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Strategies & Market Trends : Sharck Soup -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Spitz who wrote (37082)	11/8/2001 8:57:24 AM
From: Jim Spitz	Respond to of 37746

San Francisco voters back solar power expansion Associated Press Published Nov 8 2001 SAN FRANCISCO -- San Franciscans have voted to make their often-foggy city the nation's largest producer of sun-generated electricity, approving a $100 million bond issue to install as many solar panels in the area as the entire nation does each year. The measure allowing the city to fund solar projects for city and county-owned buildings and to capture wind power on bluffs elsewhere in the Bay Area was overwhelmingly approved by voters Tuesday. Voters also endorsed a measure that allows city supervisors to issue bonds for renewable energy projects without voter approval. The solar industry said the added demand could spur development of more efficient and less expensive technology. That could lower solar's cost, which is high compared with other renewable fuels. "This is a big shot in the arm for the solar industry," said Ron Pernick, co-founder of Clean Edge Inc., an Oakland consulting firm. "All of a sudden you're increasing, maybe even doubling the growth rate of solar" panels. The industry, which says it has grown about 25 percent in each of the past 10 years, got a further boost from California's power woes. High start-up costs and historically limited government subsidies have made solar power an investment for the environmentally inclined, not for mainstream businesses. Like hundreds of other California cities, San Francisco's power costs forced officials to find ways to lower electricity and natural gas bills. Previous advances have lowered the cost of producing solar energy to about 12 cents per kilowatt hour from as high as $3 per kilowatt hour a decade earlier. That's still more than the roughly 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour it costs to make electricity using wind, but less than California's investor-owned utilities charged residential customers under last spring's rate increases. © Copyright 2001 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.