The solar industry calls this technology “building-integrated photovoltaics” or BIPV. Some of this new capacity will come from thin film solar panels that will be able to be printed right onto building materials, like shingles, steel roof casing, and windows. A lot of companies have been gunning for this market, and many have been held back by the difficult solar production market in 2012. There are at least 53 companies working on this tech, says Pike.

Dow launched its solar shingle product about a year ago in Colorado and began selling them in California and Texas earlier this year. Miasole, which was sold to China’s Hanergy in a firesale, had been working on BIPV, as had Arizona-based Global Solar Energy, which recently started layoffs and curbed manufacturing. Dozens of solar module makers went bankrupt or struggled in 2012, due to an oversupply and rock bottom prices.

But the BIPV market could provide a bright spot, says the Pike report. The value of the BIPV market could quadruple over the next five years from $606 million in 2012 to $2.4 billion in 2017. The market will also be encouraged by a rebound of home sales and construction.

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Put simply, here’s how one version of the argument goes: Forecasts of savings from energy efficiency measures are overblown, because when prices go down and people start buying more efficient appliances — like air conditioners or refrigerators — they will choose devices with larger capacities and other options that will drive total consumption up. It’s a fairly simple problem to define, but notoriously complex to grasp, and could have nontrivial conclusions.

If powerful enough, the energy rebound effect could hamper an important trend in industrial, consumer and commercial energy efficiency. Between increased government mandates for energy efficiency measures and the promise of significant energy savings from energy suppliers, the developed world is becoming increasingly more efficient with its energy use.

But not everyone agrees that Jevons Paradox has any bite. The Rocky Mountain Institutes’ Chief Scientist, Amory Lovins agrees that the rebound effect exists, but says it is quite small — perhaps absurdly small. Lovins has fought arguments about the rebound effect for years, stating back in 1988:

“It is, I believe, now widely accepted to be a fallacy whose tedious repetion ill serves rational discourse and sound public policy.”

Nevertheless, the issue continues to reassert itself. David Owens, staff writer for The New Yorker describes the following scenario:

“Imagine a primitive village in which the only energy input is food and the only way to transport anything is to carry it or drag it over the ground.  Now invent the wheel. If the village were Lovinsland, [adhered to Lovin’s argument] this increase in efficiency would cause food consumption and production to fall.  In the real world, though, we know that the villagers will reinvest their sudden energy surplus, leading to a cascade of mutually reinforcing increases in consumption of all kinds.”

On the surface it seems to make sense – for the consumer, an energy efficiency improvement can function much like a decrease in price; it’s cheaper, so use more. Voila, the rebound effect.

But the limitations to this effect also seem to be common sense. Even if I have the most efficient air conditioner, I’m simply not going to keep lowering the temperature until my family is shivering. The mountains of laundry won’t get bigger necessitating more wash cycles, I’m not going to go around turning on lights in unoccupied rooms, or buy lights that are so bright that they scorch my eyes. And if I am motivated to promote environmental stewardship, then my savings could be even greater. (Let’s acknowledge the flaw in this argument; I’ll just take that extra money and go on a Hawaiian vacation, consuming even more energy!)

Robert J. Michaels recently wrote about rebounding in his Wall Street Journal article, “The Hidden Flaw of ‘Energy Efficiency.” Michaels states that:

“Rebound greatly complicates the politics of energy efficiency,” and says “[studies] have yet to account for long-term and world-wide effects of greater efficiency.”

Okay, I’ll bite. Rebounding needs to be better understood to create rational forecast scenarios that reflect true energy savings from efficiency measures. This is especially critical as demand grows as electrification becomes more widespread in the developing world.

Rational debate over energy policy is necessary, but the discussion seems to quickly devolve into acrimony rather than collaborative efforts to develop useful approaches to grapple with this issue. Why? Because the rebound paradox is contrarian to the approach of current energy efficiency policy, yet easily informed with ideological bias.

The solution is quite simple: Aggressively study the impacts of rebound effects and incorporate those understandings into climate economic models.  It’s time to move beyond theory and embrace action.

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The Logic Behind Teamly

Scott Allison, the creator of Teamly, was scratching his own itch when he started creating the system: He’d gone from one employee to ten and was having trouble keeping track of the commitments each of those employees made. His organization was a little more loosely structured than other businesses might be, making most project management systems seem like overkill. All Allison needed was a clear picture of what his employees were doing and a way to comment on it. He wanted to make priorities a priority.

