Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Clean Energy Won Big. So Where’s the Party?
No sooner had the renewables industry gained lucrative U.S. subsidies than there was a steep decline in power-purchase deals.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-16/clean-energy-won-big-so-where-s-the-party
September 16, 2016 — 7:00 AM CDT
To the skeptic, it may look like a con.
The renewable-energy industry won lucrative U.S. subsidies and immediately snapped into inaction. Advocates had lobbied hard for the revival or extension of wind and solar federal tax credits that came in December. With victory in hand ... very little followed. The industry's windfall hasn't spurred tremendous growth. In some cases, the renewal of the credits actually prompted a sudden slowdown in growth.
Without the context, it kinda looks like they won and now they're just sitting on their bums. One notable example is the number of long-term power-purchase agreements (PPAs) signed by corporations. The deals have slowed sharply, leading to a much slower addition of generating capacity this year.
n 2015, the wind industry signed more than 2.3 gigawatts of contracts with corporate buyers, in 20 deals. This year through August, it had signed 631 megawatts, in nine deals. Solar, meanwhile, has slowed from 726 megawatts contracted across 11 deals last year to 163 megawatts across three deals, according to 2016 data through August from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
"Many companies that signed those deals in 2015 were afraid that there wouldn't be a tax credit again," said Jacob Susman, vice president and head of origination at EDF Renewable Energy. "That's a big reason why 2015 was so big."
So why does 2016 look so small?
Incentives can be disincentives
With change in the tax credit regime believed to be imminent, developers and corporate clients treated 2015 as a race against time. Developers wanted to lock in long-term contracts so they could finish construction by the end of this year. Companies didn't want to lose a chance to manage their own clean power at the full subsidy level.
"There was such a flurry that people may be taking a breather," said Pete Dignan, CEO of Boulder, Colorado-based Renewable Choice Energy. "But there's significant activity ahead."
The new long-term subsidy period allows developers and potential corporate buyers to be more thoughtful in their planning and negotiations—to pace themselves. "A whole bunch of folks decided they just didn't have enough time and backed off," said Dignan, who said he had anticipated a slow start to this year. "They've re-started."
Dignan said Renewable Choice is talking to several hundred companies looking seriously at corporate PPAs.
Power prices are low
Companies sign renewable-power purchase agreements partly so they have a sense of what they'll be paying for clean electricity years ahead of time. There's always a risk, though, that market power prices will dip below their contracted level. At the moment, power is relatively inexpensive. Market prices have slid since mid-2014. That makes it much harder for would-be PPA customers to find a better deal.
Executives antsy to boost their U.S. clean-energy portfolios probably did so last year, when the clock on subsidies was thought to be ticking. "Growth will have to come from new entrants or add-on deals from existing players," said Nathan Serota, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. But they have less incentive at the moment, because "rock-bottom power prices" are making renewable PPAs less attractive today. When prices are low, the market is already giving companies a deal on power, so they hold off on taking advantage of tax credits until prices rise again.
‘Sustainable’ demand is waiting in the wings
The top 20 institutions—companies, governments, and universities—are pursuing these deals for reasons not limited to price, so a blip in activity this year may be masking pent demand. At least seven of the top 20 PPA signers this year have committed, on varying time scales, to sourcing 100 percent of their power from renewables: Google, Facebook, Wal-Mart Stores, Mars, Nestle, Steelcase, and Salesforce. Dow Chemical wants 750 MW of renewables by 2025. By 2020 Target wants to raise to 500 the number of its buildings that have rooftop solar power.
And the renewables sector isn't quite a ghost town. Amazon.com Inc. yesterday announced a 253MW facility planned for Texas that will produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of about 90,000 homes. That single play puts it ahead of where Google, which has been at it a while, and Norsk Hydro were at the end of August in this calendar year. In fact, it's the second-largest single U.S. corporate purchase to be announced, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
The next big wave may be powered by smaller companies. "A lot of companies are looking for a dance partner," said John Carson, CEO of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Alterra Power Corp. "They see the Wal-Marts and the Googles."
