Excerpt from the NCSEA newsletter:
Solar 2009 is happening this week in sunny Buffalo, New York. The American Solar Energy Society is expecting record attendance, including dozens of business leaders and technical experts from North Carolina. NCSEA has been working with the ASES team in an effort to bring this national solar conference to downtown Raleigh, NC in 2011. We expect to hear the final decision on site selection very soon, so stay tuned!
The opening plenary at this week’s conference featured a map of leading US states in the solar market. For the first time, NC has broken into the top 10. Several national solar firms place NC in their top six state markets. The conference opened with a strategic look at the industry from General Electric, Applied Materials and SunEdison founder Jigar Shah. It was clear from their presentations that NC has finally broken into the leadership ranks of the US solar market, and is poised to grow our existing solar firms and recruit new solar component manufacturers into the state.
Solar thermal hot water industry players were enthusiastic about the potential for NC’s solar thermal Renewable Energy Certificates market. Several experts stressed to NCSEA staff that if the NC Utilities Commission implements an online exchange to buy and sell renewable energy RECs, including solar thermal hot water, NC could quickly become one of the top 5 US state markets for solar thermal hot water, which could significantly reduce our state’s need for new coal and nuclear power plants. Also, several presenters on Tuesday and Wednesday stressed that while NC recently improved our Net Metering rules, they are still inadequate to drive solar and distributed generation market development in NC.
On Tuesday, NCSEA Executive Director Ivan Urlaub delivered two training presentations for over 40 state solar organizations, as part of ASES’ ongoing effort to strengthen the solar community nationwide. Urlaub gained insights into improving NCSEA while providing one-on-one mentoring for new Executive Directors and Board Directors of several state-level solar organizations struggling with change management and rapid growth opportunities. On Wednesday, Solar Nation and ASES announced they joined forces to bring the solar grassroots community, solar installers, and solar experts under one roof to increase the public’s energy literacy and use of cost-effective solar solutions.
NCSEA members Dr. Thomas Henkel, Rusty Haynes and Laurel Varnado presented papers and moderated panels on topics ranging from “Community Net Energy Metering” to “Solar-Driven 2E Absorption Chillers.”