Teamly focuses on creating very short priority lists — just five things. The web application allows for setting daily, weekly and monthly priorities. It also allows managers and team members to review those priorities and provides real-time feedback for managers. The tool’s statistics make it easy to see how well an individual is doing at completing the priorities set on any given day.

Allison says, “Most to-do software suffers from the problem that they simply encourage very long and demotivating lists to be written, which you never get round to. By having a short list you think about what you are going to do, and what you are not going to do. Once you’ve achieved it you can be satisfied knowing you’ve done a good day’s work.”

The Right Place for Teamly

It’s unlikely that Teamly would be a good fit in a structured enterprise. Rather, its approach is better with loose systems because it allows for more self-direction for each team member. It can be a good fit for creatives or other professionals who have their own ways of doing things — Allison has gotten responses from GTD users saying it has been particularly useful for providing a high-level view for managers while allowing employees to work within the task management structures that work for them. The best indicator that Teamly would be a good fit for your team is if you’ve felt overwhelmed by the features built into more robust collaboration tools.

Allison notes that Teamly’s future growth will be constrained by the need to keep the tool simple: Additional privacy controls on individual team members’ priorities, a way to keep notes on tasks that aren’t priorities but shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle, and similar features are in the pipeline. Teamly’s creators are also looking at opportunities to integrate Teamly into other applications and create mobile versions.

Teamly is currently in beta and offers a free version for a single user.

Let us know what you think of Teamly in the comments.

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A nationwide standard would result in 274,000 more jobs around the country than sticking to the status quo, and will be needed to help stave off job declines expected to come in the short term as tax incentives and stimulus funding for U.S. renewables start to slack off, the report found.

It isn’t the first time someone has talked about a national goal for renewable energy. President Obama has called for a 25 percent national RES by 2025, and the Union of Concerned Scientists said in March that this would create 297,000 jobs and save consumers $64.3 billion in electricity and natural gas bills. While not quite so ambitious, the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill now cooling its heels in the House of Representatives, calls for the nation to get 20 percent of its power from renewables by 2020.

But Navigant’s report — which also assumes shorter-term national RES’s of 12 percent by 2014 and 20 percent by 2020 to get things going, and doesn’t include energy efficiency as part of an RES, as Waxman-Markey does — says that its more aggressive framework would create about three times the number of jobs that would come from the House proposal.

About 30 states now have their own renewable energy mandates in place, with California’s call for one-third of its power to come from renewables by 2020 among the most ambitious. But “Contrary to popular belief, a strong national RES will have major impacts in every state,” Jay Paidipati, a Navigant managing consultant, said in a Thursday conference call. In fact, sticking with the status quo is likely to lead to job losses in 10 states over the next 15 years, compared to a 25-percent RES scenario, which would lead to job gains across every state, the report contends. About half of those jobs would be in manufacturing, and another quarter or so in construction and craft trades, but a fair share of white-collar jobs would also be created, the report found.

The idea of a national standard has traditionally faced opposition from states seen as lacking in the natural resources behind renewable energy — most notably, states in the Southeast, which lack the sunny skies of the Southwest or the strong winds of the Midwest to capture for power generation. But the southeast could make up those deficits by turning to hydropower, waste-to-energy and biomass energy in a big way, according to Navigant.

Much of the growth in biomass jobs — 60,000 by 2025, the report says — could come in states such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia. Robert Cleaves, CEO of the Biomass Power Association, said the Southeast was “unequivocally the future of this industry” — a clear call to Southeast states to get behind a renewables push they’ve so far been slow to adopt. (By the way, a national RES isn’t quite as simple as each state getting 25 percent of its power from in-state renewable sources, as states and utilities could trade renewable energy credits with each other to reach the goal).

There’s a lot that Navigant didn’t tackle in its Thursday report, including just how much capital investment would be involved in getting a quarter of the nation’s power from renewable resources by 2025, and what effects it would have on the price of electricity. Another question left unstudied was the impact of having — or not having — a price on carbon over that time. Of course, with President Obama publicly saying this week that carbon cap-and-trade is less likely to be included in ongoing work on national energy legislation this year (see Wall Street Journal), it might be wise to avoid making any assumptions on that point.

Images courtesy of Navigant.

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Fast-forward a year, and gigawatt-sized factories look a lot farther away, as solar companies are focused instead on trying to sell the panels they’re already producing. That’s because after increasing their production capacity over 2008, solar firms have seen demand plummet in recent months. The drop in demand is partly due to the recession, which is making is difficult to get financing for building solar projects, as well as a cap placed on Spanish solar incentives that could cut what, at nearly 2.5 gigawatts, was the largest solar market in the world, down to 500 megawatts.

