Commentary

Is there a market for solar thermal in Asia? This question is not easily answerable. On one hand of course people need hot water. On the other hand, many of these countries have natural solar water heating solutions by exposing the pipes to the sun or use of black water tanks, very common throughout all Asia. So what is the purpose to design a solar water heater system that will always be more expensive? The answer lies on a different segment or easily said on a different scale: when more users are involved the amount of water to be heated increases and the roof area may be limited, so it is important to come with shared solar water heater systems. This applies to hotels, malls, industries and domestic buildings. Shared systems for household can and should also be implemented in Asia. The market can then be divided into pressurized and non-pressurized systems and that immediately relates to cost. Good solar thermal collectors use coated absorbers and copper piping as well as insulation. All that can be relaxed in hot countries bringing down the costs and still be quality systems. The affordable price is usually not perceived, since the system has already “fuel” incorporated and that does not have to be paid. We usually talk about payback as the criteria for decision on purchasing, but be aware of the real performance of the systems, since a lower cost may not surely mean the same heat generation potential – or the quantity of water at a certain temperature. In Asia seldom standards have found their way among common people, but it should be the task of government to implement such minimum standards to avoid disappointments and prejudice from their citizens. Solar thermal is the cheapest of all renewable Energies and has a tremendous impact on the energy consumption of any country and most importantly on the livelihood. Hot water provides comfort and quality of life and improves health standards. The answer to the initial question is yes, there is a market, there is a need and it is good for the Asian countries. Standards and adoption of already established schemes – European, North America, India – should be the way forward. Another area of interest in solar thermal is the concentrated solar thermal – CSP - and here the technical, economics and financials are completely different. It is a power generation system, suitable for utility scale generation and requires a specific component of the solar irradiation – Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) – which is not abundant everywhere. In Asia India, China, Thailand have started implementing some CSP projects. Is there a market for CSP in Asia? If we take the two massive countries: India and China and if they are doing CSP, then the answer is yes. On the other hand CSP competes with PV for power generation with the single advantage of being cheaper than PV when dispatchable power is considered – it means with storage capacity. The scope of application is shorter than PV and the market players are also less. CSP and all dispatchable solutions are required when grid management is an issue, so load analysis and load management should actually dictate whether CSP is a better solution than PV. Good DNI sites exist in Asia and with large extensions and also low cost of land – usually barren lands – and if there is one solar energy that still has space for integration and addition of players is CSP, so it is also a business opportunity for Asia to be able to export technology to other continents. Solar thermal has been forgotten with all the PV revolution, but solar thermal is an industry with more than 30 years old while PV is now becoming a teenager. Asia should not forget solar thermal in its policies and goals. According to ESTIF (European Solar Thermal Industry Federation) almost 2.6 GWth were installed in 2011 (3500000 m2) in Europe and the total installed capacity in Europe is now 26.3 GWth, generating 18.8 TWh of solar thermal energy while contributing to savings of 13 MMt CO2. Despite the impact of the economic and financial crisis, the solar thermal sector still shows an average growth of 3.9% and 9.0% over the last five and ten years, respectively. China – the solar thermal giant According to the SHEC (Solar Heating and Cooling Program of the International Energy Association) on their yearly report on Solar Thermal worldwide regarding 2010, it is shown the installed solar thermal capacity worldwide per regions. China stands out with a massive 117600 MWth which means roughly 168 million sqm of collector area installed (1 m2 = 700 Wth) Asia, without China, comes second with Japan, India, Taiwan and South Korea being above the 1000 MWth (1,5 million sqm of collector area). Thailand comes next in the ranking with around 64 MWth of installed capacity. A more interesting metric may be the installed capacity per 1000 inhabitants, which removes the massive size of some countries versus others. The leaders in quantity and usually not the leaders in this metric an some countries do show a remarkable penetration of solar thermal, as Cyprus for example. China comes first again closely followed by Australia and NZ. Asia is way back with 9 m2 per 1000 inhabitants. There is actually no reason why Asia lacks so much behind when even the MENA region comes third showing that hot water is also needed in hot countries. Cyprus – the small great Champion – reigns with a massive 820 m2 per 1000 inhabitants and all those familiar with the solar thermal industry know that children in Cyprus never draw a house without a solar collector in the roof! A word for Austria which astonishingly comes third and it is a clear statement of the smart use of the solar resource for heating. China comes tenth, while Taiwan is the next Asian country in the list followed by South Korea, India and Thailand with slightly more than 1 m2 per 1000 inhabitants. Solar thermal compares favourably to other Renewable Energy technologies and stands in installed capacity hand in hand with wind, way in front compared to PV. The growing trend of wind and PV versus solar thermal is huge and the gap is being bridged, but energy is not only electricity, so heat should not be overlooked! The market growth is enormous in Asia, higher than anywhere else, even toppling China’s growth on this sector. We are poised to see Asia growing and taking advantage of the solar resource for heating and increasing the comfort of its populations. It is still common to see electrical water heaters being marketed strongly in Asia, while solar thermal should clearly be favoured and pushed by legislation. Solar thermal technologies In solar thermal for heating purposes it is usual to divide the market in unglazed, flat plate collectors (FPC) and evacuated tube collectors (ETC). The first refer to collectors that are open or are not enclosed with a glazed surface (glass), flat plates are the common type for almost everyone in the world, except in China where the evacuated tubes are more common. The distribution worldwide is: Clearly the evacuated tubes in China crowd out all the others, though unglazed still have a big predominance in some markets, namely those for swimming pool heating (Australia and the US). Chinese evacuated tubes are different from the European evacuated tubes and so are the prices and quality. It is nonetheless true that Chinese ETC from some companies are reliable and do provide a very interesting return on investment and increase the possibilities of building integration die to the nature of heat collection in evacuated tubes. Another interesting metric is the type of system installed. Here we have thermosyphon (tank and collector are both on the roof) and using pumps (only the collectors are on the roof). Asia (three countries are considered Japan, South Korean and Taiwan) shows a dominance of the former, which is also the case of China. Mostly we see domestic systems (Domestic Hot water – DHW) being the market for solar thermal worldwide, though interesting niches can be seen.

