SOLAR TODAY - January/February 2009

The private sector is starting to gear up. Former oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is building the world’s largest wind farm. General Electric, having built one of the world’s largest wind turbine businesses, is jumping into solar energy. Applied Materials is taking orders for gigawatt-scale photovoltaic fabs. The Solar Power International conference in October had 500 industrial exhibitors.

Thousands of startups aim to become the Google of renewable energy. So does Google itself!

In fact, one of the most hopeful portents is that the entrepreneurs and venture funds that defeated the monopolies at Ma Bell and IBM are turning their sights on Exxon and Peabody. We’ve come a long way since 1980, when über-conflicted oil companies dominated big solar and brilliant scientists with limited business skills dominated small solar. This time the solar industry is populated by seasoned entrepreneurs who seek to take over the energy business. With more than 150 solar manufacturing companies around the world — many of them backed by high-tech titans — the oil industry will not be able to buy them all and shut them down as it did in the 1980s.

FRONIUS

Target Federal Procurement. The federal government should buy photovoltaic devices in bulk and install them on all federal buildings, military bases and the backs of billboards — pouring the power into the grid. The goal should be to grow the market in a rapid yet predictable way linked to constantly lower prices.

Large federal purchases of computer chips for the military and NASA drove up the volume and drove down the prices of these semiconductor devices until they were cheap enough that the private sector saw an explosion of demand. Now we have semiconductor intelligence integrated throughout our lives. Serious federal purchases of solar photovoltaics could lead these devices to become ubiquitous.

Construct a Nationwide Smart Grid. Many carbon-neutral renewable energy sources are intermittent or diurnal. A resilient smart grid will make real-time data available to the grid-operator 24/7 and will embed intelligence on both sides of the meter. The best locations for sources and storage alike are widely dispersed. We need to be able to knit the nation together with a national smart grid. Only the government can assemble the multistate corridor rights and transmission capacity to make such a grid possible. The cost is generally estimated at about $400 billion spread over 10

The most effective way to avoid a long, worldwide recession is huge expenditures on green investments, putting millions of unemployed people back to work.

Make It a Federal Priority

Government has a tradition of helping sunrise industries supplant their well-entrenched predecessors. Canals were encouraged as more efficient than horses. Railroads were viewed as a way to open the West. The interstate highway system replaced many of the functions performed by railroads.

Some renewable energy sources (e.g., pho-toelectrochemistry) and storage devices (e.g., nano-enabled ultracapacitors) would benefit greatly from mini-Manhattan Project commitments to R&D. Others are poised to ride learning curves to lower prices through mass production — but they require guaranteed markets to elicit the necessary investment. (Computer chips went from being high-priced luxuries to cheap commodities only because the Air Force and NASA bought them in bulk until their prices fell to a level where the private market took over.) Here are a series of federal policies that, combined with a carbon fuel cap-and-auction, would usher in a solar revolution.