The pullback on the gigawatt-factory trend is simply a sign of the economic times, said Christopher Beitel, a managing director and general manager at Applied Materials. But Beitel doesn’t thinks the 1 GW factories will go the way of the dinosaurs, as he believes the economic benefits of scaling are too great to pass up. He said, for example, that at 1 GW, companies could build a glass-production line next to the solar factory — to supply glass for the panels — at a lower cost per watt than it costs to buy the glass, as they do today.

And as Linde’s Tolia previously noted to me, savings can also be realized on the gases needed to make solar cells — as early as the 200-300 MW level, in fact. Though the larger a facility is, the larger the savings, added Dean O’Connor, global head of market development and technology at Linde.

Still, those huge factories won’t be built until the solar industry sees demand pick up again. But O’Connor thinks that might not be such a bad thing, given how long it takes to efficiently ramp up an operation, including setting up supply chains robust enough to support all of that capacity. Beitel concurred, saying, “We could have ended up with a number of white elephants,” if all the solar capacity that was announced was built out.

When larger factories do come back into the picture, they’ll have a lot of implications for the industry, including consolidation. Tolia compared the scenario to the LCD industry. “There aren’t 50 companies doing LCD fabs,” he said. “There are five.”

Such changes are simply part of the maturation process. Paula Mints, a principal solar analyst with Navigant Consulting, said the discussion currently taking place about 1 GW capacity is much like the conversation she heard about 100-megawatt plants when she first began covering the industry in 1998. The only thing that’s changed is the degree of size, which has gone up by a factor of 10.

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“China, which already is important in production, is also going to be a large solar market,” Gerhard Stryi-Hipp, head of energy policy for the Fraunhofer-Institute for Solar Energy Systems, said last week at a roundtable to discuss trends in advance of the Intersolar North America conference next month. That’s an exciting prospect, as China — with its population of 1.3 billion — is soon expected to overtake the United States as the largest energy consumer in the world and already emits the most greenhouse gases.

New Chinese policies are spurring the transition, Stryi-Hipp says. The country in March approved a subsidy for building-mounted photovoltaic systems which could pay up to 20 Chinese yuan (about $2.93) per watt for systems larger than 50 kilowatts. For ground-mounted projects, the government is paying a feed-in tariff for the electricity generated, instead of a subsidy based on the projects’ capacity. It has settled on a price of 1.09 yuan (16 cents) per kilowatt-hour for a 10-megawatt ground-mounted project in Dunhuang, the first in a series of ground-mounted projects, says Jenny Chase, manager for New Energy Finance’s solar insight service. That’s better than it could have been — some companies actually bid at a loss for the project — but still far lower than the European feed-in tariffs, she says.

While New Energy Finance forecasts that the rooftop subsidy is only likely to drive 50 to 100 megawatts of solar installations, Chase says the provinces could end up driving additional demand by offering their own installation incentives. The Jiangsu province, for example, has announced plans to install 260 megawatts of solar through 2011.

On top of all this, the country has what Polly Shaw, director of external relations for Suntech Power, called the “most aggressive” renewable portfolio standard in the world. It aims to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, with some 100 gigawatts of wind capacity and 1.8 gigawatts of solar. The country is already rethinking its solar target, and will “probably” revise it to 10 or even 20 gigawatts this year, Shaw said. “Significant attention is being paid to solar in China,”she said. “I think we’re going to see a massive market starting up there, just like in the U.S.”

Altogether, Chase expects to see 150-300 megawatts of new photovoltaic installation in China this year, up from 40 megawatts last year, and predicts the market could “easily” exceed 1 gigawatt in 2010. “We do believe China is on the cusp of becoming a major solar market, though I suspect entirely for domestic producers,” she said, adding that the market growth still won’t be enough to counterbalance the current oversupply of solar panels and increase prices.

Of course, we’ve been hearing about China’s enormous solar potential for years, and — so far — it’s remained just that. Other analysts, including Paula Mints, a principal analyst at Navigant Consulting, says China will take more time to take off. After all, cheap coal plants are still fairly easy to start up in the country, she says.

“It’s a good start, but it’s going to take more than a year or two to see action there,” Mints said, adding that she doesn’t expect to see any significant growth this year. “A little bit is happening, but it’s mostly in the line of demonstration projects still. Next year, we expect to see an uptick, but the potential to be a gigawatt or over a gigawatt is sometime in the future, not in the next couple of years.”

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