Technical Editor Margery Conner's PowerSource streams the latest developments in electronic power design and related technologies. Follow Margery on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/margeryc.
Aug 14 2008 11:24AM | Permalink |Email this|Comments (47) |
Southern California Edison came up with an economical and scalable plan to encourage solar energy use and also delay building conventional energy generating plants in Southern California: Install solar panels on the acres of industrial rooftops in LA and use these as supplemental energy sources during daytime peak energy demand. Here are the specs: The project that will place 250 megawatts of advanced photovoltaic generating technology on 65 million square feet of roofs of Southern California commercial buildings – enough power to serve approximately 162,000 homes. It will be the nation’s largest solar cell installation.
What’s not to like with this plan? It doesn’t require environmental impact reports or installation of a new power transmission infrastructure, and with some retrofitting and strengthening, can be done over existing structures.
Not so fast, say a group of solar companies, industry trade groups and others who argue it would give Edison too much of a monopoly on California's solar market.
“Arno Harris, CEO of Recurrent Energy, applauds SCE for recognizing that added incentives are needed to tap the vast solar potential of rooftop locations for such a complex.
But he said it would be "bad policy to put that resource in the hands of one utility under a monopoly structure."
"Recurrent Energy believes ratepayers, property owners, California residents, the solar industry and its employees are best served by an open, competitive marketplace for the development of distributed solar-generating projects," Harris said.
Similar concerns were collectively voiced by the Solar Alliance, California Solar Energy Industries Association and The Vote Solar Initiative.”
Here’s a quote from SCE’s original announcement of the project: “SCE’s renewable energy project was prompted by recent advances in solar technology that reduce the cost of installed photovoltaic generation. When combined with the size of SCE’s investment, the resulting costs per unit are projected to be half that of common photovoltaic installations in California. [italics added]”
So Edison, buying in huge quantities, is able to get great prices on the newest in solar panel technology, which no small installer of solar systems can compete with. This is unfortunate for the relatively small companies, but let’s face it, if SCE wasn’t behind a project of this size it wouldn’t get done near as fast, nor most likely in a scalable, trackable manner. Let’s drop the headwind and let Edison get on with it.
Related entries in: Power Sources/Controllers | Solar/Photovoltaics |