Cincinnati Zoo To Power Park With Solar Panels

The Cincinnati Zoo has begun installing a solar power array that it hopes will provide about a fifth of the park's energy needs by April.

The zoo says it will be the country's largest urban solar array that is accessible to the public.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that workers began installing the first of 6,400 panels on metal canopy structures Wednesday.

Melink Corp. of nearby Clermont County is the developer and designer of the project and will own and operate the 1.56-megawatt system, which costs about $11 million.

An interactive kiosk will explain to zoo visitors how the array works and how much energy is being produced.

Article courtesy of Huffington Post 

African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power

Thanks to this solar panel, Sara Ruto no longer takes a three-hour taxi ride to a town with electricity to recharge her cellphone. 

KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.  

Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.

Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.

That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.

“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.

As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.

Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.

In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.

“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”

The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.

There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.

But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.

With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.

In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.

In addition to these small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and “mini” hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village.

Yet while these off-grid systems have proved their worth, the lack of an effective distribution network or a reliable way of financing the start-up costs has prevented them from becoming more widespread.

“The big problem for us now is there is no business model yet,” said John Maina, executive coordinator of Sustainable Community Development Services, or Scode, a nongovernmental organization based in Nakuru, Kenya, that is devoted to bringing power to rural areas.

Just a few years ago, Mr. Maina said, “solar lights” were merely basic lanterns, dim and unreliable.

“Finally, these products exist, people are asking for them and are willing to pay,” he said. “But we can’t get supply.” He said small African organizations like his do not have the purchasing power or connections to place bulk orders themselves from distant manufacturers, forcing them to scramble for items each time a shipment happens to come into the country. 

Part of the problem is that the new systems buck the traditional mold, in which power is generated by a very small number of huge government-owned companies that gradually extend the grid into rural areas. Investors are reluctant to pour money into products that serve a dispersed market of poor rural consumers because they see the risk as too high.  

“There are many small islands of success, but they need to go to scale,” said Minoru Takada, chief of the United Nations Development Program’s sustainable energy program. “Off-grid is the answer for the poor. But people who control funding need to see this as a viable option.”

Even United Nations programs and United States government funds that promote climate-friendly energy in developing countries hew to large projects like giant wind farms or industrial-scale solar plants that feed into the grid. A $300 million solar project is much easier to finance and monitor than 10 million home-scale solar systems in mud huts spread across a continent.

As a result, money does not flow to the poorest areas. Of the $162 billion invested in renewable energy last year, according to the United Nations, experts estimate that $44 billion was spent in China, India and Brazil collectively, and $7.5 billion in the many poorer countries.

Only 6 to 7 percent of solar panels are manufactured to produce electricity that does not feed into the grid; that includes systems like Ms. Ruto’s and solar panels that light American parking lots and football stadiums.

Still, some new models are emerging. Husk Power Systems, a young company supported by a mix of private investment and nonprofit funds, has built 60 village power plants in rural India that make electricity from rice husks for 250 hamlets since 2007.

In Nepal and Indonesia, the United Nations Development Program has helped finance the construction of very small hydroelectric plants that have brought electricity to remote mountain communities. Morocco provides subsidized solar home systems at a cost of $100 each to remote rural areas where expanding the national grid is not cost-effective.

What has most surprised some experts in the field is the recent emergence of a true market in Africa for home-scale renewable energy and for appliances that consume less energy. As the cost of reliable equipment decreases, families have proved ever more willing to buy it by selling a goat or borrowing money from a relative overseas, for example.

The explosion of cellphone use in rural Africa has been an enormous motivating factor. Because rural regions of many African countries lack banks, the cellphone has been embraced as a tool for commercial transactions as well as personal communications, adding an incentive to electrify for the sake of recharging.

M-Pesa, Kenya’s largest mobile phone money transfer service, handles an annual cash flow equivalent to more than 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, most in tiny transactions that rarely exceed $20.

The cheap renewable energy systems also allow the rural poor to save money on candles, charcoal, batteries, wood and kerosene. “So there is an ability to pay and a willingness to pay,” said Mr. Younger of the International Finance Corporation.

