Green Energy

The Tongwei Group, the 4th largest solar cell manufacturers globally, have released a plan to expand their manufacturing capacity to 30GW/year of solar cells from its currently running and under construction 9.7GW of solar cell capacity. They plan to make high-efficiency monocrystalline cells.

This plan, if executed, would make Tongwei the largest solar cell manufacturer by far.

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

AEP of Ohio to invest $1.8 billion in renewables over the next three years – The most interesting part of this analysis was a breakdown of volume to be contracted/built through 2030 – 75% new generation wind/solar and 25% generation gas. We’re just at the front edge of energy storage starting to scale, so I don’t expect to see utility-scale plants considering batteries for actual energy storage and later redistribution in their quarterly calls. With that, seeing a ratio of 75-25 of intermittent to dispatchable generation for a decade of growth – that’s a shift. As noted in the article, the company does own a large amount of coal still – 47% of its portfolio – but if you don’t plan on building any for the next decade plus of time, that’s not trivial.

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Chile has received two bids for electricity from large-scale solar projects, in 20 year contracts, at prices under 2.5¢/kWh at a recent national auction. The lowest bid was 2.148¢/kWh.

These second lowest bids in the world – to a recent Saudi Arabian bid – are a product of the country having possibly the best solar sunlight on the planet, but also represents continued price declines in the solar industry and financial trust in the product from global financial houses.

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JinkoSolar has announced three solar cell efficiency records since early October. This most recent record is an extension of the one-upmanship of October 24th-25th when LONGi announced a monoPERC record at 22.71% and JinkoSolar followed up with a 22.78% record.

Today’s efficiency announcement of 23.45% is a full 2.9% increase over two weeks ago.

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A pilot structure built in California has shown that ‘wavelength selective’ greenhouses can be designed with solar panels that feed crops enough sunlight, while also powering the structure. In the greenhouse, 20% of crops actually grew better – while overall, plants used about 5% less water.

The broader goals of the project were to lower agricultural co2 emissions with sustainable energy generation, while exploring how to increase our food security with offgrid greenhouses.

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

High Lithium-Ion Battery Demand Prompts Japanese Manufacturers to Speed up and Expand Capacity – TDK plans to increase the annual capacity by around 15% in 2018; Murata Manufacturing, which acquired Sony’s battery business in September, plans to invest approximately 50 billion yen by the end of March, 2020 to expand capacity. Already we know there are 10-20 Gigafactory equivalents around the world being built. And, due to demand growing at rates faster than projected, and costs falling greater than anticipated we’re now seeing those expansion plans – expanding. Interesting list from article: Current lithium-ion battery leading manufacturer in the world is Japan’s Panasonic, with market share 23%, followed by Korea’s Samsung SDI, with market share 21%. The rests are South Korea’s LG Chem (market share is 14%), TDK (11%), Murata (8%), China’s Tianjin Lishen Battery (6%), China’s BAK (4%), China’s BYD (4%) and Maxell (1%).

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

HSBC pledges $100 billion of finance by 2025 to combat climate change – “This will involve direct lending, bonds and project finance, alongside new products in asset management,” an HSBC spokesman said. The company has huge resources that it loans out on an annual basis. This $12.5B/year is a new tranche for them to become experts at. They’re going to have to hire experts skilled at analyzing the projects they’ll fund. They’re going to get to know a whole new group of service providers in the clean energy arena to get deals from. This number will grow. Goldman Sachs recently announced they’d be pushing $150B in the same time period.

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

I love that they call it highlights – Highlights of the Findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report – Global average sea levels are expected to continue to rise—by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–4 feet by 2100. A rise of as much as 8 feet by 2100 cannot be ruled out. Sea level has risen by about 7–8 inches since 1900, with almost half (about 3 inches) of that rise occurring since 1993. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, says that for about 10 million people, cutting back on CO2 will do nothing to fix the flooding that will already occur due to current emission levels. The Federal Government recommends 10 million people be forced to bear the consequences of Climate Change on their own, as the economics of covering them via taxpayer money would be too much and might create uncertainty.

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Mega Sunergy released a new “multi shingled array module” 315W solar panel design that increases the efficiency of a standard solar panel by up to 17%. The company has changed how they lay out the 60 individual solar cells within the solar panel. Instead of perfectly spacing those 60 out – with small, defined areas between the cells – the company has allowed the solar cell’s borders to overlap each other while increaseing the cell count to 68.

The company expects their new solar cell layout to increase solar panel output 5-17% depending on the original solar cell type. In effect, by lowering the efficiency of the average solar cell they’ve increased the solar panel efficiency.

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

PV module imports soar in US – Imports of PV modules to the US market have soared since the beginning of third-quarter 2017 due to concerns about price hikes, and as of the end of October, 5GWp of PV modules had arrived in the US waiting for customs clearance, according to industry sources in China. I was under the impression that any panels imported after the ITC accepted the Suniva back in May would be retroactively tariffed by default. Actions like this by people in the know, at a minimum, suggest that the judgment isn’t determined yet. Maybe this retroactive tax, much like the overall structure of the tariff, is part of Trump’s leeway.

