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I attended the ASES conference in Buffalo, NY last
week. The tone was much less exuberant than last year’s conference in
San Diego when oil prices were still rising ~$1/day. A lot has improved
for the solar industry over the last year—in terms of actual
legislation passed, the pace of solar installations in states like
California, and the tone of the new administration which has put
renewable energy front and center of the economic recovery—but the
credit crisis has knocked everyone on the back heel.
The
challenge we face is how to build the solar industry fast enough to
disrupt the fossil fuel industry and save the planet was well described
by Denis Hayes’s keynote address. We have a lot of work to do, and it’s mostly a matter of buckling down and doing it.
To
that end, it seems that Solar Thermal (a.k.a. hot water) was more
prominently featured than in past conferences. (Plus there was a
distinct lack of PV panel manufactures at the exhibit hall, Day4 was
the only one from North America.) Given the higher efficiency of solar
thermal (50%+ vs 15%+ for PV) and lower cost, it offers a fast payback
and I’m happy to see the resurgence. Any industry that uses hot water
daily would do well to consider using solar to heat, or pre-heat, their
water. Systems are much better engineered than folks that lived through
the 80s might remember. Solar thermal is the renewable investment with
efficiency type returns (20%+/yr).
Unfortunately the
plenary/keynote speaker line up was not as strong as in past years that
I’ve attended the conference. The opening talks sounded like corporate
infomercials that were a bit light on the info. Jigar Shah, founder of
SunEdison gave a provocative talk entitled “We [solar] got everything but respect”
in which he claimed that solar is already cheaper than new coal plants.
Jigar Shah points to the habit of [captured?] regulators raising rates
(by up to 18% in some cases) to cover the cost of new coal
plants—something they obviously would not have to do if new coal were
as cheap as we are led to believe. Hayes’ address as mentioned provided
a solid, important outlook, but was overly scolding and gloomy in my
view; like “An Inconvenient Truth” without the optimism—see the movie
to get the joke.
Thursday’s plenary(?) was a major yawn fest,
unless you find NYSERDA and LIPA fascinating--that was if you were
awake enough to figure out where they hid the session…not everyone did
and I almost envy them. The sole noteworthy tidbit that I got came from
LIPA’s talk, was that LIPA plans to install 50MW of solar this year and
wants another 50MW next year—although the speaker really buried the
lead on this story. A NY utility installing 50-100MW is both
significant and positive and it is light years ahead of IL where our
big news is a single 10MW solar plant announced a couple weeks ago for
the same time frame.
Finally the emerging architecture session
which generally provides an inspiring array of futuristic eye-candy,
was technically a re-emerging architecture session minus the
inspiration and the eye-candy. The gray hairs of the passive solar
movement confirmed that the DOE (dept. of energy) has an institutional
memory with a 3 year half life. In plain English, they can remember
about 10% of what they knew 10 years ago and 1% of what they knew 20
years ago. So the guys that did a lot of work for/with the DOE 30+
years ago, are having to remind the DOE to use the passive solar
performance data that the DOE itself collected (but can’t remember) in
today’s new whiz-bang DOE passive solar performance databases.
Obviously
the gray hairs of passive solar find this a distressing development,
and used their hour (after the requisite ½ hour of self congratulatory
backslapping and name dropping) to try to educate the audience on their
collective wisdom. Unfortunately the session wasn’t even as well
organized as I’m making it sound. These guys know what we need to be
doing in terms of sustainable architecture and have spent their lives
doing it; each has important views and ideas and info about what does
or does not work and why…and some of that even came through in the
re-emerging architecture session. I hope it was enough, but from the
audience questions and comments, I have my doubts.
Perhaps
I’ve been spoiled by some of the excellent talks (content: Yogi Goswami
in 2005; inspirational: Van Jones in 2008—come back!) I’ve heard at
prior conferences.
