“Turn right at the Big Blue Bear.”
Those are the first words that greet you as you exit the parking garage at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, where I am attending the World Renewable Energy Forum this week.
Sure enough, as you walk down 14th St. to get to the front entrance of the facility, there is a 40-foot Blue Bear with its nose pressed up against the windows, watching the people inside scurry around to get the latest information on renewable energy. There was plenty of information to keep the bear interested.
(Why a Big Blue Bear? Read the whole column to find out what it’s really all about.)*
First off, I wanted to attend a session on how the Colorado Convention Center installed its solar PV system, but when I found my way down to the room, a helpful World Renewable Energy Forum volunteer informed me that it had been cancelled. No reason was given, and that’s the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen that happen. But the volunteer presented me with my other options, and I decided to take in a session on the role of renewable energy in energy security.
I’ve heard speakers at other conferences I’ve attended discuss this issue before, and they have pretty much all said that, at least at its current penetration into the generation cycle, energy security is not the best argument for solar energy experts to make. This panel, however, begged to differ.
The general consensus of the panelists was that solar energy is the perfect way to increase energy security by taking it out of the hands of a few big generation plants and distributing it more equally around the country on rooftops and in ground-mounted solar farms. In other words, the grid will be less susceptible to going down or to terrorist attacks if there are more targets that they would have to hit instead of simply a few large coal-fired plants that we have now.
This is a wonderful idea in theory. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and in theory I agree with the panelists. But it does beg a really big question: How is the solar industry going to wrest generation control from the utilities that are not yet willing to give up centralized control over electricity production? I posed the question to the panelists, but they didn’t give much of an answer. They talked around the issue, but never got to the heart of what I asked.
That leads me to believe that the central issue — how to break the ultility’s stranglehold on generation — has yet to be resolved. Until it is, I don’t see solar energy as an effective way to increase energy security. Maybe we’ll get there someday, but right now it remains a question as to how quickly we’ll be able to do that — or if we’re going to be able to do it at all.
The other session I had the pleasure of attending was one cleverly called “A Break in the Clouds: Assessing Growth in the Solar Labor Market.” It was admirably hosted by Andrea Luecke, executive director of The Solar Foundationand featured several speakers on the subject of jobs in the solar market.
Luecke said the most recent statistics tell a story of rapid job growth in solar — up 6.8% from 2010 to 2011. In contrast, the number of jobs in fossil fuel production fell 2% (go solar!). The two fastest positions in the industry that are growing are installers and sales reps. Then Luecke made an excellent point about the installation jobs:
“They are inherently local jobs,” Luecke said. “You’re not going to ship your house to China and have panels installed.”
She’s right — and the rest of the panelists (Phil Jordan of BW Research Partnership, Neal Lurie of COSEIA, Meghan Nutting, Director of Government Affairs for SolarCity (who, as an aside, are hiring four new people a day throughout their organization worldwide) and Regina Matthews of SMA Americas backed her point.
Needless to say, it’s been an exciting show so far. I’ve learned a lot, and I hope I’ve been able to share some of my insights with you. Watch for more of Solar Power World’s coverage from the World Renewable Energy Forum tomorrow — and for the rest of the week.
*The Big Blue Bear, a sculpture actually called “I See What You Mean,” was designed by local Denver artist Lawrence Argent and was installed at the Convention Center in 2005. Denver.org (the website of the Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau) did a Q&A with Argent, which I will excerpt here:
VISIT DENVER: Why a bear? Why a giant, curious blue bear, specifically?
Lawrence Argent: There’s iconic Colorado imagery – the Rockies, the Flatirons and all that – that I think is a little bit overused, a little passé. So I thought about what it is like to be a resident here and the journey one takes down either corridor (14th St. and Speer Blvd) when one notices there is a convention occurring. I’m always interested in what might be going on in there, the exchange of information, ideas and ideologies. But there’s never really any indication from the outside what’s going on inside. I had recently seen a photo in the newspaper of a black bear looking into someone’s window and that resonated with me. As for the blue color, that was actually an accident – originally the bear was going to reflect the colors of Colorado, with sandstone colors and things like that. But a printout of the design came back blue by mistake, and I thought that was much more exciting. And it was serendipitous, because [I learned later] that the black bear was very important to the Native American Ute tribes that lived in Colorado – and also that one level of spiritual enlightenment for the Utes was the “blue” level.
As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know — the rest of the story.
Kzipp says
I want to make friends with that blue bear…..he looks like he’d be cool to know. 🙂