The conference was opened by Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, C. Donald Babers, Regional Administrator for Region VI, U.S. HUD and Texas Public Utility Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman.

Smitherman provided some interesting Texas/ERCOT stats:

+ 1.7 million smart meters are installed as of July 31
+ 6 million will be installed by 2013
+ 9300 megawatts from wind in ERCOT footprint (900 MW more in Texas but out of ERCOT footprint)
+ 18,500 megawatts from wind in ERCOT planned by 2013 (that would be 20-25% of load)
+ There is a proposed rule for NON-WIND renewable target of 500 MW (most likely, solar)

From Dub Taylor of the State Energy Conservation Office, he provided this data of the fuel mix in Electricity in Texas for 2009:
+ Natural Gas 51%
+ Coal 34%
+ Nuclear 10%
+ Renewables (basically wind) 4%

One of the highlights of the conference, of which there were many, was the presentation by the new City of Houston Sustainablity Director, Laura Spanjian (we touched on Spanjian earlier this month on this blog here), summarizing the Houston’s achievements in sustainable growth. In March of this year the City of Houston was recognized for being ranked sixth on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 list of cities with the most energy efficient buildings.

Ms. Spanjian woke the crowd up after lunch with an inspired delivery of City of Houston accomplishments.

Solar and Wind initiatives include: A 100KW solar system at George R. Brown Convention Center funded jointly by the Houston Endowment ($850k), BP ($100k) and CenterPoint ($50k) and the purchase of 2 billion kwh (50 MW of power) from Texas Wind Farms over the next 5 years. The EPA ranks the City of Houston as the #1 in terms of renewable energy purchased by a municipality.

Other energy efficiency initiatives include the LED traffic lights at 2,000 intersections which have a cost savings of $3.6M per year, the LED Streetlight Pilot Project which are up to 50% more energy efficient and 755 hybrid vehicles (the 3rd largest municipal fleet in the country). It should also be noted METRO is purchasing is purchasing 100 hybrid buses a year and will have 449 in total by 2011.

Houston is “LEED”ing the way for all new construction, as mandated in 2004, and the Looscan Library was the City’s first LEED Certified building with a LEED Gold on Central Permitting Center and Fire Station 90 not far behind. Add to all of this the Residential Program for kWh reductions, the Weatherization Program, improving air quality using MAAM and DIAL technologies and Houston is well on its way to leading the nation in energy strategies.

We applaud the new Mayor Parker and her selection of Laura Spanjian as Sustainability Director.

It was a great presentation!

By the way, the event was held at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center on UT’s campus. The facility is LEED Gold.

And if it makes it into a paper like the USA Today, it is certainly mainstream.

What are solar carports?

Take typical surface parking lots — like ones you see in strip malls and many office buildings and apartment complexes — and add carports with solar panels as the roof.

You get covered parking for customers and tenants (you normally pay extra in apartments and office buildings for covered parking).

And the space becomes an alternative source of energy.

Here’s a picture from the Dell Computer campus in Round Rock, Texas.

We have been discussing these types of arrangements with several companies recently, so I am starting to think they are starting to take off in terms of acceptance.

The installations were to be performed by a company call SunRun. On Tuesday, June 29th, SunRun announced it closed a Series C round of funding for $55 million led by Sequoia Capital and joined by existing investors Accel Partners and Foundation Capital.

For those of you not wise to the VC world, Sequoia is the biggest and baddest Silicon Valley VC that there is. You may have heard of prior early stage investments like Google, YouTube, Apple, Yahoo!, and Cisco, among others.

Original investor, Accel Partners, is bigtime too with investments in Facebook, Veritas, and comscore.

Similarly, a recent report from Matter Network states that Goldman Sachs has begun covering the solar sector, including First Solar and SunPower.

We’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about green investment, so if you’d like read more here.

The fund, managed by a P.G.&E. subsidiary, Pacific Energy Capital II, is the largest single solar leasing pool to date, according to the company, and marks the growing interest of utilities in the renewable energy financing business.

The $100 million in financing is expected to fund solar installations for 3,500 homes in Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

I’m curious when funds like this will be created for Energy Efficiency projects. A solar kilowatt is just as effective as saving a carbon based kilowatt, so when will the smart money start to catch on?

Some of the more interesting findings about Generation Y (ages 15-29, your youngest workers who also account for 25% of the population):

98% aspire to work in a greener office

67% want their workplace to be environmentally friendly

70% want to have recycling bins – frankly I would have expected this to be higher.

