500 MW Dish-Sterling Solar Electricity wins competitive bidd
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2761&IssueNum=124
Los Angeles, Sun City In 1976, L.A. was dubbed the 'Solar City.' Since then, it's been nothing but broken promises. But 2005 may be the year the solar revolution arrives
~ By DEAN KUIPERS ~
Three decades of waiting, and the future arrives just like that. Quietly, in a fax. On August 9, a press release reached my desk announcing that the United States' second-largest utility, Southern California Edison, had contracted to buy 500 megawatts of power from Stirling Energy Systems Inc., a company based in Phoenix. I held onto the piece of paper just long enough to realize that this was 500 MW of solar-generated electricity. And Stirling had won the contract with an open, competitive bid. No subsidies. No rebates. Which makes all the difference in the world.
Angelenos fiercely defend their right to not care where their electricity comes from, and why not? The culture of fantasy supports this. Just as long as the power doesn't go out in the middle of Lost. But since the oil crisis of the late 1970s, I have cared a lot, maybe more than I should, about where electrons come from, especially the huge torrents of high-voltage electrons that power the California Dream.
Big power is a big story, a kingmaker and career-breaker. The deregulation that allowed Enron and others to bilk California consumers out of more than $9 billion helped take down Governor Gray Davis, even though it was his predecessor Pete Wilson who put it all in place. And, like a magpie, I couldn't stop looking at the shiny installations in the desert, which held the promise of making electricity out of sunshine - the ultimate something-for-nothing bargain. I cut clippings about Solar One, an iconic "power tower" installation in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, which used a great field of mirrors, or heliostats, to focus heat on a steam turbine. It ran as a 10 MW plant from 1982, the year I graduated from high school, until 1988 - when they swapped out the steam for molten nitrate salt and it became Solar Two, but it's now offline.
In 1984, the first parabolic trough system came online, heating tubes of oil to run a steam turbine. Eight others quickly followed, laid out from Barstow to Boron in 1,500-acre plots, making the Mojave the solar capital of the world. In the 1970s, the government helped develop Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, a system based on an 1881 design that uses reverse refrigeration to not only make power but also fresh water. The Genesis project suggests a worldwide power grid hooked to heavy central solar or photovoltaic plants along the equator. My favorite is a dead-serious plan put forward in the late 1990s by the 81-year-old nongovernmental World Energy Council to build a 10-, 100-, and eventually 100,000-gigawatt Lunar Solar Power facility, using existing technology, capable of beaming down enough power from the moon to the Earth to bring the entire planet up to an industrialized power standard by 2050 at the very competitive price of about $0.01 per kilowatt-hour.
The American people have consistently indicated, in polls by Gallup and many others, that the energy of choice is solar. And they're willing to pay more to get it. Over the last 15 years, however, no major new centralized sources of solar juice have materialized. Even those existing facilities in the Mojave, though still running, function much like demonstration plants - together generating only 354 MW of power. The new Stirling plant, at 500 MW with an option to expand to 850 MW, is a huge lurch forward. It would be bigger, by far, than all the solar-power facilities currently operating in the U.S. combined.
For context, that is almost the size of a conventional coal or natural-gas-fired plant, like the one the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was about to build in Utah until nixed by the Hahn administration last year. It is enough to power between 325,000 and 552,500 homes.
Hot on its heels, on September 7, came a second Stirling contract, this time for a 300 MW plant in the Imperial Valley supplying power to San Diego Gas & Electric, with expansion options to 900 MW.
In themselves, these might have seemed like predictable moves by major utilities to meet California's state-mandated Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, which is to have 20 percent renewable energy sources by 2017. But there is also that interesting fact mentioned above: Both of these projects were selected in open, competitive bids against conventional plants. The longstanding problem with solar, we've been told, is that it is too expensive to install, whether as a central plant or photovoltaics on a roof. But these contracts are evidence that large-scale solar electricity, at peak hours, has now become as cheap as gas or oil, coal or nuclear - and sometimes cheaper, not to mention vastly more eco-friendly, than any of them. And it is destined to become even cheaper as it becomes more ubiquitous. In the space of a month, the entire power universe had changed.
So we've entered an era of potentially guilt-free electrons. Sure, there will always be conventional plants for cloudy days, but for these new systems, there is no fuel to buy. No emissions to legislate and protest. No lakes and rivers gone up in steam. No deadly waste to store. But that doesn't mean your power will be any cheaper. Not, at least, until you own it yourself. And Edison hopes that day is decades away.
