Turning sunshine into money isn't easy. It's a cutthroat business, full of wrangling for government funds, lobbying, and playing off fears of global warming. There also are large production and installation costs to consider. Despite their almost magical trick of converting solar rays into electricity, even the newest solar panels are light-years from "free power."
Solar power has been popular in the past few years, with thousands of Valley residents signing up with private companies to have panels installed on their roofs. But that's because the stuff practically has been given away. Homeowners — combining rebates from utilities, the state, and a federal 30 percent discount for the installation company — have received up to 70 percent off the cost of a rooftop system.
Marcia Busching, former "Solar Team" candidate
Gary Pierce, chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission.
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Though rooftop and commercial-scale projects have remained popular as the subsidies have been pared down in the past couple of years, experts say it will be many more years before the industry can stand on its own.
An important part of that hoped-for independence of the solar industry is the concept of "grid parity," the point at which solar power costs the same or less as coal, natural gas, or nuclear. One local expert says another $200 billion or more in solar-panel research must be spent worldwide over the next 10-plus years for that to happen.
But even then, it's still middle-of-the-day power. An as-of-yet uninvented, relatively inexpensive super-battery would be required if solar power ever is to truly rival traditional power sources. As anyone who's owned a laptop computer or cell phone knows, batteries haven't advanced at the same rapid pace as other high-tech equipment. Batteries are expensive, heavy, full of toxic materials, don't hold enough charge, take too long to recharge, and drain quickly under heavy use.
Marcia Busching, an unsuccessful "Solar Team" candidate this year for the Arizona Corporation Commission, says when building a utility-scale solar plant begins to equal the cost of building a natural-gas-burning electricity-generating plant, power companies will need to decide which one to build.
But that's not quite true: Non-solar sources remain crucial to supplying power for most of a 24-hour day, and they're expected to keep doing so for decades.
It's hard to see how this situation could change anytime soon, despite the proclamations of believers like futurist and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who predicts the world's energy needs will be met by solar power in about 15 years.
Forecasts by the U.S. government show a less sci-fi future in 2040, with fossil fuels, nuclear power, and other kinds of renewable energy, like bio-fuels, relegating solar power to little more than a pricey sideshow. As a Salt River Project resource-planning guide from last year states, "renewables can supplement but not replace conventional resources."
Even with all the gnashing of teeth over climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, one of the biggest stories of the past few years is rapidly advancing mining technology that allows underground mother lodes of natural gas and shale oil to be tapped. Though numerous environmental concerns have been raised about "fracking," the U.S. Department of Energy predicts that this newly recognized domestic jackpot in fossil fuels will allow the country to be energy-independent within a couple of decades. (A Matt Damon movie, Promised Land, examines the uproar over fracking; it's scheduled for release in Phoenix on January 4. New Times' sister paper in Denver published an article on the extraction method, "Controversy Over Fracking Continues," Westword, September 20.)
Despite the anti-fracking sentiment, these trillions of dollars' worth of natural resources aren't likely to stay in the ground.
Meanwhile, other energy technologies keep advancing. Research is ongoing in the quest for holy-grail energy sources like nuclear fusion and low-cost hydrogen fuel cells.
Taken together, the reliance on traditional energy sources and the potential for brand-new technologies threaten to eclipse solar power, which provides only weak, intermittent, expensive power in a stingy, tough, 24-hour-a-day world.
The basic concept for solar power began to be developed in the 1800s, was refined in the 1950s, and took off in the Space Age.
Solar panels are ideal for space vehicles or locations on Earth far from electrical hookups. In cities, solar has to be foisted upon people with sales gimmicks and mandates.
In 2006, partly because of concerns about domestic-energy independence and climate change, the Arizona Corporation Commission adopted the rules we now live by, forcing all utility companies (except for Salt River Project, a quasi-governmental agency with its own board of directors) to produce 15 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2025. APS expects to hit its goal early, though most of the sources won't be solar.
For its part, SRP's leaders decided to reach a goal of 20 percent in "sustainable" sources by 2020. Only about 2 percent of these sources will be solar, though — the other 98 percent will come from sources such as wind, hydropower, and programs that encourage consumers to use less energy.
Solar power in Arizona never has been hotter. Dozens of solar companies have popped up, and thousands of systems have been installed in the Valley. The Phoenix metro area is considered one of biggest potential markets for solar because of its 300-plus days of sunshine each year. Driving all this action are the huge subsidies offered by the feds, the state, and local utilities.
