Off Grid Home Blog

Community gardening is taking up a new energetic form across the country. Rather than rows of corn, leaf lettuce and heirloom tomatoes, friends and neighbors are planting solar gardens. The power of the collective solar will is already evidenced by the successes of organizations like One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) and companies like SolarCity that offer group buying discounts. But those installations still involve individual homes with individual solar arrays. Increasingly, homeowners are taking advantage of net metering and feed-in tariff (FIT) laws to communally install solar “gardens” in one location off-site from their homes.

Solar gardens present an alternative for renters, condominium residents and homeowners with shaded or otherwise obstructed rooftops. These solar outcasts represent the latest in creative solar power adoption. Solar gardens are groups of solar panels creating solar energy together but owned by a group of people.

To facilitate this new solar movement, one innovator, Joy Hughes, started the Solar Panel Hosting Company and SolarGardens.org (as explained in a recent ecopolitology blog). The concept involves homeowners installing solar panels on a rooftop nearby. You, the individual, monitor and record the energy production from your specific panels, subtract your home usage and collect a check. It’s the same as if the panels were on your own roof, only with benefit of group buying and cheaper, bulk installation. The ultimate goal is that anyone, no matter their financial status or credit score, can own their own solar panels.

But the community solar garden concept is a bit ahead of its time in many states, most notably those without feed-in tariffs, adequate net metering rules or tax incentives that provide equal opportunity to community solar power. According to Hughes, states like Washington, Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts have laws enabling group solar, and Oregon, Indiana, Florida and Ontario, Canada have feed-in tariffs that allow for some monetary reward — even profit.

Yet for community solar gardening to really take off, there is a need for sweeping change at the federal level or for a larger number of states to recognize and promote the concept. Right now there is a bill proposed by Colorado Senator Mark Udall – the SUN Act – that will give equal federal tax breaks to solar panels hosted off-site. SolarGardens.org has organized a campaign in support of the bill.

Similarly, also in the state of Colorado, the Community Solar Gardens Bill is currently making its way through the legislature. It would give homeowners the right to collectively install solar gardens within their own community. And such legislation is key, because even if the feds grant equal tax credits to community solar gardens, if states have rules preventing them from being built in the first place, then the federal law is essentially useless in that state.

The solar garden movement is young but, given the still high (although falling) up-front costs for home solar power, is blossoming fast. Details like business models and legislative hurdles are being created and overcome. As Hughes put it:

“The Solar Gardens movement is a community of communities, sharing knowledge and expertise. Working together, we can bring our power back home, and truly make energy a community decision.” If she and environmentally driven communities get their way, look for more community solar power plants to sprout up. They shouldn’t be hard to spot. Hughes wants them in high-profile locations within communities, thus creating awareness and a real sense of local pride.

Via ecopolitology
Photo Credit: Brewster Solar Garden & Green Technology

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Historically, utilities and solar power have had a tense, marginal relationship at best. The reasons are fairly obvious; most utilities today are deregulated, investor-owned companies looking for a profit. So how can interrupting their own revenue stream by facilitating the ownership of independent energy by their customers be considered a good business model? Yet regardless of that, utilities across the nation are getting more involved in the solar industry, and may even be guiding it.

Not without some motivation, of course. The primary impetus for utility interest in solar power came from the government. Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) require utilities to obtain a certain percentage of their power from renewable energy within a certain time frame — say, 20 percent renewable by 2020. Now, 29 states have mandatory RPS in place (four more have voluntary versions), and utilities have been forced to seek out renewable energy projects and promote energy efficiency.

Rebate programs, net metering and other incentives have popped up to help make that happen. The federal government and many state governments offer incentives for homes and businesses to adopt solar power which the utility can then buy through interconnection with that system. Before Congress extended the federal solar tax credits in 2008, utilities were not allowed to directly benefit from those credits. In other words, electricity providers had no incentive to purchase their own solar power generating systems. All the purchasing of such power was done through a power purchase agreement (PPA) with a developer or system owner.

But now, utilities do qualify and can cost-effectively build, own and operate their own solar arrays, and that is having a major effect on the solar industry. Even more so as remote, utility-scale solar thermal projects mired in bureaucratic and environmental red tape give way to more centrally located distributed PV projects. Now the question arises as to who is controlling who between the solar industry and utilities, as that inherently tense relationship gets more and more intimate.