In another Kenyan village, Lochorai, Alice Wangui, 45, and Agnes Mwaforo, 35, formerly subsistence farmers, now operate a booming business selling and installing energy-efficient wood-burning cooking stoves made of clay and metal for a cost of $5. Wearing matching bright orange tops and skirts, they walk down rutted dirt paths with cellphones ever at their ears, edging past goats and dogs to visit customers and to calm those on the waiting list.

Hunched over her new stove as she stirred a stew of potatoes and beans, Naomi Muriuki, 58, volunteered that the appliance had more than halved her use of firewood. Wood has become harder to find and expensive to buy as the government tries to limit deforestation, she added.

In Tumsifu, a slightly more prosperous village of dairy farmers, Virginia Wairimu, 35, is benefiting from an underground tank in which the manure from her three cows is converted to biogas, which is then pumped through a rubber tube to a gas burner.

“I can just get up and make breakfast," Ms. Wairimu said. The system was financed with a $400 loan from a demonstration project that has since expired.

In Kiptusuri, the Firefly LED system purchased by Ms. Ruto is this year’s must-have item. The smallest one, which costs $12, consists of a solar panel that can be placed in a window or on a roof and is connected to a desk lamp and a phone charger. Slightly larger units can run radios and black-and-white television sets.

Of course, such systems cannot compare with a grid connection in the industrialized world. A week of rain can mean no lights. And items like refrigerators need more, and more consistent, power than a panel provides.

Still, in Kenya, even grid-based electricity is intermittent and expensive: families must pay more than $350 just to have their homes hooked up.

“With this system, you get a real light for what you spend on kerosene in a few months,” said Mr. Maina, of Sustainable Community Development Services. “When you can light your home and charge your phone, that is very valuable.” 

Article by Elisabeth Rosenthal, NYTimes.com

Orange County, CA Hits Pay Dirt With Clean-Tech Industry

 

 Ruina Morales, right, and Christian Taylor, chemists with Applied Power Concepts in Anaheim, use a machine to measure the purity of ethanol. The company is a partner of cellulosic ethanol producer BlueFire Renewables in Irvine. (Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times / November 18, 2010)

The area is attracting many companies focusing on green energy and transportation. It already boasts about 300 such firms with 20,000 jobs, business groups say.
 
Besides beautiful beaches, Disneyland and the original "Real Housewives" TV show, Orange County might have a new claim to fame.

The fastest-growing segment of the county's economy is now the clean-tech market, according to government and industry officials. Hundreds of green companies are settling in the area, long known for its real estate development and medical device industry.

The number of clean-tech jobs in the county, currently around 20,000, is growing about 5% each year, according to the Orange County Business Council. There are now nearly 300 clean-tech companies in the county, according to trade group CleanTech OC.

"The notion that it's an old, stodgy county is long gone," said Mike Levin, CleanTech OC's co-founder. "It's large, diverse and politically not what you think. Orange County is extraordinarily well-positioned to be a center — if not necessarily the center — of the clean-tech industry."

Nearby green hubs such as Los Angeles, San Diego and the desert cities are feeding business into Orange County. The roster includes hybrid-electric vehicle company Fisker Automotive Inc., solar services company DRI Energy and cellulosic ethanol producer Bluefire Renewables Inc., all in Irvine.

FlexEnergy, a clean-power company, is upgrading to a 30,000-square-foot office in either Santa Ana or Irvine that will be triple the size of the original. T3 Motion Inc., a Costa Mesa company that makes a three-wheel electric vehicle, is getting interest from security agencies and police departments and even had a cameo in this summer's blockbuster film "Iron Man 2."

Quantum Technologies Inc., a diversified clean-tech company in Irvine, will use a $4.4-million loan from California regulators to build a solar-panel manufacturing facility. Similar projects have pushed clean-tech industry production in the county up 54% since 1995, according to research group Next 10.

The region is also packed with companies like Santa Ana-based QuantumSphere Inc., which makes materials and components for longer-lasting batteries and for reducing auto and power plant emissions.

