EGEB: Suniva may be filing for ‘serious damage’, South Australia 80% wind+solar, Japan drops 25GW of solar, more

Suniva going to seek extreme protections against Chinese solar panels manufacturers – The company plans to lobby the International Trade Commission under Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act — basically arguing that solar imports (not just Chinese imports, but imports in general) have caused “serious injury.”  The article goes on to say that if the 1974 Trade Act is applied to this case, and they agree that serious injury has occurred, there are many ‘solutions’ that can be applied against the industry – including tariffs against any country in the world, or minimum pricing. And it would be Trump filing these consequences. If we choose to attack solar panel pricing – it is only the USA that will suffer, the rest of the world will keep on keeping on.

South Australia projected to have 80% of electricity demand met by solar+wind by 2021/2022 – South Australia also happens to be a place that is currently in a strange type of gas shortage – one where they export before they feed the local markets. These energy issues are driving record solar growth in 2017 and the largest projects the earth has seen involving solar+batteries.

The Energy Department is reportedly denying funds for already-approved grants – If it turns out that the unidentified sources are correct – then ‘Good governance’ today is being defined as going back on obligations made to scientists who want to protect the electricity grid. Cutting these programs is part of partisan action and has little to do with fixing the budget since the budget isn’t projected to fall (all savings from other departments are being rerouted to the US Military budget). This is not patriotic.

Solar plant built specifically to power battery storage facility – this is the first large-scale solar power plant I’ve seen built to power a battery Farm.

5MW, 40MWh of battery storage coming to Long Island – Not as large as the projects out in California yet, but this project is just the beginning on the east. Massachusetts (I happen to be working on my first commercial energy storage project) will be following New York very soon.

Japan May Pull Support From a Quarter of Clean-Energy Projects (but my lord were there a LOT!) – This headline is a lot less scary than it sounds. These projects were those that had been applied for based upon the very high feed in tariff offered, but hadn’t moved forward for one reason or another. Not projects that were already built – or under construction. The two numbers that made me want to show you this – 3 million + systems and greater than 100 gigawatts of solar were applied for. That’s almost 50% more than the world installed in 2016. Even with the decreased feed in tariff expect significant future solar growth from Japan.

My once a week – oh my gosh so much green energy!! – tweet 🙂 Germany’s numbers are going to keep growing aggressively, the solar numbers have been a bit slower (but are expecting to pick up), and now with batteries starting to explode in the country (50,000 systems this year) – we might see Germany gain the steam it had a few years back.

This afternoon, 64% of German electricity was produced by wind (36%) and solar (28%)! pic.twitter.com/ze4TLHZqW2

— Kees van der Leun  (@Sustainable2050) April 23, 2017

Header image released by NRG of a single axis tracking solar power system built for CISCO

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