California utilities, as per usual, are leading the way. Southern California Edison has announced a plan approved by the California Public Utilities Commission to install 500 megawatts of distributed, rooftop solar power in southern California. The utility will own and operate the systems, and will essentially lease rooftop space from customers, offering them a fixed long-term rate in return (very similar to SolarCity’s landmark solar leasing program). PG&E, northern California’s primary utility, has a similar plan currently awaiting approval.

So now we may have utilities in control of solar projects. Both the SCE and PG&E programs have gained a lot of attention over the last year and are by far the biggest of their kind in the country. It would appear that the solar industry has changed utilities by getting them to embrace the idea that a growing number of their customers are and will become independent power producers. Yet now that utilities seem to be accepting distributed solar power as a way of life, they may in turn be changing the solar industry by turning communities into solar farms.

It seems the solar industry and utilities are growing and changing together, and there is still a lot of room for tension. As solar’s share of a utility’s electricity generation increases, the more it will cut into utility revenue. That is probably why (in addition to meeting RPS mandates) utilities are looking to gain more control over installations. At the same time, utilities may be turning new home solar power systems into something akin to new cars — often leased rather than bought. Utilities have the capital to pay for a roof covered in solar panels, while many home and business owners do not.

So, is the solar industry changing utilities or are utilities changing solar? It’s a tough question, and its true answer may not be revealed until these new additions to the game play themselves out. But in the meantime, you can listen to an informative podcast on the subject sponsored by Renewable Energy World.

Photo Credit: Choctaw County Utilities & Cotton, Shires, & Associates

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Things are looking up for solar power in England, thanks to a bevy of solar incentives soon to take effect in the notoriously cloudy island nation. Sharp Corporation, a world leader in solar panel production that controls some 40 percent of the British market, predicts that panel sales will increase “tenfold” in the next two years, according to The Daily Mail. The main impetus for the sudden and dramatic increase, says Sharp, is a feed-in tariff (FIT) for renewable energy that goes into effect on April 1.

The Japanese electronics and solar giant expects the number of solar homes in England to increase from 28,000 to 250,000 by the end of 2011 because solar system owners will soon be able to make a profit from excess energy sold to the national electric grid. Moreover, by 2014, Sharp General Manager Andrew Lee predicts there will be more than 400,000 homes with solar power, creating 30,000 new green jobs in that period, and England’s Department of Energy and Climate Change finds it likely that 800,000 homes could be equipped new solar arrays over 25 years.

In addition to the FIT, the British government also announced a new series of loans that will enable homeowners to pay for solar power with preferential interest rates on loans from electricity providers. The loan program is set to kick on at the start of 2012.

In England, says the Daily Mail, it costs between £8,000 and £14,000 ($12,000-$24,000) to purchase and install an average home solar power system. Under the new loan scheme, it would take less than 10 years to repay the loan and homeowners would save an average of £150 per year while earning £900 per year through the feed-in tariff. That could equal a £36,000 profit over 25 years.

Sharp operates a manufacturing plant in Wrexham, England, but exports 98 percent of the panels manufactured there. Britain’s new FIT and loan scheme should keep a lot more of those panels out of shipping containers and on British rooftops, and maybe even inspire Sharp to expand the facility, creating more permanent green jobs in the meantime.

Photo Credit: Guardian

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We have all seen calculators with solar cells, that enable the device to work without any batteries, and can be used for unlimited time period as long as there’s enough light.

These solar cells that are present in calculators and many other devices are also called photovoltaic (PV) cells. As the name depicts, these cells have the capability of converting sunlight directly into electricity.

A group of cells can also be connected together electrically, fitted into a frame to form a solar panel. Moreover, these solar panels can be combined together to form larger solar arrays, similar to the ones operating at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Photovoltaic cells are made up of special material called semiconductors such as silicon, which is currently used most commonly.

When light falls on to the cell, a certain amount of the light is absorbed by the semiconductor material. The energy of the absorbed light is then transferred to the semiconductor. The energy is used to loosen up the electrons, allowing them to flow freely, and thus create electricity.

PV cells also have one or more electric fields that force electrons freed by light absorption to flow in a certain direction making a current. Thus by inserting metal contacts on the top and bottom of the PV cell, we can direct the current for some external use. This current, combined together with the cell’s voltage due to the built-in electric fields, defines the power that the solar cell can produce.

This is the basic process through which photovoltaic cells work, but clearly there’s much more to it, which will be explained in the proceeding articles.

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