On Monday, we came across a (not so) surprising article from the Miami Herald, and we thought it was important enough to share with you, so we have re-posted it to our blog.

State utility regulators rejected arguments from consumer advocates and agreed to allow utility companies to charge customers so they can invest in speculative plans for nuclear power.

HERALD/TIMES TALLAHASSEE BUREAU

FPL's Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant. Image Source: FPL

TALLAHASSEE – Florida utility regulators on Monday unanimously approved a $2.09 a month rate increase for the average Florida Power & Light customer beginning in January so that the company can continue to pay for speculative plans to build nuclear power plants.

Under a state law approved by the Legislature in 2006, the company can collect the money but can change its mind and never build the facility. The commission unanimously approved the rate increase, arguing that they were required to do so based on the statute.

The ruling completely accepted the arguments of FPL, which asked for $196 million in cost recovery for upgrading its nuclear units and for planning two new reactors at Turkey Point. The cost to customers will be $2.09 for every 1,000 kilowatt hours used, up from 33 cents per month, for that estimated electricity usage.

The commission rejected arguments by the Office of Public Counsel, which represents the consumer in rate cases, which argued that the commission should deny the request because the company has no clear intention to build the plants and has misled regulators. It also rejected requests by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy which recommended the PSC halt giving the utilities the ability to charge customers for nuclear power because of questions surrounding the technology in the wake of the Fukishima nuclear disaster in Japan.

The commission is still debating whether or not to accept Progress Energy’s request to lower the existing nuclear charge from $5.53 per month per kilowatt hour to $4.68 per month to collect $140 million toward a new nuclear power plant at its Crystal River facility.

“I find that the utility has done what the statutes has asked for,’’ Commissioner Ron Brise said. He said that it could hurt investment in the state if the commission decides not to give the utilities what it wants. “We are implementing the statute as proscribed by the Legislature.”

Commissioner Julie Brown asked if the statute specifically calls for proof that the company needs to show that it intends to build a plant. Staff lawyer Keino Young said yes but noted that the company doesn’t have to decide to definitely build a nuclear plant in order to charge customers and collect money for it. “Is necessary that final decision be made prior to allowing recovery? No,” Young said. “…If the company is engaged in siting, license, construction or construction of a nuclear power plant, they meet the intent requirement of your order.”

Commissioner Eduardo Balbis said he is comfortable with allowing the companies to charge customer so they can pursue the option of building a nuclear plant as the commission has allowed them to do for the past several years. The PSC shouldn’t stop allowing the company to move forward on this because “making an irrevocable decision at this time of a project of this magnitude may not be reasonable.’’

The utilities must come back every year, he added, and “we are monitoring this. The utilities are monitoring this.”

The PSC, a governor-appointed body, makes its decision based on input from the utilities, from the state’s consumer advocate, and from the PSC professional staff, now led by Braulio Baez of Miami, a former PSC commissioner who has spent the last decade working for the utilities.

The staff recommended the PSC adopt the utilities request for $196 million in cost recovery and also recommends accepting Progress Energy’s request for $140 million towards a new nuclear power plant at its Crystal River facility.

The mayors of Pinecrest and South Miami call the request “corporate welfare” and are leading an effort to repeal the legislation that gave the PSC the ability to raise fees for nuclear power without requiring them to build them.

The change will be reflected on customer bills beginning in January when FPL is expected to seek another rate increase of up to $1 billion a year.

 

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/24/2469622/regulators-agree-to-let-fpl-raise.html#ixzz1c57gxCJl

By Clint Wilder, Clean Edge

Orignally posted on RenewableEnergyWorld.com on October 4, 2011

Here’s a headline that I bet you didn’t see (at least in the United States) in the past month, but based on the facts, could have been written:

Welcome to the Golden Age of Solar Power

A case can definitely be made. In the past two years, solar PV cell prices have plummeted by more than half, and total installation costs by about 30 percent. Solar deployment in the U.S., from residential rooftops to utility-scale PV power plants, has soared. Grid-connected PV grew 69 percent (over 2010) in the second quarter to 314 megawatts. Six states installed at least 10 MW in the quarter; that’s more than all but three states added in 2007 for the entire year.

