Welcome to the Electrek Green Energy Brief. Put together by our Electrek authors, the Energy Brief is a daily technical, financial, and political review of important green energy news.
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Coal company plans huge solar farm on strip mine – If we can make it about the money, and we can win the money argument – then the game will end. This plant is potentially being built on top of a former mountaintop coal strip mine. Let’s see it happen.
Trina sells 20MW of Bifacial PERC cells – These panels (here is their spec page) range from greater than 19-22% (cheap panels are 16-17%) depending on how much light is reflected by the surface behind them. I’m bringing up this relatively small purchase (bigger than anything in my life, but a tiny drop in the world) because of the technology involved – and because I think it will give consumers a buying opportunity sometime soon. Standard solar panels are going to get further price pressure from technologies like PERC, Bifacial, etc. Use it to your advantage as manufacturers are going to try to keep their old machines – building 16% solar panels – running as long as possible, but they really want to move onto the higher margin, higher efficiency products.
Electrek Green Energy Brief
California oversupply volumes grow, ISO curtails more renewables – Rothleder said the ISO curtailed about 60,000 MWh in February and about 80,000 MWh in March – 140,000MWh at about $0.029/kWh (rough average wholesale California electricity rate) equals about $4 million in lost revenue to these generators. If the electricity curtailing was equal daily – it’s not – that’d be 2,300MWh/day to buy, hold and resell at the peak of the duck curve. Anyone taking bets on the duck curve beginning to decline by 2020?
Merkel: Need to develop a certain passion and joy for the Energiewende – “I think we should look at the Energiewende in a rational way, and of course always take into account the basic economic possibilities. But we should also develop a certain passion and joy for it. It’s beautiful to be a part of it. – Energiewende is the name Germany gave to their energy transformation. Germany named it. And yes, being part of a great transition toward a thing generations following us will hopefully admire (since it might save a large chunk of our species) is beautiful to be a part of. It’s good to see Germany still talking highly of Energiewende so long into it.
Suniva going to seek extreme protections against Chinese solar panels manufacturers – The company plans to lobby the International Trade Commission under Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act — basically arguing that solar imports (not just Chinese imports, but imports in general) have caused “serious injury.” The article goes on to say that if the 1974 Trade Act is applied to this case, and they agree that serious injury has occurred, there are many ‘solutions’ that can be applied against the industry – including tariffs against any country in the world, or minimum pricing. And it would be Trump filing these consequences. If we choose to attack solar panel pricing – it is only the USA that will suffer, the rest of the world will keep on keeping on.
South Australia projected to have 80% of electricity demand met by solar+wind by 2021/2022 – South Australia also happens to be a place that is currently in a strange type of gas shortage – one where they export before they feed the local markets. These energy issues are driving record solar growth in 2017 and the largest projects the earth has seen involving solar+batteries.
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Major Solar Projects List from the SEIA – The USA has about 45GW of solar power running currently. This report looks specifically at projects larger than 1MW – and they’ve got about 20GW worth in the database. More interesting is that there is another 50GW of solar power in the development stages. The installation dates go through 2021 – meaning if we do nothing but what we have in the utility scale pipeline, no new projects and nothing residential or small commercial considered (many 1MW+ projects are commercial or community solar), then we will double our installed solar capacity in five years.
https://twitter.com/NGControlRoom/status/855314049038286849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=about%3Asrcdoc
While other industrialized nations are ridding themselves of coal, the Trump Administration is ramping up production. Great.
World’s largest – by 10X – battery storage park proposed – 4,000MWh lithium ion battery proposed for Australia – 2017 is the year we will see massive projects proposed all over the world for lithium ion, solar and wind. The prices fell so far in the past, and the global capital markets are ready to fund. Of course, this projects is proposed – that means there is a lot of work to do, and its got competition from hundreds of projects in Australia (South Australia – Elon – world’s biggest solar + storage).
SNEC 11th (2017) International Photovoltaic Power Generation Conference & Exhibition (SNEC 2017) in Shanghai: The next big solar module trend on display – And the answer is bifacial solar panels. Including the ‘world’s first full-size IBC bifacial module to be displayed‘ which they believe is an effective 23% efficiency in the right conditions. One challenge of bifaciality, and this could be based on my in limited (none) experience, is understanding the production from the panels. Onsite conditions, reflectivity, drive the extra efficiency – and that might require an extra layer of work before a proposal with financial returns can be delivered. From a rough pricing perspective – if a standard, high efficiency PERC solar panel costs $0.50-60/W – then you add another layer of solar cells that cost $0.30/W – you should expect these panels to cost around $0.80-0.90/W as all other hardware should be the same. SunPower has historically cost over $1.20/W.
