EGEB: Buffett has a big appetite for solar, new French President for carbon tax, wind and solar, more

Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news

“If someone walks in with a solar project tomorrow and it takes a billion dollars or three billion dollars, we’re ready to do it” – In the United States, a $1-3B solar project will be 1-3GW of solar power. I’ve seen no projects announced greater than 1GW. More likely, a project of this size will be within a Buffett owned electrical district – Nevada, northwest USA, or able to get its electricity to Nevada. If Buffett is ready to buy, then the world is ready to buy.

French election 2017: Where the candidates stand on energy and climate change – first off, these are politicians talking…so, grain of salt please…but – Macron says 1. double France’s wind and solar capacity by 2022, 2. ban all shale gas exploration, 3. no new hydrocarbon exploration permits, 4. reduce nuclear power’s share of the French energy mix from 75% today to 50%, 5. pledges to “integrate the ecological cost” into the price of carbon in France by increasing the carbon tax to €100 per tonne of CO2 in 2030. Politics in France will be tilted this direction for a while.

Trump firing pollution scientists, hiring industry people – Trump’s EPA says industry people, those being regulated, ought be dictating the rules since they have to follow them. That’s like letting a six year old decide bedtime and dinner.

Ivanka Trump to review climate change as US mulls Paris pullout – per ‘an official’ – Ivanka Trump will hold a separate meeting Tuesday with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt – What a joke. The USA is turning into banana republic.

Coal gets €6.3B in European incentives annually – the 10 countries reviewed have provided €6.3 billion per year in subsidies to coal (on average for the 2005 to 2016 period), across a total of 65 subsidies identified –  While many might complain about the incentives renewables are getting, most don’t realize the number of tax breaks and other benefits oil/coal/nuclear get. The 30% tax credit for solar has plenty of competition from oil. Historically speaking,  over the years 1950–2010 oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period. Non-hydro renewable energy (primarily wind and solar) benefited from $74 billion in federal subsidies, or 9% of the total, largely in the form of tax policy and direct federal expenditures on research and development (R&D). Nuclear power benefited from $73 billion in federal subsidies, 9% of the total, largely in the form of R&D, while hydro power received $90 billion in federal subsidies, 12% of the total.

500MW of behind the meter energy storage for California – California already has a storage mandate of 1.325GW for the utilities to install and manage, now they have a mandate for another 500MW. Now we’ll see the residential and commercial market start to pop a little more.

China installs 7.21GW in Q12017 – 4.8GW was utility-scale, the rest was distributed. Key thing I noticed from the report – curtailment/abandonment figures for Ningxia and Gansu dropped by 10% and 19% respectively, the regions of Qinghai, Shaanxi, and Inner Mongolia all saw their curtailment issues increase by 9%, 11%, and 8% respectively, while Xinjiang’s curtailment figure is still astronomically high, at 39% – That’s a lot of energy not being used right now. Energy storage and transmission lines will gain economically from this.

I thought this was a great list of the challenges to build utility-scale solar power in India – a lot of these challenges are the same in the USA –

#India = solar success story, right? Not so fast. Some gloomy thoughts from my source on the ground…only #5 is positive, and #6 annuls it pic.twitter.com/hF8O19wGPY

— Varun Sivaram (@vsiv) May 2, 2017

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