April 2007 | Green Scene
Green Trends: Energy
Supersizing Solar Power
By Paul Constant
If you think solar power is the pipe dream of off-the-grid counterculture revolutionaries, you’re more than two decades behind the curve. In 1986, Ronald Reagan had his maintenance staff dismantle solar panels that were placed on top of the White House by Jimmy Carter. (The panels were moved to Maine’s Unity College where they heated the school’s water until 2003.) The eighties were dark ages for solar power, but interest in solar is entirely renewable. In fact, it’s becoming bigger than ever.
California recently enacted a law that calls for one million solar panels to be installed on private residences, schools and other public buildings by 2018. The power generated over the lifespan of these panels will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tons. Laws like this create an important milestone for solar energy: Experts predict that by 2012 solar energy will cost roughly 80 cents per watt, which will make it competitive with carbon-based energy sources. The cost for consumers will be much lower. The California law allows citizens to use their homes as eco-friendly power plants; any surplus solar energy can be sold back to the utilities for public use.
The new ubiquity of solar power is thanks, in part, to photovoltaics—new, thin laminates that collect the sun’s energy. These durable sheets are available in rolls, like wrapping paper, making installation much easier as the heavy glass shielding that weighed down the old panels is no longer required.
Many of the fears that fueled the 1980s reticence to use solar power have faded. Research has shown that decidedly non–Sun Belt cities like Chicago and Seattle can generate ample solar power, even on an ambient basis. Despite the lack of sunshine, both cities already employ solar-powered parking meters and road signs that function 365 days a year.
If you’re interested in going solar, it’s easy to find information about solar-friendly contractors. Renewable energy advocate Verde Energy has a website, verdeenergy.com, that provides information about solar energy and a helpful search engine that locates contractors in your area and provides contract bids.
Solar power is a force everybody understands is going to play a major role in our future. Even skeptics agree: In 2002, the Bush administration quietly replaced the Reagan-exiled solar panels on top of the White House where they stand to this day.
Consultation: Craig Sieben of Sieben Energy Associates
By Gary Wisby
Environmental experts often put the extra cost of building “green” at about 5 percent, but energy consultant Craig Sieben says no add-on is needed.
In fact, if you know what you’re doing, “you can reduce the cost of construction, not increase it,” says the president of Chicago-based Sieben Energy Associates.
The 16-year-old firm is energy consultant for two dozen buildings under construction that will meet national LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards. “We have the largest portfolio of LEED buildings in Illinois,” Sieben says.
He heads a professional staff of 15 at the firm’s headquarters on Michigan Avenue. In an interview there, Sieben, 48, talked about how businesses can cut their energy costs by 30 percent. He also looked at the role of renewable power sources like wind and solar and how global warming has changed energy efficiency from “nice” to necessary.
Who are some of your clients and what do you do for them?
For the Art Institute, we are the independent expert who helps them figure out how to use energy as efficiently as possible in all their 10 buildings. They’re building a new modern wing, a green LEED silver building. We also manage their energy purchasing for electricity and natural gas.
They have as much as a 20 percent energy cost reduction if we had not managed it otherwise. With energy prices being up and down, managing when to purchase and how to purchase is critical.
For McDonald’s, we assisted in developing their national energy strategy in 2001 and since that time McDonald’s has made significant reductions in energy use. They’re about to win a national award for energy management.
Managing energy is not necessarily anyone’s job. In an industrial facility, a plant manager’s primary obligation is to get the product out the door. The energy cost aspect is important, but it may not be a significant driver in how that plant manager is rewarded.
Any organization can cut their energy use by 10 percent by changing the way they operate and maintain equipment. Then if you upgrade lighting, mechanical systems, (the energy-consuming systems in a building which is basically the movement of air for heating and cooling), and the lighting, you can cut another 20 percent. So a 30 percent reduction is aggressive but realizable.
In new construction, what percentage does it add to your costs to achieve the type of efficiencies you’re talking about?
If you start with the premise that you are going to build a highly energy-efficient building, the costs do not have to be increased. Because buildings are often over-designed—you put the mechanical systems in that are larger than they need to be. If you think about optimizing the equipment from the get-go, you can reduce the cost of construction, not increase it.
Do you have a vision for what might be done regionally in the way of clean energy initiatives?
Take a $2 trillion economy in the upper Midwest and lower Ontario, and 6 percent of that is energy expense. That could be cut by 20 percent, freeing up more than $20 billion of free cash flow. Wasted energy dollars could be converted to investments in the economy, and as such, represent one of the biggest opportunities to create jobs and also improve the economic well-being of people and businesses.
It would reduce emissions in the upper Midwest—Howard Learner [of the Environmental Law & Policy Center] would say we’re on the hook for about 5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases—if we improved that by 20 percent it would be a 1 percent reduction in world-wide emissions.
The monetary savings is the driver on one level, but I personally think the global warming imperative provides an additional driver. The need for urgent action can provide the accelerant as to why this is not just a “nice-to-do” but a “need-to-do.”
What kind of future do you see for renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar?
If we didn’t have to worry about climate change, we could just muddle through. Even with energy prices where they are, it does not tend to change people’s behavior significantly. I would argue that even if gasoline was $10 a gallon, people would still use it. They might increase their efficiency a little bit, but the value of your freedom and the value of getting around is pretty damn high.
But if I look at it through the climate lens, in the next 10 years ideally we should be using all the available state-of-the art efficiency technologies throughout the economy. First, how do we make sure we do more with less, and then how do we make an expansion of wind, of the other forms of energy that are low carbon emitting. It does not make sense to build a new nuclear plant to power a lightbulb that could be a compact fluorescent.
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