Tag: solar energy

How to Power a Renewable Energy Startup

Posted on by robbie

Donnel Baird grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. “We didn’t have heat that functioned consistently,” he says, “so we had to heat our apartment with the oven, which of course is really dangerous and also unhealthy.” Plus, as Baird notes, “It’s also really bad for the environment.”
Solving several problems at once is what BlocPower, the company Baird founded in 2013, is all about (disclosure: Baird is a member of the NationSwell Council). BlocPower’s software analyzes how buildings operate, recommends ways to save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and then installs renewable energy technologies. The company secures financing for the retrofit projects by grouping multiple buildings together — usually religious institutions, small businesses and public housing, all in underserved communities — and identifying investors. And Baird and his team aren’t just taking on climate change; they’re also addressing unemployment in the New York neighborhoods where they work, by training local workers for jobs in the green economy.
“They are certainly big thinkers,” says Rachel Wald, Social Impact Fellowship manager at GLG. The GLG fellowship program provides select social entrepreneurs with free access to its platform and membership of more than 600,000 experts across industries. Baird and BlocPower joined GLG’s 2015 class of fellows with big goals and a clear need for the technical experts with whom GLG could connect them. “Donnel is uniquely suited to be doing this work. He grew up in these communities and knows them really well,” Wald says, adding that Baird is “pretty unafraid.”

GLG Energy 3
The GLG Social Impact Fellowship helped Donnel Baird expand BlocPower to markets outside of the company’s base in New York City.

Baird’s parents — his father is an engineer and his mother is a social worker — are from Guyana. “My mom has a set of values around trying to help the less fortunate,” Baird says. “She built a career around that, and she did pass some of those values on to me.”
Those values have informed Baird’s entire career. He was working for the Obama administration, implementing a green building program as part of the economic stimulus plan, when he got a call from a pastor he knew in Brooklyn. The pastor was looking for help with the energy costs in his church, which were eating up 30 percent of its budget.
When Baird saw how much money energy efficiency and renewable energy projects could save buildings in low-income neighborhoods, the idea for BlocPower was born. He enrolled in Columbia University’s business school and started to explore building a company to take on projects like these.
“I had to quickly learn a lot when I started — about corporate finance and accounting, and a lot of concepts that were foreign to me as a community organizer,” admits Baird. Columbia also gave him exposure to entrepreneurship, which was a little more familiar. “You hear ‘no’ a lot in both entrepreneurship and politics,” Baird says. “You have to talk to lots of people, most of whom tell you no.”
Despite BlocPower’s early promise, there are still obstacles ahead, including the current administration’s tariffs on imported solar equipment and the steep cuts to the corporate tax rate. The latter has reduced companies’ taxes enough to weaken the incentive to seek renewable energy tax credits, Baird says.
“Many people who believe in climate change and want to do something about it have actually given up on the belief that we can do something about it in a massive way,” he says.
But Baird isn’t one of those people. He envisions a total of 3 to 4 million BlocPower-enabled buildings nationwide. And he says that if BlocPower hits those goals it can assist the country in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent. It’s the same goal laid out for the U.S. in the since-abandoned Paris Climate Agreement.
“That’s what’s on the table,” Baird says. “It’s just a matter of getting people to believe.”
So far, BlocPower has worked with 3 percent of the buildings it’s targeted in New York City. The company works with utilities and regulators to electrify the heating systems of 1,000 buildings in the Bronx, and it’s beginning an expansion to Oakland and Los Angeles in California.
Each energy-updated building is another step toward BlocPower’s lofty goals. An example can be found Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where BlocPower studied an apartment co-op’s energy efficiency and identified interventions, including changing the boiler settings and temperature controls in units. They also connected the co-op’s management with a company that has since installed a solar array on the roof.
Annabelle Heckler is treasurer of the co-op and worked closely with BlocPower on the project. She hopes the solar array will fully power the building’s common spaces and offset electricity costs for tenants. “We’re certainly interested in keeping our building affordable for the long term,” Heckler says, “and we’re also interested in creating a more sustainable and resilient city. New Yorkers really struggled in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and we want to be part of the solution.”
Being part of the solution motivates Baird too. “I have a 3-year-old,” he says. “By the time he’s 50, the question is, ‘What kind of planet is he going to be on?’ That’s really what’s driving me now,” says Baird.
“What we’ve got to do is get back to dreaming big and really going for it, because we don’t really have a choice.”

