Solar Shorts

Ah, 2008, the good old days. I walked into the massive solar conference hall in appropriately sunny San Diego, just weeks after the Investment Tax Credit had been approved. The keynote speakers were giddy with excitement. The booths were packed. Solar companies couldn’t keep up with the demand. The data point that hit me was that there were about 400 companies with booths, but over 400 other companies wanted to be included but there wasn’t room – and this was after the organizers had opted for a bigger venue for 2008. The Google of solar energy will probably turn out to be one of those 400 excluded companies, a start up that’s going to launch a solar technology so brilliant it will completely transform our energy usage. Of course, Google believes they will be the Google of clean energy, and if they can do it, God bless ‘em. I think it’s more likely to be someone in a garage in Cambridge or Berkley who’s going to come out of nowhere.

Another revelation came at a panel discussion that included European leaders in solar. Two PowerPoint slides where shown side by side. One showed the solar resources available in the US, the other showed Germany’s. The US gleamed like gold, with broad swaths of the west and southwest showing perfect solar conditions. The Northeast was more purple, yet still fine for capturing the sun. Germany was a shade darker then our Northeast. And yet Germany has the world’s highest amount of solar energy adoption per capita. I asked myself, what’s wrong with this picture?

As anyone in the solar industry knows, Germany is way ahead of us because they’ve had a feed-in tariff, making it possible for homeowners and businesses to sell power generated by their solar panels back onto the grid at above market rates – a great way to make solar more economic. Why does Germany have a national feed-in tariff and we don’t? I believe it’s because we in America have our own Berlin Wall. It’s made of ignorance, built brick by brick with the help of coal and oil companies spreading disinformation about clean energy, topped with a razor wire of lies by people like  Michael Steel and  Rush Limbaugh  who deny global warming, and its perimeter is a minefield of old habits. Need power? Let’s burn something.

What’s urgently needed in this country is a public service campaign on solar and wind. It’s laudable that President Obama has called for change, and is putting money behind the effort to triple clean energy production. But people are simply not going to invest in solar panels for their houses en masse, coast to coast, until they understand what’s in it for them – the thrill of watching their electric meter run backwards.  And they are not likely to approve the wind farm in their town if they think wind energy doesn’t work because the wind is intermittent, or the turbines are ugly (as opposed to those scenic nuclear plants).

Soon, our Berlin Wall will fall.  And between the shards of broken concrete strewn on the ground a new country – economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable – will slowly rise, illuminated by the power that has always been right before us but somehow beyond our reach. 

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