EUEC David Hill – Solar Energy Policy 2010
David Hill, managing consultant for the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, talks about his solar energy recommendations to the 111th Congress at EUEC conference in Phoenix, February 1. 2010.
Part One
Part Two
Seven Examples of Wineries and Vineyards Embracing Solar Energy
2) Winery goes solar with ‘Floatovoltaics’ – SFGate
3) Palisade vineyard goes green
4) Grande River Vineyards 70% of Energy Supplied from Solar Power
5) NC vineyard uses solar power to make wine
6) J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines Announces California Sustainable Winegrowing Certification
7) Oregon winery goes way beyond organic
Solar Energy Combats Poverty in Guatemala
A small solar panel lets Rufino Pablo Jeronimo, a Guatemalan farmer, run a tailoring business and keep in touch with his brother in America.
From Time.com
New Affordable Solar Energy eBooks Available Free
Bend, OR (PRWEB) December 31, 2009 — Go-Green-Solar-Energy.com is pleased to announce a new collection of Affordable Solar Energy eBooks and resource library which was designed to assist newcomers to solar energy in finding the information and resources they need to begin to use affordable solar energy in their homes.
“This information is designed to help people who wish to use solar energy at any level, whether it be to solar power their entire home, or by starting out with one of the many new solar appliances or portable solar devices now available. ” said M.S. Rochell, editor of the site.
This information is designed to help people who wish to use solar energy at any level, whether it be to solar power their entire home, or by starting out with one of the many new solar appliances.
“I was amazed to discover some of the new ways that solar energy is being used in solar appliances, solar lighting, solar ovens, and even solar backpacks and solar powered battery chargers! There are a lot of new options now available for anyone who wants to go green and use a cleaner and more renewable form of energy.”
As more people become aware of the advantage of renewable energy, new technologies are being developed that are making solar power more widespread and more affordable.
With today’s new technologies, creating a solar power home can range from a complete installation of solar heating, cooling and lighting systems for the home, to the simple use of solar appliances, solar ovens, hot water heaters, battery chargers and other devices.
The new Affordable Solar Energy Resource Library is being expanded each month with new information that includes:
* Solar Panel Basics
* Building a Passive Solar Water Heater
* Creating Your Own a Homemade Wind Generator
* How to Build an Electric Car
* A free online resource to find solar power grants
* Free and low cost grant writing software
* Additional options for financing your home solar systems
* Energy tax incentives for businesses
* A Free Solar Hot Air Do It Yourself Manual
* Where to meet and share information with other DIY solar energy enthusiasts
* Newest updates on affordable solar energy resources
About Go Green Solar Energy
Go-Green-Solar-Energy.com was founded in 2009 as an online educational resource to inspire and educate people about the benefits of using solar energy, and to assist in discovering affordable options for using solar power at home and in daily life.
“So many people see solar energy as too complicated or too expensive to use in their own lives.” said M.S. Rochell. “Our site hopes to demystify the technical complexities so that anyone who wants to use solar energy can get an idea of the possibilities, and then discover solutions that will work for their situation. ”
Currently the site includes information on a wide range of solar energy options including facts about solar energy, solar power advantages and disadvantages, where to find cheap solar power, solar panels, and the many DIY solar energy options. The editor of Go Green Solar Energy is M.S. Rochell, Ed.M, a writer, educator and avid environmental enthusiast.
Bhutan – On the Wings of Light Part 1
The Solar Electric Light Fund brings solar power technology to people in the developing world. Here we see a project that the group took on in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan using micro-credit and solar as a means to electrify rural communities.
For more, see Bhutan – On the Wings of Light Part 2
The Green Rush Is On In China
by Louisa Lim, NPR.org
A new gold rush in China is actually a green rush — an urgent drive to develop green technologies. One group of Western companies, the Cleantech Initiative, suggests China’s market for renewable energy could eventually be worth as much as $500 billion to $1 trillion a year.
Now, Obama administration officials are warning that the U.S. could risk losing the race in green technologies.
“The future of sustainable energy is here.” The words are emblazoned on a wall at the world’s largest nongovernmental solar research center. It was built by an American company, Applied Materials, in the central Chinese city of Xian.
