Community Built Solar for the Community

Each SunFab plant, according to Applied Materials, would create more than 2500 jobs and account for $400-$500 million of local economic activity per year. Installing the panels on the same power grid and community in which they are manufactured, means the money that’s used to make the solar panels stays at home and is recycled through the local economy. Economic activity, by the way, includes money that is earned, spent and spent again.

Though not mentioned by Applied Materials, presumably the cost of manufacturing the panels, and paying SunFab plant employees to do so, would come from customers on the power grid. Rate payers would pay for electricity in the normal way, but a portion of their monthly bill would be used to build more solar panels to continually build more installed solar capacity.

The new solar power capacity would be competitive with other forms of peak power such as natural gas, in the fab2farm model. The SunFab production line is fully-integrated to produce Applied Materials 5.7 square meter panel design which in itself would help bring solar costs below $3.50 per installed watt.

The cost of the new solar energy should also be lower since grid connections would be easy at load centers operated by utility companies. And, the cost of solar would also be cut down since middlemen, outside suppliers of solar panels, would not be needed: all the new solar power would be home grown, owned by the utility. With fab2farm, the utility company would be in the solar manufacturing business.

The wrinkle in the fab2farm plan, and part that would make it exempt from having world- saving status, is that it would eliminate only peak power, not baseload power. Baseload power, the electricity that flows at a steady state around the clock, can be the biggest emission problem on the grid, since it is coal that provides most of that power. An extended fab2farm model might be to continue building solar capacity until it far exceeds that offered by the baseload power plants AND store that excess solar power for use overnight. Do all that and the community, utility-owned, solar manufacturing plant would have to be bigger than that envisioned in fab2farm model. Further, another local manufacturing business would need to be created: that which builds some kind of energy storage devices, big batteries, for instance.

The fab2farm plan could easily be mimicked by others. Other solar technologies from other companies could be locally manufactured and deployed in the same basic model. There would be many questions too, of course, one of which is this: What happens when more solar electric capacity is manufactured than can possibly be consumed? A) The local solar plant would have an export item. B) With economic growth, more energy is always needed. C) Solar panels don’t last forever and will eventually need replacement.

The fab2farm website is a must visit.

Links:

fab2farm model
http://fab2farm.appliedmaterials.com

Applied Materials
http://www.appliedmaterials.com

September 18, 2009 – Vol.14 No.26

COMMUNITY BUILT SOLAR FOR THE COMMUNITY.
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News

It seems as though everyone wants to save the world or at least have a plan for doing so. (Not a bad aspiration as aspirations go.) We’re talking about energy here, so saving the world means stopping global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions related to energy consumption. (Global warming isn’t the only crisis the world needs saving from. A lack of fresh water is another one.)

Here’s one company’s plan: Applied Materials calls it “fab2farm (tm)” (For the record, Applied Materials doesn’t call fab2farm a world-saving plan. The plan, or model, by itself may not, but it would help.)

Fab2farm is described as a “business model for solar deployment designed to bring cost-effective, utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation to local areas and stimulate economic development.” In the model, locally-sited solar panel plants would sprout up that manufactured panels of Applied’s design strictly for deployment near load centers – power plants – that provide power to a community. The solar photovoltaic manufacturing facilities, using Applied Materials SunFab (tm) production line, would churn out solar panels at a rate of 80 megawatts-worth a year that would eventually displace peak power generated at the local, conventional power plant. A SunFab factory is the cornerstone of the fab2farm solar deployment model. That 80 MW per year of new peak solar power would provide power for 35,000 homes during periods of high demand, generally mid to late afternoon.

Though the fab2farm model is largely about displacing peak power supply generated with natural gas, the displacement of conventional power over time is the intriguing, world-saving part of the model. Most power is generated by burning coal. With a continuous flow of solar modules coming off the assembly line and put into service on the same grid, powered by a coal plant, over time the coal plant could be powered down, displaced at least to some degree, if not entirely, by solar power.