REPORTING FROM SOLAR POWER INTERNATIONAL 2010

From the opening session: Big Growth, Small Turnout, Calls for Teamwork at Solar Power International 2010 Kickoff; The solar industry is up in a down economy and busy doing business with utilities, winning the White House and fighting fossil fuels
Herman K. Trabish, October 12, 2010

Surprisingly quietly, the solar industry kicked off Solar Power International 2010, the nation’s biggest business-to-business solar conclave, Tuesday morning. Only a quarter of the expected 30,000 attendees were in attendance. Opening session keynoters held forth with upbeat fanfare in defiance of the small crowd and the foggy Los Angeles morning. And why not? Prognostications are for sustained solar growth in defiance of a largely stagnant economy.

The U.S. Solar Market Insight Report, from the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) and GTM Research, was released in conjunction with the conference opening and, based on first half 2010 numbers, the solar industry’s installed capacity will more than double this year and see record gains in the photovoltaic, solar power plant, solar heating and cooling, solar water heating and solar pool heating sectors.

“Solar,” said Rhone Resch, SEIA’s President and CEO, “is one of the few bright spots in our economy today.”

U.S. solar manufacturing is also expanding. “Manufacturers produced more than a third of the world’s polysilicon here,” Resch said. “And over 500 megawatts of cells and 500 megawatts of modules.”

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First Solar, Trina and SunPower, Resch said, are among the five fastest growing U.S. energy businesses. Seven of the eight fastest growing firms are in the solar industry. “That includes Standard Solar,” Resch said, “with, get this, a 3,274% growth rate over the last three years.”

Word on the street is that VCs are done with solar for the time being because of the high capital expenditures needed. But, buoyed by a new role being played by utilities, the industry is undaunted.

Resch and Julia Hamm, President and CEO of the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA), came on like cheerleaders with the convention’s themes of teamwork and collaboration.

Resch described how solar energy is now omnipresent, “from crayon factories to landfills,” he said. “We now live in a world where you can be born in a solar hospital, be educated in a solar school, go to a solar college and while there drink beer brewed in a solar brewery, get married in a solar church, go to work in a solar office building, watch your favorite baseball team in a solar stadium and live in a country protected by armed forces powered by solar energy.” He hopes, he concluded, to end up “in a solar-powered nursing home.”

Resch went on to envision the capability of adding ten gigawatts of new installed solar capacity annually, a fitting ambition for an industry that is expecting 2010 to be its first ten-gigawatt year globally. With such a capability, Resch said, the solar industry would go from providing its present 100,000 jobs to providing 220,000 U.S. jobs and would replace ten coal plants every year.

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Resch set out three objectives for what he dubbed “Team Solar.” He wants to put the solar industry on a level playing field with the other major U.S. energy sources and change the present fact that “the fossil fuels are grotesquely over-subsidized.”

Resch also called for “a whole new approach to solar financing” which, he admitted, is the “biggest obstacle to growth.” He celebrated the decision by the Obama administration to restore solar panels to the roof of the White House as a symbol of the value of rooftop solar.

Finally, he called for California’s solar industry to fight Proposition 23, the dirty energy initiative. “Do not let big Texas oil money tell you how your state should be run,” Resch said. “Play hard, play to win, go team solar!” he concluded.

Hamm emphasized collaboration, quoting Charles Darwin’s observation that “those who learn to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” She said the solar industry’s increasing collaboration with utilities has been key to its recent sustained growth. In 2009, Hamm cited, “GDP was down 2.6 percent, energy use – down 4 percent, electricity use – down 2.4 percent. But,” she said, “the overall solar capacity in the U.S. was up 37 percent” and, she concluded, “the top ten utilities with the most solar in their service territories saw a 66 percent increase.”

The point, she said, is that where the solar industry and utilities collaborate, solar use leaps ahead. She cited several important examples of solar- utility collaborations, including those between New Jersey’s PSE&G and Petra Solar, the Salt River Project and Tessera Solar, Southern California Edison and NRG, and San Francisco’s PG&E, SolarCity and SunRun.

Rhone Resch, Julia Hamm and Obama Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who signed the first approvals for solar projects on federal lands at SPI (click to enlarge)

Hamm identified three prominent challenges the solar industry and utilities have in common, the decoupling of profit from the volume of electricity sales, the building of a smart grid, and finding cost-effective large-scale energy storage. To emphasize what collaboration might accomplish, she concluded by quoting a business leader, who said, “the secret is to gang up on the problem rather than each other.”

Revealingly, the session ended with an interview of Twitter founder Biz Stone by television personality Debra Norville while the audience disinterestedly streamed out of the auditorium. It was revealing because Stone was a last-minute replacement for PG&E CEO Peter Darbee, who surely would have drawn more attention but was forced to cancel because of the ongoing investigation into the September explosion of his company’s natural gas lines in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nothing could have said how important solar can be to utilities more clearly.


