EGEB: Tesla part of offshore wind growing 53X in Massachusetts, get three bids save 8% on residential solar, more

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

Bay State Wind Submits Bid to Build Massachusetts’ First Offshore Wind Farm – This offshore wind story is going to get real big real, real fast in the USA. NREL has already told us our power grid is strong enough to handle these winds, and with Europe and China hammering offshore wind with research and investment, our large and long coast lines are ripe. Already built-in Rhode Island, now New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, and North Carolina (at least) have started the proposal process. If the bid in Massachusetts turns out to be 2GW, that would make this wind plant one of the largest on the planet. Though I think we’ll see 1.6GW of wind bids totaled in a few projects. Tesla Energy storage is part of at least one of the bids.

Will This Solar Community Microgrid Save Money AND Generate Income? – The UC students have developed code to manage the assets, said Martinez-Morales. “We take into account historical data and real-time data. We look at solar energy generation and production, the building load, the state of charge of the battery bank, and then by looking at this, we predict what should be the next action we should take.” Researchers are now negotiating an agreement with Southern California Edison and hoping to participate in special programs— such as demand response — that allow the microgrid to reap both savings and income, he said. Theoretically, everything these soon to be engineers are programming should be easy to do down to every single plug-in your home. As of yet though – we’re not there. We don’t have circuit level energy management in most of our homes, let alone plug/hardware level intelligence. Demand response and time of use, combined with residential car batteries and solar generation is going to become the large majority of the grid. Your home’s electricity revenue – since your home is fundamentally a microgrid – should cover a bill or two.

The Value of Transparency in Distributed Solar PV Markets – In the study, NREL uses data from more than 70,000 residential PV quotes provided by the quote aggregator EnergySage to study the value of market transparency. PV installers bid $0.24 per watt lower on the aggregator’s quote platform than when they bid directly to the same customers, on average. Good job EnergySage. Customers are able to educate themselves on hardware, get human support, feel comfortable with pricing, and then they get multiple bids. Contractors get customers who are warm leads, educated, feel comfortable, have already gone through the sales process on their own – instead of contractor chasing. If that pushes pricing down and knowledge up, I’m cool. By the way – this partially exists because of the Department of Energy SunShot program support.

Solar Frontier hits new thin film cell efficiency record – Solar Frontier has set a new efficiency record for its Copper/Indium/Selenium (CIS) based cell technology. The company worked with the Japanese Government’s Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to achieve a conversion efficiency of 22.9% on a 1cm² cell. The panel will end up in the upper teens – and I think there’s a place for thin-film solar panels most anywhere at this efficiency. We ought to learn something about them on this site – if anyone has a residential thin-film we should review, please suggest. Most interesting was the final paragraph – the company is consolidating and focusing sales efforts in Japan to combat lower priced hardware globally. The sales pitch of thin-film, generally, is that it is the low price leader.

There’s a reason I moved to Massachusetts from the Sunshine State. It was to become one of these people in this tweet below.

Per @MassCEC report (https://t.co/crwDTH8Tr9):

• #Cleanenergy sector contributes $11.4B to MA gross state product

• MA now has 109,226 clean energy jobs

• MA clean energy sector grew 4% 2016-17

• 68% of MA clean energy workers earn $50k plus pic.twitter.com/CeByveSMlE

— Joe LaRusso 🔌 🕳🐇 (@jglarusso) December 20, 2017

Featured image is from the Department of Energy SunShot program. Solar panels installed on top of residence for thermal heating. Photo by Terry Thompson.

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