But while the news might be good for Detroiters, it’s not so good for Canadians — or anyone who cares about a livable climate. A Nova Scotia power plant is now burning the cheap, filthy fuel to produce electricity.
The petcoke is a byproduct of refining tar-sands oil, which began recently at a Detroit refinery. The pile’s growth over the past six months has disgusted residents and their elected leaders. Rep. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) introduced legislation in Congress that would direct the federal government to investigate the health and environmental impacts of the uncovered waste. A state lawmaker introduced a bill that would require such waste to be stored inside enclosed structures. And the Detroit City Council is mulling options [PDF] for dealing with the blight.
It’s difficult to legally burn petcoke for energy in the U.S. because of the pollution it creates, but power plants in other countries — like Canada, apparently — are happy to buy it up and burn it.
A Canadian electrical power plant, owned by Nova Scotia Power, is chipping away at the three-story-high, blocklong pile of petroleum coke on Detroit’s waterfront. The company is burning the high-carbon, high-sulfur waste product because it is cheaper than natural gas. …
Environmentalists were concerned not only about the impact of the growing pile in Detroit but also about where the material would be burned. …
The electrical utility’s use of petcoke, which is a particularly high emitter of greenhouse gases, feeds into concerns that the waste material’s unusually low cost and increasing availability in the United States may derail efforts to shift coal-burning power stations to cleaner natural gas.
Communities near oil refineries along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere in the U.S. can look forward to seeing similar piles of carbon waste as tar-sands oil imports ramp up, especially if Keystone XL is built.
Even in Detroit, the pile is not shrinking. As the Times reports, “Despite the regular visits to Detroit by ships to take away the petcoke, the oil sands bitumen refinery there is producing the material at a rate which means the waterfront pile continues to grow.”
I’ve never thought of myself as much of a rebel. You generally won’t find me smashing car windows or setting garbage cans aflame. (Let’s get real: You probably won’t find me speeding. Such are the depths of my rule-following nature.) But I realize now that all along, I’ve just been waiting for the right weapon with which to battle The Man.
Wildflowers, of course. More precisely: ping-pong ball-size globs of clay and compost laced with wildflower seeds called seed bombs (or green grenades — military nomenclature is a must). The other day, I stood in front of a fenced-off lot on a busy stretch of asphalt, fingering the tiny seed arsenal I’d packed into a Ziploc bag. I looked back and forth, took a deep breath, and let one fly over the chain links; the ball came to rest on a scrubby patch of dirt in the sun. “Take that!” I muttered under my breath.
Finally, I was beginning to understand the rebel thrill. This must be what Marlon Brando felt like.
Lobbing that seed bomb was my first foray into the worldwide movement of “guerrilla gardening,” or reclaiming underused land — empty lots, vacant yards, alleys, and other areas you technically don’t have the right to plant — for lovely and/or productive gardens. In this case, the enemy takes the form of a disinterested, wasteful society that misses out on abundant opportunities to beautify the ugly and cultivate the barren.
Sometimes it’s as simple as taking over an adjacent lot with some extra pepper plants, but often there’s more at stake. Among guerrilla gardeners, you’ll hear plenty of chatter about “land use,” “re-creating space,” and “Who actually owns the earth, man?” Make no mistake: Those petunias are political.
Some guerrilla gardening reportedly plays out like a scene from a spy movie: Black-clad growers sneak out to till and water vegetable patches in the dead of night. While that does sound fun, I had something a little less intense in mind for my first time out. Then my research uncovered seed bombs — perfect for inaccessible yards, tough-to-tend spaces, and ‘fraidy cats. Make a few green grenades, toss them all over town, and wait for the blooms to take over. This I could do.
And I did. Whipping up a batch of proto-wildflower balls is surprisingly simple –mine cost me about $10 (for seeds and clay; I grabbed the compost right from my worm bin) and 10 minutes. I picked up the native wildflower mix at my local grocery store and found the natural clay at an art-supply shop, where the clerk assured me “this is just what the Girl Scouts used to make their seed bombs last year.” (Fight the power, Brownies!) After letting the bombs sit out overnight to dry a bit, I was ready to sow some rebellion. (See below for step-by-step instructions on how to make them.)