47% want solar panels on site – this surprises me

This is the group that will dominate the workforce for the next 40 years. They are already almost a quarter of the workforce.

What is your workplace doing to meet these demands?

The study concluded that along with renewable energy being 100% feasible, it was also a reliable and economically sound energy decision.

Interesting side stat: Germany currently has one of the biggest renewable energies markets in the world with 2009 showing a 16.1% increase in the total share of electricity from renewable resources.

Other interesting survey notes from McKinsey:

More than 50 percent of executives consider sustainability—the management of environmental, social, and governance issues—“very” or “extremely” important in a wide range of areas, including new-product development, reputation building, and overall corporate strategy.

Yet companies are not taking a proactive approach to managing sustainability: only around 30 percent of executives say their companies actively seek opportunities to invest in sustainability or embed it in their business practices, for example.

This VC is invested in a company which turns CO2 into building materials.

Presenter Chris Helm, a GIS developer at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory, showcased a web tool called In My Backyard (IMBY).

It is a web based simulator for small commercial and residential solar projects, calculates production potential, and estimates cost of the system and energy savings (including applicable rebates and local electric rates). It also can do a bit cruder simulation for wind projects, including calculations for production potential (limited to 38 states), but with no economic components.

Future versions will potentially include an Open API, enhancing the wind components, adding dynamic building loads (currently assumes your house and standard power consumption), and perhaps even an iPhone application.

You can check out IMBY here.

It is a good first step for looking at potential solar projects, but it has several obvious drawbacks like ignoring shading and it also assumes constant electric rates for the life of system.

They mentioned a similar tool at Cooler Planet.

For grins, I tried a house that I own in Austin, Texas for the south-facing roof space and got the following results: 11 kW generation system, $90K gross cost, only federal incentive (30%), $63K net, expected energy savings year 1 at 9 cents per kWh = $1250, payback = over 50 years. Yikes.

I also did an apartment project in Houston, Texas with a similar payback timeframe.

Then Ted Quinby, another GIS developer at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory, showed the Open PV Mapping Project.

It allows you to see where current solar projects exist that have been entered into the NREL database and it includes information on each like size, cost, date of install, and location.

The Open PV Project can be viewed here.

It is a great visualization of the available stats, but it is limited since it is only as good as the data that has been added. Think about it like Wikipedia.

Perhaps the most interest stat of the day was that the average price in the U.S. for the average size solar system is coming down substantially. It was $11.00 per watt in 1998 to $8.01 per watt in 2009.

The city of San Antonio announced three new solar projects totaling $3.7M on the campuses of UTSA, St. Phillip’s College, and Cooper Middle school.

The US Navy announced a $200M contract with five companies for 40 MW of generation at multiple Navy and Marine bases throughout the South and Southwest.

The Italian government approved plans for a 72 MW solar power plant in Northeastern Italy.

That’s a big day on a local, national, and global basis.

“We actually are a perfect environment, economically and thermodynamically, as a raw resource for solar, but it hasn’t taken off,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas to the Dallas Morning News.

The PUC’s solar program would be based on the existing renewable portfolio standards, a requirement dating to 1999 for electric companies to include sources such as wind, solar and other renewable sources in their energy mixes.

Texas’ renewable energy standards, among the most aggressive in the country, have been so successful that electric companies met the 2009 goal by 2005. The Legislature responded in 2005 by setting more ambitious targets for 2015 and 2025.

Nearly all of Texas’ growth in renewable energy has been in wind power, which increased fourfold over 10 years. Other renewable power sources remained afterthoughts.

Solar power was especially held back by its cost, technological challenges and lack of transmission lines from sun-rich West Texas to energy-hungry cities.

Legislators recognized the lag with a 2005 mandate that Texas energy include at least 500 megawatts of new power from sources other than wind by 2015. The state also took steps to provide more electric transmission lines.

Interestingly, the DOE announced a new study which was carried out by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and AWS Truewind, finds that the contiguous 48 states have the potential to generate up to 37 million gigawatt hours annually. By contrast, total U.S. electricity generation from all sources was roughly 4 million gigawatt hours in 2009. Texas was estimated to be able to contribute 6.5 million gigawatts of that amount or 17.5%.

Here are the wind potential estimates for the contiguous 48:

In a similar note, I just noticed that TXU Energy, a Texas retail electric provider, is instituting a program to help 400 homeowners lease their rooftop solar. Very interesting.