Renewable Energy Resources, held this past July in Los Angeles, as well as extensive research and analysis by Russell and Weissman.

You can watch a video of that conference here.

Kimberly Ayers

Feed-in tariffs from private solar arrays like this one enable the world's largest source of renewable energy.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) now gets to ramp up a pilot phase that could add up to 150 megawatts of renewable electricity after 2016 — enough to power 22,000 homes — all with an eye toward hitting the state-mandated goal of 33% of its power from renewables by 2020. The measure awaits the mayor’s signature, expected late next week.

A common example of the new program would be a commercial real estate or large warehouse owner installing a rooftop solar power system and selling that power back to the local utility. The simplest definition I’ve found comes from another city that just approved a similar program for solar energy, Palo Alto: “Feed-in tariff programs involve a utility paying a fixed price, a “tariff,” for the power that is “fed into” their electric grid from local generation systems.”

The pros, cons and history of this trend, known as “distributed generation” or simply “DG,” are covered in plain language and plenty of colorful graphics in this presentation from the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). ”FiT” programs, as they’re known, certainly aren’t as dramatic as acres of solar arrays stretched out across the Mojave but they offer two key advantages, according to LADWP’s presentation to the City Council and the NREL explainer:

1. Proximity:  if your local utility is receiving power from a source right inside its coverage area, then there are no expensive transmission lines to fund and string out over miles of possibly difficult terrain, like the 35 miles worth approved for Southern California Edison’s Ivanpah solar project near the Nevada border.
2. Diversification: According to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) study, diversity can spell reliability: if all your “power” eggs aren’t in the same basket, then the chance of one power source’s problem taking out a huge swath of customers for a long period of time is less.

But that diversity can still be a disadvantage. Here’s why: our model for the past 100 years has been large power generating plants — mostly run with fossil fuels — sending electricity out to the grid and on to individual consumers. “Distributed” means the power is coming back the other way from a variety of sources in a variety of amounts at any given time of day — a whole lot trickier, given the need to constantly keep electrical generation and demand in balance. The power grid runs best on an even and constant supply of power. Solar is by nature intermittent, but even the technology to store solar-generated power is getting better all the time.

One other upside to solar power is that it is produced when it’s needed most: during daylight hours when most businesses are open and in the summer when people crank up their air conditioners. According to the FERC study, distributed generation can take some of the wear and tear off parts of the grid, reducing replacement costs and possibly avoiding a few more power failures along the way.

Just how big can distributed generation get in California? According to the 2010 California Clean Energy Future report, the state’s publicly owned utilities’ goal is to install 700 MW of distributed solar by 2017.  Back in 2007, the California Energy Commission said it wanted distributed generation and co-generation built by utilities and others to meet 25% of the state’s peak load demand by 2020. Governor Jerry Brown aspires to 12,000 MW of “renewable distributed generation” by 2020. As of last year, the state had nearly 1,000 MW of customer-side distributed generation systems and another 2,200 MW from wholesale systems. UC Berkeley researchers recently issued a detailed roadmap for achieving that 12,000-MW goal. Its draft report calls for streamlining the permitting process at the state and local level; adopting a faster and less expensive utility interconnection process, and asks utilities to develop local geography-driven plans for integrating these new energy sources into the existing grid.

BrightSource Energy

Solar-thermal plants use mirrors or "heliostats" to focus sunlight on a tower receptor that produces steam to generate electricity.

A major barrier for solar power has always been that it doesn’t work at night (Duh). A few years ago, developers of big “utility-scale” solar projects were able to shrug this off to some degree. But Oakland-based BrightSource Energy has reversed field and decided to add to several projects the ability to store electricity for distribution after dark.

BrightSource managers say times have changed. Where utilities once wanted all the renewable capacity they could get, to meet state requirements, the priority has since shifted to having those renewable electrons available when they’re needed.

“The challenges of integrating photovoltaics and wind into the grid have driven a much deeper appreciation for those that can be highly reliable,” BrightSource CEO John Woolard told me in a phone interview.

But another driver is — well — us. When I interviewed Woolard a couple of years ago, I asked him why his company wasn’t including storage technology in its California projects. He said it wasn’t needed in California, which had a different pattern of electrical use than, say, Arizona.

That’s changing. Woolard says peak demand, which has traditionally hit around 4 p.m., has been shifting to later in the day, and by the end of this decade, will probably happen around 6 p.m. He says changing lifestyles are behind the shift, such as when people arrive home and fire up their air conditioners and other appliances.

