Vermont's solar forecast: Sunny

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060820/NEWS/608200389/0/FRONTPAGE

MONTPELIER – In its first year of business in 1998, Global Resource Options, a solar-energy business based in White River Junction, grossed $100,000. This year, the company's sales will approach $12 million.

Like other installers and suppliers across the state, Global Resource Options is riding a solar energy boom in Vermont.

Hundreds of solar projects worth millions of dollars are in the works. And with a new round of state grants for solar installations about to open, suppliers and installers expect to have trouble keeping up with demand.

"We've had a five-fold growth in sales since 1999 and it has definitely spiked," said Jim Grundy, president of Elemental Energy in East Montpelier, a local installer and also a board member of Renewable Energy Vermont, an alternative energy advocacy group. "We're actually booking projects for next summer, and we're building a new facility."

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It's good news if you're affluent enough to be a homeowner in Vermont; though installing solar in any part of the country will help. But it's a small slice of a big, ugly pie. And rental property owners won't do diddly until the jackbooted thugs from Big Gummint come along and put a gun to their heads and threaten to confiscate their very balls.

I hope that the "spike" Jim Grundy spoke of is, in the long-run, just the initial blip on an overall improvement in energy generation and consumption. Right now, the situation ISN'T encouraging. Even after six or seven years of renewed attention to energy issues, less than 2% of our energy is decentralizable/renewable, the nuclear industry is hated (and stalled), and the Saudi oil industry is unable increase their output.

Then, there are also the problems of the unmaintainability of sprawl-based community planning, mass production of low-value disposable consumer goods, and motorcar-based transportation systems. No energy generation plan will be able to change the fact that these are long-term disasters waiting to happen.

These stories can give us a sense that progress is being made and hope is still alive, but such projects tend to be very small, and the problem is enormous. They're "proof of concept". How can we prove and implement the concept of compelling our business and political communities to encourage capitalizing and building durable, sustainable energy sources? It's been hard enough for Julian Darley and Richard Heinberg to simply "start the conversation" about relocalization. Which "tipping point" do we tip first? We needed to do this 25 years ago, and we didn't.

At this point, we're riding the tiger, and we've set ourselves up -- not just in the USA, but around the world -- for real trouble. The Big Project is still ahead of us.

--p!

There are 20 in that very small state - if they all made that kind of money, it would be a $240 million per year business.