Philip Warburg: "Harness the Sun" | Talks at Google - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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MALE SPEAKER: I'd like to welcome Phil Warburg back
to Google to talk about his book called "Harness the Sun".
He was here earlier to talk about "Harvest the Wind"
and now we're on to "Harness the Sun".
As you see he's very interested in alternative energy
and how it can help save the climate
and why it's the future of energy in the United States.
Without further introduction, I'd
like the invited Phil up to talk to us about his new book.
PHILIP WARBURG: It's great to be back at Google
talking about my favorite subject.
I can't think of a better place to talk
about technological transformation than Google.
I want to start by asking how many of you
have solar on your homes today?
And how many of you have neighbors
with solar on their homes?
OK, and I want to see those hands together.
So that really says something to me about solar power today.
And that is that it's really become part of our lives
whether we've invested in it individually
or whether we're part of a broader community that
has decided that solar is a worthwhile investment.
And by worthwhile I mean a number of things.
For some people, that is simply lowering their electric bills
now and thinking about future fuel prices and stability
going forward in terms of their electric bills.
For some, there's satisfaction in trimming
at least a bit of their carbon footprint
by generating at least part, or a substantial part of,
their power from renewable sources.
And for others there's a satisfaction
in taking charge of at least some of the power
that we consume in our daily lives.
And that latter concept of taking charge
is one that I found particularly intriguing
as I traveled the country talking
to different people about their own commitment
to moving solar power forward.
One would expect progressive politicians
like former congressman Henry Waxman
to be avid solar proponents-- he wrote a wonderful blurb
on the back of my book-- former Head of the Energy and Commerce
Committee in the House, dedicated
to environmental issues.
Sea solar as part of broader panoply of necessary
measures we have to take to address
the overwhelming challenge of climate change.
But what was more surprising to me
was finding that there is strong support
for solar power among at least a contingent of very
right-wing libertarians.
People like former congressman Barry Goldwater Jr.,
he was Congressman from California
for a number of years, he now is the chair
of something called TUSK-- Tell Utilities
Solar Won't Be Killed.
And what that group does is it's a representation of homeowners
and business owners who want to generate solar
on their properties and who want fair compensation
for the surplus power that they generate and they are fighting
major utilities, such as Arizona Public Service, which
wants to cut back on the net metering benefits that
are provided to solar homeowners and solar business owners.
I don't know if this is enough to bridge
the gaping political chasm that exists in America today,
but at least it's a sign that there is a common language
that we can talk across the political spectrum
in looking at some of our renewable energy opportunities.
Back in 2012 when I was just wrapping up my book on wind
power, people often asked me, so will
your next book the about solar?
And my kind of flip and dismissive comment at the time
was that if I ever wrote a book about solar,
I have to call it "Dim Sun".
And the reason I said that was because at the time,
it just struck me that solar was pricing itself out
of the market and was not on the verge of becoming a mainstream
power producer.
Thankfully, and fairly quickly, I was proven wrong.
Between the first quarter of 2012
and the first quarter of 2015 the price
of residential and utility-scale solar came down about 46%.
And the price of non-residential,
as in commercial and public building related solar,
came down about 52%.
So a very dramatic drop in a very short period of time.
And another powerful indicator of just where solar is today
can be found in the first half of this year's new generation
capacity installations.
Solar, during the first half of this year,
accounted for 39% of all new power generation capacity
nationwide.
Wind accounted for about 36%.
So if you add the two of those, you're
looking at 75% of our new electric generating capacity
in the first half of this year coming from renewable sources.
You know we all hear about natural gas
as the cheaper, more convenient, accessible options--
and with fracking ever more accessible.
Gas accounted for about 21.4% percent
of new generated capacity during that same period.
So those are all pretty powerful signs to me
that solar's time really has arrived.
My own solar journey began in March of 2013
when my wife and I decided to put
solar on our own home's roof.
And we actually found ourselves just a few days after one
of Massachusetts' many heavy snow storms,
not the likes of which we saw last year, but 2013
had it's share as well-- and we weren't at all sure
that the installers from Sunlight Solar Energy
were going to show up at all, but they did.
And one member of their crew was a guy named Liam [? Madden. ?]
He was a former Marine Expeditionary Unit
member in Iraq-- tough guy-- but when
he got out of the gleaming white Sunlight Solar Energy van
and looked up at our roof, he kind of blanched.
And I said, what's-- is something the matter?
Have you not installed solar on a roof this steep before?
And he said well, actually not.
Our room has a 55 degree slope.
And he and his teammates climbed the roof
and in utter silence roped to the peak of the roof,
they installed our solar array.
Thankfully, no one was hurt and thereafter we've
gotten about 75% of our total electricity needs from the sun
and that includes the nightly charging
of a plug-in electric hybrid vehicle.
