SOLAR TODAY Blog

The real estate bubble has burst. Denis Hayes, president of The Bullitt Foundation and a pioneering solar engineer and advocate, thinks the world will work its way out of the its economic morass "in three months or three years."

But, he warned a large audience at the SOLAR 2009 Awards Banquet on Wednesday evening, "Recovery is mostly bad news. Behind it is an ecological bubble. Economic bubbles inevitably lead to collapse, and so do ecological bubbles - and there's no recovery from an ecological collapse."

Hayes recited a litany of possibly irreversible environmental disasters now under way, all driven by human activity. He warned that we are destroying not only wildlife habitat, but our own habitat as well. "We are turning breadbaskets into dust bowls," he said. "Externalities are larger than internal factors. The cost of maintaining a naval fleet in the Persian Gulf is not reflected in gas prices. Coral reefs are dying. Iowa's largest export is its topsoil. Aquifers are depleted, rainforests assaulted, and food chains are loaded with chemicals. It's a classic bubble. Mother Nature does not do bail-outs. She'll show up soon to break our kneecaps. The carrying capacity of the Earth, at the lifestyle level of a modern Swede, is two billion human beings."

"Sustainability is not easily achieved," Hayes said. As a start on environmental recovery, he advocated an upstream cap-and-trade program; green jobs that focus on crafting products that last instead of disposable junk; and a progressive tax on consumption instead of an income tax full of loopholes; and vigorous progress on deployment of clean energy technologies.

Technical papers: PV performance steady over decades

D. Osborn of Spectrum Energy Development reports that long-term testing of amorphous silicon shows they perform comparably to other PV technologies, with annual production degradation of .24 to .5%. Data were drawn largely from experience with large arrays operated by the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD). Frameless glass modules, if handled correctly, show a breakage rate of .3%, lower than other PV technologies.

Frank Vignola of the University of Oregon presented data on long-term testing of PV performance of moderate-size arrays in Ashland and Eugene. Results were close to those drawn from the SMUD data. The Oregon study reported an average decline in power, with rising temperature, of .5% per degree Celsius.