The installation business itself, a fragmented mom-and-pop market niche not long ago, has been transformed into a booming industry for the likes of nationwide service/financing companies SolarCity, Sungevity, and SunRun. Walmart says it will install solar on 75 percent of its stores in California. And the world’s 11th largest company, Total, announced that it would pay $1.37 billion for a controlling interest in SunPower back in April.

But you’d obviously never know these developments from following the Capitol Hill and media frenzy since August 31st. That was the Black Wednesday when Solyndra declared bankruptcy and ceased operations, going from a promising, well-funded solar PV startup to the Republican party’s favorite political piñata. Depending on the day and the attacker, Solyndra represents: everything wrong with government support of new technologies; proof that green jobs, and President Obama’s support of same, are a miserable failure; or most troubling of all, an indictment of the entire clean-energy sector.

In a perfect world (and in fact, a world that does exist to some extent in other nations), clean energy would not be a partisan issue. I’d like to think that an industry devoted to American innovation, entrepreneurship, job creation, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and a healthier future for our children wouldn’t raise anyone’s political hackles. There actually are encouraging examples of this, well under the cable-news radar. Clean-tech factories and biorefineries are springing up in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, and conservative Kansas Republican Governor Sam Brownback, the former senator and onetime presidential candidate, recently penned an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle supporting an extension of the federal production tax credit for wind power. “Experience has taught us,” Brownback wrote, “that investment in the renewable-energy economy is creating jobs across all employment sectors.”

But it has been a very different story in the Congressional hearings on the Solyndra debacle. Leading the partisan pile-on, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) accused the Obama administration of waging a “war on carbon-based energy.” Issa’s accusation is not original; it has been a right-wing talking point since at least early 2010. Issa and his allies conveniently ignore Obama’s approval of the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline for oil from Alberta’s tar sands, his opening of vast new areas to potential offshore drilling, and his decision not to enact new restrictions on ozone-causing emissions.

But they’re calling it a war, and in war, the first casualty is truth, said ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Why must it be a war? Why can’t we support newer, cleaner forms of energy as we continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of at least $61 billion last year, according to the 2011 report from watchdog group Green Scissors, whose partners range from Friends of the Earth to the libertarian Heartland Institute.

Was Solyndra a bad bet? In retrospect, of course it was – and many venerable stars of venture capital, including Madrone Capital, RockPort Capital, and U.S. Venture Partners, lost a lot of money as investors in the company. If there was any malfeasance on the part of Solyndra’s management, it should absolutely be investigated and prosecuted. But let’s put things in perspective: Solyndra’s $528 million loss represents less than two percent of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program (launched under President George W. Bush) for new energy technologies.

Despite the political firestorm, DOE to its credit did not hold back in approving a slew of clean-energy loan guarantees before the program expired at the end of last month [Sept]. In solar, the big beneficiaries were development projects rather than companies – more than $5 billion in guarantees for six projects with combined capacity of more than 2,000 MW from SunPower, Sempra, SolarReserve, First Solar, and industrial real estate manager Prologis. Financing deployment projects (particularly those with power purchase agreements in place) is generally a much lower risk than funding new technology developers like Solyndra, and deployment deserves at least as much government support as R&D, as my Clean Edge colleague Trevor Winnie wrote earlier this year.

Here’s what really gets me about the Solyndra-fueled backlash against clean tech in general, and the solar power industry in particular. For years, the biggest criticism of solar as a major electricity source has been its high cost. Now, the same downward price pressure that has claimed PV cell-manufacturing victims like Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and others is fueling an unprecedented U.S. boom in installation and deployment. At Clean Edge, we project that installed solar PV costs in the U.S. – without subsidies – will be competitive with residential electricity prices in more than half the states by 2020.

