CA: Schwarzenegger to unveil compromise solar energy plan

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger aims to make California a world leader in solar energy with a new proposal he's sending to lawmakers Monday.

The plan, which drops some controversial provisions that doomed his "million solar homes" proposal last year, would create a 10-year incentive fund encouraging both residences and commercial buildings to install solar power. But it would drop a requirement that half of all new homes eventually be solar powered. Those changes are designed to mute opposition from businesses and the building industry.

The Public Utility Commission would decide how electricity consumers pay into the incentive fund, most likely with a new fee on utility bills. The administration and solar advocates say consumers will save money because the fee would be offset by money earned from the extra solar power generated by some consumers and used by others.

The revised proposal requires some larger developers to offer solar power as an option by 2010, and to inform home buyers of the costs and savings.

California builds about 150,000 new homes a year. Experience shows about 10 percent of homeowners would choose solar if offered the option - about 15 times the roughly 1,000 solar homes currently built each year in the state, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, a solar advocate for the nonprofit Environment California.

"It's clearly the most ambitious solar initiative ever proposed in the United States," said David Hochschild, policy director for the nonprofit organization Vote Solar.

The incentive approach is modeled on Japan, the world leader in solar power, which has seen a 72 percent drop in solar costs as 70,000 homes have been outfitted for the alternative power over the last 10 years.

California already is the third-largest consumer of solar power equipment, behind Germany, but gets 40 percent more annual sunlight than Germany and 20 percent more than Japan. Hochschild calls California "the Saudi Arabia of sunlight."

That's part of the appeal for a state that may soon again see a repeat of the power shortages that led to rolling blackouts and soaring electricity costs in 2000 and 2001, said Sen. John Campbell, R-Irvine, who is sponsoring the bill package with Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Culver City.

"The sun shines in California - it's homegrown. No other state or country can take it from us," Campbell said.

The goal is to have 3,000 megawatts worth of solar power by 2018, which amounts to about 5 percent of the state's entire electricity usage at peak periods - generally hot summer afternoons when electricity is most in demand, most expensive, and when solar panels are most efficient.

That's the equivalent of 40 new, $30 million, 75-megawatt natural gas plants. One megawatt is enough to power about 750 homes.

"We will be building literally power plants' worth of solar on roofs across the state," said Del Chiaro.

The net projected savings over 10 years would be as much as $1 billion, said Campbell.

The proposal also encourages time-of-use metering, in which consumers pay more during periods of peak demand, encouraging them to run appliances in off-hours.

The measure also would direct the California Energy Commission to consider requiring solar energy in the same way the commission has in the past mandated low-flush toilets.

The goal is to create a large, stable solar market that will lower the cost not only of components but also of installation to the point that incentives will no longer be necessary to make solar energy affordable.

Hochschild installed solar panels on his San Francisco home three years ago, with the state's current rebate program paying about a third of the cost.

His home now feeds electricity into the power grid during the day's peak demand, and draws power at night. Because his energy supply and demand balances out, Hochschild's electricity bill last year was zero - the result advocates and the administration predict statewide.

The systems are projected to pay for themselves in five to 15 years, depending on location and climate. A desert dweller, for instance, is likely to break even more quickly than a resident along the foggy Pacific coast.

Joe Desmond, the governor's deputy secretary for energy, is optimistic about legislative support for the proposal, though he acknowledges some roadblocks. "What we have here is a broad consensus between many of the stakeholders," he said.

The existing solar incentive program is likely to run out of money in the next few months unless lawmakers act. And the proposal could face continued opposition from utilities and labor.

Germany's Top Solar Leader to Visit Sacramento

http://renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=23004

At a lunch-time briefing next week in California's state capitol, leading representatives from Germany and Japan, home of the world's two largest solar markets, as well as three American economists will discuss the economic benefits of growing California's solar power market while examining various proposals to increase solar power in California, including Governor Schwarzenegger's Million Solar Roofs Initiative.

The event will take place on March 1, 2005 from 12:00 to 1:00 PM in room 112 at the California State Capitol building. Senator Kevin Murray and the Environment California Research & Policy Center will host the event which will feature speaker Dr. Hermann Scheer, German Parliament and Chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy who was instrumental in passing Germany's renewable energy legislation which has caused a solar market explosion in the country. Other speakers will include: Shirley Neff, President-elect of the U.S. Association for Energy Economics; Steven McClary, MRW & Associates, Inc.; Dr. Daniel Kammen, University of California, Berkeley; Chris O'Brien, Sharp Solar Electronics. Summary of presentations will be provided at the briefing and also will be available for download at the following link.

8	“The goal is to have 3,000 megawatts worth of solar power by 2018...The net projected savings over 10 years would be as much as $1 billion, said Campbell.”

Solar power is so economically and energy inefficienct that is now time to consider bringing criminal indictments for fraud against the manufacturers and promoters.

