We have seen some pretty strange electric car charging solutions in the past, like solar panels deploying out of a car or chargers attached to a bear, but that’s something else.

A giraffe-looking electric car charging station powered by both solar and wind. expand full story

Global solar PV manufacturing capacity expansion plans rebound in Q1 – First quarter 2017 saw 10GW announced of solar power manufacturing capacity. With global capacity somewhere in the 115-135GW/year this is a big uptick – 7.5-8.5%. A few hours later, I get a Q2 announcement of a 2GW solar factory coming to Taiwan. This tells me that the demand of solar PV is predicted to continue to grow, and that significant investment in new factories, new machines and new technologies will continue. And since newer technologies, at the same price or lower than old technologies, are more efficiency – we will see continued increases in efficiency in the coming years.

Maryland governor has battery tax credit law on desk – The measure provides for a 30 percent tax credit on the installed cost of a storage system, capped at $5,000 for residential and $75,000 for commercial projects. The total credits awarded cannot exceed $750,000 in a year, and the program will run from 2018 through 2022. This is against state taxes – and state tax rates are lower than federal – so its not as strong as the federal incentive for solar, but its pretty close – and it will drive business. A Tesla PowerWall 2, costing $5500 retail plus about $500-2000 to install, will end up costing $4,200-5300 after $1,800-2300 tax credit.

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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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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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On Sunday, Scotland produced 106% of its electricity needs -over a 24 hour period – via wind farms. Scotland joins a select group of countries that have had peak moments (or days/months/forever) when their electricity needs comes from non-polluting renewable energy. Iceland runs completely on hydroelectric and geothermal, Costa Rica ran for 75 straight days in 2015, Portugal ran for four days, Denmark generated 140% of their demand, Germany broke 95% for a few moments and there are many other countries with wonderful clean energy achievements. With places like Hawaii aiming for 100%, Rhode Island building its first off shore wind farm and the US Department of energy readying the mainland’s grid to be able to handle 100% – we will see reports like this proliferate in the future.

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Today is the 46th Earth Day. Though from the perspective of the earth, it’s probably closer to its 1.6 trillionth day. Nonetheless, Earth Day is supposed to be an occasion to demonstrate your support for environmental protection.

You can show your support in very simple ways like using less energy or finally recycling those dead batteries that have been piling up in your junk drawer, or you can try to pick up some new habits and initiate yourself to new and greener technologies. expand full story