Solar Energy Show

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon When it comes to global warming – we’re screwed. I’m telling it like it is so we don’t continue misleading ourselves that we are on a path to reduce global warming. We have had 20+ years of climate activism; many Inconvenient Truths; wildfires, floods, droughts, blackouts; and now energy wars. Still, the economic interests from fossil fuels and related industries continue to suppress the necessary actions. Which is no surprise since the solution to global warming effectively means the end of the fossil fuel industry. The ostensible cause of this slow-motion humanity train wreck is that the politicians of our world cannot agree on either the problem or the solution. But the root cause of this political indecision is due to very effective fossil fuel industry lobbying. They mislead the public and effectively bribe politicians. How do we change this trajectory? Simple: in the short term do not support climate change-denying politicians in any way. Vote against

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon There are two types of solar customers: people with sunny roofs and people without sunny roofs. Just as every home had a chimney (before heat pumps), there is no doubt in my mind that every home will eventually have solar. But what about the people without sunny rooftops, such as apartment dwellers and homes in heavily forested areas? Or people who cannot afford the up-front cost of a solar system? How can these people avoid expensive utility electricity and benefit from the superior economics of their own solar systems? Community Solar is the answer for these sunny roof-challenged people. Basically, it is a way for people to share the power output from a large local solar array, and also contribute to the cost of the solar array. Community Solar customers benefit from lower electricity prices because they avoid the high markups, overhead and transmission costs of traditional utility power. There are no technical, logistical or economic barriers to Communit

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Buying an EV is complicated. The market is dynamic, so brand loyalty doesn’t mean much yet. There are huge differences in mileage, range, charging and price. Often the EVs that are in the highest demand are backordered — sometimes for a year or more (just try buying a Ford F-150 Lightning). Heck, just understanding the meaning of MPGe and Level 1/2/3 chargers is enough to delay an EV buying decision and keep pumping gas into that old hydrocarbon heap. Fortunately, there is an abundance of EV information on the web. Almost too much. Comparing the capabilities and specifications for EVs is a daunting task for buyers. To simplify the process there are several EV ratings sites that compare EVs based on standard criteria. The EV comparison site that I have found most useful is the Bloomberg Green EV Rating site. Their Green Rating metric is a weighted score that accounts for every vehicle’s range, weight and battery size. In addition, they include three other cri

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon If you’re like me you installed a battery storage system to preserve in solid form all that Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in your freezer during a blackout. My wife, on the other hand, just wanted to save money. Her financial priority is ultimately what is driving the demand for battery backup installations. A battery backup system can save your a thousand dollars or more on your annual electric bill — in addition to keeping your lights on during the next blackout. These battery storage savings result from time-shifting your electricity usage: you can draw power from the grid when rates are inexpensive (generally at night) and sell power back when rates are expensive (generally in the late afternoon and evening). Or as my stockbroker says, buy low and sell high. Ordinary rooftop solar systems are automatic and passive. The sun comes up, the solar panels generate power, and you sell your excess power back to the grid. With solar, there are no settings to change t

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon At the start of the Industrial Age the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). Now the concentration is over 420 ppm. This increase in CO2 levels was caused by burning fossil fuels -- coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas. High concentrations of atmospheric CO2 are the primary cause of global warming. We need to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in order to slow and eventually reverse global warming, Obviously, reducing the use of fossil fuels will slow the buildup of CO2. And natural processes, such as photosynthesis, gradually reduce CO2 concentrations. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to wait for these relatively slow processes. One obvious way to accelerate CO2 removal is to use Direct Air Capture, or DAC. DAC technology has been used for years to remove CO2 from the waste streams (flue gas) from power plants. The CO2 is absorbed in a liquid or solid media — and is then compressed for use in industrial processe

