Nanosolar

Municipal Solar Power Plants

At Nanosolar, we genuinely believe that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, particularly from municipal solar power plants of 2-10 megawatts (MW) in size. These power plants consist of rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding electricity directly into the municipal power grid.

A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes — that’s acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. With a solar power plant in each of several hundred cities, a Gigawatt of power is delivered locally to where it is needed, in a digestible size.

In a municipal solar power plant, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish in between and below the rows of panels. Care is taken that sufficient amounts of rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels so that the flowers and organisms below are not starved. In fact, in dry regions, the solar panels even benefit the ecosystem by increasing the moisture level in the soil.

Municipal solar power plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid. By feeding power directly into the (local, medium-voltage) distribution grid, they avoid the (long-haul, high-voltage) transmission grid which is expensive to build and expand, and also avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming transmission voltage to municipal voltage. It’s a form of distributed generation, but at the wholesale level, and it has been determined (using CPUC methodolgy and data) that there is a locational benefit of about 35% over wholesale power cost. These are real dollars that providers of wholesale distributed power and rate payers can split in a win-win cost advantage.

In any region with a decent amount of sunshine, the most economic way of reliably providing municipal power during the day is through a municipal solar power plant. That’s because municipal solar power plants combine the locational benefit of avoided transmission with the time-of-day benefit of solar and the economics of scale.

Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency.

While rooftops are also a good application for solar panels, it is a business that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is a fundamentally less efficient proposition.

In fact, municipal solar power plants are one of the most rapidly deployable forms of power. While it takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done (if ever given the carbon risk) or 5 years for a concentrating solar-thermal plant (also requiring a connection to the transmission grid), a municipal solar plant can be completed in as little as 12 months.

Furthermore, a unique feature of photovoltaic power plants is that they utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features. Enlightened utilities around the world are now identifying them as a very good way to manage and improve grid power quality. This is especially a point of pain at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise. (Any U.S. utility executive who is concerned about the new world of local power but desires to learn more should join this trip.)

Municipal solar power plants offer an attractive level of efficiency, scale, and benefit in solar. This is not yet well known to the public in the United States and in California, where this segment has been stifled by the policy gap that exists in California between the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (geared towards >20 MW systems) and the California Solar Incentives (designed for <1 MW systems).

But towns and cities throughout Europe and Asia have already proven the concept, and many — increasingly entire counties — are now implementing plans to go to 100% renewable energy based on a mix of solar and biofuels. It works, it is economic, and it is possible now. It is a silent revolution going on that the press rarely reports about.

[A nice exception is an article today in our local newspaper -- "Local communities reach for power over energy" (SF Chronicle) -- describing how Marin County, California is wrestling with going for local renewable power. We salute their effort. It is well timed, smart, and shows a lot of foresight. They are on the right track based on what we see happening in our own industry and in energy overall. In a few years, they will have less expensive power than is available in the rest of PG&E territory.]

The amount of activity going on behind the scenes in readying technologies, sites, and financing for such endeavors is tremendous, and this will become very visible to the public in many locations in the United States in 2010. There is a reason why one of the world’s largest power producers invested in Nanosolar.

But now is the time for cities and counties to lay the adminstrative foundation for having their own power, 100% renewable, if they care to make a difference by then.

Update 4/30: Thank you for the hundreds of comments we have received to this posting via email. Our team has read and digested every single of them. To those of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, we can reassure you that we do have a fabulous residential solution on our near-term roadmap — one that will bring the utility scale economics of Nanosolar Utility Panel technology to homes everywhere, and completely redefine how residential solar is done.

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