QuantumSphere co-founder Kevin Maloney, a UC Irvine graduate, helped launch the business from his brother's small Costa Mesa warehouse in 2002. Government funds and tax breaks now abound for clean-tech firms, he said.

"Orange County is typically known more as a software, hardware and biotechnology area," he said. "But there's a shift now that's been happening, a thrust towards more clean-tech-related companies."

Several universities are helping fuel the growth. UC Irvine is home to the Center for Solar Energy, the National Fuel Cell Research Center and the country's most advanced fueling station for hydrogen-powered cars. Two students recently won $25,000 from the X Prize Foundation's Crazy Green Idea contest with their concept for a new energy-storage system.

Even clean-tech companies outside the state — such as energy storage company Ice Energy in Colorado and Chicago-area energy efficiency company Lime Energy— are setting up satellite offices in Orange County to tap the growth.

"Orange County hasn't been known over the years as a center of clean-tech as opposed to places such as the Bay Area or Boston," said Brian Kremer, senior research analyst for clean-tech at Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach. "But we're discovering more companies here than we had originally thought."

Having several major clean-tech investors based in the county has also helped. One of the country's leading clean-tech investors, David Gelbaum of Quercus Trust, lives in Newport Beach.

"Because the political climate is different than in a lot of other areas of the country, the clean-tech emphasis here has to be on economic growth and job creation and national security," CleanTech OC's Levin said. "It doesn't matter whether your top concern is global warming or not."

Automotive designers have been active in Orange County for years, making the advanced transportation industry with its electric and plug-in vehicles a leader in the region, experts said. And the long history of aerospace in the county resulted in a local workforce trained in science and technology, fields that translate well for the clean-tech market.

But sometimes its simpler reasons that have helped draw clean-tech companies to the county, like less traffic congestion.

Steering clear of Los Angeles traffic was key for clean-tech developer 808 Renewable Energy of Huntington Beach, which is gearing up for an initial public offering in the next few months.

"And we can get a great office space for less here than in Beverly Hills," Chairman Patrick S. Carter said. "There's a little more breathing room. It's a different culture."
 

Article by Tiffany Hsu, Daily Pilot

Green Ideas That Made Millions

As more and more Americans go green, environmentally sustainable innovations are translating into big bucks for entrepreneurs.

Sure, going green feels great, but these five eco trailblazers are living proof that green business can also mean money in the bank, not to mention a lighter footprint for all.

Green moving with Spencer Brown

Rent-a-Green Box is the first zero-waste pack and move solution in America

Five years ago, product designer Spencer Brown was stunned after spending more than $800 on cardboard boxes and packing material to move his home office. After the move was finished, he was stuck with nothing but a pile of trash.

After being turned away from a recycling center because there was too much packing tape on his boxes, Brown was forced to drive to the landfill and toss his moving waste onto one of the many 40-foot piles of cardboard.

Through this shocking experience came Rent-a-Green Box, a zero-waste pack and move solution that is taking the nation by storm.

Brown’s ‘green’ boxes, called RecoPacks, are made of 100 percent post-consumer plastics and can be reused up to 400 times.

Rent-a-Green Box also distributes several other post-consumer moving necessities, including zip-ties made from bottle-caps and dollies made from aluminum cans.

Rent-a-Green Box rents, delivers and picks up the RecoPacks, which are now available in three sizes and four colors, and the company that once employed only Brown has gained international distribution and has recently begun franchising.

“If someone told me five years ago that I was going to own a franchise training facility, I would have laughed,” Brown says. “No one thought the idea of renting a green box would work, but I knew that people would love a convenient, cheaper and better way to move their stuff.”

Lyndon and Peter Rive bring solar to the city

SolarCity makes solar power accessible to everyone by eliminating up-front cost through a leasing system.

South Africa-born brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive knew they wanted to get into green business, but they wanted to choose the application that would make the greatest impact. Once they zoned in on solar power, there was no turning back.

They launched SolarCity in 2006, and immediately set out on their mission to make solar power accessible to everyone by eliminating up-front cost through a leasing system.

The Foster City, Calif. company has made a huge splash, expanding to five states and installing more than 8,000 systems in four years. To put that in perspective, only 75,000 systems have been deployed in the entire United States over the past 30 years, the brothers say.

