Arizona Solar Business Opportunity

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Arizona Solar Business Opportunity

Arizona: A Golden Business
Opportunity for Solar Power


Arizona: A Golden Business
Opportunity for Solar Power


The Phoenix of Arizona's Rising Solar Energy Industry

The purpose of this page is to educate reporters, research firms, financial analysts, venture capitalists, real estate moguls and solar manufacturers on how vast the supply of Arizona solar energy is. This bountiful natural resource pours down a motherload of pure clean, carbon-free energy on Arizona more than 320 days per year. (Click here to attend a "Building a Solar Industry in Arizona" seminar)

Not only is Arizona blessed with lots of sunshine, but we are also lucky enough to have people like Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona Corporation Chairman Kris Mayes, Mayor Gordon (Phoenix) and Mayor Walkup (Tucson), Economic Developer Barry Broome and the many other solar experts mentioned on this page that have been working overtime to make the solar industry a reality in Arizona.

This effort includes the executives permitting the land, driving the steel into the ground, stringing the transmission lines, developing the solar power regulations, driving solar business deals, building concentrated solar plants, installing solar PV on residential and commercial structures and striving for serious economic development and job creation in Arizona.

Arizona is building a network of solar power systems that will rival the telecommunications infrastructure built during the '90s. In a similar manner to the Internet's ability to carry billions of data packets around the world, Arizona's solar energy collector and transmission network will deliver 10,000 megawatts of clean, carbon free energy to Arizona and the rest of the United States.

To make this possible Arizona carefully lined up the stars of solar energy industry and made it as quick as possible to build out a solar power transmission network. And, unlike California which has many unfinished projects, Arizona is making it happen in a matter of months for projects such as the Solana plant in Gila Bend, AZ.

This is just one of the reasons why Arizona is now home to an increasing number of solar manufacturing plants and has caught the attention of many financial analysts, venture capitalists and private equity investors that see the real value in building out a massive solar collector network to capture Arizona's golden treasury of radiation and export it to the rest of the United States on a profitable basis.


Many experts and industry research reports detailed on this page indicate that there is enough solar energy in Arizona and other southwestern states to power the entire United States. All we need to do to farm this goldmine of green energy is to build utility-grade concentrated solar power (CSP) plants to soak up the sunshine, and then use high-density transmission lines to export it to other states that need more electricity.

In addition to building utility grade solar energy power plants, there are millions of large commercial and residential roof tops available that could be used to collect solar power right now. Known as distributed generation, smaller solar power plants can use Arizona's superior net metering system to reduce electricity bills by allowing customers to generate their own electricity and sell any left over juice back to APS, SRP, and TEP to help them manage their peak load demand.


Next to every big commercial structure with a large roof there is also a large parking lot with even more room to deploy solar panels. Parking lot solar plants provide a dual benefit of producing clean energy as well as providing highly sought after shade from the sun's strong rays during Arizona's scorching summers.


The abundance of sunshine and the energy it can generate has made Arizona a focal point of political campaigns and economic discussions in Washington, DC. During the 2008 presidential race, a lot of emphasis was placed on Obama's campaign promise to spend $150 billion to build a new renewable energy industry and create more than 5 million jobs.

The election is over and Obama's administration has made good on their word by funding the construction and operation of a large scale network of renewable energy power plants, which will be a guaranteed way to free our nation from its dependency on foreign oil.

During the presidential election campaign numerous press articles focused on the amount of money that would be spent and the number of jobs it would create. What the media has not focused on to date is where the best places in America are located to build utility grade solar energy power plants and large scale wind farms.

We may be biased because we live in Arizona, but taking a quick look at the solar insolation map below, it is obvious that Arizona and New Mexico are by far the best places begin spending money in order to harness the treasure trove of solar energy that warms our deserts every day.

Arizona: The Persian Gulf of Solar Power in America


Arizona Produces Solar 123,500 MWh PV Per Year
As you can see, Arizona offers a very large vein of solar energy that can be used to power utility grade solar energy power plants, which will attract billions of dollars in investment capital, provide a boom to Arizona's economic development, and generate thousands and thousands of construction and permanent jobs.

Based on the amount of natural sunshine and wind, Arizona is firmly positioned as one of the top providers of carbon-free energy.

Top States Ranked by Solar Energy Insolation

Arizona
New Mexico
Nevada
California
Texas
Utah
Colorado
Wyoming
Florida
Kansas
The good news is that Obama is very serious about this issue and plans on taking the appropriate action to get our nation back on track.

Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law and has budgeted to spend $41 billion, including:

$11 billion funding for an electric smart grid
$6.3 billion for state and local governments to make investments in energy efficiency
$6 billion for renewable energy power generation loans
$5 billion for weatherizing modest-income homes
$4.5 billion for state and local governments to increase energy efficiency in federal buildings
$3.4 billion for carbon capture experiments
$2.5 billion for energy efficiency research
$2 billion for car battery research
$500 million for training of green-collar workers
$400 million for electric vehicle technologies
$300 million to buy energy efficient appliances
$300 million for reducing diesel fuel emissions
$300 million for state and local governments to purchase energy efficient vehicles $250 million to increase energy efficiency in low-income housing

The new Obama administration needs to consider carefully how to spend federal funds on important programs such as national cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions, feed-in tariff subsidies, programs that decouple utilities' demand side management (DSM) and renewable energy programs from their guaranteed rate of return revenue, programs that continue important solar investment tax credits and solar production tax credits.

More important than money that we MIGHT receive is the Renewable Energy Standard (RES) mandated by the Arizona Corporation Commission. Per the RES, a minimum of $60,000,0000 per year until 2025 has to be spent on developing renewable energy power plants that generate clean, green power.

That budget adds up $1.2 billion of guaranteed money that will subsidize the installation of solar on residential and businesses.

Every home solar power system installation requires about ten people including sales staff to answer the phone, an engineer to do the site evaluation, a CAD engineer to draw up the solar power plant design, a permiting specialist to file permit paperwork with the city, a rebate specialist to file the paperwork to receive tax credits from the federal government, a manager to approved the design, two to three construction personnel to build it and one financial professional to arrange the financing to pay for the installation.

With a $60 million guaranteed budget from the RES, and a typical rebate issued by the utilities of $30,000, more than 2,000 residential installations per year could be built. Do the math and 2,000 jobs would require 20,000 people to make the installations happen. That is a lot of jobs, which would very beneficial for Arizona's ailing economy.

Large scale utility grade solar power plants are much larger and each would produce significantly more jobs than a residential installation.

The technology used to make solar panels is the same technology used to make semiconductor chips. In the last five years thousands of semiconductor engineers have been laid off. Creating this type of local demand for solar power panels is the single best way to attract solar manufacturing companies to set up shop in Arizona. Growing semiconductor silicon for computer chips or solar panels is a very similar process.

The Greater Phoenix Economic Council (GPEC) is working overtime to lobby the Arizona legislature to pass transferrable corporate tax credit packages for manufacturers and companies that move their corporate headquarters to Arizona. Another proposal includes passing a real and personal property tax reduction for companies that make capital investments of more than $25 million in Arizona.

It is vital that Arizona invests all of its time and energy to jump start the economy by frugally spending the yearly $60 million RES budget to stimulate the demand for billions and billions of dollars that would flow into this state to build solar electric power plants and recruit international solar manufacturers to build new solar factories in Arizona.

As with any business, volume buying by the masses will create sufficient demand to drive down prices and make solar technology available for every household and business in Arizona.

Below you will find links to an immense library of solar information retrieved from Arizona's leading solar economic development teams, solar energy research consulting firms, solar manufacturers, solar installation teams, solar business development specialists, solar commercial real estate developers and solar property management companies.

We built this repository of information so that everyone in the solar industry will have a place to research solar energy facts and figures and use them to create and disseminate marketing messages to educate the world on the endless supply of solar energy that is falling on Arizona's golden deserts every day.

Building momentum in the national media is the best way for Washington and the Obama administration to recognize that Arizona is the best place to fulfill their promise of providing quick economic relief via a 10-year, $150 billion deal to create 5 million green collar jobs.

Arizona needs to work together as team to generate a large volume of news articles, which will highlight the sheer volume of roof space and empty parking lots that are ready and waiting to be developed into distributed solar power generation plants right where we need it most -- in the middle of the grid.

Regardless of what industry you work in, if your company is doing anything related to solar energy, we would like to help you generate some positive publicity for your efforts. We can generate publicity in any of the following business-to-business categories. Each industry link is attached to other companies that are successfully generating the type of news we would like to be generating for your company.

Persuasive media campaigns are the best way to raise awareness and reach decision makers in the following industries: shopping malls, movie theaters, sports arenas, convention centers, airports, warehouses, military bases, corporate campuses, retail supercenters such as Wal-mart, ranching/dairies, hospitals, manufacturing plants, hotels, churches, schools, apartment complexes and large parking lots.

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