WASHINGTON, DC— The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) Action Fund, which works to elect candidates who will implement sound environmental policies, today announced its endorsement of former Congressman Baron Hill for U.S. Senate from Indiana. Through a long and distinguished career in public office, Hill has fought to grow Indiana’s clean energy economy and is committed to addressing climate change.
“We’ve made great strides to address climate change in the past few months, but there is still much more to do, and Indiana’s environment and families will have a terrific ally with Baron Hill in the U.S. Senate,” said LCV Action Fund Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld. “In Congress, he was a strong voice for investing in clean energy and energy efficiency, and combatting climate change. He stood up to Big Oil and other polluters and supported comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. We’re excited at the prospect of Baron Hill coming to the Senate to resume this important work.”
"Our climate is changing and we need to make smart investments in clean energy to ensure Indiana and America remain the world's economic leader,” said Hill. “We cannot fail to act on climate change, nor can we fail to protect our clean air and water—our children and grandchildren deserve to inherit the best possible future."
As a former member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Hill co-authored the Hill-Terry Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards bill to increase fuel-efficiency standards for the first time in 30 years. He also supported the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act, the first ever comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation to pass a house of Congress. Additionally, Hill backed the single largest investment in clean energy in history: an economic recovery package that included more than $80 billion for energy efficiency, renewable energy and public transit, with substantial investments for job-creating clean energy and energy efficiency projects in Indiana.
Hill is featured on LCV Action Fund’s GiveGreen website, the only bundling website devoted exclusively to raising money for environmental champions for federal office.
Legal fee to fight open records suit is more than $160,000
NIKI KELLY | The Journal Gazette
INDIANAPOLIS – Hoosier taxpayers have paid $160,000 in legal fees to shield Indiana House and Senate communications from public view in just eight months.
The final tab will be higher because the most recent tally from the Indiana Auditor’s Office doesn’t include a bill covering the March 17 oral argument before the Indiana Supreme Court.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition. “It would have been a lot cheaper just to honor the public records law.”
Citizens Action Coalition sued in April 2015 alongside Common Cause Indiana and the Energy and Policy Institute in D.C. over an open records request for email and other correspondence between Rep. Eric Koch and various utilities regarding a bill about solar power.
GOP House Speaker Brian Bosma, an attorney himself, said he isn’t sure what he expected in terms of the bill but stands behind the decision.
“It’s just important to protect constituent communication. We are defending a lawsuit brought by an out-of-state interest group that wants to change that,” he said.
“No one likes to spend money but confidentiality of Hoosiers’ communications with their elected officials is paramount.”
The suit came after the Indiana House denied the request, saying the Indiana General Assembly is exempt from Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act. The state’s Public Access Counselor disagreed and ruled the legislature must comply with the state law.
A Marion County judge dismissed the case on separation-of-powers grounds, since the Supreme Court previously has ruled the judicial branch of government must not interfere in the internal workings of the legislative branch.
Instead of using the Indiana Attorney General’s Office to handle the legal challenge, Bosma hired the Taft Stettinius & Hollister law firm in Indianapolis. Specifically, attorney Geoffrey Slaughter, whose rate is $440 per hour, and a second lawyer assisting at a rate of $345 per hour.
Slaughter –a finalist for a spot on the Supreme Court – argued the justices should defer to the legislative branch on questions of process. But he also said if the court does intercede, the request should be denied under a legislative work product exception.
The costs for the case are being split with the Indiana Senate and paid out of legislative General Fund dollars. So far the billing covers from May 2015 to the end of February 2016. The highest single bill was $36,000.
Senate President Pro Tem David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said the House asked the Senate to contribute to the legal costs because the decision affects all legislators, regardless of chamber and party.
“It’s expensive but when government gets sued and you believe you are doing the right thing, then you have to defend yourselves,” Long said.
William Groth argued on behalf of Citizens – saying email messages to legislators are public because the legislature didn’t exempt itself. An effort to do so was vetoed by then-Gov. Frank O’Bannon.
“(Groth) made our case effectively and the public has a right to know what is going on in their government,” Olson said. “It’s our hope the case gets remanded and we finally hear the case.”
Long and Bosma both have said repeatedly that Hoosiers regularly send private information to their legislators and it should not be public.
Bosma said everyone who is a resident of the state – including a lobbyist – is a constituent. He said Hoosiers can see everything that transpires on legislation, from committee testimony to vote sheets, amendments and fiscal analysis.