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

10,000 jobs to be created with SC solar power project – Cypress Creek Renewables will announce a plan to invest $1.5 billion to build 2 gigawatts of solar power in South Carolina, according to Adams and Reese LLP. The more than 80 projects will create 10,000 construction jobs and power more than 600,000 homes. The clickbaity title totally got me. I was wondering, ‘What solar project is big enough for 10,000 jobs?!’ Then I read the article and saw it was 80 projects! However, I’m glad the clickbait grabbed me. The 2GW number is huge – and it turns out, as of the end of 2016, the whole state in its history had installed 0.2GW. This series of projects will increase the state value by 10x!

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In Tesla’s Q3 2017 earnings report, they gave an update on their ‘Tesla Energy’ division. They highlighted being on track to meet the 100-day deployment deadline of the 100MW/129MWh energy storage project for South Australia. Mention was made of the work being done in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria – ‘solar panels, Powerpacks and hundreds of PowerWalls.’

Additionally, Tesla – at multiple points – pointed toward a future of more revenue from energy generation and storage. 11% of the quarter’s revenue came from the Tesla Energy division.

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

Big giveaway of my main takeaway of the solar tariff yesterday – If you’re buying higher efficiency – more $$ – panels this ruling affects you. Get moving, maybe. After clearing my head and reading everyone else’s thoughts on the case I found I like this one – ITC Issues Recommended Remedies in Section 201 Solar Trade Case – a bit more than others because of heavy details it went into. If you’re going to read something on the topic – I’d suggest giving the Electrek’s Take in my article two minutes, and then if you want harder details visit the GTM article linked to here.

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The US International Trade Court (ITC) made three separate potential tariff recommendations for Trump to consider in order to protect the domestic solar panel manufacturing industry. At a high level, the separate recommendations were a 35% tariff on all imported solar panels, a ~30% tariff on solar cells and panels, and an 8.9GW import cap for 2018. The tariffs would mostly be phased out after four years.

The most recent tariff request by Suniva called for a minimum solar panel price of 74¢/watt, and SolarWorld called for an import cap of 5.7GW/year.

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

U.S. trade panel set to recommend solar trade tariffs – In documents filed last month, Suniva asked for a tariff of 25 cents per watt on solar cells and 32 cents per watt on panels. It is also seeking a minimum price on panels of 74 cents a watt, nearly double their current cost. SolarWorld has asked for an import quota. Still though, these are only recommendations. And in our current political climate, one doesn’t know exactly how the decision makers will act. Krysti Shallenberger‏ @klshall is going to be there today reporting via Twitter if you’re interested.

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Electrical grid complexity has increased immensely. Recently, weather damage and intermittent renewable energy production have increased the dynamics that must be managed in a large power grid. In order to address that, the Dutch company Alfen is currently field testing their new ‘cellular smart grid’ solution in Lelystad, the Netherlands.

They have developed a combination of energy storage and finely tuned algorithms to help make electrical grids more resilient and to reduce their downtime.

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High-tech architecture (aka Structural Expressionism) has begun to embrace solar, and it’s the hottest thing under the sun.  One amazing example: Emirates Insolaire’s new custom colored solar panels – Kromatix, a Swiss technology developed by Swissinso. ”We go vertical, we dress the building with a beautiful energy-producing skin.”

The product debuted back in 2015 at the Water, Energy, Technology, and Environment Exhibition (WETEX 2015) and is finding its way into more installations today.

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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 World’s Tiniest Power Market Will Leverage Big Data to Sell Solar – Local medical business campus has a collection of solar panels across many buildings, now with help from a local utility and some software – they’re selling their excess solar power into the local commercial market (mainly on campus it seems). The utility is getting paid some sort of fee for allowing this to go on. The internet started with universities and military bases connecting to each other. US Military talking solar microgrids all the time…universities as well, now we’re moving onto physically tight knit business communities selling among themselves.

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Following a petition by US solar panel manufacturer Suniva, the US International Trade Commission declared on September 22nd that solar panel imports have hurt US manufacturers. They asked that a tariff of ~40¢/watt be added to solar panel imports. This decision will be finalized before January 12th.

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

Photovoltaic withstood Caribbean hurricanes better than many buildings – The largest solar farm in the Caribbean with its 58 MW, which was only finished in August 2016, also proved that photovoltaics can be made storm-proof. Here, apart from occasionally torn away modules, almost no damage was caused.  For projects done by a company in Antigua – The tests showed, according to Wolf, that the structures for ground-mounted open-site systems have to be anchored over 2 m into the ground, and sometimes additional concreting is required too. Furthermore, solar modules with a frame thickness of 50 mm and strengthened glass have been used. The angle of the solar modules has also been adjusted so that they provide the wind with as little vulnerable surface area as possible. So, we now have solid evidence – in a real category 5 hurricane – that solar can be built to withstand a hurricane. The articles note that the newest systems only lost ‘an occasional solar panel.’ If occasional panels are lost – then that means the solar system is still up, as strings can go down and a broader system still run.

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

Italy proposes phasing out coal power plants by 2025 – “We have asked (grid company) Terna to identify the infrastructure needed,” Minister Carlo Calenda said in a parliamentary hearing on the document. They’re in the early stages of doing so, but someone – somewhere, thinks its possible. Italy’s got a population of around 60 million people. France, already so clean from an electricity standpoint, plans to be coal free by 2023. No coal Netherlands by 2030. Rock on Europe.

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