EGEB: Nevada’s new battery laws excite industry, retired US military want Advanced Energy, more

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

Nevada Just Became the Most Exciting State for Energy Storage Policy – Nevada killing the duck curve: Each kilowatt-hour of energy delivered by a qualified energy storage device will count double for the purposes of meeting the RPS requirement…if discharged during peak period. This is great in one sense – it will drive energy storage people to attack the duck curve (early evening peak usage as people get home). The flip side though – if electricity coming from a battery counts toward the RPS, and the original electricity made by the solar system counts toward the RPS – then will they want less total clean energy? Got a tweet out to the author to get some refinement.

Retired military brass urge U.S. to lead world on advanced (not clean) energy – Released in a report titled, ‘Advanced Energy and US National Security,’ former US military leaders push current US leadership to take up ‘Advanced Energy’ for strong global security reasons. The document advises the United States position itself as energy demand shifts toward China and India from Europe and the USA. As countries who control and produce energy sign larger deals with larger populations, it may place further stress on the US geopolitical positions. The report says nothing of climate change and focuses solely upon energy and its effect on military might. Good enough reason for me.

IEA: World can reach ‘net zero’ emissions by 2060 to meet Paris climate goals – I may or may not be alive by that date, but if we’re net zero, and we figure out this climate thing – whatever is left of me will be happy. The IEA tends to be a conservative group as well – so 2060 might mean 2050…

The Biggest, Strangest ‘Batteries’ – Compressed air, molten salt, spinning wheels, pumped hydro, gravity train and an ice maker. Best part of the article is the large, simple graphics. Though these technologies seem like they’ll have an issue scaling, they do provide the super majority of energy storage globally.

China Adds High-quality Polysilicon Production Capacity – The article is setup funny. The top half talks of an expansion of 2,500 metric tons of high purity silicon for solar cell manufacturing. 2,500 is a lot to add in a year – the largest companies in the world in this field have around 70-80,000 tons of manufacturing capacity. The second half of the article drop the bomb – 50,000 annual tons coming from the Yongxiang Company. This group already owns 20,000 tons and will become on the three largest manufacturers of this product globally.

Waste heat + machines absorbing co2 –> increased plant growth inside of greenhouse (see header image) – The plant uses waste heat from the garbage facility it is built on top of to scrub CO2 from the air and pump that air into greenhouses to increase food production. Since Switzerland is mostly powered by hydroelectricity and nuclear, the plant is fairly clean. Amazing Rube Goldberg machine we’ve got ourselves into.

Indian PV manufacturers file anti-dumping petition against China, claim reports – India was once sued by the USA, and lost, for favoring local manufacturers. In the USA we have local solar panel manufacturers suing and asking for protection from these same Chinese manufacturers.

Israel’s Energiya Global to build Liberia’s first 10 MW plant; invest $1 billion to African PV – A country whose infrastructure was destroyed by civil war is getting a relatively small solar power system – from a country standpoint – that will supply 25% of generation capacity. At minimum, cheap solar power will bring electricity of some sorts to the 1.2 billion who are not served by standard electricity utilities.

The purpose of the piece in the NYTimes is to talk about the political divide when considering wind energy and Trump’s positions – the most wind, wind jobs and wind land leases, etc are in red states. If you look at these NREL wind resource maps you’ll see the resemblance.

https://twitter.com/zdboren/status/872391552810852353

Header image is of the Waste Heat to CO2 machine from Climeworks

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