Walmart Aims to Wipe Out Supply Chain Emissions with Project Gigaton – Walmart has identified energy, agriculture, waste, packaging, deforestation, and product use and design as the goal areas in which to focus their Scope 3 climate efforts. The goal is to create a package of tools to work with suppliers so they can cut emissions. WalMart wants to cut it owns emissions 18% by 2025 – they call this Scope 1 and 2. Good to see the largest in the world working so hard.
Vietnam introduces utility-scale solar FiT and rooftop net metering – FiT for utility-scale solar PV would be VND2.086/kWh (US$0.0935), exclusive of Value Added Tax. The FiT would be subject to fluctuations in the VND/US$ exchange rate and would only apply to projects where the cell efficiency is more than 16% or module efficiency more than 15% – A 90 million person country opening the utility and residential solar power market. Each country is a laboratory (Bahrain doing net metering hit yesterday) – it reminds me just a bit of watching individual US states and their experiments. Utility scale solar power with an almost $.10/W revenue stream will grow the industry – net metering generally does as well. These two programs should lead to significant expansion.
Industry exemptions of renewable taxes at €17 bln in 2017 in Germany – Yet, public approval for the program stays high. If German economic growth can continue, while the environment can be greened – then the people will support. That industry can afford to keep jobs in house helps – that the renewable industry itself generates significant revenue from global exports that comes back to Germany probably helps a bit. Also, that so many regular people are getting the incentive paid to themselves – instead of power companies – also helps. Its a dynamic moment when the people whole heartedly support industry tax cuts.
Goldman Sachs gaining on $1B in renewable bonds in Japan – The bond market can be a well priced, long term funding source for large volumes of solar power. The global bond market is $100 trillion. That’d be more than enough to completely convert the planet to green energy. Long term cash producing assets are the exact thing savers look toward.
Exxon, Shell Join Ivanka Trump to Defend Paris Climate Pact – Headlines like this are tough to judge in today’s political climate. It could be that those who are in power in the White House believe very much so in climate change, however, feel they have plenty more time to negotiate to get the best deal possible. Exxon and Shell historically have talked one way in the public, but spent their lobbying money very much so against renewable energy. Exxon needs to argue for climate change to defend themselves in a coming RICO lawsuit. These publicly released statements could mean a lot…or nothing.
Big installers charge more, some people are ok with that, the solution is to get multiple quotes – Using Residential Solar PV Quote Data to Analyze the Relationship between Installer Pricing and Firm Size – The numbers roughly say;
Large installer quotes are $0.33/W (about 10%) higher, on average, than non-large installer quotes offered to the same customer (Figure ES-1). The difference falls to $0.21/W after controlling for systematic differences between large and nonlarge installer quotes.
$0.21/W for install price for installs that cost between $2.75-4.50 is a 4-7% difference in pricing. The report suggests that some people simply want to buy from larger, more well known name brands – and that they will simply pay more. Other within the research group would ave benefited from connecting with local installers. Using tools like EnergySage was shown to lower costs $.30/W – for an average system that’s $2k that could be put toward a battery system.
Solar Installers Struggle as Panels Become Cheap Enough to Own – This is the best problem in the world for these companies to have. They are going to be forced to sell directly to these populations, book revenue up front and get the Wall Street people – who hate the heavy debt load of the lease structure – off their backs. There will still be a lot of solar leasing going on for a bit – but, like SolarCity has already done since at least 4th quarter of 2016, a lot of direct sales will occur. Not to mention that this is great for the solar industry in general – regular people are paying cash for solar. That’s pretty cool.
Dong Energy bids 480MW with zero incentive – OWP West and Borkum Riffgrund West 2 – DONG Energy made bids at zero EUR per MWh, i.e. these projects will not receive a subsidy on top of the wholesale electricity price – caveat, these projects are to be commissioned by 2024, as such they’re expecting much price reduction from today. Nonetheless, this is a utility scale clean energy source that the owners think can make money without incentives. That’s cause for celebration.