So we feel good about what we're doing and we're by no means
alone in doing this.
There are about 750,000 homeowners and businesses
in America today who have installed
solar on their rooftops.
During 2014, that amounted to about one
new solar installation every 2.4 or 2.5 minutes.
So we're really again, seeing solar
penetrate the marketplace.
And one thing I should just mention, which many of you,
given your work in this particular industry I'm sure
know from electronic appliances, solar photovoltaics actually
work better in colder weather.
So some people say well gee, solar
isn't a great match for Massachusetts,
it's a cold climate, snowy climate, et cetera.
As long as our solar panels are clear,
we actually get better productivity
from the sun during the winter months
than during the summer months.
Not overall, but at any given moment, because of the factor
of colder operating conditions.
But we're not just seeing solar on our homes this I'm sure
is a familiar sight to you, the Mountain View
headquarters of Google, where you
have 30% of your peak electric demand coming
from solar energy, which is pretty impressive given what
must go on at that complex.
And that might be expectable because again, you're
a high tech company, cutting edge, et cetera.
But what's interesting to me is seeing
how companies like Kohl's, like Ikea, like Walmart,
are going solar.
Walmart now has solar on 250 of its buildings
and its goal is to have solar on 1,000 of its buildings
in the coming years.
They want to be 100% reliant upon renewable energy
at some point in the near future.
Walmart isn't exactly on the cutting edge
of environmentalism or energy enlightenment,
but in fact, it is working toward the right ends
in this particular respect.
We're also seeing solar in some perhaps somewhat unpredictable
places the NFL has made a commitment to solar there
six NFL stadiums that either have solar today
or are having it installed on their facilities.
Gillette Stadium is one of those places.
I went to witness that particular facility and I
went-- the first time I went it was four a Taylor Swift
concert with my two daughters.
I think I was the only person among the crowds who
was more interested in the solar arrays than in the performer.
But this particular facility you're seeing here
is FedEx Field which is the home of the Redskins.
And this installation faced a particular problem
and I wonder if any of you could guess what it might be.
Any guesses?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP WARBURG: Well, I'll give you a hint.
What's that?
Very close.
Why tailgating?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] on top of the roof.
PHILIP WARBURG: Well, close.
What do people do at tailgate parties?
They toss footballs.
And so the guy who is responsible for designing
this facility had to calculate the arc of a football
when tossed by an amateur, but still tossed,
to make sure that the solar parking canopies were
sufficiently above that arc that footballs wouldn't
come crashing down on the solar panels on a regular basis.
Not that they probably would have broken the panels, but not
a real wise idea to have that constant collision happening.
And beyond the power that these facilities generate,
those parking canopies are now the most desired parking spots
at FedEx Field.
On a more practical level, large warehouses
are beginning to install solar on their roofs.
New Jersey is a great example.
New Jersey does not have a huge amount of open space.
It does have a huge amount of factory space and warehouse
space.
This particular building is a food storage warehouse.
It's a quarter of a mile long and it has a huge electric bill
because of the cooling and refrigeration and freezing
that has to go on inside this building.
And this building because of the solar array
now gets 90% of its total power needs from the sun.
And then if you kind of get into the real gritty aspects
of solar power's potential, you have to look at brownfields.
Brownfields for those of you who are not familiar with the term
are either contaminated or potentially contaminated
industrial properties.
They could be former mining areas,
they could be former factories, they
could be former landfills or hazardous waste dumps.
And the EPA has a department called Repowering America's
Land and they have done a survey of over 100,000
brownfield sites in America and according
to their calculations, if we were
to tap the solar potential on those brownfield sites
we could be getting three times our total power
needs nationwide.
Now, there are other challenges in terms
of developing these sites.
You have to rehabilitate them to a certain degree,
as you can see from this particular picture.
You're not necessarily inheriting pristine properties.
But that just bespeaks how profound an impact solar
could have if we were to choose hidden and not
so hidden opportunities for its development.
This particular facility is on the south side
of Chicago in the West Pullman neighborhood.
A very crime-ridden area.
Once a big industrial zone, now largely abandoned
and a site of some pretty serious local crime.
And Exelon along came in in 2008,
looked at this plot of land-- it had been an International
Harvester assembly plant that had been abandoned
in the early 1980s-- and Exelon decided this
would be a good site for solar.
So they installed the Exelon city solar plant
in the midst of the West Pullman neighborhood.
They now generate enough electricity
for about 1,500 households.
I wish I could say that this it had
some positive impact on crime in the neighborhood,
unfortunately the major source of panel breakage
is stray bullets falling from the sky.
But it did create a lot of local jobs.
There was a local metal shop for example
that made all of the posts on which
these many, many, many thousands of panels were suspended.
And it turned what was a safety hazard
and an environmental hazard and an eyesore
into an economic and environmental amenity.
