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District Energy: A Launching Pad for Solar Hot Water

If you aren’t aware of it, urban centers use a lot of energy to heat and cool the buildings within their area. We’re talking millions of dollars worth of electric, natural gas, or coal energy each month.

Traditionally, each building in an urban center, large or small, has its own heating and cooling plant. Be it a boiler, furnace; forced-air air conditioning or chiller systems, these systems are energy hungry. When you have a heating plant and an air conditioning plant in each building, it becomes very inefficient.

There is alternative however, its call “District Energy”.

Why Commercial Solar Hot Water Lags Behind It’s Potential

We have been carrying out a Performance Research Project on Commercial Solar Hot Water for approximately four months. In that time, we have noticed some very interesting facts. Though not the direct goal of our research, we have noticed some very interesting bits of information, which from a ‘business standpoint’, we believe are the reasons why commercial solar hot water has lagged so far behind it’s huge potential.

Clever Accounting Lets Utilities Cash In When You Go Solar

August 13, 2011 Reprinted with Permission Copyright, all rights reserved I recently got a copy of a utility bill for a Minnesota business that has a 40-kilowatt (kW) solar PV array.  I wanted to learn how quickly he’d pay off his array with the electricity savings. I was shocked. Payback time was 30 years.  Even [...]

How to Design Feed-in Tariffs in the USA without Fear of Federal Preemption

August 10, 2011 The cavalry has finally arrived in the seemingly endless debate about what states can and can’t do in designing workable feed-in tariffs. The cavalry is in the form of two new papers describing how states can design feed-in tariff policies without running afoul of the US government’s power of preemption. Written by [...]

Germany Passes New Renewable Energy Law for 2012

Ups Renewable Energy Target: Between 35% and 40% by 2020 Raises Payments for Biomass, Geothermal, & Offshore Wind Applies Standard Degression to Wind on Land and Solar PV Despite widespread rumors in North America that Germany was abandoning its system of Advanced Renewable Tariffs, the country’s upper chamber of parliament, the Bundesrat, approved the latest [...]

California’s Solar Program Costs More Than German Feed-in Tariffs

Newly installed solar photovoltaic (solar PV) projects in Californian were paid an average of approximately $0.34/kWh last year, according to a privately-commissioned study. Germans paid substantially less, taking into consideration the amount of solar energy their country receives.

Ontario Solar PV Attracting $8 Billion in Private Investment

Solar PV Creates 12 Times More Jobs Than Nuclear–15 Times More Than Coal Ontario Solar PV Attracting $8 Billion in Private Investment Clean Generation Saves Ratepayers 20% November 23, 2010 By Paul Gipe Using a measure of cost that all Canadians understand, a provocative new report says the impact of Ontario’s feed-in tariffs for solar [...]

Ontario Feed-In Tariff Program: $8 billion of Deals So Far

(This article originally posted April, 2010, and is even more pertinent today; reprinted with permission.) Derek Wong is a Toronto based sustainability consultant. He holds an Engineering degree from University of Melbourne and is a CSA America certified greenhouse gas professional. See contact info and more posts like this at Carbon49.com. Ontario, the largest province [...]