Read the entire article at: TPM Idea Lab: U.S. Solar Energy Exports Rise, Posting Positive Trade Balance With China.

Tuesday, the nation’s largest community owned solar energy facility opened in Rifle.

The Glenwood Post Independent reports that the array’s 3,575 solar energy panels are expected to produce more than 1,500 megawatt-hours of clean, renewable electricity each year for as many as 350 Holy Cross Energy customers who buy in to the project.

Former Governor Bill Ritter, now head of Colorado State University’s Center for the New Energy Economy gave the opening remarks at the ceremony, attended by all manner of local politicos.

Read the entire article at the Colorado Independent:  Community owned solar array goes live in Rifle.

The road ahead is paved with photovoltaics. That’s how Scott Brusaw sees it, anyway. His company, Solar Roadways, is embedding PV cells and LED lights into panels engineered to withstand the forces of traffic. The lights would allow for “smart” roadways and parking lots with changeable signage, while the cells would generate enough energy to power businesses, cities and, eventually, the entire country.

Each 12-by-12-foot Solar Roadway panel would produce about 7,600 watt-hours a day, based on an average of four hours of sunlight. At that rate, a one-mile stretch of four-lane highway could power about 500 homes. “If we could ever replace all the roads in the U.S., then, yeah, we would produce more electricity than we use as a nation,” says Brusaw, an electrical engineer who completed his first prototype panel in February with funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Brusaw’s goal is to get the cost per panel under $10,000. That’s roughly three times the cost of asphalt. But he wants to make panels that last three times longer than asphalt roads, which have to be resurfaced every 10 years in many places. “Then the cost is about the same,” he says. “But that’s just a break-even. We’re also generating electricity.”

The key to commercial viability will be the panels’ glass. It must be textured for traction, embedded with heating elements for melting away ice and snow, and able to survive years of traffic. “The toughest is going to be that fast lane on the highway,” Brusaw says, “where you’ve got a 40-ton truck, maybe with snow chains. It will have to be able to withstand all that.” At the same time, it has to be self-cleaning if sunlight is to reach the PV cells; Brusaw points to experimental hydrophilic glass that uses sunlight to break down organic dirt, and rainwater to wash it away without streaking.

Next up for Solar Roadways will be qualifying for Phase II funding, a two-year, $750,000 deal to develop a commercial plan for the panels. At the end of those two years, Brusaw would like to be ready for testing in parking lots, which he sees as the perfect proving grounds for the lights and the power-generation system. Directional arrows and parking lines could be reconfigured to deal with busy times, and the electricity generated could feed adjacent businesses. “I talked to the guy in charge of power for Wal-Mart,” Brusaw says. “Superstores are roughly 200,000 square feet, and parking lots are about four times that. I crunched the numbers for an 800,000-square-foot lot and told him how much power it could generate even if it was completely full of cars. It was 10 times the power they use.”

Brusaw wants to start smaller, though—on the scale of, say, a fast-food restaurant. A McDonald’s retrofitted with a solar parking lot could take itself largely or entirely off the grid or become a site for recharging electric vehicles (while the owners stopped inside for food, naturally). “Even the best electric cars have a range of about three hours,” he explains. “But if all I have to do is find a McDonald’s, I could drive from Idaho to the southern tip of Florida.” Improbable? Yes. But “Billions of watts served” would be a cool new tagline.

From  Environmental Visionaries: The Solar Roadrunner | Popular Science.

Are you familiar with Saul Griffith?

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/want-to-go-green-buy-a-rolex-stop-paying-taxes/

http://www.energyliteracy.com/

http://www.wattzon.com/

Back in the day when all PV systems were stand alone the idea of making one’s own renewable energy was driven partly by the desire to take charge of one aspect of life that almost everyone in society had given over to the experts. We all loved the idea of getting off the grid. And we needed to make 100% of the energy we needed (although many people had generator backup). The shared knowledge of home power technology included many of the early ways to get more bang for the buck with using the most energy efficient appliances. The rule of thumb was for every $1 spent on efficiency there was a $3 reduction in the cost of the PV system generating the power. These ideas led many people to think long and hard about their lifestyle and what energy services they really needed and wanted.

Today we live in the world of grid tied PV. Few people are off the grid and few people with PV systems meet 100% of their “needs.” They don’t think about their lifestyle because they always have the grid to power that new plasma TV so they still live in an illusory world with no limits. People are not becoming more conscious of their personal energy use much less becoming aware of the daily solar cycles within which we all must live in order to create a sustainable world. Because people don’t understand their own energy behavior they fail to question the More Bigger Faster cornucopian fallacy that there is an endless supply of energy to power our every want and no down side to ever increased energy use.

