On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Chris “Chris” Christie (R) signed into law an effort to expand the state’s fast-growing solar industry. ThinkProgress has the wonky details.

New Jersey has the second-most solar installations in the country, behind only California. According to the Solar Energy Industry Association:

In the first quarter of this year, 174 megawatts of new solar capacity were connected to the N.J. grid. Cumulatively, more than 775 megawatts of solar has been installed in the state, enough to power about 130,000 homes.

That kind of growth is hard for any politician to ignore.

Christie once worried that bolstering renewable energy could be a “financial albatross.” But now his embrace of a common-sense measure to promote solar demonstrates that renewables can be — and, of course, should be — a political asset. Christie explained his decision as follows:

Renewable energy not only helps meet our goals of increasing sustainability and protecting the environment, but can be an engine for economic growth and the creation of good-paying jobs for the people of our state. The bill I am signing today furthers these goals and will help us remain a national leader in the solar energy industry as we continue to promote innovative approaches to solar development, like developing landfills and other unusable lands and transforming them into sources of usable clean energy, all while holding down costs for families and businesses.

Caught in the turmoil of the presidential race, it’s easy to forget that the process of campaigning is different from the process of legislating. When presented with the actual benefits of renewable energy to his state, even a rising Republican star understands that anti-renewables rhetoric is a much better idea in a negative TV ad than in the statehouse.

Update: Well, it was nice while it lasted.

The state is considering cutting its funding for new energy efficiency and renewable energy projects almost in half, a consequence of the Legislature’s and Christie administration’s decision to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from New Jersey’s clean energy program.

In a draft proposal circulated by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last week, the budget for the clean energy program would allocate $339 million in new spending, a sharp reduction from the $651 million proposed by the agency last December.

Adelanto is a desert town northeast of Los Angeles. The average high in Adelanto is 75 degrees; it’s in the high desert, so it gets a lot of sun. Yesterday, the L.A. Department of Water and Power put that sunlight to work.

The Department of the Interior today announced plans to make that practice far more common throughout the West. The New York Times reports:

After more than two years of study and public comment, the Department of Interior on Tuesday identified 17 sites on 285,000 acres of public lands across six Southwestern states as prime spots for development of solar energy. Agency officials said the government would fast-track applications for large-scale solar energy installations at those sites in the hope of speeding construction of thousands of megawatts of renewable, non-polluting electricity generation. …

But officials said they were fencing off more than 78 million acres of public land from solar development because the areas have less solar energy potential, do not have immediate access to transmission lines or pose a threat to important archaeological or cultural sites, endangered species, scarce water resources or other environmental values if developed.

Click to embiggen.

As noted at The Hill, since President Obama took office, the number of solar installations on public land has gone from zero to 17, now generating 6,000 megawatts of power.

The goal is 17 more Adelantos — but bigger, generating more energy, employing more people. We look forward to hearing the fossil-fuel industry’s objections.

Photo by ssanyal.

I often get flak when I publish research on the cost trajectory for solar (my “Rooftop Revolution” report estimates 100 million Americans reaching grid parity by 2021). About half think I’m too conservative, and half think I’m too overconfident that solar will continue to drop in price by 7 percent per year indefinitely.

But I’m not alone in perceiving an enormous cost reduction opportunity for solar in the United States. An article in Forbes last week suggested that we can “Cut The Price Of Solar In Half By Cutting Red Tape.”  It provides a chart (reproduced below) like one I published in March, that shows how a similarly sized residential solar array in Germany costs 60 percent less than one built in the U.S.

This anecdote from a colleague illustrates the ridiculous disparity in red tape between the two nations (and consequently, the enormous opportunity):

There’s an article in the most recent issue of PHOTON describing a German family that got a 4.6 kW PV array installed and interconnected to their roof eight days after calling a solar installer for the first time. The homeowner had a proposal from the installer within eight hours. The installer called the utility the morning of the installation to request an interconnect that afternoon. The installer called at 10 a.m., the utility came and installed two new meters and approved the interconnect at 2:37 p.m. — the same day. The online registration of the PV system with Federal Grid agency and approval of the feed-in tariff took five minutes.

