February - March 2008
provision mean solar power
By Alvin Koo
ProVision
is not about goggles. It’s not about eyeglasses or telescopes.
I suppose it’s about forward looking thinking. Like professional vision. So I asked.
ProVision was started in 2000 by Hawaiian Electric Industries. The technocrat mindset there thought they’d be cute. The ‘Pro’ was for ‘providing.’ The vision was to get the capital ‘V,’ so as to create PV as in ProVision, which would conjur up images of photovoltaic power, commonly known as PV.
Go figure.
ProVision Technologies, Inc. is about solar electric power.
It’s probably one of Hawaii’s leading solar voltaic providers.
Headquartered in Hilo, where the sun always shine, the ProVision staff has been involved in solar renewable energy since the 1970’s. The company was purchased in 2003 by Doublas Bath and Marco Mangelsdorf.
Some of the company’s installations include 25kW for King Auto Center in Lihue, 16 kW for Minit Stop in Kawaihae, 52 kW for Island Dodge of Maui, and a 90 module set-up for Island Soap and Candle Works in Kapaa.
The company was honored in 2007 by Pacific Business News as the ninth fastest growing company in Hawaii, up 400 percent since 2004.
The company uses spread sheets and does their homework to make presentation sing and be credible.
The Hotel Honoka’a Club, a Hamakua Coast landmark since 1908, now has electricity provided by 64 high efficiency solar modules mounted on the roof of the hotel’s second story. It generates electricity worth over $500 per month, bringing the hotels energy bill to about zero.
Big Island Toyota, Big Island Suzuki in Hilo and Island Naturals grocery store in Pahoa did not incur capital outlay or balance sheet liability when installing their systems, said Marco Mangelsdorf, ProVision’s president
The deal required innovative financing by ProVision, Maryland-based solar energy company SunEdison LLC and the Bank of Hawaii.
“SunEdison
provides the system... Bankoh owns the system... and they lease it back
to SunEdison and SunEdison in turn (sells) the power, the solar kilowatt-hours
to the end-user,” Mangelsdorf said. Bankoh gets the tax credit and
depreciation.
The company installed its first net energy metering system in 2001 in a small company in Kawaihae. Net metering was made possible by a new law that year which encourages the installation of renewable energy systems like wind, biomass, hydro or solar. It means that any surplus energy created by a private system goes into the utility grid.
All electric utilities in the state are now required to offer PV power producers the option of connecting up to 50 kW for both residential and commercial photovoltaic systems to their respective electric utility grid on a net metered basis.
There are several basic types of PV modules commercially available today--those made from crystalline silicon, those made from amorphous silicon and those made from other thin-film PV materials such as copper-indium-diselenide (CIS) and cadmium telluride(CdTe). While crystalline silicon modules have dominated the market since the 1970s, thin-film modules and nanotechnology might be able to offer solar electricity at substantially reduced costs in the future.
The cost per watt of photovoltaic modules has dropped dramatically from $60 to below $5 per watt in the past 30 years.
So maybe you can afford it now, too.
Or maybe you can’t afford not to have it.
