Solar Arizona a strong possibility, but it won’t be cheap

Calls for Arizona to become “the Middle East of solar energy” sound good to environmentally conscious consumers who want to cut reliance on fossil fuels.

That goal is achievable, say solar promoters.

Though Arizona is widely touted as the sunniest state in the nation, solar energy accounts for less than 1 percent of the power produced commercially here.

Changing that would require a hefty upfront investment, advocates say. But it would pay off in a clean, endlessly renewable power source.

They say government must lead the way.

A small step was taken this week when the state House of Representatives passed a measure barring homeowners associations from enacting rules that would interfere with the placement of rooftop solar collectors.

That doesn’t leave the individual out of the picture, though. Homeowners can take advantage of solar energy for free – with a clothesline – or can install photovoltaic systems that generate all household electricity. Those systems, even with tax credits, cost $20,000 or more.

In the middle of that range are solar thermal collectors. They harvest heat, instead of converting sunlight to electrical current, and can be used for hot water needs.

Whether sunlight is harvested on a small or large scale, including it in the energy mix could help cut greenhouse gases believed to be heating up the planet.

So what’s stopping solar power from becoming the dominant source of power in the state?

Cost, said Erik Magnuson of Environment Arizona, a group that promotes renewable energy sources.

Magnuson calls our current energy system the product of decades of policies “the government has put forth to subsidize that power.”

“If governments made a similar commitment to make solar power the sole or major energy source for Arizona, the technology is there to make that happen,” he said.

The political momentum for such a shift may be building.

President Bush said in his most recent State of the Union address that the nation’s future depends on the development of alternative energy sources and that the world needs to take action to deal with “global climate change.”

Bush argued that a renewable fuels mandate – which would need approval from Congress – would spur investments in the industry and give research a boost.

Lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have proposed two of a slew of climate change bills that senators will debate in coming weeks.

That could benefit solar and wind projects in northern New Mexico and Arizona.

Large-scale action called for
For Arizona to go solar, government incentives would be necessary, said Colleen Crowninshield, coordinator of the Clean Cities program for Pima County.

“The solar-energy industry is ready to do it,” said Valerie Rauluk, a member of the Tucson-Pima Metropolitan Energy Commission. “We are just waiting to get those rules in place.

“Solar electric can happen. One way is with a solar farm and another is to put solar panels on the roofs of large building such as Wal-Marts and Home Depots,” Rauluk said. “Such installations would substantially cut fossil-fuel energy consumption and help those customers shave peak power needs.”

Homeowners also need to get into the action, Magnuson said.

“Arizona can do a lot more to put the sun to work,” he said.

Magnuson called for 250,000 homes in the state to be equipped with solar energy and solar water heating units by 2015.

“We are all about reducing the need for this dirty and expensive form of power when we have such great alternatives,” Magnuson said.

Coal-fired power plants, and even nuclear power plants, “cost taxpayers and ratepayers millions of dollars a year to supply coal and to import nuclear fuel to run them.”

Individual’s role
Even without government action, there are steps individuals can take to incorporate solar energy into their household use.

At the high end of the cost spectrum are photovoltaic arrays. These panels convert sunlight into electricity by using two layers of material that absorb light differently.

For example, one layer of silicon – essentially glass – is “doped” with boron, and another with phosphorus. The space between creates an electrical field called a junction. When light hits the junction, electrons are split off into a device that collects the flow as direct current. It’s then converted to alternating current for household use.

A medium-size rooftop system would cost about $40,000, according to BP Solar, which produces the systems.

The solar panels work better in lower temperatures. Summer heat can stress the systems, making them iffy for generating electricity during Tucson’s peak demand.

Another option is a solar water heater. Instead of converting sunlight to electricity, it stores the heat.

They can serve as preheaters for conventional heaters and may include a pump. The pump can be powered with photovoltaic panels.

Commercial production
Arizona Public Service Co. last year opened a solar energy plant, the first to be built in the nation since 1988, northwest of Tucson.

The 14-acre, $6 million plant will produce 1.3 megawatts, enough to supply 200 to 250 homes.

