June 29, 2012 at 8:50 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
In the future, the state of New York won’t be known only for its world-famous city and picturesque northern landscape, rather it may soon also be known for its renewable energy projects. Two interesting developments this week should start to attract developers of larger solar and wind power projects to various regions in the state.
In April, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the NY-Sun Initiative, a plan that brought together the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), and the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to help develop and fund a solar energy expansion plan. The goal is to double the amount of non-ultility owned solar power installed annually in New York, and quadruple that amount by 2013.
Yesterday, LIPA announced a CLEAN solar initiative, otherwise known as a feed-in tariff to spur up to 50 MW of commercial and large-scale solar projects in its region over the next two years. Under the program, LIPA will purchase all of the energy generated by local solar projects at a fixed-rate of 22 cents per kilowatt-hour for 20 years. Projects must be at least 50 kilowatts (kW) in size so residential systems won’t qualify. LIPA said that it expects the largest projects to be in the 3-MW range. The program is capped at 50 MW.
Notably, the state of New York recognized that balance of systems (BOS) costs must be reduced in order for solar to be competitive. As part of the NY-Sun initiative, the state created the NY-Sun BOS initiative, which will work with private and public partners across New York State to try to implement statewide standardization and streamlining of the procedures for permitting and interconnection, and development and training.
On the topic of permitting, the NY Public Service Commission (PSC) has just completed the comment period for rulemaking on the somewhat controversial “Article 10.” In a nutshell (and straight from the PSC website), “Article 10 provides for the siting review of new and repowered or modified major electric generating facilities in New York State by the Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment (Siting Board) in a unified proceeding instead of requiring a developer or owner of such a facility to apply for numerous state and local permits.” New projects must be at least 25 MW in size to qualify for state siting board review.
For renewable energy, Article 10 specifically addresses wind farm siting and permitting, which often faces challenging and aggressive local opposition. Essentially it gives the state the ability to approve wind farms and takes some of the oversight from local governments. Major industry players like Iberdrola and EDP Renewables are strongly in favor of the measure.
As you might imagine, there are opponents to the article as well. Resident Mary Kay Barton said, “what’s at stake is our long-held, constitutional right to ‘home rule’ — the right to decide for ourselves what we want our communities to look like 20, 40, and 60 years down the road,” in an op-ed she wrote for The Daily News.
Local towns and municipalities are fearful of having less oversight in what is built within their borders. The PSC will make a final determination on rulemaking for Article 10 sometime this summer.
Like it or not, New York State is embracing renewables in a big way – encouraging the development of solar and big wind. Our readers have supported the state in its initiatives so far. Last February, the 32-MW solar farm at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island was selected at the Readers’ Choice Project of the Year.
Perhaps Sinatra was right about New York. For renewables, “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” We’ll see.
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2012/06/new-york-state-encouraging-big-renewables?cmpid=rss
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 7:56 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
The day’s news left a trail of unemployment and unmet expectations. And the negative headlines generated by Abound Solar and Schott Solar also served to heighten the conversation about America’s resolve and ability to build a solar manufacturing industry that can compete with China.
On Thursday, The Department of Energy announced that one of its star companies, Abound Solar, would close its doors because the thin-film maker couldn’t compete with low-cost Chinese crystalline silicon panels. The company later said that with the pending bankruptcy, it would eliminate about 125 jobs.
The company’s real ambitions, and its stated future, were in rural Indiana, where the company allocated a significant portion of its $400 million DOE loan guarantee to take over an abandoned auto industry manufacturing plant. Abound was going to reinvigorate the struggling community — which has faced unemployment of more than 10 percent — with about 1,000 high paying manufacturing jobs.
Now, that community — formerly dependent on the health of the auto industry — has another empty manufacturing facility to fill and a likely deepening skepticism that America can compete with the Chinese in solar manufacturing.
More than 1,000 miles away in Albuquerque, about 200 employees at Schott’s American flagship manufacturing operation received word that they would be losing their jobs as well.
Two Approaches
The two closures are different in many respects. Abound produced cadmium telluride panels that it hoped would be able to compete directly with American company First Solar. But unlike the established thin-film leader, it would make the product solely in the U.S. That was the driving reason why the company received a DOE loan guarantee almost as large as the one received by now-bankrupt Solyndra.
