Maine citizens are taking renewable power into their own hands.Photo: Matthew David Powell

For anyone anxious for change, that’s not a pretty picture. And given the fact that a majority of Americans favor an international treaty to curb climate change, and even more want to see an increased investment in renewable energy, the lack of action and dearth of options is teeth-grittingly frustrating.

Unless you live in Maine. 

When the newly elected governor (with 39 percent of the vote) threatened to roll back the state’s popular renewable standard, a coalition of local businesses and organizations banded together to do something about it. Taking matters into their own hands, they are putting a 20-percent-by-2020 renewable energy standard on the ballot for 2012. It’s a strong push for renewable energy, with some good energy-efficiency provisions to boot.

If you are waiting on an international climate treaty to address climate change, Durban shows again that you are going to need a very comfortable chair — perhaps one that floats. And any plan that involves Congress is, experience demonstrates, a bad plan. For the forseeable future, the action is at the state level. 

What the Maine coalition is doing is no less than democracy in environmental decision-making. It’s also smart. Renewable energy enjoys overwhelming popular support — the people are way ahead of policymakers on the subject. Any military strategist will tell you the importance of fighting on the terrain of your choice … and in this case, a citizens’ initiative is the most favorable battleground. 

Indeed, a good referendum on a renewable portfolio standard has never lost. Colorado’s Amendment 37, Missouri’s Prop C, and Washington’s Initiative 937 all won.

Here’s more information on getting involved. In a world of diminishing options for action, it’s one of the most effective things you can do to make progress.

We’ve prepared a document rebutting some of the incorrect assertions in the article. You can find it here. NRG, the owner of the solar plant at the heart of the story prepared a similar doc, here. And AWEA was out with a factcheck of their own, here.  Even Time is calling BS.

The fact is, governments have long provided massive subsidies for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries — and despite the fact that these industries are amongst the most profitable in the world, and continue to raise prices while inflicting tremendous damage to the environment, these subsidies continue unabated. IEA reports that fossil fuels get six times the level of subsidies of renewables. And according to the most recent report on energy subsidies by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in 2007, subsidies to nuclear were 9.6 times higher than those for solar; natural gas and petroleum subsidies were 11.2 times higher; and coal subsidies were 22.2 times higher than solar. The important thing is that we don’t pick winners, right?

On this unlevel playing field, transitioning to clean, emission-free renewable energy is going to require some government guidance and support.

And it is working. Renewables are finally coming into their own. In California, solar has hit the gigawatt mark for customer-owned generation. Incentives for rooftop PV have dropped from $4.50/W to $0.25/W, meaning that retail grid parity is just a frog-hair away. And well over half the solar power contracts that California utilities have signed — nearly 5 GW — are below the cost of a new natural gas plant. In Colorado, Xcel, the largest utility in the state, announced that it was going to meet the 30 percent renewable goal eight years early, and at a savings to ratepayers of $409 million. 

The point is, the programs — incentives, standards, what have you — are delivering. It’s a tremendous achievement — the commercialization of clean, renewable energy, energy that doesn’t warm the planet, melt icecaps or poison babies — at costs cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative. It’s a modern-day miracle. And it’s one that the vast majority of Americans support, regardless of their political orientation.

But let’s be honest here. The next 12 months are going to be more challenging than ever. There’s a well-funded opposition that’s just getting started. The Kochs just dropped $2.4 million in attack ads. “Clean coal” has spent $80 million on TV ads alone. We are stepping through the looking-glass, where facts are not the coin of the realm. 

What to do? Chin up, fight back, and get ready to go on offense.

If you are so inclined, start by sending the NY Times a letter to the editor. Here’s how. 

There’s going to be a lot of work to do in the days ahead. 

Footnotes:

1.  Actually, it was a year ago.  Until I turn 41, I’m still “recently 40.”

2. Actually, I’ve been yelling at newspapers for years.

Because that’s exactly what’s happening. 

