At a national level, the solar industry data added nearly 14,000 new jobs in 2012, a 13% growth rate over 2011 — 5 times the job growth rate of the overall economy.

1 in 230 jobs created nationally over the last year were created in the solar industry

The Solar Foundation, an independent nonprofit solar research and education group, has put out its State Solar Jobs Map (www.solarstates.org).

Last year, “the top ten states for solar jobs were: California, Arizona, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New York, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio.” It is no coincidence that “the top three states for jobs are also the leaders in 2012 installed capacity.”

Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association explains:

Today, solar is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States, providing good-paying jobs for more than 119,000 American workers. Over the past five years, the U.S. solar energy industry has experienced sustained growth thanks to rising demand, falling costs and new financing options. Since 2008, the amount of solar powering our homes, businesses and military bases has increased six-fold–from 1,100 megawatts to more than 7,700 megawatts today, which is enough to power more than 1.2 million American homes.

Some of this growth is attributed to the fact that the cost of a solar system has dropped by nearly 40 percent over the past two years, making solar more affordable than ever for consumers. If we want to want to create new jobs, foster innovation and ensure prosperity for future generations of Americans, we must expand our commitment to using clean, renewable energy sources in the U.S. and around the world.

Hear! Hear!

How much solar energy did your utility add last year?

We know Australia has embraced solar. Germany too. Even Bangladesh has jumped on board. But what about U.S. states and communities?

For the sixth year in a row, you can take a look at the utilities that have done the most to incorporate solar power into their grids, thanks to the Solar Electric Power Association.

2012 was a huge year for utility-based solar in the U.S., with 2.4 gigawatts integrated, bringing the total by the end of 2012 to 6.1 gigawatts nationwide. That number represents over 300,000 solar projects plugged into utility grids.

They are ranked both by total megawatts added, as well as watts-per-customer. This means the big utilities with lots of customers are going to dominate the total megawatts added rankings, because they can invest in large projects. Small utilities have a chance to rise to the top of the rankings that measure solar energy added per-customer. The rankings take into account large-scale solar projects as well as smaller customer net metered projects that anyone could have on their roof.

Here are some key takeaways:

• 2.4 gigawatts = 8 natural gas plants: Utilities added 2,384 megawatts of solar capacity in 2012, compared to 1,480 in 2011. This can be compared to 8 natural gas-fired power plants.
• Both big projects and net meters: 1,106 megawatts of the total came from large-scale projects, and 1,151 megawatts came from smaller, customer-sited solar projects. There were far more of the smaller projects – 90,000 small to just 70 large, which gives you a sense of the scale of both how much power is generated from a large project, and how widespread the smaller projects have become. The large-scale projects grew the most from 2011: 250 percent.
• 88 percent through power purchase agreements: Utilities purchased the vast majority of the solar power on their grid from solar companies — only 12 percent of the projects are owned by the utilities.
• California domination: Pacific Gas and Electric’s purchase of the 250 megawatt Agua Caliente project (which received loan guarantees from the Department of Energy), the largest solar PV project in the world, represented more than a quarter of its 805 megawatt total. Along with the solar power added by Southern California Edison and Sacramento Municipal Utility District, that brings California’s share to well over 1 gigawatt. PG&E added more in 2012 than the entire country added in 2010. Sacramento had the only municipal utility on the top ten list, largely though its 50MW of large-scale projects.
• All panels: No projects fueled by concentrated solar power came online last year, though 750 MW worth of projects will be completed this year.
• Solar power concentrated: 80 percent of the smaller net metered projects were in California, New Jersey, Arizona, Hawaii, and Massachusetts.
• Northeast Ohio as Silicon Valley of alternative energy?: Looking at the watts-per-customer rankings, the Ohio towns of St. Mary’s, Bryan, and Napoleon all made the top ten, along with utilities in Hawai’i, Tennessee, California, Arizona, and New Jersey. Rural Northeast Ohio is not typically known for investment in solar, but proportionally, it rose to the top in 2012. St. Mary’s dominated, with 562.8 watts-per-customer (Kauai Island Utility was the next highest at 282.1). As Patrick McGowan, Mayor of St. Mary’s put it: “It is my opinion that the City of St. Mary’s should have a diverse energy portfolio embracing various technologies. I feel that Green Energy solutions, including solar power, offer our citizens clean and economical energy.”

