Tag: solar power

Solar power is not blazing hot in Memphis or Tennessee, but some rays of light promise the dawn of its brighter future here.

Barriers to solar power do exist in Memphis and Tennessee (as critics outlined in our previous story), but moves are underway to build the sector here and ingrain it as a sustainable portion of our power system. This story endeavors to tell that side of solar.

“We look at [solar power] two ways,” Scott Fiedler, a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) spokesman, said last week. “It’s green and green, green for money and green for the environment.”

Green Invest
We opened our “Sun Block” cover story by hypothetically hooking up Ford Motor Company’s massive Blue Oval City project straight to TVA’s current electricity grid. Ford plans for its electric truck factory to be carbon-neutral when it opens in 2025, though nearly half (45 percent) of TVA’s grid is a mix of coal (19 percent) and natural gas (26 percent). To bridge the gap, Ford will manage some of their carbon-neutral goals on their own. The Haywood County campus was designed for the potential use of geothermal, solar, and wind power.

For the rest, the company will likely depend on TVA and its Green Invest program. Green Invest is TVA’s largest solar-power program with the highest profile, involving the most money building the biggest projects, and the most likely to knock the most carbon from more carbon footprints. (It was also the largest omission from “Sun Block.”)

For TVA, Green Invest is an economic development tool attracting businesses, jobs, and investments. It’s something of a green-energy match-making program. Through it, TVA connects companies with environmental goals to solar-project developers throughout the Tennessee Valley. Since 2018, Fiedler said Green Invest has attracted more than $3 billion in investment through the TVA service area from companies seeking solar — companies like Google, Jack Daniel’s, Facebook, and others.

The program was used to bring a large-scale, 150-megawatt solar farm to Millington. That $140 million project will provide energy for a Facebook data center across the state in Gallatin, Tennessee. Green Invest has also been used by non-business entities like the city of Knoxville and Vanderbilt University to build solar facilities. Like the one headed for Millington, many of these solar installations are not built close to the entities that will use them. Knoxville’s project, for example, will be built in Walls, Mississippi.

Bryan Jacob, solar program director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), said such arrangements might lead some energy consumers to believe that the solar farm down the street will power their street lights. However, electrons follow physics, he said, and you really can’t trace where they will flow. He said, “power off that solar panel in northern Mississippi is not going to make its way to Knoxville.” But Knoxville can still feel good about sourcing solar, no matter where it comes from, Jacob said.

“It is legitimate,” he said of renewable energy credits, the accounting mechanism that allows Knoxville to take credit for cutting carbon in East Tennessee with a solar farm in DeSoto County, Mississippi. For one, he said, without the credits, the Mississippi solar farm might not have been built at all, leaving more carbon in the air. What’s more, many cities might not be able to find the open acreage in their footprints to build a massive solar farm. Placing them somewhere else makes them more affordable and, thus, achievable.

TVA Generation Flexibility Program
In August 2019, TVA began allowing the local power companies it serves (such as Memphis Light, Gas and Water – MLGW) to generate 5 percent of their power needs through sources like wind, solar, or natural gas.

However, locals can only use the Generation Flexibility program if they’ve signed one of TVA’s 20-year “long-term partnership agreements.” Jacob said about 140 of the 153 local utilities TVA works with have signed the agreement. MLGW has not signed the contract, as it weighs the decision to stay with TVA as a power provider or leave it.

In August 2021, East Tennessee’s Loudon Utility Board (LUB) used the program to begin work on the Dancing Horse Solar project. That 7.5-megawatt facility is expected to “power over 1,000 homes with carbon-free energy and will assist LUB in controlling rates with customers.” The board also hopes to leverage the renewable energy credits that come with the installation to “attract and retain industrial customers to this part of Tennessee.”

Solar at Home
Today, solar panels are mostly an exotic feature on Memphis homes or businesses. When Nike and Ikea added solar panels to their campuses, it made headlines in this newspaper.

Chris Koczaja, president and CEO of LightWave Solar and president of the Tennessee Solar Energy Industries Association (TenneSEIA), said without a financial incentive for solar or net metering (in which electricity flows in and out of a home) in Tennessee, “there’s no financial payback” to doing smaller-scale solar projects.

“It is either altruistic or based on resiliency because now that I’ve got solar and [battery] storage, I’ve got my own little microgrid,” Koczaja said. “So, when these big storms come through, I’ve got power generation available for my home. [Going solar in Tennessee] is really looking at those opportunities, but they’re much fewer and farther between.”