We often talk about solar in terms
of the individual sites that are prime prospects for solar.
But what's happening is that entire cities, entire counties
are beginning to look at solar as a serious strategic
opportunity.
And it would be easy to talk about a place like Marin
County right across the Golden Gate Bridge
from San Francisco-- generally upscale.
Marin County developed something called the Marin Clean
Energy, which is a self-defined entity that has broken away
from Pacific Gas and Electric and now purchases power
and sells power to its customers.
It has a light green option which is 50% renewable.
It has a dark green option which is 100% renewable.
It's called community choice aggregation
and this actually happens in Massachusetts,
it happens in a number of localities in California,
and it's happening in various other states.
So that's, again, the kind of predictable story about solar.
The less predictable story about solar I found in a city
called Lancaster, California.
How many of you have heard of Lancaster?
That's what I thought.
It's a community of about 160,000 people in the middle
of the Mojave Desert.
It was long known as a center for gang violence
until 2008 when a man named Rex Paris was elected mayor.
Paris came out of a class-action litigation background.
Real hard nosed, right wing, law and order guy, and he
came in saying, I'm going to clean up this city.
And he proudly told me that under his rule
20,000 gang members were put behind bars.
And as he said to me, I don't care about the Constitution
once you join a gang.
So not exactly warm, fuzzy, progressive politician.
Thankfully though, that same dogged determination
that he has applied to crime-fighting in Lancaster,
he's applied to developing solar energy in the same city.
Several years ago, he went to a conference in China
and was sitting amidst dignitaries
from a number of major metropolitan centers
and he had his staff with him.
And at a certain point he felt he
needed to say his own peace before this crowd,
stood up and declared that his city was going to become
the solar capital of the world.
And I think his staff's mouths kind of dropped open
because they weren't quite prepared for this declaration.
And people kind of shrugged their shoulders
because who had heard of Lancaster?
But he came back to California, the staff set to work,
and over the course of several years,
Lancaster has developed solar on most of its public buildings.
It's encouraged local businesses, such as this Toyota
dealership, to invest in solar.
The local ball field has solar.
Many of the farmlands on the outskirts of the city
have now built utility-scale solar facilities.
And every new residential unit built in the city today
has to either have solar on its roof
or has to have off-site solar that
provides at least a portion of the electricity
for that particular residential unit.
Paris expects that Lancaster will be a net solar energy
exporter within the coming years and I
think he's probably right.
There are plenty of opportunities for solar
within our built environment.
There are also some constraints and I encountered
some of those constraints when I visited my daughter, Maya,
at George Washington University in the heart of Washington DC.
She took me to what she regarded as the only evidence
of solar photovoltaics on the George Washington University
campus and that was this solar table, which is good enough
to charge a laptop or two or maybe a few iPhones, but not
much else.
And she wasn't very impressed with this.
I was less impressed with it.
And we were even more discouraged
when George Washington University opened
its brand new high tech engineering
center-- $300 million LEED gold certified building.
Solar on the roof?
No.
Why?
Well, the answer I got was that the District of Columbia
has very strict height limits.
And if they were to put solar panels on the roof,
they would exceed those height limits
and they'd have to knock a floor off
of this very expensive building, which obviously they
were not willing to do.
So that even impressed my daughter and me less.
But then came the really interesting and encouraging
news and that was that in the spring of 2014,
George Washington University announced
that it, together with the GW Medical Center and American
University, would be buying all the solar output from three
utility-scale solar farms in North Carolina.
With that purchase, and when those plants go online in 2017,
GW will be getting over half of its total power needs
from the sun.
There are lots of other examples like that.
On the cover of my book and in the opening to this talk
you saw a picture of Tempe, Arizona, which
is where Arizona State University has
about 80 different solar arrays on its roofs
and it gets 31% of its peak energy demand from solar power.
And it's a campus that serves 60,000 commuters.
So again, pretty impressive solar contribution.
I'm sure various of you have heard
about the divest of fossil fuels movements
that have been sweeping various university campuses.
I think that these universities are great examples of how they
could-- universities can be investing in sound alternatives
to fossil fuels, as well as raising the question about what
their universities should be investing
in by way of their endowments.
The three North Carolina solar farms that I mentioned
are examples of utility-scale solar built on open space.
That open space can be farmland or it
could be natural open space.
The facility you see here is the California Valley Solar Ranch.
It is a facility that now generates
enough electricity for 100,000 California households.
It sits in an area called the Carrizo Plain, which
some refer to I think, somewhat generously,
as California's Serengeti.
It does have some wildlife that the developers
of the California Valley Solar Ranch
have taken great pains to protect.
Before constructing the solar fields at this facility,
a team of biologists came in and documented
what were the local wildlife that needed to be protected.
And among them, was the San Joaquin kit
fox and the giant kangaroo rat.
