20 Reasons why the future is so bright for solar, you’ve gotta to wear shades.

Just how prevalent is solar power in the United States these days? In 2014, the U.S. Solar industry achieved yet another record year, growing by 34% over 2013 to install nearly 7,000 megawatts (MW) of solar electric capacity. Within the photovoltaic (PV) sector, over 6,200 MW of capacity was installed, led by the residential and utility segments, which grew by 51% and 38%, respectively.

The way the industry has been booming from one year to the next, it’s no surprise that 2015 has been even better, and 2016 will build on that momentum.

While solar is still a small overall part of America's energy mix, this type of growth shows that it will continue to boom and experts predict that solar will become the world's largest source of electricity by 2050.

The U.S. looks to follow in the footsteps of countries like Germany, where 63% of their entire electricity is supplied through solar, and Japan and China who together make up more than 50% of the world’s solar industry.

Here are 20 statistics about the U.S. Solar industry in 2015...and beyond:

1. The U.S. installed 1,306 megawatts of direct current (MWdc) of solar PV in the first quarter of 2015, marking the sixth consecutive quarter in which the U.S. added more than 1 gigawatt of direct current (GWdc) of PV installations. And experts suggest that by the end of the year it will reach 7.9 GWdc, which is a 27% increase over 2014.

2. The industry grew 418% from 2010 to 2014. Within the last two years, the U.S. installed more solar than the previous 38 years combined.

3. Through the first quarter of 2015, nearly one-fourth of cumulative residential solar installations have now come on-line without any state incentive. 

4. Collectively, more than 51% of all new electric generating capacity in the U.S. came from solar in the first quarter of 2015.

5. Every three minutes, someone in the United States switches to solar.

6. The residential and utility PV market segments each added more capacity than the natural gas industry brought on-line in the first quarter of 2015.

7. Of the 68 MWdc of community solar installations to date, more than one-third of that total has come on-line since 2014.

8. More than 5 GWdc of centralized PV has now been procured by utilities based on the economic competitiveness that solar has with fossil-fuel alternatives.

9. There are now over 22.7 GW of cumulative solar electric capacity operating in the U.S., enough to power more than 4.6 million average American homes.

10. Growth in 2014 was led by the utility-scale sector, which grew 38% over 2013 to reach nearly 4 (GW), and the residential sector, which crossed the 1 GW barrier for the first time while growing 51% over 2013. So far in 2015 utility scale segment is dominating once again, with 729 MW of installed capacity.

11. Since the implementation of the Solar Investment Tax Credit, in 2006, the cost to install solar has dropped by more than 75%.

12. On January 1, 2017, the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is scheduled to drop to 10% for third party owned residential, non-residential, and utility PV projects under Section 48 of the tax code, while the credit for purchases residential PV under Section 25d is scheduled to expire entirely.

13. In just over five years, the U.S. PV market, which doesn’t include concentrated solar plants, has witnessed a fourfold expansion, from an estimated $3 billion in 2009 to $13.4 billion last year.

14. While residential costs have dropped by 45% since 2010, utility-scale costs have dropped more significantly, with recent contracts at prices below $0.05/kWh.

15. There are many major U.S. corporations, including Walmart, Macy’s and IKEA, which are using solar at an incredible rate.

16. It would take as little as 0.0005% of the globe that would need to be covered in solar panels to power the entire world and knock out our carbon footprint.

17. The top three states for solar installations in 2015 are 1) California. 2) New York. and 3) Arizona. Other states such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, Connecticut, Colorado, and Texas are also a huge part of the solar boom in the U.S.

18. Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring California's utilities to get 33 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by the end of 2020.

19. More than 31,000 solar jobs were added in the U.S. between November 2013 and November 2014. With 85 % of those jobs being new, rather than jobs that already existed but which added additional solar responsibilities. There are now around 200,000 people in the U.S. with jobs related to solar power, a number that’s increased by 87 percent over the last five years.

20. The SunShot Initiative was announced by the Department of Energy and aims to reduce the cost of solar power by 75% from 2010 to 2020. The name is based on "moon shot", Kennedy's target of reaching the moon within the decade.

