Electrek green energy brief: WorldBank loan at 0.25% for 750MW, Trump says no to ‘carbon tax’, more

750MW solar park to get 0.25% loan from World Bank – This is just below the going rate for banks that borrow directly from the United States (or really rich people who have hard collateral). The World Bank does have political reasons for giving a loan like this and the loan is probably backed by India. Nonetheless, big names like this giving big money like this are important – for one, that one group is doing it means others will soon follow. And that means 1GW solar power plants will get built a lot more often.

The Trump Administration pushing back against carbon tax – Technically, anything this group says out loud doesn’t matter relative to truth or long term reality – however – it does represent their current philosophical positions. And that is a good thing to know. However, has the Trump administration ever heard of a ‘carbon dividend‘?

System monitoring software getting Australian attention – Posting this because of a few data points in the article – the main one 15% system losses in residential solar systems due to not recognizing downtime. Holy lost revenue! That’s huge. This needs to be tied directly to my heart – if my solar system isn’t working at high noon I need a little jolt.

1.2GW worth of wind applied for in West Texas/New Mexico – $865M for 1.23GW of solar means $0.70/W. Then know that wind will run 10-20% more (capacity factor) than solar, and you’ll understand why big wind has 5X more hardware in the ground.

I’m posting this because its SunShot and I want to say their name a lot, SunShot – Its an award from an industry that SunShot greatly helps, so it is partial. The software is valuable – like everything NREL and SunShot do. Just a reminder how much corporate america – and the regular population that gets paid to use the software – benefits from focused research done by high level, focused researchers.

Japanese FIT lowered to $0.19/kWh – That Japan had so much demand and so much volume coming into their grid probably says their FIT was a bit rich, however, it was probably needed to feed the young industry the cash it needed to turn into a bigger industry with staying power. As an individual that doesn’t know the costs of construction in Japan, nor the price of grid energy, this number doesn’t seem terrible and will lead toward significant volume being installed.

Nothing against coal, it was part of our history that has brought us from there to here – and here is amazing – but it started a long time before Obama…

Coal jobs in the US. The transition has been underway for 30 years. There are now 400K solar/wind jobs in the US. pic.twitter.com/VMHmnxOdk8

— Jeff Nesbit (@jeffnesbit) March 21, 2017

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