The National Renewable Energy Laboratory goes even further. As Vox reported last month, it no longer believes there is any technical barrier to “a grid running on 100 percent wind and solar.”

This view counters the conventional wisdom. A comprehensive study by Cornell electrical engineer Eilyan Bitar released earlier this year is highly skeptical that a grid system could be reliable without traditional “bulk power generation.”

All of which makes recent developments with California’s wind- and solar-power industries of acute interest. According to a global-energy blog run by McGraw-Hill’s financial information branch …

In the first quarter of this year, with unseasonably warm dry weather tamping down wind flows in California, the amount of power generated by the state’s 44 wind farms fell off by around 35% compared to the first quarter of 2014, according to data filed with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration … .

 

While that was a first, clear signal that wind power had its distinct draw-backs, but two more recent dates — June 8 and 9 — seemed something like days of reckoning for renewables in California.

 

As demand for power rose and generation surged to meet it, rain, widespread cloud cover and poor wind pushed down the amount of wind and solar generation available to help meet the demand. Because of the shortage of renewables, prices surged.

‘Microgrids’ meshing with the ‘Internet of things’

This relative unreliability is why Bitar thinks the answer going forward is “microgrids.” This is from a physics blog run by Cornell:

In an intelligent grid, this variability in supply would be balanced through the coordination of flexible distributed energy resources at the periphery of the system. Power would be produced locally and consumed locally, giving rise to self-sufficient communities or cities, called microgrids. Such an approach would decrease the need to transmit bulk power hundreds of miles to counterbalance fluctuations in renewable sources.

 

The architecture of such a system, which requires sensors and actuators in appliances, electric vehicles and the like, isn’t the hard part, Bitar said. The hard part is the design of algorithms to efficiently manage the deluge of information produced by those sensors in order to coordinate the simultaneous control of millions of distributed energy resources on fast time scales.

This in turn suggests the “Internet of things” that Americans have been told is just around the corner — in which an online network constantly monitors and links humans, appliances and machines — would also be an extension of the electricity grid.

Privacy advocates would then have a new area to worry about — individual energy use being subject to 24-7-365 monitoring.

An essay in the Guardian earlier this year raised such concerns.

Aiming high

The Los Angeles Times reported that “Musk introduced a new line of residential and commercial batteries [recently] in a dramatic announcement at the automaker’s design studio in Hawthorne. He outlined a vision of off-the-grid homes and businesses and remote villages powered by sunshine.”

According to Musk, the Times recounted, the new initiative reflected an ambition “to change the fundamental energy infrastructure of the world. What we will see is something similar to cellphones and land lines where cellphones actually leapfrogged land lines.”

Target and Walmart stores have already begun testing the devices, which could dramatically change the way they power their enormous, warehouse-like commercial spaces.

Regional rivals

The move rippled swiftly through Silicon Valley, where Tesla has become the most prominent, but hardly the only, battery purveyor in town. In a demonstration of PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s theory that innovators should seek monopolies, not marginal improvements, competition has ratcheted up in the power-storage space, as Business Spectator noted, because the market has not yet matured:

“‘So many companies are fighting over a market that’s practically nonexistent right now,’ said Haresh Kamath, energy storage expert at the Electric Power Research Center in Palo Alto, California. ‘Tesla is betting they can produce a charismatic product that consumers will want to buy — like what Apple did with the iPhone.’ Tesla will have to sell eight home battery systems to equal the size of each battery pack going into one of its luxury cars, he said.”

West coast dominance

In a potent sign of the business importance of location and tech infrastructure, California quickly emerged as the introductory market for top-tier firms taking advantage of the new batteries. As VentureBeat reported, “Amazon Web Services, the largest public cloud around, has started a pilot of the new stackable battery units Tesla unveiled[.]”

“‘We’re excited to roll out a 4.8 megawatt hour pilot of Tesla’s energy storage batteries in our U.S. West (Northern California) Region,’ James Hamilton, distinguished engineer at AWS, said in a statement in press materials for today’s product launch. ‘This complements our strategy to use renewable energy to power our global infrastructure.'”

