Green Energy

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

Here’s what we know so far about Rick Perry’s fake power grid study – and it isn’t good – High level – study is too short, supposed grid reliability issues are non-existent, being led by fossil-fuel lobbyist, National Security language is red herring, already proposed 70% cuts to renewable programs, and of course the outspoken support for coal. #rickperryisfake

The World’s Largest Wind Turbines Have Started Generating Power in England – The video is enough. Short article that really just shows off some imagery and connects to other websites. The visuals of these huge systems are always so compelling. Living near Rhode Island, I get to see wind turbines on a regular basis – but until you stand next to one do you realize how large they are.

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

The Green Big Bang – “Will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels?” – Big business has a big reason to ask that question. Document is full of data. Check out the GIF at bottom of brief showing wind/solar growth. Another graphic – global battery manufacturing capacity by 2020 is expected to be 173GWh worth, with Tesla being the second largest at 35GWh worth. Later on, sobriety – coal took about 60 years to reach 50% as it took over from wood in the 1800s. There is a dearth of green alternatives to the fossil fuels used to make steel, cement or plastics, he adds. And replacing a global fossil fuel energy system that took an estimated $25tn to create over the 20th century with today’s crop of renewables is a job that will occupy us “for generations”. These fossil fueled businesses grew our population from one to greater than seven billion as the industrial revolution spread to almost all reaches of the planet. History will look at these quaint times with nostalgia.

California’s 2017 energy mix showing significant clean uptick relative due to hydroelectric and solar growth – And more importantly, natural gas way down. For most days so far in 2017, the share of CAISO’s electric power generated from natural gas has been near or below previous five-year (2012–16) minimums. These numbers of course don’t consider the 4GW’ish worth of residential/commercial behind the meter solar – that would up the solar number 30-50%.

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Since Tesla started producing home battery packs and selling them through SolarCity in 2014, several other automakers, including Nissan and BMW, started also leveraging their electric vehicle battery pack technology for residential energy storage.

Now Mercedes-Benz is the latest to join the industry and it seems to be doing it in a more serious way than Nissan or BMW with a new partnership with Vivint Solar, the second biggest residential solar installer in the US after Tesla’s SolarCity.
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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news

Iowa senator slams energy chief for grid study undermining wind energy – Iowa’s Republican senator on Wednesday raised concerns that U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry has commissioned a “hastily developed” study of the reliability of the electric grid that appears “geared to undermine” the wind energy industry – Grassley said the results were pre-determined and would show that intermittent energy sources like wind make the grid unstable. We know the coal industry is going to use ‘instability’ as its tool to leverage a requirement of having large volumes of coal able to run immediately in times of risk. This has been expressed in public by the Pruitt at the EPA.

Coal plants failed in Queensland heatwave on day of record demand – A new report from the AER looks at the soaring electricity prices on February 12, 2017, when high temperatures across the state caused record demand despite the day being a Sunday, when most business and much manufacturing was closed. The principal reason, the AER notes, was the sudden withdrawal of more than 790MW of coal and gas capacity – all due to technical faults related to the heat – If the world is getting warmer, and thermal plants – coal/nuclear/gas – are going to have greater problems shedding heat, we truly depend on them?

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

Apple’s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership – Apple’s new building – header photo – is absolutely stunning. The structure will be 100% renewable powered – 4MW of biogas fuel cells plus 16MW of solar power on top. And images – like the above by Dan Winters – will help power the imagination of architectural engineers integrating renewables into structures.

Rooftop solar saved NSW consumers nearly $1 billion in heatwave – New South Wales, Australia – When temperatures broke 45°C during a three-day period in February of this year, solar power produced 17GWh. This production – while only 2% of total electricity – was produced during peak demand times, and it managed to lower pricing 60% – $from 1920/MWh to $780/MWh – saving consumers $888 million. Approximately $600 million of it was saved in one day. In many places, this money would have been earned by gas peaker plants. Often times, event likes these – where prices can sometimes increases by hundreds of a percent – were where the whole years profits would come from. Game changing.

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

China and India overtake US as best renewable investment destinations – The basis of the USA falling from the top spot are political changes put forth by the Trump Administration. Investment funds don’t like their cash sitting around – and if the USA is going to slow its movement, there are plenty of places for it to flow globally. On the other hand – politics aside – China and India should be leading the world. It’s good to see them take their proper places.