I have to say I had not heard of either before I went
to the California Valley Solar Ranch,
but these are valued species.
And what they did was they removed these species
from the solar field areas.
They built what they call temporary condos
for the giant kangaroo rats and they built temporary dens
for the kit fox and once the facility was complete,
they allowed these creatures to re-inhabit the area.
They also built migratory corridors
so that antelope and elk could traverse the facility
and not be harmed and not be disrupted
in their traditional patterns.
And they set aside 12,000 acres in conservation lands
in perpetuity.
So it's an example of a very large solar facility.
It sits on about 1,400 acres of land,
the solar fields themselves.
But a solar facility that generates
a lot of power for a lot of people and where great pains
were taken to protect wildlife values.
In another community, the Moapa Paiute
are a tribe in the southwestern-- southeastern
section of Nevada.
And they had built a large solar facility, again enough capacity
for about 100,000 households, and what they encountered
was the desert tortoise.
The desert tortoise is a threatened species under the US
Endangered Species Act.
That's one level below being endangered,
but it's worthy of protection.
There about 100,000 of these creatures left in the southwest
and what the Paiute did was they collected 75 of these tortoises
from the 2,000 acres where they were building a solar farm,
fitted them with tracking devices,
and then relocated them to a 6,000 acre conservation area
10 miles from the facility.
I talked to the chair of the Moapa Paiute very recently
and he said so far they've lost one tortoise
and that was to a coyote attack and that coyote attack could
have happened in the habitat that these tortoises inhabited
beforehand.
So good examples of great pains taken to protect wildlife
values on large, open spaces solar facilities.
How many of you have heard of concentrating solar power?
So concentrating solar power relies
upon the thermal properties of the sun as opposed
to the light properties of the sun.
And this particular facility is called Crescent Dunes.
It sits on the high desert plateau
outside of a former silver mining town
called Tonopah, Nevada.
It generates enough electricity for I
think 80,000 or so households and it uses molten salt
as the vehicle for capturing the heat that
is focused on the receiving tower you see there.
It's a 640-foot receiving tower.
That molten salt is heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit
and then it is pumped into storage vessels, giant storage
vessels, where it is held until the optimal time
to actually use that power.
So what this actually allows this solar plant to do
is surmount one of the weaknesses of solar power,
and that is its intermittency.
So they can generate lots of solar-generated heat
during the daylight hours and then they
can use that electricity at night
by converting the molten salt's heat
into steam which drives a conventional turbine much
as you use in a gas fired power plant, for example.
One of the challenges, however, with concentrating solar power
facilities is that there is a lot of heat generated
and focused on a very specific point at the upper end
of this 640-foot tower.
And what happens, unfortunately, is
that birds that fly through what's
called the flux-- the very hot zone-- get killed.
And this is an issue in Riverside County where
one of these facilities, it's called [INAUDIBLE] is located.
At the Crescent Dunes facility, which
is just about to go into full operation,
they don't expect the same problem
because there's very little bird life at that very high plateau
level.
But it's a real issue and it will be an issue
as we hear about more of these facilities being
built in the future.
One way to mitigate the damage to birds
from thermal facilities, concentrating power facilities,
is to use parabolic troughs and concentrate the solar heat
on a glass pipe that you can see there that
runs just a few feet above the parabolas
and therefore you have a heat zone where birds are very, very
unlikely to be damaged.
And this is a facility called Abengoa Solana
in Western Arizona.
These kinds of facilities are also
being built across the West.
But there are challenges that we face
as we begin to develop solar in open spaces.
There are some of the environmental community who
believes that we need to go to great lengths
to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels
and if we're going to do that using solar energy,
we're going to have to generate prodigious amounts
of solar power And that is going to mean that we're not just
going to use solar in our built areas
but we're going to build solar in open spaces.
There are land conservationists who
say, no way, we don't want to industrialize our landscape.
So that tension is going to grow in the coming years and decades
as we ramp up solar power and we see more pressure placed
upon our open spaces.
Which brings me back to talk about what can we achieve
within our towns and cities?
And the National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
which is the government's laboratory
to invest in renewable energy, did a study
and it's estimated that we could be
getting a fifth of our total power needs from rooftop solar
alone.
That's a prodigious amount of electricity.
That's more than we get today from nuclear power for example.
Not all homes are created equal, however.
This is our next door neighbor's home
and as you can see it's very heavily shaded
and there isn't much free roof space where you'd actually
be putting solar panels.
So there are those kinds of constraints.
And there are also constraints facing renters.
Boston renters constitute about 60% of the city's households
and on a statewide basis, renters are about 38.5%
of all households.
Renters don't have access to their roofs,
or at least they can't install what
they wish on their rooftops, so that is a real constraint.
