Selling the Sun

(Page 3 of 4)

On a brisk winter morning in December, I tour one of SunEdison's newest solar farms, located in Golden, Colorado, at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The five-acre installation, completed only days before my visit, is built atop a hardscrabble mesa called Table Mountain that faces westward toward the snow-clad Rockies. Aligned in precise rows are 3,696 solar panels mounted on steel trestles. Each row is coupled to a driveshaft. Every 15 minutes, small electric motors spin the shafts, and the panels rotate about two degrees to track the sun across the cerulean Colorado sky. "This cost us nothing to build. We just purchase the electricity," says Gregory Collette, acting director for laboratory operations at NREL, which signed a 20-year PPA with SunEdison. Collette leads me into a muddy clearing, where Bobby Matthews, a SunEdison superintendent, is waiting to show us around. "You'd be amazed at how much solar energy these panels can receive even when it's cloudy," Matthews tells me. 

This is a guy who loves his job. Matthews eagerly describes the pneumatic drill required to bust through cap-rock basalt in order to embed anchoring posts. He enthuses about DC inverters, high-pressure gas lines, and greaseless gearboxes. In 2007, Matthews spent three months with a crew of 80 workers constructing an 8.2-megawatt, 80-acre SunEdison solar farm near Alamosa, Colorado. Built for Xcel Energy, it was the largest solar installation for a major utility company in the United States. "Man, that was a really fun job," he recalls as we continue our tour.

The $7 million NREL facility that surrounds us can withstand 120-mile-per-hour winds, requires almost no maintenance, has a capacity of 720 kilowatts, and is able to supply about 7 percent of NREL's annual energy needs. "Today we're paying SunEdison the same rate we were paying the local utility," Collette informs me. "And we are insulated from any future rate increases."

At the NREL installation, the silence is striking. Aside from the periodic whir of tracking motors and a faint hum from a nearby transformer, the entire operation cranks out clean, green electricity without a peep. A family of deer wander into view, oblivious to the fact that they're grazing next to a quarter-mile-wide photovoltaic powerhouse. This is Shah's legacy, duplicated elsewhere in Colorado and at sites in California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Hawaii. Today, SunEdison operates about 200 commercial installations in the United States, with a total capacity of 60 megawatts -- enough to power about 48,000 homes or a city the size of Ames, Iowa. In addition to Staples, Whole Foods, and Kohl's, its roster of clients includes Costco and Wal-Mart as well as car dealerships, universities, research parks, hospitals, federal agencies, municipal governments, utility companies, and self-storage warehouses. 

When evaluating a particular site, SunEdison engineers choose from more than 40 solar products. "It's important to have a number of arrows in your quiver," says Mark Culpepper, the company's chief technology officer. "I don't think any one technology is going to be the best," he says. "If it's on a rooftop with space constraints, we might go with a high-efficiency panel. If it's on a ground mount where space is not a concern, we might opt for a thin film. If the rooftop is load constrained, we might go with a lightweight substrate and thin film." SunEdison monitors the technologies at its sites and has accumulated what Culpepper says is the world's largest collection of solar performance data. Lenders give SunEdison a bonus whenever an installation exceeds its anticipated power output, "an incentive to make sure we keep the systems running in top condition," Shah explains.

Companies such as SunRun have sprouted from SunEdison's roots, marketing PPAs to homeowners. The residential sector of the solar industry was valued at $2.5 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to $39.3 billion by 2014, spurred in part by the push to use rooftop solar arrays to power plug-in hybrid vehicles. It's a market that SunEdison has not sought to tap into. "Why bother with residential when the commercial market has so much potential?" Shah asks. Utility-scale installations are another story -- and a promising one. The $700 billion Wall Street bailout (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed last October extended the federal tax credit to utilities, which were previously prohibited from taking it. For SunEdison, having already honed its expertise in designing and building large-scale solar installations, utilities represent a fertile, untapped market. 

Some argue that utility companies will go it alone. "It makes sense for them to own the solar farms, just like they own the coal-fired power plants," contends Brian Fan, senior director of research for the Cleantech Group, a market research firm that focuses on renewable technologies. SunEdison's Culpepper sees things differently. "Utilities don't have core competency in distributed generation, so they'll look for partners," he says. "It's one thing to have a handful of power plants to manage. It's another to have a fleet of 10,000 power plants to manage -- and that is really the scale we're talking about with solar." No one knows whether utility companies will favor the PPA model or opt to pay for solar themselves and thus be able to offset expenditures with federal tax credits. In the larger sense, it doesn't much matter whether SunEdison gets into the utility game, or whether utility giants decide to venture into solar on their own. It's a shift away from fossil fuels toward clean, renewable energy, and the result is still good for the planet.

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