VivaBusiness 2.0

Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts’ worth of solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.

It’s a potentially game-changing move, one that could lower the cost of solar cells as manufacturers ramp up production to meet the utility’s schedule of installing a megawatt-a-week of arrays until it reaches the 250-megawatt target. That alone is more than United States’ entire production of solar cells in 2006 and will produce as much electricity as a small coal-fired power plant, albeit with no greenhouse gas emissions. “This project will turn two square miles of unused commercial rooftops into advanced solar generating stations,” said John Bryson, CEO of the utility’s parent company, Edison International (EIX), in a statement Wednesday night.

The $875 million initiative also marks the first big move into so-called distributed energy by a major utility. Instead of building a centralized power station and the expensive transmission system needed to transmit electricity to the power grid, Edison will connect clusters of solar arrays into existing neighborhood circuits. A significant hurdle for the massive megawatt solar power plants planned for California’s Mojave Desert is the need in some cases to build multi billion-dollar transmission systems through environmentally sensitive lands to bring the electricity to coastal metropolises.

Solar arrays of course only generate electricity when the sun is shining, but they produce the most power during the hottest part of the day when Southern Californians crank up their air conditioners. The arrays could help spare Edison from having to fire up a fossil-fuel power plant when demand peaks.

Edison spokesman Gil Alexander told Green Wombat that the utility expects the project’s scale to allow arrays to be placed on roofs at half the cost of a typical installation. Edison’s ambitions could prove a boon for solar cell makers like SunPower (SPWR) and Suntech (STP) as well as solar installation companies such as Akeena (AKNS). One unknown is whether the demand created by Edison will drive up costs in the short term, given ongoing shortages of polysilicon, the base material of solar cells. The Edison project could also help jump-start the market for thin-film solar panels, which typically use far less silicon than conventional solar cells.

Alexander says Edison is already negotiating with solar panel makers and installers. Needless to say, the project will be a boon for green collar workers.

Here’s how the solar roofs initiative will work: Edison will lease warehouse rooftop space from building owners. (The target area is the fast-growing “Inland Empire” of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.) The utility will contract for the installation of the arrays and will retain ownership of the solar systems. California regulators appear inclined to approve the project, which will be financed by a hike in utility rates.

“This will be a utility-scale solar power plant, if one thinks of the 100 or so buildings on which the two square miles of solar panels will be installed,” Alexander wrote in an e-mail. “One advantage of this project is that we will tap unused rooftop real estate directly in areas we serve where demand is growing rather than securing a major plat of land in a remote area and then building transmission lines to bring the power to those areas of rising demand.”

Anyone who has driven through Los Angeles can attest to the endless acres of big-box stores, warehouses and strip malls and the potential to generate green power from sun-baked suburban sprawl.

Edison’s solar roof ramp up is likely to put pressure on California’s other big utilities, PG&E (PCG) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE), to follow suit. Like Edison, they face a state mandate to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020. California’s global warming law requires the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to be rolled back to 1990 levels by 2020.

The Governator himself gave a not-so-subtle nudge to Edison’s competitors. “These are the kinds of big ideas we need to meet California’s long-term energy and climate change goals,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a statement. “I urge others to follow in their footsteps. If commercial buildings statewide partnered with utilities to put this solar technology on their rooftops, it would set off a huge wave of renewable energy growth.”

It is an article of faith these days that any company worth its public relations budget must proclaim loudly and frequently its good green intentions. So it was rather refreshing to hear one of Richard Branson’s top lieutenants – Will Whitehorn, chief of Virgin Galactic – cast his company’s enviro-friendly initiatives as strictly business.

“We’re not doing this to be environmentally kosher,” declares Whitehorn, referring to Virgin’s efforts to develop greenhouse-gas free biofuels for its jets and forthcoming spaceship, “we’re doing this to ensure our company’s survival.”

The occasion for Whitehorn’s remarks was one of those “green salons” that have become popular in San Francisco of late. You know, gather a group of so-called thought-leaders – executives, environmentalists, venture capitalists, journalists – in a chi-chi restaurant and let the ideas and sauvignon blanc flow. Easy enough to skewer, particularly when the well-compensated are dining on ahi tuna skewers, but you never know where the conversation will go, and in this case it strayed interestingly off-topic. The subject du jour was a white paper on corporate greenwashing from Bite Communications, the public relations firm that organized the recent lunch. Among those on hand were Whitehorn and exes from Chinese solar panel maker Suntech (STP), fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy, utility PG&E (PCG), and VantagePoint Venture Partners, investor in electric car startup Tesla Motors and solar power plant builder BrightSource Energy.

