The lights shine outside the Nipton Trading Post in Nipton, California, which gets 80% of its power from a small solar facility built just for the town.
By Julie Cart
Gerald Freeman unlocks the gate to the small power plant and goes inside. Three rows of solar collectors, elevated on troughs that track the sun’s arc like sunflowers, afford a glimpse of California’s possible energy future.
This facility and a smaller version across the road produce some 70KW of electricity, about 80% of the power required by Nipton’s 60 residents, its general store and motel.
Freeman, a Caltech-trained geologist and onetime gold mine owner, understood when he bought this former ghost town near the Nevada border that being off the grid didn’t have to mean going without power.
He contracted with a Bay Area company to install solar arrays on two plots of land. The town has a 20-year agreement to buy its power at a below-market rate.
Projects like these make do with scant financing opportunities and little support from the federal government in the United States.
The Obama administration’s solar-power initiative has fast-tracked large-scale plants, fuelled by low-interest, government-guaranteed loans that cover up to 80% of construction costs. In all, the federal government has paid out more than $16bn for renewable-energy projects.
Those large-scale projects are financially efficient for developers, but their size creates transmission inefficiencies and higher costs for ratepayers.
Smaller alternatives, from rooftop solar to small- and medium-sized plants, can do the opposite.
Collectively, modest-sized projects could provide an enormous electricity boost — and do so for less cost to consumers and less environmental damage to the desert areas where most are located, say advocates of small-scale solar power.
Recent studies project that California could derive a substantial percentage of its energy needs from rooftop solar installations, whether on suburban homes or city roofs or atop big-box stores.
Janine Blaeloch, director of the non-profit Western Lands Project, said smaller plants were never on the table when the federal solar policy was conceived early in President Barack Obama’s first term.
Utilities and solar developers wanted big plants, so that’s what’s sprouting in Western deserts, she said.
“There was a pivot point when they could have gone to the less-damaging alternative,” Blaeloch said, referring to both federal officials and environmental groups that have supported large-scale solar projects.
“There’s no question that it was a matter of choice, and it was the wrong choice.”
Built in far-flung locations where there is plenty of open land, large-scale plants require utilities to put up extensive transmission lines to connect to the grid.
Utilities charge ratepayers for every dollar spent building transmission lines, for which the state of California guarantees utilities an annual return of 11% for 40 years.
By comparison, small-scale plants can be built near population centres and provide power directly to consumers, reducing the demand for electricity from the grid.
Rooftop solar goes one step further.
It not only cuts demand from the grid, but also can allow homeowners and businesses to sell back excess power.
Falling start-up costs also have brought solar power within reach for many homeowners and small businesses.
In the last six years, the cost in Los Angeles to install a medium-sized solar system — between 50KW and 1MW — has fallen by 55%, said J R DeShazo, an environmental economist at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Even though prices are coming down, Ray Brady, manager of the federal Bureau of Land Management’s renewable-energy programme, said he has seen little interest in smaller-scale projects.
The agency has policies that provide incentives for developers to build smaller solar plants on federal land, including exempting projects from costly and time-consuming environmental reviews.
But Brady said that he could think of none in the works.
“We can only respond where there is an industry interest to do so,” he said, citing economies of scale that can make large power plants more cost-effective for developers.
The state has been more proactive in encouraging smaller projects.
Governor Jerry Brown’s California Solar Initiative has set a target of 12,000MW of energy derived from rooftop panels.
The programme offers support for home builders who construct super-energy-efficient homes with photovoltaic panels.
The California Energy Commission is running another programme, the $400mn New Solar Homes Partnership, with a goal of installing 400MW by 2016.
Evan Gillespie, who heads up the Sierra Club’s renewable-energy programmes in California, has worked to bring more uniformity to fees and permitting for rooftop solar, a statewide effort that he says has reduced the cost of a small residential system by $2,500.
“We want to make sure that in the next two to three years we are removing as much friction from the marketplace as possible,” he said.
“There’s a lot of work we need to do to get out of our own way.”
Even with the streamlining, experts estimate that 75% of California’s households cannot participate in the benefits of a residential rooftop system, primarily because they are renters. The same is true for most businesses, which often lease or rent space.
To remedy that, state Senator Lois Wolk, introduced a measure in the last legislative session to allow households and businesses to buy renewable energy from small-scale producers and receive credits on their utility bill.
“It is a practical approach in my view, and it is a finance-able approach,” Wolk said. “Frankly, small- and medium-scale is long overdue.”
Wolk’s bill was opposed by Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co and eventually died. She reintroduced it last month.
“This isn’t anti-utility,” Wolk said. “It is opening up of the renewable market to those people who cannot participate but would like to.”
Gillespie said the state’s large utilities should eventually incorporate small-scale generation into their plans.
“The subsidies are almost gone,” Gillespie said. “The market continues to grow. Instead of opposing all of this, if I were a utility I would be trying to figure out how to partner with the solar companies.”
Back in Nipton, Freeman has already seen glimmers of that possibility.
The town is just a few miles from Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Inc’s 3,500-acre power plant, visible across Interstate 15.
When the $2.2bn Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is completed, it will be the largest solar-thermal power plant in the world, producing 370MW of electricity, enough to power roughly 140,000 homes.
If things go according to plan, Nipton could eventually produce as much as 1MW of power, which Freeman hopes to sell to Southern California Edison, which in turn provides electricity that helps run a small portion of the sprawling Ivanpah facility.
It’s possible that Nipton could provide some power to its giant solar-power neighbour.
“That would be something,” Freeman said. — Los Angeles Times/MCT
*** (Los Angeles Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.)
