The cost to install solar panels as a source of energy has dropped nearly 40% over the last year. It’s still dropping, bringing the price within range of an ever-larger slice of the U.S. population. That is pushing the rise in manufacturing activity in the states, which will generate more jobs. And, together, that is very good news.
Following environmental issues can be extremely depressing. I suspect that is one reason most people don’t follow them closely, don’t consider them one of their top priorities, don’t want to talk about them much. That’s not just the case for the populace-at-large but for progressives, too. I understand this completely. Pondering the latest aspect of environmental degradation and the actual or potential payback from it can be, let’s be generous, disturbing. Combine that with enduring what’s been a far-too-slow, far-too-little response to some of our worst degradation and it's a formula for despair. Which is never good. Despair breeds apathy and apathy breeds paralysis, which is the death of activism.
For instance, four years ago today in the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, I wrote Eco New Orleans: 'A Shining Example for the Whole World', a detailed non-utopian blueprint for an expensive greening of that city and its surroundings, not just for its own sake, but as a model for others. An excerpt:
The tragedy wrought by Katrina provides a chance to do what Mayor Ray Nagin said George Bush told him after the head-bumping died down last week: New Orleans can be remade into "a shining example for the whole world."
I don't know if Bush actually said that, and if he did, it surely wasn't an environmentally sound renaissance he had in mind. In fact, I'd be willing to bet my mortgage that, when they're not figuring how to blame somebody else for the lethal federal foot-dragging just witnessed, many in the Administration are pondering schemes to enhance their personal assets via this disaster. "Shining" to them has a distinctly different meaning than what I'm talking about.
Needed is a new city paradigm. Call it Eco New Orleans, a place attuned to the definition of "sustainability" found in the 1987 Brundtland Commission: "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Not just the city, of course, but the other places blasted by Katrina and Dubyanocchio's five days of indifference. New Orleans doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the Eco New Orleans I'm talking about extends for scores of miles in every direction.
Needless to say, since the physical, financial and psychological damage to the Big Easy and its people have not yet been restored to anything approaching good health, the idea of an eco-New Orleans died in its cradle.
In the past year, however, there’s been some very encouraging eco-news. The dawning of the era of the rooftop solar panel. The idea isn’t new. It was much discussed where I worked 30 years ago at the Solar Energy Research Institute, now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In those days, the cost of installing a solar cell capable of generating a single watt of electricity would have been $100. Fully powering a house with solar would have meant $250,000-$400,000. The reliability and durability of the available cells at the time were nothing to cheer about either. So nobody installed them except for modest uses like powering garden or motion-sensor lights.
Over the years, however, the cost has plummeted and the staying power and quality of solar cells has soared. During the past two years, solar panel manufacturing costs have steeply dropped, particularly for polysilicone, and wholesale prices have fallen along with them. Solar panels now contribute only about one third of the cost of installing a rooftop solar system whereas, just a few years ago, they were more than half. The rest is labor and associated costs. But those have been dropping, too, as new installation techniques and hardware designs are developed and better worker-training systems implemented. Adam Browning, chief of the nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar Initiative, says that one study says installation costs fell 25% in the past two years.
As recently as 12 months ago, residential systems cost $9-$10 per installed watt. Now the cost is about $7-$7.50 a watt. According to the Chicago Tribune, "Homeowners who join together to buy in volume are snagging complete systems for a little more than $6 a watt." The federal subsidy knocks another 30% off that price. Several states offer incentives that reduce the cost even more. California offers $1.55-$2.25 a watt. Oregon offers a 50% state tax credit and North Carolina a 35% state tax credit. Some utilities are offering incentives, too.
In my state, California, where the majority of the solar market does its business, it cost $36,000-$40,000 in 2007 to install a 4-kilowatt solar energy system, counting state and federal incentives, plus incentives from some utilities. The same system cost about $25,000 in 2008. Now, if you shop around, it can be done for as low as $17,000. The payoff comes in vastly lower electricity costs and lower emissions of CO2 and other pollutants. Even for climate change deniers, rooftop solar at this price is a solid investment with a good rate of return. A rooftop solar system that in 2006 was estimated would take 20 years before investment costs were recaptured can now do it in less than 10.
