Pamela's Comments

Thanks for sharing this, Tor. It's hard to express how sad it is to lose a member of the tribe. I feel lucky to have met and made the acquaintance of Heather through the larger solar community. She was such a big part of making many of the solar conference tweet-ups so fun and personal.

Apple is a lifestyle product. Solar companies that offer solar solutions as a lifestyle brand will do well reaching a less niche market.

All solar industry trending in the last 6 months has pointed toward the rise of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic as the next hot markets. There is a lot of opportunity up there!

Dana,

1. Your lead in infers that you are on the RenewableEnergyWorld payroll. Are you? Are you answering to their editorial team? If so...

You have muddled the difference between module efficiency and cell efficiency here in your presentation of the facts. From the Sunrise release:

"The production runs of record solar cells which achieve a peak rate of 19.2%"

Cell efficiency does not equal module efficiency. Please check your facts.

TrahanM (hi Mike!) - Keep you eyes out for the California Solar Challenge, Bay Area cities are working to race to streamline and reduce permitting costs/process first.

Check out Santa Clara, CA for an example of a one-stop over the counter process for solar permits.

The pessimism around the potential for creating a national energy policy/plan has grown more vocal, especially at some of the recent solar summits in the last month.

If we are going to fight to convince policymakers to support solar, we need to fight on their terms, using their tools and terminology to convince them that solar has the solutions to all the hot button issues that matter to policy makers- from jobs, stable energy prices, and revitalization of local economies and urban centers- not investment exit strategies, not being green, and not the usual solar tech talk or green fluff.

We need $$$. SEIA barely spent 1M on lobbying last year. (http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/12/top-25-u-s-energy-lobbyists-of-2010) It needs millions more dollars to engage market research and focus groups and create effective campaigns on behalf of the solar industry. The oil and gas lobbies way outspent our lobby last year. Top Oil/Gas lobby spent over 16M. And there were many others. See Stephen's article from December linked above.

"There is no smart grid without smart policies," Brian Steele, PG&E (at the SolarTech Leadership Summit)

I like hearing a perspective from a Yankee. In solar in the U.S., we are too often only hearing voices and perspective from California or DC.

While I can sympathize with the author's gripes, that solar isn't far enough along- so why celebrate- I think before commenters lay in too hard on the author... let's just take a moment to realize what we are up against.

When Shayle Kann of GTM Research stands up in front of a crowd and delivers the toplevel findings from SEIA/GTM Research joint report 2010 U.S. Solar Market Insight, he always ends the exciting presentation with a critical perspective: he shows a bar graph with dozens of multi-GW individual power plants stacked up against the entire 878MW of solar installed in the US in 2010.

That being said, it is critical to uphold morale within our industry. We need to give ourselves permission to celebrate our gains, but not rest on our laurels. Ten years ago, this was a cottage industry. We are much further along and there is still a long road ahead.

There is a lot of uncertainty about whether or not there will ever be a national energy policy or plan. Let's keep the pressure on and encourage morale-boosting within the industry. Disheartened troops will refuse to fight.

Bill, did you read the article I wrote back in March outlining the topline results of SolarTech's study of consumer attitudes about solar? Here it is: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/03/hot-showers-and-cold-beer-solartech-study-findings-on-consumer-attitudes-about-solar

These results reflect the concerns of the demographic that is involved in the purchase of PV: price, reliability, warranty, customer service, incentives. Bill, Clee represents the predominant attitude amongst solar consumers. If we as an industry are going to limit ourselves to only selling solar to people who want to do the right thing, who are doing it for carbon offset/being green or other unquantifiable reasons, we are going to have trouble growing into mass market adoption.

There is nothing wrong with selling solar to people who are concerned with energy independence- they are out there. But if we try to shoehorn all buyers into that message, we will find people turning themselves away because they don't fit that ideological profile. That's just a shame.

Natural gas prices are extremely volatile and micro-regional in terms of costs. However, they have consistently been below the cost of oil and electricity.

The Prius took off because gasoline costs were high, but it became popular because it offered a new and better driving paradigm that outlasted the last gasoline price spike. Solar needs to take a page from that book.

Hi Thomas, let's be civil now. For residential, it pens out much more favorably when offsetting electricity or heating oil, like I said. Clee already pointed out the problem of it penning out for much cheaper natural gas use. I don't think I need to explain my viewpoint any further.

Commercial thermal is a great value proposition because there is huge demand for hot water at institutions like hospitals, nursing homes, food-related industries. That's an opportunity for huge savings and investment return, which is what these facilities managers care about.

Yes, Thomas, it's the economics. Follow the money.

I think we are looking at this problem in the wrong way. While we have spent so much time focusing on the $/watt cost of this widget or that process, precious little time has been devoted to looking at the value of the energy generated by the system when it is placed into service. Not all products and designs produce the same results across all utility sectors and territories. While it terrifically complicates the analysis, it delivers better results that we can feed back into the system to get a more balanced understanding of what the actual problems are in system designs. A much more micro-regional approach is needed.

To all commenters: Please note that this post is about commercial water heating and not residential. The value proposition for solar water heating or process heat is orders of magnitude better than on a residential scale. The usage is much higher and price tiers for energy to offset are very different.

Clee points out something very important about residential SDHW- if you are a natural gas user, the value proposition is not there yet. I've run numbers on many SDHW systems I designed- the natural gas users just didn't pen up to a wise investment. Those who will reap the most reward from SDHW at their home at current costs of energy are those who heat their water with electricity or heating oil.

Buck, not quite what I was getting at. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, a big problem the solar industry has is that we are incentivizing at the wrong part of the value chain. For example, the companies that develop oil fields get huge tax credits and the cost savings there get passed down the line eventually to the gas pump. The true cost of gasoline is masked from the end user, and since levelized cost calculations are still a relatively "new" analysis to the game, the numbers aren't getting wider media attention yet. Gas costs are artificially low.

Unfortunately with solar, we have a system that subsidizes the end user, so the costs are visible all the way down the line and then a confusing attempt to mitigate them is met. Why not use those subsidize or provide tax credits to manufacturing or another part of the upstream value chain? Then we wouldn't need this piecemeal system of state incentive programs.

Of course, that would also mean we would have to have a strong national solar policy, a prospect that is looking increasingly gloomy as the federal government can't even come to an agreement on its operating budget for 2011.

Eric,

This is interesting, but because the commercial solar water heating market has lacked a consistent presence in the industry news, I think it is challenging for people to understand the dollar value of the opportunity here. For instance, what are the average costs of systems installed per MWth offset? What is the average LCOE of solar thermal technologies in different market segments?

People involved in solar PV have seen years worth of press releases about project costs and there is a lot of data available to quantify the market opportunity from several different research and consulting firms.

It is not clear to me from the toplevel analysis of your report whether your firm has put a dollar value on the market opportunity for industry growth in the next 1-5 years.

Watch Massachusetts. I can only imagine it will be on the top 10 list of MW installed shortly.

Unfortunately, the fragmentation amongst state-by-state policies creates barriers of excess operating complexity for regional or multi-state companies. It also create a "death sentence" atmosphere for extremely small companies that operate in only one state. If the incentive program rug is pulled out from beneath those players....

There are a lot of smart people in the industry working on reducing costs on all fronts. Hopefully, these benefits will reach all the way the long tail of small installers, too.