Morgan Solar is hiring

We just updated the Careers section of website with three new positions, and will be posting more very soon. We are currently looking for:

• Electrical Engineer – Entry level position – Some experience required – Download Job Description.
• Optical Designer – Experience required – Download Job Description.
• Senior Manufacturing Manager – Executive/Director level position – Download Job Description.

We’re going to be posting some additional positions soon, so if you’re interested, keep an eye on the Career’s page.

Solar farms vs. farms (for food)

How’s this for a stumper?

The Toronto Star has an article about the debate about solar farm development  on prime agricultural land under the new Green Energy Act FIT rates.  Short summary, solar industry types (led by CanSIA) and farmers hoping to develop some of their land into solar farms are protesting rules for Feed-in tariffs that will restrict solar development on prime agricultural land.

Weirdly enough, it’s a debate where everyone is right, their position is reasonable and none of the claims really run counter to the others.  Strange.  This is my very over-simplified version of the positions and stakeholders:

Farmers: It’s their land and they can do what they damn well please with it.  If they can make more money by turning the land over to electrical production for 20-25 years, no one should have the right to stop them.  The land isn’t harmed, the soil and ground water isn’t contaminated, and the potential outcome of leaving the land fallow for that long could be to significantly improve the potential yield of the land in the future.

Solar Energy Industry Types: The amount of farm land that might end up being used for solar energy around 1/10th of 1%, but this represents the small number of very large scale projects that Ontario’s Solar Energy Industry really needs to develop the scale required to become internationally competitive.  Banning or limiting these projects will diminish the success of Ontario Solar companies and entrepreneurs, and it will cost Ontario many high value green jobs.

Government, Farm minded people & Environmentalists: Prime agricultural land should be used to grow food, solar energy development should take place elsewhere (rooftops, low quality land etc).  They want to avoid this:

Single Land Use - Solar Farm in Germany - Nearly total ground cover

When I first considered this, I thought that they should include an exemption for solar farm development that uses sun trackers – that is, allow this:

At first, my take was, allow this:

Dual Land Use - Solar Panels installed using sun trackers on a farm in Spain, farm is still producing food.

Trackers allow for the land to continue to be used for agriculture, can co-exist with pasture land easily, and are ideal for putting allot of solar power into small spaces like the wind-breaks between fields.  Also, they’re a fairly mature technology with lots of expired patents, so any metal shop that could make an automotive frame can make the things fairly easily.  Lots of the companies on the market don’t actually ship the trackers, they ship the controller that detects the sun and controls the movement, and licence the design and manufacturer to local contractors.

As an added benefit, you get significantly more power per day from the same panels because they’re kept at the optimum angle to the sun (where as fixed panels like the ones in the first picture are close to optimum only for an hour or so each day).  Field results from tracking vary, but 40% to 50%  more energy for the same panels is a safe number to use as a ball park when going from fixed to tracking systems.  With an efficient panel, the extra value of the energy can more than pay for the cost of installing and maintaining the panel, especially in Ontario with the feed-in tariff.

However, thinking on it a little more, I’m not sure I’d actually want to see an exemption specifically for trackers if the ban on farm development went through.

That puts the government in the position of picking and choosing technologies (and defining what is and isn’t a tracker) and it stifles innovation.  Instead, it seems reasonable to require that solar farm projects should not use more than a specific amount of any given farmer’s usable farm land.  Nobody would argue that a farmer shouldn’t have panels on his roof, and it follows that a small row of panels along the wind break between fields or a few sun trackers in among a cattle pasture wouldn’t be something we’d want to ban either.

But it’s less clear what the rule should be if a farmer with 200 arces wants to turn 4 of them into a solar farm.  It’s 2% of that farmer’s land, but could end up contributing significantly more than than 2% to his income.

It’s not a clear cut issue, and whatever the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure decide, if they’re smart (they are) they’ll keep it simple, won’t pick and choose winners, technologies and won’t ban anything – rather, they’ll put a reasonable and transparent process where solar development on agricultural land is considered on a case by case basis, with clear guidelines of what the goals of the process are.  The occasional project that plans to completely cover hundreds of acres of farm land will know that it has a high bar to to jump, and the farmer than wants to turn a pasture into a little extra profit won’t have to worry.

Why go to Greece? For the sunshine, naturally.