There are other constraints on rooftops,
such as air conditioning units, such as in this particular case
a running track on a roof.
So you can't assume that a roof, even
if it is a substantially sized roof,
is going to be available for solar power.
One way to surmount this particular constraint
is to build what's called community solar facilities
or shared solar facilities.
These were really pioneered in Colorado.
This particular facility is the Venetucchi solar farm.
It has 600 members who buy shares
in the output of this facility.
Some might buy a share equivalent to one solar panel,
some might buy a share equivalent to 10 solar panels.
They in turn get a proportionate share
of the output of this facility deducted
from their electric bill.
So this is a great way to surmount the constraints
that people might face if they can't
put solar on their own homes.
And we're seeing this happen in a number of states
and we're seeing it happen a number of different contexts.
I was in Seattle a few weeks ago,
and I visited the Seattle Aquarium
where a rooftop solar array serves
as a community solar facility.
There are also plans to develop solar
in Massachusetts and community solar
so we'll be seeing these kinds of facilities become available
here in the near future.
There's one other community that I
want to make sure we touch upon and that
is low-income communities.
How do we bring solar power to low income households?
And this is where we haven't seen enough progress.
California is in the lead in this area
as it is in so many other areas regarding solar energy.
It has required that utilities, the three big utilities,
spent $300 million installing solar power
on low-income households, like the household I
visited in the Bay View district of San Francisco.
The Wang family was a recent family-- family
of recent Chinese immigrants and they
qualified for the low-income solar program.
A group of volunteers from Salesforce
came in under the supervision of a nonprofit called
Grid Alternatives and spent the day installing a solar array
on the rooftop of this home.
And today, the Wang family gets 90% of its electricity
from the sun, which is a huge benefit in terms
of its electric bills.
And a big benefit to all of us in terms of the reduced carbon
footprint of that particular household.
Just to give you a sense of the raw potential of solar power
this is a map that was created using data from the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory.
It was created by Environment America.
And the states that appear in red, there 19 of them,
have 100 times or more-- or more than 100 times
the current electricity consumption
in that state available as solar potential.
The orange states have between 25 and 100
times current consumption available as solar potential.
Massachusetts doesn't quite stack up in that regard.
We have about two times our total current consumption
that would be available from the sun.
But we should all be proud that in fact Massachusetts
is doing very well compared to other states.
It's a small state, but we're generate-- we're
number five in the nation.
And we-- as you can see, are in the winner's circle
with California, Arizona, New Jersey--
again industrial state, but making ample opportunity--
ample use of the built environment
to install solar power-- and North Carolina.
I should mention, by the way, that some people again think,
well Massachusetts isn't prime for solar.
The top solar producer in the world is Germany.
Germany gets about 7% of its total power needs from the sun
and it is a cloudy, rainy climate by and large.
It has an average of 1,500 sunlight hours per year.
Boston gets about 2,600-- more than 2,600 hours
of sunlight per year.
So we have a lot of potential that we
could tap as part of a broader attempt
to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
We have a number of pro-solar solar policies in the state.
I'm not going to go through all of them right now,
but we can discuss them in the Q&A if you'd like.
But I think what we have to recognize is
that solar potential is huge.
Opposition to solar is also huge.
Utilities are very nervous about solar penetration
for a variety of reasons.
They're particularly concerned about distributed
solar generation, because they make their money
by selling kilowatt hours.
And that's a fairly simplistic model.
You build a coal plant, you turn on a coal plant,
you generate electrons, you sell the kilowatt hours.
What is being demanded of them today
is that they become much more flexible energy services
providers that might be involved in storing energy, that might
be involved in various kinds of smart metering, energy
efficiency.
And if they don't want to go the route of Kodak and Polaroid,
they're really going to have to become much more nimble, much
more diversified energy providers.
Fossil fuel companies are fighting hard
against pro-solar policies at the federal level
and at the state level.
So we've got to reckon with them as well.
But I think that we all need to look at the bigger picture
and embrace the opportunities that solar presents.
Reckon with some of the legitimate questions
that are being raised.
But the profundity of the transformation
that we're going to have to undergo
is going to involve some trade offs.
There is no such thing as clean energy.
There's cleaner energy and dirtier energy.
And solar offers some huge opportunities,
some huge environmental benefits,
and some personal satisfaction, such
as I described earlier in my talk.
I just wanted to invite you to join my family
in reading "Harness the Sun".
I call this picture "Harnessing the sun while
sitting in the shade".
Thank you all for coming and happy hear comments
and questions.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So looking around the room,
I think I'm one of the few people
[INAUDIBLE] marketing side of Google.
But I actually [INAUDIBLE] marketing problem.
I get ads all the time from natural gas groups
and frequently see a lot in the market
for an uninformed consumer, letting
them know about other alternatives that
aren't related to solar.