The Saudi Arabia of Sun
"California got started, back in the 1970s, leading the way for the world on solar power, and then we sort of dropped the ball, and these other countries picked it up," says Bernadette Del Chiaro, clean-energy advocate for Environment California, which has been leading the fight for a consumer initiative called Million Solar Roofs. The other countries she's referring to are Japan and Germany, which are now considered the brightest lights in public solar policy. She points out that California currently generates less than 0.3 percent of its electricity from solar sources.
"The good news is: The sun still shines," she adds. "We are like the Saudi Arabia of sun. There's a lot of potential."
But wait. Wouldn't Saudi Arabia - home to the second largest desert in the world, the Arabian Desert - be the Saudi Arabia of sun? Or, using that as a measure, couldn't it be the Sahara Desert? Not if nobody's tapping that source, and, so far, all the tapping is going on in the Mojave. Bruce Osborn, CEO of Stirling Energy Systems Inc., points out three reasons for this.
"First of all, we've looked at the U.S. and the globe, and Southern California has some of the world's best solar resources - the Mojave Desert, the Imperial Valley, etc.," Osborn says by phone from Stirling's corporate headquarters. "Two, there's a large demand for power in Southern California. Then the third thing that's going on - and I think this is a real tribute to California - is they've got a real progressive and aggressive Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, where they're looking for green energy. They're the best in the states and among the best in the world."
Osborn runs down a chart for me, detailing the 18 states that now have renewable electricity standards. Maine's goal, 30 percent by the year 2000, seems ultra-ambitious, except that the state was already generating 40 percent of its power by hydro and biomass in 1999. Similarly, New York is shooting for 25 percent by 2013, but most of that is already in place in the form of hydro. California has set the bar highest in terms of finding totally new resources.
Private utilities have so enthusiastically embraced the state's green energy regulations - creating a kind of quiet gold rush in wind, small hydropower, geothermal, biomass, solar, and other alternative technologies - that some state legislators and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have indicated they'd like to move up the 20 percent deadline to 2010, and to increase the standard to 30 percent. Southern California Edison, for example, delivered 18.2 percent renewable energy already in 2004.
Municipal utilities like L.A.'s DWP, however, are free to set their own standards, and they are lagging behind. According to LADWP spokesperson Kim Hughes, this exemption dates back to the days when the investor-owned utilities were deregulated and municipal utilities were not. L.A. currently requires the 20-by-2017 standard, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has indicated he'd like to bump the date up to 2010. As of right now, however, LADWP's renewable portfolio stands at about 5 percent, and less than 1 percent of that is solar.
"Right now, we don't have it on the books to do that kind of solar field project," says Hughes, referring to the Stirling deal. The DWP did, however, fund a 10-year, $150 million rebate program to spur consumers to buy photovoltaic panels for homes and businesses. There is currently a very long waiting list for that rebate. Meanwhile, other service areas are buying into giant energy scoops in the city's backyard.
"What we're interested in is insolation - that's a measure of the energy coming from the sun," says Stirling's Osborn. "We're interested in the direct normal component of the insolation. If you cast a shadow, the stuff that creates the shadow, the stuff you're blocking, that's the stuff that we use."
And, yes, you can measure this kind of stuff - the number of sunny days, this direct normal-beam solar radiation - in annual-average watts of electrical-generating potential. According to studies published by the California Energy Commission (the state's primary governmental energy policy and planning arm), the big winner in the state sun lotto is San Bernardino County at a whopping 988,016,559 MWH, a marginally comprehensible computation of the megawatt capacity hours per day, per square meter, for the whole county. Imperial is half that, and Riverside and Kern each a third, and on down the list. These numbers are very high, matched only by (all jokes about Saudi Arabia aside) some regions in India.
Most of it, of course, burns into the dirt. The challenge for Concentrating Solar Power systems - these big-megawatt facilities - is to collect it most efficiently. And so was born the Dish Stirling.
The Dish Stirling System
I like to imagine them waking at dawn, all 20,000 parabolic dish assemblies in Stirling's future plant somewhere near Victorville, each one its own solar generator, all responding at once to the same stimulus, whirring suddenly with that reassuring robotic twitch from their nighttime resting position to face the red glow of morning over low desert mountains. As the first rays of direct normal sunlight break into each 37-foot parabolic dish - really an assembly of 89 individual mirrors - the heat is focused onto the four-cylinder engine suspended above its center. Hydrogen gas heats up and expands in each cylinder, and they begin to push the pistons, eventually turning the engine at a steady 1,800 RPMs. A crankshaft runs a small electric generator, which kicks out power at 480 volts and 60 hertz. The output from all 20,000 dishes is collected at a transformer, stepped up to high voltage, and sent down standard high-tension transmission lines the 90 or so miles into Los Angeles.
