The first major meeting of the clean energy industry since the announcement of the Federal Government’s carbon pricing plan will take place at EcoGen 2011, to be held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre from 5–7 September.

Approximately 500 Australian businesses will be required to pay for their carbon emissions under the plan, and much of the revenue collected will support investment in research, project development and employment growth in the solar sector.

Elements of the new legislation package of particular relevance to the sector include:

• The establishment of an Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) with responsibility for managing $3.2 billion in existing Federal Government funding for solar power technologies and initiatives to bring them to market, including the Solar Flagships Program and the Australian Solar Institute
• The commencement of a Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to invest $10 billion in businesses launching clean energy projects, and in transforming existing manufacturers to meet demand for photovoltaic (PV) panels and other solar inputs
• A $40 million Remote Indigenous Power Program to connect remote Indigenous communities to solar power
• The expansion of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s future development of the electricity grid to prepare for greater integration with solar power.

The Australian Photovoltaic Association has said that the CEFC and ARENA will be of particular assistance for large‐scale PV project deployment, and that theRemote Indigenous Power Program among other initiatives will assist the off‐grid PV market.

Australian Solar Energy Society Chief Executive John Grimes said “While the details [of the plan] are still being worked out, it is likely big solar companies will be able to access loan guarantees and equity investments from the CEFC.”

“Big solar is a big winner in the Clean Energy Future Plan,” Mr Grimes said.

14 July 2011

Original source click here.

The power generation business has changed so much over the last decade that electricity generated from solar energy will be cheaper than electricity generated from the proposed new nuclear plants according to a leading UK power supplier and US researchers.

“The cost of generating power from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems has steadily fallen over the last ten years while the projected costs of constructing the new nuclear plants have ballooned,” said Ken Moss, CEO of mO3 Power company.

“The cost of producing and installing PV cells has been steadily dropping for some years,” he said. “A PV system now costs about half of what it did in 1998.”  The average price of a PV module in 2010 was $1.50/kW and by mid- year that figure is expected to drop to a maximum of $1.10kW.

Research from Duke University in America supports this view. It concludes that the cost of solar power has reached the point of ‘Historic Crossover’ with the nuclear industry in North Carolina. The price of nuclear is expected to be 16-18c/kW as compared to solar PV at 14c in 2011.

“It can be predicted with some confidence that the same will be true in the UK by the time that the new nuclear reactors have been built,” said  Moss.

“Nuclear electricity’s strength is being able to provide CO2-free base load electricity to the grid, but nuclear is not flexible and can only operate 24/7. Therefore the future requires a mix of technologies with renewable and nuclear being able to provide a sustainable solution.”

Coming of age

“Solar PV’s time is now coming of age with predictions of 30 per cent of the world’s energy coming from PV by 2050. By which time economic storage of electricity will be possible and we will no longer need base load power stations or possibly even a grid!” he said.

“With its fuel for free, from the sun, solar electricity will be the mainstream clean energy for our, and our children’s, future!” said Ray Noble, Director at the company.  But it was  inevitable that future power bills in the UK will rise as new technologies conform to Britain’s carbon reduction commitment.

“The safety of our power production is a huge issue,” said Ken Moss. “An accident at a solar park would be a small local affair but an accident at a nuclear plant is a global affair. We have to ask ourselves if we want to be subsidising the building of so many new nuclear plants.”

mO3 Power says it plans to generate a Gigawatt from renewable power from solar parks in the UK and is prepared to invest £2.3 billion. It proposes to site its parks on industrial land, brown field sites and grade 3 & 4 farmland.

Original source: click here

A report by Clean Energy Australia, released by the peak industry body today, provides a snapshot into just how Australia uses renewable energy.

It showed there were 105,520 solar power systems installed in Australia in the 10 months from January to October 2010, more than the 81,232 installed from 2001 to 2009.

The council’s chief executive Matthew Warren said it made solar power technology the “Hills Hoist of the 21st century”.

“Over the past year, more than 100,000 households have made a significant personal investment to take individual action on climate change,” he said in a statement.