Schott, meanwhile, represented another avenue to building a large-scale base in the U.S., and that was to lure established international players that could take advantage of a facility’s location near the end market. That has made the Southwest prime territory to attract these types of companies.
The American wind industry has built a formidable manufacturing base on this premise. But the mammoth components that go into wind turbines translate into high shipping costs. The relatively lightweight components in solar mean reduced shipping costs don’t cut enough off the final price to be able to compete with Chinese panels, even after accounting for the new dumping tariffs.
DOE Impact
Abound started to pull back on its ambitious plans just as Solyndra bankruptcy and ensuing House investigation was starting to unfold. Abound drew down $70 million of the $400 loan guarantee — all for the expansion of its Colorado facility — and the DOE estimates taxpayers will ultimately be on the hook for about $30 million once assets are sold.
The bankruptcy will surely increase pressure on the only two remaining DOE loan guarantee recipients that received backing specifically to boost American solar manufacturing. One is 1366 Technologies, a Boston-area company that promises to significantly cut solar costs through its innovative wafer and cell manufacturing processes. The DOE closed on a $150 loan guarantee with the company in September.
The other is SoloPower, an Oregon-based thin-film manufacturer currently building a new plant that will help it ramp up productions of its lightweight, flexible CIGS panels. The company expects the plant to have 100 employees by the end of the year, and ultimately as many as 450 workers once it reaches 400-megawatt (MW) capacity within the next few years. But CIGS technology, while promising, has failed to gain much of the market, and analysts predict that only a handful of companies will be able to survive.
That has many within the industry questioning the legacy of the loan guarantee program. Much of DOE’s $35 billion commitment went to help solar generation projects grow to utility-scale. To do this, it bet on giant developments like Agua Caliente, a 290-MW facility currently under construction in Arizona. But these large projects came with power purchase agreements, which made them relatively safe bets for the DOE.
Moving Beyond Manufacturing Loans
The DOE’s production gambles made under the loan guarantee program, meanwhile, will certainly not be looked on as favorably, and they are certain to become campaign fodder during the coming general election.
Political leaders and the industry as a whole must start to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that if America is to really turn the tide and wrestle solar manufacturing dominance away from China, it will have to move beyond strong rhetoric, sweeping tariffs and selective investments. It’s becoming clear that the combined strategy isn’t capable of overcoming powerful market forces either in America or in the more established markets of Europe.
Rather, the current administration — or future administrations — need to look long-term if they’re hoping to build a sustainable manufacturing base. That means less big ticket funding to build manufacturing operations for single companies, and much more research and development funding. Independent research groups and government programs like the SunShot Initiative, which also comes out of the DOE, spread the wealth to promote promising technologies, not necessarily companies. This allows businesses to grow naturally and to avoid the types of rapid scale-ups that can lead to the large-scale layoffs we’ve seen with Solyndra and now Abound.
The benefits won’t necessarily be apparent within one presidential term. But a more robust commitment to invest in RD is the only way America can build a bottom-up manufacturing chain that can beat foreign competitors on both cost and quality and attract the long-term confidence of investors and taxpayers.
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/two-closures-illustrate-the-need-to-chart-a-new-course-for-solar?cmpid=rss
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 7:24 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
John Lennon wrote that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Apparently, the same is true of energy efficiency. Energy savings happen when we’re busy doing other things — Internet-based things specifically.
We use email, bank online and download music not to save energy, but to make life easier and more interesting. Energy efficiency is a happy byproduct.
What online pursuits serve up the most energy savings in day-to-day life?
The Global e-Sustainability Initiative, or GeSI, recently commissioned the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) and the Yankee Group to answer this question. The study, “Measuring the Energy Reduction Impact of Selected Broadband-Enabled Activities within Households.” looked at eight broadband-related activities in the US, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France: telecommuting, Internet news, online banking, e-commerce, music and video downloads or streaming, e-education, digital photography, and e-mail.
Telecommuting provides the greatest energy savings among the activities (83 to 86 percent). From an energy efficiency perspective, it’s better to log-on to the office than drive there. Reading the news online and participating in e-education offered the least energy savings. Consumers tend to undertake these activities to complement, not replace, the old-fashion way of doing things. They still read the newspaper and travel to classes, so offset the savings gained by the online activity.