Yet I’d bet good money that some of the people and politicians now decrying the entire sector because of Solyndra were the very same ones squawking, “Solar’s too expensive!” in the past. That’s no longer the case. As happened in semiconductors and many other industries before it, these rapidly declining cost curves present huge challenges for U.S.-based crystalline PV manufacturers trying to compete with low-cost competitors in China and elsewhere. But for scaling up solar as a significant energy source in the U.S. and around the world – and for companies in most other parts of the solar value chain – they are very good news.

It would be nice if the people actually elected to set our nation’s policies could understand that.

Wilder is Clean Edge’s senior editor, co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution, and a blogger about clean-tech issues for the Green section of The Huffington Post. His new book, Clean Tech Nation, co-authored with Ron Pernick, will be released next year. E-mail him at wilder@cleanedge.com and follow him on Twitter at @Clint_Wilder.

The information and views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Electron Solar Energy or its employees and affiliates.

We need your help to spread the facts – not spin – about solar energy. Take a moment to review the facts below and keep these in mind the next time you hear GOP or Democratic politicians discussing solar energy or ‘green jobs’.

Here are the facts about solar: 

•    The solar industry employs more than 100,000 Americans, more than twice as many as in 2009. They work at more than 5,000 companies, the vast majority being small businesses, in all 50 states.

•    The U.S. solar industry grew by 69% in the past year, making it one of the fastest growing sectors in the U.S. economy.

•    Since the beginning of 2010, the price of solar panels has dropped by 30%, and costs continue to fall making solar an even more viable choice for residential and business customers.

•    The U.S. was a net exporter of solar products in 2010 by $2 billion. We were even a net exporter to China.

•    Solar power in the U.S. now exceeds 3,100 megawatts (MW), enough to power more than 630,000 homes.

•    Continued industry growth enhances our energy security and diversifies our domestic energy portfolio.

Here is the article:

Don’t Be Fooled By the Solyndra Bankruptcy Circus — Solar Is Booming

I doubt the facts are going to matter much now that Republicans have latched onto the Solyndra solar “scandal,” and even if they did matter, I’d be the wrong guy to defend the Obama administration (and some of the world’s top venture capitalists) for making the same honest mistake I made.  After a few dozen Solyndra hearings like the one in the House today, nobody’s going to remember the Bush administration was just as hellbent to make this loan. Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.

But I do want to push back against the idea that Solyndra’s failure reflects some kind of failure of the solar industry. That’s just wrong. The solar industry is on fire, thanks to the same collapse in prices that doomed Solyndra.

In just the last two months, about 7,000 megawatts of new solar projects were added to the U.S. pipeline. That’s the equivalent of seven nuclear reactors, which is seven more than we’ve built in the last three decades. And that doesn’t include residential projects, like the unprecedented “Solar Strong” effort to install photovoltaic panels on 160,000 rooftops on military housing that was just announced last week. The U.S. solar market doubled last year, and it’s expected to double again this year, even though many states are reducing their subsidies. How many other industries are growing that fast in this economy?

Like every other U.S. energy source, solar is federally subsidized. The loan guarantee program has been a particularly crucial driver for unusually large or innovative projects, like Project Solar Strong or a 250-megawatt solar generation plant in the Mojave Desert that just finalized a $1.2 billion loan guarantee on Tuesday, and will provide clean renewable power for more than 50,000 homes. Last week, the Obama administration approved a $150 million loan guarantee to 1366 Technologies, a Massachusetts firm with a new manufacturing process that could cut the cost of silicon wafers 50% and make solar even more cost-competitive.

It’s true that these are tough times for solar-panel manufacturers. Solyndra had a cool technology, but it couldn’t produce panels cheap enough to compete with Chinese manufacturers that received over $30 billion in government funding last year. It’s also true that government loan programs are inherently messy; former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers really hated them. Jonathan Silver, the head of the loan program, once told me he’d stipulate that a strict carbon-pricing regime that penalized fossil fuels for their pollution would be a more efficient way of helping green energy compete on a level playing field. But the same Republicans who are mocking the loan program killed Obama’s cap-and-trade regime.