The electricity industry in Vietnam is unique. The Government still controls large components of the industry. Critically, it controls the price. This Article discusses the general pricing regime.

Grid Collapse & Coalgate should pave the way for Renewable Energy deployment.

Asia’s growth as international manufacturing powerhouse is in part due to low apparent energy prices, worker cost, and open-ended materials procurement. The greatest profit driver has been consistent exclusion of environmental true costs associated with handling carbon and nuclear-based emissions and waste.

Technological advancements, is changing the way or rather simplifying the way electricity is measured and communicated to both producers and consumers. One such advancement gaining ground, across the world, is the use of Smart Metering technologies in the power sector.

In recent years, the Asia-Pacific region has emerged as a strong driver of worldwide economic activity. With young and skilled workforces, countries in the region are experiencing sustained and solid growth, driven no longer just by exports but also by increasing domestic demand within the region.

The trends of interconnections are gaining popularity in Asian power market. Beside the great advantages of these interconnections, a high risk is also associated with cascading effect of any local disturbance which may travelled through the interconnections and leads to a massive break down. Wide Area Monitoring System (WAMS) is now a necessity in Asian power market.

Japan energy policy, as promulgated by the National government in June 2002 in the Basic Act on Energy Policy, is based on the following three measures on energy supply and demand:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair” – and with apologies to Dickens, it was also the year the bottom fell out of the solar PV markets, yet it may also be the year the solar industry may finally have found its long term footing.

Several sectors in India, especially industrial and infrastructural that include commercial and residential corridors, are presently witnessing substantial rise in investments. Extensive power capacity augmentation and improvement of electrical grid networks are imperative to support this growth. The need to have an efficient and reliable power distribution setup at both macro and micro levels is providing growth opportunities for the electricity meters market in India. Apart from billing purposes, electricity meters are also essential to monitor and manage energy consumption on the demand side.

As India is experiencing rapid urbanisation, it faces a double challenge of managing ever-rising volumes of municipal solid waste (MSW) and securing electricity supply for its fast-growing urban population. Waste-to-energy (WtE) technology can help India address both of these needs while adding the benefit of avoided carbon dioxide emissions.

Sanhua Group, a Chinese listed company, plans to invest RMB 600 million (US $95 million) to install 600 dish-turbine units in Inner Mongolia as the first phase of a concentrated solar power (CSP) project. By the end of 2013, the first batch of the 100 dish-turbine units will be installed. After that, a combined heat and power system, including 500 dish-turbine units and two sets of 300 MW thermal power-generation systems will be built. Phase II includes plans to invest another RMB 60 billion to build a GW-scale solar thermal power base that is expected to attract other players in the value chain to cluster together in the base. Phase III plans to complete the installation of 10,000 dish-turbine units in total, reaching 1 GW of power-generation capacity.