Seeking Alpha, an excellent investment reporting, finance and economics blog has an interesting article about the Greek Solar energy market titled Solar: Greece Offers Bait, But Few Takers.  Apparently, despite some of the most generous feed-in tariff rates in Europe, uptake for new solar energy projects has been slow.

From the article:

Under the new program, systems that are greater than 10 kilowatts but less than 10 megawatts would have tariffs range from 40 to 50 euro cents per kilowatt hour. The government is offering to provide grants that would offset 40 percent of project costs more than €100,000.

Sadly, the reason for the sluggish response is what you’ve probably already guessed:

“It has excellent solar conditions. But bureaucracy is so high, it’s incredible,” said Daniela Schreiber, head of strategic operations at Germany-based EuPD Research, during a solar conference in San Francisco last week.

Greece first launched a feed-in tariff program in 2006, but it hasn’t been able to run it smoothly. The government had about 3 gigawatts worth of applications waiting to be processed when it announced a new version of the program in January this year.

(Here’s a link to a Greek Government PDF with the high level details of the program.)

Electricity generation and distribution has traditionally been massive, bureaucratic and slow to respond to anything.  Combine that with a government that is slow to move and you have all the conditions for entrepreneurs to go insane while waiting for approvals.  There is nothing more frustrating than applications vanishing for months on end into an opaque bureaucracy.

Still… for 55 euro cents per kilowatt hour I would be willing to put up with allot of grief and frustration, especially with you look at the amazing Greek solar resource.

Solar Resource: Greece

More details can be found at PVGIS (European solar resource data), although I found the way they model DNI to be counter-integrative after getting used to how NR-Can and NREL do it.

The powers that be here in Ontario, just having passed the new Green Energy Act, are trying to make a good faith effort to keep this sort of bureaucratic stalling from happening here.  Under the previous Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP), there were all sorts of limits, hurdles and quotas that kept the program from really catapulting Ontario into an Renewables leadership provision, and much of that has been fixed in the new program (hopefully).  The Greek incentives are too high not to have some effect, but it’s a shame to see such an amazing program torpedoed by institutional inertia and a lack of accountability.

Developing a Solar Farm Questions Part II

In my previous post I answered some questions people had about developing a solar farm, but in this post I’m going to take a different tack.  I’ve spoken to a few people over the last few months who fit this stereotype.  They have land, they think they can get some money, and they would like to see if developing a solar farm makes sense.  There’s nothing wrong with being at the beginning, but it’s daunting when you don’t know what you don’t know.  So what I’ve told people is that there are a basic set of questions that they need to answer before they can really proceed.  Figure out what you don’t know, and you can start.  Right?

An example of an installed solar farm.

So, here are some of the questions you need to figure out if you’re thinking of developing a solar farm:

1. Is the site I’m considering close to high voltage transmission capacity?  How close?  Is there a transmission substation nearby?  Is there capacity on the lines for additional power generation to be connected?

Substations are always easier to connect to than just power lines, and in solar farm development, easier means cheaper.  People have asked me how close is close enough, and the truth is that I have no idea.  Labour costs, permits, right of ways to put in power lines and other factors will affect this, but you need to install some fairly expensive overhead power lines to connect a solar farm to the rest of the grid.  How much costs will change, but this is a cost.  So, you absolutely need to start by contacting whoever manages the actual power distribution lines in your region and find out if you can connect.  It’s sad how often the answer is “no”.  (I’ve been told annecdotally that anything over 25 km is too far away, and that really you want to be within 5 to 10 km from the connection point, with a clear line to run the power lines.  The person who quoted this to me wasn’t developing a solar farm, but it sounds reasonable.)

2. Who manages the local zoning for development in my area? What is the land classified as now? Who manages environmental impact assessments for my area? Who might have veto power over this project? What additional costs might environmental factors add to my site?

Figure our who can block your development, and start figuring out if they might. Start looking into environmental impact assessments as early as possible in the process and contact Green Energy friendly organizations for advice. People are constantly surprised at hidden costs here, and attention needs to be paid early and often. As for environmental factors, if you’re in desert, does your area flash flood? If you’re in Canada, does the ground freezing in the winter increase costs? What about snow?

