Large-Scale Solar Project Provides Clean Power to Silicon Valley Utility

SAN JOSE, CA, OCTOBER 26, 2007

Regrid Power, a leading Northern California power system provider, today announced the completion of a 76.5 kilowatt solar power system for the San Jose Water Company atop the San Jose Water Company’s Columbine Reservoir. This solar array generates the equivalent energy to power approximately 75 homes during the day.

“The San Jose Water Company is an exemplary utility that’s helping bring clean solar power generation to the forefront of our region’s energy mix,” said Tom McCalmont, CEO of Campbell-based Regrid Power, a leading California solar integrator, and chairman of SolarTech, a collaborative Silicon Valley solar industry initiative. “As solar power becomes reaches grid parity, this technology will become increasingly ubiquitous, due in large part to savvy power customers such as the San Jose Water Company, who recognize the value of clean, emissions-free power. We’re proud that Regrid Power can play a part in the City of San Jose’s vision for a cleaner, better future for all of us. It’s vital that utilities and water districts continue to expand the use of solar.

Regrid Power installed and engineered the San Jose Water project for optimal performance. The solar array will produce clean, renewable power over the next 30 years.

SAN JOSE, CA, JUNE 1, 2007

SolarTech, a collaborative solar industry initiative created by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, today announced the establishment of the Solar Center for Excellence in Silicon Valley, a technical and educational resource focused on regional economic development and cost competitive solutions for the industry and its customers.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the Energy Summit 2007, a major daylong conference of top industry officials and companies hosted by Cypress Semiconductor in San Jose, featuring a keynote address by former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

“The Solar Center for Excellence will be a catalyst for the solar industry in Silicon Valley to thrive and take its place next to high tech, biotech and life sciences as core economic sectors,” said Tom McCalmont, chairman of SolarTech and CEO of Campbell-based Regrid Power, a leading California solar integrator and charter member company of SolarTech.

“In order to sustain the solar industry over the long term, the cost of solar-generated power must be competitive with the cost of conventional electricity,” McCalmont added. “The Solar Center will be a driving force for lowering costs and increasing photovoltaic, or PV, use in California. It will also provide access to training and certification for prospective and industry professionals.

The center will focus on resolving the complex technological, administrative, and financing challenges inherent in the delivery of PV systems - installation and performance standards, utility interconnections, rebate processing, building permits, education and workforce training, and financing.

“Many of the new technologies achieved by the solar industry originated, and are now flourishing, in Silicon Valley due to our culture of innovation together with abundant human and financial capital,” said Justin Bradley, energy director of the Leadership Group, which represents 210 Silicon Valley employers.

“The work of our energy committee in creating the Solar Center for Excellence will enable us to help chart the course for this burgeoning industry, creating high quality jobs for the region.”

Plans call for a physical home for the Solar Center for Excellence in the months ahead. For more information, visit the Leadership Group site at www.svlg.net or www.solartech.org.

About SolarTech

SolarTech (www.solartech.org) is a collaborative effort founded by members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group to create a Solar Center of Excellence in Silicon Valley. Its purpose is to identify, prioritize, and resolve technical and adoption barriers to solar technology by addressing issues of performance, processes, standards, and workforce readiness. SolarTech’s charter members include: Regrid Power, Horizon Energy Systems, Miasole, Silicon Valley Power, SunPower, NOVA Workforce Board, and PG&E, as well as Sharp Solar, SolFocus, SV Solar, Generating Assets, Tyco Electronics, and the Silicon Valley-based colleges

About the Silicon Valley Leadership Group

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, founded in 1978 by David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, represents 210 of Silicon Valley's most respected employers on issues, programs and campaigns that affect the economic health and quality of life in Silicon Valley, including energy, transportation, education, housing, health care, tax policies, economic vitality and the environment. Leadership Group members collectively provide nearly 250,000 local jobs, or one of every four private sector jobs in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.svlg.net, or call (408) 501-7864.

Company Undertakes Volunteer Efforts to Install Solar Power Systems in New Orleans Communities

Regrid Power, a Bay Area solar design and installation company, recently volunteered on solar power initiative in New Orleans, and collaborated with the charitable organization Rebuilding Together Silicon Valley on home refurbishment projects in San Jose. In recent weeks, Regrid principals and employees lent their time, talent and material to helping several Bay Area homeowners – making their homes safer and more energy efficient. Additionally, Regrid employees traveled to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward to help install solar power systems on homes in neighborhoods that had experienced devastation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

“It is very rewarding to participate in the effort to equip homes in New Orlean’s Lower Ninth Ward with clean, reliable, renewable solar power systems,” said Regrid CEO Tom McCalmont. “We were also delighted to work with folks in our neighboring community in California to help refurbish their homes – replacing lighting fixtures, exhaust fans, faucets, household appliances; making plumbing and electrical repairs, painting, and rebuilding porches that were in disrepair. Having our firm provide volunteer time and expertise is very consistent with Regrid’s philosophy of giving back to the community.”