Experienced guerrillas recommend seed-bombing right before rain is forecast. This usually wouldn’t be a problem in Seattle, but we were just about to enter an unusually warm and sunny period. Still, I couldn’t wait to dip a toe into the movement, so I loaded my bag with a handful of seed bombs and went out in search of abandoned space begging for wildflowers.
My destination was a busy thoroughfare near my apartment with a slightly, ahem, seedy reputation. Pocked with cheap motels and overgrown, weedy patches that don’t clearly belong to anybody, I figured it presented a prime opportunity for my “floral attack.” Plus, it’s close enough to let me check in on my gardens’ progress as the weeks go by.
I found my first site before I even reached the intended street: a plowed-over slope strewn with trash and construction detritus that’s lingered, untouched, for months. Nobody was around, so I chucked a seed ball into the expanse. (I don’t know who would object to a few blossoms here and there, but these days you never know when tossing an unidentified object — one you’re calling a bomb, no less — might get you tackled by a SWAT team.) “Good luck, little seeds,” I whispered.
Next up: A weedy patch near a lonely bus stop. Then a clear, empty dirt meadow. The fenced-in lot next to a boarded-up house. I strode along that eyesore of a road like a modern-day Janie Appleseed with safety pins in her ears, spreading flowers and righteous garden activism with every step.
I reserved the last ball in the bag for a quiet corner of my shared backyard. The lawn doesn’t need it, as neighbors have planted plenty of flowers, herbs, and veggies around the periphery, but I wanted to keep one seed bomb close so I could check on it every day. Hell, I might even water it. You might point out that cultivating flowers in my own backyard hardly counts as guerrilla gardening, but hey — like a true rebel, I totally did not ask my landlord first.
I’ll report back on my illicit wildflower patches and other excursions into guerrilla gardening as the spring goes on. ‘Til then, happy planting, everyone. Keep it on the downlow, and remember — if you get caught, you didn’t hear this from me. It was the Girl Scouts.
Homemade Seed Bombs
Materials:
5 parts clay soil/potter’s powder
1 part wildflower seeds
1 part compost/worm castings
1. Combine the seeds and compost in a large bowl; stir well.
2. Add the clay soil. If you’re using a dry clay, slowly add water, stirring as you go, until you have the consistency of thick mud (you don’t want it too watery to mold).
3. Shape the mixture into golf ball-size globs.
4. Set seed bombs in a tray and let them sit in the sun for a day or so to harden.
Discussions of how to respond to climate change often involve Very Large Numbers — the needed investments to transition to a fully renewable energy system are in the hundreds of billions. The brain sort of shuts down when it encounters numbers like that. They are too big to fathom. The one thing that does seem true about them is that nobody’s ever going to spend that kind of money on anything. Right? It seems hopeless.
So I always enjoy it when someone comes along to provide some perspective, a comparison that can give us context and help us see the numbers afresh. Today, wind analyst Paul Gipe asks, how much renewable energy could we have gotten from what we spent on the Iraq War?
The total cost of the Iraq War, including future costs to care for veterans, is $2.2 trillion. If we include the interest we have to pay on the debt we used to finance the war, that figure rises to $3.9 trillion by 2053. (See Gipe’s article for sources and details.)
So what could that get us? Gipe gets deep into the weeds on renewables cost and yields, but here’s the top-line conclusion:
If we had invested the $2.2 trillion in wind and solar, the US would be generating 21% of its electricity with renewable energy. If we had invested the $3.9 trillion that the war in Iraq will ultimately cost, we would generate nearly 40% of our electricity with new renewables. Combined with the 10% of supply from existing hydroelectricity, the US could have surpassed 50% of total renewables in supply.
He notes that his estimates are extremely conservative, and with some reasonable amendments, that 40 percent figure could easily become 60 percent.
So, let’s call it half. For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a fully renewable power supply.