Does the U.S. even need subsidies?
California solar and Texas wind may represent the most mature markets for renewable power. Wind farms stud the Midwest. Solar panels collect sunlight from the Mid-Atlantic states to New England.
But not every place in the U.S. has jumped on the renewables bandwagon. That makes the federal incentives for corporate buyers a bulwark against apathy or hostility to clean energy in the rest of the country, so there's still plenty of work for subsidies to do.
"Will it be 3.4 gigawatts in 2016? Probably not," EDF's Susman said. "Will it be 2 gigawatts or more annually for the foreseeable future? Probably so.''
Hannah Hunt, a research analyst at AWEA, called it "a remarkable period of stability."
To meet President Barack Obama's ambitious 2050 climate goal, the U.S. will need all the clean gigawatts it can muster and, probably, new policies to encourage construction. A sustainable energy system can be yours for the low, low price of 1 percent of GDP.
News:Sunworks Selects SolarEdge as Preferred Inverter Supplier
The versatility of SolarEdge technology allows for Sunworks to offer the existing residential and new home markets unrestricted solar systems that are easily expandable when needed. These fully monitored systems also have optimization capabilities to mitigate energy loss from module mismatch, and are battery storage ready.
Looks like Sandridge Energy shares are going to 0
Like ANR shares are GONE...
And ACI shares are about gone too...
Sunworks is worth 10X sandrige energy!
Transparent solar panels are 50 times more productive than regular photovoltaics
[Luke Dormehl] August 31, 2016
A company named SolarWindow Technologies has created transparent solar panels, which turn regular windows into photovoltaics 50 times more productive than the ones you’d attach to a roof.
If you’re looking to install new solar panels in your home, why not consider those created by the aptly-named SolarWindow Technologies, which transform regular windows into solar panels that are up to 50 times more efficient than the regular photovoltaics you’d attach to a roof?
“Just pick up your cell phone, look at the face without any power or image, and you’ll see a pretty good example of what today’s thin film looks like,” John Conklin, CEO of SolarWindow, told Digital Trends. “It’s heavy, it’s too dark to see through, and most thin-film is not flexible. This type of technology isn’t the type to build skyscraper windows.”
He, on the other hand, had a different idea.
This is where SolarWindow comes into play. As the term “regular windows” suggests, users don’t have to replace the existing windows in their home, but need only treat them with a special process developed by the company.
“We apply liquid coatings to glass and plastic surfaces at ambient pressure, and dry these coatings at low temperature to produce transparent films,” Conklin continued. “We repeat these processes, and then collectively these coatings — and thus the glass and plastic surfaces — generate electricity.”
Of these coatings, the most important is the so-called “Active Layer,” through which electricity is generated by the absorption of light, and the transparent conductors, which allow the electricity to be extracted. “[The] coatings are primarily organic, primarily from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen,” Conklin said. “We are constantly refining each of the layers to improve on the power we’re able to extract from these coatings and enhance their manufacturability.”
In addition to buildings, Conklin notes that some of the possible applications of this tech include the automotive industry, where a sunroof, windscreen or even side view mirrors could be turned into solar panels. There are also aerospace and military use-cases, and even the possibility of a “flexible fabric” being developed.
In all, it’s an exciting area to be working in, with some impressive math on its side. What kind of math? By the company’s estimates, a 50-story building with solar windows could generate around 1.3GWh every twelve months. For those keeping track, that’s enough energy to power around 130 homes for an entire year.
Wind & Solar Aren’t Alternative Energy Anymore
August 28th, 2016 by Michael Barnard
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/08/28/wind-solar-arent-alternative-energy-anymore/
Alternative energy is a term that gets bandied about a lot and is often applied to wind, solar, and other forms of renewable generation. But there are multiple other terms that also are applied and misapplied across forms of generation. Often, alternative is used interchangeably with sustainable, carbon neutral, green and distributed. But each of these terms means something different. Further, they are frequently used pejoratively as opposed to accurately.
This article is intended to provide clarity over the definitions and categorize most forms of energy generation used today by those definitions.
