More Sun for Less: Solar Panels Drop in Price

When Greg Hare looked into putting solar panels on his ranch-style home in Magnolia, Tex., last year, he decided he could not afford it.“I had no idea solar was so expensive,” he recalled. But the cost of solar panels has plunged lately, changing the economics for many homeowners. Mr. Hare ended up paying $77,000 for a large solar setup that he figures might have cost him $100,000 a year ago.

“I just thought, ‘Wow, this is an opportunity to do the most for the least,’ ” Mr. Hare said.

For solar shoppers these days, the price is right. Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year, driven down partly by an increase in the supply of a crucial ingredient for panels, according to analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray.

The price drops — coupled with recently expanded federal incentives — could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs, according to Glenn Harris, chief executive of SunCentric, a solar consulting group. That calculation does not include state rebates, which can sometimes improve the economics considerably.

American consumers have the rest of the world to thank for the big solar price break.

Until recently, panel makers had been constrained by limited production of polysilicon, which goes into most types of panels. But more factories making the material have opened, as have more plants churning out the panels themselves — especially in China.

“A ton of production, mostly Chinese, has come online,” said Chris Whitman, the president of U.S. Solar Finance, which helps arrange bank financing for solar projects.

At the same time, once-roaring global demand for solar panels has slowed, particularly in Europe, the largest solar market, where photovoltaic installations are forecast to fall by 26 percent this year compared with 2008, according to Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm. Much of that drop can be attributed to a sharp slowdown in Spain. Faced with high unemployment and an economic crisis, Spain slashed its generous subsidy for the panels last year because it was costing too much.

Many experts expect panel prices to fall further, though not by another 40 percent.

Manufacturers are already reeling from the price slump. For example, Evergreen Solar, which is based in Massachusetts, recently reported a second-quarter loss that was more than double its loss from a year earlier.

But some manufacturers say that cheaper panels could be a good thing in the long term, spurring enthusiasm among customers and expanding the market.

“It’s important that these costs and prices do come down,” said Mike Ahearn, the chief executive of First Solar, a panel maker based in Tempe, Ariz.

First Solar recently announced a deal to build two large solar arrays in Southern California to supply that region’s dominant utility. But across the United States, the installation of large solar systems — the type found on commercial or government buildings — has been hurt by financing problems, and is on track to be about the same this year as in 2008, according to Emerging Energy Research.

The smaller residential sector continues to grow: In California, by far the largest market in the country, residential installations in July were up by more than 50 percent compared with a year earlier. With prices dropping, that momentum looks poised to continue.

John Berger, chief executive of Standard Renewable Energy, the company in Houston that put panels on Mr. Hare’s home, said that his second-quarter sales rose by more than 225 percent from the first quarter.

“Was that as a product of declining panel prices? Almost certainly yes,” Mr. Berger said.

Expanded federal incentives have also helped spur the market. Until this year, homeowners could get a 30 percent tax credit for solar electric installations, but it was capped at $2,000. That cap was lifted on Jan. 1.

Mr. Hare in Texas cited the larger tax credit, which sliced about $23,000 from his $77,000 bill, as a major factor in his decision to go solar, in addition to the falling panel prices. Sensing a good deal, he even got a larger system than he had originally planned — going from 42 panels to 64. The electric bill on his 7,000-square-foot house and garage has typically run $600 to $700 a month, but he expects a reduction of 40 to 80 percent.

Mr. Berger predicts that with panel prices falling and the generous federal credit in place, utilities will start lowering rebates they offer to homeowners who put panels on their roofs.

One that has already done so is the Salt River Project, the main utility in Phoenix, which cut its homeowners’ rebate by 10 percent in June. Lori Singleton, the utility’s sustainability manager, said the utility had recently spent more than it budgeted for solar power, a result of a surge in demand as more solar installers moved into Arizona and government incentives kicked in.

California has been steadily bringing down its rebates. An impending 29 percent cut in rebates offered within the service area of Pacific Gas and Electric, the dominant utility in Northern California, means that “with the module price drop over the last few months, it is pretty much a wash,” Bill Stewart, president of SolarCraft, an installer in Novato, Calif., said in an e-mail message.

Even if falling rebates cancel out some of the solar panel price slump, more innovative financing strategies are also helping to make solar affordable for homeowners. This year about a dozen states — following moves by California and Colorado last year — have enacted laws enabling solar panels to be paid off gradually, through increased property taxes, after a municipality first shoulders the upfront costs.