Let’s take Colorado. The state has a 30 percent renewable energy requirement. How are things going? Xcel, the largest utility in the state, says it will meet that requirement in 2012 … that’s eight years earlier than required.

OK, some may say, but isn’t such a massive investment going to be painfully expensive?

Actually, according to Xcel, investing in renewables is going to save money in the long run. They are required to calculate the counterfactual — what would their costs be if they didn’t buy renewables? According to Xcel’s own calculations, if the state’s renewable energy standard didn’t exist, their ratepayers would pay an additional $409 million by 2021. That bears repeating. According to the utility’s calculations, going renewable will save Colorado ratepayers $409 million. And that’s assuming no new legislation that would require fossil fuels to compensate for carbon emissions. If such a law were passed, then the state’s renewable standard would be expected to save ratepayers $1.1 billion by 2021.

Check it out for yourself. You’ll find the calculations in Tables 7-3 and 7-4 in Volume 2 of Xcel’s RES compliance plan (available in the CO RES docket 11A-418E, link here ). According to Volume 1 of the RES plan, Xcel assumes carbon costs of $20/ton, escalating at 7 percent annually, as approved in the 2007 Colorado Resource Plan, which introduced possible carbon emission regulation in CO. Xcel is using the numbers from the 2007 CO Plan but on a delayed implementation schedule with carbon costs starting in 2014. (Vol. 1, p. 68). (Hat tip to Erica Schroeder of Keyes & Fox lawfirm for digging up these figures.)

Colorado started on it’s renewable venture in 2004, when voters passed Amendment 37, a ballot initiative to establish a 10 percent renewable standard in the state. The state legislature upped the requirement to 20 percent in 2007, and 30 percent in 2010.  And no wonder why — compliance eight years early, and massive ratepayer savings.

So if anyone asks you if renewable energy can scale, or wonders if it costs too much, share Colorado’s experience. Those questions are answered by facts on the ground.

Mainstream energy companies may finally be seeing the light when it comes to solar power.

One tip-off: when mainstream energy companies get serious about solar.

For example, take NRG, a Fortune 250 wholesale energy generator with about 26 gigawatts of capacity in its portfolio. Most of that is coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear.

That’s the past.

Going forward, as per a recent Platts article:

About 85 percent of NRG Energy’s committed investments for the next three years will go to solar projects, mainly for three utility-scale projects that have received federal loan guarantees, the company said Thursday.

Next year, the independent power producer expects to spend $705 million on its solar projects compared with $120 million on conventional projects. From 2013 through 2014, the company intends to spend $315 million on its solar projects and $65 million on conventional projects …

Solar development will come more from rooftop projects, according to Crane. “The distributed, residential is going to end up swamping the bag-scale projects,” he said.

NRG plans to install 733 megawatts (MW) of solar panels over four years on [a] warehouse owned by ProLogis under a partnership backed by DOE and Bank of America.

A form of Moore’s law — the doubling every two years of the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit — applies to photovoltaic technology, according to Crane. In the last two years, the delivered cost of energy from PV was cut in half, he said. NRG expects the cost to fall in half again in the next two years, which would make solar power less expensive than retail electricity in roughly 20 states, he said. The expected drop in solar costs has “the potential to revolutionize the hub and spoke power system, which currently makes up the power industry,” he said.

While the solar industry has benefitted from federal support, the driver for the industry has been state renewable portfolio standards, led by California’s 33 percent mandate, according to Crane.

In defense of solar in a “highly politicized post-Solyndra world,” Crane said that PV puts less strain on air, water, and land resources than other forms of power generation. It is also more predictable and reliable than wind farms, he said …

The company is also open to buying coal-fired generation, Crane said. “We’re not afraid of owning conventional generation,” he said. “We would like to own more generation in the Northeast.” However, the outlook for coal plants in the Northeast is dim, according to Crane. “The economics of coal plants in the Northeast are phenomenally challenged right now,” he said. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

It reads like an April Fool’s joke or an Onion article as written by a Koch-funded anti-renewable true believer, if that’s not too meta.

