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ICARUS ALLSORTS

Solar power could be the answer to our energy problems, but, says Erik Jaques, we still have a way to go before we are flying comfortably close to the sun

Since our days worshipping the gods of Ra, Sol and Apollo, we humans have treated the sun with reverential awe. So the only surprise about our hyperactive dash to harness its power in recent years is that it took us so long to get started. Why build nuclear power plants when there is already one a mere 93 million miles away, spewing forth all the energy we could ever need?

The world’s annual electricity demand is some 16 terawatts (expected to grow to 20TW by 2020), but the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface is equivalent to around 120,000TW – theoretically enough sate our annual needs in an hour.

In order to transform that immense power into electricity on a grand scale, the world’s current brightest prospects are solar photo-voltaic (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies.

Solar PV uses panels with semiconductors such as silicon to convert sunlight directly into electricity, a process that can be enhanced by incorporating lenses or mirrors. Though utility-scale PV farms are widespread, the technology’s real trump card is an ability to integrate with the built environment and decentralise energy production.

“PV will become the frontrunner, the main energy technology. I call it ‘the prima donna’ of renewable energies,” says Hermann Scheer, Social Democrat member of the German Bundestag and general chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy. “[PV] is the advent of a technology for a free society – we can have millions, possibly billions of auto-producers and small suppliers. This creates a more stable economy, and it overcomes a lot of economic and social discrepancies.”

As one of the chief instigators of Germany’s revolutionary 1999 feed-in tariff, which offers solar generators payments of four times the market rate for 20 years, Scheer knows whereof he speaks. Despite a paucity of sunshine, Germany has become a world leader in solar energy, particularly PV, in terms of sheer installation, technological development, and job creation – 50,000 since 2000. To date, 45 countries and 18 states/provinces/territories have adapted the feed-in blueprint to kick-start their own solar industries.

According to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, 5.5GW of solar PV capacity was added globally in 2008, bringing the total to around 15GW by the year’s end. A further 5.5GW was added in 2009, although this represented a 40% growth compared to the 60% seen in 2008. Global solar PV growth has averaged 44% since 1999.

CSP, on the other hand, uses mirrors to intensify the sun’s rays to heat fluids for steam-driven turbines. Despite more moveable parts and maintenance issues, it is currently the most efficient and cost-effective utility-scale production method. Moreover, some CSP plants are starting to incorporate that holy grail of solar energy – storage – using molten salts to store heat and release it overnight.

A recent market report from industry watcher CSP Today and consultants Altran estimated capacity growth from 679MW installed today (there is a further 2000MW under construction) to 24GW by 2020.

While both solar PV and CSP encompass all manner of variants and applications, each fizzing with technological innovation, the prevailing view is that we’ve got everything we need to upset the fossil fuel hegemony.

“You could pile up all the press releases announcing new breakthrough technology from here to the moon,” says Adam Browning of Vote Solar, a US advocacy body. “But the most important thing to understand here is we can get to where we need to go with the technology we have.”

For all the hoopla though, 2009 was a difficult year for the solar revolution, with its momentum having been checked by global recessionary forces and the first ever instance of PV oversupply.

The latter was largely the consequence of Spain’s overly generous feed-in tariff, which resulted in the frenzied installation of 3GW, half the world’s new solar-power capacity in 2008. The government’s coffers promptly ran dry, and the tariff was recently capped at a meagre 500MW.

Robert Feldmann, a solar energy expert at Deloitte and Touche, says this episode of “poor governance and silly structuring” will lead to global market disruption for up to 18 months. “They set the wrong incentives, there was a goldrush and now there’s a deep depression,” he adds.

Spain’s folly has been a significant contributor to PV prices plummeting 40% in the past six months, which has hit high-cost manufacturers hard, although it may have unlocked the technology for new customers. It has also provided a vivid case in point of solar power’s rapid commission-to-production journey, a stark contrast to, say, the lumbering of nuclear new build.

