EGEB: Solar sedan and sports coupe; Heterojunction solar in Russia; Graham believes; more

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Solar sedan and sports coupe in race across Australia – and to commercial market – Clenergy TeamArrow Founder Cameron Tuesley said the car’s energy management system included a highly efficient solar array that generates 1.1 kilowatts total power, making it able to of self-charge from sunlight, as well to charge from the electricity grid. The Arrow STF (Sports Touring Framework) was officially launched in Queensland on Thursday, after being designed and built in Brisbane. The sports coupe has a top speed of 150km per hour and can travel 1000km before needing to recharge. Violet relies on around 7kW of horsepower at 110km/h, and two 1.5kW motors that run at 98 per cent efficiency, the UNSW team says. She also weighs in at only 380kg, thanks to a twill carbon-fibre monocoque chassis. I’ve never seriously considered that a solar powered day driver car could really get it done – but every year this contest comes along, I see my levels of doubt fall. If the reality of the majority of our travel are short trips, in city traffic, at slow speeds and there is only one person in the car – why can’t we have a main driver being solar and access to rental/uber for longer trips?

Hevel completes first heterojunction-based PV power plants in Russia – First, I like that a country awash in oil and gas at low prices, is considering solar power for their electricity. Secondly, heterojunction product (higher efficiency because of multiple layers of silicon sandwiching other materials) getting more production is great. There aren’t too many plants of this product in the wild – I know Panasonic sells it, but not sure who else. Rock on.

Republican Senator Endorses ‘Price on Carbon’ to Fight Climate Change – “I’m a Republican. I believe that the greenhouse effect is real, that CO2 emissions generated by man is creating our greenhouse gas effect that traps heat, and the planet is warming,” said Graham. “A price on carbon—that’s the way to go in my view.” Now the question is, how do we get this view to overpower the political capital that controls the voting habits.

Foreign Solar Manufacturers Weigh Opening US Facilities as Tariff Decision Looms – If injury is determined, there’s a “5D calculus” that foreign manufacturers will have to work through, said GTM Research solar analyst MJ Shiao. The variables are the type of remedy (i.e. tariff, quota, etc.), the geographic scope (e.g., will free trade agreement countries be exempt?), the severity of the remedy (e.g., how high will a tariff be?), the length of the remedy (e.g., how many years?) and what other suppliers might do. We don’t yet know what will occur tomorrow, however, we know billions of dollars of projects and tens of thousands of jobs will be affected. Will manufacturers actually move to the United States for a four year tariff? It will take Tesla 2-4 years to complete their solar power factory build-out. There was a big solar market at $.78/W in 2015. I’ll be buying whiskey tonight.

U.S. Conference of Mayors Adopts Recommended National Energy Infrastructure Actions — “The New Bedford Principles” – First, the principles:

1. Seek an energy-friendly tax reform package that doesn’t undermine current progress: Keep tax-exemption on municipal bonds; Keep state and local tax deductibility; Preserve and extend tax credits and other incentives to support renewable energy
2. Authorize additional tax and other incentives to promote more investment in microgrids, distributed generation, and storage systems.
3. Direct funding to support the development of local energy assurance plans to advance local resiliency efforts, especially those to combat climatic events.
4. Direct funding to municipal utilities or tax incentives to investor-owned utilities to modernize local grids, including microgrids, to increase resilience to climatic events.
5. Direct funding to support local energy block grants to support city energy independence goals
6. Restore federal challenge grants to incentivize smart grid efforts.

Then we’ll talk about the results – New Bedford gets more than 70% of its electricity from solar power, totals more than 100W per person, will save more than $1/M a year in energy costs due to the solar, employs a healthy number of people in well paying jobs – and does this with one of the lower per capita incomes in the state of Massachusetts.Along with the solar, they’ve already got a port built that can handle large off shore wind turbines – and that might pay off big as 1,600MW of off shore wind energy ramps up off the coast.  Good work Mayor Mitchell. Thank you Mr. Kwiatkowski for the link.

Two things about the tweet(s) below. First off, bottom tweet – check out the interesting parallel from the growth in depth of deep sea oil platforms and the height of wind towers. Second – top tweet that mentions the slides. Earlier this week Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) had an annual clean energy industry keynote show. Pretty names, and more importantly – a great slide presentation (PDF) showing a lot of good information. Two of the slides I showed off on Tuesday.

https://twitter.com/DavidLawrenceUS/status/910516040261550080

Header image from the ‘Hit me with your SunShot‘ photography contest. Since I’ve shown each of the winning photographs – I’ve now moved into showing off some of the images that didn’t ‘win’ – but are beautiful nonetheless. These images are located on the flickr account page of SunShot. Genesis Solar 250 MW CSP in Blythe, California; October tarantula migration. Photo by Evan Derouen.

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