On a bright, cloudless winter afternoon, Beezer Molten dons sunglasses as he looks at the year-old solar panels on his warehouse in North Charleston. Molten owns Half-Moon Outfitters, and his business was one of the first in South Carolina to sell excess power from solar panels back to a power company. During some months, the panels cut his electric bills in half. He expected his investment in solar power and other conservation equipment to pay for itself in five years. “I think it will happen sooner than that,” he says. Across the Cooper River, at the far end of Blackbaud Stadium, Andrew Bell squints at 60 new solar panels crews put up the day before.
“We live in a sunny place,” says Bell, director of public relations and marketing for the Charleston Battery soccer team. “Why not have the sun beat down on solar panels?” Half-Moon Outfitters and the Charleston Battery are among a small but growing number of local businesses and residents harnessing the sun’s energy to generate electricity. Last year, South Carolinians installed 49 solar systems, up from 12 in 2002, according to the South Carolina Energy Office. “We’re getting tons of calls and e-mails a day — I’d say triple to quadruple the number last year,” said Erika Hartwig, who works in the office’s renewable energy division. “I think the demand for solar is out there.”
Energy experts and investors say advances in solar panel technology and other forms of renewable electricity generation have made it increasingly attractive for homeowners and businesses to become their own mini-utilities. It’s a trend that could transform the way South Carolinians generate and receive their electricity. The experts and investors say that thousands of rooftop solar arrays someday could create a powerful network that makes the nation’s power grid more bulletproof to blackouts, terrorist attacks and natural disasters, while reducing vast amounts of greenhouse gasses. They argue it could reduce the need for new coal-burning power plants, such as the one Santee Cooper wants to build on the Great Pee Dee River. Skeptics say that solar power is still a pie-in-the-sky concept that doesn’t make economic sense and couldn’t produce enough power to meet growing demand. And even solar power advocates concede that solar installations are cost-effective only because of hefty government subsidies.
Solar power’s future in South Carolina is further clouded by resistance from utilities, which have been slow to accept net metering, a program that allows customers to sell electricity they generate back to a utility. South Carolina remains one of 10 states that has yet to establish statewide net-metering standards and rates, though utilities in some parts of the state recently began experimenting with limited buyback programs. On March 10, Santee Cooper begins its “Solar Homes Initiative,” offering up to $12,000 in rebates to the first 10 homeowners who install solar equipment and participate in their net-metering program. Qualifying homes are eligible for another $5,500 in federal and tax credits. “We are doing all we can to get solar panels into our customers’ homes,” said Mark Tye, Santee Cooper’s vice president of conservation and renewable energy.
But critics say net-metering programs in South Carolina lag far behind those in other states. Molten said that he managed to work out a special contract with South Carolina Electric & Gas only after one of his Half-Moon staffers made “a relentless number of phone calls.” It’s not the best deal, either, he added. When he sells his excess power to SCE&G, the utility pays him only 2 cents per kilowatt hour. Meanwhile, SCE&G charges Half-Moon 9 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour. (In New Jersey and other states with more established net-metering programs, utilities pay the same amount as they charge.) Most days, Molten’s warehouse doesn’t have extra electricity to spare, but the solar panels offset what he would take from SCE&G, so his bills are much lower. “I might pay $270 a month now, and for a 10,000-square-foot warehouse, that’s great.”
Charlie Sneed and Libby Smith plan to install solar panels on their home in James Island, but they were surprised to learn they would save just $7 to $20 a month under a net-metering plan SCE&G recently submitted to state regulators. “It’s pretty underwhelming,” said Smith, who recently set up a foundation called SCGreen. “But we still want to do it because we think it’s important to move toward cleaner energy.” Smith and some other solar power supporters say it’s not surprising that utilities aren’t pushing for net-metering because it presents a fundamental challenge to their business models. “Utilities make money by generating power and selling it,” said David Odell, president of Sunstore Solar, a solar installer in Greer. If customers make their own power, utilities could take a financial hit. But as more people install panels, they’ll put pressure on utilities to pay fair rates, Odell said. “Solar might not be the solution to our energy package today, but I’m convinced it will be soon.”
