SUMMARY: Bypassed in the ‘30s and '40s, one third of homes in Navajo Nation still have no access to grid electricity. Yet ironically, it's a huge electricity exporter, with one of the biggest coal-fired plants churning out power sold to millions. And now a plan to shut down the plant could sorely cost the reservation. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports that some are seeing a new opportunity.
SUMMARY:It’s been just over six months since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and roughly 150,000 people still do not have power. A string of grassroots efforts aims to jumpstart the grid with solar energy. Science producer Nsikan Akpan explains what they’ll need to see the light.
SUMMARY: The plummeting price of solar panels has led to a boom of customers and solar industry jobs. What does it mean for the evolution of utility companies? William Brangham reports.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): Now, as the Trump administration is considering whether to put tariffs on solar panels made outside the U.S., the rapidly plummeting price of solar panels has led to a boom in rooftop installations and jobs.
The solar industry now employs almost three times as many people as the coal industry. This growth is also raising questions about how utility companies should respond.
William Brangham is back with this report from Vermont. It is part of our occasional series of reports "Peril and Promise - The Challenge of Climate Change."
SUMMARY:Some 1.3 billion people around the globe don’t have access to an electric grid. But solar startup companies say harnessing an abundant resource -- the sun -- can light up some of the world’s most remote areas. In this Kenyan village, rooftop panels are becoming a cheap, popular and promising source of light. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
This post can also be a "Greed File" because of big-energy's concern of "a threat to their business model." NV Energy, hint, change your business model and not stick-it to solar customers.
Excerpt
With more than 300 days of sunshine a year, Nevada seems like the perfect place for rooftop solar.
And with the help of state and federal incentives, the amount of rooftop solar in the state has exploded, increasing by more than 400 percent from 2014 to 2015. But the future of the rooftop solar industry in this state is now very cloudy after a decision late last year by the state’s Public Utility Commission to change the rates for customers with solar panels.
At stake is a system known as “net metering,” which allows rooftop solar customers to get credit for the excess energy they send back to the grid when it’s sunny.
Versions of ‘net metering’ are on the books in more than 40 states and the effect for many rooftop solar customers is a dramatically reduced electric bill. But in lowering their bill, utilities and regulators around the country have been trying to determine if solar customers are paying their fair share of the electric grid’s operating costs.
In Nevada, the Public Utility Commission ruled that there was a cost-shift from non-solar customers to solar customers.
“The customers who are participating in net metering were not sharing in the costs of the utility’s distributions and transmission system – the pipes and the wires that get the electricity to your home,” said Anne-Marie Cuneo, Staff Director of Regulatory Operations for the Nevada Public Utilities Commission.
In December, the Public Utility Commission increased the basic connection fee and reduced the value of the credit that homeowners receive for excess energy to help close the gap between non-solar and solar customers, which utility NV Energy calculated to be about $16 million a year.
Solar advocates say the change threatens the whole industry and many companies said they were moving operations out of the state, including SolarCity, which laid off 550 workers in January. Advocates argue that utilities have been pushing for changes in ‘net metering’ rules because they see solar as a threat to their business model.
“Solar is becoming real,” said Marco Krapels, Executive Vice President for Strategy and Structured Finance at Solar City. “The utility monopolies are saying, ‘well wait a minute, we’ve got to crush it before it gets too big.’ And that’s what’s happening now.”
SUMMARY: In some parts of Hawaii, where many homeowners have installed rooftop panels to capitalize on federal and state tax credits for using solar energy, the local utility company has slowed down approvals of new solar systems, saying that abundant users may threaten the safety and reliability of the power grid. As the popularity of rooftop solar spreads, many Americans could soon enter the same gridlock. NewsHour special correspondent Mike Taibbi reports.
MIKE TAIBBI (NewsHour): They’re everywhere on Oahu; on the roofs of businesses, libraries, and one house after another.
The amount of rooftop solar now accounts for 12 percent of the electric utility’s users. That’s more than 20 times the national average. It’s by far the highest penetration of individual rooftop solar in the country.
But in this tropical state, where the combination of sky-high energy prices, abundant sunshine, and federal and state tax credits makes going solar a no-brainer, the very popularity of these panels has become a problem.
MIKE TAIBBI: So we drive up and you have these lovely solar panels on your roof. How’s that workin' out for you?
CARLTON HO: It’s not!
MIKE TAIBBI: Not working out because by the time aircraft mechanic Carlton Ho joined the rooftop solar parade in September 2013, there were so many people in his area that had installed panels that the local utility company told him ‘don’t turn on that switch yet.’
Researchers at Michigan State University have created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window or sheet of glass (like your smartphone’s screen) into a photovoltaic solar cell. Unlike other “transparent” solar cells that we’ve reported on in the past, this one really is transparent, as you can see in the photos throughout this story. According to Richard Lunt, who led the research, the team are confident that the transparent solar panels can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader.”
Scientifically, a transparent solar panel is something of an oxymoron. Solar cells, specifically the photovoltaic kind, make energy by absorbing photons (sunlight) and converting them into electrons (electricity). If a material is transparent, however, by definition it means that all of the light passes through the medium to strike the back of your eye. This is why previous transparent solar cells have actually only been partially transparent — and, to add insult to injury, they usually they cast a colorful shadow too.
To get around this limitation, the Michigan State researchers use a slightly different technique for gathering sunlight. Instead of trying to create a transparent photovoltaic cell (which is nigh impossible), they use a transparent luminescent solar concentrator (TLSC). The TLSC consists of organic salts that absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of ultraviolet and infrared light, which they then luminesce (glow) as another wavelength of infrared light (also non-visible). This emitted infrared light is guided to the edge of plastic, where thin strips of conventional photovoltaic solar cell convert it into electricity. [Research paper: DOI: 10.1002/adom.201400103 - "Near-Infrared Harvesting Transparent Luminescent Solar Concentrators"]
If you look closely, you can see a couple of black strips along the edges of plastic block. Otherwise, though, the active organic material — and thus the bulk of the solar panel — is highly transparent.
Michigan’s TLSC currently has an efficiency of around 1%, but they think 5% should be possible. Non-transparent luminescent concentrators (which bathe the room in colorful light) max out at around 7%. On their own these aren’t huge figures, but on a larger scale — every window in a house or office block — the numbers quickly add up. Likewise, while we’re probably not talking about a technology that can keep your smartphone or tablet running indefinitely, replacing your device’s display with a TLSC could net you a few more minutes or hours of usage on a single battery charge.
The researchers are confident that the technology can be scaled all the way from large industrial and commercial applications, down to consumer devices, while remaining “affordable.” So far, one of the larger barriers to large-scale adoption of solar power is the intrusive and ugly nature of solar panels — obviously, if we can produce large amounts of solar power from sheets of glass and plastic that look like normal sheets of glass and plastic, then that would be big.
SUMMARY: Following 12 years of research and testing, designers and pilots Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg debuted a huge solar-powered plane in Switzerland this week. The plane, which boasts a wingspan wider than a 747's, is covered in more than 17,000 solar cells. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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