TVA ended its Green Power Providers program at the end of 2019. The program bought electricity from those with independent solar systems, like homeowners, who did not use all of it themselves. MLGW continued the program but reduced payments for that excess solar power from a retail rate to a wholesale rate.

It also instituted an electric service availability fee (of about $12 per month) for solar users. But MLGW said the fee is equal to the flat monthly customer charge now paid by regular MLGW electricity customers. The solar fee exists because MLGW’s monthly charges for electricity don’t cover the cost of serving its customers, said Becky Williamson, MLGW’s strategic marketing coordinator.

“When customers generate their own electricity, they’re buying less from us,” Williamson said. “We’re not made whole. So, as a public utility, we decided in late 2016 to add this charge.”

A common comparison for these fees among solar advocates is a grocery store charging a customer more for tomatoes because they grow some of their own tomatoes at home.

“So, I generate some of my power — but not all of my power — at home and they are going to tax me for what I buy at MLGW?” said Jacob, the solar program director with SACE. “It doesn’t sit right with me.”

Fiedler from TVA said the legacy Green Power Providers program still has 69 participants in Shelby County. Williamson from MLGW said applications for the program here, however, have “exploded” in the years after TVA ended the Green Power Providers program.

In its “on” years, the program would yield an average of 19 applications, of which maybe eight would be built, she said. In 2020, 85 applications for solar projects were filed. In 2021, 117 were filed. So far this year, MLGW has received 40 applications for solar projects, on pace to beat 2021’s record year for such projects.

“When critics say that TVA closing the program really disrupted the solar market, we’re not finding that to be true in Memphis at all,” Williamson said. “We have far more customers interconnecting now behind the meter than we ever had under the year of TVA’s incentive program, even back to when it paid as much as 12 cents above the retail rate.”

Scammy predators roam the solar space, said TenneSEIA’s Koczaja, promising deals (many on the internet) that seem too good to be true — because they are. Some solar companies will install shabby panels that won’t work or will con a customer into believing their new solar system will somehow be paid for by the government.

“It’s difficult because on one side you’ll see there is a lot more [solar] activity,” said Koczaja. “But on the other side, some of that activity or a good portion of it maybe shouldn’t be happening because of the predatory sales practices.”

To address that problem, TVA recently launched its Green Connect program. It is a network of solar contractors vetted by TVA to ensure they are insured, licensed, bonded, and will do an installation up to TVA standards.

MLGW and TVA customers do, however, have a solar option that doesn’t require installing a single black panel on their homes. That option is TVA’s Green Switch program. Like businesses getting credit for building solar farms elsewhere, customers can buy blocks of renewable power made elsewhere on TVA’s grid. The blocks are $2 each, and with each one TVA adds 200 kilowatt hours of renewable energy to its grid.

Customers can buy as many blocks of green power as they like. A Green Switch calculator on TVA’s website will show you how many blocks you’d need to offset all or part of your monthly electricity usage. For a monthly bill of $115 (1,200 kilowatts), for example, you’d need to buy six blocks of Green Switch power for $12.

Around 1,000 MLGW customers participate in Green Switch, buying about 465,000 kilowatt hours of renewable (not just solar) energy each month.

Back in the Day
Though still rare here, solar is not new around Memphis.

In an April ribbon cutting, onlookers eyed more than 4,160 black panels lounging like a silent battalion of backyard sunbathers at Agricenter International. It was the largest solar site in the state at the time, and its panels were the first in Tennessee to move side to side, following the sun. It was expected that over the next 25 years, the panels would remove tons of toxins from the air, equivalent to taking 5,000 cars off the road or planting 7,500 acres of trees.

“This solar farm will not solve America’s energy needs, but this farm and others like it are undoubtedly part of a long-term, more sustainable future,” said then-Agricenter chairman Bill Gillon at the time. That time was April 2012, 10 years ago.

Agricenter’s $4.3 million array was built and owned by Silicon Ranch, a company founded by former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. The company gave Agricenter 10 years to decide if they wanted to buy the solar farm. Ten years ago, then-Agricenter President John Charles Wilson said his organization would buy it if it was making money like it was supposed to.

Current Agricenter President John Butler said Agricenter has not yet decided to buy the solar farm. But he says it does bring in revenue from the land lease agreement with Silicon Ranch, provides power for the campus, and more.

