climate change | Solar Forward

One Belt One Road and the Solar Warrior

admin — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 20:27:47 +0000

While President Trump is talking about retrenchment, President Xi is pushing to expand China’s international reach by investing over $1 Trillion to build a transportation and economic corridor across Asia to Europe. The economic benefits are already bearing fruit for General Electric with sales of $2.3 Billion in equipment to China with another $7 Billion in possible sales by next year.

Infrastructure investment has historically served as open platforms for economic and geo-political stability. Currently China has an overcapacity for the production of solar panels, steel and many other products. Utilizing these resources to build railroads from Laos to Budapest is the largest transportation and energy development project in history.

The One Belt and One Road Initiative (OBOR) may not have an acronym that spells success, but the pay off, if it is successful, will ensure that China can ship products and influence with ease. It envisions a Silk Road Economic Belt, encompassing railroads stretching from China to Europe to host trade and infrastructure, and a 21^st Century Maritime Silk Road, establishing sea-based network of shipping lanes and port developments throughout Asia, Pacific and Africa.

GM, Ford and other companies are building technical development centers in China to piggyback on this huge marketing opportunity. China is committed transforming their transportation infrastructure to 25% electric cars by 2025. This will drive technological development and create new markets in alignment with the Paris Agreement.

The complexity of getting over sixty countries to agree to Chinese investment and Chinese owned infrastructure circumnavigating their borders is by itself a political and economic victory. The risks are high, but the long-term rewards can enable China to look back at Mr. Xi as a bold visionary who is building roads and bridges while Trump is obsessed in building a wall and renouncing Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest trade agreement in the world.

One of the architects of OBOR is Wang Huning, former college professor and now leading communist party official. He is well traveled and has had conversations with many American academics and government officials. Wang has never run a state ministry or governed a province, yet he is a key figure behind Xi’s centralized power through enforcing his theory of neo-authoritarianism. He became a top member of government in October 2017, joining the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee. The New York Times called him, “an ideologue focused on rivalry with the United States.” Exploring his past and following his footsteps will draw a path to the future of China.

Together, the 64 nations involved with OBOR account for 62% of the world’s population and 30% of its economic output. [1] To date, all these nations have consumed less energy and inserted less carbon into the atmosphere than the United States. As OBOR is rolled out the technology utilized will be modern and more efficient than legacy infrastructure in the western world.

The United States has no game plan to expand our reach, our markets or even recognize the Paris Agreement. Instead, within two months the Trump administration will implement an import tariff on all solar panels that will cripple the economics of the solar industry. This will put people out of work and increase our dependence on fossil fuels – an inverse policy of the Chinese, unsustainable and more expensive in the long run.

In Montana, the Northern Cheyenne Indians successfully fought the coal industry and embraced solar energy. Solar power, to the Cheyenne, embodied the worldview they were raised with, “You don’t take and take and take. And you don’t consume and consume and consume. You take what you need and then you put back into the land.”

Red Cloud, is a Cheyenne solar entrepreneur. He tells his students that deriving energy in a way that heals and protects the natural world is not just about employment. It’s a continuation of, “what the ancestors shed blood for, we always fought for-the earth.” He is training them not just to be technicians, but to be “Solar Warriors.” Reinvestment in renewable energy was seen a long-term solution to save money and protect the earth.

Our carbon footprint is an undisputable historical fact. If we put a price on our past consumption and the cost of climate change, the debt would bankrupt the United States. To pay off our injustice to the planet we would have to reabsorb our CO2 and find a way to keep the planet from warming, killing coral reefs and melting polar ice caps.

At Solar Forward we have common goals with the Cheyenne. We are also “Solar Warriors.” Our staff is constantly working to enable our clients to have access to affordable renewable energy by lobbying legislators and negotiating with stakeholders to keep our solar installation business alive. We only know how to slow the advance of global warming; we don’t know how to reverse it. And we don’t have clear support from our government.

At times I am jealous of the Chinese. Clearly their vision is bold and they have much work to do, but they have goals that are cleaner and more defined from top down. Trump is threatening to build a wall that might have solar panels on it. Offers a Trojan horse on Twitter, while China is building a modern beltway into the future, send a clear message that ignorance is bliss.

We only have one Earth. Our responsibility for the next four billion years is to insure Earth is healthy as long as the sun keeps sending photons through space for us to catch.