“The only real exception to that is the work product of (Legislative Services Agency) and the legislators, including communication from constituents,” Bosma said.
He said there might be a way to craft a middle ground where some records are open but noted it would involve redacting thousands and thousands of emails the 150 lawmakers send and receive, and likely mean setting up a division of staff to produce the communications while ensuring confidentiality.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory this week said that rooftop solar panels have the potential to generate nearly 40 percent of electricity in the U.S. But what about the cost of going solar?
Many people ask when the cost of producing power from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels will be equal to or less than buying from the grid – a point called “grid parity” that could accelerate solar adoption.
But in asking the question, they often compare apples to oranges and forget that the answer varies from place to place and from one type of installation to another.
For example, electricity from utility-scale solar systems (typically large arrays where panels slowly change tilt and orientation to face the sun all day) usually costs less than electricity produced from solar panels fixed on someone’s home. Also, residential electric rates, on average about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in in the U.S., are much higher than wholesale electric rates – the price utilities pay to power generators – which are usually less than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
At the same time, different states have more or less sun – solar power in Florida is typically more economic than in Alaska, for instance. All of these factors make the question more complicated than people might anticipate.
How, then, can we compare the cost of rooftop solar to the cost of buying power from the local electricity grid and thereby find when which states will hit the point of grid parity?
Putting a number on solar cost
The levelized, or average, cost of electricity from a solar PV array is derived from all the money spent to buy, install, finance and maintain the system divided by the total amount of electricity that system is expected to produce over its lifetime. We call this value the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) and it’s expressed in terms of dollars per kilowatt-hour ($/kWh). The same metric can be used to determine the cost for a coal or natural gas plant. Planners like it because it reduces the cost of a power plant over a span of many decades into a single number.
Despite the strengths of LCOE as a metric – it is easy to understand and widely used – it has some shortcomings, too. Namely, it leaves out geographic variability, changes with seasons and usually ignores the cost of environmental impacts such as the cost of carbon emissions. This metric is a bit too simple when comparing variable wind and solar generators to power plants that you can turn on and off at will, such as those fueled by uranium, coal and natural gas.
Today the average cost of energy from solar PV in U.S. is reported to be 12.2 cents per kWh, which is about the same as the average retail rate.
Those who keep close tabs on electricity prices might think that it is about on par with what they are paying for their own electricity at home. This number can be misleading, however, because it represents the average price of utility-scale solar across the U.S., not necessarily the cost borne to produce electricity from solar panels on our homes.
So how do we know how close residential solar is to grid parity where you live? Ultimately, that depends on two things: how much you pay for the electricity you buy from the local grid, and how much can you get paid for the electricity you can produce from PV. Let’s take a look at both of them.
How much sun do you get?
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) has created a map of average electricity rates by zip code, averaged to the county level and remade by the author in the map below. The deep red (or darker) colors indicate higher average residential electricity rates.
Electric rates vary a great deal across the country, and these differences could be caused by a number of economic, historical or regulatory reasons. Likewise, the costs of solar and the availability of the solar resource (i.e., how often and how strong the sun shines) also are not homogeneous throughout the U.S. The figure below shows the LCOE of residential solar across all counties nationwide.
The data on the residential solar costs were pulled together from an ongoing large-scale campus-wide research project at the Energy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. The main assumptions behind the data are a total cost of US$3.50/Watt for the solar PV installation for a fixed array pointing south with a tilt of 25 degrees. Solar production data are based on a 2013 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study.
The U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative has a stated goal of lowering residential solar PV system installations to $1.50/Watt. Cheap PV panels from China have driven down the hardware costs to the point where the price of a total PV system is now dominated by “soft costs” – namely, customer acquisition, installation, supply chain, permit, etc. Still, total installed system costs continue to fall.
While those cost cuts are impressive, the major driver in the cost of energy produced is the amount of solar radiation that strikes the solar panels. Obviously, some locations are sunnier than others so a solar array in Arizona will produce more energy than one in Washington state, making the system more economic for the homeowner.
And, the prevailing cost of electricity varies nationwide. Some of the areas with the lowest cost of grid power (e.g., Washington) have some of the highest solar costs because of low levels of sunshine. It will be difficult to make solar reach parity in those locations.
On the other hand, there are other locations where the price of grid electricity is high and the solar LCOE is relatively low, including New Mexico, California and Hawaii; these places are prime locations for solar to be at parity sooner.