As telecommuting expands, and more of our daily routine takes place online, these eight activities could cut energy use by about two percent or the equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil annually. Not bad, but still small compared with the savings offered by a series of ‘scale’ activities: smart grid, manufacturing and building upgrades, electric cars, combined heat and power.
So while it’s nice that we inadvertently save energy, say by banking online, it won’t revolutionize our energy picture. But another recent report by the ACEEE shows what might: Intelligent efficiency.
Think systems or cities instead of light bulbs or refrigerators. That’s intelligent efficiency. The US could reduce its energy use by as much as 22 percent by focusing more on system rather than gadget efficiency, says the report “A Defining Framework for Intelligent Efficiency.”
“This is not your father’s device-driven approach to energy efficiency,” said R. Neal Elliott, ACEEE associate director for research. “A large portion of our past efficiency gains came from improvements in individual products, appliances, and equipment, such as light bulbs, electric motors, or cars and trucks. And while device-level technology improvements will continue to play an important role, looking ahead we must take a systems-based approach to dramatically scale up energy efficiency to meet our future energy challenges. Through intelligent efficiency, utility systems, interconnected cities, transportation systems, and communications networks can become the new normal across the United States and will undergird national and regional economies that, even in the face of increasingly scarce resources, grow and thrive.”
ACEEE cites several examples of intelligent efficiency already in the works. Among them is Envision Charlotte, an attempt to reduce energy use in city buildings through a partnership of Duke Energy, Cisco, and Verizon. Interactive video monitors in the lobbies of downtown office buildings display the collective energy used, in near real time, by buildings in the core of the North Carolina city. People pass by the monitors and see the easily readable data, learn energy efficiency ideas, and hear about success stories. They become more conscious of energy through this repeated exposure and their behavior changes — that’s the theory. Duke Energy expects the project to reduce electricity usage 20 percent by 2016 in uptown Charlotte’s business community.
One important point here. None of this – our online household activities or intelligent efficiency – excludes a tried-and-true approach to save energy: utility sponsored programs. A third recent study by ACEEE (Yes, this is a productive organization.) finds that utilities increased energy efficiency budgets four fold in a decade, from $1.1 billion in 2000 to $4.6 billion in 2010. Often when utilities save energy rather than buy it, it turns out to be the cheapest approach.
“The concept of energy efficiency as a utility resource is really very simple,” said Marty Kushler, ACEEE senior fellow and co-author of the report, ‘Three Decades and Counting: A Historical Review and Current Assessment of Electric Utility Energy Efficiency Activity in the States.’ “To keep an electric system in balance, you can either add supply resources or reduce customer demand. Utilities, regulators, and policymakers have increasingly come to realize that it is far cheaper to reduce demand through energy efficiency programs than it is to construct, fuel, and operate additional electric generating plants.”
The report found that energy efficiency remains the lowest cost energy resource available to utilities by a wide margin. Saving electricity through efficiency is about one-third the cost of generating it from a power plant.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that states have set aggressive energy efficiency goals; no states are scaling back. Instead, “the momentum is toward growth across the map,” says the utility report.
Sometimes we save energy inadvertently, and sometimes by design. Whichever, it is clear that our digital economy, combined with our increasing understanding of the programs and behaviors that lead to energy savings, create a clear path for growth in energy efficiency.
Read more articles by Elisa Wood at RealEnergyWriters.com.
Image: Imagine via Shutterstock
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2012/06/energy-efficiency-without-trying-and-with?cmpid=rss
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 7:00 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
The Mini Home’s exterior materials are comprised of an Iverit façade and a bitumen roof while the floor is laid with hardwood panels. All of the prefabricated modules and add ons, including a compact kitchen and bath module, heater and chimney, storage module and a 12V solar power kit are delivered to the site flatpacked.
A concrete foundation is laid and the mini home is usually constructed within two days. Albeit small, the home is suitable for all weather conditions and features extraordinary attention to detail. Trimless windows and neat organization of the electrical feeds ensures that living small can also mean living large! The Mini House follows on the heels of other tiny homes like Michelle de la Vega’s impressive renovation, signaling a powerful shift to a new way of life.
+ Jonas Wagell
print
email thisemail
Article source: http://inhabitat.com/the-mini-house-by-jonas-wagell-is-a-modern-prefab-that-goes-up-in-two-days/
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 7:00 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
The Mini Home’s exterior materials are comprised of an Iverit façade and a bitumen roof while the floor is laid with hardwood panels. All of the prefabricated modules and add ons, including a compact kitchen and bath module, heater and chimney, storage module and a 12V solar power kit are delivered to the site flatpacked.