The rankings represent 96 percent of the U.S. solar market, with 260 utilities, so while this list is not comprehensive, it is one of the better snapshots of the progression of solar power in America. This year, solar power is likely to be the second-largest new source of energy. Lancaster, California has started to lead on solar power and recently adopted a solar mandate on new construction — perhaps it will make the list in 2013. Solar energy is expanding into communities everywhere, even affordable multifamily housing in Chicago. Now that the solar industry will soon be a net-positive energy source, it is a great opportunity to grow our way into a low-carbon future.

Is your state or city on the ranking’s map? Find out below the jump.

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Say you wanted to build an industry from the ground up. On a macro level, the research, development, manufacturing, sourcing, distribution, and fueling would require a lot of energy. This is particularly true for energy industries. But the great thing about renewable energy is that it generally requires no fuel and starts to pay for itself as it scales.

Solar photovoltaic production consumed more energy than it produced while it was getting started. The whole industrial process has taken more energy to create than solar PV has produced — and created more greenhouse gases than it prevented — since 2000. However, a study from Stanford University found that in recent years, all the electricity produced by solar panels in the world has become greater than the energy required to produce it. Due to the amazing growth of the industry, it will generate enough energy by 2015 or 2020 to have “paid back” the energy debt accumulated while the industry got on its feet.

The energy cost to produce and install solar has been shrinking, and can be expected to continue doing so. The more the industrial process gets refined, the more the industry will grow.

As investment and technological development have risen sharply with the number of installed panels, the energetic costs of new PV modules have declined. Thinner silicon wafers are now used to make solar cells, less highly refined materials are now used as the silicon feedstock, and less of the costly material is lost in the manufacturing process. Increasingly, the efficiency of solar cells using thin film technologies that rely on earth-abundant materials such as copper, zinc, tin and carbon have the potential for even greater improvements.

In fact, just today First Solar announced it set a world record for a cadmium-telluride module conversion efficiency of 16.1 percent. This comes 6 weeks after the company broke the previous record for cadmium-telluride cell efficiency of 17.3 percent by 1.5 percent to 18.3 percent. In English, this means that thin-film solar panels, which are much cheaper to produce, are getting more and more efficient.

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The military has begun a transition to efficient and renewable energy. The Army is proceeding with its “Net Zero Energy” initiative, which means that they will aim to produce as much energy (and water, and waste) as they use. Cost and reliability are the primary reasons, but cutting carbon pollution is one of the outcomes.

Last month, the head of U.S. forces in the Pacific said that climate change was the most likely issue to concern the military. Two recent discussions shed some light on the efforts currently underway to allow the military to use less carbon-based fuels, and the explicit and implicit reasons behind those efforts.

Fueling the combat theater

Yesterday afternoon, Mike Breen, Executive Director of the Truman Project, hosted a conversation with Sharon E. Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs at the Department of Defense. Entitled “Clean and Mean: DoD’s Tactical and Operational Energy Innovations,” it covered some of the tactics the military uses to more efficiently carry out its mission on the front lines.

Sharon Burke being briefed on solar power platforms used by tactical military units. (Photo: Summer Barkley)

Breen, a former U.S. Army infantry officer who served in Iraq, recalled the status quo at forward operating bases dependent on fossil fuel. Loud, inefficient generators burning gasoline. Unsealed tents that allowed air conditioning systems to cool the desert (racking up a $20 billion a year utility bill). Transmission and supply lines that began to feel more like a ball and chain weighing down mission-ready units.

The U.S. military is the largest single consumer of energy and oil on the planet. Assistant Secretary Burke explained how the DoD is dealing with a different frame of war with distributed operations all over the globe, from disaster relief to deterrence, fighting terrorism to peacekeeping. The military has to move fuel through long supply lines and sometimes contested areas. “It’s a challenge for us,” she said.

