Here Comes the Sun (Power)

It was a good week for solar power.

First, IKEA announced it was stepping up its cleantech investments, with the “eventual goal of seeing solar panels and other clean technologies on sale in its stores or used by Ikea suppliers.” From Cleantech Media:

The furniture giant plans to invest €50 million ($77 million) in cleantech startups… […]

Ikea GreenTech plans to focus on five areas — solar panels, alternative light sources, product materials, energy efficiency, and water saving and purification. The group said the investments will be made in companies that offer commercial prospects within a four to five year horizon.

“We’re already talking to companies,” Johan Stenebo, managing director of Ikea GreenTech, told the Cleantech Group. He said Ikea is likely to make its first investments this year. “That’s certainly our aim to make happen.”

And on the utility-scale side of solar, there’s more good news:

Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

It’s not all sunshine and moonbeams, however. The Daily Grist just arrived in my inbox to remind me that the completion date for the plants is “dependent on state and local approval and a renewal of tax credits currently stalled in Congress.”

MIT Prof’s “Groundbreaking” Discovery Could Lead to 24/7 Solar

Prof. Nocera checks out his catalyst. (Photo courtesy of MIT Tech Review.)

Daniel Nocera, an energy professor at MIT, knew there was a major problem with current solar technologies, namely:

“If you can only have energy when the sun is shining, you’re in deep trouble. And that’s why, in my opinion, photovoltaics haven’t penetrated the market. … If I could provide a storage mechanism, then I make energy 24/7 and then we can start talking about solar.”

And he has taken a major step towards solving the problem:

[Nocera] has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it’s needed, including when the sun isn’t shining.

Nocera’s colleagues have glowing words for the discovery:

• Professor Karsten Meyer of Germany’s Friedrich Alexander University: “This discovery is simply groundbreaking…this is probably the most important single [solar power] discovery of the century.”
• Professor James Barber of Imperial College London: “This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind. The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated.”

My advice to all clean tech VC’s out there: get this man some start-up dollars, STAT.

Update: Joe Romm of Climate Progress thinks Nocera’s discovery is “unexciting and unmajor.”

First Solar’s Sunny Second Quarter

Oil companies aren’t the only ones benefiting from high oil prices. Via Greentech Media:

First Solar’s second quarter net income jumped 57 percent from a year ago, thanks to a new Malaysian plant and a strong demand for its solar panels in Europe.

The thin-film solar panel maker (NSDQ: FSLR) exceeded Wall Street’s expectations when it posted a net income of 69.7 million, or 85 cents per share, for the second quarter, compared with $44.4 million, or 58 cents per share from the same period in 2007. First Solar reported a net income of $46.6 million, or 57 cents per share, for the first quarter of 2008. [...]

The solar panel maker has continued to demonstrate its much-heralded ability to make a good profit by expanding its manufacturing capacity, which allows the company to reduce production costs and the sale prices of its solar panels. The new manufacturing complex has also enabled the company to fill backlog orders more quickly.

First Solar Builds First System in California

To paraphrase that disembodied voice from Field of Dreams: If you provide incentives, they will come:

First Solar Inc. said Wednesday it has begun building the first rooftop solar system in a plan aimed at adding 250 megawatts of solar power capacity to large commercial rooftops in Southern California. [...]

First Solar began work on the initial 2 megawatt project July 14, and expects to connect it to California’s power grid in September.

Separately, First Solar said it won approval to build a solar power plant in Blyth, Calif., that will produce at least 7.5 megawatts and as much as 21 megawatts of power.

For those of you who own First Solar stock, well played, sir!

Shares of First Solar rose $12.37, or 4.5 percent, to $289.37 in premarket activity.

San Fran To Become Solar City

More good news out of San Francisco, via Earth2Tech:

After six months of hard-fought politicking, the San Francisco board of supervisors has finally approved the Solar Energy Incentive Program, the country’s largest municipal solar program. The program has been greenlighted for 10 years and has an annual budget of $3 million dollars. The money will be doled out as rebates in the form of tax incentives for private solar installations. Now the ordinance just needs approval from Mayor Newsom, who has been pushing for this program; it’s expected that the solar energy incentive program will be operational in the coming weeks.

The Sun Devils Love Sun Power

From the Arizona Republic:

More than 20 percent of the energy needs of Arizona State University’s main campus eventually could be met by one of the largest rooftop solar-power plants in the United States.

ASU planned to announce an agreement today under which three companies will install, at their expense, solar electricity-generating equipment on up to 330,000 square feet of rooftop space at its main campus in Tempe. [...]

