U.S. Struggles to Build Solar Opportunities

At the Solar Power International show last week in Anaheim, Calif., billed as America's largest solar event, the competitiveness of the U.S. solar industry was a recurring theme. At keynote sessions, panel discussions and individual meetings, speakers not only espoused the strengths of the domestic industry and markets, but urged other industry participants to make themselves heard and take an active role in government policy development.

In a speech much like a sermon from a pulpit, Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA, Washington, D.C.), did perhaps the most to try to stir the audience into action, repeatedly eliciting bouts of applause. There are crucial policy battles raging right now in the U.S. Congress, he said, and people throughout the solar industry need to support the efforts by joining SEIA, engaging their policymakers, writing opinion pieces for the local media, and contributing money to the cause. "When it comes to engaging in the major policy battles ahead, we face a choice right here, right now," Resch said. "There are two alternatives, and two alone: Go big, or go home."

Resch laid out what he called the Solar Bill of Rights, including such provisions as the right to connect solar systems to the grid with uniform national standards, the right to a fair competitive environment, and the right to equal access to public lands. He was trying to give people something that the entire solar industry could get behind, unifying the industry's various technologies, he said in a separate interview with PV Society. "And unifies us in a way that points out these aren't special treatments that we're getting," he explained. "These are just the very basic elements of a level playing field. And that we're not greedy in asking for this."

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