A steep drop in the cost of solar panels in recent months has spurred a significant increase in the number of planned non-residential projects in the U.S., an energy research company reports.

According to Solarbuzz, the number of new, industrial-scale solar projects being planned has increased to 24 gigawatts of solar capacity, up from 17 gigawatts just two months ago.

This growth has occurred as the price of solar panels has plunged 25 percent since the beginning of the year, a trend that analysts say is likely to continue. And while the market has crippled some manufacturers who have unable to keep pace — including three major U.S. companies that were forced to file for bankruptcy in recent weeks — it has made solar projects more attractive to many consumers, businesses, and utilities.

Citing the latest market data, Solarbuzz identified 1,865 non-residential projects that are either installed, being installed, or in development since Jan. 1, 2010. “Utility expectations for improved installed pricing measured either in per watt peak or kilowatt hour have vastly increased over the past quarter,” said Craig Stevens, president of Solarbuzz.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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The price of photovoltaic solar panels is dropping so quickly that by 2013 panels will cost about half of what they cost in 2009, a new report says.

Based on broker reports and industry analysis, the independent consulting firm Ernst & Young predicts that the cost of panels — typically described in terms of the price of each watt of peak capacity — will fall to about $1 dollar within two years, compared to $2 in 2009.

The current cost is about $1.50. When combined with the rising cost of fossil fuel-generated power, solar energy could be cost-competitive even without government support within a decade, the report says.

The report, which was prepared by Ernst & Young for the Solar Trade Association in response to reduced UK government support for large solar systems, also suggests that reduced government support for solar technology could undermine the growth of the emerging energy sector.

The Committee on Climate Change, an independent advisory body to the UK government, recently suggested that solar remains too expensive for short-term government investment.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Economy versus the Environment. This is a slogan for many when they consider the challenges of dealing with Climate Change and the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In 2007, McKinsey issued Reducing US Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost? that provided a a significant contribution to this discussion. McKinsey’s conclusion: at an “affordable” cost of well below $50 per ton, in aggregate, the United States can meet necessary 2030 targets for GHG emission reductions. All-in-all, this was quite good news for those advocating acting to deal with Climate Change.

There was (and is) reason why the original study and McKinsey’s continuing work in this arena have been widely discussed / cited over the past two years. And, variants of the graphic on cost abatement have shown up in briefing after briefing, article after article, book after book. Good news.

Or, well, is it? McKinsey’s work provides significant data that addressing the environment will have economic cost. Even if a low number, with many actions providing economic benefit, the McKinsey work has a serious underlying thematic: it will cost to address climate change.

Perhaps not a horribly painful cost, but a cost nonetheless. While the McKinsey reports (and, again, the broadly used graphics) demonstrate that we can achieve a substantial portion of the necessary carbon reductions at a net positive for the economy, their discussions and representations leave this as a discussion of “cost” to take action, even if a far lower cost than self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” and others working to hinder a move toward a clean energy economy would claim.

Is this, that action on reducing carbon will “cost”, truly an accurate conclusion to draw from McKinsey report?

Consider what the McKinsey team did not consider (107 pg pdf, pages xvi-xvii) :

“The project … did not examine economy-wide effects … Did not attempt to address other societal benefits from abatement efforts, such as improved public health from reducing atmospheric pollution or improving national security. …”

In other words, this is a highly conservative and stove-piped analysis. The conservative approach almost certainly significantly overstates the costs for Global Warming abatement while potentially just as significantly understating the benefits of system-of-system interactions.

Lets take just a few examples of how this stove-piping might have distorted the end results:

• Productivity via ‘greening’: While one can save money and reduce costs by “going green” in an office building, greening a work place’s value-added through added productivity is easily ten times the value of the energy savings. Does worker productivity not count to these business analysts? (And, greening school environments increases educational ‘productivity’ in similar ways, which also contributes to improved societal economic performance. See here for sources re greening schools.)
• Putting a white or green roof saves energy costs on a building, but it also reduces the urban heat island impact and has a multiplicative impact as it reduces cooling requirements in the surrounding area thus leading to lowered heat output from other buildings’ air conditioning systems driving down the demands on the ‘white roof’ building.
• And, this is a ‘positive feedback’: if a group of buildings ‘goes white’, every building owner gains even more due to the reduced ambient temperature lowering air conditioning demand and improving efficiency of cooling systems. Shouldn’t such ‘positive feedbacks’ be part of the equation for considering costs?
• The National Academy of Sciences released a report in September quantifying the health and other ‘hidden’ impacts costs of fossil fuel burning (not exploration, refining, or transport) at some $120 billion per year in the United States, alone. As McKinsey forthrightly states, the massive positive health implications (including, by the way, increased worker productivity due to better health) from reduced pollution are not part of the analysis.

In other words, the national security and trade balance and health and jobs and other benefits that McKinsey seems to have excluded from the analysis likely make the net result from addressing Climate Change a positive benefit, rather than a negative cost, for the economy.