And I'm wondering what you're opinion is on why that may be.
Why there isn't being more done from just a pure marketing
standpoint to show off the benefits of solar and the cost
[INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP WARBURG: You're saying, who
are the marketers per say, you mean the telemarketing
that we're getting?
AUDIENCE: No, literally, I'll see ads
on TV or on YouTube for why natural gas is great.
It's probably lobbyist, I'm not sure what groups are behind it.
You don't-- all the benefits that we know about--
how much cheaper it can be and all the different things like
that don't come out for something like solar.
PHILIP WARBURG: Well, first the fossil fuel industry
has huge resources to draw upon in terms of marketing.
They've been doing it for decades.
One of the advantages they have is
that they have a fairly unquestioned panoply
of federal and state subsidies that they've been getting
for decades and decades.
And I think what's happening with solar
is it's the new entrant onto the scene, along with wind power,
and everyone is scrutinizing it.
So the incentives for solar, the incentives for wind,
are questioned and become political footballs in Congress
in a way that the subsidies for oil and gas
and nuclear and coal do not.
I think that's a serious problem.
I think solar marketers are getting more and more
proactive, more and more.
Sophisticated I have to say, and we were talking over lunch,
I get several calls a week from solar companies wanting
to put solar on my roof and I politely
tell my have solar on my roof.
And Jason was saying that he gets calls from solar companies
and he politely tells them he can't put solar on his roof
because it's too shaded.
I think that we're seeing a fairly robust, competitive,
climate right now for solar.
One of the interesting things about solar
is that there are lots and lots of players.
There are small players, like Sunlight Solar Energy
which installed our facility, very small company.
It has annual revenues of about $10 million a year
on up through SolarCity.
And it's a very, very new industry.
As I said, I myself wasn't convinced in 2012
the solar was something to be taken seriously.
Three years later, solar is a buzz
in all kinds of technology circles.
We're seeing the technology itself
improve very dramatically.
And I think it needs some smart marketing
acumen applied but I think it really is beginning to happen.
AUDIENCE: I guess I was thinking more about the branding of it.
So not of individual-- someone saying I want to install it,
but just the concept of it, which
it may just be a resources thing or industry [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP WARBURG: I think some of the bigger numbers
need to get out there so that people recognize it's not just
at the margins.
So for example, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
does great research.
That research doesn't necessarily
get the circulation it should.
One of their studies that I find particularly interesting
is called Renewable Electricity Futures
and it came out in 2012.
And projected that using technology that is commercially
available today, we could be getting
half of our total powered needs by 2050
from the wind and the sun alone.
So that kind of statistic says to me,
these are serious part-- these are serious technologies that
could really transform the way we think about the energy we
use and the energy we produce.
And I think people have to be attuned to those messages
when they do get covered.
They do get covered probably in the higher brow media, maybe
not in the broader maybe, I'm not sure.
I think solar has one advantage and that is its immediacy
and that people can relate to the fact
that solar is happening again by just looking at their neighbors
roofs.
It's not some remote concept out there
that they don't really understand.
It's palpable and it is within our reach quite literally.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: What might you say to someone like Jason or others--
my roof I have slate and doesn't quite
point the right direction.
There's lots of challenges.
A community-based one that you had mentioned
might be great for something like that.
But how do you-- are there groups that
are helping to initiate that?
To find space?
To help provide the funding mechanisms-- Again,
PHILIP WARBURG: It is just starting up in Massachusetts
so I think you will be hearing a lot more about it
in the next year.
And if you ask where it's happening,
you might just find that there is a community solar facility
that you can invest in.
There is a problem in that again, between 22% and 27%
of residential roof tops are well suited to solar.
You happen to be in that other majority which is unfortunate,
but there are opportunities.
What's happening prospectively I think is interesting.
Our building stock turns over on average every 42 years.
So we're not just talking about how do we introduce solar today
and tomorrow and next year.
We're talking about how do we create a wholly different
orientation-- and I mean that both literally
and figuratively-- so that we incorporate solar
much more fully into our lives.
Madison, Wisconsin is an example of a city that
requires that new residential areas be designed
on an east-west north-south grid so that houses can be
built that will be solar-ready.
They're not yet saying you must build solar,
but they're saying that the overall layout
of new communities has to be amenable to solar.
And we're seeing that kind of thing
happen in a lot of different localities.
In some localities they are actually,
as I said, mandating that solar be installed.
I think with some older houses that have slate,
with houses that are shaded, there are trade offs
that one has to consider.
When is your roof going to be replaced?
Is that tree a tree that you cherish or is it
a tree that you would rather sacrifice to the solar cause?
And there are great advantages to shade trees
in the summertime so you don't want to be foolish and cut down
a tree only to generate solar power
to fuel the air conditioning you have to use because you don't
have a shaded house anymore.
