Noticias

Prevén auge de energía solar en Centroamérica

21 de octubre, 2014 - por Natiana Gándara
Publicado en por Siglo 21

Un reciente estudio establece la capacidad de instalar en Centroamérica hasta 1.5 gigavatios (GW) de energía fotovoltaica en un plazo de seis años hasta 2018, lo cual representaría un 81% del total proyectado.

El reporte de IHS Technology, señala que el país después de Honduras, serían los países que más aporten parte del mencionado crecimiento. Ven que Guatemala, El Salvador y Panamá, establecerán mayores proyectos que debieron competir en concursos definidos por precios y por contratos de largo plazo con los distribuidores de electricidad de cada uno de los mencionados países. El estudio refiere que la región está atrayendo la atención de los desarrolladores fotovoltaicos de todo el mundo. En este año, prevén que la capacidad en energía solar para los países de Centroamérica podría llegar a 22 megavatios (MW), frente a los 6 MW de 2013. Después se espera un salto gigantesco que tendrá lugar en 2015, cuando la capacidad llegue hasta los 243 MW. Pero es en los tres años siguientes cuando el mercado solar hará sus mayores avances en la región, pues ya se contaría con una alta participación en la generación de energía renovable. Sin embargo, el despliegue de la solar sigue siendo mínima en la actualidad.

Para Josefin Berg, analista senior de IHS Technology, alrededor del 70% de la electricidad generada en Centroamérica proviene de fuentes renovables, en su mayoría hidroeléctricas. Esto como consecuencia de que en los últimos años se han buscado opciones para dejar de depender de energía generada por petróleo, por el factor de las importaciones de combustibles fósiles. “Para contrarrestar esto y para evitar la volatilidad futura en los precios de la electricidad, los gobiernos han comenzado a apoyar la implementación controlada de energías renovables”, resaltó el especialista.

Precios favorables
A través de las ofertas presentadas, los reguladores en El Salvador, Guatemala y Panamá buscan mezclar energía renovable asequible en el nuevo mix eléctrico.

Eclipse of the Sun

22 de Abril, 2014 - Los Ángeles
Escrito por The Economist

A WORD of thanks to all those Chinese manufacturers who plunged into the solar-panel business and caused prices to plummet. Many have gone out of business as the subsequent glut made it difficult for any of them to turn a profit. Still, without their investment, the world's sunbelt would not have enjoyed such an unprecedented boom in rooftop solar energy.

Solar panels that use crystalline silicon and other photovoltaic (PV) materials to turn sunlight directly into electricity have experienced a five-fold decline in prices over the past half a dozen years. When Babbage first ran the numbers for his own roof, the cost of a typical 200-watt panel was around $1,500 (see “Sunny side down”, February 15th 2008). Comparable panels today cost no more than $300 apiece, while lower quality ones can be had for half as much.

Panel prices have actually inched up slightly over the past year, thanks to a flurry of demand in Japan since the government’s generous new “feed-in tariffs” (attractive rates used to boost the uptake of renewable energy) went into effect. Fortunately, solar’s other costs—inverters, switch gear, mounting racks and installation charges—have all continued to decline. Overall, the Solar Energy Industries Association reckons system prices fell by a further 15% last year.

Solar energy remains in its infancy, accounting for no more than 0.1% of electricity produced in the United States. But it has been growing rapidly from its minuscule base. America installed more solar capacity over the past 18 months than it did in the previous 30 years. It now boasts 13 gigawatts worth, with California contributing 5.7 gigawatts of that. Followed by Arizona, New Jersey, North Carolina and Nevada, the sunshine state shows no sign of slowing down—at least, for the next few years while PV arrays continue to sprout on rooftops.

The regulated utilities are a different matter. Financing for big solar projects is becoming a problem, as banks begin to worry about how generous clean-energy incentives will be when (or if) authorities renew them as they expire. Ushered in by the economic stimulus bill of 2009, many are already being phased out. In particular, the temporary tax credit that covers 30% of investments in solar plant—the cornerstone of the recent solar boom—is scheduled to fall to 10% in 2016.

Meanwhile, the market for big blocks of solar power is beginning to dry up. Across the country, utilities are fast approaching the proportion of electricity they are required to produce from renewable sources. By 2020, for instance, California’s electricity suppliers—facing the most aggressive requirement in the country—have to generate 33% of their output from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass or other non-fossil sources. However, their average is already over 20%. And most have locked up enough deals to meet the 33% target ahead of schedule.