BrightSource says it will use a molten-salt technology to store the power, rather than huge banks of batteries or experimental technologies such as flywheels. “That’s a solution for 2050 or 2060,” Woolard told me, “depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.”

Here’s a good summary of how it works, from The Energy Blog:

“The molten salt, with properties like water at temperatures above its 240^oC (464^oF) melting point, is pumped from a large storage tank to the receiver, where it is heated in tubes to temperatures of 565^oC (1049^oF). The salt is then returned to a second large storage tank, where it remains until needed by the utility for power generation. At that time, the salt is pumped through a steam generator to produce the steam to power a conventional, high-efficiency steam turbine to produce electricity. The salt at 285^oC (545^oF) then returns to the first storage tank to be used in the cycle again.”

BrightSource will add molten-salt units to three of its projects in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, but not to its Ivanpah Valley project, already under construction near the Nevada border. Spokesman Keely Wachs says that the added cost will be “fairly nominal,” and that expanding the plants’ operating hours will, in effect, reduce the price of energy from those plants.

CEO Woolard says that despite plunging prices for conventional photovoltaic solar panels, BrightSource will not be joining a trend among developers to convert some of their giant solar arrays to PV. He says PV output tends to peak at noon (PV power is a function of light, not heat), so their output is falling just as demand is rising. He says that by adding storage capacity to solar-thermal plants such as his,”You can extend when you deliver power and and you’re delivering more of it when the real system peak is.”

A gigawatt – or a thousand megawatts – is enough energy for about 600,000 homes. Only five nations — let alone states — including Germany and Japan, have reached that level. “Even in a bad economy, the solar industry has been growing exponentially by 40 percent per year,” says Michelle Kinman of Environment California.

The goal comes five years after California’s Million Solar Roofs Initiative began, which mandates three gigawatts of rooftop solar by 2016.

The report credits the rapidly falling prices of solar panels for the growth, as well as the California Solar Initiative, a $2 billion solar rebate program. In 2007, the program provided a rebate of up to $2.50 per watt. As demand has grown, the program is designed to reduce the incentive. Today, it’s between 25-65 cents per watt.

“The real goal of the program is to create a sustainable solar industry in California that will continue to thrive without continued ratepayer incentives,” Scott Murtishaw of the Public Utilities Commission. “And I think that we’re achieving that. The installed cost of solar has fallen by roughly a quarter since the program began.”

The report says California is on track to meet the three-gigawatt goal in 2016. Adam Browning of Vote Solar says the state’s net metering cap could get in the way. Solar customers sign up for net metering contracts with their utility, so they’re credited for the electricity they generate. Right now, California utilities are only required to sign contracts for up to 5% of their overall load.
“There are clouds on the horizon and we’re going to have to lift the cap again,” says Browning.

Still, he says it’s a good story. “We’ve hit that transformation point with solar. It’s like cell phones. They’re nowhere until they’re everywhere. Once they hit a sweet spot, you see an explosion and I think that’s what’s happening now.”

This week as Fremont-based Solyndra sets about the grim business of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it leaves in its wake ample confusion over California’s much vaunted “lead” in renewable energy — so much so that last week a national solar industry association felt compelled to issue a statement reassuring us that Solargeddon was not at hand. (Cy Musiker’s interview with Sev Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute provides some solid perspective on the Solyndra collapse).

It didn’t help that Solyndra had been the arc light of California’s renewable power surge. President Obama, Energy Secretary Steve Chu and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had all led media parades through the company’s Fremont manufacturing plant. The bankruptcy announcement came within hours after Chu finished extolling California’s leadership at an energy “summit” in Las Vegas.

Craig Miller

John Hild with the new solar array at the Contra Costa County Office of Education. The panels were "made in the USA"-- but by a Chinese company.

Recently I climbed to the roof of the Contra Costa County Office of Education with John Hild, for an overview of a new 700-panel solar array that covers the agency’s parking lot in Concord.

Hild, who manages facilities there, was impressed with the May electric bill, which had dropped to $19 from about $7,200 before the photovoltaic (PV) panels were hooked up. But Hild says it was tough to find American-made panels, something required by one of the incentive programs that CCCOE was tapping into to make the project affordable. In the end, they found some–but they were made in Arizona, not California, by the Chinese solar juggernaut SunTech.

