Recently, this blog again mentioned a topic of interest for some time: BIPV (Building Integrated Photo Voltaic) systems. While not the talk of the town, there is talk among “green jobbers” about the potential widespread adoption of PVL (Photo Voltaic Laminates), a.k.a., TFPV (Thin Film Photo Voltaic) panels.
Thanks to the Big Gav, we learn that USA Today has picked up on the idea, envisioning property owners or contractors covering warehouse roofs with cheap solar panels. 2 retardants to such development: 1) lack of utility coöperation in buying back the power (they rather would have brown outs, SoCal) and 2) lack of feed-in tariffs (instead the Fed continues to subsidize environmental devastation).
And, certainly an economic recession put a damper on the idea of TFPV everywhere. Nonetheless, smart property managers increasingly are recognizing the value of DER (Distributed Energy Resources) from Building Integrated Photo Voltaic systems.
So this post is more than just carping about solar development setbacks. This post asks a naïve question. You have seen where some package delivery companies are testing electric vehicles. Would it not make sense also to test photo voltaic on the warehouses? Indeed, would it not make sense in these days after Peak Oil, to get a package deal to test?
Photograph by Jill Connelly for The New York Times
Since June 2006, a photo voltaic array has been in operation on the roof of a GM parts warehouse in Rancho Cucamonga, California. The installation has the capacity to generate as much as 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year. General Motors is purchasing the electricity from the company that installed it; the installation cost GM nothing. About half of the total electricity demands of the building are being met by this renewable energy source.
O.K., so it was more than 1 question. And, the beauty of grid-tied BIPV is that the juice does not have to go to a ‘juice point“, it can go for air conditioning (or Klieg lights in La-La-Land, for that matter). But, if that Cornell professor is right, and you want to avoid and not foster methane leakage, then should we not want to encourage solar-powered electric propelled material handling? Just asking, T. Boone, just asking… You can lower that swift boat any time now.
The view from a warehouse roof here is consistent. In every direction, there are blocks and blocks of warehouse roofs baking in the Southern California sun.
Rather than letting them sit bare, a California utility hopes to blanket roofs like these with solar panels to produce enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.
Southern California Edison has installed solar on two warehouse roofs and is working on another in the Los Angeles region. The utility expects to do 100 to 125 more, totaling about 1.5 square miles of roof space in the next five years.
The program, in which the utility owns the solar, is the largest of its kind in the nation, not surprising since California is the No. 1 solar market. But utilities in other states, including North Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey, have smaller plans to rent roofs for their own mini-solar-power plants, too.
The phenomenon, while in its infancy, presents another way for solar to spread in a bigger way than it has historically done when home and business owners put solar on roofs. The deep-pocketed utilities are planning bigger installations. Yet the systems don’t consume green land or require new power-transmission links, as do some massive solar farms planned for deserts in California, Arizona and Nevada. As such, rooftop solar is likely to face fewer environmental hurdles than the farms and can get permits and be built much faster.
“Everybody is looking to see how this works,” says solar analyst Alfonso Velosa at research firm Gartner. “Southern California Edison is the experiment.”
Other AG Posts on the Need for Policy to Encourage BIPV
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IGHIH contributor and Americans for Energy Leadership cross-poster Teryn Norris tells us about Solar Valley City (cue Beach Boys):
Dexter Johnson II rhetorically asks, “Is lowering the production costs of thin-film solar cells while not improving efficiency really a commercial game changer?” The short answer in Dexter’s book is No, TFPV as yet is still uncompetitive. A competitive cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) is one “that gets closer to the cost of generating electricity from wind ($0.05 per kWh).”
And, speaking of lack of utility company cooperation and the merit order effect, even the Gray Lady is willing to report that FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) has “a set of central policy issues are on the table.”