Whitehorn held center court, tracing Virgin’s trip down the green path back a decade when the company forecasted a dramatic rise in oil prices and tried to gauge the impact on its airline and new railway business. As a result, he says, Virgin spent big bucks on energy-efficient locomotives to hedge against future fuel cost spikes.

“This is not really a question of being green,” says Whitehorn, who expresses annoyance that Branson’s pledge last year to invest $3 billion in biofuels research and development was portrayed in the media as a charitable deed. “We’re doing this to make money and we’re creating a more sustainable economy in the process.”

“We’ve got to get away from this idea of doing these things as good works,” he adds. “We’re doing what we’re doing to create a profitable business for the future.”

It’s a meme increasingly being advanced by some environmentalists, most notably by the black sheep of the movement, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism” riled the green elite. The Berkeley duo’s new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, calls for reframing global warming from a doom-and-gloom scenario to an opportunity for unbridled economic prosperity by investing in green technologies. Their central argument: only when people and societies achieve a certain level of material wellbeing do they have the luxury of supporting environmental preservation. In other words, greed is green.

Whitehorn also took aim at companies that proclaim themselves carbon neutral, scorning the notion that corporate greenhouse gas emissions can be offset by merely buying carbon credits. “We’re not going to be carbon neutral – it’s impossible,” he says of Virgin. “You need to get out and do something other than buy someone else’s carbon problem.”

Still, Kristina Skierka, director of Bite’s cleantech practice, wanted to know just how green can Virgin Galactic be, given its business model of ferrying the rich into outer space for a couple hundred grand a pop. “If we use biofuels we will get the emissions down to near zero,” Whitehorn claims. “This is about a new type of launch system; the carbon impacts will be negligible.

He says space tourism is just the launching pad, as it were, for a host of space-based ventures. “If you look at space as an industrial place to conduct human activities, it has huge advantages.”

Virgin’s next frontier is the deep blue sea. According to Whitehorn, the company recently created a skunk works to develop a “radical” new submarine technology for a startup to be called, what else, Virgin Oceanic.

Abu Dhabi is not content to just sell you the oil that fuels your SUV; now its going to sell you sunshine to keep your lights on and power your electric car when the internal combustion engine goes the way of the buggy whip. Masdar, the oil-rich emirate’s $15 billion renewable energy venture, and Spanish technology company Sener on Wednesday announced a joint venture called Torresol Energy to build large-scale solar power plants in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.

Torresol initially will invest $1.2 billion in three solar power plants to be built in Spain but the company is targeting the global “sunbelt” for future expansion. Masdar will take a 60 percent ownership stake in Torresol with Sener holding a 40 percent stake. A Torresol spokesman declined to reveal the dollar amount of the investment. A prime market for Torresol will be the U.S. desert Southwest, where companies like Ausra, BrightSource Energy, Solel and Abengoa Solar are competing for contracts with utilities PG&E (PCG), Arizona Public Service (PNW) and Southern California Edison (EIX). Torresol potentially could shake up that market, given its very deep pockets and ability to independently finance billion-dollar solar power plants.

The venture is just the latest move by Abu Dhabi to control what Masdar CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber described to Green Wombat recently as “the whole value chain” of renewable energy, from research and development to manufacturing silicon for solar cells to the large-scale deployment of green technology.

The irony is too rich to leave unsaid: A leading oil producer invests billions in carbon-free energy while a leading consumer of fossil fuels - the United States - continues to subsidize Big Oil while while offering only tepid support for green technology. It is inevitable that climate change will foster the rise of renewable energy - the only question is which countries and companies will profit from the new energy economics. It is entirely possible that the U.S. will trade energy dependence of one kind - on Middle East oil - for another - on Middle East and European solar technology - in the era of global warming. It’s no coincidence that most of the solar energy companies with contracts to build utility-scale power plants in California and the Southwest have overseas roots - Ausra hails from Australia, BrightSource was founded by American-Israeli pioneer Arnold Goldman, Solel is based in Israel and Abengoa is headquartered in Spain.

Torresol plans to build solar power plants using a technology it calls a Central Tower Receiver system. It’s similar to technology used by competitors like BrightSource in that fields of mirrors called heliostats focus the sun’s rays on tower that contains a receiver. In this case the receiver is filled with salt which when heated vaporizes water to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The company says it intends to have 500 megawatts of solar electricity online by 2012.