Giffords and Mitchell look toward the sun

It is rare for U.S. representatives to travel far from the bosom of Washington, D.C. to the desert of southern Arizona. It must be counted a victory for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-8), then, when yesterday she presided over a field hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee's Subcomittee on Energy and Environment in her Tucson district with four colleagues.

Convened "to explore the potential for utility-scale solar power to provide a significant fraction of U.S. electric generating capacity," according to its charter, the hearing comes at a critical time for solar energy in Arizona and the country as a whole, as fuel and electricity costs rise and environmental concerns grab more and more attention. What took place yesterday in the sunniest major city in the country was not an exploration of the fact of the viability of solar power, but a discussion of how to deploy the technology most efficaciously.

The witnesses who joined Rep. Giffords and four other members of Congress, including Harry Mitchell (D-5) at the Pima County Administration Building, were culled from a diverse background, though monolithic in their commitment to solar energy. The six members of the panel consisted of resentatives from groups pushing to develop solar energy, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and executives at the state's two largest public utility companies.

"Solar is a big idea whose time has come," said Giffords in her opening remarks. "Imagine what it would be like if every time it rained, it rained oil – big, black drops falling from the sky. Don’t you think we’d find a way to catch some of that bounty from the heavens? I think we’d be running around with big buckets, scooping up every available drop," she said.This was a sentiment echoed by several other witnesses, if not as evocatively.

"I truly believe that solar power...can provide a significant level of generating capacity in the United States," said Mark Mehos, manager of the Concentrating Solar Power Program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is administered through the U.S. Department of Energy. And Tom Hansen, Vice President for Environmental Services, Conservation and Renewable Energy at Tucson Electric Power, advocated the "Solar Grand Plan," which was published in Scientific American in January and envisions an America that gets 70% of its energy from solar power by 2050.

Nonetheless, if the hearing served as a forum for solar advocacy, it wasn't always a sunny picture the witnesses painted. There is a real debate in the pro-solar community about whether to jump into large-scale production or a "distributed generation" (DG) model employing many scaled-down producing centers. The testimony of Valerie Rauluk to the effect that DG is for the moment far preferable than utility-scale facilities would seem to fly in the face of the plans to build the Solana station, a proposed 2,000 acre plant at Gila Bend that would be built by Spanish company Abengoa and administered by Arizona Public Service (APS).

There is also a question as to which solar technologies would best meet consumers' needs. While the most common approach at the moment utilizes photovoltaic panels, which convert sunshine into electricity directly, there are also proposals that would create facilities to concentrate heat from the sun to generate steam and power electricity-producing turbines.

Yet the point upon which all the witnesses converged was the need for federal support to advance solar power as a major electricity source. Tom Hansen claims that it will take $420 billion to institute the Solar Grand Plan in its entirety, but noted that "the Interstate Highway System had an initial cost of $425 billion in 2006 dollars." Joe Kastner, a vice president at MMA Renewable Ventures, claimed the existing tax incentives must be extended for at least seven years, saying "this is the minimum period necessary to enable rational investment decisions and deployment of resources in utility scale projects." Those tax incentives are set to expire at the end of 2008.

Unfortunately for the panelists, they may not be addressing legislators from the right house of Congress. Last month, the House passed a renewal of the credits, at which time there was stirred up some controversy around Harry Mitchell's vote on a motion intended to kill the bill. The bill now advances to the Senate, which has not yet calendared it.