Nelson: "... not a bad thing"

KINGSTON – As an interest in solar power has surged in the last few years, its different technologies are also coming to the forefront. And solar thermal was getting some due attention Tuesday during a conference at Tech City.

Sponsored by The New York Solar Thermal Consortium, the Solar Thermal Roadmap Symposium highlighted some of the positive aspects of solar thermal technology.

“It has been overlooked in the last 10 years because of the growing interest in photovoltaics, and that’s not a bad thing,” said Les Nelson, executive director of the Solar Rating & Certification Corporation.

“Photovoltaics have a great role to play in solar going forward, but what’s been ignored is that solar thermal technologies are significantly more efficient than photovoltaics and significantly less expensive to generate the same amount of energy.”

Photovoltaics take sunlight and converts into electrons to power electrical equipment, while solar thermal is used for heating.

“(Solar thermal) taker sunlight and converts it to heat, which is used to heat water or space or steam for electrical power. Photovoltaics could heat a tank of water – but about five times what a solar thermal system does it for,” said Nelson.

Solar thermal also competes with photovoltaics economically. Copper, glass aluminum, labor, insurance health, insurance, gasoline, are involved in the manufacture of solar thermal systems and the components are readily available at any building supply store. But as Nelson noted all of these components will increase in price in the future.

“We are at a point in solar thermal where one of the ways to reduce costs would be to literally put in thousands of systems in new construction. But that’s not a very workable scenario when no one is building new houses these days,” said Nelson. “The cost of finding that customer and selling to them is not going down.”

Instead, said Nelson, consumers have latched onto photovoltaics because of the tax incentives offered by the federal and state governments.

“Incentives have brought people out who just like the idea of solar,” he said. “In states where’s there no incentive, there’s not a market for photovoltaics.”

As solar power use increases and begins to mature in the future, Ed Hamilton, executive deputy director of the New York State Foundation of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), a state program that provides funding for research to universities and businesses, said both technologies could eventually serve users.

“I think both technologies will impact users and households,” he said.