Green Options

Arizona wants to be the “solar-energy hub of the world,” Kristin Mays, chair of the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, said at the Intersolar North America conference in San Francisco this week.

The state last week enacted a law that offers new incentives, including a tax credit of up to 10 percent, for solar companies that set up shop there.

At the Intersolar North America conference in San Francisco this week, some state rivalry became apparent as Arizona leaders argued the state’s advantages compared to California. “We know the Mojave desert’s off limits. Well, the desert in Arizona is open for business,” said Barry Broome, CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, to laughter from the audience.

More than 17,000 solar industry insiders are gathering in San Francisco this week for the annual Intersolar North America conference.

Conference organizers say the event is bigger this year, attracting more than double the attendees as the inaugural event last year – when the industry saw the solar-technology market grow 80 percent, with 5.5 gigawatts of sales, according to Navigant Consulting analyst Paula Mints – as well as more than double the number of exhibitors and almost triple the floor space. The growth has been “faster than we ever imagined,” said Eicke Weber, chairman of the conference committee and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, in a press release.

The boost this year may seem surprising at first glance, because the solar industry is in a downturn. Slower demand – partly due to an incentive cap in Spain that significantly shrank what was the largest market in the world last year, as well as limited financing in the recession – have led to falling solar-panel prices around the world. Mints estimates the market this year will fall to 3.75 gigawatts. “That’s going to hurt,” she said, especially because the industry’s gotten used to high growth rates and has built some 11 gigawatts of run-rate capacity. “We’ve overbuilt.”

Solar is already a source of power. Now some hope solar projects’ striking appearance can also make them a powerful marketing tool.

For the Fourth of July, concentrating solar-thermal startup eSolar programmed a quarter square mile of mirrors in Lancaster, Calif., to form the American flag and the Statue of Liberty.

The point? To celebrate Independence Day, and to help lobby for the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which would enact a carbon cap-and-trade program and other emission-reduction measures if approved and signed into law. The House of Representatives passed the controversial bill last month, and the Senate is now considering it.

While cleantech investment appears to be on the rebound, it’s clear the recession isn’t over yet. Mark Jensen, managing partner for the venture capital services group at Deloitte & Touche, said Wednesday that about half of the largest venture-capital firms expect to reduce their overall investments in the next few years in response to the recession.

But venture-capital firms expect cleantech to fare better than most other categories. According to the Deloitte survey, a whopping 95 percent said they plan to either increase or maintain their level of cleantech investment, with 63 percent anticipating more investment and 32 percent expecting to invest the same amount as they do now.

Solar venture investments hit a three-year low in the second quarter, the Cleantech Group said Wednesday. According to Brian Fan, senior director of research for the group, solar startups in North America, Europe, China and India raised a total of only $113.8 million for the quarter, which is down 7 percent from $365.7 million in the first quarter and down 86 percent from $834.7 million in the year-ago quarter.

As stimulus funding leads some industry insiders to think of Washington as “the new Wall Street” for green energy, some investment experts say they’re concerned about the government’s new role. “I worry about the government as a dealmaker in this space,” said Tom Bratkovitch, director of LP Capital Advisors, a consulting firm for private-equity investors, at a Thomson Reuters conference in Palo Alto, Calif., this week. “I just don’t know if the government is the best one to make decisions in this space.”

After all, the federal government has supported some technologies that have not panned out, while missing some that have ultimately been successful. The government also has a reputation for moving slowly – though the Department of Energy certainly is trying hard to get stimulus money out as quickly as possible – and the applications for the grants and loan guarantees can be extremely time-consuming.

Cleantech startups have stopped seeing GE as an adversary and have started realizing the company can help them make a difference, Kevin Skillern, a managing director at GE Energy Financial Services, said in a keynote speech at a Thomson Reuters conference called “Financing the Cleantech Vision” in Palo Alto on Wednesday.

In spite of the recession, Skillern assured the audience that the long-term business opportunity for cleantech is still there, though it will require “a strong stomach and a lot of patience” to cash in on it. He also called climate change “one of, if not the biggest, societal challenges of our time” and said technology was an essential part of the solution.

The prospect of green jobs has proven very attractive to Californian job seekers. According to a survey released this week by the Vote Solar Initiative, a solar advocacy group, more than 5,400 people are participating in solar job training programs this year in the state.

“It is clear that Californians of different economic and educational backgrounds are all looking to solar to provide much-needed career opportunities, and the state’s training institutions have stepped up to meet that rising demand,” said Claudia Eyzaguirre, the author of the report, in a press release.

But it’s not clear whether the state will have enough jobs to support these trainees. Part of that will depend on the kinds of jobs they are training for.

There’s no question that China is a force to be reckoned with in the solar industry. The country is the largest silicon-based solar-cell producer in the world, with Chinese and Taiwanese production accounting for 39 percent of global production last year, compared with 28 percent from Europe, according to a report the Worldwatch Institute released last week.

But while China had long been considered a potential game-changer in solar, companies’ growth had previously been slowed by a silicon shortage that hit newcomers more dramatically than incumbents. Even so, Chinese manufacturers overtook German and Japanese companies in 2007. Now that plenty of silicon is available, could the country’s dominance grow even larger? Or will some Chinese manufacturers struggle to differentiate themselves and suffer more than the rest of the market during an oversupply of panels?

As U.S. policymakers debate the best renewable policy for the country, many German experts are already convinced they know the answer: a feed-in tariff. Germany’s feed-in tariff, which offers generous set prices for renewable electricity fed into the grid, stimulated 1.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity last year, and similar programs also have boosted markets in countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey and South Korea. All the fastest-growing solar markets in the world today have feed-in tariffs.

Gainesville, Fla., and Ontario, Canada, also recently created German-style feed-in tariffs, but the policy hasn’t yet taken hold as a U.S. state or federal policy. I recently wrote a post for Earth2Tech about the difficulties of implementing a German-style feed-in tariff in California: the policy isn’t responsive to market signals that would encourage electricity generation when and where it’s most needed, it’s more challenging to make work in places with lower conventional electricity prices and widely varying utilities with different restrictions, and it doesn’t address retail electricity or encourage customers to use less energy.