Solidifying California’s significance in the battery market, solar power firm SolarCity — co-founded by Musk’s cousin, Peter Rive — also announced plans to use Tesla batteries to share revenues with customers whose homes are connected to the power grid.

“SolarCity’s financed battery-solar residential system offerings will include a standard customer contract that ‘essentially splits revenues that grid services provide,’ he said,” according to GreenTechGrid.

And though both firms have benefited from millions in subsidies granted by the Self-Generation Incentive Program established by the Golden State, GreenTechGrid noted, Rive insisted that, “for this product, we are not counting on any SGIP incentives whatsoever.”

Nevertheless, state regulators’ impact on energy markets appeared set to influence the tech business in other ways. In yet another extension of Tesla’s power on the west coast, the company’s former senior finance director, Ryan Popple, recently secured “a $3 million grant from the California Energy Commission to help set up a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles County” for Proterra, the electric bus company where he has become CEO, as Government Technology reported.

“Popple says rechargeable buses have benefits that diesel can’t match, especially in California. By 2030, Gov. Jerry Brown wants to cut in half the state’s use of oil for transportation. And California’s urban areas, particularly the Los Angeles region’s massive sprawl, constantly struggle with air pollution. Electrifying public transportation within cities would be a substantial step forward, Popple said.”

“The Ivanpah project is a shining example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy,” said Moniz. It “shows that building a clean energy economy creates jobs, curbs greenhouse gas emissions and fosters American innovation.”

Moniz’s boosterish remarks sound very much like the giddy comments made by his immediate predecessor, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, when he was in Freemont in 2009 to dedicate the Solyndra solar panel manufacturing plant.

Chu predicted Solyndra’s new plant would “kick off many more” such groundbreakings by clean energy companies, which would usher in “the second industrial revolution.”

However, in 2011 Solyndra went belly up, taking $535 billion in the federal taxpayers’ subsidies with it. While the start-up solar panel manufacturer’s copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film technology worked well enough, it simply was not economically competitive with conventional, flat silicon panels.

Ivanpah Solar, which was gifted a whopping $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee, has run in to the same problem as Solyndra – its technology is far more expensive than competing technologies.

Indeed, SEGS uses solar thermal power to produce its 392 megawatts. Its “generating system” has more than 300,000 “heliostats” – mirrors to the lay public – spread over 5.5 square miles in the Mohave desert.

The heliostats reflect sunlight onto boilers atop three towers, each of which is reportedly 150 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. The entire complex is said to be visible from the International Space Station.

PV technology

Yet, even the companies that jointly own Ivanpah Solar – BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google — acknowledge that their $2.2 billion clean energy venture has been undercut by photovoltaic technology, which has fallen significantly in price in recent years.

“There’s no doubt,” said NRG Chief Executive Officer David Crane, “in terms of price competitiveness, solar photovoltaic is cheaper.” It represents the future of solar energy, he suggested, not solar thermal generating systems, like Ivanpah.

“What really gets me excited in the morning,” he said, “is that there are 50 million American buildings that should have solar PV on them.”

Quite unintentionally, Crane has made a persuasive argument against government subsidy of clean energy.

The U.S. Energy Department bet $535 billion on CIGS, the technology Solyndra employed to manufacture its thin-film solar panels when the market went with conventional, flat silicon panels.

And Moniz’s department bet $1.6 billion on solar thermal power, the tech used by Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System, when solar photovoltaic is shaping up as the marketplace winner.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Wasn’t the sub-prime disaster of the last decade bad enough?

From 2003 to 2007, it was likely the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) helping unqualified low-income renters fill out sub-prime home loan applications to buy homes at an inflated price. This may have resulted in a foreclosure or an “underwater” mortgage with more money loaned than there was actual market value in the home.

Now, the California Energy Commission is sending canvassers into single-family residential neighborhoods to offer homeowners one-stop home energy improvement loans with a rebate.  CEC will batch the names of interested homeowners and then find them a home energy improvement contractor, a lender and an appraiser, and do everything for them through its Energy Upgrade California program.  Several friends have already informed this writer that canvassers have come knocking at their front door offering such a package.  And the canvassers are apparently paid for by the CEC.