The plant has six rows of parabolic mirrors that track the sun, concentrate sunlight on steel tubes, and heat mineral oil in the tubes to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot oil heats a second fluid that vaporizes, producing steam to spin an electric turbine.

By 2025, APS plans to get up to 15 percent of its power from solar, wind and other renewable sources.

Tucson Electric Power Co. operates a 2.4-megawatt solar facility near its coal-fired plant in Springerville.

Yet the power still costs much more than electricity delivered from coal-fired plants.

“No one is saying that biofuels and solar energy are going to take care of all our needs,” said Rauluk, of the Tucson-Pima Metropolitan Energy Commission. “They can’t, but they certainly can take care of part of our needs, and they have certain benefits: reduced pollution and reduced greenhouse gas.”

So what’s it going to take to make the leap?

“The world is moving toward a place where there will be a tax on pollutants, taxes that get passed onto the customer,” Rauluk said. “We are going to have to pay one way or the other. But by aggressively going heavily into solar energy, we are providing a hedge against those rising prices of the future.”

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INCENTIVES AVAILABLE IN ARIZONA
Tucson Electric Power

• Residential: Up to $3 rebate per watt of solar electricity used (it takes 2 watts to power the average electric alarm clock).

• Nonresidential: Up to $2.50 rebate per watt up to 100,000 watts.

State

• 10 percent tax credit of installed cost, with a maximum of $25,000 for any one building and a total of $50,000 for one year.

• Personal tax credit up to 25 percent of total installed cost up to $1,000.

• 100 percent rebate of sales tax on eligible equipment for solar hot water, solar space heat, solar thermal, photovoltaics and solar pool heating.

Federal

• Residential solar tax credit up to 30 percent of total cost up to $2,000.

Source: Erik Magnuson, Environment Arizona

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ENERGY SOURCE PROS AND CONS
The thread linking global warming, U.S. security interests, pollution and traffic congestion is energy.

Driving and electricity account for most of the energy we use. Savings in one area might offset consumption in another.

Some pros and cons to energy sources:

● Solar is abundant and readily usable for warming air and water, but it is expensive to generate electricity from sunlight.

● Nuclear is relatively clean but produces radioactive waste, which can cause genetic mutations.

● Biomass fuels include biodiesel and ethanol. They can be made with crops or agricultural waste from the U.S., but there are fewer places to fill your car’s tank.

● Coal, which generates about half the country’s electricity, is plentiful, cheap and a major culprit in greenhouse gases.

● Natural gas may be cleaner than other fossil fuels, but there is little domestic production of cars that run on natural gas.

● Oil is relatively cheap, but may get more expensive to extract. Like natural gas, it is abundant in countries that may become hostile to us.

● Hydroelectric power is fairly clean and cheap to generate. It’s expensive to build dams and doing so has devastated river ecosystems that are a vital part of Earth’s sustainability.

Source: Pima Association of Governments

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ON THE WEB

For information on how small solar electric systems work: www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/ your_home/electricity/index.cfm/mytopic=10720

To calculate your costs for a solar energy system to meet household needs: www.bp.com/ solarsavings.do?contentId=3050766&categoryId=3050485

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A $2 million allocation by the Arizona Board of Regents is expected to improve research program development by fostering more sharing of discoveries between Arizona’s two largest universities.

“This funding will promote joint projects between Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, and will provide seed money to allow researcher time and funding to evolve projects to be more competitive for federal grants,” said Vicki Chandler, director of the BIO5 Institute at UA.

The goal is to encourage the two universities to work together to advance human health, said Leslie Tolbert, UA vice president for research.

The money is expected to pave the way for funding from federal sources such as the National Science Foundation.

Biomedical research affected by the funding includes work on asthma, Parkinson’s disease, valley fever and cancer, Tolbert said.

The funding comes from the sales-tax-supported Technology Research Infrastructure Fund approved by voters in 2000.

Ten research projects involving both universities will receive funding over the next year, UA said.

UA’s BIO5 Institute and ASU’s Biodesign Institute will receive $1.2 million to fund four of the 10 projects, UA said in a news release.

An additional $800,000 has been designated for six projects including research in chemistry, engineering, radiology, medicine, basic sciences and optical sciences.