I’m sure that not every project gets completed that fast in Germany, but an interconnection and permitting process that takes less than a day?! 10 times that … would still be just incredible.

By comparison, New York City’s permitting goal under Solar America Cities was 100 days (before Solar America Cities it took 365 days).

As I’ve mentioned before, the difference is mostly in “soft costs,” not hardware, and these cost barriers are solved by policy, not technological, innovation. For example, soft costs include an enormous paperwork burden for U.S. solar installers (pictured in the Forbes post on cutting costs), and already there are policy ideas that significantly reduce these costs.

So is it too ambitious to assume the price of solar continues to fall by 7 percent per year? On the contrary, if the cost of solar continues at that pace, it will take the U.S. until 2025 — 13 years! — to match today’s cost of solar in Germany. Can anyone honestly claim we’ll remain so far behind for so long?

When you add potential hardware innovations (like this) to the soft-cost reduction opportunity, the cost of solar is likely to keep falling rapidly in the United States.

Baseball fans will gladly tell you why tonight’s All-Star Game doesn’t matter. Even when the Bud Selig-tie-game debacle led to a contest that determined which league played host during the World Series (basically always the American League) it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to the outcome.

So here’s something that matters anyway: The All-Star Game is very, very green.

Very green. So green, uneaten hot dogs will be composted.

The Royals, in conjunction with Missouri Organic Waste, will divert organic waste from food prep and from the suites to composting. Uneaten food will be collected and donated to Harvesters.

So green, the toilet paper is made from recycled paper.

Paper products in the restrooms contain post-recycled content such as the toilet paper (30% post-consumer) and paper towels (up to 73% post-consumer).

So green, the power used in the stadium will be offset.

120,000 KWh of energy used during the All-Star Game and related events, including the Home Run Derby, the Legends & Celebrity Softball Game and the All-Star Futures Game will be offset with Green-e Certified Renewable Energy Credits supplied by Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

So green, the stadium had solar panels installed.

In advance of the All-Star Game, the Royals and KCP&L installed on Kauffman Stadium 120 solar panels that will produce 36,000 kw/annually.

So green, viewers at home will know how green it is.

This thing is so chock-full of green that the MLB’s partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council have a blog post loaded with the partnerships, offsets, changes, additions, upgrades, products, and details of how in-your-face, green-to-the-max baseball’s night of honor is going to be.

They may not have put too much thought into doing the right thing when it comes to the National League’s starting pitcher (R. A. Dickey was robbed!), but at least they’re trying to do the right thing for the environment. At the very least, the planet Earth will be a winner tonight.

Also, hopefully, the American League.

A bill advancing through the California legislature would change all that and make it easy for anyone who pays a utility bill to become a solar customer. Senate Bill 843 has passed the state Senate and just got approval from a key committee in the Assembly. As GigaOM reports:

The bill … aims to enable people who don’t own homes, or own homes that don’t have suitable roofs for solar panels, to buy clean power and offset their utility bills. They could sign contracts with owners of solar power projects for a portion of the power produced, and the amount they pay for would show up as credits on their utility bills. The proposed program would be available not only to consumers but also businesses who are customers of the three big investor-owned utilities.

Susan Kraemer at PV Insider explains further:

Solar developers would sign up interested subscribers and then build neighborhood solar projects on nearby open space, industrial buildings or big box store rooftops to supply their electricity. … It could catapult the development of distributed solar even more effectively than feed-in tariffs did for Germany or Spain — but at no cost or risk.

Tom Price of solar investment firm CleanPath helped draft the legislation. “What’s important and transformative about this bill is that for the first time, it allows everybody in California, regardless of income or home ownership status, to choose to buy renewable energy,” he says. “Considering that 75 percent of residents and businesses in this state currently don’t have that option, imagine what kind of impact we’ll see.”

Price predicts that the bill will ultimately be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D).  If so, it will be yet another reminder that California, were it a country of its own, would be not only the ninth-largest economy in the world but a green policy pioneer to rival those show-offs in Scandinavia.

The Wall Street Journal isn’t the most environmentally friendly news outlet. (For example.) (And, also: It frequently chops down thousands of trees, turns them into pulp, crushes soybeans into ink, and combines all of this into a product that is dumped directly into landfills. Can you imagine?)