Global solar PV manufacturing capacity expansion plans rebound in Q1 – First quarter 2017 saw 10GW announced of solar power manufacturing capacity. With global capacity somewhere in the 115-135GW/year this is a big uptick – 7.5-8.5%. A few hours later, I get a Q2 announcement of a 2GW solar factory coming to Taiwan. This tells me that the demand of solar PV is predicted to continue to grow, and that significant investment in new factories, new machines and new technologies will continue. And since newer technologies, at the same price or lower than old technologies, are more efficiency – we will see continued increases in efficiency in the coming years.
Maryland governor has battery tax credit law on desk – The measure provides for a 30 percent tax credit on the installed cost of a storage system, capped at $5,000 for residential and $75,000 for commercial projects. The total credits awarded cannot exceed $750,000 in a year, and the program will run from 2018 through 2022. This is against state taxes – and state tax rates are lower than federal – so its not as strong as the federal incentive for solar, but its pretty close – and it will drive business. A Tesla PowerWall 2, costing $5500 retail plus about $500-2000 to install, will end up costing $4,200-5300 after $1,800-2300 tax credit.
Wal-Mart, Advanced Microgrid Solutions to Turn Big-Box Stores Into Hybrid Electric Buildings – the-meter batteries at stores to balance on-site energy and provide megawatts of flexibility to utilities, starting with 40 megawatt-hours of projects at 27 Southern California locations – I specialize in installing solar power on top of structures like these (this is us), and the groups that occupy these buildings all listen real hard when I show them spreadsheets that sometimes eliminate their electricity operating expenses. Soon enough, with microgrid growth and recognition from utilities of services – I’ll be turning roofs and storage closets into revenue generators. Everyone listens then.
Trina launches bi-facial PERC solar module – First, the PERC cells mean a higher system efficiency. Secondly, bi-facial means you collect energy from the backside. Cool on both. The question I have is what’s the cost difference between single face and bi-face if the production increase is 10-25%. The images I’ve seen of bifacial show a lot of material to create the second layer – I guess the low pricing of solar panels makes it ok. Anyone have price estimates?
When solar panels became the jobs killer – A few solar people in my streams have pushed back on this article, its title and the lead in are a bit tough, but broadly it tells some good stories on the new growing-evolving-reacting-failing-attacking-living-breathing solar power industry. The Chinese are attacking the industry – with a vengence. This article is playing a bit to the times of Trumpism – the populist fears – and if we are to argue from a purist capitalist, free trade point of view – those fears are real. However, in my mind, we don’t exist in that clean world and to argue from that purist position is extremist. If nothing, check out the cool images and graphs.
14 Arab countries sign MoU to establish joint Arab electricity market – Multiple times they mentioned renewable energy as part of the driving ideas, and that excites me because I hear Saudi Arabia talking about building infrastructure to export solar electricity. If this happens, we’ll see the Middle East develop into a broad grid with much growth. Interconnection of large areas drives renewable development.
Solar and wind tax credit extension worth 29GW of utility scale wind/solar from 2016-2020 – Another interesting number, $23B in economic activity in the USA from wind and solar in 2017. Roughly – $5B will be given to solar power installations in the form of a federal 30% tax credit. There will be $25B’ish in solar power sales in the USA in 2017.
Green political groups attempt to influence Trump by going after swing states – First, I say its interesting, because that’s how you do it. You’ve got to attack strategically and you have to attack today – 3.5 years before the next election. One thing though – while many say Trump’s favorability ratings are down and that he might bend because of weakness…I’m not so sure. First, favorability is down in those outside of the groups that voted for him. Favorability within those who voted is up. And secondly, attacking Trump on the environment might be hard – check out the main chart. Those who supported Trump – feel the environment has gotten better by a HUGE amount. Have fun fighting that type of education.
FPL wrote portions of bill that imposes requirements on solar – Florida voters chose to lower taxes on certain solar installations within the state. The State of Florida legislature then took up the task given to them by the voters – and they created a document they thought represented the will of the people. The law, instead of focusing on lowering taxes on solar installations, instead had multiple requirements added to the sales process. And now we know where the language came from – Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Fort Myers took an MS Word document from Barbara J. Washington senior legal assistant at NextEra – the company that owns the Florida utility. Technically – is it illegal for an interest group to be involved in writing legislation? Nope. What matters though is the Rodrigues took $15k from FPL to write a law that he himself said was not being broken…but it might be. And this is how Electrical Utilities – like FPL – abuse their state sanctioned monopoly power. And in turn why Florida, the Sunshine State, lags places like New York and Vermont in Solar installs per capita.
