EGEB: Solar tariff potential impacts, harm on nature will haunt us, 70-store solar deal, more

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

The Potential Impact of Solar Tariffs in 12 Charts – Good charts. Potential is the keyword. These numbers are probably close to true. If so, residential costs aren’t really noticeable. Utility yes, however, those price increases aren’t enough to end investment – maybe slow it down a bit…but not a lot. Clarity would be best at this point so our pricing is hard.

In Big Test of Wind Farm Durability, Texas Facility Quickly Restarts After Harvey – from a few weeks back when hurricanes were headlines, a few interesting pieces of data in the story – Weather gauges suggest the wind farm didn’t take the brunt of the storm: they recorded sustained winds of 90 miles an hour, or the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Justin Sharp, a consultant and chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s renewable-energy committee, said turbines would probably begin to fail when winds reached 140 miles an hour, with blades detaching and smashing into nearby towers. At those speeds, Dr. Sharp said, “all bets are off.” Nice round numbers there – 90 mph did no real damage, by 140 mph is expected to. The individual blades also have the ability to change their pitch – ‘feathering.’

Chinese Premier Xi Jinping to China: “Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us” – The quote in the title of the article is the most compelling piece of the story. The story of course, is that China has chosen to make taking care of the environment an important part of its broader government plans. They’re driving the solar panel industry by far, in funding financially and deploying – now expected to break 50GW of solar power installed in 2017.

Upstream completes largest rooftop solar PPA – 4MW across 70 stores – 70 stores getting solar power, a third-party owning and operating the system, and the store owners (but not necessarily the building owner) saying something really interesting: So content is it that it has now made rooftop solar installations mandatory for every new store – it rolls out about two each year – and executive chairman Ian Robinson is urging other large format retail chains to do the same. Mandatory solar on new stores. That’s ought make you heart flutter a beat.

CEFC provides debt finance for Australia’s first wind+solar+storage array – 43.2 MW in wind capacity, 15 MW of solar PV, and 2 MWh of battery storage & The CEFC will provide $94 million in debt finance to the $170 million Kennedy Energy Park. Seeing more installation ratios of wind+solar vs storage is the first interesting point, Australia getting its first combined park (there aren’t too many like this globally yet) is a second interesting thing, and the cost $170M – a bit strong it seems, without me knowing details of course  (turns out these are Tesla batteries).

Solar panels offer a lifeline in Rohingya refugee camps – One reason I think technologies like solar power are important is because of how small it is, and how it gets small amounts of electricity to individuals. Cell phones plus personal computers plus regular could be one of the more formative things our species deals with. Electricity production on the same level can be similar. A solar panel isn’t going to feed these people, but it will help somewhere.

Price Trend: PV Cell Price Experiences Major Change under Unstable Market Conditions – Really, they’re talking about PV Cells made in Taiwan undergoing a price shift downward toward Chinese manufacturing pricing. This downward shift is pricing seems to be driven by slackening American demand.

And then someone retweeted an account that talk about solar panel related pricing – what a great morning:

Mono PERC prices have declined significantly following the continuous weakening mono demand. #PV #Solar pic.twitter.com/zG7ZnLAdBf

— InfoLink Consulting (@InfoLinkConsult) October 19, 2017

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. These sheep live at the La Ola Solar Farm on Lanai Hawaii. They keep the weeds and grass trimmed down in the hard to reach places between and under the solar panels. Photo by Merrill Smith.

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