Now, imagine if someone had proposed, in 2003, spending $2.2 trillion of public money over the next 10 years on renewable energy. My God, the outrage! The wailing and rending of garments! It would have been scorned, mocked, dismissed outright by VSPs across the land. Such investments in the nation’s future are too expensive; it would bankrupt us; we would never recover.
And yet, the country survived spending that much on the Iraq War. The economy is growing again; the debt is shrinking. And that’s with $2.2 trillion almost entirely flushed down the toilet, to virtually no long-term benefit. The same money spent on renewables would have produced massive returns in energy security and resilience, new industries and jobs, and an international reputation as a courageous humanitarian leader (rather than a belligerent, lying warmonger).
Next time you hear that responding to climate change is too expensive, ask, compared to what?
It’s a little after sundown, and Arun Kumar is hawking his wares in the neighborhoodfor the first time. He’s selling a light, just a small half-circle tied to a three-inch-wide solar panel. An older man tests it in his home, a tiny hut of tarp and tin built like the 30 others in this slum settlement on the far north side of Bangalore. A kerosene lamp flickers inside.
At a second home, Arun wields his 1,600-rupee ($29.48) gizmo for a woman seated with nine children. He points out the small cellphone charger in the light’s rear. The woman turns inside, pulling out her phone to consult her husband.
She is one of millions in India and worldwide in a surreal contemporary fix: She owns a cell phone, but her home has no toilet or power line. The country’s mobile users mushroomed in a few short years, reaching some 900 million. Cheap phones have not suddenly lifted owners out of poverty. But they have given them access to resources and economic ladders once unreachable.
Mark BergenPollinate Energy’s solar light.
Arun fails to sell any here, yet he will return tomorrow. The hyperactive 20-year-old is a salesman for Pollinate Energy, a social enterprise NGO that has, in the past five months, sold 400 private solar systems to slum dwellers in north Bangalore. Pollinate is one of a growing number of companies betting on “leapfrog” technology designed to help the urban poor in developing nations to skip right over fossil fuels for electricity.
On their first visit to a slum, the staff never make a sale, explains co-founder Monique Alfris. Residents are understandably skeptical of consumer goods in India. Though the panels pay for themselves in about six months, those making $3 to $4 a day are reluctant to put down the 400-rupee ($7.47) installment plan payments.
And many are transitory, like the migrant construction laborers Arun visited, nervous of investing on land they could be booted from.
When the Pollinate Energy founders arrived from Sydney, they expected urban communities to prep them for rural markets, where far more people lack power. By some accounts, Bangalore was the second Asian city, after Tokyo, to be electrified. According to estimates, only 20,000 slum dwellers here lack electricity.
That figure “is clearly wrong,” says co-founder Jamie Chivers. Of the 100 city slums they work in, only “one or two” are on the grid. A survey of their work area found 3,400 families without power in a six-mile radius. And their urban market is a booming one.
Last week, India’s Ministry of Housing released a “Slum Census” of 2011, the most comprehensive government estimation since 2000. One in six urban Indians, about 64 million people, live in slums — cramped quarters of 20 households or more in “unhygienic conditions.” (The fraction, below earlier projections of 27.5 percent, prompted the housing secretary to issue the bizarre verdict that the data “comes as a pleasant surprise.”)
The report predicted the total Indian slum population would topple 104 million by 2017. Many will clamor to get onto the grid, one India clearly cannot stretch beyond its existing users. The colossal blackout this past summer was followed by persistent shortages in several states.
Slowly, the government has begun pushing alternatives. In the winter, three states unveiled sizable solar installation plans. Rooftop solar, whose unit cost in India has dipped below diesel and natural gas, can grow quickly, from 1,000 megawatts to 12,500 in four years, according to a recent report from the consultancy KPMG.
Experiments are cropping up across the country. In Ahmedabad, a company recently started offering water “ATMs”: stands that dispense drinking water treated with solar power.
Simpa Networks, another Bangalore startup, is trying to replicate the success of India’s mobile revolution. Co-founder Michael MacHarg recalls their first question: “Why has that grown so rapidly?” The answer is the payment model, which allows phone owners to pay as they go, in manageable increments. Since 2011, Simpa has sold over 100 solar PV units to households across the state using a similar system. “We’re looking to be the first electricity that a family has,” explains MacHarg.