So those are the kinds of considerations
that I think you have to weigh.
Did I see another hand in here?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was wondering what
your thoughts are on needing to store energy
to make solar [INAUDIBLE]?
PHILIP WARBURG: I think that goes back
to the question of what is the function that our utilities
play today and what function do we play in generating
power and storing power.
I'm sure you've all been hearing about the power wall that
is being proposed or already being marketed on a household
level, on a business level.
One can begin to store solar power on those levels.
There are also much larger means of storing solar power.
For example, pumped hydro storage
is a great way to capture a lot of surplus electricity
when let's say the sun is shining
or when you have major wind farms producing
huge amounts of wind power in the middle of the night
when no one needs that power.
So if you can pair those facilities
with a pumped storage facility, pump the water into a storage
reservoir, release that water when the power is needed,
you have a great storage resource.
I think we also have to just get much, much smarter
about how we manage our own use of energy
and that has to do with the lights in this room,
has to do with computers in our household,
it has to do with industrial refrigeration,
it has to do with heating and cooling,
where utilities could be playing a much more significant role,
where Google I'm sure we'll be playing a much more significant
role in helping us manage our energy use in a wiser and more
energy-conserving and better timed way
so that it actually does sync with the power resources that
are available.
One other resource I should mention, by the way,
is car batteries.
If we had a fleet of tens of millions of electric vehicles
your average car is driven let's say 20-- an hour
a day, half hour day, hour and a half a day.
So you have the vast majority of the day
when your car is sitting idle and that battery could
be used to charge your car or it could
be used to de-charge and in fact fill in some
of the bumps in the electric power grid
if there was a well-integrated, smartly coordinated use
of that battery resource.
The great thing about that is you're
not just creating battery as storage,
you're creating battery as mobility
and it also serves a storage function
when the car isn't being used for mobility purposes.
So again, I think there's no single answer
and I think we've got to move away
from the kind of monofix that is going to solve
our future energy problems.
There isn't a monofix It's going to be a much more
complex environment, a smarter environment,
and one hopefully that is much more reliant
upon renewable resources.
Yes?
Is there still aggressive tax subsidization
of installation in public technologies
the way there was we were seeing three, four, five
or is that largely [INAUDIBLE]?
PHILIP WARBURG: There is a federal investment tax credit.
I wouldn't use word aggressive.
I would say perhaps,
AUDIENCE: --Massachusetts.
PHILIP WARBURG: --robust.
OK.
First, on the federal level there
is an investment tax credit.
A 30% tax credit available for solar installers and that
can be at the utility level, it can
be at the non-residential level, and it can
be at the residential level.
That tax credit is slated to sunset at the end of 2016
entirely for residential properties
and it will drop from 30% percent
to 10% for non-residential and utility scale solar.
That will have a very, very serious impact
on the solar industry.
In a number of states there are a number of incentives
that are being phased back.
There used to be much higher solar rebates
for example in Massachusetts.
They had been phased way down and that's
true in a lot of other states.
There are tradeable credits called solar renewable energy
certificates that are still in effect,
although the Massachusetts legislature is considering ways
to phase them out in future years.
I think any energy technology requires an incentive
to get it off the ground.
And I think what troubles me when people hyper scrutinize
the solar subsidies is they're not again,
looking at the playing field that solar has to play on.
We're talking about royalties on mineral extraction
in America that are among the lowest in the world.
We're talking about all kinds of depletion allowances
and other benefits to the oil industry.
We're talking about an act called the Price-Anderson Act
Act that allows nuclear reactors basically
to function in this country.
It sets a cap of half a billion dollars per reactor accident
as the liability limit for a reactor owner and operator.
The rest is covered by the federal government.
Without that cap, civilian nuclear would go nowhere.
And so we're not talking about a level playing field
and we are talking about creating
some incentives to jump start an industry, which is really
in its infancy.
And we have to think about why we're so interested in moving
a sustainable energy technology forward
and build from there toward well,
what are the steps we need to take to integrate it more fully
into our economy?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Just to add to the point that you just made,
the [INAUDIBLE] published study a couple of months ago
which said that G20 countries pay over $1,000 per citizen
in fossil fuel subsidies and in the United States
it's $2,000 per citizen which I think
dwarfs any of the solar subsidies.
PHILIP WARBURG: That's a great example.
There is a lot of debate right now about
whether solar homeowners are cross--
are being cross-subsidized by average rate payers.
And there may be some of that going on.
There's a lot of studying going on
as to whether there needs to be some adjustment in net metering
pay regime.
And we'll see adjustments being made going forward
but I think it's very important, again, to give people
an incentive to go into a frontier technology
that people might have apprehensions about
and where you break down some of that resistance
by helping people recognize some of the economic benefits
of moving towards solar energy.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Do you have a sense of the chance
that the federal [INAUDIBLE] is going to be renewed
or is it gone?