Transportation fuel is not included in this, just electrical generation. Similarly, lake- and ocean-side district heat exchange and building geothermal heat exchange are not included.
Alternative Energy
Alternative energy means a form of generation that isn’t part of the dominant paradigm at a given point in time. As of 2016, that typically excludes legacy forms of generation such as hydro and nuclear because they are mainstream forms of generation that have been in production for decades around the world.
By this definition, utility-scale wind energy and utility-scale and distributed solar photovoltaics are not alternative forms of energy because they are the dominant form of new generation on grids in many parts of the world. In 2015, 145 GW of renewable capacity became operational globally, most of it wind and solar generation.
This term is often misused by proponents of legacy generation forms such as coal and nuclear to assert that wind and solar energy are not mainstream, but still inferior.
What is interesting is that with so much coal generation being sunset globally and so little new coal generation actually being built, the day when coal is considered alternative energy is coming. Similarly, although on a longer timeframe, the day when nuclear and gas generation are considered alternative is foreseeable.
Clean Energy
Clean energy would best be defined as forms of generation which over their full lifecycle emit insignificant amounts of chemical, particulate, harmful radiation, or carbon pollution after mitigation and remediation. Any environmental damage is localized, relatively small in scale from a global perspective, does not causes species-level threats to flora or fauna, and issues are insignificant on a per MWh basis.
By this standard, wind and solar are obviously clean with minimal care of siting. Hydro electricity outside of the forested tropics — where anaerobic decomposition of submerged vegetation creates a significant carbon load — is clean energy. Nuclear power plants when sited carefully and operated properly are clean energy; nuclear power plants sited on earthquake faults and tsunami zones are not clean energy.
Fossil fuel generation is never clean generation no matter how much mitigation and remediation is performed in the fuel chain and effluents and waste chain. There is no economically viable way to reduce the negative externalities of fossil fuel generation to anywhere near the levels of wind or solar generation.
Distributed Energy
The best definition of distributed generation is that it is energy generated at or very near to the point of consumption.
Home rooftop solar is a good example of distributed generation. Run-of-the-river hydro used by a remote lodge is distributed generation. Industrial co-generation which sees a small thermal generation plant generating electricity and heat for a factory is distributed generation. Diesel generators for remote locations are distributed.
Also, obviously, major hydro dams, nuclear power, coal plants, and the vast majority of gas plants are not distributed generation. They are grid-tied, centralized forms of generation of electricity which will be transmitted and consumed at endpoints substantial distances away.
To be clear, utility-scale wind and utility-scale solar generation are not distributed generation by this definition.
Another and also intended-to-be-disparaging use of the term comes from some legacy, centralized generation advocates who consider anything that is dispersed to be distributed and hence not significant in scale or manageable. This is more of a connotation that they infer to the word distributed, and typically people using the term in this way include utility-scale wind and solar in this as a lead-in to attacking them on the irrelevant metric of energy density or watts per square meter. It’s not accurate or helpful.
Sustainable Energy
Sustainability is defined by the consumption of energy inputs which are either renewed automatically by major geological or atmospheric processes or which consume so few resources that they effectively will last tens of thousands of years or longer, and which do not cause substantial and ongoing ecological harm as they operate, are commissioned, or are decommissioned.
By this definition, wind and solar are definitely sustainable, hydro which does not cause species-level risks due to loss of spawning is sustainable, geothermal is sustainable, and, arguably, well-sited nuclear — once again, not on earthquake or tsunami zones and by major bodies of water not subject to drought or overheating — is sustainable.
Standard proviso: I like nuclear as technology. It’s stable, clean, has low environmental or health threat per TWh, emits little CO2e full lifecycle, and works. The problems for nuclear are those of price, slow speed to build, lack of horizontal scalability, and fiscal risk. When nuclear is poorly sited, poorly managed, and something goes wrong, as is the case in Fukushima, then cleanup costs can approach a trillion dollars (USD) and take dozens or hundreds of square kilometres out of economic, habitation, and other uses.
Fossil fuel generation is inherently unsustainable by every portion of the definition.