A concrete foundation is laid and the mini home is usually constructed within two days. Albeit small, the home is suitable for all weather conditions and features extraordinary attention to detail. Trimless windows and neat organization of the electrical feeds ensures that living small can also mean living large! The Mini House follows on the heels of other tiny homes like Michelle de la Vega’s impressive renovation, signaling a powerful shift to a new way of life.
+ Jonas Wagell
print
email thisemail
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 6:45 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
The government initiative will require utilities to buy power from renewable energy providers at premium prices under so-called feed-in tariffs. As a result, investment in solar, wind and other forms of clean energy may jump to $17.1 billion from $8.6 billion in 2011, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates.
“The level of interest in clean energy is at its highest ever,” Yugo Nakamura, an analyst at New Energy Finance said. “The national government has shown strong commitment to renewables by setting generous feed-in tariff rates.”
The tariffs are part of efforts to cut Japan’s dependence on nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster last year, which forced the closure of all reactors in the country for safety checks. They also aim to curb a surge in imports of fossil fuels to switch on non-nuclear plants that cost utilities an additional 2.3 trillion yen ($29 billion) in the year ended March 2012 and pushed the country into a trade deficit for the first time since 1980.
Industry researchers and business lobby groups say the generosity of the subsidy, which is paid for by consumers in higher electricity bills, will require frequent reviews to prevent a boom and bust scenario that played out in Europe.
Scaling Back
Germany, Italy, Spain, France and the U.K. are scaling back feed-in tariffs for solar energy after a bigger than expected boom in installations made the subsidies unsustainable.
Japan should consider cutting solar tariffs every month or two, setting a cap on installations and matching tariffs with international levels, said Kenji Asano, a researcher who studies renewable energy at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Tokyo.
“It is important not to introduce too much solar power,” Asano said. Geothermal power is the most ideal source of clean energy for Japan, he said.
The earthquake and tsunami that crippled the station at Fukushima last year caused radiation leaks, mass evacuations and power shortages, splitting politicians and industry leaders about the future of atomic energy.
New Plan
Noda on June 16 approved restarting two reactors. No timetable has been set for restarting any of the country’s 48 other reactors offline.
The government in Tokyo is debating long-term policies on where it will derive power, with a final decision due in August.
“The new energy blue print will paint an ambitious plan to increase power supply from renewables from 10 percent in 2010 to 25-35 percent by 2030,” BNEF said in a report.
For solar, the subsidized rate utilities pay is 42 yen (53 cents) a kilowatt-hour for 20 years, about triple the rate industry users pay for conventionally-generated power. Wind gets 23.1 yen per kilowatt-hour for 20 years. The incentives also cover biomass, geothermal and small hydroelectric plants.
“There should be a regular review of the program including the possibility of scrapping the program,” Keidanren, Japan’s most powerful business lobby, said on June 1 in reference to the feed-in tariffs.
Softbank, Japan’s third largest mobile phone company, will begin operations at a 2.1 megawatt-facility in Kyoto prefecture and a 2.4-megawatt station in Gunma July 1. It plans to build several plants with more than 200 megawatts of solar capacity, according to the company’s renewable energy unit SB Energy Corp.
“We are getting more and more inquiries,” said Yasushi Yamamoto, a spokesman for GS Yuasa, which makes power conditioners that convert direct current from solar panels into alternating current suitable for the power grid. “We are preparing to produce about twice as much as last year.”
Worker Shortage
Solar projects could be delayed by shortages of workers and power conditioners, Takashi Watanabe, who led research on feed- in tariffs for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Tokyo, said in a June 18 report. There are a limited number of manufacturers of power conditioners used in large-scale projects and delivery is three to six months, the note said.
The majority of solar projects will begin in the second half of the fiscal year, between October and March, the Goldman report said.
“There could be a shortage of workers” because work on other projects that depend on government funding hits peak between January and March, the Goldman Sachs analysts said.
The current tariffs will be good until March 31, 2013.
The industry minister will set the terms and rates paid each year, or every six months if necessary. Costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of surcharges, which the government estimates will total 87 yen ($1.10) a month for average households.