Nevertheless, 2010 is set to be another awkward year. “A bit of a bloodbath,” predicts Richard Youngman, managing partner at the Cleantech Group, a renewable energy research heavyweight. “I’m expecting a lot of distressed mergers and acquisitions. There’s some good assets around, but they are just going to run out of cash. You’re seeing the start of a period where Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern investors will probably pick up a lot of European, particularly German, assets at good value.”

But the long-term story for solar manufacture and uptake is far from doom and gloom. Despite currently representing less than
0.5% of generation in the $1.3tn (€860bn) global electricity market, an enormous latent potential remains.

Grid parity – the point where solar electricity rivals or becomes cheaper than conventional sources – is rapidly approaching in some parts of the world, and will be accelerated by dwindling oil reserves and increased attention paid to the environmental and financial costs of CO2 emissions.

Some critics have noted that this watershed moment will be undermined by the artificiality of feed-in tariffs – a conspicuous reminder of solar energy’s inherent cost-inefficiencies – but Scheer is having none of it.

“All conventional energies got where they are through public support, a lot of subsidies and laws,” he spits. “It is a double standard to say ‘not for solar’.”

Whatever Copenhagen finally brings, the next few years are likely to be intriguing, particularly with world leaders processing US President Barack Obama’s recent declaration that the nation that wins the renewable energy race will lead the global economy.

In Europe, Germany will remain in its customary role as the doyen of solar power, while Spain, with its hours of annual sunshine, will continue to wield a notable global influence. Big moves are now afoot in France and Italy, with the latter currently boasting the most attractive feed-in tariff in Europe. Portugal, meanwhile, is busying itself building one of the world’s largest capacity solar PV farms, a 45MW per year jigsaw piece in its plan to generate 31% of all its energy from clean sources by 2020. The UK is bumbling along too, rising from its slumber at the foot of the European renewable energy league table (with only Luxembourg and Malta below it, according to Greenpeace) to introduce a feed-in tariff from April 2010.

But however you slice it, China will be the country to watch. The world’s largest manufacturer of solar energy solutions, it is set to start improving its much-maligned environmental credentials by keeping some of the good stuff for itself. Chinese solar manufacturers can undercut European companies by around 30%, and Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice-chairman of China’s national development and reform, recently stated that 2020 targets for solar would triple to 9GW, a 75-fold expansion from today’s 120MW capacity. And that’s just for starters.

Japan, whose manufacturers are responsible for around half the world’s output of solar power equipment, has also decided to go beyond export, and commit to furnish 30% of houses with solar panels by 2030.

Meanwhile, embarrassed by its lousy renewable record and filled with self-loathing over its marriage of convenience to hydrocarbon imports, the US will inevitably start to flex some serious solar muscle. A Klondikian dash for desert land for various utility-scale plants – the Bureau of Land Management has noted a 78% increase in applications since July – coupled with Silicon Valley’s superabundant intellectual capital provides a sturdy platform for some serious ‘yes we cans’.

Keen to safeguard its position as a global energy leader, Abu Dhabi, through its multi-tendrilled Masdar Initiative, has invested €400m in Masdar PV, the UAE’s first business of its kind, and established a joint venture with a Spanish company to build and operate CSP projects globally.

In northern Africa, there are grand plans to use the Sahara desert to supply electricity to Europe via a trans-Mediterranean super-grid, and some companies are even looking to space for a solar solution.

Solar would also appear to have got the celestial thumbs-up too, as The Vatican, already bedecked in PV itself, is planning to invest €500m into building one of Europe’s largest solar power plants to export electricity to 40,000 homes to Italy.

“Solar is a sunrise industry and the sun is rising fast,” concludes Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group, a not-for-profit organisation working with government and business leaders on climate change issues. “So, sunrise or sunset – it’s a simple choice I think.”

THE IDEALIST

HARISH HANDE
Founder, SELCO Solar

In a country where 600 million people have no electricity, and peak power falls around 12% below demand, prompting widespread power cuts, plans by India’s National Solar Mission to increase solar energy production from virtually nothing to 20GW by 2022 is welcome news.