It never ceases to amaze me how Washington wise men seem to think of renewable energy as some kind of gee-whiz Jetsons technology. I was on some TV show with Sam Donaldson after Fukushima, and he scoffed that maybe we’d have wind and solar someday, but not in his lifetime. Dude! It’s here! Wind is now a bigger employer than coal. Solar is finally scaling up, which is why its costs are falling down. The notion that you have to plunk down $50,000 for a solar system is totally 2008. In much of the country, companies like Solar City and SunRun now finance deals where you plunk down zero dollars to get a panel on your roof, then pay for it with a fixed monthly fee that’s less than what you save on your electric bill.

The collapse of Solyndra is an embarrassing bump on the road to a clean-energy future. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the politicians who are hyping Solyndra tend to be the politicians who want to close that road. But we’re getting farther down the road than people realize. And it’s taking us where we need to go.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2011/09/14/dont-be-fooled-by-the-solyndra-bankruptcy-circus-solar-is-booming/#ixzz1YO7IkwFH“

As a part of our new push to show more of what we do, our Solar Thermal installation team had just finished a new solar pool heating installation, so I thought it might be nice to share some of the photos.

The client had a specific request for us to mount the system to the roof of the rear patio, which was perfectly sized for the system the pool required.

The system shown was fully installed in one day.  The majority of the time of installation was permitting, but once issued, Electron’s work crews pounce on the task at hand!

Clean lines, Professionally installed.  This is how Electron Solar Energy provides the highest quality to the client.

A benefit of placing the system on the flat surface means the panels’ capillaries will not warp over time

Flexible Solar Panels – Some quick insight:

Flexible solar panels are a nice option for a solar electric installation, but there are some disadvantages to traditional glass-framed panels that consumers should be aware of:

1. While flexible solar panels can produce energy at longer periods of the day, they also produce energy at a slower pace.  This results in a larger footprint necessary to compensate for the efficiency gap.
2. Only flat roof systems can be used for flexible solar panels.  Shingles require breathing along the edges, and tile has too much contour for the adhesive to stick.
3. If you have to re-roof an area where flexible solar is installed, you will lose the adhesion to the building when tearing up the old roof.  If the panels can be re-applied, you will not achieve the same anchorage strength, and certain building departments may not allow them to be re-adhered.  The best way to ensure longevity of the system is to get a new roof right before the panels are adhered.  Electron Solar Energy has affiliates that are experts at roofing located from South Florida all the way to North-Central Florida to assist in this regard.

Despite these three factors, our client on North Bay Road was a perfect candidate for the flexible panels.
The home had ample roof space, a new or like-new condition roof, and a home owner that did not wish for us to penetrate the current roofing system.

We hope that the quick glimpse into one of our projects will provide helpful insight into one of the many decisions that Electron Solar can assist you in.  Let our years of experience provide you with the proper solution for your energy problems!

I hope you enjoy the video!
-Kevin K.

FPL is offering a new rebate program to customers who install photovoltaic (PV) and solar water heating systems on their homes and businesses. The solar rebate programs are authorized by the Florida Public Service Commission to promote clean solar power and reduce energy consumption. Electron Solar Energy provides all aspects of the systems including design, engineering, installation, FPL connection, and rebate management for residential properties and also full project management for commercial properties. Applications begin on June 21 and funds are extremely limited! Call us today to reserve a solar installation on your home that will lock in this great cash incentive from FPL!

What you need to know about the FPL Solar incentives.