“You’ve got 100,000 cars that pass the campus every day [on Walnut Grove]; you’ve got thousands of kids on the campus,” said Butler. “So [the solar farm] is a really good opportunity to incorporate it not only in our education but in our research.”

For many, Agricenter’s installation was the first solar farm they’d ever seen. But even back then solar panels were not new to Memphis. Agricenter’s panels were made just across town at the Sharp Manufacturing Company of America.

Between 2003 and 2010, Sharp made 2 million solar panels here, enough to power 65,000 U.S. homes. In 2011, the factory employed nearly 500 union members to build the panels, more than double the 230 working at Sharp in 2007. Business was booming, it seemed. But the company scuttled solar-panel production here and at a plant in Wales in 2014 under a restructuring of its solar business.

A major milestone for Tennessee solar was 2009’s Volunteer State Solar Initiative. Introduced by Bredesen, the program used $62.5 million from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to establish the Tennessee Solar Institute. That entity designed and built the West Tennessee Solar Farm in Haywood County, helped fund 171 solar installations across the state, trained 350 in a state solar workforce development class, and gave technical help to solar companies.

“This statewide initiative puts Tennessee in a leading role nationally to promote and capitalize on the solar industry and in turn curb our nation’s dependence on foreign oil,” then-Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Murfreesboro) said at the time (2009).

The West Tennessee Solar Farm, by the way, was built in part to help market the Memphis Regional Megasite to prospective companies. That site, of course, will become Ford’s clean-energy Blue Oval City campus.

TVA’s Fiedler said he couldn’t speak to specifics of Tennessee’s deal with Ford, especially whether the company was attracted by its Green Invest program. But he could say that “TVA has made our region the premier destination for businesses who want to achieve their sustainability goals.”

Global and National Perspectives
The world is still pretty dim when it comes to solar. According to the latest data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), solar power supplied just a bit over 5 percent of the world’s electricity last year.

But there’s no denying that solar power has turned a market corner and is hurtling toward the future at a breakneck pace. Consider that record numbers of solar installations have been installed all over the world in the last two years, even as the pandemic slowed materials production and gunked up supply chains.

For perspective, in 2010 about 17 gigawatts of solar power capacity was added. In 2021, 172 gigawatts of new solar installations were built. By the end of last year, more than half (57 percent) of solar installations were in Asia, 21 percent were in Europe, and 16 percent were in the Americas, according to the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

China leads the way as the unmatched global champion for solar installations. Last year alone, China added nearly 55 gigawatts of capacity for solar energy, nearly a third of all new solar power installations in the world. In the first quarter of 2022, China added 13.2 gigawatts of solar, a 148 percent increase in solar production from the same period last year. Still, China (at around 4.5 percent) ranks just below the global average (5 percent) for solar as a percentage of its total electricity generation.

Though the United States’ solar market was second only to China’s last year, the U.S. installed 23.6 gigawatts of solar last year, not even half of China’s increases. The U.S. total solar capacity was 120 gigawatts last year, less than half of China’s 309 total gigawatts.

The U.S. also falls slightly behind the global average of solar in its overall electricity mix (at 4 percent) behind China, the United Kingdom, South Korea, South Africa, and Morocco, according to the IEA. Australia leads the way globally on using solar, as nearly 15 percent of all its energy came from solar last year. The top five is rounded out by Spain, Greece, Honduras, and the Netherlands.

But if California were a country, it would top this list. The Golden State’s total electric generation mix is 25 percent solar. Other U.S. states would top Australia on this list, too. Behind California is Massachusetts (at 19.7 percent), Nevada (at 18 percent), Hawaii (at 17.1 percent), and Vermont (at 16.12 percent).

Oh, and how does Tennessee rank against other states on solar? It sits at 43rd place. The Volunteer State’s percentage of total energy from solar is 0.0056 percent, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA). That’s enough solar to power 61,904 of the state’s 2.4 million homes.

It’s still enough, however, to have 109 solar companies in the state that employ 3,948 people. The total investment of Tennessee’s 608 megawatts of installed solar power is about $918 million, according to the SEIA. However, the agency projects Tennessee’s solar capacity will more than double over the next five years (to 1,314 megawatts) and rank 22nd nationally.

Note: This story is a companion piece to “Sun Block,” our cover story from March on solar in Tennessee and the South. That story largely outlined challenges and barriers to solar power here. This story focuses on the opportunities for solar and the investments being made in it, and it frames Memphis in the global and national context of solar power.