However, while Harish Hande, who founded SELCO Solar in 1995 to provide aff ordable solar solutions, is pleased, he remains wary of the methodology.

“The thought process is so much on a large-scale, centralised basis. These large numbers are still going to feed into the same old creaky transmission lines, so you’re losing the whole beauty of solar being viable, vibrant, site-specific, and decentralised.”

SELCO, which has received funding from, among others, the Rockerfeller Foundaton, brings solar directly to India’s poor, particularly rural areas. To date, the company has helped power 100,000 homes, and aims to reach a further 200,000 clients within the next four years.

Some notable SELCO design innovations include solar-powered headlamps for rubber-tappers and midwives, and portable lights to feed silkworms.

“Solar will be fantastic for creating decentralised solutions,” says Hande. “I’m not even talking about the climate change issue, just from a poverty reduction standpoint it makes so much sense for developing countries like India.”

THE GAME CHANGER

FRIEDRICH FÜHR
Director, DESERTEC Foundation

The Sahara desert could soon be meeting 15% of Europe’s energy needs via a €265bn CSP farm and high efficiency transmission lines.

In November, Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, brought together a consortium to deliver the work — Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII). With the likes of Siemens, E.ON, and Deutsche Bank on board, there is optimism that power could be delivered as soon as 2015.

The idea has the support of the recently formed Union for the Mediterranean, and even UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a notorious renewable energy laggard, has accepted it could be a good move.

Friedrich Führ, director of the Desertec Foundation, a catalyst for the realisation the concept both in the Sahara and other locations, says: “Mankind has developed knowledge and technology to prevent the world from climate collapse.

“We are reminding politicians and the industry that the solution is very simple if they start to think in the new way.”

THE OPPORTUNIST

DMITRY KOTENKO
Founder, NITOL SOLAR

In the unlikely locale of a Siberian Cold War-era chemical factory, the Great Bear is waking from its slumber to smell the sunshine.

It all began in 1998 when ambitious science graduate Dmitry Kotenko founded Nitol, an acronym of the mission statement “New, Innovative, and Technological”, and waded, intially, into the chemical trading industry.

Five years later, the company acquired a dilapidated chemical factory near the remote city of Irkutsk. Ostensibly a dud asset, it was soon revealed to possess a veritable goldmine: a production facility for trichlorosilane, the main feedstock for the polysilicon, a component of solar panels.

After a succession of autodidactic renewable energy crash courses, Kotenko, now 38, and his founding partners, decided to go for broke.

It would appear to have been a good call. Today the company is valued at around $1bn (€660m), and has signed long-term deals worth $1.66bn (€1.1bn) with some of the world’s biggest PV firms, including China’s Suntech Power (the largest solar module manufacturer in the world and now a minority shareholder in Nitol Solar) and US’s Evergreen Solar.

Moving forward, Nitol Solar plans to ramp up its polysilicon production from 300 metric tonnes of per year today to a 3,800, as well as branch out into monosilane, one of the main components of thin-film solar models.

THE NEW FRONTIERSMAN

GARY SPIRNAK
CEO, SOLAREN

As companies toil to increase efficiency of solar technologies, Californian start-up Solaren is cutting to the chase and get closer to the source.

Solaren plans to launch a solar space farm into orbit to convert radiation into radio-frequency transmissions for beaming back down to Earth, and the reason is simple: 200 miles into space, the sun’s rays are 10 times more powerful and available 24/7.

To ensure the project goes beyond mere sci-fi, Solaren has agreed with San Francisco-based utility PG&E to supply 200MW of astral solar from 2016; there are hopes to expand levels to 1000MW within three years of that date.

Solar space farms aren’t a new idea: NASA has been studying them since the 1960s, and solar panels are a mainstay of satellites and spacecraft.

“We were looking for another challenge from space,” says Cal Boerman, Solaren’s director of energy services. “We don’t have to invent anything. We just have to scale things up.”