Carbon-Neutral Energy
Carbon-neutral energy is defined as energy which over its full lifecycle of mining, manufacturing, distribution, operation, and decommissioning has an emissions per kWh in the range of 10 to 100 g of CO2e/kWh after any mitigations or remediations.
By this standard, nuclear, wind, and solar are carbon neutral. Hydro outside of tropical forested areas is carbon neutral.
Fossil fuel generation is not carbon neutral and never will be. Methane gas generation emits on average 480 g CO2e per KWH and coal is worse at around 1.1 kg CO2e per KWH. To achieve carbon neutrality, each fossil generation plant would have to capture all of the carbon, ship the carbon to physically different sites, and sequester it. This would add 16.8 to 19.6 cents per kWh to the cost of these forms of generation per analysis based on numbers from organizations promoting CCS. In addition, enhanced oil recovery is the only form of sequestration with significant economic value and high volume, so sequestration by definition would be used to produce more fossil fuels, which is not a net benefit
Interesting quote!
Solar power now employs four times more people than coal mining.
Has this got any legs ?
Grassley: Trump will eliminate wind energy 'over my dead body'
By Ryan Lovelace (@LovelaceRyanD) • 8/31/16 11:46 AM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/grassley-trump-will-eliminate-wind-energy-over-my-dead-body/article/2600638
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley indicated he would stand against Donald Trump if the GOP nominee sought to eliminate wind power as president.
Trump has railed against wind energy on the campaign trail, and Grassley sounded as though he was spoiling for a fight in an interview with Yahoo News.
"If he wants to do away with it, he'll have to get a bill through Congress, and he'll do it over my dead body," Grassley told the outlet.
Grassley has touted his status as the author of the "original production tax credit for electricity from wind" and has fought to maintain the credit that he argues benefits Iowan workers.
Trump, however, argued earlier this month that wind energy harms wildlife.
"The wind kills all your birds. All your birds, killed," Trump said in Pennsylvania earlier this month. "You know, the environmentalists never talk about that."
Grassley is running for re-election in 2016 and his remarks about wind energy may be aimed at distancing himself from the GOP nominee. Trump visited Iowa last weekend and was joined onstage by prominent Republicans such as Congressman Steve King, Gov. Terry Branstad and U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst — not Grassley.
With under 69 days to go until Election Day, RealClearPolitics' average of polls places Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by 1.5 percentage points, 42-40.5.
Energy disruption: Solar plus storage to be cheaper than grid in 2017
By Giles Parkinson on 31 August 2016
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-to-be-cheaper-than-grid-in-2017-2017
Some utilities may think that it will be up to a decade before there is a mass market uptake of battery storage, and the chair of the Australian Energy Market Operator may even try to convince themselves that the technology won’t be commercial for another two decades, but they might be kidding themselves: New research suggests that the cross-over point between the value of solar and storage and grid prices for Australian households may occur within one year.
That, at least, is the conclusion of research from Curtin University’s Jemma Green and Peter Newman, which suggests that the A1 tariff – the standard tariff offered to households by state owned retailer Synergy in West Australia – will become more expensive than the combined value of rooftop solar and battery storage some time in 2017.
The graph was presented on Tuesday by David Martin – Green’s fellow executive in the solar trading start-up Power Ledger, which is using blockchain technology (the software behind Bitcoin) to trial solar sharing business models in Perth.
“That price crossover – the point where the A1 tariff is equal to the value of energy from solar and tariffs happens next year … next year,” Martin told the Energy Disruption conference in Sydney co-hosted by RenewEconomy.
He said that did not meant that people were going to “leap off the grid” in big numbers straight away. That’s because when that point is reached there are “intangible benefits” of being connected to the network, and it would cost a lot more to install enough batteries to deal with the consumer’s demand peaks, or days of cloudy weather.
“But as soon as these lines diverge by a significant amount – and overtake the benefits of being connected to the network, then what happens?”
The answer, he pointed out in another graph, is a big problem for the utilities that make their money from supplying power to households, because a lot of that demand will now disappear from view, and go “behind the meter.