I’ve heard solar panel sales people tell potential buyers that because they’re black, they warm in the sun and don’t accumulate snow. Total BS. First, “getting warm in the sun is code for “inefficient”. If sunlight is turning into heat, it’s not turning into electricity. Second, if you live anywhere where it snows, you know full well that what colour something is has no effect on how much snow builds up on top of it. Snow is an issue in solar farms in Canada, and I’ve heard some innovative ideas, but nothing actually deployed in practise.

3. How much sun do I actually get per year here? How many hours per month for each month, and at what intensity in kWh/m2? If possible, what is the ratio of direct to diffuse light?

Just about every country in the world has some version of this information available, in Canada it’s Natural Resources Canada, in the US it’s NREL.  However, what I strongly recommend is that you consult your local utility to find out what insolation data they recommend.  If your local power utility (or whoever manages the power grid you want to connect to) is at all interested in solar energy, then they will be able to recommend solar resource data.  If they’re not interested, don’t have solar resource data and can’t answer your questions, find out in anyone has connected a grid tied solar power project.  If no one has… yikes… good luck.  At the end of the day, if you have some sun, it’s probably ok, but the real factor is the price of electricity.  Higher price, solar makes more sense.

Calculating DNI can be harder, as not everyone tracks this data.  There are companies that will provide you with reports, and there is software you can download, but for some areas it can be a challenge to get an accurate number if you’re not in the US or Europe.  The company 3TIER will sell you a report for your area and you can download a sample report to see what they can provide.  I haven’t worked with them, and they seem to be expensive, but they look like they provide a detailed and independent report, which can make investors less nervous.  Also out there is Meteonorm, a software package you can download or order as a CD.  They let you download a sample version that has data for one city to allow you to evaluate the software.  I like this option as it’s much cheaper than 3TIER, but you would need to be sure that Meteonorm gave you all the details you felt you needed.

Busy week, so I’ll do a third part when I can.

Developing a Solar Farm Questions

Lately I’ve received quite a few questions regarding the development of a solar farm in emails and in comments on this blog, mainly from the comments in this post and a few others.  I’m happy to do my best to answer, but I’m not an expert – so grains of salt people.  (Big grains of salt.)  To keep the post from getting too long, I’ll answer the direct questions today and follow up with additional details and other things to consider in my next post.

Also, since this seems to be an interesting topic, I’ve made a “Solar Farms” category, so if you want to just see my posts related to solar farms, select that from the Categories drop down menu on the right.

So, questions:

Can I recommend a good book on the subject?

I don’t think a good book exists, and don’t think one will for a while yet.  Three reasons:

1. Most of the knowledge that would make for a GOOD book is very new and the people who really have it can make more money by being among a select group of experts.
2. The issues are very regional.  Someone who is an expert in California would lack a knowledge of what’s what in Florida for example.
3. This is still an emerging market and industry, so the knowledge needed is changing and evolving all the time, so anything writen down (including this blog post) will be out of date fairly quickly.

In lieu of a good book, there are some websites, conferences, webinars and other resources (many of them free) that are available, and some strategies that you can employ.  If you’re serious about laying out many millions for a serious solar farm, I would partner with or hire an engineer.  I’ll go into more detail in my next post.

Several people have asked if their local climate (Maine, New Zealand, Northern Ontario etc) has enough sun to justify a solar farm.

Sadly, right now, solar is still too expensive for most projects in regions where electricity isn’t VERY expensive, and where no subsidies exist.

I’ve talked about this a little in this post, but you need to basically get your hands on solar resource data (also called Insolation).  Most governments track this and make it public, Natural Resources Canada (NR-CAN) and NREL in the US provide this data, and I’ll bet most other countries do too.  If you need very highly regional data, there are consultants you can pay for reports or solar test equipment you can buy to do tests.

Short version however, and I’ve said this before, the amount of sunlight does not matter as much as the cost of electricity.  If electricity is expensive or otherwise unavailable, then yes, develop solar.  The people who have to do their homework are the majority in the middle who have moderately high (and ever increasing) electricity costs, and need to evaluate.  There, kWh/m2/year data is available, and you need to get to a useful cost per watt value for your solar farm.  From there it’s a quick bit of math to figure out the rest.

I’ve talked about pricing out solar panels before, and make a few additional comments in my next post.

Have I heard of municipal push back on solar farm development?

Yes, absolutely, and for many reasons.  This can be a real show stopper, and as I said in my previous post, the specific local reasons can be surprising.  (Endangered species protection, retention of valuable food producing land for farming, reflections distracting pilots during take off and landing… you name it.  Do your homework.)

