Compiled by Staff

Solar Plant Policy Hearings Set for
Larimer County

FORT COLLINS - The first of two public hearings on rules for new solar energy power plants in Larimer County will be held at 6:30 PM on Dec. 16, before the Larimer County Planning Commission.A second hearing in front of the same body is scheduled for Jan. 4 at 3 p.m. Both hearings will be in the county commissioners’ hearing room in the Larimer County Courthouse, 200 W. Oak St., in Fort Collins.

Under a proposed County Land Use Code amendment, new solar plants that disturb an area greater than five acres will require a 1041 permit from the county. For more information, call 970-498-7689.

La Plata County Holds Off on Special District for Solar Installs

DURANGO -  Bucking the trend of other mountain counties in Colorado, La Plata has put on hold a proposal to form a special district for the purpose of installing solar electric systems.  Boulder County was the first Colorado county to form such a program last year, and in November, voters in Pitkin, Eagle and Gunnison counties all approved similar programs.

Local company CarbonZero had been lobbied La Plata county commissioners to take advantage of 2008 state legislation that allows for the formation of special districts to collect taxes for installing solar or other renewable-energy systems on homes and businesses.

Residents are taxed only if they opt into the district. The idea is to eliminate the hefty upfront cost of going solar. La Plata County would have collected the taxes, while CarbonZero proposed doing the rest. Solar leasing is another option that has come into play since the state legislature passed AB52, which gave the go ahead for residents to install PV systems
atop their roofs on a lease basis.
Read this article for more info on solar leasing.

“Boulder was the first one that did it,” County Manager Shawn Nau said. “They ended up with a whole lot more administrative costs than they expected.”

He said other possible means to the same end are coming together, and the county wants to see how those shape up. They include strictly private ventures that provide the financing and proposed legislation that would allow for a statewide district that would do the same thing as the county-based districts.

Andrew Klotz, CEO of CarbonZero, remains optimistic that some variation of the company’s proposal will succeed. We’ll wait and see. I don’t think it’s over yet,” he told the local newspaper.“ People’s interest in alternate energy is going to remain strong.”

“How High” Asks Pitkin County on Free-Standing Panels

ASPEN, Colo.—Pitkin County is currently debating how high freestanding solar panels should be built.
A staff recommendation to change the height limit to 16 feet from 10 feet off the ground died on a 2-2 vote Wednesday when the push for renewable energy collided with preserving the mountain community’s rural character.

Another proposal by staff is expected to be made.

Commissioner George Newman says expanding renewable energy is commendable, but the county should address the impacts of facilities on neighborhoods. He says some homeowners are bothered by glare from neighboring solar panels. However, Commissioner Patti Kay-Clapper says defeating the proposal sends the wrong message after county voters approved a district allowing people to take out low-interest loans to install renewable energy systems.

Wanted: More Solar Energy Powering Photovoltaic Production Plants

Journalist Tom Cheyney writes a Chip Shot column for a European-based PV Journal. He recently raised an interesting question when he asked why there weren’t more solar production plants powered by solar energy? Cheyney notes that while it’s not uncommon for solar cell and module companies to have some panels a valid operating onsite, atop the roof or bolted to ground-mounted racks, they’re usually smallish test arrays, of no more than a few kilowatts, not serious power systems providing a significant chunk of the electricity needs of the plant.

Here is more of his post:

Nothing says “sustainability” like clean and green products manufactured using renewable power, not to mention the benefits for a company’s carbon footprint and energy payback time stats. That’s why the news of a couple more manufacturers plugging in decent-sized PV systems on their own factories provides a modest pretext to be thankful.

He’s talking about installations in Euope, including manufacturer, Centrosolar, which has hooked up a 300KW system on the roof of its warehouse and soon-to-be-150MW capacity module factory in Wismar, Germany. The 41 rows of 1565 crystalline-silicon modules, all assembled directly below where they are installed, cover some 11,000 square meters and will provide at least 10% of annual energy requirements. According to Cheyney’s blog …

Another German installation at Obenburg am Main recently had 4445 panels deployed on its roof (photo).  Reis Robotics, which supplies a fair amount of automation gear and turnkey moduling lines to the PV sector, now sports a 1MW system installed by Isofoton. It is also the Spanish outfit’s first major rooftop project done in Germany. (I wonder if the company will put a few thousand of its own modules on top of the 60MW panel factory, equipped with a Reis line, set to be built in Ohio next year?)

The last batches of Isofoton modules are being installed for the 8000 square meter system, which will be connected to the grid later this month and be up and running by year’s end, according to the Other PV-oriented manufacturing companies already grabbing electrons from ol’ Sol—or planning to enter the unbroken-circle distributed-generation PV fray soon–include Applied Materials and its ~2MW of panels located in several locations on its Northern California campuses, and Sharp Solar, which has an ambitious scheme to put as many as 18MW of PV on the rooftops of its new 1GW thin-film megafactory set to open next year in Sakai City, Japan. 

One of the largest copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide (CIGS) power systems on the planet sits across the parking lot from the one of the largest CIGS factories—Global Solar’s Tucson HQ plant in Arizona. The 750KW array of Solon modules strung with Global flex cells made within squinting distance of the array has been working extremely well since the launch in late 2008.

Cheyney concludes by wondering whether the Centrosolar and Reis projects in Europe (admittedly a different market than here in the U.S.) offer signs of a trend where one will be able to say, “solar is as solar does.” Only time will tell.