Solar Energy In L.A.-- And Japan

Monday night I was at the Hammer Museum for a screening of Shaun Kadlec's and Deb Tullmann's fantastic new film, Born This Way, a documentary on the gay and lesbian underground in Cameroon. Afterwards I ran into Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti. Eric's an old friend and one of the smartest politicians I've ever met. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and he studied Urban Planning at Columbia. I doubt L.A. has ever elected anyone as qualified to be mayor in its entire history. I hadn't talked to Eric since he beat out the DWP shill he ran against in the runoff. I've been dying to talk with him about how the DWP systematically rips off solar energy users in L.A.-- but I restrained myself... for now.

The DWP is going to be one of many tough problems Eric is going to face as mayor. I know he already knows what crooks they are and I figured I don't have anything substantive add anyway. My home solar system was designed to eliminate my electric bill and it did but after nearly a year it started creeping back up again and is now at around 50% of it was before I covered my roof in solar panels, I can never get a straight answer out of the DWP crooks. Lucky for Cambridge, Massachusetts they have MIT on hand to make sure ratepayers there don't get the DWP treatment. They've developed a new tool to assess a city's solar power potential. “In this project we developed a new simulation-based technique to reliably predict the annual electricity yield from an arbitrarily oriented and obstructed photovoltaic (PV) array located anywhere on the planet.”

SA+P researchers have developed a new interactive map to show a city’s property owners how much electricity can be produced on their rooftops from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, how the financial investment will pay off and how much pollution will be reduced.

The new tool shows that if photovoltaic panels were installed on all good and excellent locations in MIT’s hometown of Cambridge, the city could generate about a third of its electricity needs via PV for about $2.8 billion. The technology has been found to predict electricity yield to within 4 – 10% of actual measured results.

So far the biggest solar power generation stars have been Germany and China. But now Japan, transitioning away from nuclear, has started making a dent-- a big one. Before Fukushima only 1% of Japan's energy needs came from solar. By next year Japan will be the world's second largest solar market after China.

According to a report by energy analyst IHS on Japan's energy mix, Japan's solar installations jumped by "a stunning 270% (in gigawatts) in the first quarter of 2013." That means by the end of 2013 there will be enough new solar panels equal to the capacity of seven nuclear reactors. Such massive growth will allow Japan to surpass Germany and become the world's largest photovoltaics (PV) market in terms of revenue this year.

"Japan is forecast to install $20 billion worth of PV systems in 2013, up 82% from $11 billion in 2012," IHS said. "In contrast, the global market is set for tepid 4% growth. The strong revenue performance for Japan this year is partly driven by the high solar prices in the country." Germany still leads with the total number of units and capacity, however, with its 32,192 megawatts. Japan is now closer to the U.S.'s 8,069 megawatts at 7,429 megawatts, according to London-based BNEF.

Solar energy in Japan has come to dominate thanks to government incentives now offered to the producers of renewables and rules which require public power utilities to buy alternative power at above-market rates. A deal forged by the last government desperate to wean Japan from its addiction to oil and nuclear power led to the implementation of a very generous feed-in tariff (FIT) for renewable power generators.

Starting at 42 yen per kilowatt hour last July and now reduced in April to 37.8 yen (39 cents) the FIT is more than twice those of Chinese and German offerings.

...The provenance of the hardware has also seen a sea change with domestic panels now outselling cheap imports. Japan has a strong solar panel manufacturing industry and companies like Sharp, Kyocera, Sanyo, and Mitsubishi Electric would benefit from the new energy polices and emphasis on solar power, according to IHS.

Those same failing companies are now banking on a technological edge to push the quality up of made-in-Japan solar panels while keeping prices down. Doing so could make solar one the few bright points of the Japanese electronics industry. Sharp recently unveiled new solar panels that it claims not only use just 1% of the expensive silicon used in conventional models but are thin enough and clear enough to replace windows.

Others are focusing on efficiency. To make solar electricity affordable on a large scale, researchers have long been trying to develop a low-cost solar cell, which is both highly efficient and easy to manufacture with high output-- silicon-based solar cells typically have an efficiency of around 21% for converting sunlight into electricity.

According to Panasonic its prototype solar cell has achieved the world's highest conversion efficiency at 24.7%, verified by tests performed at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

"How long the boom in solar can last in Japan is hard to tell, but as land runs out, there will be slowdown," says Hoshi. "Of course there are still the rooftops to exploit as mobile carrier Softbank is doing. It's renting rooftops for solar-- a very smart and interesting business model. Perhaps, unlike previous attempts to deregulate Japan's electric utility industry, this should be a success."

Meanwhile, The U.S. generated 730 million kilowatt hours of solar electricity in the first two months of 2013-- so not the sunniest months anywhere-- 227% more than the same period in 2012, according to new EIA data. That's already 10% of the total amount generated for all of 2012.