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This article was paid for and produced in partnership with GLG. GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost. Read more about the program here.

Laying the Ground Work for Street Solar

Posted on by robbie

After seeing former Vice President Al Gore’s climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006, Scott and Julie Brusaw wanted to do their part to help the planet. Yet they hesitated at the idea of getting solar panels.
“I pictured them on our roof and knew I wouldn’t like the look of them,” admits Julie.
Plus, the solar panels would have to be taken down anytime the roof needed to be repaired. And they’d be a pain to clean. Julie wasn’t about to climb onto the roof. She worried that Scott would fall and hurt himself if he did.
They also worried the panels would be hampered by weather troubles. The couple lives in Idaho. Every winter, wouldn’t the panels get buried under snow?
Glancing down their long driveway one day, Julie mused, “Couldn’t solar panels be on driveways and roads instead of roofs?”
“Scott laughed and said they’d be crushed, so I let the idea go,” she recalls.
But Scott couldn’t. As a kid, he’d loved playing with slot cars. Maybe the idea of electric roadways could work in real life?
A week later, the electrical engineer was thinking about how to design a protective case that could protect solar panels from the weight of cars and trucks.
“I come up with dreams, ideas, concepts and designs,” says Julie, a former counselor retired from private practice. “Scott makes them tangible and real.”
Neither of them had built a tech company from the ground up. People cautioned that their idea would never get off the ground, but Julie and Scott had a feeling they were onto something.
In 2009, their start-up company, Solar Roadways, won a contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. A 12-foot-by-12-foot prototype was created. Next came a 108-panel parking lot on Julie and Scott’s property and a 30-panel pilot project — a pedestrian plaza — in Sandpoint, Idaho. (Another is slated for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor this spring and will be open to the public.) Civil engineering labs continue to test samples for traction, load stress and impact resistance.
The idea has come a lot farther than Julie’s initial brainstorm of solar panels on roads. “Our panels have solar cells for energy collection, heating elements to prevent snow and ice accumulation and LEDs to illuminate roads lines and provide graphics,” says Scott. They have the potential to charge in-transit electric vehicles, welcome energy from other renewable sources into the nation’s power grid and create an “intelligent road” that can actually steer, accelerate and brake autonomous vehicles.
“Imagine getting into your car and telling it to take you to the store,” says Julie. “You could take a nap while the road guides your vehicle to the store, finds a parking spot, and wakes you up.”
So far, Solar Roadways has interest from all 50 states and virtually every country in the world. Eventually, Julie and Scott hope to have manufacturing facilities throughout the globe as well.
They want to sell panels not only for roads and driveways, but for patios, bike paths, playgrounds, sidewalks, pool decks and parking lots.
The possibilities of the panels are only limited by the imagination: Flexible parking lot lines could shrink to fit motorcycles or widen to fit RVs. Handicapped spots could be created dynamically instead of dedicated by the use of paint. LED lights could illuminate lots for nighttime safety.
And imagine airport runways built with solar panels — Scott and Julie have. “We don’t know if actual runways are possible,” acknowledges Scott, “but we expect that by keeping surfaces snow and ice-free and eliminating most of the plowing needs for airports, Solar Roadways could greatly reduce flight delays due to snowy, icy conditions.”
Scott estimates there are nearly 33,000 miles of impervious surfaces in the U.S. Transform them into solar facades, and they could generate three times the electricity the nation needs. Greenhouses gases could be slashed by 75 percent.
“We honestly believe Solar Roadways is the most viable plan to help halt climate change before it’s too late,” says Julie. “We want to make this world a safer and greener place.”