You should not, therefore, be surprised to read its triumphant proclamation of the imminent end of foreign oil.

America will halve its reliance on Middle East oil by the end of this decade and could end it completely by 2035 due to declining demand and the rapid growth of new petroleum sources in the Western Hemisphere, energy analysts now anticipate.

Hooray! First paragraph! Oh, also:

By 2035, oil shipments from the Middle East to North America “could almost be nonexistent,” the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries recently predicted, partly because more efficient car engines and a growing supply of renewable fuel will help curb demand.

Bottom of the third paragraph. If they could have whispered it, they probably would have.

A reduced reliance on importing oil is indeed good. But primarily if it’s because we’re reducing oil use. That’s not a runner-up.

We’re also cranking out another energy source: solar. From Forbes.com:

Solar panel makers are on track to deliver 59 gigawatts of their products worldwide this year when demand will likely hit 30 gigawatts, according to a report released by GTM Research Wednesday. To re-establish a healthy balance of supply and demand, an estimated 21 gigawatts of existing factories will close by 2015, said Shyam Mehta, author of the report.

The oversupply problem began to surface in early 2011 and led to a near 50% drop in wholesale solar panel prices last year. Lower government subsidies and worries about the financial health of Europe – the largest solar market – tempered demand for solar equipment last year. Emerging markets such as the Japan, China and India should see a big jump in solar panel installations this year. The U.S. also could experience a 75% growth in 2012. But all these increases aren’t going to be enough to make use of most of the solar panels that will be rolling off assembly lines, especially when some manufacturers have built new factories over the past year and a half or plan to add more production lines in the next few years.

I can’t vouch for the figures here (I’m not sure, for example, what “21 gigawatts of existing factories” means), but the core claim is correct: supply of solar is rising dramatically. This has negative ramifications for the businesses involved, hence the Forbes writer’s hand-wringing. Market saturation and competition from China was one of the things that kneecapped Solyndra. But for customers? This is good news.

Maybe someday we’ll read that in the newspaper.

Here’s the news from Politico:

More than a year after House Republicans began investigating the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, the lawmaker leading the probe says it could soon come to a close. “We’re getting closer to getting closure on this,” Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight panel, told POLITICO late yesterday.

“What?” you will exclaim. “Am I to believe that perhaps there was no evidence of wrongdoing to be found?” Yes, dear reader. That is what you are being asked to believe. We understand your hesitance.

Ostensibly, the investigation was all about the money, a wringing of hands over the government’s wasteful expenditure. Granted, it could have turned out better. But as we noted last year, the $535 million invested was chump change compared to other failed investments the government has made. In March, David Roberts predicted that the investigation would end empty-handed, noting that the real goal was never accountability on the investment (an investment that was anything but unusual). Instead, the goal was always political: leverage concerns about misspent money into a tool to attack the president and green energy more broadly.

In February, Politico tried to figure out how much the Solyndra investigation itself cost, coming up with a figure of, “We dunno.” The Republicans doing the investigating were “much less talkative” about how much they’d spent on their investigation than they were on the Energy Department’s investments.

That is why I, today, am calling for an investigation into the investigation of Solyndra. An unknown amount of your tax money was wasted on an overtly political effort! Congress: Issue subpoenas! Call hearings! We must get to the bottom of this, for the sake of the bald eagle and the New York Yankees!

It’s what the Republicans would want.

Bad news, coal. A massive study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled the impacts of a national energy grid with renewable power comprising between 30 and 90 percent of the mix — including the requisite generation, transmission, and storage. In short:

The central conclusion of the analysis is that renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.

That quote scratches the surface of the NREL’s findings, which follow collaboration with 110 contributors from 35 organizations inside and outside the government. (The list of abbreviations used in the report itself runs two-and-a-half pages.) Another study released in 2010 found that Europe could similarly make a transition to a renewable-heavy energy infrastructure.

The United States currently generates 3.6 percent of our energy from renewable, non-hydroelectric sources, meaning that a target of 80 percent renewable generation by 2050 seems, well, optimistic. Even if the political will for such a transition existed — which it very much does not, as reinforced by those turnpike billboards — such a shift would require a massive investment and shift in energy economics. But it’s by no means impossible.

