Green Options

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.

Scotland plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 42 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, the most by any country.

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.

Move — to Louisiana:

According to SolarPowerRocks! Louisiana has a state tax credit of 50% for solar roof installations, the most generous state subsidy for solar — Combined with the 30% Federal tax credit for solar that we all get now; (you knew about that, right?) so in Louisiana you can put a solar roof up, paying only 20% of the cost: (30% + 50% = 80% off).

The way this credit is designed it will benefit modest homeowners the most. If you need a $25,000 system, you get the full 50%. If you need a larger system you get less than 50%, because it maxes out at $12,500.

So, if you have ten plasma tvs and a pool pump and run the A/C day and night, you won’t get as much help with running all that…but

Details:

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?

The California solar market faces a serious potential roadblock next week, warns Solar Nation.  The policy that allows us to roll our meter backwards when we generate more solar electricity than we use — Net Metering — is capped at 2.5 % of system peak load. Once we reach that limit, solar net metering sunsets out.

And we are now almost at that limit. If the Legislature does not extend net metering by June 30th, that solar roof you planned in a year or two might soon be unaffordable.

If you want to stop it, take action through Solar Nation: Don’t kill Net Metering!

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.

Desertec has for years been just the pipe dream of an international network of scientists and engineers; an example of some seriously out-of-the-box thinking on climate change prevention. It is the ambitous plan to power Europe, the Middle East and Africa off renewable power strung along a giant new supergrid of High-Voltage Direct Current transmission lines connecting the two continents.

A key element of the concept has been to build a humungous 6,500 square mile concentrated solar power (CSP) hub in the Sahara and send the massive amounts of power generated to Europe.  To cut long distance transmission losses to well under 15% across the incredible distances involved, Desertec proposed to use existing technology to build a supergid of High-Voltage Direct Current transmission lines.

“With HVDC, transmission losses are about 3% per 1000 km and there are small AC/DC conversion losses as well.” according to Desertec. ” Taking both of these into account, electricity may, for example, be transmitted from North Africa to the UK with less than 10% loss of power. It is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity for 3000 km or more.”

This week Desertec is finally grabbing global headlines with an unprecedented colossal cash infusion for its project from a heavy hitter consortium of major European corporations. This would change the world solar industry. To say nothing of its impact on climate change!

Bringing Desertec to life would utterly change the face of solar energy generation for the whole planet.

It is truly a giant undertaking. Here, finally - is the serious action that we need to take to avert catastrophe.

Goes one further….

If every building had a white roof, we would be able to cool the surrounding areas. That is the reasoning behind a California law about to go into effect next month requiring light reflective roofs on all new buildings. It is already the law for new flat roofs here.

Read the rest of this entry at GreenbuildingElements…

This is a notch up from high-altitude wind turbines.

It’s another type of space race, to be the first company to get solar satellites into orbit.

U.S. companies are aggressively researching the technology, reports Yale 360. One firm called PowerSat in Washington state has filed for patents to link as many 300 shiny satellites together in space, beam the energy to one big satellite, then transmit the power back to Earth.

The star trek also includes using solar-powered thrusters to launch satellites into orbit 22,000 miles above our planet.

A California utility called PG&E also has signed a deal with Solaren for 200 megawatts of space-based solar power in 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As part of its National Action Plan on Climate Change, India plans to give out $100 billion as subsidies to speed up solar energy production over the next 20 years.