Some installers have adopted similar approaches. Danita Hardy, a homeowner in Phoenix, had been put off by the prospect of spending $20,000 for solar panels — until she spotted a news item about a company called SunRun that takes on the upfront expense and recovers its costs gradually, in a lease deal, essentially through the savings in a homeowner’s electric bill.

“I thought well, heck, this might be doable,” said Ms. Hardy, who wound up having to lay out only $800 to get 15 solar panels for her home.

Airport travellers get a robot chauffeur

Driverless, battery-powered pod-cars will soon zip passengers around part of London's Heathrow Airport. The manufacturers of the Ultra personal rapid transit (PRT) system say it is the world's first public transport to balance the convenience of a taxi with the efficiency of a bus or light rail – albeit only for business passengers arriving at the world's third busiest airport.

Personalised rapid transit has been an elusive dream of engineers and city planners. Since the mid 1970s, many schemes have been proposed at sites around the world, and a PRT-like system has been built at Morgantown in West Virginia. But Ultra is the first PRT system to give passengers control over their destination.

Ultra has been in the works since 2005, when BAA – the company that runs Heathrow – ordered a pilot project from Advanced Transport Systems (ATS) of Bristol, UK. Four years later, Ultra is undergoing final tests before its opening to the general public, planned for later this year.

The Heathrow Ultra system will initially carry passengers between the business car park and terminal 5. Each pod-car holds up to four passengers and can travel at speeds of up to 40 kilometres per hour on 4.3 kilometres of dedicated roadway, stopping at any of three stations. The journey takes around 3 minutes, non-stop, with wait times of no more than a minute for the next available car. A central computer system monitors demand and controls traffic.

Bus buster

"It's faster and more convenient than [airport] buses, and uses half the energy" to move the same number of passengers in the same amount of time, says Martin Lowson, who first came up with the Ultra concept and is deputy chairman of ATS. That's because it only stops at the station the passengers require, and it's so small that there's no wasted capacity even if just one or two people need a ride.

Lowson says 70 per cent of passengers have zero waiting time – the buses currently used at Heathrow run every ten minutes. He also claims that the system averages 0.55 megajoules per passenger kilometre, making it the most energy efficient system of its kind. Buses average just over 1 megajoule per passenger kilometre.

According to Peter Muller, president of PRT Consulting of Franktown, Colorado, which has helped roadtest several PRT systems including Ultra, the promise of PRT goes beyond airport transit.

"It has the ability to transform our way of life," says Muller. "You could have a city where the automobiles are kept on the periphery, with PRT bringing people into the city."

As an example he points to a PRT system being installed in Masdar City, a new city under construction in Abu Dhabi that is intended to be carbon neutral. Built by the Dutch company 2GetThere, based in Utrecht, it could go online later this year.

"All of a sudden you have a city that is very pedestrian friendly. You don't have to waste space on roads and parking garages inside the city," says Muller.

We are the Jetsons

Muller says that other locations are starting to consider PRT systems. The city of San Jose, California, and the US army's Fort Carson base outside Colorado Springs are looking at the feasibility of installing such a system. ATS recently announced that it has been commissioned to study how Ultra might be used in the city of Bath in the UK.

Despite widening interest in the idea, Muller says that many city planners and architects do not consider PRT a feasible option for urban public transport.

"People think PRT is The Jetsons and it'll never be here," says Muller. "They don't realise it's here now."

If the Heathrow pilot proves successful, ATS hopes to expand Ultra to cover all the airport – from its current three-station, 21-car set-up to 50 stations attended by 400 cars.

China: Political interests hamper climate talks

China’s senior climate change official said on Monday that with “commercial and political interests” continuing to prevail, little progress has been made so far to combat global warming.Industrialized countries are still attempting to persuade the developing world to accept specific targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the vice-director of the National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua, said, according to a report by Xinhua news agency."Developed and developing countries are still the two major factions and the focus of disagreement remains on each country's proportion of responsibility for emission reduction, funding and technology transfer," Xie was quoted as saying.However, industrialized countries are ignoring the importance of economic development and the key principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol, he said in a report delivered to China's legislature, the National People's Congress.In his report, Xie also complained that developed countries have so far not fulfilled their climate change funding and technology transfer commitments."They have talked much, but not done much," he said.