California politicians are in a panic. It is an election year.  Unemployment has barely ticked downward in California.  And worse: by 2015 California’s “Renewable Energy Portfolio” of 33 percent green power will lower every household’s income by $2,400 per year. Additionally, California’s Cap and Trade program, which requires industries and utilities to buy pollution permits, will cost about $500 per year per household loaded into the price of everything ($6.25 billion per year divided by 12,393,852 California households).

Dirty Secret: No payback on energy loans in down market

No matter what cost savings the contractors and loan brokers promise homeowners for taking out an energy improvement loan, they won’t tell them the dirty little secret about such loans.  There is no payback in a down real estate market.  Buyers won’t pay for upgraded energy efficient windows, solar panels, window caulking, or attic insulation when the market is depressed.  And economist Gary Schilling, who has predicted all the recent recessions, is forecasting that home values will drop another 20 percent this year.

But homeowners might say they don’t care as long as their power, natural gas and water bills can be lowered.  However, another problem is the payback period.  Most major energy improvements take seven years to break even with what they cost to install, plus the interest cost on a loan.  If a homeowner moves within that period, it would not be worthwhile to take out an energy improvement loan.  And if the home is so old that its highest and best future use is demolition for a new home, then spending on energy improvements would be a loser.  One might be restricted from demolishing one’s home within the period of the loan.

Most cost-effective energy-efficiency improvements do not need a contractor to install.  Using contractors picked by the state will only inflate the price of such upgrades because the contractors will likely have to comply with Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wage laws and other costly regulations.  And the $1,000 to $1,500 rebate will likely only cover the cost of the building permit. This would result in more jobs for municipal unions.  Most energy efficiency upgrades can be done more cost effectively by homeowners.  Any government inducements for home energy efficiency improvements will only result in an inflationary bubble, especially in a recessionary real estate market.

Many homeowners are fearful of pulling building permits for older homes because the homeowners would likely be forced to bring the entire structure up to code.  For example, this writer relocated an 82-year-old lady from San Marino, Calif. to San Antonio, Tex. this past year.  A prospective buyer of her California home wanted to install a new electrical panel with circuit breakers as a condition of sale.  The city of San Marino would not allow her to upgrade the electrical panel in her home unless she brought the entire structure up to building code at a cost over $150,000.  In a falling market, this was economically infeasible.

Local building code compliance is a barrier to energy-efficiency loans.  This is especially so for old commercial buildings, where it would be cheaper to demolish the structure than install any energy improvements that might trigger full building-code compliance or an Americans with Disabilities Act noncompliance lawsuit.

Older homes would be the best candidates for home energy loans.  New homes built after 1978 are constructed with modern energy-saving improvements to conform to Title 24 – Energy Efficiency Building Codes.  About 60 percent of California’s housing stock was built before 1978.  But the California Public Utilities Commission has been mandating electric and natural gas utilities to provide energy rebate programs for the past four decades. So the actual number of homes that might benefit from energy improvements is uncertain and likely over-estimated.

But not to worry: President Barack Obama has rigged the rules so that you can get a higher real estate appraisal for any energy improvements that you install.  Federal regulators might even take away an appraiser’s license if they have an independent opinion that such energy improvements don’t add value to your home.  Apparently, there no longer are independent real estate appraisers, bankers, contractors, or home energy payback consultants.

And federal tax credits for home energy efficiency improvements for home purchases in 2012 have expired.

Repeating the sub-prime loan meltdown

Evidently, we have learned nothing from the collapse of the national bank financing system in 2008. Opportunist legislators are still clamoring for bubble financing to create jobs and provide banks with loans that might save on energy costs that cannot be recouped upon resale of the home.  The California Energy Commission apparently has no conscience about proposing bubble financing for deadweight energy-efficiency improvements in a declining real estate market. And banks will probably have to comply with new energy loan quotas to keep their banking charters in the state of California or face penalties for discrimination.

As we can plainly see with the CEC’s Energy Upgrade California program, perverse incentives for “greed” start out as well-intentioned and slickly marketed proposals, fashioned by government and highly regarded academic institutions such as U.C. Berkeley, as well as by low income or green advocacy special interest groups. It does not start with banks.  Banks will be prone to being corrupted, but only to keep their bank charters.