While Simpa’s focus is primarily on the unplugged rural, its first customers were a group of eight migrant families in Bangalore who make the small, cheap cricket bats swung in every Indian alley.
Arun has sold units to 13 families in a similar settlement, an established slum, tucked behind railway tracks, that makes bangles. One of the panels, tied to the tarp roof, has a thick rope through its center, blocking the sun. Another has gathered considerable dust.
But most panel owners appeared more prepared to reap the benefits. Standing in the compact home of her family of four, Amruti, an early customer, says the solar light allows her work at night and finish four times as many ornamental goods. She used to rely on squat wax candles for light.
“It’s a nice idea — the poor leap-frogging the rich,” says Chivers of Pollinate Energy. Without prior home energy, slum residents are poised to do what the West envies: kick fossil fuel habits and conserve. “They’re much more resource-efficient than the rest of us,” he says. “That’s where solar works really well.”
It’s a little after sundown, and Arun Kumar is hawking his wares in the neighborhoodfor the first time. He’s selling a light, just a small half-circle tied to a three-inch-wide solar panel. An older man tests it in his home, a tiny hut of tarp and tin built like the 30 others in this slum settlement on the far north side of Bangalore. A kerosene lamp flickers inside.
At a second home, Arun wields his 1,600-rupee ($29.48) gizmo for a woman seated with nine children. He points out the small cellphone charger in the light’s rear. The woman turns inside, pulling out her phone to consult her husband.
She is one of millions in India and worldwide in a surreal contemporary fix: She owns a cell phone, but her home has no toilet or power line. The country’s mobile users mushroomed in a few short years, reaching some 900 million. Cheap phones have not suddenly lifted owners out of poverty. But they have given them access to resources and economic ladders once unreachable.
Mark BergenPollinate Energy’s solar light.
Arun fails to sell any here, yet he will return tomorrow. The hyperactive 20-year-old is a salesman for Pollinate Energy, a social enterprise NGO that has, in the past five months, sold 400 private solar systems to slum dwellers in north Bangalore. Pollinate is one of a growing number of companies betting on “leapfrog” technology designed to help the urban poor in developing nations to skip right over fossil fuels for electricity.
On their first visit to a slum, the staff never make a sale, explains co-founder Monique Alfris. Residents are understandably skeptical of consumer goods in India. Though the panels pay for themselves in about six months, those making $3 to $4 a day are reluctant to put down the 400-rupee ($7.47) installment plan payments.
And many are transitory, like the migrant construction laborers Arun visited, nervous of investing on land they could be booted from.
When the Pollinate Energy founders arrived from Sydney, they expected urban communities to prep them for rural markets, where far more people lack power. By some accounts, Bangalore was the second Asian city, after Tokyo, to be electrified. According to estimates, only 20,000 slum dwellers here lack electricity.
That figure “is clearly wrong,” says co-founder Jamie Chivers. Of the 100 city slums they work in, only “one or two” are on the grid. A survey of their work area found 3,400 families without power in a six-mile radius. And their urban market is a booming one.
Last week, India’s Ministry of Housing released a “Slum Census” of 2011, the most comprehensive government estimation since 2000. One in six urban Indians, about 64 million people, live in slums — cramped quarters of 20 households or more in “unhygienic conditions.” (The fraction, below earlier projections of 27.5 percent, prompted the housing secretary to issue the bizarre verdict that the data “comes as a pleasant surprise.”)
The report predicted the total Indian slum population would topple 104 million by 2017. Many will clamor to get onto the grid, one India clearly cannot stretch beyond its existing users. The colossal blackout this past summer was followed by persistent shortages in several states.
Slowly, the government has begun pushing alternatives. In the winter, three states unveiled sizable solar installation plans. Rooftop solar, whose unit cost in India has dipped below diesel and natural gas, can grow quickly, from 1,000 megawatts to 12,500 in four years, according to a recent report from the consultancy KPMG.
