Green Energy News | February 4, 2001

February 4, 2001 – Vol.5 No.45

ENERGIES... week of February 4, 2001

SOLAR DEAL FOR LOS ANGELES. After making a close examination of their patterns of electricity use and its cost, customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) can then decide whether to take part in the Department’s generous Solar Rooftop Incentive Program.

Under the Program, LADWP will subsidize the purchase and installation of a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) solar system for a customer’s home or business. The incentive amounts to $3 per watt for systems manufactured outside the city, $5 per watt for systems manufactured inside Los Angeles city lines. LADWP will pay up to $50,000 for each residential system, up to $1 million for a commercial installation.

There are a few stipulations that seem fair enough. Systems can supply no more than 100 percent of the customer’s power needs. Since excess solar power is delivered to the grid, customers will have net metering - a meter that runs backwards - but not be allowed to actually sell power to LADWP. And with similar reasoning, energy storage systems are not paid for with the incentive. Systems must be grid connected only.

What’s in it for LADWP? Why would they purchase a portion of a customer’s solar system? They get to build solar generating capacity. They get to resell excess solar electricity - excess power from incentive participants rooftops - to other customers on the grid. LADWP would like to see 100,000 solar rooftops by 2010. Working together, all of these would make a powerful solar system.

What’s in it for customers? The possibility of reduced electric bills or the availability of reliable solar power for home or business at a significantly reduced cost. And, of course, a contribution to cleaner air.

Benefiting too from the incentive will be Siemens Solar which announced that they will set up a sales and manufacturing facility in L.A. With the incentive being greater for locally manufactured systems Siemens expects to make a few sales. The Siemens facility will include a training center to teach electricians how to install the equipment. The company plans to offer ready-to-install, pre-engineered systems to incentive participants.

On a 2 kilowatt - roughly $15,000 - system participants can save $6000 on imported PV panels, $10,000 for locally built ones. Visit the LADWP initiative at http://www.GreenLa.com/

BIG GUN IN FUEL CELLS. With an eye on the expected $10 billion market by 2010, the nearly 200-year-old DuPont company has decided to enter the burgeoning fuel cell industry - as a material and component supplier.

The newly formed DuPont Fuel Cells will focus on proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Initially Dupont will supply its DuPont (tm) Nafion (R) perfluorinated membranes and other engineering polymers to fuel cell system developers. Eventually the company would like to supply other fuel cell stack components such as membrane electrode assemblies and conductive plates. The company believes 50 percent of PEM fuel cell stacks could be made from DuPont-supplied materials and parts.

DuPont is also active in the development of direct methanol fuel cells. Visit DuPont at http://www.dupont.com/ .