In the same vein, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt made clear that he’s seen the future, and the future’s solar-powered. GE is building a 400 MW solar manufacturing facility in Colorado. How do they feel about the prospects of solar in a post-Solyndra world? Pretty good:

“We are all-in. We are going to invest what it takes … Because I know by 2020 this is going to be at least a $1 billion product line. I don’t care about Solyndra or any of that other stuff, we did this with no government funding. We can do this,” Immelt said.

Solar. It’s not just for hippies anymore.

The molar-grinding irony of it all is that Solyndra was the victim of a big success — the price of solar power has fallen rapidly, making more expensive technologies like theirs uncompetitive, but more importantly, making solar power a real player in the U.S. energy economy.

Since October of 2008, the average price of solar modules has fallen from $4.20 per watt to around $1.20 to $1.50 per watt today. These are mind-boggling reductions. And these new prices are resulting in extraordinary market development. As of June, California utilities have signed over eight gigawatts of solar contracts … half of which are below the price of new natural gas generation. That’s right. Gigawatts of solar cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives.

The media have been hinting at scandal and impropriety. While we have no idea about Solyndra’s actions in securing the loan guarantee, we can say that their technology approach was squarely within mainstream thinking of the time. Solyndra was attempting to develop a photovoltaic (PV) technology that didn’t use silicon, the dominant raw material for PV then and today. Take a look at this chart [PDF]. For years, silicon was manufactured primarily for semiconductors, and the solar industry essentially relied on excess material. In 2004, when Germany introduced robust incentives and the solar industry really started taking off, a shortage of silicon became a huge problem. There were seven plants in the world capable of manufacturing solar grade silicon, and as they had the scarcity in the value chain, they were able to command premium prices. The market price of silicon went through the roof. The main material for crystalline PV technology, which once cost $25 per kilogram (kg), soared to $450 per kg. Silicon manufacturers had the solar industry by the short hairs, and everyone looked for an alternative. Silicon was the single biggest obstacle to bringing down costs and bringing solar to scale, and everybody — absolutely everybody — was trying to figure out how to deal with it.

Solar manufacturers that had relied on silicon-based PV technology tried to develop new methods that didn’t need silicon. For example, Sharp, which was once the world’s largest PV manufacturer using crystalline silicon technology, made a significant capital investment in a thin-film product that was half as efficient … but used about 1 percent of the silicon [PDF]. And venture-capital money poured into start-ups working on breakthrough new materials that addressed the silicon problem. Nanosolar, Miasole, HelioVolt, and, yes, Solyndra, all received hundreds of millions of dollars of private venture funds to commercialize CIGS technology — an approach that did not rely on any silicon at all. Solyndra’s premise was squarely within mainstream thinking.

So what happened? Silicon got cheap, and the manufacture of crystalline silicon panels got even cheaper. All the innovation, market pressures, and government investment worked. Analysis out today from the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab shows that the pre-incentive price of going solar in the U.S. dropped 17 percent last year, and another 11 percent in the first half of 2011 — record reductions since they began tracking the data. Importantly, the Berkeley Lab report further indicates that federal and state market-building policies have been instrumental to those gains. What little policy support solar has received relative to its fossil counterparts is working as it should — to build scale, bring down costs, and deliver strong economic returns on our nation’s investment. And today the solar power industry is the fastest-growing industry in America.

The holy grail of those working in the field is to bring down costs. Solyndra had a reputed cost structure around $2 per watt. The fact that’s no longer competitive is a sign that solar is succeeding, and delivering on its promise faster and better than the brightest minds and the big bucks ever imagined.

You know what you do at this point?  You relax.  A community that rips up asphalt and grows its kids in greenery is a community that has it going on.  It’s a tell-tale sign of caring place that has its priorities right and comes together as a community to act on its principles.  It’s a place that cares about its kids and cares about the future.  Probes unlikely.

