There’s a big reckoning happening in the solar inverter space right now. SolarEdge, an Israeli startup that we’ve profiled previously just announced bigger than expected earnings, sending their SEDG stock price up 5 points or a whopping 30% in today’s trading…
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Solar Team Eindhoven is a group of 21 students from the Technical University of Eindhoven (Netherlands) who put their studies on hold for over a year to work on what became the Stella Lux; an energy positive solar car.
Energy positive means that the solar panels on the roof of the vehicle can actually produce more energy than the vehicle consumes while driving.
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Yale University announced the purchase of a 4,400-solar panel installation from SolarCity for its West Campus. The panels are spread on the rooftop of a 350,000 square feet warehouse.
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Earlier this month SolarCity announced details of a new high-efficiency solar panel it plans on producing at its 1 GW module factory under-construction in Buffalo, NY. The company claimed that the module’s 22.04% efficiency was enough to make it the “most efficient rooftop solar module” ever made. The claim apparently sparked a “war” of high-efficiency solar panels because in the week following the announcement two other solar panel makers claimed to have surpassed SolarCity’s record.
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SolarCity announced today that it has built the most efficient rooftop solar module with 22% efficiency according to a third party tester: Renewable Energy Test Center. Until now, SunPower’s X-Series panel was considered the most efficient rooftop panel with 21.5% efficiency.
SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive says that the new modules will produce between 350 to 360-watt compared to the company’s current 260-watt panels.
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Recent pictures of SolarCity’s ‘Gigafactory’ show that the solar panel plant is, at least from the outside, looking close to be ready for production. The Buffalo News managed to get a bird eyes view of the plant and compared the progress with pictures from a year ago.
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SolarCity, the biggest solar installer in the US, announced a new program to install solar for affordable housing communities. Under the new program, SolarCity will finance and install solar arrays for affordable housing developers, and then the company will distribute the energy produced by the solar panels to individual housing units.
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SolarEdge announced a significant upgrade to their smart inverter line this today called “HD-Wave” which will have a profound impact on the solar industry. Further followup from SolarEdge yields a nice (HDWave PDF) Deck as well outlining some of the bigger upgrades.
In short, SolarEdge has done for the inverter (a critical piece of the solar ecosystem which turns DC powered Solar/Wind/hydro electricity into AC which is used by homes and long poweline distance travel) what flat panels did for the TV just a decade or so ago. The new technology uses 16 times fewer magnets, smaller thin film capacitors and much less cooling to yield a 99% efficient power transformation. That not only makes solar installs less expensive, more productive and easier, it makes Tesla’s Powerwall a whole lot smaller…
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GTM Research is out with a new report on the US solar industry’s second quarter 2015 and according to the firm, by most metrics the industry had its best quarter ever. The firm says that 40% of new electricity generation installed in the US in 2015 is from solar energy.
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Yesterday SolarCity released a SEC filing listing the milestones its co-founders need to achieve to vest tranches of shares of their new performance-based compensation plan. The milestones reveal some ambitious goals for the solar installer.
For example, the first milestone is to achieve a cost of production of $0.50/Watt for solar modules with at least 20% efficiency.
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Electric cars continue to sell well in spite of lower gas prices. Why? Because it is still an order of magnitude less expensive to fill up an electric vehicle. And that’s if you pay for your electricity rather than get it from solar panels or free EV chargers. I expect Tesla’s Model X launch, the rise of solar panels and continuing education of car buyers to accelerate this trend for the second half of 2015. Five more graphs below:
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There has been a lot of uninformed banker-speak in the media about Tesla’s battery including by Bloomberg here. The problem is these folks don’t understand the new market that Tesla is opening up.
But I’m also turning to Bloomberg for the first smart analysis and that’s not surprisingly from Solar City’s Lyndon Rive (who happens to be Elon Musk’s Cousin – perhaps you noticed the accent?).
The complaints have been that the battery wall doesn’t make economic sense – that for the average household to go off the grid with these combined with solar (or wind), it would be incredibly expensive.
That’s correct…
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11:24 PM
power wall is “beautiful, fits on the wall, garage wall or outside wall of your house. 6 inches thick. 3 feet across and tall. Really easy to fit in garage or your house.”
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: Connected to Internet.
Smart micro grids
Ten year guarantee
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: “Nothing remotely in these price points”
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change how the world uses energy”
[11:26 PM] Seth Weintraub: Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.
[11:27 PM] Mark Gurman: Musk says great for cold climates when there are power outages and ice storms
Good thermal management system for very cold environments
[11:29 PM] Jon Jivan: Wayyy below suggested price of $13k by some outlets. Nice to see it come in so cheap.
[11:29 PM] Mark Gurman: “Going to be huge in Germany”
[11:31 PM] Mark Gurman: Doesn’t require heavy foundations
“the integration at the system level is the big differentiator”
Ready to scale to a very large scale today
[11:32 PM] Mark Gurman: they’ve been using it for a year in house
[11:33 PM] Mark Gurman: Tesla will continue to open source the patents on all these
[11:34 PM] Mark Gurman: Giga factory designed in the same as a giant car
Fundamentally different way than approaching manufacturing and engineering
[11:39 PM] Mark Gurman: Installable by two people in half hour to an hour
Installation prices up to distributors
[11:42 PM] Mark Gurman: “This would be bigger in terms of pack utilization than the car industry, actually comparable size”
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: international, still need to figure out certified installers however
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: it’ll scale as fast as we can scale it.
[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: international next year
Germany and Australia late this year
[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: China early next year
Musk said “we own tesla energy.com” when asked if they’d change from tesla motors as name
Update: Here’s our first look. Looks familiar
https://twitter.com/TomerDavid_/status/593964617161805824
https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593967615887872000
Update: Tesla Energy!
We’ll be covering the Tesla Battery announcement later tonight but Tesla just unleashed the livestream page. Check back soon. We’ll run down the highlights here. We’re expecting Tesla to announce home and industrial battery products that allow users to store solar and lower cost, high availability electricity for use at night or during higher cost/watt time periods. The battery will be a down payment and rental fee which should more than pay for itself in electric bill savings.
There has been further speculation that, with this announcement, Tesla Motors will change its name to Tesla, Inc or Telsa Energy to note that it is an energy storage company, not just a car company. We’ll find out more soon, stay tuned.
The AP reports today that IKEA will begin selling solar panels. Not just a back up iPad battery but like whole house to grid assemblies.
Swedish flat-pack furniture giant IKEA will start selling residential solar panels at its stores in Britain, the first step in its plan to bring renewable energy to the mainstream market worldwide. The company started selling solar panels made by China’s Hanergy in its store in Southampton on Monday. It will sell them in the rest of Britain in coming months, it said.
A standard, all-black 3.36 kilowatt system for a semi-detached home will cost 5,700 British pounds ($9,200) and will include an in-store consultation and design service as well as installation, maintenance and energy monitoring service.
Getting Solar in front of more eyes and making it easier for consumers to swallow is a big step in improving consumer adoption. If the UK test run is successful (and if you can sell solar in cloudy Britain, why not?) then I’m hoping to see a wider rollout globally.
Even in Britian, the break even point for solar is 7 years so I’d imagine sunnier places, like *everywhere*, will be more successful. The UK does have a solar friendly environment however:
The U.K. government offers private solar panel owners the opportunity to sell back electricity to the grid on days when they have surplus production and has a financing plan for solar power investments, which means residents can buy a system for no upfront cost and pay it off gradually.
