Sunny Side Up

Did you see the sunrise this morning? Me either. It’s one of those leaden West Michigan February mornings, with lake effect snow falling, obscuring all.

The conventional wisdom, that indispensable encyclopedia of unreliable information, holds that Michigan is too dark and cloudy a place, with winters too long and miserably sunless, to benefit from solar energy technology at all. And there’s no denying it can get a little dark and featureless around here in the wintertime. So, does the conventional wisdom have it right?

The issue is more complicated than most people assume.

In the last few years, West Michigan has seen sun power become, if not practical, at least more noticeable. Local experiments in solar technology include, perhaps most notably, the Jarecki Center at Aquinas College; the David D. Hunting YMCA; the Vincent and Helen Bunker Interpretive Center at Calvin College; and Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center.

To sort it how Michigan can be more sun-powered, the first step is to distinguish between solar heating, which is intended to warm our living spaces, and solar photovoltaics, the making of electricity from sunlight. They are two completely different things.

Getting the Price Right
Solar-assisted heating is in relatively common use today. If you define it broadly enough, most structures, old or new, are sun-dependent to some extent for wintertime warmth. “Green” architects and builders are familiar with the principles of passive solar design; new solar-assisted buildings go up in Michigan all the time. Designers have even mastered much of the challenge of incorporating passive solar heating principles invisibly into traditional building designs. You can have your solar Cape Cod or your solar Neo-Victorian. And monetarily, solar heating already pays back. So there is really not much standing in the way of a substantially greater role for solar heating in Michigan.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, on the other hand, make only a miniscule contribution to our electricity mix – substantially less than 1 percent. The challenge of ramping up that dismal level of production cannot be underestimated.

I asked Jennifer Alvarado, executive director of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association, located in Dimondale, to illuminate me on why PV hasn’t caught on in Michigan. After a couple of minutes of conversation, she zeroed in on the large utilities.

“The major utilities have set up what we think are a lot of unnecessary hurdles,” for customers wanting to install PV systems, she says.

Michigan passed a net metering requirement two years ago. The policy allows consumers with renewable energy capacity such as wind turbines or solar collectors to wire their building into the utility-run power grid, thereby slowing down or ideally reversing their electric meter whenever the wind blows or the sun shines.

But state policy, guided by the Public Service Commission, also allows each utility to charge exorbitant interconnection fees to cottage energy producers.

“We’ve heard of connection fees totaling a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars,” Alvarado says. “And then on top of that, they let the utilities charge hourly rates for unnecessary onsite inspections. Three inspectors would show up, at $75 per hour each, and stay for two hours.”

Some utilities demand comprehensive insurance coverage beyond the reach of small applicants, or special assessments for distribution costs.

Then there’s the cost of the electricity itself. Solar photovoltaic power is currently quoted at more than 21 cents per kilowatt hour – even higher in some applications. That is at least twice as much as the most expensive electric power we ordinarily buy. There aren’t many would-be solar electricity ratepayers at that price.

Blazing a New Path
Meeting peoples’ electricity demand even at times of peak usage is another challenge in the campaign to equip our state with a practical and diverse mix of energy sources. Can solar-generated electricity provide the boost we want under those circumstances? To put it another way, can we rely on it precisely when we most need it, on sunny summer afternoons that send the mercury up to intolerable levels, and when people have their air conditioners set on “high”?

The answer to that, experts say, is a resounding ‘yes.’ Under current conditions, we are most likely to experience power brownouts on those dog-day afternoons when the sunlight is intense. Those are the times when we get peak energy prices approaching 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

You would think that the utilities would be eager to get hold of some PV power on those blistering afternoons. But power companies, though required to net-meter by law, are mainly interested in selling electricity, not buying it. They’d rather not pay the home producer full value for the power generated.

In these and other ways, Michigan’s public policy discourages the use of and investment in renewable energy sources in favor of traditional fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. But demand continues to grow among consumers for cleaner, cheaper, and home-grown power. The trick is to align the policy with the people.

Alvarado favors a proposal that would remove some of the most cynical obstacles to practical net metering in Michigan, and make it more profitable for small producers to get into the power business. Because solar electricity, if not yet competitive, has a role to play in Michigan’s energy future.

Solar enthusiasts – and investors – are standing by.