INTRODUCTORY SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY ... - PHOTON Info

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Under the Sun heaters and books to aid remote living – got Schaeffer into the business of selling PV. »A guy from L.A. came up in a Porsche with PV in the back of his car, he said he was coming from the space industry,« says Schaeffer. Intrigued at the possibil- ity of using PV to charge batteries to power homes, Schaeffer bought 100 9-watt mod- ules to test if he could sell them. 26 In the late 1970s into the 1980s, then, as Reagan came into office and elimi- nated funding for DOE demonstration projects, and as the oil companies tried, and failed, to make solar profitable, a new market emerged to help keep PV alive. Off-grid denizens of a particular sort were especially enthusiastic about deriving power from the sun. »It was a good fit because there were thousands of people living off the grid who had money because they were growing marijuana,« says David Katz, president of AEE Solar in Humboldt County in northern Califor- nia. »That’s how they financed it.« Pot growers in northern Califor- nia and elsewhere didn’t typically use PV for cultivation of their cash crops – regular sunlight was good for that – but instead as a source of electricity for their homes. Bringing in grid power would have necessitated lots of unwel- come visitors, any one of whom might have noticed the illegal farming opera- tions and tipped off the authorities. PV didn’t have that problem and pot farmers quickly became a significant market. »That’s how we got our start,« says Schaeffer. »Thank God for those early growers who really built the industry.« Even the manufacturers of PV took notice. One day a Learjet from ARCO Solar landed at a tiny airport in Wil- lits, California. »I think it was the first jet that had come to the airport,« says Schaeffer. »They wanted to come into the store first hand and find out why all their photovoltaics were selling to a little store called Real Goods.« Lesson seven: Faraway events matter Had nothing changed, PV would like- ly have remained a relatively obscure industry, supplying tiny, niche markets. Even Schaeffer says that, at the begin- ning, 95 percent of his business was non-solar and that virtually every bit of PV he sold was for off-grid applications. Certainly, there were blips of demand for PV, driven, as in the past, by major events, like the fear of what would happen when the world hit the year 2000. »We’d get Mormons or survivalists in Idaho that wanted 20 PVs Fed-Ex’d to them and they had to arrive by Friday be- pV h i g h: mAriJuAnA fArmers, like this o n e in northern cAliforniA, h AV e l o n g been big purchA sers o f pV (n o t i c e the r o o f t o p system) b e c A u s e it A l l o w s them to liVe discretely o f f cause the apocalypse was on Saturday,« he says. »It didn’t matter what it cost.« Today, though, 95 percent of Real Goods’ business is with PV and virtually all of it is grid-tied. And in many ways, the transformation of Real Goods, now part of Gaiam Inc., a publicly traded company, is a microcosm of an industry that has matured. What happened? In short, the industry got real, thanks to a host of different factors, many of which originated far, far away. In the early to mid-1990s, Germany and Japan got serious about boosting the amount of energy they generated from the sun, and launched attractive incentives to encourage people to install PV on their homes. the g r i d A n d still e n J o y m o d e r n c o n V e n i e n c e s This created a new market for Ameri- can manufacturers of PV, who had been satisfying the small off-grid domestic demand and exporting more to devel- oping countries that used solar to sup- ply electricity to light their homes. »It was a lot of exporting out of the United States,« says Rever of BP Solar, who says other little market segments, like powering highway traffic signs, added up to something, although not much. »Dribs and drabs added up to a modest market.« The ripples from overseas eventually reached American shores. In 1998, Cali- fornia launched an incentive program to encourage PV installations, one that has been expanded and added to ever since. Then in 2005, as part of the Ener- gy Policy Act, the federal government’s investment tax credit (ITC) launched a subsidy that has helped drive demand for PV from individuals, businesses November 2009
and, these days, utilities and investors. »It was like a little plant in the desert. It didn’t have the spring rain until it got the 30-percent tax credit,« says Rever. »Then we got the credit and all of a sud- den you have a big bush.« In addition to the tax credit, there are now a raft of state subsidies and incentives to encourage PV installations as well as renewable energy portfolio standards, which mandate that utilities generate a certain amount of energy from wind, solar and other renewables. Taken together, these initiatives – along with concerns about climate change and hopes that renewable energy can boost economic growth – have done what past efforts haven’t: create a real American market. »So much capi- tal and production capacity has gone into the industry that it did what we all said needed to be done, which is get real and get big,« says Mike Stern, who got his start working for ARCO Solar and is now chief operating officer of Woodland Hills, California-based proj- ect developer Solar Electric Solutions. All of this, Stern insists, has helped the industry reach the critical mass it needs to capture economies of scale and drive down prices. »That is the fundamental difference and that is why this time it’s for real.