About Rebuilding Together Silicon Valley

Founded in 1991, Rebuilding Together Silicon Valley (formerly Christmas in April) transforms homes and lives by repairing or rebuilding homes and community facilities for low-income homeowners, particularly the elderly, the disabled and families with children. Each year, more than 1,500 Silicon Valley volunteers gather to complete both major and minor repairs and improvements, enabling residents to live in warmth, safety and independence. All repairs and improvements are completely free of charge with materials provided through donations and funds from area businesses, organizations, and private individuals. Please visit www.rebuildingtogether-sv.org for more information.

By Vindu Goel, San Jose Mercury News

Article Launched: 11/25/2007 01:45:34 AM PST

Every once in a while, somebody in government comes up with an idea so brilliant, that everyone else ought to copy it.

Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and a former official in the Clinton administration, dreamed up one of those just-gotta-steal-it notions.

DeVries crafted a plan, just approved in concept by the city council, to help Berkeley homeowners and businesses pay for solar electric systems, solar water heaters and other energy-efficiency improvements through a customized, voluntary surcharge on their property taxes.

Essentially, the city would use its access to cheap bond financing to offer residents low-cost home-improvement loans, repaid over 20 years by whoever owns the property. Homeowners paying the typical $15,000 for a solar-power system after federal and state rebates would owe an extra $100 to $115 a month in taxes, much of which would be offset by savings on their monthly electric bill.

Meanwhile, taxpayers who don't borrow anything wouldn't pay a dime. All administrative costs would be borne by participants.

"It's not rocket science," said DeVries, who came up with the notion after a couple of intense weeks of brainstorming at the beginning of the year. "I was pretty convinced that someone would have thought of this before. We do this for underground utility districts."

DeVries is too modest. Although a lot still needs to be worked out before Berkeley starts offering the loans next summer, the property-tax financing structure could offer a national model for how local governments can help fight global warming and save residents money.

In one stroke, the plan would remove the biggest barrier to installing solar - coming up with the upfront cash. It would cut participants' energy costs and make their homes and buildings more valuable. If adopted widely, it would significantly reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

Tom McCalmont, chief executive of solar installer ReGrid Power in Campbell, said the concept also could give the California solar industry a huge boost. "If it sweeps like wildfire, I think we could see a dramatic increase in demand, like a doubling," he said.

EPA is impressed

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is so impressed that it's expected to give Berkeley $160,000 to figure out the legal and financial details, with the goal of helping cities around the country copy the idea. Berkeley hopes to target 100 homes and 25 commercial and multifamily buildings in the program's first year.

State officials are already trying to figure out how to extend the notion beyond Berkeley to help meet California's goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020. Under current law, only California's 86 charter cities - which include San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto - have the authority to create a "sustainable energy financing district."

But "there's no reason you couldn't have a statewide assessment," said Ken Alex, who coordinates global-warming initiatives for California Attorney General Jerry Brown. "It just strikes us as one of these very creative solutions that doesn't seem to have any downside."

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is also studying the mechanism, which could help him achieve his vision of 100,000 solar roofs in San Jose in the next 15 years.

"The payback is almost guaranteed," said Jeff Janssen, a senior policy adviser to Reed. Janssen and other local officials are pushing the idea of forming a Bay Area regional entity that could borrow the bond money more cheaply than an individual city, lowering the costs to homeowners even further.

Just about the only losers in this scenario could be the banks that offer home-equity loans for energy efficiency. But with the turmoil in the mortgage market, especially for second loans, lending money to a city government looks a lot more reliable.

Removing an obstacle

Mike Borbely, a custom home builder who recently organized more than 40 Willow Glen residents to make a group purchase of solar panels, said one of solar's thorniest issues is that it takes up to 10 years for a homeowner to recoup the installation costs through lower electric bills.

Although people can take out home-equity loans to finance the system, owners who think they might move in just a few years often don't want to make the investment. By bundling payments into the property-tax bill, a new owner would inherit the tab along with the solar panels. "It's pretty cool," Borbely said.

Not bad for government work.

By Matt Nauman, San Jose Mercury News

Article Launched: 11/20/2007 01:49:31 AM PST

Tom McCalmont came to Silicon Valley in the '70s to work in the tech industry. He likens the time to the anything-goes atmosphere of the Wild West. There was lots of talk about big ideas and fabulous riches from hundreds of companies backed by flush investors.

"The opportunity was there," he said, "but nobody quite knew what innovation was going to trigger it." It turned out to be the personal computer. He's now in the solar-power industry and senses a similar vibe.