Farmers protect climate by planting trees

Farmers should be seen as positive allies in the fight against climate change. They are actually part of the solution – all though they are often portrayed as a problem, cutting or burning forest to obtain farmland.This is the message from the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi that just released a new report showing that farmers are widely protecting and planting trees. The report is the first to estimate tree cover on the world’s farmed land based on information from satellite photos. It tells that trees cover around ten percent of farmland. "The area revealed in this study is twice the size of the Amazon, and shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously," says Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, according to Reuters.Farmers integrate trees in their farming in most parts of the world to create shade for crops, plant windbreaks and produce nuts, fruits, building materials etc. North Africa and West Asia are two exceptions to this climate friendly use of trees in farming.According to the World Agroforestry Center, farmers would do more to preserve trees, if they got a stronger incentive and obtained credits under the new UN climate pact that will be negotiated at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December

Climate protests in London

22 sites in London will be targeted by climate change activists just after noon on Wednesday. The event will be coordinated from a "Climate Camp" at an undisclosed location in the city where there will be shops, toilets and daily events.
The Climate Camp – the activist group behind the week-long event – says that about 1,000 people will gather across central London before a ”mass swoop” on sites to be revealed by text messages.
Among other sites, the campaigners plan to target 12 organizations that they call the ”dirty dozen”, including the Department for Energy and Climate Change, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, the Department for Transport, the Stock Exchange, carbon trading firm Climate Exchange and Heathrow Airport.
”The targets have been chosen because of their enormous impact on climate change because of their promotion of failed market logic like carbon trading,” says a spokes person from The Climate Camp to BBC News.
The organizers say they protest against issues ranging from the expansion of Heathrow Airport to plans for new coal-fired power stations.

Danish embassies walk the green talk

That each of us needs to get smarter about how we use energy is one of the messages that Danish diplomats deliver to decision makers around the world in the lead up to COP15.
To underpin this message, 17 Danish missions have decided to implement energy savings measures on their missions.
“The motivation was to ‘walk the talk’,” says Jesper Fersløv Andersen, deputy head of mission at the Danish embassy in Athens.”You are much more convincing when you show a good example yourself, especially in a country like Greece where people are fed up with words without action from their politicians and the EU.”
The Athens embassy has committed to cut electricity use with 4.5 pct. over the next three years. The embassy is the first out of 12 missions to sign a so-called curve-breaker agreement with the Danish Electricity Savings Trust. The agreement obliges missions to reduce their energy consumption with around 1.5 pct. per year.
The reductions will be achieved mainly by focusing on IT equipment, air conditioning systems, copying machines and TV sets.
An energy efficient procurement policy will also be implemented as part of the Curve Breaker Agreement.
While the effort to make Danish embassies greener aims to support an agreement in Copenhagen, the commitment to energy savings will continue beyond 2009.Most missions have already committed themselves to a three-year energy saving effort. Later this spring, a status report on the Green Mission project will be launched as part of a campaign to encourage more missions to walk the green talk

U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming

The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect. "It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court.The EPA is having none of it, calling a hearing a "waste of time" and saying that a threatened lawsuit by the chamber would be "frivolous."EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said the agency based its proposed finding that global warming is a danger to public health "on the soundest peer-reviewed science available, which overwhelmingly indicates that climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare." Environmentalists say the chamber's strategy is an attempt to sow political discord by challenging settled science -- and note that in the famed 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a courtroom battle over a Tennessee science teacher accused of teaching evolution illegally, the scientists won in the end.The chamber proposal "brings to mind for me the Salem witch trials, based on myth," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. "In this case, it would be ignoring decades of publicly accessible evidence."In the coming weeks, the EPA is set to formally declare that the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for climate change endanger human health, and are thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The so-called endangerment finding will be a cornerstone of the Obama administration's plan to set strict new emissions standards on cars and trucks.The proposed finding has drawn more than 300,000 public comments. Many of them question scientists' projections that rising temperatures will lead to increased mortality rates, harmful pollution and extreme weather events such as hurricanes.In light of those comments, the chamber will tell the EPA in a filing today that a trial-style public hearing, which is allowed under the law but nearly unprecedented on this scale, is the only way to "make a fully informed, transparent decision with scientific integrity based on the actual record of the science."Most climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, are warming the planet. Using computer models and historical temperature data, those scientists predict the warming will accelerate unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced."The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable," said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world's largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.The EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, as proposed in April, warned that warmer temperatures would lead to "the increased likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, more wildfires, degraded air quality, more heavy downpours and flooding, increased drought, greater sea level rise, more intense storms, harm to water resources, harm to agriculture, and harm to wildlife and ecosystems." Critics of the finding say it's far from certain that warming will cause any harm at all. The Chamber of Commerce cites studies that predict higher temperatures will reduce mortality rates in the United States.