In states that have splurged heavily on solar (Arizona and North Carolina as well as California), the contribution made by residential units is actually quite small. By far the biggest producers are either the utilities themselves, or merchant generators with long-term contracts to supply local utilities with clean power.

The biggest utility-scale solar installation by far is the 377-megawatt Ivanpah plant 120 miles (200km) north-east of Los Angeles. This $2.2 billion facility, with its 170,000 steerable mirrors focused on a boiler at the top of a 40-storey tower, started generating electricity in January (see “Let the sun shine”, March 8th 2014). Two other utility-scale solar farms are being completed in the region. Like Ivanpah, both also use concentrated solar power (CSP) rather than arrays of PV panels. The $1 billion facility at Crescent Dunes in Nevada will generate 110 megawatts, selling its electricity to NV Energy, a utility based in Las Vegas (see “Steering sunbeams”, August 7th 2009). Meanwhile, a 250-megawatt solar station is nearing completion in the Mojave desert, north-east of Los Angeles. The $1.6 billion array of parabolic mirrors will supply solar power to Pacific Gas and Electric.

After these three solar projects, the pickings for developers within the United States look slim. A handful of other projects planned for later in the decade have encountered obstacles of one sort or another. Some have been suspended, others cancelled or rejected by regulators. Nearly all have run into environmental difficulties.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s proposed array of 1m PV panels in Owens Valley is a case in point. With a bitter history of dealings with Los Angeles stretching back to the water wars of the 1920s (subject of the film “Chinatown”), local ranchers, residents and conservation groups have dug in. The city may have to look elsewhere for the final tranche of renewable energy needed to meet its mandate.

The same tale is heard across America. Of the 365 applications made since 2009 for federal aid to help build solar plants, only 20 projects are underway, reports the Los Angeles Times. The three mentioned above are the only ones actually in service, or soon to be so. Indeed, had it not been for a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee, the Ivanpah plant would never have been built, admits NRG Energy, joint owner of the facility (along with BrightSource Energy and Google). According to David Crane, NRG’s chief executive, the trend to such large solar plants was “idiotic”

Apart from being on track to meet their solar targets, the utilities are struggling to digest the large chunks of renewable energy they have recently acquired. Because solar power is intermittent, matching electricity supply with customer demand has made load balancing more complicated than usual. Given the recent abundance of cheap natural gas, the utilities understandably feel no burning desire to commit themselves to any more long-term solar contracts.

All the more so now their market is in secular decline. Since peaking in 2007, electricity consumption in America has been falling steadily—thanks to conservation, more efficient appliances, and changes in America’s industrial mix. With businesses and homeowners buying less electricity as an increasing number of them have switched to solar, utilities are having to spread their high fixed costs over fewer kilowatt-hours. That has made them more determined than ever to roll back the generous rates they have had to pay for purchasing electricity from customers with spare solar capacity.

Under the so-called “net-metering” rules, a utility’s customers with solar systems are credited for any surplus electricity they generate that flows back to the grid, usually at the same retail rate customers pay when they buy electricity at times when the sun is not shining. The reimbursement appears as a credit on their electricity bills.

In the past, the power companies reimbursed independent suppliers at their own “avoided-cost” (ie, wholesale) rate. But they have gone along with net-metering because it is simple and cheap to administer and requires no investment. Modern electricity meters work just as well backwards as forwards, allowing the net amount of electricity bought or sold by a customer to be measured directly (see “To and from the grid”, June 1st 2012).

Lately, however, the utilities have begun to chafe at having to buy electricity from solar customers at the retail rate now there are so many of them. They argue that solar customers do not cover their share of the cost of maintaining the grid, driving up costs for those without solar systems. They want the net-metering rules changed, so they can buy electricity from solar customers wholesale and sell it to them retail.

Unsurprisingly, the solar industry and its customers are up in arms. Rooftop systems relieve utilities of having to make costly additional investments in renewable energy, they say. Besides, in encouraging distributed generation—ie, lots of small islands of power scattered throughout the community—net-metering strengthens the grid rather than weakens it. As a bonus, solar customers tend to feed surplus power into the grid at times when the utilities are desperate for it and are having to pay a higher price to meet peak demand.

In California, the present net-metering rules expire in 2017. A law passed in 2013 by the state government required the California Public Utilities Commission to come up with a replacement programme for net-metering by the end of 2015. The law also asked the regulators to devise a transition plan for people who already have rooftop arrays. The utilities have pushed for a six-year grandfathering period before net-metering would cease to apply, while homeowners and businesses have sought 30 years—the working life of a typical solar system.

