New law aims to brighten solar power's future

Gov. Jerry Brown has just signed a complex bill that will change the way that residential electricity rates are figured in California - and hopefully pave the way for more people to get access to solar energy.

The bill, AB327, won't make everyone happy.

But the measure tackles a complicated issue, and it's the end result of months of negotiations and revisions. It could never make everyone happy, but what's most important is that it protects consumers and underlines California's commitment to renewable energy.

On the latter point, AB327 is a definite winner.

The bill protects and expands "net metering," a popular program that allows homeowners, businesses and school districts that have rooftop solar panels to run their electricity meters backward when their solar panels are feeding excess energy into the electrical grid. Current state law requires major utilities to make net metering available, but only up to 5 percent of a utility's "aggregate customer peak demand." San Francisco's PG&E has more than 90,000 net-metering customers in Northern California.

AB327 will authorize the California Public Utilities Commission to create new net metering regulations after that 5 percent cap has been reached. The PUC hasn't made the regulations yet, but they're widely considered to lead to an expansion of net metering beyond the cap - and that's a big win for the solar industry and solar enthusiasts. Net metering is one of the major benefits of installing solar, which can be quite expensive. Opening it up will surely encourage new customers to buy solar.

All of this is great news. But there's a catch, of course.

The three major utilities aren't coming out of this empty-handed. They've long complained that solar customers using net metering aren't paying for the costs to transmit energy - and now they may have found a way to make sure that every customer, solar or not, will have to pay for transmission costs.

Under AB327, the PUC will also gain the authority to implement a monthly surcharge of up to $10 per customer and $5 per low-income customer. The PUC expects to come to a decision on those charges sometime next year, following the usual public comment process.

The PUC says that the change won't necessarily mean that your monthly bill will go up; the fixed charge would come with a shift in electricity assessment as well.

"If you implement a fixed charge, it's likely that the volume rate goes down," said Edward Randolph, energy director for the PUC. "What's important about the fixed charge for those who advocate for it is that it helps us get closer to the principle that everyone pays for the fixed costs of their energy transmissions."

Consumer groups are already getting nervous about a new charge, and rightfully so. Gov. Jerry Brown instructed the PUC to protect those customers who already have solar when creating the new regulations for net metering. But when it comes to new utility charges, the PUC needs to protect all of us.

Should Other Nations Follow Germany's Lead On Promoting Solar Power?

Answer by Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea Hydraulics Engineer

Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea Hydraulics Engineer

The answer is the most forceful possibleno.

Solar power itself is a good thing, but Germany’s pro-renewables policy has been a disaster. It has the absurd distinction of completing the trifecta of bad energy policy:

1. Bad for consumers
2. Bad for producers
3. Bad for the environment (yes, really; I’ll explain)

Pretty much the only people who benefit are affluent home-owners and solar panel installation companies. A rising tide of opposition and resentment is growing among the German press and public.

I was shocked to find out how useless, costly, and counter-productive their world-renowned energy policy has turned out. This is a serious problem for Germany, but an even greater problem for the rest of the world, who hope to follow in their footsteps. The first grand experiment in renewable energy is a catastrophe! The vast scale of the failure has only started to become clear over the past year or so. So I can forgive renewables advocates for not realizing it yet — but it’s time for the green movement to do a 180 on this.

Some awful statistics before I get into the details:

