Burn Some Daylight

There are a couple of ways to visualize how we contribute to CO2 in the atmosphere through our daily routines.

One is with a graph--the infamous hockey stick made famous in Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's documentary.

What I like about PV is that it doesn't release CO2 during operation.  Besides avoiding expensive, and dirty power, costs, it is clean.  But graphs don't work for everyone.

The other, perhaps more compelling, is this Australian advert:

Burning fossil fuels releases CO2 trapped eons ago.  There are better ways to maintain our productive lifestyles--PV being one of them.

McKinsey recently published a study on the costs of reducing US greenhouse gas emissions [GHG's].  This study looks at the costs of abating the amount of carbon we use in our economy and lifestyle and assigns a value, based on current technologies and cost, of different abatement options.

Sustainability is rapidly becoming a priority for those of us in the real estate and renewables business.  The most significant take-away was that the cost of becoming sustainable is not as forbidding as some think.  McKinsey brought an analytical structure to looking at the costs and benefits--giving us a robust point of departure for determining what we build and where.

What struck me was the potential of PV in California and the West to be a dramatic driver for reducing our carbon footprint, insulating us from escalating energy prices, and adding value to real estate.  The math really does work...

"...distributed generation with photovoltaics represent considerable abatement potential.  In total, distributed solar PV could achieve nearly 50 gigawatts of capacity by 2030..."

PV was one of more than 250 abatement options McKinsey researched, from swapping out light bulbs to buying that Prius.

PV is not a slam dunk.  The US is late [this time] to this global technology, and there is a significant inelastic response to new ways we develop, build, and operate real estate.

"...abatement from solar power exhibits the widest range of potential outcomes.  In 2005, the US had less than 0.5 gigawatts of installed solar PV capacity.  By 2030, the US could have somewhere between 28 and 148 gigawatts of solar pv capacity, depending largely on the degree of cost compression and learning rates achieved for production and installation."

California is at the head of the pack--we have a favorable climate for integrating this technology into our built environment, our Governor has set up a ten year funding program to aid cost compression, and our power costs are high--and increasing.  And we have great sunshine.

I recommend you spend some time going through this study. For a country that put a man on the moon, reducing our carbon footprint is a much more manageable moon-shot--but we need to get going.  Now.

is basically about two things--

1. keeping your harvestable area from being shaded from 9A to 3P, and
2. orienting your array for production. 

The numbers below represent percentage harvested vs percentage available of total insolation--so a flat array for example, harvests 89% of the energy an array tilted at latitude would achieve.

Tilting the modules needs to be balanced with the amount of the area you are losing to shade from the tilted arrays.  The angle on this model represents latitude--which for us in NorCal is 37 degrees or a 9:12 pitch, or a 7:12 pitch for our amigos in Southern California.

The first post AB 32 report on California's energy policy just came out. 

This was not an easy task to pull together.  California is the second largest consumer of transportation fuel in the world--16 billion gallons of gasoline and 4 billion gallons of diesel annually.  We are the twelfth largest emitter of greenhouse gases [GHG's] in the world, and the eighth largest economy.

The major issues are transportation and powering our electrical grid.  Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is critical to restraining climate change, and the California legislature has passed a number of laws addressing what needs to be done.

How effective are all these laws and policies?  Our public utilities are no closer to meeting the requirement that 20% of their power come from renewables by 2010 than when the law was enacted:

Demand has grown apace with bringing renewables online--but they are just treading water.  This may be telegraphing an increase in power costs to lower demand.

If not the utilities, then who?

The California Public Utilities Commission, through its “Big Bold Energy Efficiency Strategies,” has adopted three programs designed to move all new residential and commercial construction to a zero net energy standard. The goal of this program is to reach zero net energy in residential construction by 2020 and in commercial construction by 2030. 

The CPUC is calling on builders and developers of residential projects to design to a net-zero energy building standard by 2020, and 2030 for commercial.  Distributed generation--namely PV--is exempt from property taxes in California, is exempt from discretionary review--building permit review only--and can be deployed in a matter of months rather than years.  And people like shaded parking!

Entire report [pdf, 4MB, 301p] downloadable here.

says Kleiner Perkin's Second Law.

I depend on making an emotional connection with my audience with I talk about Solar Options.  And I have experienced no better emotional connection than this talk by John Doerr about how everything we are doing about climate change is not enough.

What conversation are you going to have in 20 years?