Meeting in San Francisco in late March, the regulators agreed that solar customers in the current net-metering programme will continue to receive net-metering benefits for 20 years from the date they installed their systems. The bigger issue—of what deal future solar customers can expect from 2017 onwards—has yet to be resolved. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the solar industry’s future rests on the outcome.

La energía solar, una alternativa que comienza a crecer en Centroamérica

San José, 16 nov (EFE).- Ante los elevados precios de los hidrocarburos y la necesidad de disminuir la huella ambiental, en los últimos años en Centroamérica se ha comenzado a impulsar la energía solar como una alternativa más barata, aunque su uso, hasta el momento es limitado.

Iniciativas de energía solar a nivel empresarial son cada vez más frecuentes en la región, a lo que se suman otras como la Planta Solar Miravalles, la primera en su tipo en Costa Rica y la más grande de Centroamérica, con una capacidad de 1,2 gigavatios hora (GWh) al año, capaz de abastecer unos 600 hogares.

La planta, ubicada en la calurosa provincia de Guanacaste, fue inaugurada hace un año y tiene una superficie de 2,7 hectáreas, 4.300 paneles fotovoltaicos de 235 vatios de potencia cada uno, y fue construida con una donación japonesa de 10 millones de dólares.

Las autoridades calculan que la operación de este proyecto ha logrado la reducción de unas 1.394 toneladas de emisiones de dióxido de CO2, desde su instalación en octubre del 2012.

Por otra parte, la estatal Refinadora Costarricense de Petróleo, asegura que ha logrado ahorrar 5.000 dólares mensuales en la factura eléctrica con la utilización de paneles solares en su edificio administrativo y otras instalaciones.

Según Recope, con esta tecnología es posible evitar la generación de 150 toneladas de dióxido de carbono al año.

A nivel empresarial, la comercialización de los paneles solares en Centroamérica está comenzando a cobrar fuerza como un medio de ahorrar y mejorar la competitividad, mientras a nivel residencial ya existen algunos esfuerzos.

La directora de Comunicación Corporativa de la empresa Panasonic en Latinoamérica, María Elena Álvarez, afirmó que la firma ha establecido como una de sus prioridades el desarrollo de paneles solares para empresas y casas.

"Si las personas invierten en generación de energía, tendrán un retorno de inversión a los seis o siete años de utilizar los paneles solares. Esto es un punto positivo para incentivar a las personas a utilizar energías limpias", comentó Álvarez.

Según datos de Panasonic, Costa Rica, Guatemala y El Salvador son los países de Centroamérica donde más se utiliza la tecnología para generar electricidad a partir de la luz del sol.

La empresa, cuya tecnología es utilizada en la Planta Solar de Miravalles, Costa Rica, calcula que con estos paneles solares, el ahorro de la factura eléctrica para una familia podría ser de hasta un 95 %.

En El Salvador, uno de los proyectos más importantes es el de la empresa HILCASA, que en septiembre pasado culminó la instalación de un sistema de paneles solares que consta de 4.028 unidades para generar 1 MW de electricidad.

Según datos de Panasonic, la empresa INTRADESA de El Salvador tiene contemplada la instalación de 3,884 paneles, que permitirán generar en total 1.68 GWH anuales.

Otros ejemplos en la región son la empresa MAX de Guatemala, el Registro Público de Panamá que logra generar 83 KW con energía solar, entre otros.

Según la Alianza en Energía y Ambiente de Centroamérica (AEA), que forma parte del Sistema de Integración Centroamericana (SICA), la región se ha convertido en un líder mundial en energía renovable, pero especialmente en la generación hidroeléctrica.

Según datos de la AEA, Centroamérica cuenta con el potencial para satisfacer el 100 % de su necesidad eléctrica mediante fuentes renovables.

En esta región, donde 7 millones de personas no reciben energía eléctrica y cerca de la mitad de la población aún cocina con leña, el 62 % de la energía eléctrica se produce con fuentes renovables y el restante 38 % corresponde a derivados del petróleo.

La principal fuente de energía renovable de la región es la hidroeléctrica con cerca de un 45 % de la generación total, seguida por la geotérmica con aproximadamente un 10 %, mientras la biomasa y el viento suman alrededor del 8 % y la solar es apenas incipiente.

(Agencia EFE)
Noticia obtenida de lainformacion.com