Thailand underpinned its credentials as a leader in the Asian power sector for renewable energy by introducing a comprehensive package of adder rates for renewable energy technologies in 2007, and currently offers incentives for biomass/biogas, solar (thermal and photovoltaic), wind and mini/micro hydropower projects. Adder rates are available for VSPPs (Very Small Power Producers, producing up to 10 mW) and all adder rates except for hydropower are available for SPPs (Small Power Producers, producing from 10mW up to 90 mW). The adder rates are payable in addition to the normal price of electricity paid to VSPPs and SPPs. Adder rates for solar and wind projects apply for ten years and adder rates for other renewable energy projects apply for seven years. Renewable technology                            Adder rate (Baht/kW hour)* Biomass/biogas (>1 MW / up to1 MW)                          0.30 / 0.50 Hydro (50-200kW/<50kW)                                            0.80 / 1.50 Waste (landfill, digestion/thermal)                                 2.50 / 3.50 Wind (> 50kW /up to 50 kW)                                         3.50 / 4.50 Solar (Thermal and photovoltaic)                                      6.50                                                                                                       * 1 USD = 31.6 Baht, July 2012 Additional adders are also available for projects located in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat (where civil unrest has received consistent media coverage for several years) and for projects which replace electricity produced by diesel generators. Additional adder rates (Baht/kW hour):

It’s a common perception that we have a carbon problem here on earth. Most everyone nods there head in agreement when it comes to recognizing that we’ve got to do something and there is a need to reduce emissions. Air pollution is not a good thing; I left Cleveland, Ohio many years ago because of it.Regardless of which side of the climate debate you fall on all but a few madmen agree that clean air is essential. But mad or not that’s where the agreement ends and the controversy begins on how best to reduce emissions and save the planet. Where is all the carbon coming from? The combustion of fossil fuels of course, but that is the engine that has taken us to where we are today and continues to drive the economy of the world. So unless there is a massive return to subsistence farming we need practical solutions that will give us and future generations breathable air that won’t cripple the global economy any further than it already is. One scenario, carbon trading has been presented by the same people that gave us energy trading (Enron) and Wall Street firms that were a part of the Subprime real estate debacle that the global economy has yet to recover from. As I understand it, carbon trading involves setting caps on emissions, issuing credits that can be traded (by the above investment banks) and offsets that are issued by doing something such as planting a forest in Botswana to negate any carbon emitted. Leave it to the financiers to figure an angle to bilk trillions from a problem. Criminals in Europe also thought it was worth a look and managed to steal about $62 million in these certificates, so some obviously see an opportunity in carbon. In addition to Wall Street, Governments are suggesting what comes natural to them, levying taxes. Over on the other side of the pacific there is a movement in the USA to tax carbon emissions and the SOCA or Save Our Climate Act is being considered. SOCA is not likely to get serious consideration until after the presidential election, but it is estimated that the proposed $10 dollar per ton of Co2 produced will generate 2.6 trillion dollars over ten years. According to an article by Dan Watkins of McDermott Will Energy LLP the tax will be used to pay for the bureaucracy to run the program and set up a Clean Climate Trust fund. The article starts out by pushing the “Oceans” button talking about the most rapid acidification of the oceans in 300 million years. Wow, that’s a long time! I don’t know about you but I’ll be sleeping a lot easier knowing another tax, federal bureaucracy and “fund” is put in place to save the planet for our children’s, children. The reason we have the carbon problem is because somewhere, someone is profiting in one way or another from the burning fossil fuels. Carbon is a commodity, why not treat it as such and make the reduction in carbon profitable in a tangible way, capture a ton of carbon and get compensated, not some financial scheme that benefits no one but investment bankers? If the tax is actually used in a logical way like that to create incentives for inventors, scientists and industry to come up with solutions that will be profitable then a tax may indeed be beneficial. The next step would naturally occur as the carbon piles up and someone finds a way to turn it into something useable that could be profitable instead of pumping it into the ground for future generations to deal with. We’ve come a long way since we first unleashed the energy stored in fossil fuels, but now is the time to invest some of the wealth that burning all that fuel has created to discover how we can continue to provide power for economic development while still reaping the benefits and assuring future generations that they too will be able to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. One thing in the carbon debate is for certain, Mother Nature has built-in self-limiting mechanisms and if we cross the tipping point where they kick in the discussion and solution will be taken from our hands; carbon will come down and the air will clear and life will be better for those left to report the outcome!Or will it?

Under the context of Renewable energies Bankability takes shape under several concepts and it is interesting to see that the concept has an Asian concept that is completely different from the European or North American one.

A famous sporting coach once said, “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.”