The Solar Highway of the Future

Posted on by robbie

Off Interstate 85 along the Alabama-Georgia border, an area of asphalt the size of two SUVs parked nose-to-nose is soaking up the sun. But unlike traditional blacktop, it’s capturing solar energy and using it to power a nearby information booth and electric car-charging station.
This bright idea to cover a roadway with solar tiles stems from the notion that highways should be dual purpose.

This solar road is the first of its kind in the U.S.

“Roads are an extremely underutilized resource right now. They’re just asphalt that takes us from Point A to Point B,” says Anna Cullen, director of external relations for The Ray, the Atlanta-based project that installed the tiles. “We don’t have anything in our lives today that is just one purpose. A road should be the same.”
Solar roads have already been installed in the Netherlands and France. Georgia’s patch is the first in the United States.  
But cost is a significant roadblock. The tiles — which are thankfully skid resistant — are composed of expensive materials imported from France. Plus, they must be laid on top of existing pavement, which is labor intensive.
MORE: Building the Future: Sustainable Infrastructure
And there’s the question of whether the tiles will generate as much energy as is projected. In Sandpoint, Idaho, a company called Solar Roadways paved a town square with hexagonal solar panels that were meant to generate electricity for nearby restrooms and a fountain. The multi-million-dollar project collects just a fraction of the energy it intended — only enough to operate a hairdryer.
“Aside from road dust, particularly black tire dust and diesel exhaust, which will quickly cover a portion of each panel, the continuous traffic covering panels will reduce their solar output,” Stanford University Engineering Professor Mark Jacobson told National Geographic last year.
If successful, however, Georgia’s project could become the model for the entire United States, where hundreds of thousands of roadways are in need of repair.
Homepage photo courtesy of The Ray.

Just Because You’re a Member of the Far Right Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Believe in the Importance of Solar Energy

