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

National Grid to trial solar, wind in frequency response markets next year – Within the document National Grid said it wanted to trial a market which could enable providers of frequency response that are incapable of forecasting or controlling their availability, paying specific mention to solar and wind generators. In the case of solar power, you know when you’ll be producing electricity. If you’ve got a large area, you can deliver a percentage of your potential production – as a safety margin – and offer a fairly consistent daytime service. After getting excited with Tesla’s battery offering super fast grid services, this offering makes me think there’s a growing movement for renewables to up their revenue generation ability.

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Tesla’s world record sized 100MW/129MWh lithium ion battery reacted within milliseconds when an Australia coal power plant removed itself from the power grid last Thursday. Technically, the Tesla battery responded to the trip event, and finished its work, before the coal plant’s backup plant finished its start up process.

The purpose of this battery was specifically to defend the power grid from trips like this after outages in the summer of 2016.

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Solartech Universal is a South Florida solar panel manufacturer that started with a family discussion in the kitchen in 2012. Sometime in 2018 or 2019, if all goes well, they’re going to launch a ~24% efficient, 480-500W glass on glass bifacial heterojunction solar panel for the commercial and utility-scale solar market.

Solartech Universal started shipping in January of 2016 and currently has 80-85MW of annual manufacturing capacity, plus they’re hiring.

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

India proposes US$1.7 billion support for local solar manufacturers and 12GW CPSU scheme – Also contains a neat visual on showing how they are, roughly, looking at each stage of the manufacturing process for development. The incentive is a 30% ‘subsidy’ – and different amounts of it are available at different levels of solar panel manufacturing process. Seems like a smart way to get solar panels into a country – instead of, say, taxing every person who wants to install their own systems.

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

Omnidian Raises $5.1 Million for Residential PV Performance Offering – Omnidian offers residential solar owners a performance guarantee so any loss of production, below an agreed level, is reimbursed. It has a software platform that integrates with third-party PV monitoring systems and identifies underperforming assets requiring a field service dispatch. The firm partners with a nationwide network of precertified field technicians who carry out repairs. If you’re the type who is going to check your system constantly, then don’t get this type of product. If you’re the type that likes things to just run, then consider insurance. Maybe you’re the type who will check your system out everyday for the first year or two, then fade. I’m closer to the last one.

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

US solar deployment hits lowest level in two years (w/ charts) – According to the latest figures from GTM Research and Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) across the nation 2.03 GW of solar PV was installed, slightly below Q2 2016, which saw 2.05 GW. There are no simple answers to why the industry saw this slump, and instead a variety of factors can be seen. A 51% year-over-year decline from Q3 2016 has more to do with the volume of projects initially planned for completion before the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) was extended to 2020, than it does with the weakness this past quarter. There’s a lot of complexity going on in US solar. Smaller utility-scale stuff is on hold because of the Suniva issues – larger utility-scale stuff won’t show up in report just yet. Commercial is actually up in volume, but it’s a smaller component. Residential is down overall – lease and cash dealing with separate complexities. Some of these things are temporary, some are permanent evolutions (less leasing as a percent of the total). Still though, expectations of 12GW of solar power is a lot of solar power. And it’ll grow again soon.

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

SPP Sets New Records for Wind Generation – Wind resources peaked at 13,587 MW at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 4 and then again at 14,150 MW at 9:55 p.m., bettering the old record of 13,342 MW, set on Feb. 9. And per the graph the peak was about 56.25% of total electricity. They suggest that this record means breaking 75% is within the technical possibilities. That’s a lot of wind power in the Midwest USA.

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Solar power and energy storage (batteries) have fallen in price enough that they’re now competing with the cost of natural gas peaker plants in specific markets. New analysis is suggesting 10GW of natural gas peaker plants are at risk through 2027 in the USA specifically.

Other, more aggressive suggestions don’t see a place for gas peaker plants after 2020 in the USA. It seems the age of the renewable energy plus energy storage power plant is upon us.

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

Wind Turbines as Artistic Canvas – Senvion, a German wind turbine manufacturer supports local artists by allowing them to use its turbines as an artistic canvas. Artists in Portugal and Australia have also collaborated with their local wind industry to create original works of art. Imagine painting wind turbines so they create a sort of optical illusion and blend themselves into the local environment. Could we gain optical benefit from these giant structures?

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SunPower’s stock jumped 12% on Monday partially because an analyst is highly impressed with the sales opportunity of the P Series solar panel.

The solar panel raises efficiency partially through the use of a weird $9 trick – shingling solar cells – to maximize direct sunlight on silicon. The new panel could be built in the world’s largest capacity solar panel factory.

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

Energy Storage Well Past the ‘Tipping Point,’ Panel Says – A mix of comments, So, 10 years from now, do I think we’ll have a commercially available storage technology that’s below $100/kWh? Sure.; “I think you could argue that the tipping point was several years ago when big PJM systems started to come online,”; and “We’re looking at much more ambitious efforts that would require the attributes of a flow battery, which is a minimum of six to 12 hours of energy.”. A lot to unpack in this article – including a reference to storage being too expensive relative to a large number of energy actions. Big, pretty words though – we’re past a tipping point, but not yet to wide market application yet – which means we believe the amount of projects that can get built-in smaller expensive, incentivized markets is enough to build the factories that will deliver the learning curve benefits. A machine is in motion that seems to now generate its own steam.