You can call us photon farmers, solar warriors or renewable energy capitalists; Solar Forward is trying to save the planet, one solar system at a time.

Mark Smith, CEO, Solar Forward

[1] https://qz.com/983460/obor-an-extremely-simple-guide-to-understanding-chinas-one-belt-one-road-forum-for-its-new-silk-road/

Who Killed the Electric Car? Again?

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 21:48:13 +0000

Who Killed the Electric Car? Again?

Last weeks Republican Tax Proposal would eliminate the $7,500 income tax credit for electric vehicles. The impact would be devastating to the emergent electric car industry and adversely impact consumers and the environment. A New York City employee said, “it’s national suicide.”

In 1990, The California Air Resources Board (CARB), created a “zero-emissions vehicle mandate” requiring auto manufacturers that sold cars in California to offer an electric car model. The General Motors (GM) EV-1 electric cars, were loved by consumers, but after the mandate expired, GM repossessed the cars and destroyed them.

In 2006 an independent documentary explored the life and death of the EV-1 electric car. Actors Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks and Alexandra Paul are in the documentary film praising the car. As GM trucks were taking EV-1 cars away to be crushed, police stood guard and Ms. Paul was arrested, while protesting the death of her electric car.

I picked up an electric car in 2016 mainly due to the tax credits. Now it seems odd to visit a gas station. The car is clean and quiet.

In a replay of the California mandate in 1990, this month China announced an initiative: by 2025, 20% of all cars sold are to be electric. Warren Buffett backed, BYD (electric vehicle company based in China) has delivered over 50,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles – including busses to UCLA. China already leads the world in the number of electric cars produced with an estimate of nearly 300 thousand new electric cars on the road this year.

Where is our clean energy policy and who is leading our industry into the future? GM, Ford and Renault-Nissan are setting up electric car research ventures in China. The Warren Buffett backed BYD share price is up 50% since September 2017.

Are we repeating history and pushing our cart backwards? Or can industry lead the way without being impacted by government obstacles?

Solar Forward installs solar systems and electric car chargers every week. As a new industry we rely on incentives to enable the market to establish a foot hold. We ask for your support in contacting your legislators and letting them know it is in the economic interest of this country and the interest of our grandchildren’s lungs, to support green technologies and enable the electric car industry and ancillary businesses to thrive.

Mark Smith
CEO Solar Forward
11/12/17

http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-02/tax-credit-for-electric-cars-said-to-be-axed-in-gop-tax-proposal
https://jalopnik.com/what-could-happen-to-electric-car-sales-if-the-7-500-t-1820109797

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/china-hastens-the-world-toward-an-electric-car-future.html[/facebook]

Don’t Hold Your Breath

admin — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:31:01 +0000

In 1960, NASA tested the first Astronaut candidates by asking them to hold their breath. It seemed important at the time. NASA was looking for the smartest and most physically capable test pilots to fly a rocket into outer space. The unknowns facing the birth of a space program exponentially outnumbered the known’s.

We know our climate is changing. We know the extraction and burning of fossils fuels is harmful to living organisms affecting the Earths ecosystem. This is not rocket science, only empirical observation. When the most powerful North Atlantic storm in history hit Ireland this week, it was not just bad luck at work here – the weather patterns are different.

Periodically since the 1980’s years I have flown over Alaska. Glaciers are aging faster then my face. These types of changes are not normally witnessed in the span of one human life.

With the clarity of a single picture of Earth, the NASA Space program showed us that we are but a small sphere, in a massive void of darkness. The astronauts, who went to the moon, looked back at Earth and knew instantly, that blue and white dot, isolated and alone, was their only option.

You don’t need to be a test pilot or an astronaut to understand that there are limits to the capabilities of your spacecraft. If systems over heat, they go off line and you could die. Earth is our only spacecraft. It has a finite set of resources and the same rules apply for a space ship with three seats or planet with seven billion seats.

The process of extraction, refining and burning of fossil fuels creates chemical pollution and greenhouse gases. We warm up the planet with unutilized waste heat and release particulates and gases, adding catalysts that trap more heat. This is a simple fact of exploiting coal, oil and natural gas. An electric power plant is less than 40% efficient in converting heat energy into electricity. With transmission losses, another 15% of electricity is lost before electrons lights up your computer screen to read these words.

The efficient production and consumption of renewable energy has been my mantra and business model since the twin towers fell in New York. My goals are to stop extracting fossil energy and stop harming the planet.

Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the EPA, are acting like two drunken sailors after too many days at sea. The EPA announced the withdrawal of the Obama Clean Power Plan. Trump may have ended an imagined war on coal, but he continues to ignore market trends, science and the fact we can’t hold our breath for the next three years. Why is The Paris Climate Agreement in limbo? We now have an absence of a clean energy policy when the residents of the planet need fifty-year policy options on the table. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration is on track to dismantle over fifty environmental rules that are now considered too burdensome for the fossil fuel industry. This is an irresponsible violation of the laws of physics.

The only solace we are finding these days is in the courts, in private enterprise and in individual citizens who are making environmental decisions to shape their own policy. Why is there is insignificant political will to decrease pollution and increase efficiency? It seems like the best investment we can make in our future.

China announced a commitment to require auto manufactures to sell more alternative-energy cars be and 20% of all cars in China to be electric by 2025. The Internet “Great Fire Wall” keeps fake news from medaling in Chinese domestic politics. Clearly, at this point in United States history, we need to start learning from the Chinese.

Some days I have a longing for my past career as a journalist over my current vocation as CEO of a solar company, only due the predictability of my expectations. I never expected to be working in an industry where 85% of the companies fail and the market place alters radically based on political whims and arcane policies at utilities.

In Los Angeles we have a utility that promised new policies to integrate solar and battery storage within two months. This was July 2017. The translation: six months to never. Why is our industry frozen with hundreds of clients waiting? We are not holding our breath; we are working the problem.

When I was a 19 year old college freshman on the East coast, I was lucky to be given the keys to a Porsche 911 for the ten days of spring break. The only requirement was to deliver the car to Los Angeles without a scratch. Upon my arrival in the Los Angles basin, I entered into a thick cloud that smelled like dirty socks cooking in a gas station. I looked up into this gray mass and was befuddled. What was this foul haze? My uncle calmly told me, “this is persistent LA smog and it is perfectly normal.” Over the next fifteen years, politics, private enterprise and technology, worked together to clean up the air and breathing became fun again.

Tsingtao beer (CNN claims the most popular in the world) is brewed in the Chinese city of Qingdao, less than 300 miles as the crow flies from North Korea. If Stanford University is correct and one million people would be killed in the first day of a war between the United States and North Korea, this would have a catastrophic effect on beer sales. Not funny.

Nuclear gamesmanship is a critical world issue. Yet boys are playing with nuclear toys that should never be take off the shelf. The end result of boys pushing buttons with their nuclear toys would create a persistent layer of smog circling the Earth that would contain radioactive particles and dust. Reducing solar irradiance would lower solar production worldwide. The impact of this calamity would be devastating to the world economy and everyone’s health. There is no technological method to clean up this large of mess.

At this point every decision we make, as individuals, are the most important actions we can take to protect our future and the future of our planet. Politics is not staffed with enough folks with a vision beyond the next news cycle. We need to be thinking 50 to 100 years ahead or we will not have much to breath.

It is our collective and individual responsibility to take care of our space ship. We just can’t hold our breath long enough or expect the planet to clean itself.

St. Andrew’s Celebrates Solar Sunday

admin — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 21:48:06 +0000

St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mar Vista recently celebrated a huge milestone in their efforts to reduce their environmental impact. On Sunday February 16th, they held their “Solar Sunday” event, an afternoon filled with great food, tours of the facility’s green aspects, a skit about the hazards of being wasteful, speeches from community leaders, and a blessing of the 28 shiny new SunPower solar panels we installed for them.

It was wonderful to work with Pastor Caleb, Jan Peters, and the rest of the congregation at St. Andrew’s to truly help them put into practice the environmental stewardship they preach. Their 9.2 kW system will generate clean, renewable energy and reduce their dependence on the energy coming in from the grid, which is mostly generated using fossil fuels.

Solar Forward was happy to be a part of St. Andrew’s Solar Sunday event to educate attendees about the ins and outs of generating clean energy. If you’re a member of a church interested in going solar, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 310-433-3770. Utility rebates are still available for tax exempt customers. Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the process from start to finish.

Check out the photos below to see highlights from the day:

Utility Customers Outraged Over Possible Fee To Cope With Revenue Loss From Popular Solar Panels

admin — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 19:19:46 +0000

The relationship between some utility companies and solar customers has gone from lukewarm to downright hostile.