• Germany is widely considered the global leader in solar power, with over a third of the world’s nameplate (peak) solar power capacity. [1] Germany has over twice as much solar capacity per capita as sunny, subsidy-rich, high-energy-cost California. (That doesn’t sound bad, but keep going.)
• Germany’s residential electricity cost is about $0.34/kWh, one of the highest rates in the world. About $0.07/kWh goes directly to subsidizing renewables, which is actually higher than the wholesale electricity price in Europe. (This means they could simply buy zero-carbon power from France and Denmark for less than they spend to subsidize their own.) More than 300,000 households per year are seeing their electricity shut off because they cannot afford the bills.Many people are blaming high residential prices on business exemptions, but eliminating them would save households less than 1 euro per month on average. Billing rates are predicted by the government to rise another 40% by 2020. [2]
• Germany’s utilities and taxpayers are losing vast sums of money due to excessive feed-in tariffs and grid management problems. The environment minister says the cost will be one trillion euros (~$1.35 trillion) over the next two decades if the program is not radically scaled back. This doesn’t even include the hundreds of billions it has already cost to date. [3] Siemens, a major supplier of renewable energy equipment, estimated in 2011 that the direct lifetime cost ofEnergiewende through 2050 will be $4.5 trillion, which means it will cost about 2.5% of Germany’s GDP for 50 years straight. [4] That doesn’t include economic damage from high energy prices, which is difficult to quantify but appears to be significant.
• Here’s the truly dismaying part: the latest numbers show Germany’s carbon output and global warming impact are actually increasing [5] despite flat economic output and declining population, because of ill-planned “renewables first” market mechanisms. This regime is paradoxically forcing the growth of dirty coal power. Photovoltaic solar has a fundamental flaw for large-scale generation in the absence of electricity storage — it only works for about 5-10 hours a day. Electricity must be produced at the exact same time it’s used. [29] The more daytime summer solar capacity Germany builds, the more coal power they need for nights and winters as cleaner power sources are forced offline. [6] This happens because excessive daytime solar power production makes base-load nuclear plants impossible to operate, and makes load-following natural gas plants uneconomical to run. Large-scale PV solar power is unmanageable without equally-large-scale grid storage, but even pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities are being driven out of business by the severe grid fluctuations. They can’t run steadily enough to operate at a profit. [2,7] Coal is the only non-subsidized power source that doesn’t hemorrhage money now. [8] The result is that utilities must choose between coal, blackouts, or bankruptcy. Which means much more pollution.

So it sucks on pretty much every possible level. If you’re convinced by these facts, feel free to stop reading now and go on about your day. This is going to get long — I haven’t even explained the half of it yet. There are lots of inter-related issues here, and the more you get into them, the worse the picture gets.

A new type of solar cell which could boost the efficiency of solar panels by over 25 percent

A new type of solar cell which could boost the efficiency of solar panels by over 25 percent compared to silicon-based cells has been developed by British scientists, but they need another two or three years to assess whether it is commercially viable.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a hybrid solar cell which is capable of converting 44 percent of sunlight into electrical power, 29 percent more than traditional cells' capability of 34 percent, they said in the journal NanoLetters on Wednesday.

Solar cells convert the sun's energy into electricity. They absorb energy through semi-conductor materials like silicon from light particles called photons, generating electrons to make electricity.

However, silicon solar cells cannot extract all the energy in a photon and much of the energy from the more energetic blue photons is lost. Usually a solar cell generates one electron from each photon captured.

"We present the first hybrid solar cell that utilizes a phenomenon called singlet exciton fission to generate two electrons for each absorbed photon in the organic material," Bruno Ehrler, lead author of the research, told Reuters.

Hybrid cells are not new and were first developed in 1996 but their efficiency needs to be increased and stabilized before they can be commercialized.

"These (hybrid cells) are the first of their kind so it is very difficult to estimate when they will go into commercialization," Ehrler said.

"The firm Eight19 works closely with the group and will put our cells in production if they turn out to be commercially viable. However, in order to assess that we need to investigate the devices further. This might take 2 to 3 years," he added.

The price of silicon-based panels and cells has fallen dramatically over the past year, cutting profit for manufacturers and putting them under more pressure to produce even cheaper products.

Fledgling technology such as concentrating photovoltaic solar, which multiplies the sun's powers up to hundreds of times, has gained the backing of some large industry players due to its promise of delivering cheaper electricity than traditional solar panels.

The university research team's new hybrid cells could help to reduce costs as well, Ehrler said.

"Since our materials can be dissolved and processed by roll-to-roll printing, we expect the actual cost of a solar panel be much lower than (with) conventional silicon solar cells."

"On an industrial scale, the cost of making the basic silicon solar cell would dominate over the cost of an organic layer printed on top of it. However, this discovery is in an early stage so it is difficult to predict the final cost and device structure," he added.

(Editing by William Hardy)

ENVIRONMENT