There is yet an even greater ‘uncounted’ element that tips the scale from “cost” to “benefit”: the ‘insurance’ value of mitigation efforts reducing the future impacts of catastrophic climate chaos. While humanity already faces real economic (and other) impacts from climate change and those will grow more significant in coming years, mitigation efforts offer the potential for reducing future impacts and future costs.

This, however, is yet again explicitly not part of McKinsey work:

The project did not attempt to assess the benefits to society from reducing global warming.

When one begins to assess the myriad of direct and indirect benefits excluded from the McKinsey work, their conclusion that we can successfully take action to mitigate climate change for costs below $50 per ton of carbon begins to look quite pessimistic. Counting in that ‘insurance value’ and the benefits of reducing climate change impacts, the famous graphic begins to look like a dire doom & gloom scenario.

Sadly, for whichever set of reasons, those seeking to lay out honest economic discussions as to the cost structure for serious engagement on climate change issues seem to systematically apply conservative analytical principles. This analytical ‘conservatism’ (caution) is not matched by those striving to impede action toward a clean energy economy, who systematically engagement in distortion and outright deceit in their efforts to misinform the public and decision-makers.

The analytical caution (‘conservatism’) ends up fostering a discussion about relative amounts of cost of action (high or low cost of action) when the real societal discussion should be the costs of inaction in the face of ever-more conclusive scientific work on climate change and the benefits from acting to mitigate climate change.

NOTE: The “problem”, here, is not with the McKinsey team (at least not fully). Modeling and valuing ‘positive feedbacks’, attempting to quantify productivity gains across society from ever-’greener’ work places, and placing meaningful figures on the ‘insurance value’ of mitigation are not simple tasks.

And, the McKinsey team forthrightly and explicitly laid out that they did not attempt to take on these sorts of challenges. The problem lies with those who ‘crib’ from the McKinsey work while failing to highlight the study team’s openly stated constraints that fostered a pessimistic statement about the true value of action.

Also, to reinforce, this is not ’solely’ an issue with McKinsey & Co work. Here are some related discussions:

• EPA fails to think in four quadrants in valuing climate legislation examines how the EPA analysis on climate change fails to look at the benefits of action and the costs of inaction.
• Greenpeace grossly understates value of Energy [R]evolution is a look at how even an environmental organization’s research work quite significantly understates the payoffs from acting to mitigate climate change.
• Inhofe and Republicans are Right: Analysis of Climate Bills is Flawed due to the analyses systematic undervaluing of the benefits of action.
• CBO, Media in Need of Remedial Science Classes highlighting how CBO work significantly understates potential costs from unchecked climate chaos.
• CBO’s good news re Climate Legislation is significantly understated calls out the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of legislation for not conducting a holistic analysis.

Article by A. Siegel, appearing courtesy of Celsias

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The AFCOM association recently revealed the results of a survey of 436 data center sites that showed the following trends: Cyber terrorism is an increasing concern, mainframe deployment is declining, storage deployment is increasing, and “green” technologies are definitely happening.

AFCOM found that there is a shift in data centers away from mainframe computers and toward other types of servers. That makes total sense as virtualization is the mantra of the day for those companies that are interested in optimizing their power by having several operating systems function within just one server. Data processing and storage is done within one server as opposed to a traditional system where the network is distributed in an elaborate design comprising of several servers and workstations all attached to their own separate hardware components. Similar to a virtual environment, all the physical resources such as additional servers, PCs, storage, hard drives, processors, and mother boards are totally eliminated. That way, not only are we saving big time in hardware investment (good for the planet!), we are also avoiding excess maintenance costs. That’s a big thumbs up!

The “not so thumbs up “ news is that even though 60.9 percent of data centers worldwide officially recognize cyber terrorism as a real threat, only about one-third of respondents included cyber terrorism in their disaster-recovery plans. The survey goes on to note that currently only about one of every four data centers addresses cyber terrorism, and one in five has procedures in place to prevent an attack. That means the remaining four out of five data centers are left dangerously vulnerable to sophisticated malwares and viruses.

The risk of cyber attacks becomes more critical as several data centers expect massive expansion due to dramatic increase in storage demands and aggressive business plans in the next five years. The AFCOM study finds that 22.0 percent will utilize a colocation center to meet their increased space requirements and 13.8 percent will use managed Hosting services. Companies will also rely more and more on cloud computing services to meet their increasing computing needs that cannot be totally met with onsite especially if they are cash strapped.

Cloud computing – cutting costs and energy

Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud technology as a part of their initiative to cut costs and energy. How does it work? Computational power and storage borrowed from a third party decreases the power load on the home front. You pay for what you use and waste fewer resources in the bargain. You eliminate redundant power, redundant servers, spare capacity, fail-over processes, backup servers etc and equipment never gets outdated. Services on the host side, run on shared infrastructure at high utilization as not all users will be accessing service at the same time which means there is further potential for power savings.