Banks will be prone to securitizing such high-risk energy loans by slicing and dicing them to spread the risk of ultimate losses among many lenders. This is precisely what happened with sub-prime home purchase loans during the 2008 mortgage meltdown and bank panic. Banks were unjustly accused of causing the mortgage meltdown by securitizing their loan portfolio of what they knew to be high-risk loans. But it wasn’t securitizing such bad loans that caused the mortgage meltdown as much as it was government policies. The same situation will likely repeat itself with home energy loans in California.

Is California now a predator lender?

The state of California has now joined the ranks of the so-called predator lenders. Once again, low-income homeowners will be the likely targets of the Energy Upgrade program. This is because many middle class homeowners will be more likely to understand that utility bills may be reduced but home energy improvements won’t likely add value to their property.

Where are the Occupy Wall Streeters?   One of their demands was: “Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same time bringing an alternative energy economy up to energy demand.”  California’s Energy Upgrade California program is creating just such an artificial demand.  We can only imagine as homeowners later complain about unrecoverable energy improvement loans that the Occupy Movement will be protesting for debt forgiveness.

Conversely, the “fracking” energy boom -– hydraulic fracturing of rock formation to extract oil and gas –- is largely market based.  Any time government builds a “false economy” without market-based prices and economic feasibility, it is going to lead to economic busts, widespread corruption and suffering. Sub-prime home purchase loans, redevelopment, green power and now sub-prime home-energy loans are examples of false economies made by government jobs programs.

Note: The author was a real estate appraiser for a large utility for 20 years. Prior to that, he was the coordinator, for a short time, of a large solar hot water heating project for all public housing in Los Angeles County. 

It’s difficult to ignore the two-headed snake that has become California’s political process — and it’s not just the Democrats fighting the Republicans. Today, Republicans fight each other while Democrats are passing laws that hamstring California’s future.

Gov. Jerry Brown just signed into law a bill requiring utility companies to increase purchases of renewable energy so that, by 2020, at least 33 percent of retail sales must be from renewable energy resources. And while this may seem like only another notch on the belt for global-warming enthusiasts, it’s a very big problem for California residents, utility ratepayers and taxpayers.

California’s regulatory climate prevents new construction of just about any facility, including power plants and transmission lines.  The same environmentalist extremists who for decades pushed for solar and wind power are now preventing wind farms from operating because of harm to the condor and several other raptors which have been killed in the big turbines. Environmental groups have fought solar plants and transmission lines, using regulations that largely favor those opposed to projects.  If renewable energy projects are blocked, then supply will be reduced and rates will go up.

The Democrats have won. They have managed to set up a system to halt to any future growth in California through legislative gridlock — alternative energy mandates on one side, and environmentalist restrictions on the other. Competing and conflicting laws, passed by through committees controlled by Democratic legislators, are now being signed by Gov. Brown, in his third term after a 30-year break in between terms.

Rules for Radicals

Jamming the bureaucratic gears into gridlock in order to bring the entire system crashing down is a tactic right out of the 1971 book Rules For Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. He was a “transformational Marxist” who promoted the strategy of capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society, through stealth and deception. By cultivating an image of centrism and pragmatism, and a master of infiltration, Alinsky successfully won over Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.

Examples of this can be found in the actions and bills being promoted by lawmakers.

“This bill establishes California as the national leader in clean energy, improving the environment and stimulating the economy while protecting ratepayers from excessive costs,” state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Santa Cruz, said about his SB X 1 2.

However, even the California Public Utilities Commission has warned that increasing the renewable standard would cost utility companies in the state “tens of billions of dollars” and increase electricity costs to ratepayers. In its 2009 Legislative Summary, the CPUC wrote about Simitian’s previous renewable bill, SB 14, “[A]s drafted this measure would make it more difficult and costly to achieve this very important goal,” and “adds new regulatory hurdles to permitting renewable resources in the state, at the same time limiting the importation of cost-effective renewable energy from other states in the West.”

With the restrictions in the bill on how much renewable energy can be purchased out of state, several energy company representatives recently testified in legislative committee hearings that it is a violation of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress, not the state governments, control over interstate commerce; that violation could cause the need for a judicial remedy.