Speaking of hundreds of billions of dollars – Solar to attract more investment than coal, gas and nuclear combined this year – Game, Set, Match, folks. Plus another $100B+ for wind. In Europe, renewable technologies will attract 73.4% of power generation investment this year. By 2020, say the analysts, non-hydro renewable energies will account for 65% of all power generation investment, led by the strong backing for solar found in India, China and other emerging economies and markets. India alone will see clean energy investment grow by 24% per year until 2020, the report finds. We will still need fossils and nuclear for a while – but change is coming hard.

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

Blackout parties: how solar and storage made WA farmers the most popular in town – “People assume the grid is something reliable and permanent, but in reality it is a centralised system with very long lines out to remote communities – it is in fact highly susceptible to failure” – Every day, as the price of solar + storage falls, more places become economically viable for solar power. What’s more interesting – with advancing microgrid technology – is how a grid can develop and broader stability exist outside of the incumbent centralized model.

The Next Step in Energy Storage: Aggregation – Australia and Germany are piloting smarter grids that tie to together home storage + solar generation. Hawaii is testing pieces of it. Now we have Tesla working in Vermont. The program, basically, offers people a home energy backup for $15/month. Cool. What it offers the broader grid is much more – a distributed power plant able to be called on in a near instant. There are many ways for batteries to make money from the grid. I’d be interested in who owns these batteries – and whether Tesla is making money off of the services offered to the grid – and is there an official ‘Tesla Utilities’ department yet?

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

Michigan Tech study suggests outfitting military infrastructure with solar PV microgrid systems – study found that the military requires 17 gigawatts (GW) of PV to fortify domestic bases and that the systems are technically feasible and economically favorable – also interesting directly from the research paper – the DOD operates over 400 military bases within continental USA. 27 of these bases already have or are planning solar power installations. Now, instead of talking about the geopolitical risks of protecting oil or arguing about pollution/climate change – solar is now defined as a strategically important distributed energy resource for the military.

1000 km range thanks to a new battery concept – Individual battery cells are not strung separately side-by-side in small sections; instead, they are stacked directly one above the other across a large area – the idea is to put the batteries together in a way eliminate much of the housing and contacting that can take up more than 50 percent of the space. One thing I’ve learned in the past year being a part of electrek.co is that battery density has many ways to improve that don’t need recreating of fundamental physics, but instead – packaging.

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

SolarWorld insolvent – On the one hand – its sad to see one of the oldest, most respected and groundbreaking companies in the industry in this state. Being younger in the industry, ten years, I grew up in a time when there were always many solar panel manufacturers – and I also got to see SolarWorld force the politicians to tax solar panels from China in both the USA and Europe. In the end – it’s true that the Chinese model of underwriting the solar industry as it loses money in the early stages of development has hurt long-term manufacturers. It’s true that SolarWorld’s shareholders and employees have bore the brunt of this Chinese investment. However, I’m hard pressed to say I wish it’d have come about differently. Easy to say when I’m not a shareholder or employee…

Elon Musk: “This is a connector that has to last for more than 30 years. It has to be weatherproof, heavy rain, snow, slush, salt, water leaking – it’s like connector hell” – technology in the connectors – I’m still wondering exactly what is going on underneath those tiles. Are the tiles going to lay on top of the sheathing – the plywood that makes the first layer – of the roof? Will we lay down roofing felt (the paper like under layer)? I’m guessing the paper might be valuable – not sure – and we still use a standard nail gun to hold the tiles in place after they’re assembled and connected. Connector is probably built hard into the tile so the connect can last decades on top of a roof. This excites me folks.

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

A million people in LA County might ditch their utility and investors are scared – They’re not going off grid, but instead are joining a CCA. California Assembly Bill 117 of 2002 established CCAs, allowing “customers to aggregate their electrical loads as members of their local community.” California CCAs have eight operational members/1.25 million customers/projected 2017 load of 13,750 GWh. This is a complex thing – multiple power utilities within the same area, neighbors even. Electricity pumped over shared power lines using various sources for generation. A very smart electricity grid will be required to maximize concepts like this. Anyone know who owns the local distribution power lines in California? Private? Public? Anyone in this program already?

Paying for Utility Politics: How ratepayers are forced to fund the Edison Electric Institute and other political organizations – In essence, your payments to the utilities go directly toward an organization that will manipulate the public and pay Congress to make laws against your best interests. The story here focuses on how the Edison Institute is constantly shown to be violating the rules surrounding collecting fees used for lobbying in shareholders, not ratepayers, interests. And Edison consistently being told they’re not allowed to lobby with that money – many times after it is shown they’ve broken rules. This isn’t new – Ten major utilities spent more than $250 million total on political expenditures over a five-year period beginning in 2011 – and it isn’t going to stop.