The BIO5 Institute is a collaborative bioresearch institute that brings together scientists from five disciplines – agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, basic science and engineering – to solve complex biological programs.

The Biodesign Institute was created to address challenges to human health by integrating research in biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, agriculture, environmental science, electronics, engineering and computing.

Nominations for outstanding Arizona students and teachers are being sought for the 2007 Everyday Heroes awards, a program sponsored by Cox Communications and the Arizona Interscholastic Association.

Students, coaches, faculty members or athletic administrators who live in Arizona are eligible, Cox said in a news release. Nominees are judged on how well they display a strong sense of character and interscholastic achievement, with an emphasis on sportsmanship and healthy lifestyles.

The deadline to nominate someone is today.

Winners are to be announced at a May 19 ceremony at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix. The event is broadcast live in Phoenix and Tucson on Cox Channel 7.

Since the inception of the program in 2003, Everyday Heroes has honored more than 260 people and awarded more than $150,000 in cash and prizes.

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ON THE WEB

For nomination forms and other details, go to the AIA Web site: www.aiaonline.org and click on Everyday Heroes near the top of the page.

A claim in a television documentary that 2,000-year-old ossuaries found in a tomb in Jerusalem may contain the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and a boy who may have been their son is “sad, quite sad,” but not true, said retired University of Arizona archeologist William G. Dever.

The documentary is scheduled to air Sunday on the Discovery Channel. It claims new scientific evidence, including DNA analysis, that suggests the tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family, Discovery said in a news release.

Researchers found an ossuary – a stone or metal box where the bones of the dead are placed after they decay – in the tomb, which bears the names Jesus son of Joseph, Mary, Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene.

The findings suggest Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah, the release said. The DNA findings, along with statistical conclusions about the artifacts, open a potentially significant chapter in Biblical archaeological history. The relics were excavated in 1980.

But Dever said he and fellow scientists are skeptical.

“The more I discover about it . . . the more I see it as a publicity stunt,” Dever said in a telephone interview from his Bedford Hills, N.Y. home.

“They have gone far, far beyond the evidence, and every scholar I’ve talked to has agreed,” said the 73-year-old archaeologist, who has spent more than 50 years excavating ancient sites in Israel.

“These fellows made a pretty penny, I guess, with “The DaVinci Code” and “Titanic.” I think they are very clever filmmakers, and I don’t think you have to look very far to see their motivation,” Dever said. “They are not scholars. They are not breaking the story. The tomb has been known for nearly 30 years to scholars.

“I don’t want to demean them, but there is something really shady about this,” Dever added. “I’ve read the script, by the way . . . so I know exactly what they are going to do in their documentary, and it’s worse than I thought.”

The film was produced by James Cameron, who directed “Titanic” and other films. Its director, Simcha Jacobovici, caused a similar stir five years ago with a documentary about another ossuary that he purported to be that of James, Jesus’ brother. Israeli officials have since declared that ossuary a fake, though Jacobovici still maintains it’s authentic.

The supposed Jesus tomb is a typical Jewish burial site, Dever said.

“The only thing unusual about this tomb is the decoration in it, on the bedrock itself,” he said.

“The point is that these names are common enough that . . . you can’t connect them to the New Testament names,” Dever said. “The only thing interesting, even remotely, is the grouping of names. That is a little unusual, but given we have so few names, it is not statistically significant.”

The site was nothing special to archaeologists in 1980, Dever said. “I didn’t even go to the tomb when it was being dug because these finds are made all the time in Jerusalem.”

Dever said he also found the claim that the producers had visited the tomb disturbing.

“It’s now all sealed over. You can’t go into it,” Dever said. “Frankly, some of the experts, so-called, being quoted (in the documentary) are just charlatans,” he said. “A number of real experts have looked at it, in Israel and here. I know them all, and we agree there isn’t much of a story here if you stick to the facts.”

The show’s producers and a Discovery Channel spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

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ON TV

The “Lost Tomb of Jesus,” premieres on the Discovery Channel on Sunday at 9 p.m. The documentary comes from executive producer James Cameron and director Simcha Jacobovici.