All day, the orderly dish garden tracks the sun precisely, maintaining the optimum angle for solar collection. Then, as the sun disappears, the machines whirr back to their night stow position.
This is how they work now, the six Dish Stirling Systems currently online in a test facility at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, this is how they have been working for almost as long as I have been watching, since the 1970s, without ever going into mass production. The evolution of the Stirling system is essentially the history of centralized solar, or the latent history, and it's a Southern California story.
Bruce Osborn likes to say that this dish system is the Ford Focus of solar collectors, by which he means it was made to be stamped out on an assembly line, relatively cheap and scaleable. But it's apt he should invoke Ford, since that's where it all started. He was working at Ford's now-defunct aerospace division in Newport Beach when he helped develop this technology in the 1970s. Then McDonnell-Douglas bought it and set up a dish in Huntington Beach in the 1980s. Edison was actually the next owner, and then Stirling - and Osborn - bought it back from that company in 1996. For the last 10 years, Stirling has been rather quietly tweaking the technology, with the help of the Department of Energy's Sandia Lab and the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado.
Then, recently, Edison put out a call for bids, and both the Stirling technology and the market were finally ready. Stirling won the bid without price support from the state, which was a first.
"I think we're on the verge of an inflection point where you're going to start seeing our renewable stuff, our solar in particular, potentially less expensive than conventional peak power," says Osborn. A gas plant, for example, is actually cheaper to build, but the fuel is getting more expensive every month. And - going back to that Ford analogy - with these first large contracts, the manufacturing price for the Stirling plummets.
"We aren't going to beat the base load stuff, because that's still pretty inexpensive," Osborn adds. "There's plenty of power at night and in the early morning. But as the day warms up, people have their office lights on, they're running their computers, and especially their air conditioners, so they need a lot more power. And that's when we produce peak power, when the sun's out. We're a good fit."
Assuming the contracts are approved by California's Public Utility Commission next month, the first phase would be to set up 40 dishes in a 1 MW test plant, ideally in either the Victorville or Imperial Valley areas, though a final site hasn't yet been determined. After that, the potential is limited only by just how much of the desert the public wants covered over with mirrors.
Los Angeles, Solar City
Or maybe a desert of mirrors won't be necessary. That depends on whether or not a similar inflection point can be reached for distributed solar power - the consumer photovoltaic systems we put on our roofs. This has been the plan since Mayor Tom Bradley put together a special advisory group in 1976 called (don't laugh) the Los Angeles Solar City Committee. The idea was to put enough solar on the rooftops to sell it back into the grid and to build the solar industry - mostly photovoltaic systems - into a new Silicon Valley. It's not hard to see why investor-owned utilities tried to snuff this vision, and why LADWP has tried to ignore it.
"The utilities would love to redirect the spotlight to shine it on the facilities they can own and make a profit off of," says Bernadette Del Chiaro. "I'm all for companies making a profit on clean technologies - way better than making a profit off of dirty technologies - but we can't lose momentum in building support for policies that revolutionize the way energy is generated."
Nor can we lose sight of a most tantalizing fact that makes an electrical revolution possible: You and I own the grid.
This little factoid has set one of L.A.'s most innovative companies, Solar Integrated Technologies (SIT), storming out into the marketplace to remake the way we look at electrical power.
On a rainy Tuesday, a scale model of the revolution sits untended in the SIT parking lot off a heavily industrialized stretch of Alameda Street in Vernon. Two car-mat-sized slabs of white roofing material sit on the asphalt, and sealed to them are some foot-square sheets of photovoltaic material only microns thin. A single red wire runs out of the mats and into an electric fan, which is buzzing merrily. It doesn't seem to matter at all that the skies are completely black and drizzling down rain.
Rain and heavy weather, in fact, are why SIT exists. It doesn't make photovoltaic cells. It makes roofs - roofs that happen to produce whopping amounts of electricity.
Joel Davidson, SIT's vice president of product development, shows me around the plant. He is one of America's solar pioneers - he had one of the country's first solar-power homes in the late '70s and even a solar car, and he's designed or installed more than 10,000 systems worldwide. We stand next to a massive, one-of-a-kind laminating machine that glues 18-foot-long and one-foot-wide strips of flexible, "amorphous" PV wafer only 20 microns thick to vast gray sheets of Sarnafil, a flexible, single-ply industrial roofing material. It is wired with heavy-duty electrical cable outputs and rolled out on huge industrial buildings with a 20-year guarantee for leaks and a 20-year guarantee of reliable power. Each of the PV strips, built by Unisolar in Auburn, Michigan, puts out 136 watts. It's just that easy, and no one else in the world is doing it.