New Policies, Old Technologies

The other problem with creating more renewable energy is using old technology. An energy expert I recently spoke with said that California’s electricity plants are like old machinery — they still run, but are not as efficient as the new technology. Most electricity plants in the state were built between 1947 and 1978.

He said it’s like an old car needing to be warmed up before driving, where a new car can be started right up and driven immediately. The energy produced in the old plants is not produced efficiently or cost effectively. And ramping up the clean-energy demand will only further strain the old energy plants.

But new plant start-ups are difficult and, in California, take exorbitant amounts of time to build. Construction faces built-in timetables and extra costs for litigation, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) restrictions and permitting for every layer of government (local, state and federal). Thus far, California has built no new energy plants in at least 10 years.

He added that we know that wind and solar doesn’t always work, and cannot be counted on. At best, solar and wind work intermittently, when there is wind or sun. For every megawatt of wind or solar power, there needs to be plenty of traditional electrical backup, costing ratepayers far more than if we just counted on traditional energy production.

And the same environmentalists who for decades pushed for solar and wind power are trying to stop wind farms from operating because the California condor and several other native raptors can be killed in the big turbines.

Oil vs. Renewable Funding

As justification for creating a false demand for renewable energy, Democrats relish claiming that oil companies receive billion-dollar subsidies. But according to Lawrence McQuillan, Ph.D., with the Pacific Research Institute (CalWatchdog’s parent think tank), “While oil and gas receive slightly more than 1 percent of government energy R&D funding, renewables receive 22 times as much funding.”

And, McQuillan says that oil and gas supplies more than 60 percent of all U.S. energy needs, compared to just 8 percent for renewable energy production. “While renewables are expected to grow in coming years, analysts say that even by 2035, more than half of the nation’s energy demand will still be met by oil and gas,” said McQuillan.

Where do the subsidies for wind and solar projects go? The energy companies have already run through the $2 billion subsidy allotted for commercial solar projects, leaving nothing for homeowners.

The latest pet project of the California do-gooder crowd is putting solar on the roofs of affordable housing projects. And the companies even provide financing, such as that by Borrego Solar:

We’ve secured funds to finance more than $100 million of solar power installations for customers with good credit and high energy bills. We’ve also established strategic partnerships with financial institutions that allow us to bring the latest solar financing options to customers looking to eliminate the upfront cost of installing solar.

Favored Subsidies

While energy plant construction is at a halt, the government money available for clean energy subsidies is moving around to other government entities, or “public” projects as they prefer to be called.

Government and municipal buildings, water authorities and public housing are all being built with the latest in green technology. But the average homeowner can’t afford this.

It’s a terrifying notion that our elected lawmakers are creating legislated gridlock. And while doing so, they are also moving public money around to other public entities. Much of the subsidy for renewable energy has gone to government entities and municipalities. They were even named as a “priority” in how the money was to be used in the California Solar Initiative.

While preventing the sources of energy from being produced, and at the same time mandating higher and higher clean energy standards, Democrats are realizing the fruits of their strategies. And the more entitlements they hand out, the more entitlement voters they get.

Spain already found out the hard way that every subsidized green job cost more than three private-sector jobs. And the billions spent on wind power in Denmark have not helped to lower their carbon output because of the constant backup energy needed to cover intermittent wind energy output.

This would be a good time, given California’s history, to start up a moving company to handle the coming exodus from California. Business would be booming. But I couldn’t afford the time it would take for two-year permitting process to start up such a company. Nor could I afford the excessive diesel regulations imposed on the trucks — or the expensive  workers compensation insurance for the employees.

Californians are just going to have to rent their own U-Haul trailers on the way out of the state.

I recently read this observation:

A limited government can better protect the economic health of its citizens by policing corruption from the private sector, under the direction of term-limited representatives who will never become worth the risk of buying off. The larger government becomes, the more its arrogant ruling class believe themselves worthy of royal treatment … and the more justified they feel about lying to the public for their own good.

We are there already.

– Katy Grimes

By KATY GRIMES

The California Solar Initiative Program has spent $2.1 billion in only three years. But three large utility companies and one contractor say is not enough to meet the Legislature’s solar power goal within the 10-year timeframe.