And the closing session: Mary Matalin, James Carville Agree, Solar is a Good Product that Needs a to be Sold in Washington; Closing keynoters at Solar Power International 2010 foresee a shift to Republican influence and the need to sell the economic and jobs benefits of building sun
Herman K. Trabish, October 14, 2010

Al Gore was recently asked by Tom Friedman if he thought the discussion of climate change and renewable energy was expanding or remained confined to the same small demographic. Strange bedfellows Mary Matalin and James Carville, keynoters at the closing general session of Solar Power International 2010 (SPI), suggested an answer to Friedman’s question.

Republican Matalin, adviser to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and Democrat Carville, part of President Bill Clinton’s brain trust, remain – despite their recent relocation to New Orleans – on intimate terms with behind-the-scenes Washington.

Announced to be bringing inside dope on the brutal political realities facing the solar and other renewable industries in the mid-term elections, their celebrity nevertheless failed to noticeably boost the SPI general session turnout, perhaps because of the solar industry’s meager appetite for news about the brutal political realities facing it.

Carville joked about the Democrats’ November fate. Republican candidates are, he said, “some entertaining people. You know with one dressing up like a witch [Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell] and another dressing up like a Nazi [Ohio Republican Congressional candidate Rich Iott], you’re doing pretty good.”

Carville (click to enlarge)

Widely predicted losses by Democrats across the nation could cost them control of both the House and the Senate. That bodes ill for the advancement of renewables-supportive policy legislation like a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), requiring the nation’s utilities to obtain a portion of their power from renewable sources. It would also mean the end of any action that might help prevent the advance of global climate change.

“There’s a hurricane coming,” Carville said. “It’s not gonna change course. It’s gonna hit the Democratic party on election day.” But, Carville asked, “Is it gonna be a category five? In which case, you lose everything. You’re wiped out. 1994. Is it a category four, where you lose most things but some things sort of survive? Or is it gonna be a category three, where you lose a lot but the structure remains intact, you keep a majority in the House and the Senate?”

Carville said the situation is still shifting. “A month ago it was a five. Two weeks ago it was a pretty strong four. Today, it’s a weak four.” His colorful description belied his tactic. By reframing the argument, if the Democrats just maintain control of the Senate they can claim a sort of victory.

Matalin handled this carefully. “Most handicappers,” she said, “even the thoughtful ones, have a takeover of the House by Republicans by somewhere between 40 and 50 seats.” She called that “unprecedented.” On the other hand, she said, “handicappers would still not predict a Senate takeover. But that there are as many seats in play in the strange situations that they are says something about the zeitgeist.”

She predicted that Republican Carly Fiorina would beat incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer in the California Senate race.

“If Boxer loses, it’s a five,” Carville said quickly.

Matalin (click to enlarge)

Matalin and Carville agreed that one race to watch is the fight for the Colorado Senate seat where appointed incumbent Democrat Michael Bennett is running just behind Republican challenger Ken Buck.

“If I knew the outcome of the Colorado Senate race,” Carville said, “I would know a lot about the election.”

“I agree Colorado is illustrative,” Matalin hedged, not wanting to provide even a small opportunity for Democrats to gloat after November 3, “but not necessarily dispositive.”

Matalin and Carville both agreed on three points. The first was that putting up rooftop solar panels is a good idea.

“Magnificent,” was the way Matalin described the Brad Pitt/Global Green Make It Right sustainable housing project in New Orleans. “They were initially quite expensive but over a short period of time,” she said, “they are selling energy back to the city.”

A Make It Right hoouse ready for high water and power outages (click to enlarge)

Carville said the solar panels Matalin recently had installed on their New Orleans home make good economic sense with Louisiana incentives.

The second point they agreed on was that the way to sell solar and the other renewable energies is to emphasize that support of the renewable industries with smart incentives will provide domestic revenues and jobs.

There is a way, Matalin and Carville agreed, to win the fight for renewables policies that until now, as someone said, has resembled the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. “Repackage it and call it something else,” Carville said of the vital Treasury Grant provision of the Recovery Act.

“I agree,” Matalin said. “Don’t say recovery, don’t say stimulus, don’t say earmarks, say job-creating.” She added something very important. “The type of Republicans that are going to win,” she said, “get innovation, they get entrepreneurship, they get the decentralization of solar and they get that they have to deliver.”

The third point on which Matalin and Carville agreed was not explicit but was the answer to the question Tom Friedman asked Al Gore. Like the larger public, Matalin and Carville are beginning to see the inherent economic value of renewable energy and sustainable ways and agree those things can be politically viable with the right methods and language.

“Your future,” Carville said, “is going to be determined by politicians. And your competitors, the coal people, the petroleum people, the nuclear people, they’re all in this, they’re all over Washington. I would urge you to make your case. You have a very good case to make.”