If that sounds like the kind of place that you want to live too, but don’t want to go through the trouble of getting dropped off by aliens to find it, then you are in luck.  The San Francisco Schoolyard Alliance is hosting the first international green schoolyards conference, coming up on Sept 16th through 18th.  Practioners from around the world (galaxy?) will come together to share experiences and best practices.  If you are looking for ways to make the future a better place, its a great way to start.  Registration here.  And if you can’t make it, read the book.

As a result, the grid operator is asking that people help avoid blackouts by reducing electricity usage between 3 and 7 PM. 

And as of 3:45 PM today, Texas paid $3000 MWh for wholesale electricity.  Yes, three dollars a kilowatt hour.

May I suggest that solar could help with that?  A tracking system would generate very well during that time slot, at a thirtieth of the cost.

What’s more expensive than solar?  No solar.

Here’s where it gets good. The utility was “floored” by the low prices they saw…and so upped their order to 400 MW of solar.

It’s not just the cost that they like. It’s also the economic development. Check out this NPR ‘Talk of the Nation’ segment with the mayor talking about investing in the new energy economy. This is what we’ve been working for–cheap solar means big solar.

The Bachelorette‘s Ryan Park. Photo: Karina Marchese of REC Solar

The New York Solar Jobs Act is an effort to bring 5 gigawatts of solar to the state by 2025. It’s the biggest solar campaign currently underway in the U.S., and GE is doing its part by joining a broad coalition of businesses supporting the effort. The global solar photovoltaic market is going strong — it surged from $2.5 billion in 2000 to $71.2 billion in 2010 — but all politics is local, and brand-name, hometown business involvement is key. 

Charlie Sheen’s doing his part by dedicating all his free time to orgies, drugs, and general hedonism. This, in turn, lead to the abrupt and unexpected cancellation of his TV show, which freed up space on the CBS Super Screen in Times Square … making it available to a coalition of solar advocates for use as a campaign tool. 

Thanks, Charlie. Your sacrifice will be remembered.

The Super Screen is currently running a couple of pro-solar pieces (“When there’s a big spill of solar energy, it’s called a Nice Day … Solar: the Perfect Combination of Woodstock and Wall Street”). 

Some of you may be thinking: “I could do better than that.” Well, some of you are in luck: There’s a contest under way to get your mug on the Times Square billboard (1.5 million views per month) making the case for solar in New York. Connect on Facebook and give it your best shot.

Even solar executive Ryan Park — he of Bachelorette fame — is taking time out of his wooing schedule to help the New York solar campaign out. Think you can do better than this? Have at it.

The AZ Court of Appeals just told them to go pound sand.  The ruling, here (pdf).

Underlying this legal victory is a re-affirmation of the value of renewable energy to Arizona.  The court essentially found that the Commission acted in the public interest, and had a robust record to back it up. From the ruling:

“The record here establishes a sufficient nexus between the REST rules and ratemaking. Prophylactic measures designed to prevent adverse effects on ratepayers due to a failure to diversify electrical energy sources fall within the Commission’s power “to lock the barn door before the horse escapes.” Id. Indeed, as Woods found in the context of inter-company transactions, “[i]t would subvert the intent of the framers to limit the Commission’s ratemaking powers so that it could do no more than raise utility rates to cure the damage. Id. at 296, 830 P.2d at 817.”

There are several ironies here — the first being that Barry Goldwater, a famous champion of competitive enterprise, was also a champion of strong government action in the fight against pollution for the public good.  The other is the fact that renewable energy offers one of the brightest opportunities for Arizona’s economy.  This represents a win for both the environment and the economy.

“While I am a great believer in the free competitive enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment. To this end, it is my belief that when pollution is found, it should be halted at the source, even if this requires stringent government action against important segments of our national economy.”

Many thanks to Tim Hogan of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest for taking this on.

This entry is crossposted at Vote Solar’s blog.