-Applications begin on June 21, 2011
-Save 50% or more on solar electric (PV) systems
-$1,000 rebate for solar water heating
-Pay back in as little as 4 years
-System lifetime 25+ years
-Up to $20,000 rebate for Residential PV
-Up to $50,000 rebate for Commercial PV

Dont wait, the 2011 FPL solar rebate incentives will be snapped up in days by those who are prepared. For example, Tampa Electric’s 2011 solar rebate program sold out within 72 hours of accepting applications! Electron Solar Energy will make sure that you are properly documented to receive this money thanks to our in-house rebate management team. Call or email us now and we will work to make sure that you are ready to go on June 21st!

Contact Electron today by phone at 1-800-726-4981 or Email.

“Right now, Florida’s lack of a clear vision and a consistent energy policy is costing Floridians good jobs – that ends when I am Governor,” said Alex Sink. “I feel strongly that new and renewable energy must be a key part of remaking a new economy for Florida. That’s why I have the plan to move our state decisively toward a sustainable and job-generating energy future. I am so proud to receive the support of our state’s industry leaders in new and renewable energy, and look forward to working together with them to bring needed jobs and a more diversified economy for our state.”

Leading renewable energy industry groups are getting behind Alex Sink because she is the only candidate with the experience and leadership to support Florida’s businesses and create sustainable jobs. Sink has developed a comprehensive Business Plan to revitalize Florida’s economy, which includes a focus on developing innovative sectors like solar and biofuels, and a Plan for Florida’s New Energy Future which details her focus on green jobs.

“Alex Sink is the only candidate to submit a detailed plan which outlines the path towards the state’s first renewable energy marketplace that will result in long term job growth and the attraction of new manufacturing into Florida,” said Ed Strobel, Vice President of the Florida Alliance for Renewable Energy. “I am a fiscally conservative Republican and a small businessman that has to meet a payroll every week. The solutions are simple — we just need a leader who won’t be afraid to stand up to the large special interests to make it happen. Alex Sink will be that leader.”

“I am a huge advocate for solar energy and distributed generation, and our entire statewide membership believes in public policy that promotes local home-grown power, energy efficiency, domestic security, job creation, and in-state manufacturing,” said Bob Stonerock, President of the Florida Renewable Energy Association. “While we are not permitted to make political endorsements as an organization, I personally believe that Alex Sink will be the governor who creates these policies, which is why I am proud to give Alex Sink my endorsement for Governor.”

Sink’s Business Plan highlights the new and renewable energy sector as a top innovative industry to create a more sustainable economy for Florida. To specifically target and encourage new energy industry growth, Sink’s plan includes the creation of energy finance districts, boosting partnerships between our university faculty and private industry, and leveraging investments from the federal government and private capital for new and renewable energy initiatives.

“Florida has the opportunity to be a national and global leader in the development and production of new and renewable energy – but we have to start focusing on this innovative industry right now,” Sink continued. “As Governor, I will champion the exciting innovations already going on around our state – in solar, biofuel, biomass, and other innovative sectors — and bring the kind of policies and leadership needed to make new and renewable energy a true force here in Florida. With our state’s unique combination of natural resources, cutting-edge R&D capabilities, and skilled workforce, it is clear that new and renewable energy should be a key part of remaking Florida’s economy for the long-term.”

The growth of solar installations in the U.S. has been nothing short of meteoric. According to data from the American Solar Energy Society, www.ases.org, the number of residential solar power installations in the country grew by 40 percent last year. That is even more impressive in light of the tepid economic conditions that prevailed in 2009, when millions of jobs were lost and gross domestic product contracted by 2.4 percent.

In fact, the editor of the society’s magazine, Solar Today, revealed to HousingWatch.com this month that solar has been growing at a breakneck pace for some time. In the U.S., Seth Masia said, “solar power installations have averaged about 35 percent to 40 percent annual growth over the past five years.”

To be sure, Americans has some catching up to do. Other developed nations have been installing clean energy for years, and the U.S. is still far behind nations like Germany and Italy in terms of total capacity. But solar could get a big boost in America if the drivers of its popularity in Europe – subsidies called feed-in tariffs – emerge here.