Renewable energy equipment providers have historically set their marketing strategy to target off-grid and similar small, very tolerant users. Recently, there has been focus on utility scale systems. Thus, the renewable energy industry has few standards with poor system integration and documentation. While the National Electrical Code (NEC) is a standard, at least for safety, the NEC is not the type of standard that the industry needs; it is both unaffordable and unintelligible to the homeowner. Given the advent of lower cost renewable energy equipment, the higher cost of fossil fuel, and the increased awareness of human caused global warming, now is the time for the renewable energy industry to implement a marketing strategy for the residential user, which means providing standards for the homeowner to design, install, operate, and maintain renewable energy systems.

The primary obstacle for implementing residentially distributed renewable energy generation has been cost, when compared with heavily subsidized centralized fossil fuel electricity generation. With the increasing awareness of the full environmental and societal cost of burning fossil fuels and the increasing costs for transmitting electricity from large central facilities, the rapid implementation of distributed residential renewable energy systems has become economically viable. Distributed renewable energy residential generation is a very practical approach to meet a significant portion of United States wide energy needs for the next 20 years or so without having significant additions to existing infrastructure. While a number of other factors are relevant, e.g., bureaucratic inertia, special vested-interest opposition, regulatory hurdles, these factors can be either eliminated or reduced with the appropriate standards and standard setting process.

The renewable energy industry needs its participants to initiate writing appropriate standards. Participating companies could select the individual members, along with others from other sources like, ASES, DOE, NREL, Home Power, distributors and installers.

Appropriate standards from the electronic industries (www.jedec.org has many examples) can be used as models, not just for document format and style, but the nature of the contents to generate standards in at least the following areas:

* Performance: to what defined limits a piece of equipment should comply.

* Measurement (test): how to measure performance.

* Quality and Reliability: measurement of variance control and longevity in manufacturing, assembly, and test.

* Educational: to explain why things work the way they do.

* Interface standards: how pieces of equipment work together and what connection methods should be used, including hardware, firmware, and software.

* Form, fit, function: what each piece of equipment should “look” like, and how it will operate.

* Shipping and labeling: how packed to prevent breakage and how to label to comply with RoHS, Country of Origin, recycling, etc. requirements.

Some examples of best-practice standards would include:

* Measurement and reporting methods for PV modules that represent the actual environment, e.g., range of insulation values, realistic roof-mounted temperatures.

* Connecting rules for strings of PV modules, e.g., so maximum voltage is not exceeded. Many module manufacturers have on-line tools to do this, but the general requirements should be standardized.

* The NEC is strictly for the consumer side of the meter. While this was acceptable when electricity was “one-way” (from the grid ? consumer), we now have “two-way” systems (grid ? consumer), which need to include additional recommendations, e.g., transformer size.

* Mechanical connection points need to be sized to accommodate various sizes and types of wires, e.g., not have to bend 4-gauge solid copper wire to fix into a box.

* How for smaller electric cooperatives to deals with load-balancing when variable generation renewable energy is a measurable fraction of the total system capacity?

* How to pack evacuated tube solar collectors so that none are broken during normal freight transport.

* How to program different charge controllers, e.g., for wind and PV, that feed the same battery bank.

* How to ground PV racks or trackers in different types of soil with different relative humidity.

* How to set up metering systems for Renewable Energy Credits, what reporting format to use.

* What preventive maintenance activities and schedules are required for systems, e.g., how to integrate the (often undocumented) requirements from components?

In general, these are best-practice standards, incorporating the knowledge and experience from a wide variety of sources. The standards can be provided to regulatory bodies, but would not be legal requirements (requiring inspection and legislation).

Standardization is independent of technology: what design and manufacturing technologies that are used are not an impediment to the standardization process. For example, standards on how the performance on any given piece of equipment is achieved, e.g., for a PV module, the intrinsic crystalline technology (single, poly, amorphous) is not mandated or restricted; however, interface requirements and measurement of performance would be.

Given the general lack of standards and the poor system integration documentation for the renewable energy industry, what is the best way to develop the standards and provide system integration? One needs a “test bed” of users where standard and other documents can be “de-bugged” and equipment can be installed in a “real-world” environment with feed back for improvement.

Such a set of users already exists: rural America. While rural America for the long term only represents a small fraction of the total available market, e.g., 5-10% of residences and small businesses, this is the ideal market to use to de-bug standards, documents, and systems prior to widespread implementation in the urban residential market.

Today’s ruralite is much more self-sufficient than an urbanite is. Unburdened by urban bureaucracy, e.g., building inspectors, building codes, unions, neighbor or neighborhood association restrictions, the ruralite (maybe with the help of neighbors, e.g., the old “barn-raising mentality) is very capable of safely installing and operating electrical and plumbing systems. Safety (because doctors and volunteer fire departments are often hours away) is of prime concern, so following NEC rules for electrically safe installations is not an issue; assuming installation instructions clearly stipulate required and best-practice standards are available. Excellent reliability, ease of installation and operation, and minimum maintenance are highly valued characteristics.

The Renewable Energy Industry Marketing has not just ignored the rural market because of the small size; there is the significant problem of the low availability of disposable income for investment. In order to take advantage of the capabilities of the rural home and small business owner, the system providers must have creative financing options; such as offering the equipment at a reduced rate and providing low interest rates for financing the remainder. The provider could work with USDA programs (see http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/farmbill/index.html) that are intended to increase renewable energy implementation in agricultural environments. The provider would require the rural installer/operator to provide specific feedback on what additional information and tools are needed to easily install and operate; especially in the existing weak areas of documentation and interface hardware.

Therefore, while in urban locations, there are currently many obstacles to easily installing renewable energy equipment, few of those obstacles exist in the rural setting. Therefore, the renewable energy system provider could readily learn how to design and manufacture complete systems that would first be de-bugged in the rural setting, and then be efficiently transferred to the urban environment. The provider would need to help with the up-front cost, but then the systems and documents would be de-bugged so that widespread high volume implementation in urban settings would have many fewer problems.

In summary, the renewable energy industry needs a new marketing strategy to focus on providing standards and documents to enable residential and small business opportunities. This is best accomplished by improving documents and system integration, using the many talents of rural Americans to provide the necessary feedback. The feedback will come by helping to finance a wide spread implementation of renewable energy systems, e.g., solar hot water heating, photovoltaic, wind, small hydro, even concentrated solar, in rural locations, including homes and small businesses, e.g., stores, farms, ranches. Then, with the added knowledge, the increasing demand for the high volume urban market can be better met.

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