Davidson has no kind words for L.A. city officials, as they dealt SIT some significant setbacks when it first set up shop in 2002. When the company was started by Edward Stevenson and Bruce Khouri of Southern California Roofing, the city was offering not only rebates for solar installation but also another credit for companies that bought from local manufacturers. Just as the first roofing sheets rolled off SIT's laminator in 2003, the manufacturing credits went away - not to save money, Davidson says, but just because the city council was philosophically opposed to subsidies. Siemens Solar, which had also built a facility in L.A., was forced to move to Camarillo. So much for the Solar City, or LADWP's more recent Green Power program.
SIT stayed put, and its idea caught on instantly anyway. The company put a roof on the old Coca-Cola building downtown, then Coke bought seven more. Frito-Lay put on two roofs, then five more, including in snowy Rochester, New York. SIT began to innovate, leasing roofs on more than 20 schools in the San Diego Unified School District - giving the schools the tax credits, but selling them a service contract and taking a cut of the power generation. Now SIT is buying every inch of PV laminate Unisolar will sell it, and that company has had to expand.
"It's getting to the point now where you could approach people who need a new roof and say, 'I'll give you a new roof if I can own the electricity off it to sell to other people,'" says Davidson. He holds up two fingers that almost touch. "We're that close. That close."
So - surprise! - there really was a consumer upside to deregulation, despite the large utilities' best intentions. The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, or PURPA, eliminated monopoly territories, allowing anyone to use the grid. Some companies, like Borax, did create co-generation plants, but it wasn't cost-effective. The large utilities still had an edge, in that they required two meters on your home or business: You bought at retail prices and sold back to them at wholesale. So, if you were a net exporter of electrons, you bought your own power back from the utility at a loss. But in 1996, the utilities agreed, in exchange for all kinds of deregulatory goodies, to "net metering," which meant there'd only be one meter, and power was bought and sold from the grid at the same price.
Davidson points out that there are still limits on how much power a utility is required to buy from any individual or company, but the grid is open for business.
SIT's roofing is too big for use on homes, but the company has a lot of other nifty applications, like a solar-powered tent that has the U.S. military sniffing around, and a solar-powered hydrogen fuel generator, at which a hydrogen-powered vehicle can refill. Companies like Frito-Lay or the U.S. Postal Service could now charge up their delivery trucks, at extremely low cost, using rooftop power and clean hydrogen fuel.
But none of that is as exciting as the democratization of the actual grid. Feel like going into the energy biz? Put solar roofs on a few warehouses and start selling the power back to your local utility.
Waiting for a Sunrise
I am still waiting for Los Angeles to become the Solar City, to start seeing the big flows of electrons the way its residents see it, as a resource we can make practically for free - and maybe even sell at a profit, maybe, to people somewhere else. We could use the money to pay for things we lack, like water. Or universal wi-fi. Or homeless shelters.
In the 1980s, LADWP built a demonstration house downtown, across from the Convention Center, called the Solar Optimum Energy House. The roof was covered in racks of PV, and the long-term plan was to turn it into a solar-powered childcare center. Eventually, the PV was stripped off, and it became a crack house. Then it was boarded up and finally bulldozed.
L.A. has had enough demonstration houses. The technology works. It's finally affordable. Mayor Villaraigosa has to get green and sink major resources into local solar businesses or just miss the biggest economic opportunity since Mulholland brought water into town and created the San Fernando Valley. There are heroics in the offing. Literally.
In the meantime, folks like Davidson and Del Chiaro remind us that freedom isn't free (even President Bush likes to say that), and consumers are scrapping for our piece of the future. The state Senate's Million Solar Roofs bill was stopped in this year's legislature by electrical-union protections, but would go a long way toward spreading the cleanest kind of electrons - unused ones. It would re-up the state rebate program, which is set to run out of money, and create incentives for integrating solar in new construction. The city should do its own 100,000-roofs program, which has been an official proposition since 1997.
"People have been asking for solar power for decades, and even said they'd be willing to pay extra for it, but the utilities drag their feet and say it's too expensive," says Davidson. "Well, a lot of their consumers are now going to be putting it up themselves. But we can do better. I'm hopeful we'll see a new approach."
10-20-05