Goals:

Residential system prices reduced from $6/W to $1.50/W

Commercial system prices reduced from $5/W to $1.25/W

Utility-scale system prices reduced from $4/W to $1.00/W (CSP, CPV and PV)

Look up. The Green Roof Revolution is coming.

There will come a time soon when if you walk outside and scan the horizon, you’ll see tranquil green gardens as far as your eyes can see, not the drab brown and black rooftops we see now. Everyone will have grasses, natural vegetation, and flowers on the top of their homes, sprouting and changing colors with the seasons and attracting birds, butterflies, and endangered bees to flourish in their new rooftop habitats. Even commercial buildings will have green roofs, with full trees, water gardens, and organic fruits and vegetables produced in space that is wasted now.

Thanks to these green or “living roofs,” there will be less pollution, cleaner air, less water waste, less noise pollution, and our energy costs to heat or cool our homes will be lower.

Does it sound like something out of a futuristic sci-fi society – or only for the ultra modern homes of the super wealthy? In fact, living roofs and already here and being used around the world, growing fast in popularity as we better understand and focus on the consequences of our mass ecological footprint.

 In this blog, we’ll cover some of the basics of living roofs (and living walls.) In part 2, we’ll go into the amazing benefits in detail and also outline the installation and maintenance process if you wanted to add one to your home!

What are living roofs?

Green roofs, also called living roofs, is when a residential or commercial building has a specially constructed micro ecosystem of grasses and vegetation installed as the top layer on its roof surface. The roof can be flat, sloped, or pitched just like any roof. But instead of using a top layer of shingles, slate, rubberized membrane, or other traditional roofing materials, vegetation is grown in a thin layer of topsoil or organic medium that lies on top of waterproof sheeting.

There are also living walls, which can be incorporated into horizontal living spaces large or small, indoors or outdoors. Living walls are usually either grown from specialized posts that hang affixed to the walls, with plants growing up a climbing net, trellis, or similar structure, or grown right out of an organic membrane that hangs on top of regular sheetrock and includes specialized irrigation and drainage. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll include living walls whenever we say living roofs or green roofs.

There are terrific benefits to living roofs and living walls, both for the homeowner or resident, the immediate neighborhood or city, and to the ecosystem of our world as a whole.

Why are living roofs so important?

You only have to turn on the television to hear calamitous reports of climate change, global warming, and draught. And as our world gets more populated, our urban areas become more dense, with more buildings and pavement and less trees, grassy areas, and natural habitats. Rivers and waterways are more polluted than ever and at the same time, human beings are toxifying the environment to the point where other species of animals are being killed off or crowded out.

But every building has a roof, which becomes completely wasted space 99.9% of the time. The good news is that not just environmentalists and scientists but the average person is starting to understand the mutual benefit to installing solar panels to capture energy and lessen their environmental impact. Or now, living roofs.

Living roofs have some amazing benefits to the environment, and with almost 120 million homes (or households) in the U.S. alone, and countless other large commercial spaces, imagine the positive impact if they were all utilized to “green” our society.

Where can living roofs be found?

Living roofs may seem ultra-modern, but they’ve been used for over 1,000 years around the world, from the Vikings with turf living roofs in Scandinavia to traditional living roofed cottages in Ireland and Scotland.

Germany has been very progressive with clean energy and clean environmental practices, already having used living roofs for 30 years. The German government encourages Green Roof building through their Federal Nature Protection Ac as well as building codes and incentives. In nearby Austria, cities like Linz mandate green roofs for new residential and commercial buildings over a certain size. The UK has been experimenting with green roofs, anchored by the living roof atop the notable Rolls Royce showroom. And in Australia, living roofs are starting to take hold and grow in popularity.

In the United States, living roofs are still rare – mostly seen only in ultra modern and luxury, cutting-edge architecture. But already in many cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the idea of rooftop gardens on urban buildings is becoming prevalent, a precursor to familiarity and comfort with living roofs.

What kinds of living roofs are there?

There are generally two types of living roofs; intensive and extensive.

Intensive living roofs have deeper soil and can support all sorts of large vegetation up to the size of full trees. Most rooftop gardens are intensive roofs.

Extensive living roofs have a much shallower growing surface that hosts groundcover vegetation like grasses.