PHILIP WARBURG: My guess is that what
we might see is a more graduated phasing out of the-- right now
it's a pretty radical 30% to zero for residential solar
and 30% to 10% for the others.
I would hope we'd at least see a more gradual phasing down
of that incentive, but the whims of Congress
are a little hard to predict.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming.
One of the early slides if you could have shown--
the cost of installing is going down
for residential and non-residential
on the utility scale.
With that in mind, is it much more cost-efficient
to invest in community solar than to have everybody
put it up on their own?
PHILIP WARBURG: One of the advantages of community solar
is you can choose an optimal site.
And because you're building a larger
scale per installed panel, it is cheaper.
So yes, there are cost benefits there.
Utility scale is also-- is cheaper still, much cheaper
still.
You have the issue of transmission right?
Because if you're building one of those large facilities
like the California Valley Solar Ranch,
you've got to transmit that power from that ranch
into the grid and to, in that case,
I think it's the LA Department of Water and Power
where that power is ultimately going to be consumed.
So larger scale does allow for more efficient citing.
One of the things that is-- we're waking up to a little bit
is we're not just talking about what are
called the hard cost of solar.
We're not just talking about the cost of the panels,
or of the inverters.
We're talking about the soft costs, marketing costs,
the permitting costs.
And what we have found is that Germany-- one
of the reasons German solar is cheaper per installed watt
than American solar is because the soft costs are
a fraction-- they're about 10% percent of our soft costs
because they've gotten very, very effective about marketing
and very expedited about their permitting of solar facilities.
So there are opportunities to economize on solar they
we're just beginning to tap.
AUDIENCE: Do you see-- you put up also the map
of the red and yellow states.
Do you see one of these red states just coming
forward and doing what the mayor of Lancaster did
and saying we're just going to export solar
to the whole country.
And Nevada has basically an eastern border
and a western border and there's not a whole lot in between
[INAUDIBLE]?
PHILIP WARBURG: That's to some degree happened with wind.
Where if you look at Iowa, Iowa now generates about 28%
of its total power from wind.
It has decided that wind is an important export commodity, as
well as a commodity that's being used within its borders.
Same thing with Wyoming.
In the case of solar, my guess is
we're going to see a more even distribution across a variety
of different contexts.
I think that that tension that I described between open spaces
protection and solar exploitation
will lead us to rely upon farmland-based solar
much more than on natural spaces based solar.
And if you look at our country-- I'm
sure you've all flown across the country--
and you see the grid of farmed America,
there are huge, huge parts of the country that it would
be very hard to call natural.
And so I think if you're talking about converting a soy field
or corn field or an alfalfa field to solar,
you're talking about a very different kind of wildlife
versus renewable energy trade off
than you are if you're talking about open desert land
where there are species that people are very
concerned about protecting.
One opportunity I think it's in California where,
as of 2013-- I couldn't find the number for 2014--
but as a 2013, more than a quarter of a million acres
were still in cotton cultivation.
Cotton is a water intensive crop.
It's not an essential food crop.
It's expensive to grow in California.
There's one huge solar opportunity
and the rate of solarization in California is terrific as well.
So I think if we look at farmlands--
and we're seeing farmlands developed
in places like Maryland, for example--
one of the advantages, by the way of solar photovoltaics as
compared to concentrating solar power is
that you can locate solar fields that are not necessarily
immediately adjacent to one another.
So if you have scattered corn fields with forest land
in between you could build the solar on those cornfields
and protect the forest lands.
You can't really do that with concentrating solar power
because you need a very large area where
you are focusing all of that heat energy on the receiving
tower.
So I think plenty of opportunities.
More likely on what you could call degraded lands,
as in farmlands or, again, looking
at brownfield properties than on natural open spaces.
Maybe one more question.
AUDIENCE: The place that I see would be ideal for putting
these is parking lots.
Like you were saying at the stadium,
it's a great place to park-- it can give you
shade and protection from rain.
PHILIP WARBURG: Right.
AUDIENCE: Any chance of developing those more?
PHILIP WARBURG: Yeah, I mean they are developing.
The cover my book has a large parking garage
at the Tempe Campus at Arizona State University.
Rutgers University at its Livingston Campus
has major parking canopies built as well.
The NFL stadiums are using that same approach.
It's a great opportunity.
It is more expensive per unit for example
than ground-mounted solar because you
have to build the superstructure which
is a larger superstructure than simply building the row
after row of solar panels.
But it's certainly a huge opportunity.
And a lot of people for example, when they look at New Jersey,
and they say, look, we don't want
to encroach upon our farmland, we have little enough of it
left, they say, look at parking lots.
And look at warehouse roofs and those
are certainly opportunities that we could exploit.
Thank you all very much for coming.