It was also a sign Australians were bracing themselves against hikes in electricity prices, Mr Warren said.

Electricity costs are slated to rise by up to two-thirds in NSW and Queensland by 2015 to meet increasing energy demands, with at least $100 billion needed to upgrade aging infrastructure.

Mr Warren said investments in clean energy would be much cheaper.

The report forecasts that the government’s 20 per cent Renewable Energy Target (RET) will dramatically boost the sector, with more than 55,000 jobs to be created by 2020, mostly wind and solar.

That’s up from the 8085 that presently exist.

Mr Warren said policy uncertainty surrounding climate change and renewables had slowed investment in large-scale clean energy projects, which recorded just modest growth.

Seventeen major projects were recorded to October this year, although another 11 are under way.

Overall, 8.67 per cent of Australia’s electricity was provided by renewable sources in 2010, creating 21,751 gigawatt hours, with the remainder coming from fossil fuels.

Original source: click here

EnviroMission, a solar-energy start-up based in Melbourne, Australia, said today it is moving forward with plans to construct two 200 MW solar-power facilities in Arizona. EnviroMission Limited, the Australian company’s Phoenix-based subsidiary, has apparently initiated the environmental review process for the two mega solar tower facilities by filing documents with the Arizona Power Plant and Transmission Line Siting Committee.

Considering the scale of the proposed towers, the environmental review may receive more significant scrutiny than other solar-energy projects. A pilot facility using similar technology operated in Spain during the 1980s, but only produced about 50 kW of power. The scale proposed for the Arizona projects would be a step-change in scale for these types of solar-energy projects. Each of the towers would be roughly the size of a two-car garage standing well-over half a mile high. Collectively, both facilities would occupy more than 10,000 acres of land. In October, EnviroMission received approval to sell electricity from the first of two planned 200 MW solar power facilities to the Southern California Public Power Authority under the terms of a Power Purchase Agreement.

The solar tower would produce electric power through a so-called “solar updraft” technology. The tower harnesses the sun’s radiation to heat a large body of air stored under a large collector zone. This process can raise air temperatures above 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This heat funnels intense drafts of hot air through wind turbines constructed on the inside of the tower’s vertical shaft. The massive scale of the two towers would produce up to 200 MW of electricity respectively.

While the facility would only operate at full capacity for 12 hours a day, the technology is designed to work without water, which is often used in cooling systems for solar thermal plants and is a precious commodity in Arizona. The precise locations of the proposed facilities in Arizon is still confidential.

By William Pentland.
Original source: http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2010/11/10/solar-tower/

Energyfarm.

CLIMATE SPECTATOR: What really killed NSW solar?

It seems that the massive take-up of rooftop solar under the excessively generous NSW feed-in tariff was not the middle class indulgence that it was thought to be.

The review into the Solar Bonus Scheme prepared for the Keneally government by the Department of Industry and Investment dismisses the perception that solar panels were a privilege reserved for affluent homeowners in Sydney’s northern and eastern suburbs and the inner west.

It turns out that the greatest demand in Sydney for solar PV under the scheme came from the western and south-western “Aussie battler” suburbs of Prospect, Seven Hills, Mt Druitt and Liverpool.

And the highest numbers per locality were recorded in country areas – Including Lismore, Coffs Harbour, Taree, Port Macquarie, Ballina and Gosford in the north, Bega in the south, Armidale and Wagga Wagga further inland, and in numerous localities in the central coast. The country areas had particularly large appetites, ordering systems of an average size of 2.8kW, compared to 1.9kW in the city.

And while some social service groups had complained about the inequality of the scheme, the report noted that the cost of solar panels had come down so quickly in the last 12 months – from $12,600 per kilowatt to $6,000/kW (they had been $17,000/kW in 2001) – that installations had been offered for zero up front cost by some retailers. Clearly, the battlers in the mortgage belt were quicker to seize a bargain that the toffs in the inner suburbs.

The report also reveals that the Keneally government appears to have ignored the report’s advice that a low cap on rooftop solar would cause the state’s solar industry to come to a shuddering halt.

