Word: solarization
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Sami Khoreibi couldn't stop beaming at his company's work. The baby-faced CEO of Enviromena Power Systems, Khoreibi started his business just a little over a year ago. Now he was standing over a 10-megawatt solar farm in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, with row after row of solar panels angled to the Middle East sun like bathers lying poolside. The solar farm was the first tangible evidence of Abu Dhabi's Masdar City, a $22 billion project that is planned to be the first zero-carbon footprint, totally renewably powered settlement - a monument...
...Dhabi isn't the last place you'd expect to find ambitious plans for solar energy and ultra-green construction, it has to be close. The seaside capital of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) is the world's fifth largest producer of petroleum, and the wealth that oil brings this former fishing village is evident in the foreign luxury cars that choke its highways, running on gas that costs just 45 cents a gallon. But a year ago, the government launched the multibillion-dollar Masdar Initiative, a combination clean-tech investment fund, property developer and renewable-energy start...
That leaves the U.S. market to make up the difference, and with Obama's election, many renewable energy advocates were confident the country was about to make a solar leap. But the credit market's deep freeze has hit new solar projects just as it has almost every other facet of the economy - the only difference is that many solar manufacturers don't have the cash reserves to ride out a long downturn. That could leave the U.S. shorthanded on solar at the very time when it's finally gotten serious about renewables. "This is still a capital intensive business...
...energy companies and used them to reduce their own tax liabilities - for the good that did. With that market vaporized, Washington can increase tax credits all it wants, but the policy will have little effect. The answer is to make the tax credits directly refundable, so that if a solar start-up can use its credits to reduce its tax bill to below zero, it would actually receive a check from the government for the difference. "That would solve the problem, and we could go right to work," says O'Brien...
...relations and is based in Washington, says some in Congress worry that making the credits refundable would set an uncomfortable precedent. But if the government truly wants to change the energy sector - and make green jobs more than just green rhetoric - refundability is the way to make sure the solar industry doesn't go dark...