With so many solar panels already installed, it’s time for a break, right? No way. The Rive brothers hope to install more than a million solar systems and have plans to expand SolarCity to the East Coast by 2011.

“At the current rate of adoption we’re not going to move the environmental needle,” says Lyndon Rive. “If we want to make an environmental impact, we have to do this fast. So, we want to keep expanding and bringing affordable solar power to even more people.” 

Kyle Berner and his all-natural ‘feel good’ flip-flops

Feelgoodz operates its business through the triple bottom-line model of People, Planet, Profit

After returning to the states from a one-year backpacking adventure in Thailand, recent college grad Kyle Berner knew he wanted to stay connected to the country. While he was visiting Bangkok for a wedding in 2007, fate stepped in – literally.

As Berner was crossing a busy Bangkok market, the strap of his flip-flop broke. His search for a new pair brought him to a vendor with a rubber tree display and a curiously comfortable flip-flop.

“When the vendor told me they were made from rubber trees, I was amazed, and I immediately tracked down the manufacturer and set up a meeting with them,” Berner remembers. “The next thing you know, I secured the exclusive distribution agreements for these flip-flops to be sold in America.”

Rights secured, Berner returned to his hometown of New Orleans, La. and started Feelgoodz in 2008 out of a shed in his parents’ back yard.

The company has since moved out of mom and dad’s house and has grown exponentially, selling more than 50,000 pairs of flip-flops in more than 200 retail locations in its first year.

The cradle-to-cradle business model of Feelgoodz ensures that the Thai rubber farmers harvesting the flip-flop’s natural material are paid fair wages and that disposal is sustainable through a grassroots recycling program that recycles any brand of flip-flop.

Feelgoodz also hopes to expand its recycling program in partnership with Soles 4 Souls and plans to launch a new sub-brand of boutique items made by Kenyan craftsmen from recycled foot-ware.

“There’s no end to this flip-flop,” says Berner. “We’re just going to keep running with it.”

Margarita McClure turns diapers into dollars

Margarita McClure is out to clean up the mess the 27.4 billion disposable diapers leave behind annually. Photo: Margarita McClure

New mom Margarita McClure hardly had visions of grandeur when she began sewing cloth diapers for her son in 2005. When her husband suggested she turn her diaper designs into a business, McClure decided to give it a try.

She sewed about a dozen diapers and put them up on eBay to gauge interest. When the first diaper sold for $26, McClure realized she had found something special.

After launching a website and finding an American sewing contractor, Swaddlebees was born.

“At first I thought I could sell a few hundred diapers per month and justify staying home with my son,” says McClure. 

“In the first month, we sold 2,000 diapers.”

The Knoxville, Tenn. company now sells its nontoxic and reusable diapers in more than 100 retailers, and although McClure has been approached by big-name retailers such as Walmart and Target, she prefers to sell her diapers in stores and baby boutiques owned by entrepreneurial moms like her.

“Over the years, I realized that we’re not just selling diapers,” McClure says. “We’re actually helping other women create revenues for themselves, and we’re helping other moms stay home to watch their babies by selling diapers.”

With Swaddlebees booming, McClure has also launched Blueberry Diapers, a fun and funky diaper line sure to please even the chicest eco-baby, and Pink Daisy, a premium line of reusable feminine hygiene products. 

Eric Hudson’s passion for toothbrushes

 

Preserve products are made from 100 percent recycled plastics and 100 percent post-consumer paper. By using recycled materials, saving energy, preserving natural resources and creating an incentive for communities to recycle.

Eric Hudson had an idea to redesign the toothbrush since he was a teenager, and when he coupled it with a desire to make a quality product out of recycled materials, there was no stopping him.

Hudson left his job as a management consultant to launch Preserve (aka Recycline) and take it straight to retail stores.

Preserve has since expanded to a full line of razors, kitchenware and food storage, all made from 100 percent recycled material.

Through Preserve’s take-back program customers can return Preserve toothbrushes and razors, which are reused to make park benches or porch decks through its Plastic Lumber program.