Moving target
To illustrate this point, we take the same information that underlies the solar cost map and reduce the total installed cost of installed solar in $0.50/Watt increments – from $3.50/Watt to $1.50/Watt (the SunShot goal). We can then subtract the electricity rate from the solar LCOE in every county. Where this difference is zero or negative (electricity rates > LCOE), we can estimate when that county will be at grid parity for residential solar PV.
Below is a GIF that shows the estimate of the point of parity as the price of installed solar falls. Note that the total installed costs include the federal investment tax credit and any local rebates and tax incentives.
These calculations and estimates come with several caveats. First, the above calculation assumes that PV owners are paid for their generation at standard electric rates in their area. This arrangement is typically known as net metering.
But there is a wide range of ways that utilities interact with customers who have installed solar PV. Some utilities may pay homeowners wholesale market rates for the excess electricity they feed into the grid from their panels, which tend to be considerably lower than retail rates. If utilities pay homeowners based on the wholesale rate, rather than the retail rate, solar is less economic.
But that’s not all. One could add in the cost benefits of reducing CO2 emissions and other pollutants. On the other hand, there are costs associated with “firming up” the solar power when it’s nighttime or cloudy.
Keeping these factors in mind, the answer to the question, “Does it make economic sense for me to install solar?” is: it depends. As the map demonstrates, the crucial thing to watch, apart from any changes in electricity costs, is how quickly the overall costs of solar go down.
Author
Joshua D. Rhodes, Postdoctoral Researcher of Energy, University of Texas at Austin
Joshua Rhodes abides by the disclosure policies of the University of Texas at Austin. The University of Texas at Austin is committed to transparency and disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest. He has filed all required financial disclosure forms with the university. Joshua Rhodes has not received any research funding that would create a conflict of interest or the appearance of such a conflict. In addition to research work on topics generally related to energy systems at the University of Texas at Austin, Joshua Rhodes is an equity partner in IdeaSmiths LLC, which consults on topics in the same areas of interests. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by the University of Texas at Austin in accordance with its policy on objectivity in research.
Joe Ryan
JoeRyanNews
March 29, 2016 — 7:01 PM EDT Updated on March 30, 2016 — 6:06 AM EDT
North Carolina added almost 1 gigawatt of farmland solar
Projects offer stable income not affected by commodity markets
For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-megawatt array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.
Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That’s also been a boon for struggling U.S. family farms that must contend with floundering commodity prices.
“There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm,” said Singletary, 65.
The rise in solar comes as the value of crops in the Southeast -- with the exception of tobacco -- has dropped. Cotton prices have fallen 71 percent in the last five years. Soybeans are down 33 percent and peanuts have slipped 16 percent.
Solar companies, meanwhile, are paying top dollar, offering annual rents of $300 to $700 an acre, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. That’s more than triple the average rent for crop and pasture land in the state, which ranges from $27 to $102 an acre, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
The economic incentives spurring solar will be discussed at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York starting April 4.
“Solar developers want to find the cheapest land near substations where they can connect,” said Brion Fitzpatrick, director of project development for Inman Solar Inc. of Atlanta. “That’s often farmland.”
Developers have installed solar panels on about 7,000 acres of North Carolina pasture and cropland since 2013, adding almost a gigawatt of generating capacity, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. Georgia has added 200 megawatts on fields and cleared forests over the same period, much of it farmland, according to the Southface Energy Institute of Atlanta.
The number of megawatts developers can generate per acre of farmland varies, based on weather patterns, size of the panels and contours of the land. On Singletary’s farm, Strata Solar installed 21,600 panels, each about 6 feet by 3 feet (1.8 meters by 914 centimeters). Combined, they can power as many as 5,000 local homes.
Long-Term Contracts
Farmers typically lease a portion of their land, signing 15- to 20-year contracts with developers who install the panels and sell the power to local utilities. In rare cases, farmers have leased their entire property to solar companies.
Singletary signed a 15-year lease in 2013, with two 10-year extension options, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Strata sells the power to Duke Energy Corp. He declined to disclose financial terms.
Government incentives have played a key role in the spread of solar farms built on real farms. North Carolina granted developers tax credits equal to 35 percent of their projects’ costs though a program that expired at the end of 2015, helping make the state the third-biggest U.S. solar market. In Georgia, the Public Service Commission passed a bill in 2013 requiring the state’s largest utility, Southern Co.’s Georgia Power, to buy 525 megawatts of solar by 2016. Both policies sent companies scouring for open space to build.
Solar panels have buoyed tax bases in impoverished rural counties, said Tim Echols, a member of the Georgia Public Service Commission. They also let farmers diversify their income with revenue that’s not subject to markets or unpredictable weather patterns.
