Neville Williams - Sun Power: How Energy from the Sun Is Changing Lives Around the World, Empowering America, and Saving the Planet

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Dedicated to the memory of the late Hermann Scheer, the worlds greatest solar visionary

CONTENTS

Global civilization can only escape the life-threatening fossil-fuel resource trap if every effort is made to bring about an immediate transition to renewable and environmentally sustainable resources and thereby end the dependence on fossil fuels. Making the groundbreaking transition to an economy based on solar energy and solar resources will do more to safeguard our future than any other economic development since the Industrial Revolution.

H ERMANN S CHEER

The Solar Economy ( Solare Weltwirtschaft , 1999)

The most important thing in the world is to have the love of God in your heart. The next most important thing is to have electricity in your house.

T ENNESSEE FARMER, 1940

(inscribed over the entrance to the electricity exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan)

Id put my money on solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we dont have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left.

T HOMAS A LVA E DISON

Solar power provides a marvelous alternative source of energy, particularly in remote places. It has been proven in the harshest of environments both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. With solar power, the village in the jungle can leapfrog into the modern age.

S IR A RTHUR C. C LARKE

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertakewith expense no objectseem to be wars.

P AUL K RUGMAN

The New York Times , April 13, 2012

PROLOGUE

N EW M EXICO: 2012

In 2010, my old friend Tom Tatum called me with a proposal for a large solar project. I thought I was done with solar, but he had other ideas. Tom got me into solar at the U.S. Department of Energy back in 1979. He was working as President Carters solar energy liaison with Capitol Hill and federal agencies. We stayed in touch ever since, despite going separate professional and geographic ways. Tom has a ranch in northern New Mexico, fourteen hundred acres of dry sage on the slopes of ten-thousand-foot Ute Peak that overlook the fertile San Luis Valley. A one-kilowatt solar-powered deep-well pump provides water to guest cattle and large herds of elk that share the meager grazing.

Lets do a solar project on my ranch, he said.

Who will buy the power? I replied.

Ill talk to Kit Carson Co-op in Taos, he said. And he did.

Luis Reyes, CEO of the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, one of the most progressive and visionary electric cooperative managers in the nation, was interested. I flew out to walk the ranch and to meet with Tom and the Kit Carson engineers. There was a perfect section of one hundred acres on the ranch that could accommodate 10 megawatts of solar. I contacted Suntech, the worlds largest solar company at the time, and they said they could finance and build it; they sent out one of their project executives to see the site and meet with Tom and me.

Then, we discovered that the ranch was a little too far from the nearest substation and that new high-voltage lines would be required. This could have been overcome, but the bigger problem was that Tri-State Energy, which provides wholesale coal-fired power to its member co-ops through long-term contracts, would not permit members to buy more than 5 percent of their electricityin this case sun powerout of contract. This bedeviled Luis Reyes, who fights for more solar at every turn and may one day get Tri-State to reconsider its policy. Luis believes, Part of our culture in New Mexico is sustainability and so we want to be a renewable, green community. We want to make solar the rule, not the exception. We were all angered that coal-generating plant owners and operators were able to block sun power from providing as much electricity as Kit Carson wanted to purchase. We retrenched, but didnt give up.

We wanted an open energy market, not protected monopolies, so the fight was on. We were mad, and determined to take on the coal boys any way we could. It was clear to us right then that the future of electricity in this country was a battle between coal and renewable energy, including solar. We believed solar would win one day.

Luis agreed, and he suggested we build a smaller solar power plant on a piece of land he knew about close to a substation just two miles south of the Colorado border, at Amalia. It was owned by the Rio Costilla Cooperative Livestock Association, at Costilla, just up the road from Toms ranch house. The cattlemen liked the idea of leasing fifteen acres for a solar array. Luis said hed buy 1.5 megawatts of direct current (DC) of solar, but Suntech said they werent interested in building anything under 10 megawatts.

So I took the project to my former company, Standard Solar, which you will read about in chapter 11, and they said theyd love to do it. They agreed to finance and maybe own part of it. When Luis came to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (hes also on the board of the Solar Electric Power Association) I set up a breakfast at the Grand Hyatt Washington with myself and Standard Solars CEO, Tony Clifford. Tony and I wore suits. Luis arrived New Mexico style, in a polo shirt. He charmed us with his eagerness to go solar and told us how he would socialize the additional cost of sun power across the rate base. New Mexico required utilities to purchase a set amount of solar electricity, but that wasnt what was driving Luis. He knew that solar was the future, that New Mexico had more sun than almost anywhere else in the continental United States, and that the cost of coal-generated power would rise, whereas solar purchased on a multiyear contract would be fixed, even if it cost more initially. And he wanted to do the right thing, and so did most New Mexicans.

All that remained were a few minor details like acquiring a lease on the land, getting county planning and zoning approval, and having the project OKd by the Kit Carson board based on a price for the solar kilowatts to be negotiated. Tom put on his cowboy hat and boots and began attending meetings with Luis and his staff, with the county authorities, with lawyers, and with the media, which supported the project from the start. Tony flew out from D.C. to negotiate the price for the power. We negotiated a twenty-five-year land lease with the cattlemens cooperative. We soon got unanimous approval from the county zoning board. Even with cooperation and goodwill on all fronts, the entire development process took two years! In America today, nothing is done with alacrity.

The deal finally came together in August 2011, and we broke ground on beautiful Wild Horse Mesa, at eight thousand feet above sea level. Standards subcontractor, Paradise Power Company of Taos, worked through the winter of 201112 as best it could. Northern Taos County was thrilled to have the jobs. Standard purchased container loads of 280-Wp polycrystalline panels from Chinas Trina Solar, which were shipped to the site (see the glossary for an explanation of technical terms and abbreviations). Washington Gas Energy Services, from D.C., came in to finance and take an equity stake in the project.