"It feels to me as if we're in the same phase," said McCalmont, who runs ReGrid Power, a solar installation company in Campbell. "There's a lot of excitement, a lot of innovation."

There's also a lot of hiring. Silicon Valley solar companies are on a hunt for talent. Akeena Solar of Los Gatos is looking for installers. GreenVolts of San Francisco wants reliability test engineers. Innovalight of Santa Clara wants an ink formula chemist. Nanosolar of San Jose wants technicians and engineers.

And Solyndra of Fremont, SolarCity of San Francisco and SunPower of San Jose, well, they want everybody. Those companies had 31, 50 and 69 job openings, respectively, on Web sites earlier this month.

"We're growing a team so fast," said Nancy Hartsoch, vice president of marketing at SolFocus of Mountain View. Hers is one of dozens of Silicon Valley solar companies hiring hundreds of workers right now, from semiconductor expatriates who worked with silicon to construction workers who will install solar panels on roofs.

That's welcome news in the Silicon Valley, which had lost jobs for three consecutive months through September before adding 6,900 in October, according to the state Employment Development Department. The Valley has 11,200 more jobs today than a year ago, but employment is nowhere near the levels hit during the dot-com boom.

The hiring binge is likely to continue. Solar Tech, a group of local solar companies trying to create a Solar Center of Excellence in Silicon Valley to serve training and product-testing needs, says the number of people employed locally in solar will grow 10 times over the next 10 years. That's from 1,000 to 2,000 now, to 10,000 to 20,000.

McCalmont, who chairs Solar Tech, said that number might be conservative and could approach 30,000 jobs.

Hartsoch has seen this before. She came out of the integrated-circuit business before joining SolFocus, which builds photovoltaic systems to provide power for industries.

Getting the right people, when other companies are looking to hire them, is "clearly very intense," said Hartsoch, who saw similar competition in her previous career.

SolFocus' staff, now 55, will grow to 70 by the end of the year, and to 130 to 150 by the middle of 2008, she said.

Bob Legendre, SolFocus' vice president of operations, previously worked in the telecom and disk-drive industries. He wasn't looking to move into solar, but he kept getting four or five calls from head-hunters a week.

When he talked to SolFocus, he became convinced of the industry's potential. "This is an upcoming, emerging technology. . . . It's going to change the world."

Legendre, 50, hears some compare the solar expansion to the Internet boom nearly a decade ago, but he dismisses it. "Solar has a lot more substance," he said.

Solar companies are aggressive in finding new employees. SolFocus has an employee referral program. Hartsoch uses a recruitment firm to help SolFocus find the right people.

"I want those people to be the people other companies don't want to lose," she said.

SolFocus gets applications from engineers, from people with experience in optics who have worked for lighting companies, from materials experts with physics degrees.

Few, however, come out of solar companies. That makes sense as most of the companies in the field are new.

"The good and the bad thing about solar is that nobody who comes to apply has any experience with solar," McCalmont said, "so we have to train them." The common theme among applicants, according to Doug Richards, vice president of human resources at San Jose's SunPower: "They see the opportunity to make a real difference in the world."

Peter Beadle launched greenjobs.com in 2005. Based in Fairfield, the site has a few hundred jobs listings from renewable-energy businesses, most of them solar companies.

He said one small solar company bought an ad package that included seven job listings. "They used up all their listings within two months," he said, and now have an unlimited package normally used by large companies such as BP Solar, GE Energy and Sharp Solar.

A study financed by the American Solar Energy Society released this month forecasts almost unprecedented job growth in solar and other clean-tech industries. From 8 million jobs and $933 billion in revenues generated by renewable energy and energy-efficiency industries in 2006, the numbers are predicted to rise to perhaps more than 40 million jobs and $4.5 trillion by 2030. Solar represented just 17,600 jobs nationally in 2006, the report says. But the industry group is forecasting almost unimaginable growth to more than 1.3 million solar jobs in 2030, representing a 7,582 percent increase in 24 years. "The green collar job boom is here," said Neal Lurie, marketing director of the solar group.

GOAL: MAKE EQUIPMENT CHEAPER, EASY TO INSTALL

By Sarah Jane Tribble, San Jose Mercury News

Front page, 06/02/2007 01:36:17 AM PDT

Sure, it's cool to be green these days. But Silicon Valley says it's something much more: It's good business.

Regional leaders in business, government and policy announced an alliance Friday to advance solar power by making it cheaper and easier to install. The group, led by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, will work to improve the solar workforce and promote research that will make solar panels more efficient.

Clean technologies - such as solar - are seen by many as the offspring of the high-tech industry that has driven Silicon Valley's technology for years. The same innovation and risk-taking attitude that is a trademark of high-tech entrepreneurs is also driving investment in alternative energy.

