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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Solar power in California started setting production records on February 24th – production peaks have continued to occur since then. On Thursday of last week renewables broke 56% of total demand. This record is partially the result of a national 2016 installation boom of greater than 14GW of solar power that California took 35% of.

According to the daily report on March 23rd, solar peaked around 11.16 AM – three minutes before the solar + wind peak of 49.2% and nine minutes before renewables peaked 56.7%.

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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.

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750MW solar park to get 0.25% loan from World Bank – This is just below the going rate for banks that borrow directly from the United States (or really rich people who have hard collateral). The World Bank does have political reasons for giving a loan like this and the loan is probably backed by India. Nonetheless, big names like this giving big money like this are important – for one, that one group is doing it means others will soon follow. And that means 1GW solar power plants will get built a lot more often.

The Trump Administration pushing back against carbon tax – Technically, anything this group says out loud doesn’t matter relative to truth or long term reality – however – it does represent their current philosophical positions. And that is a good thing to know. However, has the Trump administration ever heard of a ‘carbon dividend‘?

System monitoring software getting Australian attention – Posting this because of a few data points in the article – the main one 15% system losses in residential solar systems due to not recognizing downtime. Holy lost revenue! That’s huge. This needs to be tied directly to my heart – if my solar system isn’t working at high noon I need a little jolt.

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SunPower thinks it’ll be a challenge for Musk to deliver PV at the prices suggested – Two things – 1. SunPower sells the most expensive – and maybe best quality – solar panel a regular person can buy. 2. SunPower has been selling solar panels for a long time. My default reaction with Musk is to expect that maybe it’ll take a little longer (month? six?) to arrive and roll out a bit slower (80,000 vehicles in 2016 versus almost 100,000 as guidance) – but, it will arrive and it will be priced right and it will change the game. I can accept that – I would celebrate that.

California looking to specify renewables for peak moments – The gist – California legislators are attempting to restructure the power market so it makes more sense economically for renewable energy to be applied to the very expensive peak demand areas. The reason we ought watch these types of legislation is that places like California are at the cutting edge of power markets and how we’re going to monetize clean energy. Funny that we’ve so quickly progressed from renewables can’t scale and are expensive, to there are too many renewables and they’re so cheap we need to change everything.
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The header image is found on spot.com. It is a piece of solar glass art made by Sarah Hall. I’ve never seen anyone make such gorgeous solar art that generates electricity. Combined with the products we’re seeing from groups like Onyx Solar – it seems new construction with customized solar in the place of glass – could be economically sound (everything I do in solar involves return on investment). And that economically sound glass could be quite beautiful.

How to create a 26.3% solar cell – The image of an almost pure black solar cell is fitting. Developer of cell says manufacturing timetables haven’t been discussed. 2020? Later probably. In real life, 30 standard 280W solar panels taking up 550 sq ft of roof space would cover the average 2.6 family household – if the efficiency increases from 16% to 26% (65%!) you’d need about 18 solar panels taking up 330 sq ft of roof space. There are a lot more surfaces that are 330 sq ft then there are 500 sq ft plus. One of the major arguments I get is that they want more electricity out of the same space – this is the path.

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Low cost wind displacing coal – 56GW of coal at risk, that’s a big number – about 16% of the current stock around 339GW of coal. If wind runs at a 35% capacity factor and coal is around 60%, that’d mean about 96GW of wind to replace the at risk product – that would more than double the current US wind capacity. That’d be a lot of progress

East Coast off shore wind energy headlines coming daily it seems – Maryland weighing two wind proposals, 750MW vs 120MW – North Carolina, New York, Maryland and Massachusetts have all expressed interest in joining Rhode Island in the off-shore wind game. With the Department of Energy saying we’ve got greater than 2,000GW of off shore wind potential on US coasts – and that with HVDC lines that wind could meet 30% of US electricity needs, this might be a big game gearing up. Any advice on how to get off shore wind into a well balanced portfolio?

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India doubling solar capacity in 15 months – From 10GW to 20GW – You know why this solar revolution really could happen, because it seems the revolution slowly moves around the world – Germany, Italy and Spain, then the USA and Japan, then China that leads – and now India stepping onto the big field. Of course, there are others growing – Australia and Africa and the Middle Eastern oil countries. It seems as I hear about slowdowns in Germany and China as they build out their grids, India picks up. And once China and Germany fix their grids, their volumes will explode again. Virtuous cycle spreading across the globe in a complex pattern that we’ve seen before with many other technologies that come to dominate.

