Invasion of the power snatchers

MOST Europeans come to Las Vegas on vacation. Maybe they spend a week or two relaxing in Sin City, trying to stay out of the summer sun unless it finds them poolside.

The Spanish owners of Acciona Energia are different -- when they came to town in 2007, they came to stay. And instead of avoiding the sunlight, they came to harness it and turn it into energy that could be sold back to the state's electric utility, NV Energy. Acciona's SolarONE 64-megawatt thermal plant is one of the largest solar energy projects ever built, with the capacity to generate 134 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

SolarONE works by using mirrored troughs to collect the sun's rays and concentrate their heat to boil water for steam turbines. It is the largest effort to date to take a renewable resource Nevada has in abundance, like sunlight, and turn it into saleable electricity.

And that effort came from folks who developed their expertise far from the place with the potential to become the so-called Saudi Arabia of renewable energy that could attract a possible $40 billion in investment from key industries. It's an emerging trend in the state of Nevada, a place that has seen solar projects proposed by German and Australian companies, and whose largest geothermal projects have been spearheaded by an Israeli corporation that relocated to Reno.

"I think this whole issue of renewable energy is really new," says Steve Rypka, a consultant with Green Dreams. "The U.S. has really lost its leadership role and other countries have picked up the ball. I think right now it's going to be the norm to see this industry dominated by European and Asian companies."

False start

Asians and Europeans have a particular advantage when it comes to utility-scale projects like Boulder City's SolarONE. But that wasn't always the case. American scientists developed many of the first solar and wind energy technologies five decades ago. In the 1950s, Bell Labs invented the first photovoltaic panels for use by NASA. Interest in these technologies increased during energy crises in the 1970s, and peaked when President Jimmy Carter installed several solar panels on the roof of the White House.

Soon after his 1981 inauguration, President Ronald Reagan pulled the PV panels down. Then he gutted Carter's solar research program. All of that coincided with a drop in fuel prices that made the investment in renewable energy seem unnecessarily costly.

So the American companies such as Bell Labs that made early strides in the development of renewable energy sold their proprietary technologies to companies across the pond, corporations that benefitted from governmental support for renewable technologies.

"Almost all these technologies were developed in the United States," says Robert Boehm, the director of UNLV's Center for Energy Research. "Now almost all of them have gone to foreign ownership. Photovoltaic systems went to Asia, wind machines to Europe, and the last thing we had going for us, solar thermal, now Spain in particular has been buying out all those plants."

According to a report published by the Bureau of Land Management, there are 76 applications for renewable energy projects on Nevada's federal lands. If all the projects are approved and completed, they would generate 20,470 megawatts of electricity through a combination of wind and solar projects. Not all of the companies vying to build their renewable energy projects in Nevada are foreign. Cogentrix is based in North Carolina, and several California companies have jumped into the mix. There is, however, a notable absence of companies headquartered in Nevada angling to get in on the utility market.

Reno's Ormat Technologies is one exception and is one of the leaders in geothermal power generation. The company started in Israel in 1965 and moved to Nevada a few years ago to capitalize on the area's abundance of geothermal resources. Ausra, a solar energy that started in Australia, moved to Palo Alto, Calif. and opened a manufacturing facility in Las Vegas earlier this year.

Sun up or shut up

Renewable energy experts agree that the U.S. in general, and Nevada in particular, have to make up a lot of ground if they want to compete with Asian and European companies that have been installing large-scale projects two decades longer than their American counterparts. Boehm says he doesn't think the state has done enough to encourage a homegrown industry, even though it has stepped up its efforts to recruit more renewable energy investment.

Neal Lurie, a spokesman for the American Solar Energy Society, says he is optimistic that the U.S. will close the renewable energy gap. He cites President-elect Barack Obama's stated commitment to the development of renewable energy technology and action by Congress that repealed a cap on solar energy tax credits.

"Global competition in the solar energy market is good for helping to drive down the costs of renewable energy. But right now there is a sense of urgency that time might be running out for U.S. companies to become part of this market. It's going to take tremendous dedication by politicians and policymakers."