The company also recycles more than 100,000 pounds of plastics #5 every year through its Gimme 5 program and turns the plastic waste into kitchenware.

The total waste Preserve converts into personal care products and kitchenware each year is almost 10 times that, and Hudson partners with about five companies to secure the 1 million pounds of pre and post-consumer recycled plastic he needs annually to produce Preserve products.

Since launching in 1996, Preserve has seen a steady growth of about 50 percent per year, on average. Not too shabby for a company with a former staff of one.

“Ultimately we think we can be a global brand,” says Hudson. “It’s exciting to be where we are now, and it’s a real testament that people out there have an interest in products that reduce human impact on the earth.”

Article by Mary Mazzoni, Earth911

Sandia Announces Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Energy Generation

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have announced a breakthrough that could lead to break-even nuclear fusion reactions within 2-3 years. The goal of nuclear fusion research is to make energy from sea water, producing only the harmless gas helium as a result of the fusion reaction. It is the holy grail of clean, sustainable energy, the same process that powers our sun.

The nuclear fusion efforts involve research at the cutting edge of physics, where one of the avenues of exploration goes by the name "Z-pinch" (which should gain the technique immediate street cred should it be successful). So what is a Z-pinch? And how could it power the future?

Pinching Atoms
The name Z-pinch derives from the early experiments in plasma pinch technology, in which the "pinch" occurred in a tube running along what physicists refer to as the Z-axis. The driver for the pinch is the Lorentz force, a phenomenon which can be seen in the example of two wires carrying electrical current in the same direction: the wires will pull towards one another. Instead of two wires pulling together, imaging a cylinder of charged plasma, in which the entire cylinder pinches at once. The "pinch" is the force that pushes the starting fuel, hydrogen isotopes, so close together that they actually fuse together into helium, releasing a nice dose of energy in the process.

While sounding good in theory, the Z-pinch method ran into a major obstacle: the faster you squeeze the plasma together, the faster it becomes unstable and breaks up. Further studies demonstrated that this effect is unavoidable. The instabilities, named "magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor [MRT] instabilities", are the target of the recent breakthrough at Sandia.

The Sea Monster of Nuclear Fusion
In their press release, Sandia refers to the MRT instabilities as the "sea monster of nuclear fusion." The image is telling. Mankind has finished braving the unknown seas, adventurously exploring distant continents, and ultimately learning that no sea monsters dot the map. Sandia researchers surely envision a day when the specters currently haunting the goal of safe, clean, fusion energy are mapped and understood.

The basis for the breakthrough by Sandia is the use of a solid aluminum cylinder, instead of a plasma cloud, to compress the fuel. Without going into all the complexities, older methods relied on a web of wires to initiate the pinch. Small imperfections in the surfaces of the wires were known to be a source of the MRT instabilities. But there was no way to controllably reproduce the imperfections, inhibiting study of the MRT instabilities. The aluminum cylinder can be etched to deliberately and predictably destabilize the system during the pinch.

The knowledge gained from studying the instabilities will be used to better simulate the pinch process in computer models, which will help physicists to better control the conditions of future Z-pinch experiments. The leader of the study, Daniel Sinars, believes that this could open the path to achieve a break-even fusion reaction in the next two to three years. Break-even is the point at which as much energy is generated by the fusion reaction as must be used to create the fusion conditions.

Currently, Sandia National Laboratory's Z-machine is the only facility seriously attempting to demonstrate nuclear fusion using the Z-pinch method. However, several facilities around the world continue research into other nuclear fusion methods. It is not time to give up on wind and solar yet, but the future of fusion is one step closer. 

Article by Christine Lepisto, Treehugger

SunChips War Spreads to Canada (Video)

In early October, Frito-Lay said it was scaling back its effort to replace the conventional packaging for its SunChips brand with a compostable, plant-based bag in the United States.

Consumers had raised a ruckus about the unusual noisiness of the new bag, which some said made it difficult to snack and watch television at the same time. In response, FritoLay scrapped the renewable bag for five of its six SunChips flavors.

In Canada, Frito-Lay has faced some of the same noise complaints over the new SunChips bag. But in a new video announcement, the company says that Canadians are just going to have to cope with the noise as they munch.