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

Russia Tells the UN It Wants to Produce More Renewable Energy while Macron tells Trump he will protect what was made in Paris – the people and the Paris Agreement – In terms of Russia, we have a minister telling the UN that one of the largest oil and gas-producing countries in the world likes green energy. In France, we have a country run on nuclear energy with heavy investment in taking care of the environment and building plenty of solar. Macron gives me something to believe based upon history – and Putin speaking can be used to influence.

LG has a 20.8% efficiency solar panel available for sale – LG NeON® R, Module efficiency: 20.8%, model LG360Q1C-A5 – This is cool because it’s the second time I’ve seen a normal solar panel above 20% and available from a serious player. Someone on reddit said their contractor was offering this panel up at SunPower pricing (meaning expensive) versus the regular priced LG product in the 18-19% efficiency range. This might be a great panel to start looking for if your roof is space constrained as it’ll come down in price fast as production ramps.

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

“If someone walks in with a solar project tomorrow and it takes a billion dollars or three billion dollars, we’re ready to do it” – In the United States, a $1-3B solar project will be 1-3GW of solar power. I’ve seen no projects announced greater than 1GW. More likely, a project of this size will be within a Buffett owned electrical district – Nevada, northwest USA, or able to get its electricity to Nevada. If Buffett is ready to buy, then the world is ready to buy.

French election 2017: Where the candidates stand on energy and climate change – first off, these are politicians talking…so, grain of salt please…but – Macron says 1. double France’s wind and solar capacity by 2022, 2. ban all shale gas exploration, 3. no new hydrocarbon exploration permits, 4. reduce nuclear power’s share of the French energy mix from 75% today to 50%, 5. pledges to “integrate the ecological cost” into the price of carbon in France by increasing the carbon tax to €100 per tonne of CO2 in 2030. Politics in France will be tilted this direction for a while.

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In this week’s top stories: TSLA earnings, Tesla Model Y details, Model 3 reservation data, more Gigafactories, and the latest solar and energy news. 
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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news

Trina Solar achieves 24.13% conversion efficiency for IBC solar cell – Cool to see the R&D happening not only in the labs of universities, but also the largest companies on the planet. A few notes though – this was a single cell. Trina Solar noted that the record-breaking IBC cell was fabricated at its State Key Laboratory (SKL) of PV Science and Technology (PVST), on a large-sized phosphorous-doped Cz Silicon substrate (156×156 mm) with a low-cost industrial IBC process, featuring conventional tube doping technologies and screen-printed metallization. Also, the move to market will be long as doesn’t have a commercial line producing this type of product. 3-5 years? Not worth waiting for with tax breaks/incentives/net metering being hacked at.

Linking to this new website – Electrek.co – heard of it? Tesla battery researcher unveils new chemistry to increase lifecycle at high voltage – If made into a car battery pack, 1,200 cycles would translate to roughly 300,000 miles (480,000 km) – meaning that a battery pack could still retain about 95% of its original energy capacity after ~300,000 miles – or 25 years at the average 12,000 miles per year – If put in a house, the values would mean that you’d be above 80% of the batteries original capacity after 25 years. That’s a 25 year warranty on a battery pack coming! Game over.

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

U.S. Wind Energy Installations Surge: A New Turbine Rises Every 2.4 Hours – According to the 2016 annual market report, wind now pays over $245 million per year in land-lease payments to local landowners, often farmers and ranchers. $245M in revenue to land owners isn’t a joke. In Massachusetts, land leases for solar power were making $1000-4000/acre per year. The renewable energy revolution will win because the people will make significant chunks of money.

In Q1 2017, 46 utilities in 23 states and Washington D.C. attempted to increase home solar charges on all customers by at least 10% – The biggest theme of the Q1 report is more attempts by utilities to increase fixed charges or minimum bills on customers. The power companies want to stick it to you. Obviously though, it’s because you want their money. You should check out this site linked to in this article to better understand the laws in your state – it’s a great, constantly updated resource. Additionally, if you have any questions on certain laws and how they might affect you personally – post a comment linking to the law, and the group will help out. Until then – watch what your local politicians are doing.

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

Google’s Project Sunroof expanding into Germany – Have any of you used it? Did it lead toward getting a contractor quote? Just for playing? I’ve only played with it – but it seems powerful for consumers.