Indeed, the region is already embracing the clean-technology industry. Nearly $730 million was spent on clean technology investments in Silicon Valley during the past two years, and networking events are a constant. For instance, prospective entrepreneurs and investors are expected to gather Monday at a matchmaking event in Menlo Park.

"It's clear that this is the Internet revolution on steroids," said Tom McCalmont, president of Regrid Power and chairman of the alliance, called SolarTech.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed joined the effort Friday, saying his city will put together a "package of incentives" to entice more solar development. That will include expediting the permit and certification process for solar installers as well as possibly offering a citywide purchasing program, which would allow residents to buy solar equipment at a discount.

"This will be another Silicon Valley success story," Reed said. "I am absolutely sure."

Could Add Tens Of Thousands Of Jobs

By David Louie, KGO

June 1, 2007

The next dream for many high-tech leaders is to see Silicon Valley turn into a serious center for solar energy technology. But, it is easier said than done as attendees learned at a conference in the valley today.

In a room at San Jose's Cypress Semiconductor may be the next Steve Jobs, David Packard or Bill Hewlett. Instead of computers, their focus will be on solar technology.

Instead of computers, their focus will be on solar technology. It's only a $15 billion dollar industry today. To grow, a host of issues will need to be tackled.

Tom McCalmont, Regrid Power Solar Electric Systems: "Things like building permits, utility interconnection standards, assuring that we have a trained work force. All of these are issues, and as we tackle them, we will proliferate the size of the market and the technology."

Reducing costs is another issue. Installation runs about 20-percent of the cost. It's half that amount in Japan and Germany.

Land to build large solar panel arrays is expensive, especially in California. So, other ideas are being tested.

Bobby Ram, Sunpower Corporation: "Similar products can be used to put parking lot structures or arrays on top of parking structures that provide solar power and shade to vehicles during the day."

As these issues are addressed, the valley could see 20,000 to 40,000 jobs created.

Michael Curran, Nova: "One of the nice things about solar is the range of jobs here are not just in the design and engineering. They're in the sales. They're in the production. They're in the installation. They're in the logistics of moving things around. They're in the maintenance. They're in the operations, which is a wide range of jobs."

Solar entrepreneurs are showing the same confidence and appetite for risk-taking as the semiconductor pioneers.

Alan Gartner, Energy Connect: "I don't think I would be here unless I thought that our company was wildly capable of morphing and changing and meeting whatever the needs of the energy market are."

No one's suggesting that the name Silicon Valley will soon be replaced by Solar Valley, but given the interest in solar technology, it appears that it's going to play a major role in the future of the region's economy.

SolarTech will help train installers and facilitate permitting

Tom Abate, Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle

Friday, June 1, 2007

Source link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/01/BUG6HQ5KH91.DTL

Hoping to cement the Bay Area's lead as a solar energy center, an alliance of industrial, academic and policy leaders will unveil an organization today, SolarTech, aimed in part at helping homeowners finance solar arrays and at training workers to install them.

"We could need 20,000 to 40,000 workers in the Bay Area alone," said Tom McCalmont, chief executive of Regrid Power, a solar energy installation company in Campbell and a founding member of SolarTech.

The group debuts at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Energy Summit today at the San Jose headquarters of Cypress Semiconductor -- the chipmaker that has spun off a solar-cell manufacturing company called SunPower.

In a white paper posted on its Web site, the group outlines plans to do things like work with community colleges to train installers and help governments streamline permit processes.

"It's the Wild West out there in solar right now,'' said Leadership Group energy director Justin Bradley, who helped pull together today's summit and SolarTech.

Likening solar now to computing three decades ago, Bradley said startups are creating technologies faster than consumers can understand their features, or local permit offices can figure out how to inspect them, or banks can devise financing packages.

Add to such headaches the need to train workers to install these arrays and the result is a set of nettlesome issues that could either retard or accelerate the adoption of solar energy, depending on whether they're solved, Bradley said.

Among the speakers scheduled to address the Energy Summit is former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is expected to tell the group about his plans to install a solar array on his home. In addition to the SolarTech report, the summit will unveil a wider-ranging document that pulls together an overview of all the efforts under way to reduce greenhouse gases in California in keeping with the spirit of the state's Global Warming Solutions Act.

"This is the first report that shows how the pieces fit together in California's first-in-the-nation law to limit global warming pollution,'' said Eric Wanless of the National Resources Defense Council, which co-authored the report with the Leadership Group and with Environmental Entrepreneurs, the groups of investors who played a key role in passing the carbon-reduction bill.

Meanwhile, in a related development indicative of the mounting interest in alternative energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers Ryan Wiser and Mark Bolinger have released the first Annual Report on U.S. Wind Power Installations, which assembles facts about the costs and performance characteristics of the turbines used to turn breezes into current.