‘Stable Income’
“Solar and wind farms have become a new stable income stream for farmers -- and they don’t fluctuate with commodity prices,” said Andy Olsen, who promotes clean energy projects in rural areas for the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center.
Not everyone is happy to see solar panels or wind turbines becoming more common on farmland. In the U.K. lawmakers have pushed to limit large clean energy projects on farms, saying they blight the landscape and squeeze out local food production. Similar criticisms have surfaced in the U.S., where local officials have pushed for zoning changes to restrict solar developments to industrial properties.
Neighbor Complaints
“I get a lot of complaints from neighbors” said Tim Sheppard, who don’t like the looks of the 1-megawatt solar system that takes up about 5 acres of his 135-acre cattle farm in Brasstown, North Carolina.
Despite the recent flurry of building in North Carolina, solar panels cover less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all farmland in the state, said Maggie Clark director of government affairs for the NC Sustainable Energy Association.
Singletary, the Bladen County farmer, said the solar panels will let him retire without selling his family land.
“It gives me way to keep the farm,” he said. “I’d like to pass it to my grandchildren someday.”
Solar Over Louisville seeks to increase solar power usage to 2 megawatts by next year. The Courier-Journal
One man's drive for cleaner energy has run up against historic preservation guidelines in a Louisville neighborhood.
A Louisville resident's rooftop solar installation has collided with one neighborhood's historic preservation requirements, setting what city officials described as a first-of-its-kind architectural design battle.
The dispute comes as a largely coal-fired city begins to weigh just how much it will embrace making clean solar power mainstream.
In a sign of solar's growing pains, however, city planners have told Clifton resident Mark Frazar that the solar panels he installed in December 2014 on his William Street home violate historic preservation rules because they are visible from the street. He was fined $100, and, after an appeal, his case has been set for a hearing by an architectural review board April 13 to determine whether they need to be removed.
"They are hanging their hat on visible from the street," saying that's not allowed, said Frazar, a project manager for an architectural firm, in an interview. "That's certainly making it pretty difficult."
Frazar has spelled out his case in correspondence obtained by The Courier-Journal through the Kentucky Open Records law.
"I ask you to take into account our need for lower energy consumption and renewable energy sources," and conditions specific to his home, he wrote to city planners. Solar panels need southern exposure, he said. At his home, he limited panels to a south-facing roof atop a rear, second-story camelback portion of his shotgun-style 19th-century home.
For their part, city officials insist their policies in neighborhoods with historic preservation rules do not hinder residents from adding solar panels.
Frazar should have sought what the city calls a certificate of appropriateness, said Develop Louisville spokesman Will Ford, who said this was the first time solar panels have gone before an architectural review committee after those solar panels had already been installed.
"If the homeowner would have consulted with the urban design team before installing the solar panels, they could have worked as a team to find a solution for the location of the solar panels on the property," Ford said. "Solar panels are treated like other proposed exterior changes in a historic district.
"Solar panels are not discouraged in historic districts, but they must fit within the guidelines of the historic district."
City solar push
Frazer said he was not aware of any limits on solar panels when he reviewed the guidelines in 2014.
Seven Louisville neighborhoods have been designated historic districts, requiring government oversight of exterior alterations, demolition and new construction and installation of solar panels: Butchertown, Clifton, Cherokee Triangle, Limerick, Old Louisville, Parkland and West Main Street.
His challenge comes at a time when Mayor Greg Fischer has blessed a Solar Over Louisville effort that seeks to persuade Louisvillians to install 2 megawatts of solar capacity this year. That's roughly enough capacity for 333 typical homes, said Nancy Givens with Solar Over Louisville. The Louisville Metro Council also last year passed a strongly worded resolution in support of solar power, encouraging the discussion and promotion of solar use on public and private buildings.
Frazar included that resolution in his appeal.
In August, The Courier-Journal reported that solar installers acknowledged that workarounds in historic districts are possible in some situations, but sometimes the limitations mean not enough panels can be put on a roof to cover a home's electricity needs, or the panels cannot be installed for optimum efficiency.
Frazar has support from the David Coyte, land-use and preservation chair of the Clifton Community Council.
"I am more than sympathetic," said Coyte. "My position is that if we don't allow such things (as solar panels) there won't be a future to value the history we are seeking to protect," citing concerns about global warming and a need for cleaner energy.
"We should welcome and support anyone in Clifton who is seeking to develop alternative energy resources," he said.