While some argue that cloud computing just shifts the energy consumption from the data centers to the hosts’ side, even with all the additional overhead costs and single computer power usage (on the host side) , there is a considerable decrease in net power as you take other systems offline and pay a whole lot less for cooling.

Highly specialized energy saving environments that are carefully cultivated by big players like Amazon and Microsoft are likely to waste considerably less energy than the clients who seek their cloud services.

Security concerns

But the big elephant in the room when it comes to cloud computing has always been security concerns as you let go of sensitive client data over an open network. Remote computing increases the risk of breaches. This was recently brought to the forefront with Google’s well documented case when a hacker got hold of confidential Twitter documents after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. Certainly Google has been exceptional in embracing green computing and proclaims to run the most energy-efficient data centers in the world. But are we willing to ease up on the security of confidential data to get our carbon limits under control?

Organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance, comprising of industry leaders, global associations and security experts, have published guidance to come up with secure cloud computing practices and have released guidelines that cover 15 security domains, ranging from computing architecture to virtualization for organizations. Just like any other emerging technology, there are certain matters that require meticulous ironing out. I’m optimistic that we will be able to make cloud work as we cannot ignore the business benefits that it brings us (lots of cash savings!) while keeping our individual and collective carbon limits under check.

Dilip Tinnelvelly is VP of Technology and Product Management at ChannelVission Inc., a global business development company specializing in channel sales & marketing services for the information technology industry.

photo: purpleslog

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China will break ground this month on a gigantic, $17 billion wind power farm in the northwestern part of the country that will produce 5 gigawatts of power by next year and 20 gigawatts by 2020, according to the official Xinhua news service. The installation in Gansu Province is known as the “Three Gorges of Wind Power” after the gigantic Three Gorges hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Gansu wind power installation is scheduled by 2020 to produce five times the power of T. Boone Pickens’ proposed wind power project on the U.S. Great Plains.

The Chinese are building wind farms at about one-third the cost of European and U.S. rivals because the price of manufacturing the turbines and installing them is so much cheaper in China. In addition to its huge installation in Gansu — which is expected to produce power for more than 10 million Chinese households by 2020 — the Chinese also are planning a half-dozen similarly large projects, many on the windy western plains. China is planning to boost its wind power capacity to eight times the current level by 2020.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 at http://e360.yale.edu

[photo credit: Kaj17]

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Is the world warming, cooling or does it matter? Most of us will say it matters, a lot, at least in public anyway. And especially if you are hoping to pay rent or retire one day with a career based around the belief that Amsterdam, New York and Dubai will no longer exist unless we cut greenhouse gases and stop the icecaps from melting. But what has happened now that the earth cooled over the past year? Not to mention former NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson’s claim last year that now that she is “no longer affiliated with any organization nor receive any funding” that she can publicly say that she “remains skeptical.” Recently the name was changed from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ – what is really going on? Or does it matter?

This blog, by the way, is not about proving or disproving global warming, global cooling, or that the earth’s warming and cooling cycles over the past 6 ice ages really were the fault of mankind. This is about the fact that it does not matter what is happening with temperatures but that reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and energy use and creating renewable energy makes complete sense even without climate change political debates.

Republican, democrat, socialist or communist, the following 3 ideas for cutting greenhouse gases without relevance to climate change are hard to argue, but if you can I welcome you to comment below:

1. Releasing black substances that cause cancer into the air in which we breath is not healthy. As if it weren’t obvious enough, the EPA finds greenhouse gases pose a danger to health. That’s for any skeptics out there that think that ‘the solution to pollution is dilution’ and that puffing on a tailpipe is good for your skin. No reference to climate change here.
2. It costs money to put these black cancerous gases into the atmosphere. It is our extreme use of carbon based fuels, oil and coal, for transportation and electricity that our money is going to instead of being used for health care, education, infrastructure and your dividend payout. Who can argue that energy efficient policy and using energy efficient products, therefore, reduces the amount of these black gases that enter the atmosphere while basically paying you to do it. More legitimate reasons with no reference to climate change.
3. Politically and financially we cannot afford to continue to use finite sources of fossil based fuels, that create greenhouse gases, to power our lives. Some believe it is the left’s fear factors that say the earth is running out of oil to push their agenda. Even if true, definitely not the whole picture by any means. Briefly, China and India’s population and need for energy is skyrocketing while oil discovery is steadily declining (left). Therefore the most simple supply/demand curve from your first economics class will explain what that means for our future cost of energy. Renewable energy that does not create pollution nor depend on other nation’s economies and that does not put gases into the air solves more than one problem without the mention of climate change.

Simple enough? So depending on your argument there is a way to curb climate change for some, put money in the pockets of others and finally if neither of those are your flavor, how about not breathing poisonous gases? By using common sense and not trying to pinpoint who is right and wrong, we can appease the masses in one way or another by decreasing energy use and turning to renewable sources of energy. If you are able to think of it, what is a way to argue climate change that does not touch on the topics of health, immediate financial benefits or protecting us from the future cost of energy?

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