Burke has noted that “a $1 rise in the price of a barrel of oil translates to approximately $130 million over the course of a year.” It’s not just money at stake — fuel resupply endangers the lives of our men and women in uniform. Delivering fuel via truck over dangerous roads has led to heavy-lift helicopters often being used to deliver fuel to bases in Afghanistan.

To cut inefficient use of, and therefore dependence on, fossil fuels in the combat theater, the military has been doing things like adding solar panels to tents and backpacks and sealing tents with an insulating coating so cooled air does not leak. Mortar pits can be powered by the sun instead of an idling Humvee. Radio towers are getting electricity from solar panels instead of a generator that drinks gasoline, requiring resupply. The DoD now dispatches energy teams to these forward operating bases with deep policy knowledge of how renewable energy systems can be used, and they can work with soldiers on the ground to ascertain the best practical implementation. This leaves an experienced Chief Warrant Officer behind who can support the unit with these systems. As Ms. Burke said, it “doesn’t sound very exotic, but it adds up.”

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Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris and SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive marking the installation of solar panels at a baseball stadium. (Photo credit: Solar Home & Business Journal)

On Tuesday, the City Council of Lancaster, California approved a mandate that most new homes must produce solar energy. This is the first such mandate in the nation.

Lancaster is a suburb in northeast Los Angeles county, and this new rule had no bigger advocate that Mayor Rex Parris, who is a Republican. He has long sought to make Lancaster “the solar energy capital of the world.”

Lancaster isn’t your prototypical hotbed of greenie environmentalists. Yet Mayor Parris said the rule wasn’t controversial: “It serves as a model. Here I am in an extremely conservative area, and there was almost no push-back.”

The mandate requires for any new home construction permit issued after January 1, 2014, builders must meet a minimum number of kilowatts of solar energy produced per house. This gives builders flexibility, allowing a larger solar installation on a few homes rather than a cookie-cutter solution to every home. The rate would be 1 to 1.5 kilowatts of solar per 7,000 square foot lot. Rural homes on 100,000 square feet must have at least 1.5 kilowatts. Prospective home buyers will be able to see the solar system offered in the builder’s model home.

Some home builders are not happy because they see this as something that puts them at a disadvantage with their main competitor: the resale market. But the mandate does not necessarily mean that a project cannot move forward if the builder doesn’t want to install solar panels: they can “choose to meet the solar energy generation requirement off-site by providing evidence of purchasing solar energy credits from another solar-generating development located within the City.”

And Parris says that the opposition just part of the process: “I understand the building industry is not happy with this. We will just have to take the heat.” The Mayor didn’t pursue this mandate simply to make Lancaster a solar hub. According to E&E News, he also sees climate change as a pressing problem that his fellow Republicans would be smart to acknowledge.

“The one thing we have to recognize is just how desperate this situation is with global warming,” Parris said, “and at the same time recognize that we can actually fix it. We have tremendous capability if we just have the courage to do it.” …

“The Republican Party is in a quandary because the polling shows that the voters support environmental protection. It’s the leadership that doesn’t,” Parris said. “You’d have to be a moron to discount global warming. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t recognize it’s occurring.”

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Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

by Julius Fischer

Germany is moving forward to replace fossil fuels with renewables faster than most countries. But there is always pushback, most recently in the form of much media discourse about rising electricity prices spearheaded by the Federal Minister of Environment Peter Altmaier. Like many politicians, he is already preparing for national elections in September, so let’s take an honest look at this discourse surrounding electricity prices and how they affect Germany’s move toward renewables.

Ever since the Fukushima catastrophe two years ago, Germans have redoubled their efforts to phase out of nuclear energy and fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy — called the “Energiewende” (energy transition) that began in 2000. Minister Altmaier, CDU (Christian Democratic Party — center-right) believes that the recent rise in electricity prices for households poses the biggest threat to the success of the Energiewende, because rising household electricity bills endanger public support for renewables. He thus proposed a plan to prevent an “explosion of electricity prices.”