But it’s still a lot of upfront bucks for a typical home-owner. One way to drive those costs down even more is to adopt the approach taken by One Block Off the Grid, a San Francisco Bay Area company that organizes groups of people and then bargains for discounts. Even then, of course, for some people, a solar rooftop system may be too expensive. However, if more companies take the approach of SunRun , it may remove one of the last disincentives to rooftop solar. SunRun finances the system over 18 years with a homeowner paying relatively modest installments that are less than her current electricity bill. Or a homeowner can lease with an option to buy.
Even though this approach hasn’t spread very far, last year was a very good one for rooftop solar installations. In the United States, 33,500 rooftop solar systems were installed, a 63 percent increase over the capacity installed in 2007. Here in California, so dysfunctional on so many other levels, the increase was 95 percent.
The best news is yet to come. Because this expansion in more affordable solar-generated electricity doesn’t just mean a better environment, it means jobs.
The Bay Area city of Fremont, California, recently winced when Toyota Motor Corp. said it plans to shutter its giant NUMMI next year. A joint project with General Motors, the plant has operated for 25 years and employs 4700 workers, most of them blue-collar. But, Friday, Solyndra, a solar panel company already based in Fremont, announced that it will build a $733-million solar-panel factory. Some 3000 jobs will go to the hard-hit construction industry, but it’s the permanent jobs making solar panels that count.
At the Mercury News, George Avalos reported yesterday:
Giving a timely boost of stimulus to this city in the wake of the news that the giant NUMMI plant will close, and helping to cement the Bay Area as a center of the clean-tech industry, solar-panel maker Solyndra said Friday it would use a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government to build a factory here that will ultimately employ 2,000 people.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu came to Solyndra's headquarters just off Interstate 880, joined by Vice President Joe Biden via satellite, for the announcement that the company will construct a $733 million solar-panel manufacturing plant that would add thousands of blue-collar jobs to the Bay Area's workforce. ...
"These jobs are going to be permanent jobs," Biden said. "These are the jobs of the future. These are the green jobs. These are jobs that won't be exported. These are the jobs that are going to define the 21st century."
Solyndra's deal is the first loan from a federal program that will ultimately offer $30 billion in guarantees to clean-tech companies, Biden said. ...
Solyndra comes to market with an innovative design, making cylindrical solar cells that resemble fluorescent bulbs. It uses a combination of elements — and not silicon — to create the semiconductor material used in its photovoltaic solar cells. And it targets a specific market — the flat roofs atop thousands of commercial buildings around the world.
"If you build a better solar panel, the world will beat a path to your door," U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said. "Building a better solar panel is what Solyndra has done."
It goes without saying that rooftop solar isn’t a silver bullet. No single energy source is. If we’re to solve our long-term energy needs – the world’s needs – we must have many arrows in our quiver. But the whole idea of energy users producing their own power on their own roofs, an idea that was ridiculed and blockaded 30 years ago when scientists and advocates began their work at the Solar Energy Research Institute to make it a reality, is coming of age.
Yes, some still ridicule the idea. And others, including some electric utilities, still seek to throw up obstacles, as noted by Newsweek last month. But they’re fighting a losing rearguard action. And with the spread of new technologies, like thin-film solar panels, resistance will fade even more.
That’s good news almost anywhere you live. It will, of course, take a lot more than making rooftop solar cheaper to transform cities such as still-battered New Orleans into shining examples. Making the urban environment more environmentally friendly is far more complex than that. And environmental problems are scarcely the only things troubling our cities. But what’s happening rooftop solar panels is encouraging indeed.
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Here's the calendar for the rest of our GreenRoots environmental series this week:
Tuesday September 8: Username 4242
Wednesday September 9: FishOutofWater
Thursday September 10: Stranded Wind