Of course, there are all sorts of rooftop gardens where people grow flowers, fruits and vegetables. Those may have similarities but usually are built separately and after the fact on top of a traditional roof, not incorporated into the roof itself.

What kind of vegetation do living roofs use?

There are different kinds of grasses and vegetation commonly used in living roofs. What you use depends on your climate, what plants are native to your terrain, how much rain and sunlight you get, and how deep the soil or growth membrane is on your roof.

When first setting up a living roof, installers and homeowners usually plant at least four different grasses for several reasons. Some of them may not take root or flourish so it’s good to have several varietals. And with different kinds of grasses or vegetation, you’ll have different blooming times and colors during different seasons.

So living roofs usually look like wildflower meadows, not tightly cropped short grass on our front lawns (which isn’t healthy and takes much more water.)

***

Tune in for part 2 of this blog, with the benefits of living roofs as well as information on installation and maintenance. 

10 Ways "going green" around the house can also save you big money.

1. Install high efficiency light bulbs.
Did you know that the traditional light bulbs we still use waste up to 90% of their energy emitting heat? So replace your normal incandescent bulbs with high-efficiency Energy Star bulbs. They’ll lower your energy costs, last much longer, and are much friendlier on the environment.  Look for compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), and light emitting diodes (LEDs), which you can buy at any Home Depot.  Those should save you a couple hundred dollars or more per year. And if every family in the U.S.A. replaced their bulbs, we’d reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one trillion pounds!

2. Program your thermostat.
A new “smart” thermostat, like an Energy Star, allows you to program specific temperatures for different times of the day.  Too often we set one temperature for night and one for day, or even worse, one set temperature, which is completely unnecessary. So you can lower the temperature at night (when you are under blankets) or during the day (when you are at work.)  The U.S. Department of Energy estimates you’ll save 5 to 15 percent per year by turning your thermostat back 10 to 15 degrees for eight hours a day.

It's recommended you keep the thermostat at 78 degrees or higher when cooling the house in the summer, and 68 degrees or cooler in the winter.

3. Stop pouring money down the drain!
Water is expensive these days, and the vast majority of indoor water usage comes from toilets flushing (30% of residential consumption) and showers. So install low-flow showerheads in your bathrooms - they only cost $20 or so and spray no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, saving you a couple hundred dollars per year. And install high-efficiency (low-flush) toilets, which can save a family of four a whopping $300 per year or more in water bills. If you don’t want to replace your new toilet, there’s a super simple (and free) way to turn it into a low-flushing model. Just fill up a few plastic water s with sand and place them in the tank!

4. Plug air leaks
Whenever you turn up your heat or AC, drafts can waste a lot of your money. Close doors, windows, and curtains appropriately to keep the heat or air in the rooms you need it most. Consider foam rollers or stick-on energy tape under doors or around window frames where the most air leaks in or out. In addition, caulking around exterior doors and windows and installing weather stripping in the chilly seasons can save you a bundle on energy costs!

5. Set up an outdoor compost bin.
Did you know that up to 50% of the trash in your home comes from food waste? All of that organic material goes in the trash and fills up landfills or is even dumped in the ocean! So instead of burdening our trash system with food scraps, set up a small compost station in your back yard. Over time, it will naturally break down organic material and create a safe, health fertilizer for your yard and plants. Studies show that separating food scraps from the trash also increases the amount of recyclable materials that are properly separated.

6. Optimize your water heater
If you don't have one installed already, put an insulated blanket around your hot water heater and also insulate the pipes around the water heater. Insulated blankets cost between $10 and $20, and you can get pipe insulation for less than $1 for six feet. Also consider turning the temperature on the water heater down to 120 degrees. Think about it – we turn the water on super hot and then use cold water to cool it down to the proper warm temperature – what a waste! Setting your water heater to a comfortable 120 degrees. It will save you up to $450 annually in energy bills…and use far less water!

7. Fans
In warm climates like the Central Valley of California, it takes far more energy (and money) to cool your house every year than it does to heat it. So during the scorching summer, instead of cranking up the air conditioning in the whole house, use fans. Ceiling fans are inexpensive to install and can cool down a room for cheap. Attic fans do a great job pushing hot air out of the attic, which accumulates because heat rises, attics have less ventilation, and roofing materials like tiles or shingles collect heat.