First of all: why care about what happens in Germany? For one thing, German policy-makers played a dominant role in the evolution of feed-in tariffs (FITs) for renewables (the term is actually an Anglicization of the German “Stromeinspeisungsgesetz”). FITs are the most elegant and effective policy instrument to incentivize renewable energy deployment in a cost-effective manner. Germany remains on the forefront of optimizing FITs to account for the differences in renewable technologies and decreasing market prices over time. Germany also has an impressive record of success in deploying renewable energy (especially solar), and set uniquely high targets of efficiency improvement and renewables deployment. Once we realize that the Energiewende is not a big government program by naïve tree-huggers, we can use the German example to help show that renewable energy can and does create jobs and lower costs.

The discourse surrounding the Energiewende has ranged from whether the grid expansion can keep up with renewable energy deployment, to whether the grid liability can be maintained (yes it can), and whether shutting down nuclear power in Germany will just result in imports of nuclear power from France or the Czech Republic (it hasn’t). The current discourse raises the questions of whether household electricity consumers should pay less, whether industry should pay more, and whether the Energiewende can be done cheaper.

Should households pay less?

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Solar power is on the rise, even as the growth rate of U.S. electricity consumption has been slowing. This year, energy generated from solar power will be the second-largest source added to the U.S. electric grid.

“Solar is going to move into the No. 2 position in terms of new build, second only to gas,” Recurrent Chief Executive Officer Arno Harris said in an interview yesterday at the company’s main office in San Francisco.

Rooftop solar systems can be installed for about $4 a watt and utility-scale systems for $2 a watt, Harris said. “We can see our way to $1.50,” he said. “At those kinds of costs, we’re competitive in the Southwest with conventional electricity.”

Panel prices have fallen almost 69 percent in the past two years, benefiting companies such as Recurrent that purchase and install the equipment and sell electricity from the systems to utilities. Falling costs also have enabled developers to accept lower-priced contracts. First Solar Inc. has signed a power purchase agreement for a project in New Mexico that will sell electricity at a lower rate than new coal plants earn.

Specifically, another report projected the U.S. would install a total of 4.2 gigawatts of solar PV power in 2013. Last year, the U.S.’s share of the global solar installations grew strongly, from 7 percent to 11 percent. Globally, expected demand for solar photovoltaic installation is expected to grow by two gigawatts, or a 7 percent rise.

Solar, wind, and biomass comprised all new installed electricity capacity that came on line in January 2013. Despite what certain news organizations would have you believe, the U.S. has great potential for solar power, especially in the Southwest. And despite what you may hear about individual companies, the industry is growing globally and creating jobs in the U.S.

Where can the U.S. look to for inspiration for ways to further strengthen solar capacity in the U.S.? Rooftop solar installations in certain sectors of the Australian market have already reached the saturation point, to the extent that the peak electricity demand curves are being reshaped. For instance, midday electricity demand on the grid is down 15 percent despite higher nighttime demand.

As solar power grows, the need for adequate energy storage grows too. Fortunately, a recent report shows that global energy storage is expected to grow exponentially in the next nine years.

Alta Devices CEO Christopher Norris

A Silicon Valley solar company has developed a method for manufacturing light, ultra-thin, flexible, and durable solar cells that manage to convert a record 30.8 percent of the energy in light into electricity. The company, Alta Devices, previously set a record of 28.8 percent conversion efficiency with another form of solar cell.

It hopes its latest creation could be adapted to fit small mobile devices such as smartphones and iPad tablets, which until now have only been able to fit conventional solar cells that are much less efficient and charge slowly.

Here’s the quick summary, via Energy Matters:

Alta Devices has announced a record 30.8 percent efficiency with its latest generation dual-junction thin-film solar cell, a breakthrough the company says has the potential to vastly improve the battery life of mobile systems.

The record efficiency has been verified by the USA’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the same body which last year confirmed Alta’s record of 28.8 percent efficiency for its single-junction solar cell.