Martin says a home with a 4kW array might still use the grid for most of the time – meaning that only 45 per cent of the load is “hidden” from the network behind the meter.
But with battery storage, the rate of “load defection” – as opposed to grid defection – was likely to increase to the high 90 per cent levels in some instances (see graph above). Those households will only be tapping into network for a small amount of their energy needs.
This, of course, has major implications for network business models – particularly their revenue source – and for other consumers. Networks, Martin says, will have to face losing $100 million in revenue in West Australia for instance, or load 20 per cent more grid costs on to other consumers to protect their revenues.
Hence, Martin says, the need for completely new ways of thinking about network use, and of sharing solar energy and battery storage. That’s what Power Ledger intends to do with its shared solar model – it allows those with solar and storage to share their power with those who maybe don’t have it – and allows better utilisation of the grid.
It also requires, he says, a completely new way of thinking about regulations. The rules governing the electricity industry had been framed without any consideration for sharing energy, for storing energy, or for the kind of technology that his company proposes.
Martin was not the only person talking of an imminent tipping point in the economics of battery storage. Stefan Jarnason, the founder and head of Solar Analytics, a monitoring company partly owned by AGL Energy, says he believed that even some of the more bullish forecasts for battery storage were too conservative.
hese included predictions – from the likes of Bloomberg New Energy Finance above – that some six million households will have energy storage by 2040. Jarnason says that this shows that massive uptake is inevitable, but it is the speed the count.
He notes there there are already 1.6 million homes with rooftop solar, and around one million of these would soon be paid “visually” nothing for the vast majority of their rooftop solar production that is exported back to the grid. Most premium tariffs end at the end of the year in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.
“We talk to those customers and they are not very happy about that. They love the fact that they have solar, they feel a bit green, a bit financially savvy, even a bit smug, but they already have got their money back on solar and they are now looking to do something extra.”
That estimate is backed up by experience from one of the many battery storage providers moving into the Australian market.
Enphase Energy, which is launching its first battery storage product in Australia, says more than half of the 72,000 units of its 1.2kWh battery has come from NSW, where generous feed in tariffs come to an end at the end of the year.
“The energy storage revolution is going to come much faster than a lot of people imagine and a lot of people are prepared,” Jarnason says. “Residential solar plus storage is going to eat the energy world.”
Solar power does work – and a lot better than we thought
By Giles Parkinson on 30 August 2016
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/solar-power-does-work-and-a-lot-better-than-we-thought-29528
One of the prices we have to pay for our ideological divide on renewable energy is that we have to read headlines like this, particularly in the Murdoch media: “Solar and wind power simply don’t work, not here, not anywhere”. It was written by the former chairman of a coal mining company, in case you were wondering.
Solar doesn’t work? New analysis of Australia’s first large-scale solar farms shows that solar actually does work, and rather better than expected. And the findings should make it a lot easier for future projects to get the backing of equity investors and bankers, if not the owners of coal fired generators desperately protecting their turf.
The research has been produced by US-based solar module manufacturer First Solar, whose panels have been used for around three quarters of the large-scale solar projects built in Australia to date, by capacity.
Its study shows that at all the solar farms built by First Solar – in western NSW, north Queensland and Western Australia – the output has been higher than forecast. Collectively, the Australian solar plants using First Solar thin-film PV modules are performing above expectations by an average of 3.2 per cent.
The solar farm with the longest record to date, the 10.2MW Greenough River solar facility near Geraldton, in WA, shows that over four years it has produced an average 1.2 per cent above forecast.
The best result has been produced by Broken Hill, the 53MW plant built near the iconic mining town in western NSW, which is so far delivering 4.2 per cent above expectations.
(Spectral advantage, btw, is a measure that First Solar uses to show how much better their panels work in humid conditions than silicon-based rivals).
Now, this might not sound like ground-breaking news – forecast production broken by a few percentage points.
But people in suits are very conservative types, and investment in renewable energy in Australia, both in wind and solar, has been hampered by the fact that bankers won’t finance investments unless they can actually touch, feel and watch the technology, and have proof that it actually works.