“Feed-in tariff is the first step,” said BNEF’s Nakamura. “But that is not enough,” he said, adding that the cost of clean energy must decline, deregulation is needed and grid infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
“Geothermal has the potential if Japan pushes through deregulation,” Asano said. “It is good for Japan because it is not intermittent” like power from solar and wind.
Copyright 2012 Bloomberg
Image: Money via Shutterstock
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/japan-renewable-energy-investments-may-double-as-incentives-start?cmpid=rss
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 6:31 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
Talk about the importance of microgrids has reached a fever pitch in recent years. Many have discussed the need for industrial campuses, military bases, universities, and many other critical loads to operate when isolated from the utility grid — or, in other words, as a microgrid. Is this some fancy new smart grid concept? Hardly. A microgrid is essentially any isolated electrical system that has its own generation source, and they’ve been in existence practically since we began using electricity as an energy source. The first true microrgrids were remote, built for cities or businesses that didn’t have an economical way to tie into the nearest utility system. Oil refining, mining, lumber and other business brought generators on site to provide the power they needed to operate.
“Quasi” microgrids — where loads use utility generation as their primary source of electricity, but also have local back-up generation sources if there’s a disruption in their utility service — are not a new concept, either. They emerged as certain load types (think hospitals, airports, critical manufacturing processes, and more) grew very dependent on constant energy to operate. These facilities typically brought in two different utility sources of power to assure that if one failed, the other could be used as a back-up. Onsite generation was used as an emergency backup in case of a loss in both utility sources.
So…if microgrids have been around for decades, why are they such a hot topic today?
The difference is advancements in renewable energy generation and energy storage. Renewable energy generation has only recently have become efficient enough to provide the volume of power that facilities demand. With this increase in efficiency, it’s become practical to use renewable energy generation as a back-up, or even primary, source of generation for important loads. Renewable energy is also becoming more reliable because new battery-based stored energy systems ensure the microgrid can meet demand when production of intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar energy is low.
This combination has drawn the attention of many operators of critical facilities, because the energy source holds the potential to be cheap, secure, readily available, and green. The U.S. military, for one, sees potential in these new energy technologies, as do electricity users ranging from data centers to universities. Though industry continues to advance these technologies, they are making their way into real-world microgrid applications. SC recently worked on a microgrid project at the Santa Rita Jail in California where both renewables and battery-based storage are applied.
What do you think of the current state of microgrids? Have we reached a point where we’ll begin to see broader use of microgrids incorporating renewables and stored energy, and if not, why not? Please use the comment form to share your thoughts.
This blog was originally published on SC’s Blog and was republished with permission.
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2012/06/microgrids-2-0-new-technologies-require-a-second-look-at-an-old-concept?cmpid=rss
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
The Mini Home’s exterior materials are comprised of an Iverit façade and a bitumen roof while the floor is laid with hardwood panels. All of the prefabricated modules and add ons, including a compact kitchen and bath module, heater and chimney, storage module and a 12V solar power kit are delivered to the site flatpacked.
A concrete foundation is laid and the mini home is usually constructed within two days. Albeit small, the home is suitable for all weather conditions and features extraordinary attention to detail. Trimless windows and neat organization of the electrical feeds ensures that living small can also mean living large! The Mini House follows on the heels of other tiny homes like Michelle de la Vega’s impressive renovation, signaling a powerful shift to a new way of life.
+ Jonas Wagell
print
email thisemail
Article source: http://inhabitat.com/the-mini-house-by-jonas-wagell-is-a-modern-prefab-that-goes-up-in-two-days/
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
Carbon nanotubes have been used in everything from energy-free lights to oil spill clean-up technology, and now a team from Rice University has used them to develop a paint that transforms any surface into a lithium-ion battery! This transformative paint holds the potential to create a functional, rechargeable solar battery on just about any surface.
The Rice University team’s rechargeable battery consists of spray-painted layers, each representing the components in a traditional battery. “This [design] means that traditional packaging for batteries has given way to a much more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices,” said Ajayan, Rice’s Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry. “There has been lot of interest in recent times in creating power sources with an improved form factor, and this is a big step forward in that direction.”
The team showcased the first test device for their paintable batteries on an array of standard ceramic tiles that was combined with a solar cell and an array of LEDs. The LEDS were arranged to form ‘RICE’ and were lit up by the 2.4 v emitting batteries for over six hours.