 On rooms that face the sun (on the south and west of the house) hang heavy solar-blocking curtains to keep the rooms cool, and consider energy efficient windows to protect against UV rays.

8. Native plants and shade trees.
Pull up your front lawn – which wastes an incredible amount of water for nothing more than an aesthetic. In fact, 30% of all water used in the U.S. goes to lawns and outdoor irrigation! By installing native species and draught-tolerant plants, you’ll have a much more attractive, natural, and garden-like front yard – and help the planet in a huge way. Shade trees plated on the south and west of your house can reduce AC bills by up to 15%, and many cities will come plant them for your for free.

9. Rainwater barrels and proper irrigation.
With California in the throes one of the worst draughts in U.S. history, every drop is precious – even rainwater. So why not put out a few barrels in your yard and next to your house, with gutters and downspout flowing into them. In a typical good night of rain, 300 gallons of water may be dumped on your roof alone, so capture this water and then use it for natural irrigation.

10. Go solar.
There is no doubt –the solar revolution is here, and in dry and hot climates like California, it’s nonsensical NOT to take advantage of the free and abundant sunshine. Thankfully, the cost to install solar panels on your roof or at your home has gone way down in the last several years, as technology and infrastructure has improved. Solar panels pay for themselves pretty quickly and grant homeowners huge tax rebates and incentives. If buying solar panels was too big of an investment, you can even lease them, which costs less than your energy bill every month!

For more information how solar works and availability in your area, click here.

Solar Roads will shine brightly in their failure.

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." ~Ansel Adams

Maybe, just maybe, they’re on to something big.  That’s what people say when they see the images on Facebook; synthetic highways the color of AstroTurf, a trail of bright incandescent glowing as a car drives over or even a moose walks across it.  The ensuing social media post, entitled Solar Roadways, goes on to describe how Julie and Scott Brusaw, an unassuming couple from Idaho, have devised solar technology that’s ready to change the world.

Their idea is alarmingly audacious and plausibly simple enough to capture our collective imagination – to replace all the roads in the United States with special solar panels that collect the sun’s energy, even as we drive on them.

Their imaginative innovation isn’t just folly – Scott is an electrical engineer and the couple has worked on Solar Roadways for years, manufacturing a working prototype and rising to popularity with an Indiegogo campaign that’s raised $1 million so far from private contributors, including $400,000 in the first month.  Our Federal Highway Administration has already dolled out two rounds of funding to Solar Roads to advance the technology.

The concept works like this; instead of asphalt, we’ll replace all roadways and highways with their solar materials, impact-resistant panels that look like paving stones, covered in clear “smart” glass that is as tough as bullet proof glass.  The solar panels gather, conduct, and store energy from the sun’s rays, and are embedded with digital sensors and as well.  The solar panels are so tough that they can withstand a 250,000-pound truck driving over them, or a massive tractor, as the images of one test showed.

The panels would also serve to filter storm water off the roads, conduct electricity so they’d replace aboveground cables, and have heating cells so they’d automatically clear the roads of snow and ice.  They’d also have built in LED lights, so they’d light up at night, light up to show when an animal or obstacle is stopped in the road (like a moose or a stalled car,) and could transmit driving safety messages to motorists.  In theory, these roads would also totally eliminate our need for cars motored by fossil fuels because they’d be able to regenerate the batteries in electric cards as they drove over them. 

Ostensibly, buy replacing all the nation’s roadways with these panels, we’re be able to generate more than three times the electricity needed for all U.S. energy consumption. 

Sounds downright Utopian, huh?  There’s no denying that the idea of solar roadways is enticing beyond measure, but is it viable?  That’s where we run into a few bumps in the road (so to speak.) 

Critics of Solar Roadways (and the backlash is gathering like storm clouds,) point to a few fundamental reasons why the idea will never come to fruition, and is essentially a waste of time and money;

The first is cost.  There are approximately 29,000 square miles of roadways in the U.S.  It would take about 5.6 billion of these solar panels to replace all that surface area, at a conservative price tag of $56 trillion dollars.  And that’s just the cost of the solar panels – imagine the tab when we add in installation, ripping up our roads, highway shutdowns, etc.  Even if we grossly overestimate the cost of asphalt roads, solar roads are estimated at about 50% more than traditional roads. 