In my next post I’ll try to expand on what I would want to know before seriously investing time and energy in a solar farm project, resources that are useful (and some that are indispensible) and other tips and advise I’ve heard from people.  If you’re reading this and I don’t answer your question here, let me know.  I’ll try to update these posts to keep them relevant.

More Good News for Ontario Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy World just published a well written article about the proposed Ontario Green Energy Act.  I was quoted a couple of times, and enjoyed the article as a whole, although it’s still strange to see what was a 30 to 40 minute conversation condensed into a few sentences.  I’ve linked to co-author Jon Warren’s blog before, and I agree with most of what he has to say.

I’ve written in support of the Green Energy Act already, but this is fairly thorough treatment of what this act will specifically mean for renewable energy companies in Ontario.  Definitely worth a read.  Jon doesn’t say too much about some of the other advantages that Ontario has right now for renewable energy ventures.  First off, the Ontario Green Energy Act, and the Clean Tech Investment Fund are just the tip of the iceberg for government funding opportunities in Ontario, and many of the other funds are cozying up to Green companies as well.  Add to that federal government programs like the SR&ED and IRAP, along with the SDTC, and local support, funding and research collaboration from groups like OCETA, OCE and even start-up support from the MaRS DD, and basically it’s not just renewable energy companies, but renewable energy innovators and entrepreneurs that are getting the love.

SR&ED is a great example – you get a direct cash reimbursement of up to 35% of research expenses up to $2 Million, and %20 on excess amounts.  It’s not specifically a renewable incentive, but ANY company no matter how small that’s actually doing research can qualify.  Basically, there are good incentives at the Federal level, and Ontario is upping the ante.  Throw in all that under-utilized automotive infrastructure and I guarantee you that there will be more than a few clean tech success stories in Ontario.  Will Ontario be the next Germany?  In the sense of being a solar energy success story, sure.

One small clarification, the photo of a solar panel installation is credited to Morgan Solar, and it’s not emphasized that we took the photo, but the panel pictured is not ours.  That photo were taken by our engineers on a day where we were helping some people from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund run some tests on the PV array installed on the Automotive Building at Exhibition Place.  They needed to take some measurements, and we happened to have the gear required to do it, so we lent a hand.

Toronto Networking Event

Thinking of checking out this event – Toronto Greenhouse – sounds pretty interesting.

I haven’t been updating this lately, but it’s been busier than normal lately.  Hoping to get back to this semi-regularly fairly soon.  Also, I caught these guys the other day, NowSolar, a start up solar installer here in Toronto.  They’re planning a cool project called “Summer of Solar“, which just makes sense to me.  Get lots of people together and put through larger scale orders to get lower costs, and then focus neighbourhood by neighbourhood to keep costs lower.  Best of luck to them, I’d love to see more people getting creative with alternative energy like this.

Two Conferences Next Week

Wow, insanely busy this week – everything seems to happen at once.  Quick notes, we’ll be manning a booth at the OCE Discovery 09 Conference next week, and it looks like it’s going to be a worthwhile conference.  I’ll do my best to post a few more details later this week, but the student attendance is only $50 which isn’t bad, and the general admission is $395 which again, isn’t that bad.  It’s not a solar energy conference, but a technology, research and innovation conference.  The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) are putting this on as a showcase of the sorts of collaboration and research they support.  If you’re doing any sort of technology development in Ontario and you’re not talking them, you need to start.  Anyway, it’s all day Monday and Tuesday, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also, we’re sorry to be missing the ASES National Solar Conference in Buffalo, NY.  This is the classic conference/trade show mix and should be really good.  Also, they’re offering a public segment, which is a strong plus – if the conference registration is too much, they offer access to the exhibit hall, a general session on Friday and a Public Day program on Saturday.  A great deal for $10 if you’re at all interested in solar energy.  I’m really kicking myself that my schedule next week just makes this impossible.

Solar Myth 7 Expanded – Solar Doesn’t need intense sun

The “Solar Myths” page is the most linked to and most read part of this blog – most hits there than most other posts put together, and it’s the post that generates the most emails and questions.  I’ve been meaning to add a few more myths and I’ve been meaning to expand a little on some of the points that I raised.  Recently I got called on Myth #7 – Solar power needs extremely intense sun to work (solar isn’t for Canada, New York, the UK etc) as needing more explanation – the points as stated are a bit thin, so I might as well expand on that one now.