« Lesson eight: Don’t predict the future Back at SunPower headquarters, R ich- ard Swanson, the company’s founder winces in pain. It may be due to the fact that he’s contending with a broken rib from a sailing accident. But then again, for a guy whose office is adorned with a drawing of Don Quixote, it may just be a reflexive response to hearing that plenty of people are so confident about the industry’s prospects. »That’s kind of ominous,« he says. Swanson has lived through enough of this history that his caution is un- derstandable. Swanson first got into PV after finishing up his PhD in semicon- ductor devices in the 1970s and figur- ing, wrongly, it turns out, that the truly pioneering days of the microchip busi- November 2009 27 ıı ness were already past, he instead opted to pursue solar as a career (along with his teaching assignments at Stanford) eventually founding SunPower in 1985, which was essentially a commercial out- let for work he was doing at Stanford to design higher efficiency solar cells. As we’ve seen, there were precious few commercial applications in those days and Swanson learned to be wary about how enthusiasm for PV didn’t necessarily translate into a market. For instance, when the DOE demonstration programs were dismantled after Reagan came to office, it ended what had been a »heady climate,« as Swanson remem- bers it. »A lot of my friends and others in the industry were forced to exit,« he recalls. He’s also had plenty of experi- ence simply keeping SunPower alive, at times relying on research grants and small projects, like outfitting a Honda vehicle with solar for a race across Aus- tralia. All that said, Swanson does agree with many other observers that things are different now – largely because of the industry’s size. »The big difference is that PV panels were, in current dollars, $30 to $60 dollars a watt back then,« he says. With size, the industry has ben- efited from what he terms »the miracle of the learning curve,« which means that as it grows, more resources can be devoted to solving technical and production problems, which leads to costs going down and even more growth. »I think we still continue to amaze ourselves at how much we’ve taken costs out,« he says. Lower costs, policy support and lots of investment: it’s a recipe that would seem to add up to a very bright future. But if history is a guide at all, it teaches caution and to expect the unexpected. Rever learned this in his early days at Solarex in the 1970s, when it appeared to him that one of two things was sure to happen. »It looked like it was going to go bust or it was going to do great things, and inter- estingly neither one of those happened,« he says. »I would never have guessed the future as it unfolded.« Chris Warren
Page 1: A LONG, STRANGE TRIP SOUTHERN EXPOS
Page 4 and 5: 4 Under the Sun National Renewable
Page 6 and 7: 6 Photo of the month The garden of
Page 8 and 9: May we introduce ourselves? The PHO
Page 10 and 11: 10 Readers‘ letters PHOTON, welco
Page 12 and 13: 12 Readers‘ letters So why are so
Page 14 and 15: 14 Under the Sun History A long, No
Page 16 and 17: 16 Under the Sun The headquarters o
Page 18 and 19: Under the Sun selling book, »A Gui
Page 20 and 21: Under the Sun Academy of Sciences,
Page 22 and 23: Under the Sun made to uniquely fit
Page 24 and 25: Under the Sun to figure out how to
Page 28 and 29: 28 The 13 Solar Colonies PHOTON inv
Page 30 and 31: Politics to federal income tax. Als
Page 32 and 33: State 32 Politics invest. If histor
Page 34 and 35: 34 Politics San Francisco From mega
Page 36 and 37: 36 Politics (see table below). Acco
Page 38 and 39: Politics cent of permits are over-t
Page 40 and 41: 40 Politics Stimulus package Feel t
Page 42 and 43: 42 Politics guide companies interes
Page 44 and 45: Politics »There was a lot of hoopl
Page 46 and 47: Solyndra, Inc. (2) 46 Business Seri
Page 48 and 49: 48 Business DOE in the spotlight So
Page 50 and 51: 50 Business US Boom, bust, or neith
Page 52 and 53: Business guarantee program, and the
Page 54 and 55: 54 Business Buying programs Solar b
Page 56 and 57: Business run three campaigns a year
Page 58 and 59: Business in additional savings for
Page 60 and 61: 60 Science & Technology AlsoEnergy
Page 62 and 63: System Photonics S.p.A. 62 Science
Page 64 and 65: Science & Technology In October, Ya
Page 66 and 67: Science & Technology Japan’s Shar
Page 68 and 69: Little product, big comeback An old
Page 70 and 71: Science & Technology Microinverters
Page 72 and 73: Science & Technology Filling a nich
Page 74 and 75: Anne Kreutzmann / photon-pictures.c
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76 Science & Technology Exeltech’
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Architecture Belgium Returning to e
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80 Architecture November 2009
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82 Architecture November 2009
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84 In Practice Proposals The perfec
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86 In Practice Is your proposal com
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88 In Practice that are predictable
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90 In Practice System: accomplished
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In Practice bluntly: »We have this
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Elkus’ golden trout pond is the l
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Test Laboratory A couple of years a
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Events From system inspection to in
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November 19-20, 2009 Alternative En
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Who should exhibit? • Manufacture
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Education & Training Producer-indep
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Internships New internships in the
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Ask the Editors Whether it’s abou
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Industry Registry Here is informati
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Preview The issue 12-2009 appears a
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