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The market for solar energy in the US has grown exponentially due to increased consumer demand resulting from price reduction via economies of scale, technological progress, and a variety of incentives from federal and state governments as well as utility companies. The installation of solar power in Tennessee has more than doubled each year from 2009 to 2011. In this paper, we focus on the behavior of the Tennessee Solar Value Chain (TNSVC) to study the factors that influence growth of solar industry in the state. The impact of existing incentives on the TNSVC is analyzed. The TNSVC is simulated based on inputs from on-site survey to estimate economic impact in terms of the number of jobs added and the tax revenue generated in the state. In addition, a sensitivity analysis for the impact on the TNSVC under different policies those may be adopted by the state of Tennessee in the future is conducted. This paper employs a holistic model which can predict PV installation demand, understand solar value chain capacity, and estimate the revenue generation. It should be noted that the method employed in this study is not unique to the solar energy industry in Tennessee. The data utilized in this study is a combination of public domain information and surveys of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and installers. This makes the model in this paper flexible enough to be applied to assess the solar value chain in other state or country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recently, several improvements were made in the DORIS data processing at the IGN/JPL (Institut Geographique National, France; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA) analysis center: use of GRACE-derived gravity fields, data preprocessing and station discontinuity detection, etc. This allowed enhanced performances for ground station geodetic positioning (typically 10mm using a week of data), as well as for polar motion (0.5–1.0 mass for daily determination). However, since the loss in 2004 of the DORIS receiver on the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, only four satellites (SPOT-2, SPOT-4, SPOT-5, and ENVISAT) are currently equipped with DORIS receivers. Furthermore, most of them are aging and some have already far exceeded their expected lifetime. The goal of this paper is to analyze how the geodetic performances could be degraded in the future if one or more of these satellites would unfortunately be lost, and to envisage which satellites are currently the most critical in the DORIS geodetic performances. We have reanalyzed 1 year of recent DORIS data (2005), processing all possible combinations of satellite constellation sub-sets. We then compared these results (station coordinates and polar motion) with those obtained in regular data processing when using DORIS data from all four available satellites in 2005. We demonstrate the importance of the SPOT-5 data, equipped with a new type of on-board DORIS receiver. The study also shows some possible weaknesses in our current ENVISAT orbit computations. Fortunately, new DORIS satellites are also expected in the near future (Jason-2, CRYOSAT-2 and AltiKa), which could improve current DORIS-derived geodetic results due to their specific type of orbit (different from the SPOT sun-synchronous orbits) and also to enhanced on-board receivers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]