Solar Energy Evolution: Death and Transfiguration

The publication last week of the IPPC’s “Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Adaptation” brings home yet more evidence of the profound physical changes to our planet caused by man-made climate change: increase in the frequency of hot days, longer and more intense droughts, more heavy precipitation and increased wind speeds of tropical storms. The idea of the report is to get policymakers on the climate change adaptation page.

And in terms of actual GHG emissions, the news is no better. The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2010 since pre-industrial time and the rate of increase has accelerated, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released today. It focussed special attention on rising nitrous oxide concentrations.

The International Energy Agency also published last week in World Energy Report 2011 a stark warning that unless we invest in cleaner energy technology, temperature rise from climate change could be economically disastrous. “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

This raises the obvious question about mitigation: Where do we stand today in deploying non-GHG-making energy sources? How is solar energy faring?

A number of recent articles point to the fact that solar energy is going through a death and transfiguration phase, to borrow an image from Richard Strauss.

Richard Blackwell from the Globe and Mail wrote a rather dismal assessment of solar collector manufacturing companies in Ontario where policy uncertainties at the federal and provincial levels lead inevitably to customer nervousness. He shows that over the last year, a number of Ontario-based companies like Arise Technologies, or ATS Automation Tooling Systems are facing bankruptcy or closing plants. He blames the industry downturn on falling prices, over-capacity and intense competition. He also claims that there is a weak market, but others disagree.

Nobel economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman takes on a more global perspective and is firmly convinced that solar is much more promising than appears to be the case. For him, companies like Solyndra went under because they could not keep up with the competition and the dramatic drop in the global price of solar panels. The cost of electricity produced by photovoltaic cells has gone down by 7% percent a year in real terms. And “ if this downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.”

The source of this competition is China. According to Keith Bradsher of the New York Times, the country accounts for three fifths the world’s solar panel production. 95% of that is exported, much of it to the United States. Given China’s government-controlled economy, US solar panel manufacturers see their Chinese competitors as benefiting unfairly from government subsidies. And so it’s not surprising that the US Department of Commerce at the request of these manufacturers opened an investigation into “dumping” charges. The Chinese are accused of selling solar panels in the United States at prices lower than the cost of making and distributing them.

The Chinese cleantech industry responded to these charges vigorously which was to be expected. But surprisingly, a new American trade group representing buyers and installers of solar energy systems argued that “any new Commerce Department restriction on Chinese solar panels would slow the adoption of clean energy technology in the United States and could cost thousands of American jobs. Environmentalists also tend to oppose policies that might slow the adoption of solar energy.”

So here it is again, the age-old process of the introduction of a new technology and the death and transfiguration of a global industry.

Study finds high level interest in an Eastern Ontario Sustainability Cluster

As part of our initial explorations of Phase II for our work, we have just completed with Ralph Torrie and Fiona Wright an initial study on the feasibility of creating or encouraging a sustainability cluster in Eastern Ontario.

Here are some of our conclusions:

A cluster is a reasonably understood geographic model for economic development, and Silicon Valley in California is a classic example. Other examples would be the Research Triangle in North Carolina, or Kanata in Ottawa West in IT and telecommunications.

Selecting Eastern Ontario as a geographic area of concentration for sustainability makes sense from a number of perspectives, including demographics, natural and ecological resources, presence of educational and research institutions, and, as the survey in this report shows, a large number of interested individuals and organizations working towards the goal of sustainable economic renewal.

An electronic survey was sent to 176 stakeholders, of which 27% responded. By most standards, this is considered to be a very high response rate, and is indicative of the high level of interest by these stakeholders in the proposed initiative. Respondents came from all over the region, including some outside Eastern Ontario, and included governments, financial institutions, businesses and corporations, and associations, networks, and NGOs. The survey was complemented with in-depth interviews with a selected sample of opinion leaders.

There is a high interest in sustainability in the region, judging by the significantly high level of response, the type of sustainability projects identified, and the response to various questions in the survey and the interviews.

There is a varying degree of awareness of market-based instruments (“MBI”s) to promote sustainability. This is based on the degree of recognition of a list of more than 50 MBIs presented in the survey, where fees and pricing strategies appear more prevalent than tax-related measured and outright incentives.

All respondents in the survey and the interviews were in favour of the idea of a cluster supported or facilitated by a central hub.

They also strongly suggest that the cluster address other sustainability challenges including water, water quality, waste generation and recycling, toxics and industrial hazardous waste.