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

Longi claims 82.15% bifaciality record for its PERC solar cell – Bifaciality is commonly defined as the ratio of the output measured from the rearside of a cell over the output measured from its front side. According to Longi, the bifaciality of standard bifacial PERC solar in the market is currently around 75%. The manufacturer announced it has achieved an 82.15% bifaciality world record for its bifacial PERC monocrystalline cell, dubbed Hi-MO2. Bifacial is real folks, and even if you only get 10% more electricity because your roof doesn’t reflect as nicely as others, you’re still getting 10% more energy. In perfect settings, I’ve read of efficiency going up 30% – though I’ve not seen it personally.

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LG is pushing out their upgraded “Neon R” and “Neon AC” solar panels to the residential solar market in the USA. The Neon R peaks at 365W and 21.1% efficiency in a 60 cell format. The Neon AC – with an integrated Enphase Microinverter – peaks at 330W and a 19.3% efficiency.

Both panels are available immediately.

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

China market: GCL SIT automates PV module production – Becoming a smart dark factory via full automation, the PV module factory has managed to reduce the number of its workers from 52 to eight and also lowered its defect rate by 0.1pp, said the report. On one side of the building they have pallets coming in, on the other side they have pallets leaving – drivers manage the product. They shut the lights off inside the building. The only people employed are engineers, robot technicians, and those needed to secure the site. This is the future of manufacturing as a whole, but it’s hitting the solar power industry hard as there is a need to scale quickly and economically.

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Facebook’s (soon to be) solar-powered, wifi serving, laser mesh network drone, the Aquila, is retiring to the V&A – the world’s leading museum of art and design – in London.

The plane has completed two successful test flights, one each in 2016 and 2017. Facebook’s goal is to create a broad network of technology to deliver internet connectivity to the 1.6 billion on earth without access.

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

First Solar produces first S6 module, seals 800 MW of deals – The 1.2 x 2 meter modules are expected to become commercially available at 420-445 watts with efficiencies of over 17%. First Solar expects to have around 3 GW of annual capacity in 2018, 5 GW in 2019 and 5.7 GW in 2020. I’m excited to see that First Solar is at 17% with a thin film product. Also nice to see First Solar with plans to double capacity.

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

Solar Power Plant O&M: Robots Offer Smarter Way to Protect and Enhance Your Investment – Two reasons I’m posting this, 1 – They’ve got a great chart that shows the value of having a robot cleaning from a financial sense perspective. In that chart they do use a great price of 1.78¢/kWh in a PPA as their base price. And 2 – They’re pulling the cleaning robots with pickup trucks. Robots cleaning large-scale solar panel installations will get smarter, and will see improved design – but being part automatic and part human is creative maximization of resources. Check out the short video at the end. The hardware requires two people to place it on a double row of solar panels. I wonder if there will be a residential solar panel cleaner that’s really smart at finding the edges of solar panels once you place it on the roof yourself…

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Puerto Ricans in the coastal town of Loíza have looked to an MIT invention to get their water supply flowing again. Serving 600 Puerto Ricans, the solar plus water purification system produces 850 gallons of clean drinking water daily, with rooftop rain barrels as storage.

The solar panels used are a rollable thin-film product.

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The coal and nuclear industry are lobbying the federal government for extra payments to store fuel on site because their current cost structures cannot compete in the US power markets. The Trump administration has suggested a $70 billion tax on US electricity consumers that could bring about an additional 27,000 deaths.

Murray Energy Corporation, a coal company, CEO Bob Murray says of the tax, ‘It’s the single greatest action that has been taken in decades to support low-cost reliable electric power in the United States. It has to happen.’

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

The Trade Case Just Put $1 per Watt Solar Pricing Back Out of Reach – As I read something I hadn’t thought about, that Suniva will kill the $1/W utility market in the USA, I’m reminded of a short story I read as a kid. Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers. And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang! Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well. They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. Solar power is being shackled. Tied and restrained. I am being a bit emotional, but that’s the type of guy I am. Fly, solar, fly.

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Stanford University has found design inspiration with solar cell material perovskites by analyzing the microlenses in the compound eye of an assassin fly. By utilizing the hexagonal substructures of the fly eye – they’ve strengthened and stabilized the nascent solar material.

Perovskite is the solar power media darling that is slowly inching toward the marketplace. Constant and quick evolution has earned it outsized attention. An Electrek revisit seems timely as some are suggesting pilot products in 2018 and the product recently broke 26.4% efficiency in labs.

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Tesla, as a result of purchasing SolarCity and their ongoing litigation, is headed to the US Supreme Court. Interestingly, the case headed to the Supreme Court is an off shoot of the original case filed.

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

Elon Musk’s SA battery record will be short-lived as rivals go even bigger – South Korea’s Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems is building a 150-megawatt lithium-ion unit, 50 per cent larger than Musk’s, that the company says will go live in about three months in Ulsan near the southeast coast. And then this plant will be passed by a larger one. And then it will happen again. I remember sometime in 2016 when I used to only retweet solar projects that were 100MW or larger – and I was amazed at the project sizes. Now, 1GW gets my attention. Soon – that’ll be with batteries too. When will we see the first 1GW announcement? 2018 maybe, 2019 definitely.

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