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The UK gov't has newly cast itself as solar-skeptic, but advances in technology suggest it's a good choice for homeowners and small businesses.

GREEN LIGHT FOR RENEWABLE FUELS
NEW TECHNOLOGY MAKES SOLAR END-USER FRIENDLY
15 December 2005

Renewable fuels have enjoyed a lot of attention in recent months, in a market driven by escalating oil costs, strained fuel stocks, worsening environmental degradation, promises by the G8 —yes, all of them— at Gleneagles, Scotland, in July to reduce carbon emissions. Revelations about the vulnerabilities inherent in the fossil fuel infrastructure and in the political situations of the largest petroleum exporters have exacerbated concern about the stability of fossil fuel stocks and costs.

The UK brought attention to the issue recently, by announcing its plans to "review" new developments in nuclear plant technology, and the US government is still struggling to draft a security and containment plan for its proposed national nuclear waste repository that would satisfy scientists, regulators and the courts.

As noted in a Sentido article on nuclear policy last week: petroleum is a finite resource, a "fossil" fuel that cannot be replaced when existing volume has been exhausted. Coal, another carbon-based fossil, is so sooty, it cannot burn cleanly —though "clean cloal technology" may produce less noxious fumes than the standard coal-fired plant, it still contaminates far more than other means of power generation.

Nations like the United Kingdom are finding it hard to cope with Kyoto-agreed obligations. Current infrastructure cannot extract enough power from wind or tide to power the island of Great Britain. So, spokespeople for fossil fuel providers and nuclear plant builders and financial backers have long cited "cost per kilowatt-hour" (kWh) of generating electricity through renewable resources versus that of doing so with carbon-based fuels or nuclear plants.

Much of the disparity has been related to existing infrastructure and the cost of building administrative frameworks to measure and deliver the power from renewables. Now that wind turbines have a much expanded wingspan, and turbine technology has advanced sufficiently to adjust to faint winds or change of direction, wind is competitive even at wholesale rates per kWh, and of course far outstrips carbon-based fuels in waste costs, having virtually no post-production cleanup.

For this reason, any talk of the low cost of nuclear power generation must as a matter of fact exclude the long-term clean-up, containment and security costs related to protecting against even minuscule leakage of nuclear waste, so its cost estimates are handicapped for, beyond the kWh wholesale standard.

It has long been clear that fuels with high risk of contamination carry hidden costs behind production. Nuclear fuels may retain their radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years, prompting the US Environmental Protection Agency to pursue containment targets up to 1 million years into the future.Every carbon-based fuel poses waste disposal problems, and requires sophisticated technology just to reduce the chemical pollution caused by waste materials. So there is already a major price differential built in.

Despite the UK's newfound renewables skepticism, Scotland is reportedly aiming to be that nation that, by implementing an ambitious offshore wind and tide power-generation plan, will become "the Saudi Arabia of renewable fuels". North Sea wind conditions and tidal activity do seem to provide the potential for generating vast energy output, possibly even for export.

But the big news of the moment is solar. Long touted as too expensive to be viable, at an estimated four times the cost per kWh of fossil fuels, new innovations appear to solidify solar's model as being an end-user-centered production method. This means that the cost for power generation is designed to compete with fossil fuels' retail market costs, not their wholesale generation costs.

And solar can compete or even surpass carbon in that area. The regulatory climate is changing, and the days for incentives to expand carbon-fuel production are numbered. Even in the US, where the federal government rejects calls for moving away from carbon, the state of California has unveiled a plan to put $3 billion into incentives for using solar-voltaic power-generation technology.

New developments give solar power the edge it needs, though, in terms of technology, production, and ease of use. New levels of computerization are making it simpler to install, maintain and operate solar-cell systems. New "smart" solar panels can monitor weather forecasts, adjust the timing and the threshold for selling power back to the grid, calculate optimum rates on adjustable pricing markets, and plan for grid shortages.

This means significantly less work and less headache, less time spent and less expenditure for end-users, who generally host the solar-voltaic cells on their own property. The innovations are also motivating power companies to offer services whereby they install, operate and maintain the solar panels on the end-user's site, also maintaining ownership, but end-users hosting such solar panels get lower fixed-rate long-term contracts for the green energy.

All of these factors are making solar power more attractive, more competitive and more sustainable as a core power-production model, which puts fossil-providers' protestations in an interesting light: fossil and nuclear lobbies have long criticized renewables as non-competitive and costly for depending on subsidies... and they are still saying it.

The trouble is, energy infrastructure has always depended heavily on subsidies and tax incentives, and many industry leaders still enjoy unique tax break privileges at rates not seen in other highly profitable industries. What's more, their claims are no longer justified by the state of technology, and the subsidies they begrudge renewables happen to be a matter of direct competition for federal budget spending.

The Bush "Energy Act", which oil executives helped to write, gave most of its $80 billion to fund traditional fuel exploration and production, precisely because they need the infusion of cash to sustain the immense, unrivaled profits of the last few years, already increasing at far more than the rate of inflation (by nearly 10 times inflation in 2004).

In countries like Germany and Spain, which have pushed wind power heavily, traditional fuel sources have continued to enjoy government funding, but renewables have grown and become more competitive nonetheless. Japan, which is a pioneer in solar-voltaic technology is starting to phase out its subsidies, because the industry is strong enough to compete without them.

In light of dwindling supplies, more intense regulation, popular outcry against carbon emissions and, yes, competition from new upstarts in the green energy sector, traditional energy providers are fighting not against subsidy dependent solar and wind, but rather they are competing to get their hands on that very money, to prolong subsidies that don't appear to be sound policy going forward. [s]

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