Immediately following the documentary, a forum produced by former ABC “Nightline” host Ted Koppel will offer various experts’ opinions on the program.

Sometimes, catching the train can be as easy as stepping into the garden.

But only if you’re really small.

These trains are part of Tucson Garden Railway Society’s Rails in the Garden Tour, where members’ imaginations in gardening meld with modular large-scale model railroading, said Jane Dorgan, a modeler since 1999.

Dorgan’s garden railway project, the Red Rock Railroad, includes more than 600 feet of track, 500 human figures and six operational model trains.

It will be on display from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday as part of the group’s annual Rails in the Garden Tour, said tour chairman, Robert “Dirk” Dirksen, 70. The tour features eight garden railway projects that use “G” gauge equipment, he said (a “G” gauge train is any train of a larger scale usually designed to run in a garden). One of the largest is an extensive project created by several residents of a recreational vehicle park.

Another project uses considerable rock work and numerous bridges and trestles, Dirksen said. And there is one that features tracks winding through a landscape of mountains, deserts and lakes.

Visitors won’t want to miss the Gnome Valley Railroad, created by a member who uses a wheelchair and offers a special stop on the tour for people with disabilities.

Tickets are available, Dirksen said. Proceeds go to fund public model-train exhibits at nonprofit organizations and at the Pima County Fair, as well as promoting the organization.

Displays such as Dorgan’s are works of art, Dirksen said. Dorgan, working with her husband, Mike, built dozens of structures. They included homes, rail-yard equipment, bridges and a scale model of the Birdcage Theater in Tombstone.

“We went to Tombstone to make sure ours was an accurate depiction,” said Dorgan, 68, who created most of the objects from raw materials. Her project includes three towns, one with a cable car, stage station, beer hall and wagon works.

Each of Dorgan’s three track loops features cars playing music, from mariachi to circus selections. Up to eight trains run on her rails.

Dirksen said members’ love for trains and project-building is natural for retirees because trains were a big part of their lives when they were young.

“When I was a boy, I lived in northern Ohio. We had two railroads that went through our town,” he recalled. “I lay awake at night listening to those trains. I loved them. They were our access to the rest of the world.”

That’s why the main goal of the society is to have fun. But members also want to educate the public about railroads and railroad modeling, especially garden railways, Dirksen said.

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IF YOU GO

What: Rails in the Garden Tour

When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Cost: $5 single; $10 family

Where: Directions come with ticket purchase

Contact: Call 409-3269

For more on the Rails in the Garden Tour, go to http://tucsongrs.org.

Craft, with UA device, leaving solar system

Voyager 1 continues to amaze University of Arizona scientists who helped speed it to the edge of our solar system, where it is about to enter the uncharted reaches of interstellar space.

It is also Earth’s message in a bottle to potential extraterrestrial life. And at some 9 trillion miles into its journey, it has gone farther than any other object launched by humans.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the craft’s launch.

“Our instrument is still operating,” said UA senior researcher Lyle Broadfoot, the principal investigator on the Ultraviolet Spectrometer, or UVS, one of nine instruments on Voyager 1.

The mission has been more successful than anyone expected when it was launched “so long ago,” said the 77-year-old retired scientist. “The productivity of the program is pretty clear.

“The team published more than 300 papers on the instrument,” Broadfoot said. “And we rewrote the textbooks on the outer planets.”

Scientists had no idea of the atmospheres on those planets before Voyager went out there, he said. And the achievements of Voyager 1 continue.

Voyager 1 found that the edge of the solar system is much farther from the sun that previously thought, Broadfoot said. “We didn’t think the bow shock was very far outside of the orbit of Neptune, but we are finding it is much farther away.”

Bow shock is the boundary at which the the sun’s magnetic field and the outflow of solar wind abruptly drops. Scientist are not sure what the spacecraft will encounter.

“There has to be something there. There will be a change,” Broadfoot said.

The spacecraft, powered by a nuclear generator the size of a large coffee can, rocketed away on Sept. 5, 1977.

A twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched in August 1977. Voyager 2 also carried a UVS, one of four prototypes built by Broadfoot’s team of scientists and engineers.