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Rob Black has been a popular TV, radio, and podcast personality for more than twenty-five years. Not only do I love his daily radio show on KDOW and and Bay Area TV, he also recently installed a rooftop solar and battery storage system on his home. I had the pleasure of joining Rob on one of his recent shows — which is the subject of today’s Energy Show. Rob has a knack for explaining complicated financial and technical issues in a very down to earth way. We covered a lot of ground on this show, including considerations for selecting a solar contractor, financial benefits, the trend towards electrification, and EV charging. Most interesting to me was Rob’s engagement in the energy flows in his house. He charges his car directly from the sun during the day — keeps his storage battery charged enough to get him through peak electricity times in the late afternoon and evening. Rob has discovered that the biggest challenge is encouraging his family to watch when

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Clean energy has come a long way since the first water wheel, windmill and solar cell. Solar, wind and battery systems are steadily replacing fossil fuels because they are both cleaner AND cheaper. For simple business reasons, the superior economics of wind and solar generation are steadily supplanting coal and methane for power generation. And electric vehicles are on track to replace 90% of new gasoline-powered vehicles within the next 20 years. But the fossil fuel industry is not going away without a fight. Since economics are no longer on the side of “drill baby drill,” fossil fuel companies and their supporters promote a variety of myths that clean energy is simply more expensive than good old gas and coal. I hate to break it to you, but candidly most of these clean energy myths have a kernel of truth. Yes, it is true that clean energy used to be expensive. Nevertheless, as a result of mass production and widespread deployment of solar, wind and batteri

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon This week’s Energy Show is a special Public Service Announcement for the “Don’t Tax the Sun Rally” in SF and LA on June 2nd. It’s a Call to Arms — with solar panels and screw guns. All solar customers — and anyone interested in solar — should attend. As well as the 68,000 solar workers in California. If you haven’t heard, California’s utilities are intent on stopping customer-owned rooftop solar and battery systems. This tax only benefits big utilities — making them even more profitable at your expense. We need your help on June 2nd to stop the tax in new and expanded systems. Dave Rosenfeld, Executive Director of the Solar Rights Alliance, is our guest on this week’s Energy Show. Dave will explain what the utilities are trying to do to your solar panel system. A big public turnout in San Francisco or Los Angeles is the best way for us to steer the state towards clean and affordable energy. California should not tax the sun, period. We need more solar, not

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon How much heat could a heat pump heat if a heat pump could pump heat? Technically, the answer is about 3. “Heat pump.” What a dumb, geeky name for what is arguably the most important climate modification device known to man. Heat pumps are really just refrigerators operating in reverse. Spelling-wise that would be a rotaregirfer. OK, “heat pump” is comparatively a better name. Almost every building in the U.S. has one or more heat pumps — usually in the form of air conditioners or refrigerators. Air conditioning has been tremendously important to society. Could you imagine working in a high rise in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix or Atlanta on a hot summer day without air conditioning? Now this established technology for cooling is now being deployed throughout the world for clean and efficient heating. So why is there so much excitement about heat pumps? Because they generate three times more heat than the electrical energy it takes to run the heat pump. Essentially

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Stop burning fossil fuels and electrify everything. That’s the path that humanity must follow to avoid a global warming calamity. Two technological changes have made it both practical and economical to transition to an (almost) all electric economy. First, heat pumps, EVs and induction cooking are now practical replacements for furnaces, hot water heaters, gasoline-powered cars and stoves. Second, inexpensive solar and wind electricity mean that these appliances and vehicles are cheaper to operate than their fossil-fueled ancestors. Of course electric appliances are cleaner, and in many cases provide more comfort, convenience and safety. I added the word “almost” since long distance transportation (trucks, rail, airplanes) and industrial process (steel, cement) heat are still more practical and cheaper when powered by fossil fuels. The clean solutions to these transportation and industrial processes are still a few years away. Almost without exception, all