Services or support that a hub could provide include:

• Access to financing and government programs
• Quantitative analysis of projects and provision of common information
• Finding partners for DSM projects
• Generation of economic and performance indicators, including job creation
• Better access and communication with other players in the region.

In short, there is a wealth of interest and pent-up demand to start building a more systematic network or sustainability cluster in the region.

More to follow…

Creating an innvovation cluster in sustainability

Can we create a regional innovation cluster to promote sustainability and job creation? To explore this question, we launched a small survey among Eastern Ontario stakeholders to determine their interest in sustainability and a possible Eastern Ontario initiative to promote regional sustainability. Here is the invitation letter to participate in the survey. If you have an interest in the region, feel free to fill it our by clicking the link below:

The Eastern Ontario Sustainability Strategy Project (EOSS)

Hello,

This is an invitation to participate in the initial steps of EOSS, the Eastern Ontario Sustainable Strategy, an initiative to drive job creation and sustainable economic development.

You and your organization have been identified as a stakeholder in the economic and sustainable development of the region

We are conducting a survey to assess the feasibility of promoting job creation and economic development in Eastern Ontario by creating a sustainable or green region. EOSS is supported by a number of organizations in the region, including the University of Ottawa, Queen’s University, community colleges, industry and non-governmental associations.

This informal survey will help assess the current efforts in your community and region in projects promoting a cleaner environment and a sustainable community. We would also like to find out what services and support a hub or facilitative group should offer to increase this level of activity.

We would very much appreciate if you could spend a few minutes and fill out the survey in the link below.

Click here to Start Survey

Feel free to send out the survey to other people in your network.

The EOSS project team

André Potworowski andre@tma.cc

Ralph Torrie rtorrie@torriesmith.com

The next phase of our work - Can you help?

The start of a new year is an appropriate time to make resolutions. It’s also a good time to define the next phase of our project. We talked to a lot of people and explored many options. We looked at the possibility of going into greater depths in analyzing more barriers and obstacles. We also thought of broadening our scope to examine other industrial and economic sectors.

But one idea did emerge as being particularly attractive and relevant for today’s society. Why don't we just take a specific geographical area, bring together all the local players, and look at all the levers to remove obstacles and accelerate change and the adoption of sustainable measures? Why not nurture and promote a sustainability cluster?

In other words, why not just "make it happen"?

Going back to the definition of Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School, an innovation cluster is a geographically proximate group of interconnected organizations such as universities, colleges, manufacturing and supplier companies, service organizations, financing and regulatory bodies linked by commonalities and complementarities.

Clusters have a common central purpose and generally excel in a particular sector of economic activity. Classical examples would be Silicon Valley in the area of semiconductors, Kanata (Ottawa West) in telecommunications and IT, or the lesser known town of Montebelluna in Northern Italy which for many years was the world capital for ski boots manufacturing, with companies like Nordica, Tyrol, Rossignol and Lange. Then there are the older clusters like the wine making regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy that have been around for centuries.

But here, we're not talking about a cluster that exports goods and services (although that may eventually happen) but a region which is specifically designated to promote the accelerated deployment of sustainability measures.

There is growing recognition that you can create more jobs for the buck when you invest in such measures as energy efficiency, energy conservation, or even locally-based renewable energy. The literature is small but solid and growing.

Being Green in short makes high economic sense. And it can be used to promote economic development and economic renewal, especially in a region where manufacturing and traditional industries have virtually disappeared.

At the Telfer school, we are exploring a specific initiative like that. We also know that any kind of cluster requires the building of a social community. That’s often called a cluster facilitator or catalyst. And we need the tools to do that, and we need your help to find them.

A special request

As part of our new project on regional sustainability at the Telfer School, we are looking for novel applications of social media to help facilitate and catalyze our cluster community. We need an integrative social media platform that can provide the critical linkages for an innovation clusters. We are looking for successful examples where these social networks have been used to build communities.

At the end of the day, we want to create a Clean Tech or sustainability cluster. We want to bring together communities, local government, as well as suppliers, manufacturers, technical experts and skilled trades, supported by a network of financial and technical advice and expertise. We want to share case studies, best practices, and provide some basic feedback, performance metrics, and scenarios and roadmaps.

We are looking for an integrative platform that would use the latest social network tools (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and link to Blogs and URL sites) to accelerate the trust building, communication and sharing among the stakeholders in the cluster.

Specifically, we're looking for successful examples where a social network integration platform has been used to help grow an innovation cluster, build a community, and link the various players and stakeholders. It doesn’t have to be related to sustainability or clean-tech, but we would like to see some truly effective (viral?) examples.

Can you help us by pointing us to such sites?