This data, Curtis says, is proof that the projects are, indeed, bankable. And that’s more important than it might sound.
Curtis says that even though large-scale solar has been proved in many international locations, local investors still wanted proof that it would work in Australia, even though it does have some of the best solar conditions in the world. Such, perhaps, is the insular nature and/or inherent conservatism of Australia’s banking system.
But Curtis is reassured, not just by the release of the production statistics, but also by the attitude of equity investors and financiers in the local market.
“What’s been most encouraging is that the international banks are bringing their lending frame of reference to the local market, rather than adopting the local ones,” Curtis says. “That will make it hard for local banks to ignore.”
This new level of competition should make it easier for project developers to obtain finance. As RenewEconomy reported on Monday, Curtis believes that the results of the large-scale solar tender by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency in the next few weeks will be a “watershed” moment for the utility-scale sector in Australia.
That’s not just because the projects selected to share the $100 million in ARENA grant funding will get the go-ahead, but because it will also be a trigger for other projects to move forward.
And Curtis expects that many of the solar projects to be built will incorporate single axis tilting, allowing the panels to track the movement of the sun from east to west, and adding to their output in the early morning and late afternoon.
Curtis says the costs of adding single axis tracking mechanisms will be more than compensated by the increase in output.
Based on research at the Gatton solar farm, Curtis estimates that tracking-enabled solar farms will have capacity factors in the high 20 per cent and low 30 per cent, compared to the 25-26 per cent of those without.
“Given the evolution in tracking technologies, any project north of Sydney is doing itself a disservice if it doesn’t have tracking technology,” he says.
Australia’s biggest solar farm with tracking technology is the 57MW Moree solar farm in NSW. First Solar is proposing tracking for the Manildra solar farm in NSW it is planning to build for Infigen Energy, and which has applied for the ARENA grant.
The 100MW solar farm proposed by Sun Brilliance in the West Australian wheat belt will also use single axis tracking technology, making it the biggest solar farm b output if and when it is completed.
Of course, Curtis says the results from the four solar farms his company has built in Australia underscores the advantage of his company’s “thin film” technology over the silicon based panels favoured by its rivals.
“This shows that our panels perform better when it gets hotter, and when it gets humid,” he said. “That’s why Australia is one of the core markets for First Solar.”
Coincidentally, about 2 minutes after I had put down the phone from my chat with Curtis, Dylan McConnell, from the Melbourne Energy Institute, emailed through a production chart from the 102MW Nyngan solar farm, which also used First Solar technology.
McConnell pointed out that, indeed, Nyngan was producing at a capacity factor of 25 to 26 per cent. This, he said, was far higher than official forecasts relied upon for the Australian Power generation Technologies Report, which estimated the average capacity factor of large-scale solar PV at 19-22 per cent.
That, says McConnell, suggests that the forecasts relied upon by the federal government underestimate the output of solar farms by between 15 and 35 per cent.
Little wonder that the government can’t make any sensible decisions about large-scale solar, and why it insists on defunding the agency that has brought about most of the cost reductions in the past year, ARENA.
N.C. A&T charges into lithium-ion battery research
Aug 26, 2016, 7:39am EDT
Industries & Tags Technology
Members of an engineering team at N.C. A&T University are working to increase the capacity and lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries through an agreement with a national company.
Dr. Sung-Jin Cho, an assistant professor in N.C. A&T’s nano-engineering department, is lead investigator in a research project sponsored by BioSolar Inc., based in Santa Clarita, Calif. The company is a developer of energy storage technology and materials.
Dr. Sung-Jin Cho
Submitted photo
BioSolar hopes N.C. A&T will help it develop technology to double the storage capacity, lower the cost and extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.
“We are excited to have Dr. Cho lead our new engineering and commercialization program at A&T,” said Dr. David Lee, CEO of BioSolar.
Cho has a history of similar research. In addition to his role with A&T, he is also director of the Nano Energy Laboratory in Taiwan, a position he has held since August 2014. From 2008 to 2014, Cho was a technical lead at Johnson Controls Battery Technology Center in Milwaukee. He led the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium program to design and evaluate battery material and lithium-ion cell engineering for automotive application for more than six years and before that worked on lithium-ion battery technology in South Korea.