Some of you may have read excerpts from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Candidly, I didn’t. Even the summaries were indecipherable. Which is probably a good thing since there is only one shred of good news in the whole report. More on that at the end. The report — indeed, the entire process — has been depressing. We have had 20+ years of climate activism; many Inconvenient Truths; wildfires, floods, droughts; and now energy wars. Still, the economic interests from fossil fuels and related industries continue to overwhelm the necessary actions. Which is no surprise, since the solution to global warming effectively means the end of the fossil fuel industry. As a result of their logical economic interests, the world is simply not reducing the use of fossil fuels quickly enough. Atmospheric CO2 hit 421 ppm in April. Global temperature increases will be closer to 2.5C under the best of circumstances. In order to keep global warming under 2C we need to do five things: put a high price

Copyright 2020 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon The most common question people ask about rooftop solar is: “What solar panels should I buy.” Unlike buying a car — which people do every 5 or 10 years — people buy solar panels only a few times in their life. But unlike cars, the “best” solar panel on the market at any given time typically changes every 5 or 10 years. When we recommend solar panels the most important criteria are cost-effectiveness, efficiency aesthetics and reliability. There is not a solar panel manufacturer on the planet that does not say they have high quality manufacturing and a 25 year warranty. Unfortunately, reliability is hard to determine objectively, so the best gauge is the advice of an experienced solar installer. Or an industry expert like Paula Mints with SPV Market Research. “Top Ten Solar Panel” lists are typically more of a popularity contest — more influenced by advertising than objective criteria. When I recently reviewed a popular Top Ten Solar Panel list I noticed that

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Ribbit or Croak. Which one are you? An urban myth has it that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will instantly leap out. But if you put it in a pot filled with pleasantly tepid water and gradually heat it, the frog will remain in the water until it boils to death. This myth reminds me of the slow-motion train wreck we are facing from destructively high electricity and methane (natural gas) costs. We’re gradually getting boiled alive with increasing energy prices. Don’t believe me? Just look at California’s residential electricity and methane prices over the past few decades as reported by the Energy Information Administration. Average single family home electric rates increased at an annualized rate of 3% from 2000 to 2015. These increases accelerated to 6% from 2016 to 2020. Rates then skyrocketed (I’m running out of adjectives here) to 11% in 2021. This year…so far…PG&E raised rates by 18%. The combination of PG&E’s costs to catch up on defer

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Your friendly local solar contractor has to contend with two basic types of costs: hardware costs (solar panels, inverters, racking, batteries, etc.) and non-hardware costs, referred to as “soft” costs (just about everything else, including sales, advertising, salaries, rent, insurance, vehicles, inspections and interconnection paperwork). Solar contractors do not have much control over equipment costs, other than diligent equipment selection and shopping. However, contractors have control over soft costs by carefully managing their sales, installation and back office activities. Not surprisingly, these soft costs are over half the costs of a typical solar or battery installation! To keep these soft costs down, solar companies are always seeking ways to improve their efficiency. Automating these soft cost activities — marketing, rooftop design, sales proposal, engineering, permitting, inspection, interconnection, incentive, etc. — can reduce these costs by 2

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon I’m sure you’ve noticed that the reliability of our electric grid is getting worse -- not better. In spite of new utility generation, transmission and monitoring technologies, blackouts and Public Safety Power Shutoffs are more common. There are more power outages, and these outages last longer. In the “old days” about 20 years ago when the power went out we still had wired phone lines, we could throw a few logs in the fireplace, and we could go to the gas station to top off our tank. Now, without reliable electricity, our communications, entertainment, heating and cooling, and transportation are all as useless as a chocolate teapot. I came across a recent report from E3, an electric grid consulting company, that summarized six trends that they say are making the grid’s reliability worse: 1) More customers and more electric demand 2) Retirement of coal and gas plants 3) Increasing dependency on renewables, storage and distributed resources 4) Increasingly e

Copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Energy costs keep going up — and faster than ever. Gasoline is over $5/gallon, natural gas prices are projected to skyrocket, and PG&E electric rates increased 11% in 2021 and 9% (already) in 2022. Luckily, we have more options than ever for significantly reducing our energy costs. 20 years ago just about all you could do was install a setback thermostat. Now, solar is standard on new homes in California, battery backup systems are popular, LEDs bulbs are all you can buy in most hardware stores, and electric vehicles are ubiquitous. But when approaching building electrification, how do you figure out what makes the most sense for your home? Should you install a heat pump and induction cooktop first? Should you try some load shifting with incentives from your utility? Should you install solar and storage? Steve Schmidt with Home Energy Analytics has many of these answers. His company has free software that analyzes your home’s energy use and coordinates with

Copyright 2022 - Barry Cinnamon - The Energy Show My 2022 solar and storage predictions came into clearer focus — although I didn’t like the picture — after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) dropped a bomb on California’s solar and battery storage industry. Basically, the CPUC sided with PG&E and other utilities in California to eliminate Net Metering. The proposed terms for Net Metering 3 (NEM 3) cannot be considered net metering since new solar customers will actually be penalized for connecting to the grid under this rate. The utilities’ NEM 3 proposal includes high monthly fixed costs, wholesale daytime reimbursement rates, and a change in grandfathering for existing NEM customers. Under this planned NEM 3 regime, solar customers will be better off economically with a battery and never send excess power to the grid. The California solar and storage industry mobilized to modify this poorly-reasoned CPUC decision. The NEM 3 decision is now delayed for another few months, most likely being

Copyright 2020, The Energy Show - Barry Cinnamon There are two segments of the renewable energy industry growing like crazy (in addition to solar), electric vehicles and home battery storage systems.People are installing battery storage systems for two reasons. First, batteries avoid sky-high peak electricity prices ($0.50/kwh from 4 to 9pm here in Silicon Valley). Second, batteries provide reliable backup power during increasingly frequent blackouts. The switch to NEM 3 is creating the biggest rush to install battery systems that I have every seen. Customers with EVs often ask: “When can I use that big lithium-ion battery in my car to power my house?" It’s a natural question to ask since Ford showed that Vehicle to Grid (V2G) capability in one of their Mach-e commercials. Ford is also promoting V2G capability with their upcoming Lightning pickup truck. The perception is that V2G is ready for prime time. As they said on the Six Million Dollar Man: "We have the technology." But not so fast. There are two bi

copyright 2022 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon The outlook for solar and storage in 2022 is pretty clear. Because of dramatically higher electric rates and changes to Net Metering in California, I expect the first half of the year to be the best time for homeowners to install solar and storage in over a decade. Second half of the year in California…not so hot. On the other hand, the second half of the year will be great for homeowners throughout the rest of the country since the federal Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is stepping down to 22% at the end of 2022. There are a lot of moving parts that will affect the industry in 2022. I’ve tried to break down these changing factors into three categories: economics, availability and safety. So here they are: Economics PG&E rates are guaranteed to increase. Why? --It’s the utility business model. Full stop. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) announced a preliminary decision to eliminate Net Metering. They call it a transition from NEM 2 to NE

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon I’ve been bombarded with customer questions about the change from Net Metering (NEM) 2 to NEM 3. If you haven’t heard, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is in the process of effectively eliminating Net Metering. If the preliminary decision by the CPUC goes through, the solar industry — including both new and existing solar customers — will be clobbered. Here is the current situation in a nutshell. The CPUC decided to add a fixed charge of about $60 per month to the average new solar customer’s electric bill, reduce the daytime reimbursement rate from $0.30 to $0.05 per kwh, and reduce the grandfathering period of all customers (even existing customers) from 20 years to 15 years. They call this NEM 3, but new solar customers are better off effectively disconnecting their solar and battery systems from the grid — not net metering at all. This poorly-reasoned NEM 3 decision is scheduled to go into effect on May 28, 2022. To compare NEM 2 to NEM