600MW needed to fix Australian grid issues – And then read this on the broader effect/consequences of Musk and this Australia battery play. Per the BNEF article, the 100MW is going to cost South Australia $169M – if they need 600MW per the Bloomberg article – then that totals $1B – spread that over 1.7M people and 10 years – $5/month/person. With big solar signing the biggest deals yet in Australia – technology like this allows this region to cut dependence on fossils and jack their renewable – maybe $5/month makes good sense.

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Energy monopolies driving Ohio prices upward (not renewables) – Because of ‘gold-plating’ and legislative bill riders electric utilities have made tens of billions extra since 1999 per a study. Gold plating is the process whereby a utility is given a guaranteed return on investment – via increasing rates – on all money spent. Buy a new truck? Charge the ratepayers + 10%. Redo the CEOs office? Charge the ratepayers +10%. No joke. The common refrain we hear is that adding renewables to the power grid is driving the price – except we know this isn’t true.

FPL (South/Central FL electrical utility) awards 600MW of solar power contracts in Florida – I am happy to see my home state of Florida installing many megawatts of solar power at $1.50/W (I bet the wind code of 135mph+ increased the price of the install by ¢10/W or more). Of course, FPL is partially a crook when it comes to manipulation of the general public to keep a monopolistic stranglehold on electricity generation. Florida, The Sunshine State, must be on the top ten list of solar power! Right? Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey are though…not the Sunshine State. And just in case you were wondering – Florida isn’t even in the top ten of cumulative solar power, being as how it is the third largest state in population – this is whack.

Quality of service figures for the electricity networks of Germany – The Bundesnetzagentur uses the information to calculate the system average interruption duration index (SAIDI) – This value has fallen from 21 minutes/year to 12 minutes/year. Germany takes on significant intermittent renewable energy in the form of solar power and wind. With the support of surrounding power grids, increased engineer experience, upgrades to the power grids, and more battery systems (50,000 today), zee Germans have been able to continually increase their grid’s up time – even as renewables keep increasing (more slowly today – but still growing).
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Net metering 2.0 slows down California’s residential solar market – And that is the way it is supposed to work. If the most energy is being used in the early evening (the duck curve), then we need fine tune our systems. Time of Use helps us better understand pricing as private people and business, we invest appropriately, and our challenges will shift.

JA Solar posts 16% revenue, 25% shipment year-on-year increase in 2016 – 5.2GW of solar sold at $2.3B is ¢44/W for solar panels. Gross margins were down to 14% from 17% – I’ve always been taught that healthy, long term business needs margins closer to 25-30%. Interesting note from the article – a new $1B solar cell factory in Vietnam was put on hold due to environmental issues.

Price Drop across Multi-si Value Chain Continues and Embroils Price Trend of Mono-si Products – Nice report – many product types moving different directions. A few items I am looking for – Will solar panel prices start to drop as Chinese demand slows by mid year? Answer – they haven’t begun to fall yet, but no significant demand bumps have occurred to drive volume up year either. What are utilization rates of factories? Answer – the Taiwanese factories noted in this article are running 50-60%.

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Connecticut talking about a $15/ton carbon tax – The word ‘direct dividend’ is used to describe a portion of the carbon tax being returned to business (30% of tax) and private people (40%). 25% of the tax will be used to invest in efficiency/infrastructure. The article tries hard to paint that a carbon tax is coming – first they point out that many states in the region are doing it, and they quote a politician saying Washington DC is ‘sending signals.’ Hrmm – 25% of a carbon tax to infrastructure/efficiency…it’s something.

Since the northeast USA got some snow yesterday – here is a short on snow and solar panels – 1. Snow slides off – without frames it slides fast – higher angles it slides fastest. 2. Snow cleans panels as well any anything cleans panels. 3. Microcracks can develop from too much weight – research is being done. 4. Light gets through the snow – so much so – that it generates electricity even when covered. 5. Type of snow will affect how snow rolls off, as well as wind. 6.* Added by me – when that tiny bit of light get through to the panels, the panels heat up – and start to melt the snow (header image from linked video). Plus these benefits from the comment section.