First off, my point, not well made in the original, is that the price of electricity or incentives for renewable energy are more important than “solar resource” when considering the viability of solar energy.  What they’re considering here in Ontario is a case in point – they’re instigating a progressive feed-in tariff regime which will massively incentivize home solar development, commercial development and the development of solar farms.  There are many places in North America where the same solar panels would produce slightly more or much more electricity per day, but they’ll be installed here, because the incentives are here.  Now, in Ontario, the reasons are regional and complicated – basically Toronto is inching closer and closer to a severe electricity shortage,  and they want to shut down a really horrible coal burning power station that is a national embarrassment – but at the end of the day, they need every scrap of additional power they can get their hands on.

But look at a different example – using the PVWatts Calculator default settings (4 kW Peak System, 0.77 DC to AC Derate factor, latitude fixed tilt) for Newark, New Jersey and Cedar City, Utah.  Cedar City is in southern Utah and gets much more sun on average than Newark, but look at the results:

Newark, New Jersey
State Average Cost of Electricity – $0.112/kW
kWh/m2/day – 4.46
kWh per year – 4732
Value of Energy per year – $529.98

Cedar City, Utah
State Average Cost of Electricity – $0.072/kW
kWh/m2/day – 5.95
kWh per year – 6281
Value of Energy per year – $452.23

So, even though the Utah system produces over 1500 kWh per year more, or close to 30% more power per year, the higher cost of electricity in New Jersey makes the Newark system more valuable – producing just over $75 more per year.  The variability in the cost of electricity is much bigger than the variability in the solar resource.

Average Price of Electricity by State in the US

States where electricity is expensive and sun is excellent (California) will lead solar, but the second runners will be the states with expensive electricity (or incentives for solar) – NOT the states with great solar resource and cheaper power.  So it’s not surprising that California leads the US in Solar adoption, but considering the map above, it’s not a surprise that New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are the next four states with the highest per capita solar adoption.  (New Jersey and Connecticut also have state solar incentives.)

Now, what makes the price of power vary from state to state is a whole complex set of factors, but ask anyone who works in electricity and they’ll agree that that prices of electricity are going up nearly everywhere.  Prior to the financial crisis, analysts were predicting that the price of electricity would double in 5 to 7 years for most regions of North America.  Some now say that will slow down (consumption is dropping) and some say that will accelerate (collapse of financing for new power stations and for grid upgrades) but no one is saying the price of electricity isn’t going up.

Rising Price of Electricity

In my original post I used the example of Germany.  Germany does not have great solar resource – the average kWh/m2/day is very low comparatively – ranging from 2.6 kWh/m2/day to 3.7 kWh/m2/day.  There are parts of Alaska that have better averages, and the lower 48 states mostly get 5.5 to 6 kWh/m2/day or better.  Yet, until the end of 2007, 50% of all the solar panels installed in the world were installed in Germany.  If that doesn’t prove that the amount of sun ISN’T the main factor, then nothing will.  Germany decided that they wanted to create a thriving solar energy industry, partly to deal with rising costs of electricity and partly to get ahead of the world on what they saw as a growth industry.  They examined the possibilities and went with a feed-in tariff system, which made solar installation viable, especially in the south.  But those same panels could product two to three times more power (or more) in most of the USA.  They make sense in Germany because of laws rewarding solar energy.

The USA and Canada are starting to follow the same model.  The USA has the Investment tax Credit which creates large tax incentives for installing solar, and in Ontario they’re following the feed-in tariff model.  That, combined with falling solar panel prices and rising costs of electricity will lead to more and more solar installations.

Long and short, I originally raised the issue that intense sunshine as a pre-requisite for solar energy was a myth and I stand by that.  The pre-requisite for solar energy is the need for  ANY alternative energy – which isn’t driven by the sun (air conditioners notwithstanding) but by shortages or high costs of existing sources of energy.

Energy Matters Presentation

Here are the (slightly modified) slides that I presented at the Energy Matters Conference last week.  I tried to embed audio, but WordPress didn’t like the file format.  I made some modifications to add a little more context here and there.

Edit: There was a small correction needed for slide 19 I uploaded  a new version.