Using ratepayer funds, the solar initiative, a solar rebate program, was launched in 2007 with  a total funding promise of $3.3 billion. The goal was to install 3,000 megawatts of new solar power in California during the next 10 years.

The solar rebate program is “for customers of the largest investor-owned utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric,” according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Through the CPUC, $2.1 billion has been provided to nonprofit organizations, public agencies, homeowners and businesses to install solar technology — all of it paid for by ratepayers.

The three utilities chosen for the solar initiative have megawatt goals divided among them according to their electricity sales: PG&E 43.7 percent, Southern California Edison 46 percent and San Diego Gas & Electric 10.3 percent through the California Center Sustainable Energy, a nonprofit organization “that helps residents, businesses and public agencies save energy, reduce grid demand and generate their own power through a variety of rebate, technical assistance and education programs.”

In a presentation on Monday from the California Public Utility Commission about the status of the state’s solar initiative, legislators on the Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce were presented with a glaring problem: The mandate for the California Solar Initiative is costing more to equip affordable housing projects and commercial projects than initially planned for.

Four Program Components

Molly Sterkel, a Supervisor with the CPUC, explained that the solar initiative program has four program components, each with its own program administrator, as well as the 10-year budget:

• * The research and development program, which provides grants to solar technologies has a budget of $50 million.
• * The Single-family Solar Affordable Solar Housing (SASH) program, which provides solar incentives to single family low-income housing and has a budget of $108 million.
• * The Multifamily Affordable Solar Housing (MASH) program, which also provides solar incentives to multifamily low-income housing. It has a budget of $108 million.
• * The Solar Water Heating Pilot Program (SWHPP), which provides solar hot water incentives to residences and businesses in San Diego only, and is administered through California Center for sustainable Energy.

But it’s the affordable housing component of the solar program that seems to be over budget. To date, Sterkel said that only 331 affordable housing homes have been outfitted with solar roofs, and 36 multi-family affordable housing projects, but the total cost was not given.

“Why are the numbers and percentages so low?” asked Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, D-Baldwin Park. “The numbers are so de minimis that it doesn’t even show up on the radar.”

Sterkel said, “It’s a really new concept bringing solar into low income communities.”

I contacted the CPUC to discuss why affordable housing solar costs more, and for future projections, but did not get a return call.

At the hearing, Sterkel said that in addition to the CPUC’s solar initiative program, the Legislature expected that the State of California would also have other programs to support onsite solar projects besides the solar initiative, including the California Energy Commission’s New Solar Homes Partnership as part of the total “Go Solar” program with the solar initiative.

Committee Chairman Steven Bradford, D-Inglewood, called the numbers Sterkel shared “dismal, based on the amount of investment.”

PG&E director David Rubin told the committee that PG&E has paid out more than $950 million of financial incentives to solar customers, and called the program “very successful.”

However, Rubin also said that the utility has run out of money in the non-residential incentive program promoting rooftop solar systems, and wants “additional money to be added for the shortfall.” If additional funds are not added, Rubin said that the projects reserved for funding “may not make it all the way” before other projects on the list get funded. He also said PG&E may need to restrict additional payments made to the non-residential projects, to adjust for the shortfall.

Alternatives

Other options being considered by PG&E to cover the shortfall are rate increases, or possibly moving some of the research and development money to incentives.

However, Sterkel later clarified for the legislators that the total number of solar systems installed to date through the program is 45,000, which does not include the 331 low-income housing projects.

Southern California Edison presented a similar picture to PG&E’s shortfall situation. Gary Barsley, a manager with SCE, said the utility will not achieve the projected solar projects because they are spending money “at a faster rate than expected.”

But Barsley also said, the incentives decline as the life of the project continues, making it more expensive in the up-front investment.

Southern California Edison has 16,000 customers in the program,  15,000 of which are residential.

Both utilities said that government programs receive a higher priority on the project list than non-governmental programs.

The California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) states that  its solar initiative program for the San Diego Gas & Electric company is currently operating with a $32 million shortfall, similar to the other utilities. Interestingly, the CCSE is a non-profit organization which receives federal stimulus money through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and other government subsidies, according to its most recent annual report.

At the end of his testimony, Barsley added, “The solar industry is not ready to exist without incentives.”