Posted on by robbie

They’ve been called an “unholy alliance” and “strange bedfellows,” and it’s partly true: Debbie Dooley, a Tea Party firebrand, is solar power’s most unlikely ally.
A lifetime campaign operative for the Republican Party and an organizer of the first nationwide Tea Party protests in 2009, Dooley is making some very persuasive arguments for why conservatives should support renewable energy. She’s reached across the aisle to form the Green Tea Coalition, breaking with Republican candidates she says are in the energy sector’s pocket. By teaming up with progressive groups like the Sierra Club, Dooley is taking on a utility and fighting to bring solar power to the Sunshine State.
Dooley’s reasons for selecting clean energy as her pet project may sound somewhat trite — her baby grandson became an in-the-flesh reminder of the urgent necessity of conserving the planet for future generations — but her reason for supporting solar power is fresh. Unlike liberals who tout the environmental benefits of solar’s clean technology, Dooley makes her argument based on Tea Party mainstays like free market economics and self-sufficiency.
A New Orleans native and a preacher’s daughter, Dooley’s always been involved in politics, usually of the right-wing brand. Fifty miles north of The Big Easy, her grandfather ran a popular gas station and became well-known in political circles as a “power broker,” she says. “When someone ran for political office, they always paid him a visit.” Dooley spent much of her childhood at political events, accompanying him to rallies and town hall meetings.
She got involved in her first serious campaign as a high school senior in Montgomery, Ala., staffing the phone bank and canvassing door-to-door during Ronald Reagan’s first attempt at the presidency. When she moved to Georgia at the tail end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, she became an active member of the state’s Republican party.
But it’s policy, not party, that matters to Dooley. She’s unafraid to call out politicians on both sides when they shy away from their principles. Her interest in founding the Tea Party — when the “teapot started boiling,” she says — was prompted by disappointment with President George W. Bush’s policies, particularly the Wall Street bailouts. “I began to feel like the Republican Party had lost its way. They began to be the party of big spenders,” she explains. She co-founded of the Atlanta Tea Party, and she’s still on the board of directors for the national Tea Party Patriots.
“Debbie is somebody that has a lot of integrity in the positions that she takes,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a nonpartisan energy watchdog group, since 1993. “She will point out inconsistencies where there are conservatives that are on the financial take from utilities and fossil fuel companies. Debbie is an absolute watchdog on the political right when conservatives start taking positions that aren’t true to conservative values.”
In 2012, Dooley won her first victories for solar power before the Georgia Public Service Commission, the regulatory authority for the energy utility. Competition is virtually nonexistent in the utility business because there’s no need to construct multiple overlapping grids (a neighborhood only needs one set of power lines), and shakeups are rare. To ensure there’s no blackouts and that customers get a fair price, utilities are monitored — and often protected — by government. In Georgia, the state had a number of laws on the books that stifled better technology. Essentially, “If I purchase electricity, I must purchase it from this government-created monopoly,” Dooley explains. She promised that expanding access to solar would create “competition and choice,” two values that persuaded the commission to open the market.
In Florida, Dooley faces a similar battle, but against an even stronger opponent. Florida Power & Light has huge influence over legislators, killing some bills before they ever reach the floor for a debate and, along with three other utilities, spending $12 million on Florida’s legislative races since 2010. The Sunshine State is one of only five states that forces consumers to buy electricity from a utility, meaning a resident can’t install a solar array and sell the excess power to neighbors or lease panels from a solar company to reduce up-front costs. That power — Dooley calls it “corruption” — is why she’s asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment tearing down barriers to supplying local solar power. (NationSwell reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment, but did not receive a response.)
“It shall be the policy of the state to encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers,” the measure reads. “This section is intended to accomplish this purpose by limiting and preventing regulatory and economic barriers that discourage the supply of electricity generated from solar.”
In an early telephone poll of 600 registered voters in Florida (commissioned by SACE and executed by North Star Opinion Research), nearly three quarters of voters said they would support a proposal to amend the current law to allow solar companies to install panels at no up-front cost and sell the power to the resident. More than half — 54 percent — believed their average monthly electricity bill was too high.
Dooley’s “been a very strong voice from the beginning. She recognized the tremendous national significance of opening the Sunshine State to solar. There, the utilities have an absolute stranglehold on the market. It has enormous potential but it continues to underperform,” says Smith, who also serves on the board of Floridians for Solar Choice. “There’s a lot of issues that Debbie and I disagree on, but on opening markets for solar power, we’re in lockstep. There’s no daylight between our positions there.”
Her campaign has already collected over 100,000 signatures in the first five weeks, Dooley says, but it needs several hundred thousand more to qualify for the election and the Florida Supreme Court’s approval of the ballot text, which the utility has promised to challenge.
Dooley couldn’t have chosen a better proving ground to test her ideas. The fourth largest state, Florida has a huge energy market powering homes for 19.9 million residents. But unlike other massive states — California, New York and Texas — Florida is a swing state. Her proposition will likely appear on the November 2016 ballot, downticket from the race that will decide Obama’s successor. If she’s successful, the Sunshine State’s expansion of solar power would be a beacon of bipartisan unity, potentially igniting a movement across the nation.
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Why Aren’t We Doing This to Every Single Parking Lot?

