It’s our birthday. Vote Solar is turning 10. That’s right–ten years of hard work, big wins, small victories, heartbreaks, come-backs, and interminable regulatory proceedings, all in the name of U.S. solar power policy progress. And we’re celebrating that decade of solar advocacy with our biggest Equinox party yet.
Yesterday we visited sunny Milpitas, California – the newly announced home of SunPower’s first domestic manufacturing operations. Yep, you heard right. Another global solar biggie is making moves to make panels right here in the U.S. of A.
The 75 MW production line is expected to employ Bay Area 100 workers by the end of the year – and spread the wealth around even more by sourcing equipment and materials from a host of other states throughout the U.S.
Gov. Schwarzenegger and SunPower CEO Tom Werner celebrate green job growth
SunPower’s decision to locate manufacturing in California is a testament to the state’s market-building solar policies. And so it is appropriate that stalwart renewable energy supporter, Governor Schwarzenegger, joined in celebrating the good news for green manufacturing jobs. During the event, Schwarzenegger highlighted a few policies that have been so instrumental to solar growth that we think they bear repeating:
* California Solar Initiative. Dubbed “Million Solar Roofs” by the Governator’s own office, this rebate program helps energy consumers go solar. Cleverly designed to build a self-sustaining solar market, the program is comprised of incentives that decline as progress is made toward 3 GW of installed solar. And it’s working. Big time. Last month the CSI program hit yet another record growth milestone with more than 50 MW of rebates reserved. That’s about the same capacity as a typical peaking power plant that utilities use to meet high mid-day demand. That, my friends, is solar going mainstream.
Anyone following our California campaign over the last couple years knows that the CSI program is in fact so successful that we were on track to hit a cap on a related policy called net metering. Net metering allows CSI participants to “bank” excess electricity generation and save it for a rainy day (perhaps literally) when they’re consuming more than they’re producing. California law capped net metering participation at 2.5% of utilities’ peak load. The CSI program alone takes customer-sited solar to about 5% of peak load. That’s a problem. With strong support from the Governor and champions in the state legislature, Vote Solar worked with the Solar Alliance and other advocates to pass a new law that doubled the amount of solar that utilities are required to net meter. With the higher cap now in place, California solar customers can rest assured knowing that they’ll receive fair credit for their clean energy investment.
* Renewable Portfolio Standard. Designed to get more clean electrons flowing to all of California’s energy consumers, the RPS requires the state’s major utilities to get 20% percent of their electricity from renewables by 2020. That’s an impressive target. One that’s going to take all kinds of renewable energy development. And fast. So we’re working on programs that support deployment of large-scale, mid-sized and distributed rooftop solar generation alike. And if that’s not aggressive enough for you, at the SunPower event Schwarzenegger assured the audience he’d be taking another run at raising that RPS target to 33% this year.
* AB 32. This is California’s first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas law – not a renewable energy policy per se, but an important model for carbon regulation that has helped redefine the national energy debate. It’s now under threat thanks to a nefarious measure on the November ballot. AB 32 defender Schwarzenegger made a point of calling out the “greedy Texas oil men” funding the ballot initiative, and asked voters to stand firm in support of this leading piece of climate legislation.
California’s innovative policy framework has spurred the diverse, fast-growing solar market that we see today. Through these programs and favorable tax-policies, the state sent a clear signal to the global industry that California is in it for the long-haul – and companies like SunPower are reciprocating by setting up shop close to this hot-spot of solar demand.
In the case of this new Milpitas facility, we can thank the Federal Government for its commitment to solar as well. In 2007, the DOE’s Solar America Initiative awarded SunPower a R&D matching grant to develop the uber-automated equipment that will make up the new manufacturing line. Yesterday DOE Solar Energy Technologies Program Manager John Lushetsky was on hand to see his office’s public-private partnership turn R&D vision into commercial reality.
And how did the Governor respond to an invitation to revisit the space when that new manufacturing line is up and running?
As solar’s market penetration increases, so do questions about grid integration. It’s a hot topic, as regulators and utilities confront the issue from both an engineering and process point of view.
Carl Lennox, Principal Engineer at Sunpower, sent me an email listing recent papers on the subject. It’s posted below for your reading pleasure:
This IEA report summarizes the potential issues of integrating PV into the distribution system. The report discusses a wide variety of possible mitigation measures, and reviews findings from several high-penetration demonstration projects in Europe and Japan. The first conclusion of this report is as follows:
“Most of the potential problems indicated have yet to become tangible problems at the present time. Furthermore, even the issues with the potential to become problems in the future are generally not serious issues, and can be dealt with sufficiently with existing technologies or else avoided with proper planning and design”.
This report is an update on monitoring being carried out at a subdivision where all homes are equipped with a PV system (typically ~ 2.0 kW_ac) and energy efficiency measures exceeding Title 24. Overall PV penetration on the feeder is relatively low due to other loads, but within the community itself penetration is higher. The report has three main conclusions:
There was no excessive service or substation voltage due to reverse power flow from exporting PV systems. It was possible to see the effects of the PV systems on the voltage at individual homes and the distribution transformers.
There was no indication that utility voltage transients caused the PV systems to trip off.
Passing clouds did not seem to adversely affect the distribution system. At the current penetration levels, the ramps seen in PV output due to clouds are less than the ramps produced by cycling loads such as air conditioners at the individual homes.
This report summarizes the findings of multiple presentations at the 2009 Utility-Scale PV Variability Workshop. The primary focus of this report is to characterize the short-term variability of irradiance, PV systems, and groups of PV systems with respect to geographical diversity (system size and dispersion) and the timescale of interest.
A key conclusion is that compared to measurement of irradiance, sub-minute timescale smoothing (reduction in relative variability) occurs even with systems as small as 10’s of kW, and sub-10 minute smoothing is observed in multi-MW plants. Longer timescale smoothing occurs over larger geographical areas with multiple sites. Within multi-MW plants, smoothing at short timescales (sub-10 second) is significant.
This set of reports are the deliverables from the EU PV-UPSCALE project, dating from 2007 and 2008 and so are not as recent as the others, but well worth reviewing if they have not been encountered previously. Of the several reports, the two most relevant are:
Deliverable 4.1, a publications review of the impact of PV DG. No significant issues found, though several areas of added value benefit and the desirability of advanced capabilities was noted.
Deliverable 4.3, results of monitoring campaigns of three high-penetration communities in Germany, the Netherlands and Holland (110%, 80%, and 33% of transformer rated power respectively). The programs investigated acceptable PV penetration, loading of equipment including reverse power flow, and power quality (harmonics and flicker). No major issues were observed though in one case some higher harmonics were found to exceed permitted values, which could have been avoided by selecting a different inverter. Based on these results, the report recommends that “As a rule of thumb PV systems in a typical European LV grid segment should not cause any trouble, if power is limited to 70% of the feeding transformer. In some cases higher amounts of PV are possible”.
