Spain is a powerhouse for solar energy production in Europe because it has excellent sun resources and because it has a feed-in tariff for renewable energy production, as does Germany. With a feed-in tariff, project developers are ensured that electricity will be purchased at a certain rate over a fixed term (currently €0.34 per kWh), usually for 20 or 25 years, this creates an excellent annual financial return of up to 12%. Try getting that kind of return from your bank.
One such deal has just been announced by Recurrent Energy. They plan to install 4.8 megawatts worth of solar panels on several rooftops leased from distribution company ProLogis. In this model, Recurrent owns and operates the panels and sells the electricity the panels generate. ProLogis gets a one-time construction management fee and an annual rental payment.
ProLogis will also provide construction management services and is expected to begin development in October 2009. The execution of the projects will use local services within Barcelona and Madrid, including local contractors, engineering firms, and consultants. The completion of all projects is estimated for mid-2010.
I am very interested in this kind of distributed energy network in Spain as one of the companies following this model is my own company, Pretasol Energia. This model, where an outside company rents rooftop space and sells the panels’ electricity, is also being pursued in the U.S. by a small number of utilities. Southern California Edison, is planning to install as much as 250 megawatts worth of solar energy capacity on hundreds of commercial rooftops.
Over the past few years the focus has been on large, autonomous solar photovoltaic power plants. But financing those large plants and finding sites for them, often in environmentally sensitive protected land in the southwest U.S., has slowed deployment of those large-scale systems.
The combined output of Recurrent’s installations in Spain, which are set to go online in 2010, is enough to power well over 1,000 homes. By contrast, a centralized solar plant would be built with enough capacity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. However, the benefits are that the land is already developed (the rooftop is already there) and power lines are in place reducing infrastructure costs and environmental impact.
“Working with Recurrent Energy brings us their expertise of developing distributed-scale projects which are faster to interconnect and permit, delivering the benefits of solar energy sooner, “ said Drew Torbin, director of global renewable energy for ProLogis. “We are a solid match, with more than 450 million square feet of large, flat, unobstructed, permit-ready roof space worldwide, ProLogis is able to solve one of the most basic issues involved in developing large-scale solar projects –the availability of appropriate host sites.”
Recurrent Energy CEO Arno Harris said in a statement.
“We have over 500 MW of distributed-scale projects in development across North America and Europe, and what this project successfully demonstrates is the sizable role commercial and industrial rooftops can play in large-scale solar deployment,”.
Photo is an illustration of a solar installation planned in Spain (Credit: ProLogis)
This seems a perfectly logical and excellent use of existing resources, shame this would not be viable in Scotland, there’s no F*@king sunshine! Go McMental….
Hold it there, Khalifa!
Your money in an US bank is insured by FDIC. Who insures that the panels, inverters, and wiring you have installed will work even for 5 years (after all, many of the current high-cost PV makers won’t be around for that long)? And what happens if you had the misfortune to install BP Solar or Unisolar modules, which are known to ignite on the rooftops? What then? Don’t underestimate the risks of this 25-year investment, or you will learn a painful lesson.
Spain is no powerhouse in PV. It is a well-documented disaster. And the government there may smarten up even more. If PV solar is so great, why does it have to rely on subsidies, thus RAISING electricity rates for EVERYBODY in the country? What, you feel no pity for the poor Spanish ratepayers? Shame on you!
Insurance is underwritten by specialist insurance brokers who will insure the installation work and the equipment itself.
Seems like you’ve got an axe to grind with Unisolar for some reason, but the in the case of the Isofoton modules we use, there are some of their earliest modules still operating with 80% efficiency after 20 years of operation.
Not sure how you define disaster, but I would say that an installed solar generating capacity of 3000 MW, the fourth largest manufacturer in the world of solar power technology and exporting 80 percent of this output to Germany doesn’t really qualify Spain as a disaster!
Electricity rates in Spain have been subsidized by the government for years, whatever the generating technology.
The cost of the environmental damage and clean-up is very rarely counted in the price of coal, nuclear or other dirty types of electricity generation and this leads to a sort of subsidy after the fact, rather than built into a long term program. If this was counted at the beginning then it is likely they would be much more expensive than solar even with the feed-in tariff.
Subsidies are there to build up demand, achieve economy of scale resulting in reduced price and a whole new industry built on cheap, clean energy.