Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news.
India plans 20GW solar tender, eyes domestic manufacturing boost – “The tender is being conceptualized by the Minister of Renewable Energy. These contracts will be awarded in one go with developers to construct projects in phases. Once people see visibility of such projects, then manufacturing can kick in.” India has goals of 175GW of renewables by 2022, with 100GW of it being solar power. They’d prefer to jump-start their own manufacturing industry instead of feeding China their hard cash. Doing the 20GW in phases and you give local business people a chance to believe. After seeing contracts cancelled in India because later contracts were lower, it’s understandable that there might be unease in the business world.
Solar Installers Are Starting to Turn a Profit – What the article means to say is that the US’s largest solar lease companies are starting to collect more payments from past installations relative to their new quarterly deployment costs and general business needs. These companies are getting over the hump of needing constant quarterly investments to get them to an up and running position. That says nothing of the rest of the solar installations that represent 70% of the residential industry.
Canadian Solar plans to reach over 10GW of module production in 2018 – When I got into the industry in 2008, the annual global volume was 16GW. The year before it was 8GW. I’ve spoken to people who were excited when the industry broke 400-500MW/year. Now, we have a solar cell manufacturer building a single plant that is 10GW in size and Canadian Solar looking to ship the same volume of solar panels.
Price Battle to Start between Mono-Si and Multi-Si PV Cells; Impact on the Downstream Market will Need Two to Four Weeks – Last week a major solar cell manufacturer dropped the price of monocrystalline solar cells to a price similar to poly(multi)crystalline cells. Now we’re starting to see the results of that, though it is still early. I don’t know enough of the science of solar to see if there is a long term value of polycrystalline silicon from a technological standpoint – mono has historically been more efficient, but we are seeing that the financial benefit poly used to carry is going away.
Artificial Intelligence Meets Offshore Energy – The goal is to develop shore-operated autonomous and semi-autonomous solutions for inspection, maintenance and decommissioning of offshore energy infrastructure using marine, terrestrial and airborne robotic systems. The ORCA Hub’s activities are therefore designed to lead advancement in key robotics and A.I. technologies that will create a step change in the current practices of offshore inspection, repair and maintenance. They’re building a university for ocean robots to fix floating wind power on their own. I hope you people know that this means floating wind farms in the middle of the ocean with robot shepherds will become a thing.
Coal way down, gas up, solar up, nuclear down, wind up – and total CO2 emissions moving down –
.@matthewcgray We found that 30 GW #coal retired over the last three years. Watch the vent livestream here: https://t.co/NDFADRIHzj pic.twitter.com/lvKEPEPz0z
— Carbon Tracker (@CarbonBubble) November 10, 2017
Header image by Joan Sullivan
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