View: Renewable Energy Too Important to be Dismissed

By Al Rosen, Absolutely Solar
27 September 2012   

 

The LA Times article "Taxpayers, Ratepayers will Fund California Solar Plants" took on the world of solar policy in a totally irresponsible way and got it all wrong. Renewable energy and distributed generation are too important to LA, the U.S. and the world to be dismissed so flippantly.

There’s no solar gold rush or windfall profit.  Most solar developers and their projects are struggling.  The failure rate is extraordinarily high.  Financing and investment is hard to come by.  There are few viable programs and they all have small capacity and difficult requirements and limitations.  Interconnection processes are highly complex, costly, uncertain, and time consuming.  Land use entitlements, environmental approvals, zoning, planning, building and safety issues all add additional barriers to solar development.
These barriers increase the cost of solar unnecessarily.  As a result, Germany, with the same sunshine as Anchorage, Alaska, installed far more solar in the fourth quarter of 2012 than California has installed in total.
The article focuses on the few giant projects that received government loans (which were only for very large projects and are no longer available), are very far from load centers and require huge transmission upgrades.  These projects make up a small part of California solar, and definitely are not the best opportunity for development.  Even with government help, considering that they can take 5 to 10 years to permit and that most giant projects fail, their returns are probably not excessive.