Posted on by robbie

Last May, we got really excited about paving America’s roads with solar panels. But instead of laboriously tacking panels on the nation’s 4-million mile stretch of concrete, how about something much, much simpler?
Solar parking lots.
Chris Mooney raves on The Washington Post’s new environmental blog that solar carports are the “best idea in a long time.” That’s because a photovoltaic canopy helps power whatever office or building the parking lot services, provides shade for the cars parked underneath and can help juice up electric car charging stations.
This idea isn’t new — Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters has had one since 2007, the Washington Redskins’ FedEx Field also has a solar carport that generates 20 percent of the stadium’s power and tricked-out lots are also found in solar-happy states like California, New Jersey, Arizona, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina.
It’s a tantalizing consideration for any business that wants to go green with the renewable energy of the sun or even for homeowners who don’t have a proper roof for a rooftop installation.
But as Mooney points out, the reason why this seemingly no-brainer idea is not yet widespread is its cost. “It’s the most expensive type of system to build,” Chase Weir of TruSolar tells the columnist. “A lot more engineering, a whole lot more steel, more labor, and therefore, it’s a relatively small percentage [of solar power]…but it is growing, and the cost to install a solar canopy today is less than the cost to install a rooftop just a few years ago.”
It’s true. Despite a recent glut of cheap oil, clean energy is booming. Panels are only getting cheaper and more efficient. One day, we will run out of fossil fuels, but the sun will shine on and on. Looks like the forecast for solar carports is sunny.
DON’T MISS: Going Solar Is Cheaper Than Ever. Here’s What You Need to Know About Getting Your Power From the Sun
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When Low-Income People Can’t Afford Solar Energy, This Organization Helps Out

Posted on by robbie

What nonprofit asks low-income people to don hard hats and safety harnesses and scramble up on roofs?
GRID Alternatives does.
The organization not only provides solar energy to low-income neighborhoods, it also teaches residents how to install the panels themselves — helping them gain experience for potential jobs in the solar industry.
Low-income people are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods, and they definitely can use the break on energy bills that solar panels provide — but most can’t afford to have them installed. That’s where GRID Alternatives steps in. According to the nonprofit’s website, its solar installation efforts have prevented “the release of 340,000 tons of greenhouse gasses over the systems’ lifetimes and provid[ed] more than $110 million in energy cost savings.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers turned up recently to help install solar panels on 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in a low-income Washington D.C. neighborhood, according to Katherine Ling of E&E. The installation celebrated the grand opening of the Oakland-based nonprofit’s D.C. office, which joins branches in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The D.C. installation event also gave 10 “solar trainees” from a local organization for at-risk youth the chance to gain some valuable job skills and learn about an industry that might eventually provide them with a career.
GRID Alternatives has been able to expand its mission recently due to a $2 million grant from Wells Fargo, as well as equipment donations from Enphase Energy Inc., Sun Edison LLC and SunPower Corp.
The group also sponsors SolarCorps Fellowships, a one-year volunteer training period that qualifies participants for employment in the solar industry. The nonprofit is especially interested in providing jobs to low-income people, minorities and women. To that end, it hosts “women builds” as a part of its National Women in Solar initiative.
Ling visited a woman-only solar installation project in Los Angeles, where SolarCorps construction fellow Ilana Feingold declared, “We love power tools!”
We’re sure they love the energy savings and the jobs that come along with it, too.
MORE: For Those Most In Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Solar Energy
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For Those Most in Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Free Solar Energy

Posted on by robbie

Normally, the families that can afford solar panels are the ones who are least in need of the energy savings that accompany the green technology. But now, a new program in Denver is giving some low-income households free access to solar energy.
The charter elementary school Academy 360 (80 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch) in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood focuses on health and wellness in its curriculum and provides wholesome breakfasts and lunches to all its students and encourages plenty of exercise.  And now, the new solar program, which was announced by Denver Mayor Michael Hancock last month, should bring more overall wellness (not to mention budget savings) to the families of each of the 125 students enrolled in the school.
Last year, Colorado became the first state to give people the option of accessing solar energy by subscribing to a solar garden connected to their houses via an energy grid, rather than purchasing and installing their own solar panels. This type of thing isn’t legal in every state, but four years ago Colorado legislators passed the Community Solar Act, allowing for partnerships between solar and electrical companies.
The first two solar gardens were located in Colorado Springs, and now a company called SunShare is bringing this option to Denver. The first subscribers will receive six-tenths of a kilowatt of solar energy and should see their home energy bills reduced by twenty percent, according to Anthony Cotton of the Denver Post.
“When I was your age, I used to see these magical solar panels on houses, and I wondered what they did,” Mayor Hancock said as he spoke to the Academy 360 community. “They were very expensive to have then, and they still are. But because of this project, we’ll all be able to share in affordable energy.”
SunShare CEO David Amster-Olszewski tells the Post that he thinks the program will bring a variety of benefits for the Academy 360 families: “It means they’ll be able to put healthier foods on the table or buy more sports equipment for their kids’ health.”
MORE: The Gridiron Goes Green
 