Major transmission lines being built across the USA to move renewable energy – A lot more renewable energy will be able to be integrated into the US power grid because of these power lines being built. The Department of Energy thinks we can hit 30% of US electricity from wind alone by building cross national transmission. Solar power would also benefit from this in that excess noon time energy will be pushed east or west as it is needed.
85GW of solar power projected in 2017 – These are the first projections I’ve seen saying 2017 will be a growth year. Greentech Media says about 78GW of solar was installed in 2016 – 2017 to 85GW would be 9% growth. Four countries – China, USA, India and Japan in that order – will comprise 73% of global volume. Interesting that the globe will grow as it is while the USA is projected to contract 10% on a slowdown in utility scale growth. 2018 numbers now show project about 0% growth over these new 2017 numbers – now my emotions make we think those numbers will be altered upwards when the time comes. That might see us break 100GW in a year in 2019.
Kentucky Coal Mining Museum converts to solar power – “It is a little ironic,” said Communications Director Brandon Robinson, “But you know, coal and solar and all the different energy sources work hand-in-hand. And, of course, coal is still king around here.” – A great headline showing that many groups see the economic value of solar power in their electricity mix.
Edmonton structure’s south facing facade made of solar glass – Header image above is from Google Street View, October 2016. The system, composed of 500 solar panels, cost $400,000 and will pay for itself in five years. Overall the combination of solar energy collected and additional natural light reduced the projected energy use by 80%. The technology – Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) – is the same thing as the Tesla Solar Roof. If the technologies are sound enough for architects to integrate at time of design – this will proliferate. In the area of 600-900,000 new houses and 70-100,000 new commercial buildings in the US each year – that’s a lot of solar potential.
2,500 utilities from 26 of 28 EU countries commit to no new coal after 2020 while the EU shows that it cut fossil fuel usage – mostly coal and gas – 11% since 2005 with significant help coming from renewables. In the end – the goal is to lower co2 right now – and cutting coal and gas are a way to do it.
Keeping in the spirit of solar as default – residential housing development with 2.7kW solar system (SolarWorld plus EnPhase if you were wondering) as default option. A 2.7kW system will meet 20% or less of a 4,000 ft home’s energy use with an average of 2.6 people living in it – but – 700,000 new homes at 2.7kW means 1.9GW of solar that is ready for energy storage.
Turkey to tax Chinese panels by size for price dumping violation – $20-25/m2 – comes out to be about $.10-.13/W. About ~$30 per solar panel. Interesting that Turkey just passed this ruling after a major solar panel manufacturer said they’d build a factory in the country in order to supply solar panels to a 1GW solar project.
The sun is so intense and the air so dry that seemingly nothing survives – Chile – ‘A solar Saudi Arabia’: The high mountain plains of northern Chile are some of the best solar resources on the planet. The workers must be in suits for protection. Sunlight is almost twice as intense as the Sunshine State of Florida. The list of greatest sunlight includes – The Sahara, Gobi Desert, Middle East, Northern Mexico/SE USA, Chile, north Australia and northern India.
Ohio House pushes law forward to lower renewable energy standards and eliminate penalties for failure to meet – Per article, Senate fate unclear, Governor indicates veto – however – House vote veto proof. The oil/coal/gas groups across the USA (Alec/Koch) will continually push at the legal systems hoping to get laws through wherever they can. This process will not stop while they see a political pathway – Republican control – and a chance to use lobbying money well. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on campaigns, dinners, and plenty of illegal benefits to keep revenue streams consistent.
North Dakota House committee rejects ‘glorified moratorium’ on wind energy – “Since I’ve been a kid, you flipped the light switch on, the power’s always been there” – Politician attempting to use intermittent nature of wind power to require a three person committee to approve all wind systems. Later on this committee will be stacked as a strategic bottleneck – see Arizona. Story noted one politician bringing up list of federal coal tax benefits when solar incentives were mentioned. Good to see a rejection of the amendment – good to see the discussion.
754MW solar plant breaking ground in Mexico – Largest in the Americas. This past summer, I was excited to see 100MW projects in the news so often. My largest personal project in the 0.6MW range for perspective. Now it seems the headlines from the big news sources don’t break unless 500MW or more. These projects will cost more than $500M – that’s a lot of capital to raise, but, I often hear investors only wanting to invest large sums of money due to fixed costs. And in the big game – where Blackrock has $5T under management – $500M barely gets you in the door.
