In today’s Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB):
As of late, the idea of getting rid of coal in their own national electricity grid has become a popular one among several major nations across the world. At 6 least major countries, including Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and now Finland, have all recently announced the imminent phase-out of all coal-fired power plants.
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Dubai received bid of $.0299/kWh for 800MW of solar power. This price represents the lowest yet recorded for solar power (and might not represent the end of the price drops…).
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has received 5 bids from international organisations for the third phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, said HE Saeed Mohammed AlTayer, MD & CEO of DEWA. The lowest recorded bid at the opening of the envelopes was US 2.99 cents per kilowatt hour. The next step in the bidding process will review the technical and commercial aspects of the bids to select the best one.
In the USA, in 2014 and with incentives, utility scale solar projects averaged $.05/kWh. On this bid alone, five companies bid below $.045/kW – without subsidies!
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Local news reports in Chile are stating that “senior Tesla executives” met with government officials to evaluate a partnership with state-owned mining company Codelco in order to source lithium in the country.
The agreement would presumably be to supply Tesla’s Gigafactory under-construction in Nevada.
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SolarCity announced today a new project with the Temecula Valley Unified School District to install 6 MW of solar energy capacity and 2.6 MWh of energy storage at a total of 19 schools in the district. The solar installations will mainly consist of carports using the company’s ZS Beam system (see picture above).
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In an effort to promote renewable energies, Vector launched a new campaign this week to offer 130 free 3 KW solar installations each equipped with Tesla’s new stationary energy storage battery pack, the Powerwall.
Soon after Tesla unveiled its series of energy storage products in April, Vector announced a partnership with the Silicon Valley car manufacturer to make the new products available in New Zealand.
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SolarCity is the largest installer of residential solar so looking at their market performance is a useful indicator for the solar industry as a whole. This week, the company released their financial results for the second quarter of the year (April to June) and they achieved record bookings and installations.
Even though the company missed Wall Street’s expectations, they impressed the industry with 189 MW of solar power installed in just 3 months. I’m not overstating anything when I say this is impressive. For comparison, SolarCity installed more distributed solar power on rooftops than the capacity of a large solar power farm like the Centinela Solar Energy Project in California.
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If you wonder about the Solar future of vehicle transportation, this is where you should start. The World Solar Challenge has a great deal of innovation in the solar field as well as pushing innovation in efficiency and recovering electricity for electric cars.
In friendly competition with others attempting the same goals, the teams depart Darwin aiming to be the first to arrive in Adelaide, some 3000km to the south.
It’s all about energy management! Based on the original notion that a 1000W car would complete the journey in 50 hours, solar cars are allowed a nominal 5kW hours of stored energy, which is 10% of that theoretical figure. All other energy must come from the sun or be recovered from the kinetic energy of the vehicle.
These are arguably the most efficient electric vehicles.
Having made the journey to Darwin by successfully navigating quarantine, customs, scrutineering, safety inspections and undertaken event briefings, participants are ready to start their epic journey.
The elite Challenger class is conducted in a single stage from Darwin to Adelaide. Once the teams have left Darwin they must travel as far as they can until 5pm in the afternoon where they make camp in the desert where-ever they happen to be. Other classes have different requirements, but all teams must be fully self-sufficient and
for all concerned it is a great adventure – many say the adventure of a lifetime.During the journey there are 7 mandatory check points where observers are changed and team managers may update themselves with the latest information on the weather and their own position in the field. Here teams may perform the most basic of maintenance only – checking and maintenance of tyre pressure and cleaning of debris from the vehicle.
There are also undisclosed check points which may be imposed by the event officials to ensure regulatory compliance.
Will a future Leaf or Tesla be solar powered? Probablynot any time soon, but slapping solar panels on top of electric cars can only help improve their efficiency, extend their range and rely less on the grid. If it is any indication how far we need to go, the Prius had a short lived solar panel that only cooled the car.
Here’s a great gallery of the cars. More videos below:
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