Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial, and political review/analysis of important green energy news.
China Flooded U.S. With Solar Panels Before Trump’s Tariffs – Fourth-quarter deliveries from China were almost 11 times higher than in the first nine months of 2017, according to a report Friday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Manufacturers also hauled panels and cells across the border from Mexico, Canada and other countries to beat the import duties that were announced last month. Key point for folks buying solar – does your contractor have a connection to some of these panels? Were they all bought by bigtime developers for their projects alone? It looks like SunPower made some imports as well – so they’ve probably got decently priced product still. If you’re buying right now – use this knowledge as pricing leverage if a contractor’s price is a bit strong.
LONGi Plans To Triple Its Wafer Capacity To 45GW By 2020 – Based on a silicon wafer capacity of 15GW by the end of 2017, the company will aim to increase this to 28GW by the end of 2018, to 36GW by the end of 2019 and to 45GW by the end of 2020. Plus an interesting article – Terawatt-scale photovoltaics: Trajectories and challenges. Both of these were sent to me via email by Will Driscoll in response to the 120GW of global capacity post. On the one hand, we’ve got LONGi growing the global solar wafer manufacturing capacity by ~10% a year, single-handedly!!, for a few years. The terawatt scale article shows us that a 29% compounding growth rate could still have solar dominating global energy by 2030…but that feels so aggressively strong to hold up for another decade. And honestly, we’re just babies at the edge of the growth curve…sometimes I’m euphoric about solar’s success, and sometimes the grandiosity of solar’s potential overwhelms.
Multicolored facade of Onyx Solar’s PV Glass in Dubai (sent via email press release – so no direct link) – The four facades of the building will implement a louver system composed by Onyx Solar® amorphous silicon glass with transparency degree XXL and 6 different colors, creating a multicolored façade that provides a unique effect to the building. The two entrance canopies on north and west facades will also integrate Onyx Solar®semitransparent glass to maintain visual continuity in the complete building envelope. All photovoltaic glass pieces manufactured for this project are 100% customized to fit the design requirements of the building. On the one hand – my lord, I love the creativity, the beauty, the color and ideas – and this is what future construction, that is free of the strings of power grids, will model itself from. We will rise directly from the dirt and inhabit the universe. The other hand begins to shake and point at the very articles above speaking of our need to grow 29% a year, for years. We’re also reminded that we don’t build enough new building for this beautiful product to be the product that saves our atmosphere in the short run – but I do softly remind myself that it will sustain us in the long run. So, my professional side lets the kid stare and smile – and then gets back to the spreadsheets. Note – the header image is from the same email and represents green colored solar glass.
Spain’s most popular holiday destination wants to be 100% renewable—against Spain’s wishes – You know how we win this game folks? You book your vacations to these places. You show the politicians that their opinions are irrelevant in the face of your massive amounts of free capital to strategically deploy. I’ve got money down on a Tesla Model 3 specifically for this reason – I’m not even a car person, but I am a CO2 person.
The IEA gets a lot of negative press for being a fossil fuel/nuclear focused group. Their long term projections of solar power growth are so far off, they are constantly mocked. With those points in mind:
"While the figure for fossil-fuel consumption subsidies may be coming down, it remains much higher than estimated government support to renewable energy"
Read more from IEA analysts Toshiyuki Shirai & Zakia Adam https://t.co/p5fnoeLHp4
— International Energy Agency (@IEA) February 18, 2018
On the tweet below – Solar power is saving electricity buyers huge amounts of money. Shouldn’t the average solar power customer be paid for lowering the most expensive, peaking priced system needs during the hottest times of the year? It used to be that energy companies made all of their profit on the backs of annual ‘extreme events.’ Solar power coincided highly with these events. We’re savings many billions globally as a result.
Rooftop Solar Lowers Peak Electricity Demand In Australian Heatwave https://t.co/EmPQASeqSG via @cleantechnica
— Stefan Krauter (@solarpapst) February 17, 2018
The Featured Image is of an Onyx Solar solar power glass product.
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