 

PowerCube: The Pop-up Power Station Revolutionizing Solar

Posted on by robbie

We’ve all been there. You know, that time your phone dies in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a charger. In times like those we all wish we had a portable power source for whenever and wherever we need it. Well, the PowerCube, by Ecosphere Technologies may provide the solution we’ve been waiting for…. and then some.
The process is relatively simple, if not astonishing. At the push of a button, a shipping container-sized cube instantly transforms into a pop-up solar power station that churns out up to 15kW of electricity. It won’t be powering the SuperBowl anytime soon, but it does provide nearly five times the power an average household generates in a single day.
The company spent seven years developing the cube to ensure it packed the biggest electrical punch while remaining self-contained and versatile over land, air or sea. This led to its unique design of panels extending outwards from the structure in all directions; that added surface area helps the cube produce as much as 400 percent more electricity than would be possible with panels solely on top.
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Ecosphere touts the PowerCube’s possibilities to assist in disaster relief, military work and humanitarian efforts abroad, but for many Americans this could also be the first step towards living a life “off the grid,” without a carbon footprint. There’s plenty of space in the container underneath the panel for a school, hospital, home, or really “whatever you can come up with,” explains the company’s director of marketing, Corey McGuire.
With small, mobile and environmentally-conscious prefab homes increasing in popularity, PowerCube provides some interesting new possibilities for alternative living. And, of course, a fully charged phone whenever you need it.

So Meta: Using the Power of the Sun to Create Solar Devices

Posted on by robbie

Solar energy is now greener than ever thanks to an incredible breakthrough from Oregon State University researchers.
According to Clean Technica, the research team figured out a way capture the sun’s energy to produce materials used in solar technology. It’s solar-powered solar, if you will.
Chemical engineering professor Chih-Hung Chang, the lead author of the study, said the process is not only environmentally conscious but saves both time and money in solar manufacturing, too. “Several aspects of this system should continue to reduce the cost of solar energy, and when widely used, our carbon footprint,” Chang said. “It could produce solar energy materials anywhere there’s an adequate solar resource, and in this chemical manufacturing process, there would be zero energy impact.”
MORE: Here’s a Number That Will Change How You Think About Solar Power
You can learn more about the specific process in this release from Oregon State. It notes that this technology could enable builders to capture more solar energy by coating roof shingles and windows with thin films that previously have not been available at an affordable price.
For the country to reduce its unhealthy and unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels, there needs to be a real push to make alternative energy less expensive and more efficient. Perhaps truly bright ideas like this to will help move the country in a more environmentally-friendly direction.
 
 

This Solar Farm Stands for a Lot More Than Clean Energy

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Farming is a tradition in Reginald Parker’s family. His mother and her family grew up picking cotton as sharecroppers, and his dad picked tobacco. But Parker is continuing that legacy in a new vein — farming solar energy. He plans to open a six-acre, 1.4 megawatt solar farm in North Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a form of remembrance for his family, but also as a triumph for African American entrepreneurship in the South. “This land was originally used for cotton farming, so with our groundbreaking we are announcing the change from cotton farming to solar farming in North Carolina, and cotton farming is something I truly will not miss,” Parker told Grist. “It was something like servitude to be a sharecropper, but now we’re owners, and that’s a source of pride in my family.”
An MIT graduate, Parker learned about solar energy after he wrote a paper for the African Technology Forum where he proposed the use of solar energy in Zimbabwe. “People beat up on solar because of the initial start-up costs to install solar energy, but it’s still significantly less than the costs for coal,” Parker told Grist. “Coal is trying to stay in there, but coal and natural gas have two things working against them: Both are in limited supply.” Here’s to many years of bountiful sunshine in North Carolina.
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