A state bill is working its way through the Legislature that would charge customers (not just solar customers) with a $10/month fee to make up for revenue losses utility companies have experienced due to the rising popularity of solar panels.

We at Solar Forward think this another blunder by the utility industry. Solar saves everyone money and reduces the need for power plants and transmission lines. Solar energy is generated where it is consumed, saving 10% on normal loss in wires and transformers.

This fee would apply to customers within Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric territories.

Consumer groups produced the video below, prompting Southern California Edison to issue a cease and desist letter.

Now customers are making their voices heard by rallying outside Edison’s offices in Rosemead and expressing their outrage at utility companies creating even more roadblocks for clean, renewable energy.

At Solar Forward, we will do everything in our power to make sure the bill does not become law so California residents can continue to choose solar energy for their homes and businesses.

Shutting Down Nuclear, Powering Up Solar

admin — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 19:41:19 +0000

The mistake of trying to fix fifty year old nuclear technology is going to cost us over $2 billion. That is enough to pay for over 100,000 home solar systems or rebates for 1,000,000 homes that enable a five year break even point. That is more power than San Onofre ever produced in a year.

Nuclear power is toxic forever, a national security risk, and inefficient. As with any centralized power source, more than 10% of the power produced is lost in the transmission lines before it gets to our homes.

Residential solar power plant

Solar on your roof is safe, clean, nontoxic, and decentralized. The power you produce on your home is consumed on site or next door. There is no transmission loss. There is no risk to the Earth and no risk of terrorism or nuclear meltdown. Solar power maintenance is simple, without risk of radiation, cancer or contaminating thousands of square miles.

Beware the atom, embrace the sun!

Outages More Likely with Climate Change

admin — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 19:00:35 +0000

Workers repairing power lines

With more energy breakdowns in our future, now is the time to consider a battery backup system or a new SMA inverter with an emergency backup circuit. Solar Forward is the most experienced installer of reliable grid interactive power systems in Southern California.

Put Out the Fire. Go Solar.

admin — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:36:21 +0000

After reading this riveting first hand account of the Doce fire in Arizona, it’s impossible to deny Mother Nature is a strong force to be reckoned with.

The Southwest is the hottest on a planet that is measurably hotter. We are extracting an endless supply of carbon from the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere with some clear results.

How do we live with ourselves and our planet as we change our already dynamic eco system? The key is to not add heat to our environment. Solar energy cools the planet. Be part of the solution. Put out the fire. Go Solar.

Doce Fire – Photo Credit: Rhonday Snyder

Truly Sunny Day for California

admin — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:18:01 +0000

Last Friday June 7th was an even sunnier day than usual across the state of California. That’s because solar electric systems provided 5% of the power consumed in California! This is an all time high, with more than double the solar power generated since last September.

Rooftop solar power plant

This news comes at a particularly opportune time as the San Onofre nuclear power plant, once Southern California’s largest electric generating station, is shutting down due to safety concerns. The amount of solar power generated last Friday was just about on par with the megawatt output of the soon to be decommissioned power plant.

At Solar Forward, we think last Friday is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more rooftops across California waiting to absorb the power of the sun and make California’s the cleanest grid in the nation.

More SunPower Than Ever Before

admin — Wed, 01 May 2013 00:30:16 +0000

Andrew and Mark at Antelope Valley

Deserts may look barren to the untrained eye, yet as California’s Antelope Valley proves, they’re a fertile breeding ground for solar.

Last Friday, Mark and Andrew took a trip out to what will be the world’s largest solar power plant. Known as the Antelope Valley Solar Projects, the development consists of two solar installations side by side in Kern and Los Angeles counties.

The Antelope Valley Solar Projects are creating 650 jobs and injecting more than $500 million into the regional economy

Through a partnership with Sunpower and MidAmerican Solar, construction on the 579 megawatt project is anticipated to be done by 2015. Not only will this project provide enough clean, renewable energy to power 400,000 homes, but jobs are already being created for the construction, operation, and maintenance of the project.

The panels used for the project exhibit the quality and cutting edge technology you’ve come to expect from SunPower. SunPower panels, which already provide the most energy in the least amount of space, will be mounted on Sunpower T0 Trackers, allowing the panels to track the sun throughout the day, resulting in a 25% increase in energy capture.

Check out more photos below from the kickoff celebration that took place Friday April 26th.