The cost of solar panels has dropped dramatically — 30 percent in the past year alone. One major reason is the “China price,” or the competitive advantages offered by Chinese manufacturing, with its cheap labor and economies of scale. China is now the world’s biggest producer of photovoltaic solar panels, making about 40 percent of all panels, according to the China Daily, mostly for export.
At Applied Materials’ $250 million research center in Xian, Elizabeth Mayo, a process engineer from Santa Clara, Calif., is working with local staff testing solar panels in the Sunfab panel reliability test lab. This simulates extreme weather conditions, and the company boasts that it is the world’s only laboratory capable of testing 61-square-feet solar panels.
Mayo is impressed by the facilities in Xian. “We don’t have facilities like this in the U.S. We don’t have anything of this magnitude,” Mayo says.
Catrina Ren, an enthusiastic English-speaking engineer, beams while showing a visitor another facility at the research center: vast empty hangars waiting for new pilot lines for crystalline silicon, and thin film solar technology to be installed. “I’m very proud I have chance to work here,” she says. “This is most advantaged tech center in world. I graduated from university only two years ago. I’m very proud.”
And Applied Materials is no doubt overjoyed to have Catrina and her former classmates on staff. Costs in China are much cheaper than in the U.S. An engineering graduate in Xian earns one-tenth of her American counterparts.
And the biggest draw is the eternal lure of China’s fabled market. Gang Zhou, general manager of Applied Materials Xian facility, says the company has decided to put its money where its customer base is.
“China is No. 1 producer of solar panels. That’s where our market is. The China new R&D center, that’s where we validate a lot of R&D work that is being carried out in U.S. and in Europe,” he says.
Click link above for complete article.
Boulder City to have nation’s largest solar PV array
By Stephanie Tavares, Lasvegassun.com
Boulder City is soon to be home to yet another large solar plant, thanks to Sempra Generation receiving final approval to sell solar energy generated in the Eldorado Valley to a California utility.
The company received approval from the California Public Utilities Commission today to sell energy to California’s Pacific Gas and Electric. Sempra will begin construction next month on a 48-megawatt solar thin film power plant, an expansion of its existing 10-megawatt solar plant located near a Sempra natural gas plant along Highway 95.
The two solar plants combined will create the nation’s most powerful solar photovoltaic array, outdoing Nellis Air Force Base’s 14-megawatt photovoltaic array by dozens of megawatts.
The new Boulder City plant will take at least a year to build and will employ more than 200 construction workers and electricians during the building phase, said Sempra President Michael Allman.
“It will be a mix of job types,” Allman said. “Some are for trained electricians but some of the work is basic construction work: installing posts in the ground and installing brackets to hold the panels. … We expect to fill the vast majority of the jobs locally.”
This will be the first solar project built since Sempra completed its 10-megawatt array last December. There are several other projects planned, but most would be on federal land which has a longer permitting process.
The solar energy corridor in Boulder City is owned by the city and is already zoned for solar energy development allowing for fast tracked permitting.
“The land was zoned and ready to go,” Allman said. “We just entered into a lease and we’re off and running. You can’t compare that to BLM land that’s similarly situated with the flat land and the transmission lines, the permitted process is much more complicated and a lot slower.”
Going solar at cut-rate cost
By Tony Castro, DailyNews.com
“I seriously started doing the calculations,” said Dickinson, “and it finally financially made sense, especially with the tax changes.”
In the San Fernando Valley, homeowners like Dickinson and his wife, Sara, a jewelry designer, have become the unwitting faces of the solar energy movement – residents who didn’t set out to be green activists but for whom going green makes sense now more than ever.
The Dickinsons are getting a 23 percent discount on solar panel installation arranged by One Block Off the Grid, an Internet-driven group that in a year has become the nation’s largest solar-buying collective. In its short organizing campaign in Los Angeles, the firm has already assisted 102 clients.
“They were able to negotiate a much better price than anything I found on my own,” Dickinson said.