The second issue is one of practicality; imagine the infrastructure nightmare of actually doing the work!  The Federal Government now spends about $50 billion a year maintain our current roads, and we still have potholes and bad areas and construction shutdowns everywhere.  Can you even fathom how big a job it would be to rip up every roadway and replace it with solar panels?  Think of Boston’s Big Dig – a 10-year catastrophic cluster – and that was just one tunnel in one city!  To get it all done and convert entirely to an electrical infrastructure, while we still need to use our roads, would be so expensive and time consuming it’s unestimatable. 

So far, there has been a lot of cheering, back-patting, and superficial dollars thrown at the project – the pom pom’s are out – but how they’d come up with real funding necessary to launch this is still a mystery.  Solar Roadways has been uber-popular with the Google Solve and TED crowd, admirably so, but a million dollars will buy you a slick PR campaign these days and a working prototype and little else.

In fact, Solar Roadways lost out on GE’s $200 million Ecoimagination grant and if you added up all the clean energy grants all around the world we’re still only talking a couple billion clams.

The retort from the Brusaw camp is that solar roadways will bring in revenue in other ways – by creating jobs, producing spare energy to sell back to the grid.  They can also charge a nominal fee for reenergizing electric cars, and sell advertising space for electronic billboards on the roads.  Or, we could just put a toll every ten feet…

But the biggest obstacle to Solar Roadways comes, surprisingly, from serious clean energy advocates.  Quite simply, there are better ways to do it.  Instead of ripping up every road and replacing it with tech that needs to be driven over and maintained, why not just equip every rooftop in America with solar panels?  And build solar cell banks on the unused sides of highways and the medians? 

That’s the light bulb realization that will doom Solar Roads.  Already, progressive states like Oregon are building solar cells by their highways – not on them – to capture usable energy.  It’s a far more efficient method – they don’t need to worry about ripping up existing road, keeping new panels clean, glass durability, and how to store and relay captured energy.

Rooftop solar is far cheaper, easier to install, has a decade of innovation invested, and comes with none of the logistic hassles of solar-in-the-road.  Rooftop solar can turn toward the sun automatically and you don’t have to worry about shutting down a whole highway for maintenance or replacement. 

So the conversation comes back to the same one we’ve been having for 20+ years; why aren’t we utilizing solar power more in the United States?  Photovoltaics (capturing the sun’s energy) still only accounts for no more than 1.13 percent of America’s power production, yet it is free once the infrastructure is in place, never runs out and turns a problem (global warming?) into a viable solution for clean energy that can be phased in with little or no detriment.

20 years is also about how long the technology to generate solar power from unused spaces, or “distribution generation,” has been shining on.  You can put solar panels anywhere there is wasted space – rooftops being the main one (especially commercial) but also car covers, pool covers, car rooftops, etc.  Even the archaic U.S. Census Bureau estimates that installing solar panels on every home in America would produce 3.75 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, about the same amount of energy generated in the entire United States in 2011. 

Already, we’re lagging far behind much of the world in solar and clean energy generation.  Germany has already implemented solar programs that produce enough energy on par with all of the United States (in a much smaller country with a colder, less-sunny climate.)  China has a stated goal of producing 8 gig watts of solar power from distributed generation this year.  Sun-rich Middle Eastern countries are even on board. 

Yet it seems that unless there is forced governmental regulation calling for certain solar and clean energy quotas from corporations (commercial roof space,) states, and municipalities, it’s unrealistic to think the needed change will occur one humble homeowner’s rooftop at a time.  And that is exactly where Solar Roads may succeed - publicity, bringing solar alternatives to our national awareness and back into our conversation, making solar energy marketable, cool, and within reach.  Indeed, the concept of solar roads may end up advancing the cause of clean energy in its eventual failure more than all other predecessors in their success.  For Solar Roads it may be a case of “Shoot for the moon, but settle for the sun.”