Voyager 2 was turned off in 1998 and is presumably coasting through space without a power source. Before the spacecraft was abandoned, it became the only spacecraft to have flown by the sun’s most distant planet, Neptune, and its moons, Holberg said. (Pluto once was thought to be the planet farthest from the sun, but most scientists no longer consider it a planet.)

Voyager 2 collected huge files of data when it flew within 3,000 miles of Neptune and passed Triton, one of Neptune’s moons.

Voyager 2 also discovered Neptune’s rings and six of its 13 moons.

“Voyager 1 was only commissioned for two planets,” Broadfoot noted. They were Jupiter and Saturn.

Scientists decided to sacrifice Voyager 1′s proposed visit to Uranus and Neptune for an opportunity to conduct a flyby of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan, Broadfoot said.

It continues to examine solar winds and the flow of charged particles streaming from the sun at about a million miles per hour, said UA senior research scientist Jay Holberg, 61, who joined the team in 1980.

But studying the bow shock region between our solar system and interstellar space will be a real challenge for the aging spacecraft, said Bill Sandel, also 61, UA senior research scientist and UVS team member.

Voyager 1 is literally venturing into the great unknown, traveling at 1 million miles per day, Sandel said. Crossing into interstellar space is something that has never been done before by any human-made object.

“Certainly, going there is going to turn up a lot of surprises,” Sandel said.

Voyager 1 already is 100 times more distant from Earth than Earth is from the sun.

Communicating with Voyager 1 requires 12 hours for radio messages, moving at the speed of light, to travel from Earth to Voyager 1, and another 12 hours for messages to get to Earth.

But that could end as soon as 2020, Sandel said. The fuel in the nuclear generator is beginning to wane. When all power is lost, listening will cease.

One UVS prototype is on each of the Voyager missions. Another was on the spacecraft Galileo that crashed into Jupiter’s surface in September 2003, Sandel said.

According to NASA, Galileo was the first spacecraft to fly past an asteroid, the first to discover a moon of an asteroid, and gave scientists the only direct look at a comet colliding with a planet.

A fourth AVS, built about 34 years ago during the construction phase of the Voyager project, is on display in UA’s Sonnet Space Sciences Building, 1541 E. University Blvd., on the north side of the UA Mall.

Broadfoot and Sandel worked for Kitt Peak National Observatory during the development of the UVS instruments and when the Voyager missions launched. Holberg joined the team three years after the launch.

Sandel and Holberg now work at UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Source: NASA
Source: NASA

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HOW IT WORKS

The instrument looks for specific colors of ultraviolet light that certain elements and compounds are known to emit. If sunlight passes through an atmosphere, certain elements and molecules in the atmosphere will absorb specific frequencies of light.

If the UVS, when looking through filtered sunlight, notices the absence of any of the specific colors, then particular elements and/or compounds have been detected.

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Voyager 1 and 2 carry more than scientific instruments. They carry messages to possible extraterrestrials.

Each craft’s message is carried on a 12-inch, gold-plated phonograph disk that contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The contents were selected by a committee headed by the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University. There are 115 images and a variety of natural sounds such as surf, wind, thunder, birds, whales, and musical selections from several cultures and eras.

The disk also carries greetings in 55 languages, and printed messages from former President Carter and former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Each disk is clad in protective aluminum and has a cartridge and needle to play the recordings.

NASA says it will take 40,000 years for the spacecraft to reach another planetary system.

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Space missions with University of Arizona connections.

- Phoenix Lander, 2007

- CubeSats project, 2006

- Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 2005

- Mars Surveyor, 2001

- Mars Pathfinder, 2001

- IMAGE, 2000

- Planet B (Japanese), 1999

- Mars Polar Lander, 1999

- Cassini, 1997

- Huygens, 1997

- Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, 1996

- Mars Global Surveyor, 1996

- Ulysses, 1990

- Galileo, 1989

- Voyager 1, 1977

- Voyager 2, 1977

- Shuttle flights (several)

Source: University of Arizona

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http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

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HIGH-TECH MESSAGES FROM EARTH