OneWorld.net (U.S.)

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 19 (New America Media) - For the first time, a big, American utility company is investing in large-scale solar energy. Pacific Gas & Electric has decided that solar is part of the answer for California's energy needs.

Solar power plant. © Center for Global Development / carma.orgAt a recent press conference with the senior executives of the two solar companies they've chosen for the project, OptiSolar and Sunpower, PG&E's Chief Operating Officer Jack Keenan said that by 2013, this move will provide energy at a market rate for almost 250,000 houses a year, and create about 1,000 jobs in California.

Both OptiSolar and Sunpower have purchased land in San Luis Obispo County, just north of Los Angeles, and are in the final stages of securing approval from the local authorities to install their solar power panels there. This area was chosen because it has, as Tom Werner, CEO of Sunpower put it, "big transmission lines and big sun."

Big sun makes California particularly well suited for solar power. "Sun and demand correlate here," says PG&E's Fong Wan, which means California houses use the most energy during the hot summer months.

Solar energy has long made sense in California. Innovators and entrepreneurs have been working on it for years. Sunpower was funded in 1985 by a Stanford professor. But until recently it has been realized on a small scale and that has made it expensive.

"The whole game is bringing the cost of solar down. It's an economy of scale," says Adam Browning, executive director of the Vote Solar Initiative (www.votesolar.org), a non-profit campaign that urges cities and towns to use solar energy.

When the big players are interested, the cost comes down. But Randy Goldstein, CEO of OptiSolar, says solar has been missing "the technology and business models" to function on a bigger scale.

The roadblock cited by all, including a representative from the National Resources Defense Council, is the possible loss of tax breaks for renewable energy. The growth of solar energy is largely being developed by "states and companies," according to Browning, and Keenan says it's up to the government "to provide the proper frame for success." But the tax breaks for this industry will run out at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, solar companies are frantically making the case that they are "driving development in cutting-edge technologies." After all, noted Browning, "We can deliver solar energy more cheaply than we can fossil fuel."

Editor's notes:

• Executives from 23 U.S. utility companies recently traveled on a fact-finding trip to Germany, the world's leading installer of photovoltaic solar cells, to learn how that country's utilities are coping with the shortcomings of solar power generation, particularly its intermittent nature. Roy Kuga, vice president of PG&E, said many of his concerns were allayed, reports the Worldwatch Institute.

• The Prometheus Institute, a nonprofit research group, projects that installed system prices for large solar projects will fall 50 percent by 2010. Solar electricity is likely to become cost-competitive with the retail price of electricity in many parts of the world in the next several years, notes Worldwatch.

• The tax credits that help drive solar energy investment and job creation across the United States are set to expire at the end of this year, and an eight-year extension passed by the House of Representatives in May is now being held up in the U.S. Senate, reports the nonprofit Network for New Energy Choices. Republican senators balked at funding the extension by repealing tax breaks for oil and gas companies, the group says. In an attempt to find a compromise, the legislation then got enmeshed in the debate over off-shore drilling for oil, and remains in limbo.

OneWorld TV: U.S. Oil Barron Promotes Renewable Energy