Alta’s technology is based on flexible thin-film solar wafers made from gallium arsenide (GaAs). GaAs solar cells are far more expensive to manufacture than traditional PV cells, but with such high energy conversion levels, the new dual-junction cell allows for more energy to be generated over a smaller area, making them perfect for use in devices such as smartphones, tablets and other portable devices.

The gallium arsenide layer, while not the entirety of the completed cell, is incredibly then — approximately one micron, or one-fortieth the width of a human hair — reports the New York Times, which also has a more detailed description of the cells’ construction process.

Alta has already developed a prototype cover for a Samsung Galaxy phone and is working on designs for other smartphones. If it works out, the solar cells could vastly improve the battery life of most mobile devices for very little cost:

It wouldn’t do away with the battery. But depending on the light level where the device was carried, it could add 80 percent to the battery life. The main benefit would be outdoors or on a windowsill, because sunlight has about 100 times more energy than the light typically provided by fluorescent or incandescent lamps. Indoors, it might add only 10 to 15 percent. But the efficient type, gallium arsenide, is not only better overall at capturing energy; it is also better suited to capturing energy in low-light conditions that the ordinary silicon solar cells.…

A smartphone would probably take a patch of film with a peak output, in full sunlight, of 1.5 watts, he said, which is probably only about $3 worth of materials. (A cellphone plugged into a wall outlet generally draws 3 to 5 watts, [Christopher S. Norris, the chief executive of Alta Devices] said, and an iPad, about 10 watts.) “If you’re in full sun, a watt and a half for 10 minutes will give you an hour of talk time,” he said.

Alta has even posted a calculator online that can estimate the benefits of the cells in different types of light.

The technology remains in the development phase: Alta’s only actual customer so far is the military, which uses the cells to cut down on the batteries soldiers have to bring into the field, to reduce diesel fuel consumption at fixed bases, to power drones, and to sew into everything from backpacks to tents. But the company is already eying an advance into the automobile market: while the surface area of a car wouldn’t provide enough energy to power the motor, it could power additional functions like air conditioning, power steering or power brakes.

Alta already has a pilot manufacturing line to take care of the demand from the military, and a 40-megawatt factory on track to begin construction next year solar components for smartphones and other mobile devices. “[The 30.8 percent target is] also an important step toward our target of 38 percent efficient cells,” Norris said. “We continue to redefine the boundaries of what is possible with solar power.”

This week Bloomberg caught an announcement from Apple that all of their data centers are now run on 100 percent renewable energy. Apple is at 75 percent for their corporate facilities worldwide — a remarkable increase from 35 percent in 2010.

Apple was targeted by Greenpeace last year, in a report that ranked the Silicon Valley giant 12th our of 14 large computer companies for use of clean energy to power data centers and cloud computing services. Apple received a “D” grade for energy transparency, efficiency, and renewables advocacy, and an “F” for infrastructure siting.

Apparently, that dismal assessment got the company’s attention:

We’ve already achieved 100 percent renewable energy at all of our data centers, at our facilities in Austin, Elk Grove, Cork, and Munich, and at our Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. And for all of Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide, we’re at 75 percent, and we expect that number to grow as the amount of renewable energy available to us increases. We won’t stop working until we achieve 100 percent throughout Apple.

“Apple’s increased level of disclosure about its energy sources helps customers know that their iCloud will be powered by clean energy sources, not coal,” Gary Cook, an analyst at Greenpeace, wrote in a statement. According to Apple’s numbers, the company reduced its carbon emissions per dollar of revenue by 21.5 percent between 2008 and 2012 — though their overall carbon footprint still went up due to increased sales.

You can dig into Apple’s environmental self-reporting a bit more here.

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, said that a 100-acre solar array set up next to its largest data center, located in Maiden, North Carolina, came online this past December. The company says it’s generating 60 percent of the center’s power on site — through a combination of solar power and fuel cells that convert biogases to energy — and that the rest of the electricity is drawn from renewable sources. Another data center under construction in Prineville, Oregon, will run on a combination of wind, hydro, solar and geothermal power.