The plan calls for 2 megawatts of generating capacity installed on 135,000 square feet by the end of the year.

That’s enough to run 4,600 computers and reduce carbon emissions by 2,825 tons per year, or the equivalent of taking 530 cars off the road for a year. Long-term plans call for up to 7 megawatts of solar-generating capacity to be built at ASU in Tempe, with additional solar installations at its campuses in downtown Phoenix and other locations.

Solar Power Nearing a Tipping Point?

The soaring price of electricity means solar power may be competitive with other energy sources sooner than expected–one solar CEO thinks it could happy by 2010. Reuters reports:

The tipping point at which the world’s cleanest, most renewable resource is cost-competitive with other sources of energy on electricity grids could happen within two to five years in some U.S. regions and countries if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace, they add.

“In the long run — as in two to three years — you should see competitiveness especially with the grid in a number of regions in the world,” said Vishal Shah, an analyst who tracks the industry at U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower Corp, the largest North American solar company by sales, sees such “grid parity” for solar power in the United States and elsewhere happening in about five years, or possibly as soon as 2010.

“That’s actually more aggressive than what we would say previously, and that’s because the cost of electricity is going up faster than we had ever modeled,” Werner said an interview at the Reuters Global Energy Summit on June 3.

“It is becoming more and more clear it is a real possibility, and we believe, a reality,” he said.

The Sun Is Shining on California’s Solar Industry

Some big news out of Cali has brightened my day:

An electric company plans to install a huge patchwork of solar cells, 10 times bigger than any previous such installation, on more than 100 large rooftops around Southern California.

The solar panels, covering more than two square miles of rooftop, will be able to produce 250 megawatts of electricity when the sun is shining, enough to power about 160,000 homes.

Solar photovoltaic installations are usually measured in thousandths of a megawatt, and Edison’s order is roughly equal to all the solar cells produced in the United States last year.

Looks like the solar industry is heating up:

The plan illustrates the shifting finances and growing scale of the solar industry. Once consisting mainly of small projects paid for by the owners of homes or businesses, solar installations are increasingly being financed by companies that offer cheaper electricity or lease payments in exchange for the use of a roof.

The New York Times reports an interesting factoid–most of the world’s largest solar arrays are in Spain and Germany:

The largest solar installation in this country is 14 megawatts, at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The largest in the world, in Spain, is 23 megawatts. Of the top 10 worldwide, all are in Spain or Germany, except for Nellis.

Perhaps someday California will become the new Spain of the solar world.

Forecast for Solar Thermal: Sunny With a Chance of Heavy Demand

Don’t call it a comeback, but thermal solar is on the up and up. Thermal solar “involves covering acres of desert with mirrors that focus intense sunlight on a fluid, heating it enough to make steam. The steam turns a turbine and generates electricity.” More from the New York Times:

The technology is not new, but it is suddenly in high demand. As prices rise for fossil fuels and worries grow about their contribution to global warming, solar thermal plants are being viewed as a renewable power source with huge potential.

After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels, neon included, on the Las Vegas Strip, about 20 miles north of here. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada.

On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.

Thermal solar became commercially feasible in the 1980s, but the industry collapsed in the 1990s when the price of natural gas dropped. But thermal solar has been revived:

Today, natural gas prices are much higher, and political opposition is rising to construction of new coal-burning power plants. Many states, including California, are imposing mandates for renewable energy. All of that is reviving interest in solar thermal plants.

And the Times describes a day at the office for a “green collar” worker, giving us a glimpse of the kind of jobs the industry has already created in the U.S.:

At Nevada Solar One the other day, Mr. Boucher, 30, ran the computerized control room. Dressed in a T-shirt, sneakers and a Boston Red Sox cap worn backwards, he looked a bit like a teenage gamer as he used a computer mouse to manipulate the plant.

He was trying to produce as much electricity as possible while saving heat to tide the plant over as clouds cast episodic shadows on the solar array. “I’ve been fighting it all day,” he said.

Outside, row after row of U-shaped mirrors, covering nearly a square mile, stretched across the desert. In the center of each U, where the force of the sun was magnified 70 times, ran a pipe painted black, and inside it flowed oil that warmed to hundreds of degrees as it collected the heat needed to run a generator.

The buzz in the control room, as Mr. Boucher worked, contrasted with the sanguine scene beyond the windows. Imperceptibly, in the dusty wind of the high desert, 182,000 mirrors moved from east to west, tracking the sun across the sky.

Pretty cool stuff.