1.2GW for Maryland by 2020 – We’re in 2017, that’s 400MW/year if we don’t include 2020, if we do it then its still an impressive 300MW a year. Maryland’s 6M people will definitely feel the effect of the economic bump if the market grows at that rate. Massachusetts has a bit larger population, and slightly higher annual volume per year – but now has 20,000 solar employees. The projections here were of 1,000 jobs per year as volume grows, maybe more.
New NREL report details installed costs and deployment barriers for residential solar+storage – If you really want to do some research on what your battery system is going to cost, and why, start here. NREL reports are always top notch – I distribute them often (and maybe some of you should download this stuff before Pruitt deletes it).
South Australia getting 100MW energy storage plus 330MW of solar – Is 100MW the largest battery system connected to a power grid? How do they go from announced last night to built before end of year? Or that’s right – solar + storage. And, most interestingly, it isn’t Elon Musk doing the deal. These Australians move fast when the electricity stops running.
Trump signs executive order to review Clean Power Plan – A couple of interesting points within the article – 1. The EPA, per the courts, is obligated to protect against CO2 – which has been defined as a pollutant. It seems that if the current administration were to simply get rid of the Clean Power Plan, they’d be open to law suits. 2. Scott Pruitt, the new EPA chief that pretty much works for the fossil fuel industry, wrote a version of regulations for the coal industry that forced an ever so slight increase in efficiency. We can see a future pathway – a toothless replacement plan, versus an absolute rescindence of the law.
31.3 percent for a fully integrated silicon-based multi-junction solar cell – Space age stuff these days, unless you’ve got a dual axis solar tracker and you’re ok with a slower return on investment. These multi junction technologies – multiple layers of solar cells absorbing sunlight – will break through to the mass market one day. The recent 26.3% solar cell was two layers – both silicon. This cell is three layers with different product types. Being discussed in the article is how to bond the solar cells – maybe that’s where the real breakthroughs are these days.
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World’s largest artificial sun (original source)- Its purpose is to test ways to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight. There is a lot of thought about what we could do with hydrogen storing excess intermittent energy – though lithium ion is taking the early lead. Personally, I’m starting to lean toward lithium+solar because of the solid state nature of the two technologies (this picture really got to me), however, there could be places where liquid fuels make sense.
Hundreds of Clean Energy Bills Have Been Introduced in States Nationwide This Year – Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent by utilities in a concerted effort across the country to influence the political process against. Concurrently though, especially when you check out the RPS map in the linked article – there are many people pushing upwards. Get into your local area.
Big Oil throwing down for Big Offshore Wind – If there is anyone with an expertise and the cash needed to build ocean based hardware that can produce long-term consistent revenue, it would be the engineers that have deployed oil wells in the deep seas for decades. Ocean-based wind can sometimes run for 50% of the time – and with floating units coming next, big oil with its big capital might see its most powerful weapon against the coal industry be renewable. I’ll take it from where ever it comes.
Partisan reactions to Trump over environment – Large chunks of the US electorate have shifted their views on future of the environment since Trump came into office. Republicans toward believing the future environment is getting great attention and will improve, while Democrats see it getting worse. With Trump and Republicans seeing poles like this I don’t expect them to be very interested in legislative measures.
After Florida voters approve solar law by 73%, utilities attempt to add on solar limiting rules – In the last election in Florida, voters decided to support tax breaks for commercial companies going solar. Florida politicians decided that the law – instead of focusing on tax breaks – ought also add additional requirements, strategically chosen, to make residential solar a little more complex. One of the strange aspects of the law is that it says you cannot use past history prices to predict future energy savings. Best part is that one of the politicians pushing the law says we don’t actually need the law today in Florida since there aren’t any contractors breaking the law – but you know – just in case someone might want to break this law, we ought make a law.
Southern Company Says $7B+ ‘Clean Coal’ Kemper Not Viable as Coal Plant, Blames the Public Service Committee – At the end of spending $7B a clean coal plant is said to not be economically viable burning coal – and of course, it isn’t the technologies fault but those who are hoping to protecting rate payers. Coal has significantly cleaned itself relative to pollution of yesteryear – wikipedia says coal plants are 77% cleaner than they used to be. And imagine, even so much cleaner coal is releasing twice as much CO2 per kWh as natural gas.