At the same time that Solyndra was burning through federal stimulus dollars to gain traction with a new panel technology, SunTech and others were cranking out standard-technology panels, bringing the price down dramatically — 30% in 2011 alone, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

A few months ago, when I interviewed SunTech founder and CEO Zhengrong Shi, he said he doesn’t see China and California in competition. “We still need to buy raw materials from all over the world,” Shi told me. He said facilities like SunTech’s Phoenix operation could provide the impetus for manufacturing hubs. “[Components] manufacturers can put their factories next to our factory,” Shi said.  “I think that way [it will] make the whole industry grow much faster. Manufacturing costs will come down because all materials…will be produced locally.”

A recent report from SEIA touted the US as a net exporter of “solar energy products.” But the bulk of that is polysilicon, the basic feedstock for fabrication of PV panels, not the finished panels.

While the SEIA report makes its case for a robust US-based industry, total investment in clean energy flows increasingly eastward. A parsing of the $243 Billion global investment pie by the Pew Charitable Trusts showed China leading all contenders in 2010 with $54.4 Billion (a 39% jump from 2009) $243 Billion. The US fell to third with $34 B (global investments in the solar sector were up by more than half).

In the end, Shi may be right in his assertion that there’ll be plenty of room for everybody. A new report from the South Korean electronics giant, Samsung projects the global market for solar panels to more than double by 2020. But right before Labor Day and overshadowed by the Solyndra hysteria, the German manufacturer SolarWorld announced that it, too, was shutting down production at a California plant and moving the work to Oregon, where labor costs are lower.

California’s policies have helped to create a steady market. California’s labs might provide the next game-changing solar breakthrough (which Shi says is likely ten years off). But with the basic rooftop hardware rapidly becoming a commodity, current trends would seem to cast doubt on California’s place in the sun as a world-beating producer of solar panels.

Photovoltaic Panels at a PG&E's Dixon-Vacaville array. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Photovoltaic solar panels are becoming the new black for large-scale solar projects in California.

Developers of what’s billed as the world’s largest solar project, spanning 7,000 acres in Blythe, California, say the plant will get half of its 1,000 megawatts from photovoltaic panels. This recent announcement makes Solar Trust of America the fourth large-scale solar developer in California to switch from solar thermal to photovoltaic panels, which Solar Trust CEO Uwe Schmidt calls “the right technology at the right time.”

Brett Prior, Senior Analyst at Greentech Media, says that large-scale solar developers have preferred solar thermal but the plummeting cost of photovoltaic panels is changing that.

“Over the last couple of years PV [photovoltaic] panels have dropped significantly in price,” says Prior.

How’s 70% over the last two years for “significant?” Prior says that’s because China is emerging as a major player in panel manufacturing. “Just in the last five years, China has gone from sort of a minimal role to over 50% of all worldwide manufacturing of PV panels.” says Prior.

However, cost of technology isn’t the only factor affecting large-scale solar projects.

“One area where [solar thermal] players are making a lot of progress is incorporating thermal storage,” says Prior.

For some solar developers, thermal storage is a viable feature for solar thermal power and worth the extra cost. Since solar photovoltaic panels only work when the sun is shining, some solar-thermal plants incorporate a feature that uses molten salts, which can store heat throughout the day and be released to generate steam for turbines.

Prior says solar-thermal plants using storage features allow more flexibility to grid demand, which is consistent after the sun sets.

“They can store energy during the morning when it’s not really needed by the grid, deliver 100% output at one p.m. when it’s most needed, and continue to deliver 100% output at eight p.m. when electricity demand drops off,” says Prior.

Despite the emerging energy storage technology, three other large-scale solar plants (links to interactive map, below) have made the transition from solar thermal to solar photovoltaic panels for at least part of the project. Other developers like NextERA’s Beacon Solar, builder of a large project in Kern County, have suggested similar plans.

View Making the Swtich in a larger map

(Photo: Craig Miller)

Google is giving a boost to the solar industry today – but not to those large solar farms in the California desert. Nope, the company’s largest clean energy investment to date is going to home solar.

Five years ago, SolarCity was a small, Bay Area start-up. Today, it’s getting a $280 million-dollar investment from one of the most influential players in the game.

“We are very excited,” says Lyndon Rive,  CEO of SolarCity. “It’s a big vote of confidence in SolarCity as well as hopefully a big vote of confidence to the entire market.”