Experiments are cropping up across the country. In Ahmedabad, a company recently started offering water “ATMs”: stands that dispense drinking water treated with solar power.
Simpa Networks, another Bangalore startup, is trying to replicate the success of India’s mobile revolution. Co-founder Michael MacHarg recalls their first question: “Why has that grown so rapidly?” The answer is the payment model, which allows phone owners to pay as they go, in manageable increments. Since 2011, Simpa has sold over 100 solar PV units to households across the state using a similar system. “We’re looking to be the first electricity that a family has,” explains MacHarg.
While Simpa’s focus is primarily on the unplugged rural, its first customers were a group of eight migrant families in Bangalore who make the small, cheap cricket bats swung in every Indian alley.
Arun has sold units to 13 families in a similar settlement, an established slum, tucked behind railway tracks, that makes bangles. One of the panels, tied to the tarp roof, has a thick rope through its center, blocking the sun. Another has gathered considerable dust.
But most panel owners appeared more prepared to reap the benefits. Standing in the compact home of her family of four, Amruti, an early customer, says the solar light allows her work at night and finish four times as many ornamental goods. She used to rely on squat wax candles for light.
“It’s a nice idea — the poor leap-frogging the rich,” says Chivers of Pollinate Energy. Without prior home energy, slum residents are poised to do what the West envies: kick fossil fuel habits and conserve. “They’re much more resource-efficient than the rest of us,” he says. “That’s where solar works really well.”
It’s a little after sundown, and Arun Kumar is hawking his wares in the neighborhoodfor the first time. He’s selling a light, just a small half-circle tied to a three-inch-wide solar panel. An older man tests it in his home, a tiny hut of tarp and tin built like the 30 others in this slum settlement on the far north side of Bangalore. A kerosene lamp flickers inside.
At a second home, Arun wields his 1,600-rupee ($29.48) gizmo for a woman seated with nine children. He points out the small cellphone charger in the light’s rear. The woman turns inside, pulling out her phone to consult her husband.
She is one of millions in India and worldwide in a surreal contemporary fix: She owns a cell phone, but her home has no toilet or power line. The country’s mobile users mushroomed in a few short years, reaching some 900 million. Cheap phones have not suddenly lifted owners out of poverty. But they have given them access to resources and economic ladders once unreachable.
Mark BergenPollinate Energy’s solar light.
Arun fails to sell any here, yet he will return tomorrow. The hyperactive 20-year-old is a salesman for Pollinate Energy, a social enterprise NGO that has, in the past five months, sold 400 private solar systems to slum dwellers in north Bangalore. Pollinate is one of a growing number of companies betting on “leapfrog” technology designed to help the urban poor in developing nations to skip right over fossil fuels for electricity.
On their first visit to a slum, the staff never make a sale, explains co-founder Monique Alfris. Residents are understandably skeptical of consumer goods in India. Though the panels pay for themselves in about six months, those making $3 to $4 a day are reluctant to put down the 400-rupee ($7.47) installment plan payments.
And many are transitory, like the migrant construction laborers Arun visited, nervous of investing on land they could be booted from.
When the Pollinate Energy founders arrived from Sydney, they expected urban communities to prep them for rural markets, where far more people lack power. By some accounts, Bangalore was the second Asian city, after Tokyo, to be electrified. According to estimates, only 20,000 slum dwellers here lack electricity.
That figure “is clearly wrong,” says co-founder Jamie Chivers. Of the 100 city slums they work in, only “one or two” are on the grid. A survey of their work area found 3,400 families without power in a six-mile radius. And their urban market is a booming one.
Last week, India’s Ministry of Housing released a “Slum Census” of 2011, the most comprehensive government estimation since 2000. One in six urban Indians, about 64 million people, live in slums — cramped quarters of 20 households or more in “unhygienic conditions.” (The fraction, below earlier projections of 27.5 percent, prompted the housing secretary to issue the bizarre verdict that the data “comes as a pleasant surprise.”)
The report predicted the total Indian slum population would topple 104 million by 2017. Many will clamor to get onto the grid, one India clearly cannot stretch beyond its existing users. The colossal blackout this past summer was followed by persistent shortages in several states.