While this analysis suggests such a high renewable generation future is possible, a transformation of the electricity system would need to occur to make this future a reality. This transformation, involving every element of the grid, from system planning through operation, would need to ensure adequate planning and operating reserves, increased flexibility of the electric system, and expanded multi-state transmission infrastructure, and would likely rely on the development and adoption of technology advances, new operating procedures, evolved business models, and new market rules.

In short: daunting.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t note the most broadly engaging aspect of the NREL’s findings: the projection maps.

The animation above is an inelegant representation of the NREL report’s animated map of possible growth of renewable energy over the next 38 years. More amazing: an hour-by-hour look at energy flow in the year 2050. Watching these provides more than a little sense of living in a world of science fiction. But the more important point is what they demonstrate. We can build the renewable energy we need and even project how it will work in a national grid.

Even in 2050, the NREL projection indicates, coal has a role. But it’s unlikely our self-driving cars will pass any billboards touting it.

Other findings from the full report [PDF]:

• Electricity supply and demand can be balanced in every hour of the year in each region with nearly 80 percent electricity from renewable resources, including nearly 50 percent from variable renewable generation, according to simulations of 2050 power system operations.

• High renewable electricity futures can result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.

• The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost.

• With higher demand growth, high levels of renewable generation present increased resource and grid integration challenges.

On the other hand, Japan is also moving to become a solar power heavyweight. A boom in the country’s solar market may soon move it past Germany and Italy to be the second-largest in the world. Bloomberg reports:

Industry Minister Yukio Edano set today a premium price for solar electricity that’s about triple what industrial users now pay for conventional power. That may spur at least $9.6 billion in new installations with 3.2 gigawatts of capacity, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast. The total is about equal to the output of three atomic reactors. Solar stocks rallied.

In other words, the Japanese government set a higher price for solar-generated electricity in an effort to spur generation. In 2011, Japan got 1.6 percent of its energy from renewables and added 1.3 gigawatts of new solar. The addition of as much as 4.7 gigawatts this year would nearly double the country’s existing solar output — but still not produce enough to completely replace nuclear in its energy mixture.

But it might be enough to take those two reactors back offline.

I was once in a meeting with a guy who sold and installed solar panels. When he asked a woman sitting next to him if she’d thought about putting solar panels on her house, she replied that she’d love to, but she couldn’t afford it. His response came with the casual immediacy of the salesman: “That’s what you think.”

The challenge to broad adoption of solar used to be a lack of awareness. Now, it’s often a lack of capital. People understand that solar promises to save on utility costs over the long term, but many are discouraged by the investment cost of installation and the time it takes to recoup. One approach to offsetting those initial costs is the revolving loan fund, a pool of money often from a government body that provides initial capital the borrower can repay from the eventual savings. Once the loan is repaid, the fund invests in another similar project.

Oakland’s Solar Mosaic takes a different tack. Its process, as Greg Hanscom outlined in April, is to create a one-time pool of investors who provide initial capital — a strategy often compared to Kickstarter or Kiva. It’s brilliant in its simple adherence to the tried-and-true: You invest, money is made (in the form of reduced electric bills), you are repaid. (Currently, the pool doesn’t return any interest on the loans, but it’s easy to imagine that it someday could.) The company is still in its beta stage, but it has already tapped over 400 investors for five installations.

The Department of Energy is also optimistic. Yesterday at its SunShot Grand Challenge Summit in Denver, the department announced that Solar Mosaic would receive a grant of up to $2 million. In a blog post the company explained how it planned to use the grant.

Currently, around 25% of the price of solar installations is due to financing and customer acquisition costs, known as soft costs. Mosaic’s unique online crowdfunding platform will help the SunShot Initiative reduce these soft costs while enabling millions of Americans to own a piece of the growing clean energy economy.

Yesterday, we noted that the market for solar is expected to double this year. Much of that will be commercial installation, but a drop in the up-front cost of installation could expand it to homes, multiple-unit residences, and small businesses.

You can’t afford solar? Solar Mosaic’s response should be simple: That’s what you think.