The picture is of Charles and Gerry Fry. Fry Farms is a customer of ours that we are waiting for USDA grant funds to finalize their installation of a solar heating system for their machine shop.
Charles is an old friend from a previous startup company. The have a good article about their new company and growing of edamame here.
We were invited to a private meeting yesterday at the White House for clean energy leaders. The discussion was led by Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. He is a great speaker and a greater leader for our energy sector. The discussions were really around what the administration is doing and can do better to help lead the energy transformation we are going through.
Secretary Chu's message is very similar to the one we've been stressing. We cannot afford to be passive in this arena. Energy is the worlds largest industry and it will be transforming over the next decades. If we want to remain a world leader we must grab this opportunity now. We need clear market signals to move this forward.
After that we visited with Senator Sherrod Brown's office and shared some of our perspectives with them as well as delivering an Op-Ed we recently wrote.
After that we had some time with Senator Voinovich's office as well as the Chief of Staff for Mary Jo Kilroy.
I think it is important that people other than lobbyists visit them in person. We know the fossil fuel lobby groups are outspending the clean energy groups by at least 15 to 1. Hopefully real constituents and businessmen in their offices carries some weight.
It's been a busy few days for us.
Other future seminars:
Our friend Joe Recchie, whom we wrote about earlier, has recently won an award from the US Department of Energy for their Solar America Showcase Awards. He is with National Community Builders and the award is for developing a creative and repeatable model for financing large solar installations. His approach is brilliant and this project should yield exciting results.
The Ohio Energy Office has released a press release today on the general programs that they will be funding with their share of the State Energy Program funds allocated through the AARA.
The basics are:
Developing Renewable Energy in Ohio – $35 million toward increasing renewable energy projects that will propel Ohio forward in the solar, wind and biomass waste industries, and deploying related technologies in combination with fuel cells and energy storage for electricity, heat, biofuel and bioproducts.
• Making Efficiency Work – $8 million will fund grants to conduct commercial and residential building retrofits in existing and new construction to attain greater energy efficiency.
• Targeting Industry Efficiency – $15 million will fund grants to the manufacturing companies seeking to improve the sustainability of Ohio industry and build expertise and awareness in industrial carbon management projects.
• Banking on New Energy Financing – $30 million will transform the energy finance landscape in Ohio by creating an Energy Alliance and bringing more significant funding to energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.
• Setting the Stage for Ohio’s Carbon Management Strategy
– $500,000 will be deployed to identify industries and businesses seeking to lessen their carbon footprint, assess the economic impacts, and develop scenarios to provide policy guidance for future energy efficient economic development.
More details here
The $30 million for financing is probably the most exciting portion of this to me. If you've spent anytime around renewable projects you quickly realize that financing is the missing part of the puzzle.
We have been very busy lately with a lot of interesting developments.
We recently signed a Master Services Agreement with Ohio State University to work on a join venture to commercialize solar cooling technology. We will be working to use the thermal energy gathered from the sun to drive cooling devices like absorption chillers. This will help improve the overall ROI for a system by providing us with a good use of summer heat.
We are introducing our new product "The Mobius System" to the market. It is an all in one hot water and space heating product that also has an integrated air handler and traditional air conditioning unit. It works great for new builds and retrofits of residential and small commercial spaces.
We have a lot of great projects in the works. We are gaining a lot of traction in the low income multifamily space. Some of these projects have a real possibility to involve local residents in the training and installation as well as include the local schools from an educational perspective.
We are doing feasibility studies for a couple of local governments and are spending time looking at creative financing to make these type of projects work.
Swimming season is almost here and we have been installing a few solar pool heating units which are a great investment and extend the swimming season by almost two months.
Well that's all for now. I'll post more updates as they occur.
It's been awhile since I last posted. We have been very busy with a lot of great things happening.
So here is some Ohio news:
In the first post we discussed why we are fans of using the sun to heat water. Once the water is heated there are a lot of options for using it. We are big fans because of how efficient the technology is and how much clean energy it can generate at a low price.
A recent example is a project we are working on with a hotel. The project is to convert the existing hot water heating for the hotel from electric to a solar and high efficiency natural gas system. A quick look at the numbers:
Cost of the system after incentives: $23,689
Energy Savings per year: $9534
Simple Payback Time: 29 months
10 yr ROI: 47%
Lifetime Positive Cash Flow: $272,017
These numbers are based on a 5% annual energy inflation and do not account for any of the benefits of accelerated depreciation.
With numbers like that who wouldn't love solar thermal?
Last week at the 13th Annual Ohio Energy Management & Restructuring Conference I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Casten from RED. I have written about energy recycling before and we are working on a couple of potential projects.
Tom's keynote, Powerpoint here, was excellent and certainly opened some eyes to the benefits of energy recycling. I look at these guys as visionaries in the field of sensible solutions to energy issues.
Ohio is a prime candidate for energy recycling solutions. We have very little of it or CHP deployed today and we have a lot of heavy industries.
Tom described several changes that could be made to SB221 that would help:
Given that SB221 rules have not been finalized by PUCO these all seem possible.
The Rocky Mountain Institute has published an interactive map that shows each states efficiency and opportunities to improve that. A simple measure of GDP/khw is used for the base calculation.
This echoes similar studies that have shown Ohio as having huge room to improve on it's carbon reduction.
However it does beg the question, how good of a measurement of gdp/khw? Banking makes more money than farming and uses less energy. I think there is some validity in the overall picture it paints, but is by no means hard science.