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Solar viability at Google’s Googleplex HQ

Today Google updated its Project Sunroof with some pretty striking data on approximately 60 million buildings and the viability for Solar Panels to power them. According to the search giant, almost 4 in 5 US homes are viable for solar panels with over 90% of homes in sunny states like Florida and California being viable. But even for houses in “not so sunny states” like Maine and Minnesota, over 60% of the homes surveyed were eligible to benefit from solar panels.

That’s a huge, untapped market for solar companies like Tesla’s SolarCity subsidiary… 
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Exxon CEO hid climate change communications from legal probe – First off, #exxonknew and they continued to pay third parties to lie to the public about the effect of CO2 on climate change. And they know the bell will soon toll – the question is how long can they hold off the wolves of public opinion, how much more cash can be generated? That’s all it comes down to. Money.

EIA probably going to underestimate their solar development projection, again – It’s almost a joke how the EIA constantly underestimates how much solar power will be built, and this matters because it influences policy and the public. Of course, it is a bit more complicated than a batch of great scientists missing data – and the EIA has responded to these criticisms. I’ll take the path that we need not look at the EIA for solar power projections in the USA – it’s not their job and they don’t focus on it (as they say clearly in their report). That means government folk ought not to pay attention to the projections and instead maybe look at Greentech Media who seems to get pretty close every year.

A carbon dividend really can slow fossil fuel use — under these conditions – First off, I don’t like this article at all. Don’t like how they describe things – and don’t like their conclusions/parallels to other programs. The reason I grabbed the article – I think whomever is writing this document is getting a nudge to use the term ‘carbon dividend’ in a headline.

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California recently put forth a resolution to consider 100% renewable electricity by 2045, paving the way for solar and wind to spread their wings as the main electricity sources in a state on the frontier of renewable energy. But Julian Specter at Greentech Media argues the choice to forego other market choices in California, to focus solely on wind and solar as electricity sources, is a bad strategy to achieve lower climate warming emissions.

I think that logic put forth by GTM is wrong. California needs to aggressively chase this path toward 100% renewable for the following reasons: one, the state is only one market among many; two, prior examples of ultra-focused groups ‘over investing’ in a technology have brought about amazing change;  three, wind and solar technology can get it done; and, finally, legislative paths can change if need be.

California can go it alone and focus on these high probabilities of victory technologies without hurting the rest of us. In fact, it probably needs to so the rest of us can benefit from their advancements.

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New York state: “Utilities should be using energy storage as part of their normal course of business” – We’re seeing energy storage grabbing onto more chunks of the power grid. There is a game that occurs inside of us – we see headlines of something happening far away, we see rich thought leaders do it, we see others we know do it, we see our competition do it – each of these occurrences build up a certain confidence in ourselves. New York State is pushing because they recently bore the consequences of a hurricane combined with ocean rise, and were reminded of the need to be resilient. The reason they chose this path i particular is because others had shown it to be sound. No fluff – just your normal course of business.

$100 trillion of institutional money in the world, and less than 1 percent is invested in anything green – I’ve heard $1T/year is needed to fix the co2 issue. Globally – $287B in green investments. In the US, $200B in 2016 in a broader set of technologies. These numbers aren’t covering the exact same area – but they give you a scope of the work being done, and that we need do more work still. After we juxtapose those needs with the available capital – we should feel a bit more optimistic on the financial potential. Solar, wind and energy storage projects are able to come on piece meal and relatively quickly, meaning cash flows back to investors start sooner than later – time value of money stress is lowered and money gets deployed again. Virtuous cycle.

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50,000 distributed renewable projects coming to Mexico in 2017 – Mexico has some of the best sunlight and expensive electricity for residential customers. Not to mention a large, and wealthy population. Mexico’s northern neighbors recently hit 1,000,000 residential installations, and will double that number every few years now.

‘Development of centrally-located artificial Power Link island(s) in the North Sea to connect over ten thousand wind turbines’ – ‘Power Link will be the base for transmitting generated wind energy to future connected North Sea countries: the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Norway and Belgium.’ The gloves are coming off and the engineers are being given the opportunity to innovate. The money is there, the demand is there, the evidence over the last decade that we can manage it is there – now we build it.

Header image comment – image source is Tesla’s Kauai power plant that was launched recently. Solid state electricity generation plus solid state electricity storage placed next to each other. Looking at the image is otherworldly to me – it seems weird that these vertical cubes and flat panels can drive society after so much of my existence means burning stuff to break bonds. The feel of future in this image – like it’s a movie set – makes the energy revolution seem all the more real and magical. Good luck Elon.

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