“There’s been some confusion about the SunChips compostable bag here in Canada,” Helmi Ansari, sustainability leader for Frito-Lay Canada, says in the video. “I’m here to set the record straight. SunChips is and always has been planning on keeping the compostable bag in Canada.”

“The trade-off is pretty clear. A little more noise, for a little less waste, and a little more green,” Mr. Ansari adds.

For Canadians who find the noise of the bag too much to bear, Mr. Ansari directs consumers to its Facebook page, where they can request a free pair of earplugs.

The Facebook page has inspired a lively discussion over the sustainable bag — and a few requests for earplugs.

“I love the chips and the idea behind the bag idea. But I do dislike the sound so earplugs would be great,” one visitor commented.

An administrator for the SunChips Canada page also addressed the question of why Canada will keep the sustainable bag and the United States, for the most part, will not. The difference came down to the number of customer complaints over noise.

“As with any new product, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from consumers and are considering this feedback as we make future improvements,” the administrator wrote in response to a question from a visitor. “We have not received the same levels of consumer feedback as our U.S. counterparts, so we will continue to use the compostable packaging for our 224g and 425g size bags.”

Article by John Collins Rudolph, NYT

Own or Contract Solar Power Plants? Utilities Need to Decide

Operations and Maintenance Costs are Part of the Decision 

Utility scale solar photovoltaic (PV) sites have a cost, and I'm not talking about the energy.
 

Sure, a utility could rely on a third party power purchase agreement (PPA) as it formerly did. But as they contemplate ownership of both central and distrib¬uted solar-based generation, they now must consider system performance, reliability, and asset management priorities.

The issue has drawn attention to require a closer look.

To that end, the industry's research arm, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), has released a white paper on the growing trend.  "Addressing Solar Photovoltaic Operations and Maintenance Challenges - A Survey of Current Knowledge and Practices" looks at what goes into this decision and how utilities are coping with the challenge.

"In short, PV asset ownership shifts the financial onus onto utilities," the report says.

I recently spoke to the point man involved in the creation of the report, Nadav Enbar, senior project manager for distributed renewables, power delivery and utilization.

"The fundamental rationale behind this report is that PV is growing and we are not moving back in time," he said. "As we look historically at the growth of conventional generation sources, we're seeing order-of-magnitude growth, with a similar trajectory for solar photovoltaic power right now."

Although state renewable portfolio standards are playing a part, some utilities are making a deliberate decision to add additional PV, Enbar said.

"The idea is that utilities are spending more on the technology whether they are mandated or not .and many are choosing to bring the assets under their own umbrella," he said.

The choice is pretty basic, but one which was easier to make when PV was a tiny part of the power generation system: a PPA offers lower up-front costs as electricity is bought from outside the organization but more expensive over the 15- or 20-year life of the contract. Some utilities are now favoring the longer view and incorporating the assets into their portfolios.

That decision entails another set of costs. "Utilities have to pay attention to the upkeep and maintenance of their assets base to bring the greatest amount of value in terms of electricity production but also to maintain a level of reliability," Enbar added.

Those expenses can range generally from1 percent to 5 percent of the all-in installation costs.

One utility that has gone this route is Southern California Edison, which started out by sending out its O&M but has now decided to bring it in-house. The scale of its commitment to PV made the decision a little easier. In 2008 announced its intention to own 500 megawatts. That in itself will support 23 full time employees.

A hybrid option is also starting to emerge in which the utility that is adding PV gears up its O&M by first outsourcing its functions for a couple of years while it gets its own staff trained from the third party it has hired. It can then transition its operations and maintenance to eventually becoming a utility function.

But there does not seem to be typical tipping point when the utility makes a decision to bring PV O&M in-house. Local conditions seem to be the determining factors: travel distances to sites, climate and season, ground versus rooftop systems, and even when the best time might be to roll a truck.

There's also the power market coming into play. Enbar said scheduling panel cleaning can be done just before the peak solar energy season to take advantage of the increased generation capacity.

In other words, the reasons are all over the map.

Article by Bill Opalka, RenewablesBiz