The Inefficiencies of Solar Power
(Based upon a horizontal PV array located at
the average continental U.S. latitude of 38º.)

ref.	source	loss (%)	power (per m²)
1.	Solar flux	-	1,368 W
2.	Atmospheric losses	45	752 W
3.	Night times losses	50	376 W
4.	Solar angle losses	50	188 W
5.	Cell conversion losses	88	22.6 W
6.	DC®AC inverter losses	10	20.3 W
7.	Net efficiency		1.5%
8.	Net energy (per m² per day)		0.5 kWh
9.	Value of energy (per m² per day)		4.3 ¢
10.	Solar panel cost (per m²)		$530
11.	Payback period		33 years

Notes:

1.	Above the atmosphere. Compare to solar constant.
2.	Loss = atmos. absorp. + atmos. reflect. + cloud absorp. + cloud reflect. See additional references: 1, 2, 3,
3.	Necessary for calculating average daily value of energy production.
4.	Effect of solar angle on efficiency. Line 4 equals 4.5kWh per day. Compare to U.S. Average Daily Solar Radiation.
5.	Shell SQ175-PC, including specified de-rating for cell temperature and irradiance level.
6.	5kW modular, certified, grid-interactive, inverter.
7.	Line 6 divided by line 1.
8.	Line 6 times 86,400 and divided by 3.6E6.
9.	From 2004 DOE stats for average U.S. residential price.
10.	Shell SQ175-PC solar panel, $699, 1.32m² area.
11.	Exclusive of installation, inverter, interest, etc.

--Boot Hill

He's been on record for a long time re: energy and California , btw.

Build nukes,, what's so difficult about that?

http://republican.sen.ca.gov/web/mcclintock/article_detail.asp?PID=172

Solar Sophistries

Senator Tom McClintock
Date: April 6, 2001
Publication Type: Column Print Version

Published April 6, 2001 in the Los Angeles Daily News
Ever since the back-to-nature administration of Gov. Jerry Brown, politicians of both political parties have boasted that “California leads the way” in environmentally sensitive policies. One of the linchpins of these policies has been to actively discourage the construction of conventional power plants in California, preferring such trendy alternatives as “solar power,” the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity through photovoltaic panels.

As the energy shortage has intensified, so too has the commitment to solar power. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a $100 million bond to build a photovoltaic generator for the city. California already offers to subsidize half the cost of household solar panels, and $50 million of additional subsidies was recently approved overwhelmingly by the State Senate.

At first glance, the advantages of photovoltaics are intriguing. Modern solar panels use a fuel that is inexhaustible and costs exactly nothing. It is not necessary to store the power for evening use: home rooftop photovoltaic panels can pump electricity into the grid during the day when most people are not at home, run the meter backwards and cancel out the cost of drawing from the grid in the evening hours.

With advantages like these, one wonders what took the San Francisco Board of Supervisors so long to think of it – and why the world, or at least California, hasn’t “gone solar.” Photovoltaic technology has been around since its discovery by Edmond Becquerel in 1839. After many years of intense solar subsidies, less than two one hundredths of one percent of California’s power is produced by photovoltaics. What’s wrong with this picture?

In all the solar exuberance, politicians would do well to heed the old maxim, “When it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.”

Consider first the production cost. The cheapest photovoltaic panels cost $6,000 per kilowatt to manufacture, producing peak power for about one fifth of the day under average conditions. Thus, to replace the 52.8 gigawatt-hours daily output of the single nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon would cost about $66 billion – enough to build 13 Diablo Canyons, or 22 comparable nuclear plants with today’s technology.

Just to recoup the material costs would require 26.8-cents per kilowatt-hour over the 25-year life of the facility. This compares poorly to the 3-cent per kilowatt-hour that nuclear power now costs for construction, operations, maintenance and decommissioning.

And that doesn’t include land costs. A modern photovoltaic panel produces about 10 watts of peak power per square foot under average conditions. Replacing Diablo Canyon would require 35.9 square miles of solid solar panels.

Such comparisons aren’t fair, say the solar enthusiasts. Solar cells can be distributed among rooftops, producing all the power that homes would need. Never mind that solar panels don’t work in the shade and that shading is a major factor in reducing air conditioning needs.

An average home consumes about 19 kilowatt-hours of electricity each day. To meet this demand would require a peak capacity of 4 kilowatts of solar panels, at an initial cost of $24,000. At six percent interest, that homeowner would pay $154 per month, for the 25-year useful life of the panels or roughly twice the current average monthly electricity bill.

Why then, are homeowners purchasing them? Because solar panels are heavily subsidized with taxes, which hides their true cost. Even with 50 percent subsidies, the best that solar panels can do is to match the cost of today’s expensive electricity. And the comparison is illusory, since it would require roughly $100 billion in new taxes to provide such a subsidy to every family in the state.

Solar energy has taken great strides in efficiencies in the last ten years, but then again, so have nuclear power and many other technologies. If the industry’s progress continues, someday the economics of solar energy may pencil out. But at this moment in history, it doesn’t.

The great tragedy is that politicians routinely tout the solar option as the cure for the state's electricity shortage. It is the same tragedy created when quackery diverts seriously ill patients from proven remedies until it is too late to save them. The precious time since the electricity crisis became obvious last year has been squandered with such solar sophistries, and summer now approaches with no time left to build the conventional power plants to meet the demand.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.