Happy New Year! As we look forward in 2009 to a new administration and speculate on what changes we’ll see in the solar marketplace this coming year, we have to take into account what has gone before. 2008 was a year of big news: the US economy crashed spectacularly from its more than decade-long high, we voted in a serious regime change in November, our strategy in Iraq officially changed from persistence to planned withdrawal, energy prices skyrocketed, and tantalizing advances in solar research were announced (cylindrical thin-film, paint-on, and printable organic solar cells, among them).

The Wall Street crisis had more repercussions for solar than anyone could have imagined when a bill for extending the federal investment tax credit for solar was appended to the bailout package. Since the credit, set to expire at the end of 2008, had repeatedly been voted down in both the House and the Senate for various reasons (mostly to do with disagreements between the parties on how the ITC was to be funded), its passage was a incredibly bright silver lining to an otherwise gloomy situation. While the rest of the country looked at the collapsed credit and housing markets, and the the world held its breath to see if the bailout would work, the solar industry had something to celebrate. Eight years of a generous tax credit to encourage large-scale and even residential solar, set against a backdrop of oil at over $140/barrel, really had us feeling like good things were on the horizon. Given this scenario, how could solar not be booming? But the ITC has some drawbacks: on the residential side, it means many states are considering scaling back their own solar rebates in order to keep the end cost of a PV system more or less the same. And perhaps with the ITC recently extended, the Obama administration may relegate more support for solar to the back burner.

Meanwhile, corporate and utility-scale solar continue to grow. Google really set the bar high with its 1.6mw installation in 2007–the largest in the US–but then the Atlantic City Convention Center announced in June 2008 plans for a 2.36mw system (financed as a PPA through Pepco); construction began in November. Florida began work on the world’s first integrated solar thermal/combined cycle power plant; California got its first new solar thermal plant in two decades (in addition to a huge one on Fort Irwin, courtesty of the US Army); and even North Carolina announced plans for a new 1mw PV plant.

Closely following the ITC boom, there came a bust of sorts: oil prices have dropped to nearly half of last year’s high, and the focus is once again off renewables. Since this is what happened in the ’70s–oil crisis, crazy investment in renewables, no more oil crisis and everyone wanders back to coal and 20mpg vehicles–let’s hope we have the sense to reconsider, focus on the future, and continue to build a strong solar base in this country on the path to true energy resource diversity.

So a hearty welcome to 2009. Let our resolution be to learn from the past, instead of repeating it.