With David Dickinson’s exorbitant monthly electric bill to chill two wine cellars, run two refrigerator-freezers and heat a pool at his 2,000-square-foot ranch house, it long made sense to go solar.
“But the upfront cost was just too high,” said Dickinson, 57, a Canoga Park manufacturer’s controller.
That was even with a 30 percent federal tax credit offered this year, a California state rebate of 10 percent and additional city incentives.
Then Dickinson heard about a San Francisco-based firm that pools homeowners who want energy-saving solar panels on their roofs into large communities that can get better rates by buying in bulk. The company then brokers significantly lower prices from local installers. Substantially lower cost
This past week, workers began installing 34 photovoltaic panels to the roof of the Dickinsons’ 1960s style four-bedroom ranch house – and put the Dickinsons on the solar energy grid.
Dickinson said the deal negotiated with regionally based SolarCity by One Block Off the Grid will cost him about $6 per watt of power capacity. According to the California Energy Commission, the average total cost of a solar photovoltaic system is almost $8 per watt.
Even after customers like Dickinson pay for an inverter to convert the DC power the panels generate into the AC power appliances use, the deal negotiated by One Block Off the Grid is substantially lower than the average in Los Angeles.
“We wanted to create a group purchase program that makes it easier for people to get into solar energy – one that makes them more comfortable with the process,” said Dave Llorens, co-founder of One Block Off the Grid.
The group’s name comes from its goal of removing one average block’s worth of electrical usage each time it runs a community solar purchase campaign in a city.
One Block Off the Grid, according to a spokeswoman, makes its profit through finder’s fees paid by local installers.
Since its founding in June 2008, the company has mounted campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, New Orleans, Phoenix and Denver.
In its Los Angeles campaign, which began last week and runs into next year, the solar-buying collaborative has been assisting potential clients through its Internet site, www.solarlosangeles.1bog.org. The Web site uses an online tool allowing homeowners to call up a satellite-generated image of their roof and find an estimate of solar rates and costs.
Click link above for complete article.
New solar energy technology comes on line in Hawaii
Solar energy through solar-thermal technology is not new, but it has not been adopted on a micro scale until now.
Sopogy, the designer of a concentrating solar power system called MicroCSP, announced this week that it has built the world’s first small-scale solar-thermal plant on the Hawaiian island of Kona.
Sopogy’s technology is similar to that used in massive solar-thermal installations that occupy thousands of acres of land. Those systems use mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a central tower that contains fluid; the fluid is heated and steam can be generated to spin a turbine that generates electricity. But the MicroCSP units are small and modular; they circulate fluid through a receiver in the middle of the mirror.
The new plant on Kona occupies just 3.8 acres, Sopogy says. Its 1,000 MicroCSP units can generate 2 megawatts of electricity, and a buffer system allows thermal energy to be generated even in cloudy weather.
The 2-megawatt facility was built at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, a state-run research and education center on Kona’s west coast. The lab’s tenants study ocean-based and renewable energy technologies.
Solar energy and lithium-ion batteries: Sanyo now builds “green” homes in Japan
Sanyo is already being considered Japan’s “greenest” brand in the consumer electronics field (which is the main reason Panasonic is about to acquire the company), but them building complete, eco-friendly buildings is certainly new. Sanyo Homes [JP], a wholly-owned subsidiary, will start marketing all-electric homes with lithium ion batteries providing back up power to Japanese customers as early as tomorrow. (Sorry for the tiny picture, which shows a CGI-model of how these houses look like.)
Each house will be equipped with a 3.78kw solar energy system. But buyers will also get 1.57kw Sanyo lithium ion batteries to make sure they’ll have access to eco-friendly energy during the night or during days without enough sunlight. Sanyo Homes says that each of their houses will come with ten LED light fixtures running on direct-current power to minimize energy loss and a solar-powered heat-pump water heater.
The company expects these extras to boost the prices for their homes to some extent, but says buyers will be able to recoup the initial plus in investment over time and will also get financial from the Japanese government. A 132sqm Sanyo home, for example, will sell for $355,000, which is $62,000 more than a comparable conventional one (but only eco-friendly homes will get government subsidies, in this case $30,000).