Safety first: A microgrid project in Brooklyn tackles lithium-ion fire fears – Batteries moving indoors is something new for a lot of inspectors. At minimum, Lead batteries had to be in vented areas as they gave off significant gasses. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. New York City code will influence the National Electric Code (NEC), and the NEC will evolve on a national level which will lower/refine the installation costs of home battery systems.

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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A technical, financial and political analysis via a weekday review of important news

After a 100-Year Hiatus, Batteries Are Helping the Grid Again – The first cars were electric. And the ‘Duck Curve‘ being solved by batteries is over a hundred years old. The Duck Curve is a result of lots of solar power going away at sunset combined with the daily usage peak of everyone getting home – the previous way to solve it was via a Peaking Power Plant (gas plants that start up very fast but only run 3% of the time in the USA). Now a days – we’re going to build batteries, just like they did over a hundred years ago.

US budget proposal doesn’t hurt EPA or ARPA-E funding, does cut $800M from renewable energy programs – The headlines and Trump’s talk are running differently than the reality that’s coming out after we account for judges and Congress having their own will. Congress seems to have ignored certain suggestions and crafted their own, more consistent, budget. Strange language here though – Renewable energy programs, “which have already received significant investments in recent years,” were cut $808 million compared to the previous Administration’s budget request. Someone thought it appropriate to cover their actions with an excuse.

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Global pension funds warm to India’s solar power ambitions – This is the best possible money that solar power can have access to. Trillions of investment dollars are available for long term time frames at agreeable rates due to solar’s average relatively stable returns on investment that pay cash (electricity). There is risk in the commodity price of electricity – but outside of that, once the solar plant is built – it’s going to be there pumping juice for a long time. Pensions and solar go together well.

“Carbon capture is total bullshit” – I’m with Bloomberg on this one. My logic – 1. We’ve been trying to clean coal for almost 200 years, and it is still expensive and we’re still terrible at it. 2. The same challenges that existed in the solar industry 15 years ago – the ability to scale and developing global pipelines on viable technologies – would exist in the carbon capture world. Why would we want to start over when wind/solar/energy storage are coming along so well? 3. I do not trust pumping carbon underground. Just like I am watching earthquakes occur all over the USA due to pumping fluids – when we start needing to maximize profits – we do dumb things. Human nature, let’s just keep the carbon it in the ground, shall we?

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Elon Musk discusses future plans for Tesla and his other endeavors with curator Chris Anderson at a TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada, April 28, 2017. The transcript below is an attempt to capture the conversation as accurately as possible. 

Chris: Elon. Hey, welcome back to TED. It’s great to have you here.

Elon: Thanks for having me.

Chris: So, in the next half hour or so we’re going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes my first question a little ironic. Why are you boring?

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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A technical, financial and political analysis via a weekday review of important news

100 by ’50 Act – legislation that would phase out the use of fossil fuels in the US by 2050 – Probability of it being seen on the floor of Congress is close to zero %. However, that’s not the purpose of this document – this document is to let the people know what’s coming.

85% of California Electricity Generation Renewable Energy for Brief Period – Renewable energy provided more than 85% of California’s in-state generation (CAISO system) for 5 hours in the afternoon on Sunday, April 23. Over the whole day, renewable energy provided 74% of the in-state generation. The maximum penetration was 86.4% from 2-3 PM. The five-hour window is the most impressive – mostly we hear about these peaks when they occur for an hour, but here we have the middle of the day completely fed by renewables. And this does not include rooftop solar on a house or a business – with those volumes included I bet we were over 80% on the day and above 90% of demand met between 2-3 PM. We’re gonna have a 100% moment soon.

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Electrek Green Energy Brief

California Senate committee clears bill for new energy storage rebate program – The bill, SB 700, would require utilities to collect funds from ratepayers to establish an Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) that would work in tandem with the state’s existing Self Generation Incentive Program and the California Solar Initiative. The ESI would be funded through 2027. A ten-year energy storage boom coming to California – solar and wind will benefit greatly from this.

HECO (Hawaii power company) grid ran on 26% renewables in 2016 – Just a progress report –On Hawaii Island, customers used 54% renewable energy in 2016—the first time clean energy’s share on the system passed the halfway mark. On Oahu, renewables composed 19% of energy use last year. Hawaiian Electric’s oil use declined 21% between 2008 and 2016, with the bulk of the reduction coming on Oahu. A pretty good progress report if you ask me.

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