SolarCity’s business is built around installing and financing solar panels for its customers, sparing homeowners the steep up-front costs. That’s been helped recently by falling prices on solar panels.

Rive says the financing has largely been provided by banks thus far. But he’s hopeful Google’s move will bring more corporations into the mix. “If we want to see solar power truly get large-scale and get adoption across almost every home and every business, we need to see the corporations start investing into solar power,” he said.

Residential solar is a new focus for Google. In the past, the company has invested in large-scale wind and solar farms.

“We use energy to power our services and we want that energy to be as clean as possible,” says Parag Chokshi, a spokesperson for Google. He says the company sees small-scale solar as important part of the energy mix — and a good investment.

“We think that supporting the development of this sector will help all of these different technologies get down that cost curve to become cheaper and cheaper over time,”said Chokshi.

The investment will fund between 7,000 and 10,000 new solar installations across the country.

A key component of new solar panel technology being tested at Stanford. (Photo: Nick Melosh)

In a kind of cruel paradox, heat has always been the enemy of solar panels.  At higher temperatures, photovoltaic cells become less efficient, which is problematic in an industry where efficiency is the name of the game. That heat also represents wasted energy.

Today, researchers at Stanford University announced that they may have helped solve that problem. Nick Melosh of Stanford’s Materials Science & Engineering department set out to make use of the wasted heat. He and his colleagues created a solar cell technology that uses both light and heat to generate electricity. It’s called “photon-enhanced thermionic emission” (or PETE for short). “This is the first time that a process has been reported that can use the heat and the photons together harmoniously,” says Melosh.

Traditionally, solar power falls into two camps; those that make solar power from sunlight, which is what photovoltaic (PV) panels do, and those that make solar power from heat, which is what concentrating solar power plants collect. Melosh is hoping that this technology would bridge the gap between the two.

The PETE process is designed to work at temperatures above 400 degrees F, much hotter than silicon solar panels can stand. For that reason, Melosh sees the panels being used in solar farms in the desert. “It’s probably not something that you would  put on your rooftop, but out in the desert, they would be perfect,” he said. Melosh hopes to see the efficiency eclipse 50%, which would be double that of most solar panels today.  The panels could also be added to existing solar thermal farms, since the high-temperature waste heat from the PETE process could be fed into system.

The technology is still confined to the lab, but Melosh hopes to see a prototype in three years. In the meantime, his lab will be testing different semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of the process.

Eicke Weber of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems made the comment on KQED’s Forum program this morning, during an hour devoted to solar energy prospects.

Weber said that California will represent a tiny fraction of the world’s growth in photovoltaics this year; just 200 of the 10,000 megawatts that he projects will be installed globally. California remains ahead of all other states in the deployment of solar panels. Weber’s forecast for California still represents two thirds of his projected total for the US. That’s “far below what could be expected from a country that’s as rich and sunshine-filled as the United States,” added Weber.

Chinese suppliers had a high profile at this week's solar expo in San Francisco (Photo: Craig Miller)

The global face of solar was impossible to miss at the Intersolar conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Three levels of exhibition space were crammed with industry exhibits. To get there, attendees had to jostle for space on the escalators. Though this was billed as the “North American” conference (following an even bigger one in Europe), the halls included major product exhibits from China, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and other nations. Organizers told the trade publication Solar Industry that they booked 30% more exhibitors than last year for the expo.

While speakers at the conference were calling for more government support for solar and other renewable energy sources, state officials in California were going to the mat to save what’s already in place here. On Wednesday attorney general/gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown said he is suing key players in the mortgage markets, in an effort to save the vaunted PACE program, which finances residential solar projects through property tax assessments. The announcement came even as the California Public Utilities Commission said it was suspending some solar incentive programs for schools and community organizations, after being overwhelmed with applications.

During the Forum discussion, Weber was sometimes at loggerheads with a former colleague from UC Berkeley, where Weber taught for more than 20 years. Weber predicted that rooftop solar could be cost-competitive with fossil fuels within seven years. But Severin Borenstein, who co-directs the Energy Institute at Berkeley, said he considered that forecast to be “at the very optimistic end of the range.”

Borenstein said he was not surprised that the PACE program is in trouble. He said that from the outset, mortgage lenders had been queasy about the program because when properties end up in foreclosure, the banks could find themselves second or third in line for their money, behind counties that finance the PACE energy upgrades.