Opportunity awaits South Carolina has plenty of sunshine; it also has some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation, a key factor that makes solar power and renewable energy less attractive here. But in the western United States, Japan, Europe and other places where electric rates are high, interest in solar power has grown dramatically. Last month, Wal-Mart finished the first of 22 planned solar rooftop projects in California and Hawaii.
Google said last year it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on its “Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal” campaign. At its headquarters, it installed panels that can generate enough energy to power 1,000 homes. The company says it could recoup its costs in energy savings in five years. In 2006, German businesses and residents installed solar panels capable of generating 1,050 megawatts, equivalent to power generated by a coal-fired power plant. The renewable industry’s holy grail is “grid parity” — making renewable energy systems competitive with coal, nuclear and gas. To reach this goal, companies around the world are investing billions of dollars in new solar manufacturing plants, which experts say will drive down costs. Share prices for solar energy stocks have skyrocketed. Last year, Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner called solar energy the “biggest business opportunity the world has ever seen.”
But some economists say solar power won’t become cost-competitive unless the government places a very large tax on carbon from coal-fired power plants. “We are throwing money away by installing the current solar PV (photovoltaic) technology, which is a loser,” Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California, Berkeley, Energy Institute, wrote in a report in January. Borenstein found that a typical solar panel system costs $86,000 to $91,000, but the value of its power ranges from $19,000 to $51,000 over the system’s lifespan. “We need a major scientific breakthrough and we won’t get it by putting panels up on houses,” he wrote. It’s just a matter of time Federal energy officials and others say it’s a matter of time before these breakthroughs happen and solar power reaches grid parity.
The U.S. Energy Department estimates that solar manufacturing should increase 12 times by 2010, making solar competitive with coal and nuclear power by 2015. In some parts of the country, wind power already is cheaper than coal and nuclear generators, said Arjun Makhijani, a physicist with the Washington-area Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Makhijani said that as solar and wind become more competitive, it could fundamentally reshape the way the world powers its machines, lights and cars. People now get their energy from a centralized grid powered by a relatively small number of large generators owned by utilities, but individuals and businesses with their own solar or wind generators could create a “distributed” grid, Makhijani wrote in his recent book, “Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy.” In the book, Makhijani argues that global warming, instability in oil-producing countries and nuclear proliferation threaten to disrupt the existing energy infrastructure.
A distributed grid would be much more robust in a natural disaster or a terrorist attack of a power plant, he said. Makhijani’s particularly interested in the concept of putting solar panels in parking lots, which could eventually be used to charge plug-in hybrid cars. Erik Lensch, owner of Argand Energy Solutions, the company that installed systems for Half-Moon and the Charleston Battery, said he gets frustrated when he hears Santee Cooper officials tout their plans for a new coal-fired power plant. “The idea that the only solution is another coal-fired power plant is ludicrous,” Lensch said. “That would negate a lot of great work companies are trying to do to reduce global warming.” Battery scores with solar
Before the Charleston Battery installed its solar panels, it worked with the Sustainability Institute in North Charleston to find ways to make the team’s operation more efficient, said Bell, the team’s marketing director. Among other things, the team installed special lighting and a geothermal heat pump. “You have to be as efficient as possible first, or the solar panels don’t make much sense,” he said. The last puzzle piece was the solar array. The team placed 60 solar panels on six poles at the north end of the soccer stadium, making sure they were tough enough to withstand the impact of a errant soccer ball. On sunny days, the panels will generate 11 kilowatts of power and offset about 12 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Every fan in the stadium will be able to see the solar panels. “We are a wasteful society, but small adjustments can make a big difference,” Bell said. “Our solar panels won’t produce all the energy the Charleston Battery needs, by a large margin, but installing them forced us to concentrate on ways to lessen our daily use.”
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