Slowly, the government has begun pushing alternatives. In the winter, three states unveiled sizable solar installation plans. Rooftop solar, whose unit cost in India has dipped below diesel and natural gas, can grow quickly, from 1,000 megawatts to 12,500 in four years, according to a recent report from the consultancy KPMG.
Experiments are cropping up across the country. In Ahmedabad, a company recently started offering water “ATMs”: stands that dispense drinking water treated with solar power.
Simpa Networks, another Bangalore startup, is trying to replicate the success of India’s mobile revolution. Co-founder Michael MacHarg recalls their first question: “Why has that grown so rapidly?” The answer is the payment model, which allows phone owners to pay as they go, in manageable increments. Since 2011, Simpa has sold over 100 solar PV units to households across the state using a similar system. “We’re looking to be the first electricity that a family has,” explains MacHarg.
While Simpa’s focus is primarily on the unplugged rural, its first customers were a group of eight migrant families in Bangalore who make the small, cheap cricket bats swung in every Indian alley.
Arun has sold units to 13 families in a similar settlement, an established slum, tucked behind railway tracks, that makes bangles. One of the panels, tied to the tarp roof, has a thick rope through its center, blocking the sun. Another has gathered considerable dust.
But most panel owners appeared more prepared to reap the benefits. Standing in the compact home of her family of four, Amruti, an early customer, says the solar light allows her work at night and finish four times as many ornamental goods. She used to rely on squat wax candles for light.
“It’s a nice idea — the poor leap-frogging the rich,” says Chivers of Pollinate Energy. Without prior home energy, slum residents are poised to do what the West envies: kick fossil fuel habits and conserve. “They’re much more resource-efficient than the rest of us,” he says. “That’s where solar works really well.”
I wrote a (rather heady) post this morning about the move from centralized to distributed energy systems. Thanks to John Farrell — who, by the way, is the guru of distributed energy — I just came across a great example of how it’s beginning to happen.
NRG Energy is a huge provider of power to U.S. utilities, the biggest single provider, actually, with a large fleet of enormous fossil fuel plants. But now it’s getting into a different business. NRG has started selling solar panels directly to homeowners. And it intends to couple those solar systems with fuel cells and micro-turbines that can generate power from natural gas, to serve as backup when the sun isn’t shining.
What happens then? NRG CEO David Crane puts it this way: “The individual homeowner should be able to tie a machine to their natural gas line and tie that with solar on the roof and suddenly they can say to the transmission-distribution company, ‘Disconnect that line.’” Put more simply, consumers will realize “they don’t need the power industry at all.”
Think about that! For the first time since the power industry was created in the late 1800s, consumers will need no intermediary between them and their electricity. Says Jim Rogers, CEO of utility giant Duke Energy, “It is obviously a potential threat to us over the long term.”
Of course NRG is not alone. Tons of companies are springing up lately to sell or lease micropower solutions directly to customers. And as those customers generate more of their own power, and hook up with other members of their community who are doing the same through microgrids, utilities will increasingly be pushed out of the picture.
That’s a big, big deal. It’s just beginning now, just in its larval stages, but the fact that the biggest utility power provider in the country is getting into the game is a clear signal that it’s real. We live in interesting times.
Suddenly everyone knows about Germany’s solar power dominance because Fox Newsheads made an ass of themselves, suggesting that the country is a sunny, tropical paradise. Most media folks have figured out that there are some monster differences in policy (e.g. a feed-in tariff), but then latch on to the “Germans pay a lot extra” meme. Germans do, and are perfectly happy with it, but that’s still not the story.
The real reason Germany dominates in solar (and wind) is their commitment to democratizing energy.
Half of their renewable power is owned by ordinary Germans, because that wonky sounding feed-in tariff (often known as a CLEAN Contract Program in America) makes it ridiculously simple and safe for someone to park their money in generating solar electricity on their roof instead of making pennies in interest at the bank.