The report recommended a cap to keep a lid on costs, but warned that placing too low a cap would create a boom-bust scenario, and a heavy loss of jobs.

The Keneally government chose a cap of 300MW – allowing just 100MW of new solar rooftop to be installed at the drastically reduced tariff – a target that its own bullish forecasts predict could be met within 12-15 months.

The report prepared suggested the government take one of two options – cut the gross feed-in tariff of 60c/kwh to either 30c/kWh or 20c/kWh.

The reason for this was that the higher than expected take-up would likely see the capacity surge to nearly 1000MW of rooftop solar connected to nearly half a million homes by 2016, and estimated accumulated costs of $4 billion to energy consumers over the seven-year period.

Surprisingly, the report included estimates from consulting group AECOM that said cutting the tariff to 30c/kWh would still generate demand from more than 400,000 homes for 843MW of rooftop solar, at a reduced cost of $2.5 billion, while a 20c/kWh tariff would still generate more than 777MW of rooftop solar demand from some 350,000 homes at a cost of $1.9 billion over the seven years. The solar industry finds those estimates to be remarkably bullish.

Nevertheless, these were the figures that the government used to decide on the lowest recommended tariff and a 300MW cap. Meaning that, for the sake of saving $470 million over six years, it sacrificed – according to the calculations it was presented with – some 477MW of installed solar capacity and up to 20,000 if future jobs.

By the report’s own estimates, the 50MW that had been installed by June, 2010, had created 2,500 jobs, with 10 jobs created for every 1MW in manufacturing, 33 in installation, 3-4 in sales and marketing, and 1-2 in research. On those figures, the Keneally government’s decision to place a cap of 300MW would cost 15,000 in future installation jobs alone.

Given the upcoming election, the demographics of the scheme, the identified job sacrifices, and the fact that the NSW Labor government must now explain why new owners will now pay more for coal fired power than they will receive for emissions-free solar, this may have been a more heroic decision than was first realised.

Intriguingly, the report appears have placed great store in the submission from the Energy Supply Association of Australia, particularly its comments that case studies of solar PV indicated a cost of abatement of greenhouse gases ranged from $484 a tonne to $1,500 a tonne, which the ESAA compared unfavourably to prices of around $17 a tonne for CO2 in the Kyoto protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism and the prices of $3 and $15 in the NSW Greenhouse Gas Reduction Scheme.

Even if you accept the PV abatement cost, which most have put at around $400/tonne, it is, by any measure, an extraordinarily disingenuous comparison. The price of carbon in a market is usually dictated by the ambition and breadth of the scheme, and the CDM currently has few participants and an uncertain future. A better comparison would have been feed-in tariffs in the 50 or so other countries that have them.

And, as the report indentified, reducing emissions is not the primary goal of a feed-in tariff. If it was, you wouldn’t do it. It has broader purposes, including creating jobs, supporting those who want to generate renewable energy as a response to climate change, and to increase the exposure to renewable energy technology in order to encourage the whole community to respond to climate change.

Wind developers were also opposed. The UK group RES Australia said the flood of solar PV had caused large-scale renewable projects to be deferred or abandoned and job losses in other renewable energy sectors.

But other companies were supportive. Indeed, the report said building group CSR wanted the scheme extended to 30 years, citing the need to provide a nurturing environment for emerging technologies in the renewable energy industry.

The retailer, Woolworths, said it had already had reinforced roof structures on its distribution centres at Laverton and Erskine Park which could accommodate solar PV arrays of 1MW, but it had been unable to go ahead because commercial installations were excluded from the FiT.

It suggested a 20-year scheme rather than a seven-year scheme to enable businesses to achieve an acceptable financial return, and suggested specific FiT arrangements with a sliding scale that increased with installed capacity.

Predictably, this was resisted by network operators, who raised concerns about the impacts of large-scale systems on the integrity of the network. Country Energy conceded, though, that there were potential network benefits from small-scale generation, particularly in peak demand reduction and the deferral of investment.

Original post: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/CLIMATE-SPECTATOR-What-really-killed-NSW-solar-pd20101029-ANSF9?opendocument&src=rss