Palo Alto, a chartered city located in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California has put out a Request for Proposal (RFP), seeking proposals to provide electric power generated by renewable resources. The city is seeking contracts for power for terms ranging from five years to 30 years from eligible renewable resources.
By some measures 2009 has been the worst year in the young solar PV sectors history. In fact, global revenue for Photovoltaic (PV) panels is expected to drop by nearly 20 percent in 2009, as oversupply causes prices to crash by nearly fifty percent. Many of the weaker firms may not survive this shakeout and right now things do look very gloomy – even though by some other measures 2009 is not as bad as it may seem. For example more newly installed capacity (4.2 GW) is installed this year than any year – ever; however this is of little comfort to the many firms in this sector that are being buried under an avalanche of negative revenue. This article examines the short term outlook for the solar PV sector going forward, basing itself on market data from a recent iSuppli study.
Distributed energy systems can range from the micro sized do it yourself systems being installed on rooftops and on hilltops to small scale systems ranging up to around 20MW (megawatts) of capacity, although it must be understood that this is a pretty fuzzy boundary. The defining characteristic of distributed energy systems is that they generate energy close to the point of use where that energy will be consumed; hence the admittedly fuzzy 20MW upper boundary for their size.
This update highlights several current issues and developments in the solar energy space. Concerns have been raised about the potential deleterious impact of utility scale solar energy projects in the fragile water poor desert environments of the Mohave Desert. Large scale solar collection farms use water to wash the mirrors and for concentrating solar thermal often use water for cooling.