It also makes their “energy change” movement politically bulletproof. Germans aren’t tree-hugging wackos giving up double mochas for wind turbines, they are investing by the tens of thousand in a clean energy future that is putting money back in their pockets and creating well over 300,000 new jobs (at last count). Their policy makes solar cost half as much to install as it does in America, where the free market’s red tape can’t compete with their “socialist” efficiency.
Fox News’ gaffe about sunshine helps others paper over the real tragedy of American energy policy. In a country founded on the concept of self-reliance (goodbye, tea imports!), we finance clean energy with tax credits that make wind and solar reliant on Wall Street instead of Main Street. We largely preclude participation by the ordinary citizen unless they give up ownership of their renewable energy system to a leasing company. We make clean energy a complicated alternative to business as usual, while the cloudy, windless Germans make the energy system of the future by making it stupid easy and financially rewarding.
I’m all for pounding the faithless fools of Fox, but let’s learn the real secret to German energy engineering and start making democratic energy in America.
Over time I’ve grown more and more suspicious of stories about breakthrough technologies. I always think back to those heady days of EEStor, the guys who were going to make a battery that would revolutionize grid storage and electric cars alike. “EEStor CEO says game-changing energy storage device coming by 2010”! As you may have noticed, 2010 came and went and the game remains unchanged.
All of which is to say, regarding the post to follow: caveat lector.
Still, this looks very, very cool.
CleanTechnica has an exclusive on a new solar technology that claims to be able to produce power with a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of 8¢/kWh. That is mind-boggling, “two-thirds the price of retail electricity and over 3 times cheaper than current solar technology.” If the claim proves to be true (and a lot can happen between prototype and mass manufacturing), it could revolutionize the solar industry.
The company is called V3Solar (formerly Solarphasec) and its product, the Spin Cell, ingeniously solves two big problems facing solar PV.
First, most solar panels are flat, which means they miss most of the sunlight most of the time. They only briefly face direct sunlight, unless expensive tracking systems are added. The Spin Cell is a cone:
The conical shape catches the sun over the course of its entire arc through the sky, along every axis. It’s built-in tracking.
The second problem: Solar panels produce much more energy if sunlight is concentrated by a lens before it hits the solar cell; however, concentrating the light also creates immense amounts of heat, which means that concentrating solar panels (CPV) require expensive, specialized, heat-resistant solar cell materials.
The Spin Cell concentrates sunlight on plain old (cheap) silicon PV, but keeps it cool by spinning it.
It’s just so damn clever.
Here’s a video that explains:
The company’s technology claims have been confirmed by a technical review commissioned from independent consultant Bill Rever. As to the 8¢/kWh cost claim, the company told CleanTechnica, “We think we can go below that, but we want to stay conservative.” Hitting it, or close to it, could shake up the energy world. Here’s a chart comparing LCOE for various power sources:
The company’s aim is to capture 3 percent of the energy market. For context, CleanTechnica notes that “all solar power installed in the U.S. to date currently accounts for about 0.5-1% of the energy market.” More than tripling the size of the U.S. solar market is … well, not short on ambition.
Most impressively, to me, the company tells CleanTechnica that it already has over 4 GW of requests for orders. There is 7 GW of installed solar in the U.S., total.
There’s lots, lots more on the technology over on CleanTechnica, if you want to dig in.
To me, the most exciting implications of the technology (again, if it proves out) are for distributed energy. Spin Cells are only a meter across and quite aesthetically appealing. You could carpet a city in these. Like this:
Maybe this tech or this company will peter out before reaching mass-market scale. But advances in solar technology are coming faster and faster. (Small, distributed energy technologies are inherently more prone to innovation than large, capital-intensive energy technologies.) Sooner or later, solar will be woven seamlessly into the fabric of our lives. Our built environment will harvest energy as a matter of course (from the sun, from the wind, from waste), store it effectively, and use it wisely. Power harvesting and power management will be ubiquitous; power imported from large, distant, polluting power plants over long-distance transmission lines will come to be seen as back-up, a necessary evil. And perhaps, someday, an unnecessary one.
Energeiaworks/San Francisco, CA
The Spin Cell concentrates sunlight on plain old (cheap) silicon PV, but keeps it cool by spinning it.