Well there is that small issue of CO2, whatever that is, but “they” will figure that out (or maybe “they” are wrong about this climate thing) so we can continue consuming in ignorance. Disinformation is powerful stuff.

Over years of following the development of renewable energy there were several times when projects were proposed that seemed to me not to have been well thought through. Before the advent of grid tied inverters I remember a developer in a Colorado ski town was proposing to power all the new 10,000 sq. ft., above timberline (not passive solar designed) homes with PV systems. I couldn’t think of a better way to show that this solar thing doesn’t work. Rich people are the most likely group to be unclear on this energy thing. They do things like drive a Prius or a Tesla to the airport to take their private jet half way around the world. And the thought of them all showing up for their winter vacations and suddenly powering up a few thousand lights and dozens of hot tubs was sure to crash any PV system known. Another example was the federal government came up with the million solar roof program. One part of the proposal was to put PV on federal buildings. Unfortunately there is not enough roof space to install enough PV to power the energy inefficient buildings that our government owns.  Luckily, neither of these projects ever happened.

We have failed to question the assumptions upon which all of our buildings, food production, transportation and industry were built – the assumption of an unlimited supply of cheap energy. Energy so cheap we could ignore energy efficiency and build systems that were wasteful in the extreme. So wasteful that we are now beginning to see the environmental effects as well as the end of “endless” supplies. The days of ever increasing energy use are over and the implications for the existing buildings, transportation and industry (as well as our more-bigger-faster lifestyles) are disastrous.

There are many predicting doom but that, like the cornucopians’ ideas that we can meet the ever increasing demand with green power, also ignores the concept of energy efficiency.  We can get many of the same energy services for a minor fraction of the energy we have used in the past. We know how to build buildings that use very little energy (doesn’t help fix the one you live in but..). We can make light with a fraction of the power we once used.

And electric transportation will give 10 times the miles of mobility per dollar as gasoline. If I get my personal mobility with an EV and power it with PV from the sunshine that falls on my roof (instead of middle eastern terrorists – sorry I just couldn’t resist being inflammatory – but we do export a billion dollars a day mostly to countries that hate us), I have reduced the national debt, reduced my carbon footprint, reduced the need for resource wars, improved the air quality, kept money in the local economy and bought a hedge against all future increases in the cost of my mobility. I will never again be concerned about cost or supply shortage. I have more peace of mind and I have taken responsibility for the energy I use for personal mobility something that cannot be done with ICE technology. If we all do this we have created a virtual oil field right in our own neighborhood. And my EV is faster than your minivan.

If we question assumptions there are very different future scenarios and very different policies to reach that sustainable future. We certainly don’t need any more power plants, nuclear or otherwise. The question is not about peak oil or global warming. It is, “Have we reached peak energy stupidity yet?” The answer seems to be No.

One example of failing to question the assumptions is the attempt to power wasteful personal transportation with an alternative to oil. A plentiful supply of oil has allowed for the use of inefficient internal combustion engines and ever increasing and unnecessary vehicle power and size. There is nothing like oil. If there was Exxon would be selling us “that.” Trying to power the technology that uses oil with biofuels will not work although many seemingly smart people are trying to do just that. This doesn’t mean we can’t have personal mobility. We just have to question the assumption that the way we do it now makes sense. The 200+ horse power, 4000 pound, 10% efficient internal combustion engine car only makes sense if you have an endless supply of oil and no environmental downside to using it. If we had questioned this assumption 50 years ago we would be in a very different world today.

The problem with energy efficiency is that if I do the best I can and you don’t, it doesn’t work. This is the tragedy of the commons. Socialism is a good thing if we all share the same values. If we all understand our energy use and we all implement the best technologies we can have a renewable energy future that has most of the same features of our present profligately wasteful society. But at the present time it is stupid for me to carry your hot

tub/plasmaTV/wrongly oriented and poorly insulated house/giant SUV lifestyle any further up the ever increasing energy stupidity curve. (Gee, could there be a link between the increased energy prices of 2009 and the economic problems?)

If I do everything to make my life energy efficient I can easily reduce my home energy use to 1/6th the average. (200kWhr down from the national average of 1200kWhr/mo) That makes it easy to power 100% of my home energy use with PV. But if my PV system is grid tied I am dumping any extra of my valuable green energy into your wasteful lifestyle. If I can put any extra into a high value energy service that I can enjoy I reap the benefit rather that letting my neighbor waste it. If I put the extra PV power in my EV I am one happy tea-bagger.