California utility to turn roofs into solar power plants
Southern California's Edison (company name) plans to install 250 megawatts' worth of solar panels on unused (wasted) commercial rooftops in the fast-growing “Inland Empire” of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Their calculations state that this installation of solar panels will generate enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.
The plan:
Edison is planning to lease 65 million square feet of unused warehouse building rooftop spaces from the building owners. Edison will contract for the installation of the arrays and will also retain ownership of the solar systems.The regulators of California seem inclined to approve this massive scale project and the project will be financed by rising utility rates. “One advantage of this project is that we will tap unused rooftop real estate directly in areas we serve where demand is growing rather than securing a major plat of land in a remote area and then building transmission lines to bring the power to those areas of rising demand.” (Edison spokesman Gil Alexander). The plan is to save money (decrease expenditure) by connecting clusters of solar arrays into existing neighborhood circuits instead of building a centralized power station and the expensive transmission system needed to transmit power to the existing grid.
The expected results:
According to Edison's plans, they will install a megawatt a week of arrays until it reaches the 250-megawatt target. This alone will be more than the entire solar cell production number in 2006 and is said to produce as much electricity as a small scale coal powered power plant. This is also part of the first steps taken towards the plan of building a massive megawatt solar station in California's Mojave Desert. Although solar arrays will only produce energy when the sun is up and shining, they will produce the most power during the hottest part of the day when the Southern Californian's crank up their air conditions. (plans for a substitute of electricity).
Problems they face:
Edison expects that due to the massive scale of the project, the solar assays could be placed on the roofs at half the cost of a typical installation. However, the ongoing shortages of polysilicon (main ingredient for solar panels) may lead to increasing costs of installation.
Thoughts:
During our lectures we learnt that at the current fuel consumption rate of the world will lead to fuel shortages within 70 years or so. This is why it is important to find alternative methods to produce power, for example the 'fun electricity' methods video we watched in class. Edison's idea of constructing massive scale solar assays is said to provide electricity for the whole area, without having to invest money in building transmission lines. Although there is the consequence of a high cost ($875 million), this potentially game-changing decision may prove very useful and environment friendly in the future. It also motivates other competitive power companies to think of other innovative ways of producing energy because "they face a state mandate to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020. California’s global warming law requires the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to be rolled back to 1990 levels by 2020". I think this major decision to be the 'first mover' (the concept that we learnt in class) challenges Edison, but I think it is a necessary step to take because these are the kinds of big ideas the world needs to meet Earth's long-term energy and climate changing goals. If commercial/residential buildings worldwide formed partnerships with utilities to put this solar technology on their unused (wasted) rooftops, it would set off a huge wave of renewable energy groups. However, I have a concern about the way that this process of decreasing fossil energy and increasing renewable energy will affect the power (political) that the oil producing countries of the world has. This will in turn affect the economical balance that has been set up between countries over the years.
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