The battery’s development has been a long process with the team spending hours formulating, mixing and testing paints for each of the five layered components. The paint was then airbrushed onto a variety of surfaces, including ceramic bathroom tiles, flexible polymers, glass, stainless steel and even a beer stein to see how well they would bond with each substrate.
The battery’s multiple layer design is described in Nature’s online, open-access journal Scientific Report. “The first layer, the positive current collector, is a mixture of purified single-wall carbon nanotubes with carbon black particles dispersed in N-methylpyrrolidone. The second is the cathode, which contains lithium cobalt oxide, carbon and ultrafine graphite (UFG) powder in a binder solution. The third is the polymer separator paint of Kynar Flex resin, PMMA and silicon dioxide dispersed in a solvent mixture. The fourth, the anode, is a mixture of lithium titanium oxide and UFG in a binder, and the final layer is the negative current collector, a commercially available conductive copper paint, diluted with ethanol.”
The team foresee a future where snap-together integratable painted battery tiles (working in conjunction with solar cells) create an energy-harvesting combination that would be hard to beat. As good as the hand-painted batteries are, she said, scaling up with modern methods will improve them by leaps and bounds. “Spray painting is already an industrial process, so it would be very easy to incorporate this into industry,” Singh said.
+ Rice University
via Discovery News
print
email thisemail
Article source: http://inhabitat.com/rice-universitys-carbon-nanotube-paint-turns-any-surface-into-a-solar-battery/
Solar News
June 29, 2012 at 4:35 pm | Solar Blog | No comment
Sunora inaugurated its headquarters and factory in Phoenix last week, and it intends to provide not just manufacturing but also power plant engineering and construction services to its customers. Sunora’s presence reflects NRG and GCL-Poly’s expansion into the solar power plant construction business in North America. Within the past four years, New Jersey-based NRG has invested heavily in solar power plants, including the 290-MW Agua Caliente project in Arizona that is being built with First Solar’s panels and the 250-MW California Valley Solar Ranch project in central California that uses SunPower’s equipment. China-based GCL-Poly, one of the world’s largest silicon and silicon wafer makers, meanwhile, also has been aggressively pursuing project development opportunities worldwide.
NRG and GCL-Poly first announced the formation of Sunora back in February this year. In a Feb. 6 press release, NRG and GCL-Poly said they would each own a 50 percent stake in Sunora. In another press release dated Feb. 3 and provided by NRG, it said each company “will invest or contribute US$7 million of cash or in kind assets in Sunora and own 50 percent interest accordingly.”
Though Sunora is partly owned by NRG, which itself is a project developer, Sunora intends to attract other developers as customers, said Keith Bluford, vice president of sales and marketing. The company’s ties to NRG will not present a conflict of interest if its customers compete with NRG for contracts, he added. Sunora is working on NRG projects including a 26-MW plant in Borrego Springs, Calif.
Bringing manufacturing into its operation will set it apart from other engineering and construction firms, and it can significantly reduce the cost of a project, said John Plumlee, CEO of Sunora. In fact, Sunora’s approach could lower the installation cost by 15 percent to 40 percent, depending on the size, location and other aspects of the projects, Plumlee said.
“If you really are going to take the responsibility of dropping the installed cost, you can’t do that as a general contractor using a bunch of third-party stuff,” Plumlee said. “A lot of people are more system integrators who piece together projects that create a lot of layers and inefficiencies.”
Part of Sunora’s strategy is to pre-assemble solar panels with racks that NRG has designed at its factory. The factory will fabricate the racks and use solar panels made by others, and it will put them together before shipping them to a project site. This way, Sunora can better control the labor and transportation costs, particularly for projects that would otherwise rely on expensive labor from a union shop, Bluford said. Traditionally, builders would ship solar panels and racks to the construction site and assemble them there.
Part of the strategy, too, is to standardize rack-and-panel designs for ground and roof installations to also reduce costs, Bluford said.
The Arizona factory will serve projects primarily in the southwestern region of the country, and Sunora plans to open other factories to serve projects elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada. The production capacity of the factory is a mystery — Bluford declined to disclose it. The space has three production lines occupying 58,000 square feet of the factory, which has another 60,000 square feet of production space that Sunora could use later.
Article source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/nrg-backed-sunora?cmpid=rss
Solar News
Search our database of more than 280 industry companies