Since 2014, BioSolar has been involved with the University of California at Santa Barbara on scientific efforts. The company’s association with UC Santa Barbara ends in October.
Steve Huffman is a general assignment reporter for Triad Business Journal.
Boy! Tech is changing everything.
It seems that combination of solar and LED lighting is getting cheaper than letting light in a window. The cost of letting heat in/out costs more than the "free" light. Except if it is well planned with passive solar.
Farming with LED Grow lamps (probably powered with solar) is making growing much more productive.
The falling costs of US solar power, in 7 charts
Updated by David Roberts on August 24, 2016, 1:30 p.m. ET
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/768895240442818560
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12620920/us-solar-power-costs-falling
The fate of the world depends on driving down the cost of solar power.
Yes, that’s a melodramatic way of putting it. But it’s not wrong. Any scenario that has humanity avoiding the worst ravages of climate change involves explosive global growth in solar power.
That’s why the US Department of Energy has a program, the SunShot Initiative, devoted entirely to driving down the cost of electricity generated by solar panels — the target is solar power with $1 per watt installed costs by 2020, a 75 percent reduction in costs from 2010.
So how’s that going?
Happily, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) releases a set of reports each year devoted to tracking solar prices; they’ve just released the latest editions. Long story short: Prices are steadily falling, more or less on schedule
There are two reports, one for each type of solar power. One is on "utility-scale solar," which means solar systems larger than 5 MW. The other report is on solar photovoltaic (PV) systems under 5 MW.
Those are two very different markets, but I’m going to squish them together in this post, with the help of a bazillion charts.
Solar is growing, growing, growing
Here’s a good scene-setter. It shows historic and projected solar power capacity additions, by technology. (We’ll get into the difference between CSP and varieties of PV below — ignore for now.)
A few things to notice about this chart. First, there’s about 29 GW of solar installed in the US now; LBNL expects that to clear 100 GW sometime around 2020. That’s crazy-fast growth (from almost nothing in 2007!), but it will still only put solar at around 3 percent of the US electricity mix in 2020.
Second, on a total installed capacity basis, there’s been more utility-scale solar than small solar since 2012, and that is expected to continue for at least the next five years. For all the hype around rooftop solar, big power plants remain the solar workhorse.
Third, the giant spike in utility-scale PV happening this year is an artifact that reveals how much solar still depends on policy. Everyone thought the 30 percent federal investment tax credit (ITC) for solar was going to expire this year. Contracts signed in 2016 would have been the last to qualify. So there was a huge rush to get projects on the books.
As it happens, the ITC was unexpectedly extended late last year (it will phase out over the next five years), or else the spike would have been even bigger. As it is, more than twice as much utility-scale PV capacity will be added in 2016 than in any previous year.
Prices for utility-scale solar are falling
Prices are falling for both big and small solar, though at different rates and for different reasons.
Let’s start with utility-scale solar. Recall, the vast bulk of utility-scale solar plants are ground-mounted PV farms, like this:
There are also a few concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) plants, which use lenses to concentrate light on PV panels, and a few concentrating solar power (CSP) projects, which use mirrors to concentrate sunlight on towers with steam generators. For our purposes here, we can mostly ignore them, since their growth has been dwarfed by PV’s and PV is expected to dominate growth for the next several years.
So, what about utility-scale costs? They are falling. One way to measure that is "installed costs," i.e., the cost to build and install a project. Here:
This chart is unnecessarily complicated — I’m not going to get into the debate over whether to measure costs via DC or AC — but the thing to notice is that the lines go down. Installed costs are falling each year.
That’s the cost of building these plants. What about the power they produce? Those costs are revealed in power purchase agreements (PPAs), in which a buyer agrees to purchase a fixed amount of power at a fixed price over a fixed number of years. A chart of PPA costs:
A few things to note about this chart. First, where California (the green circles) used to dominate, there are now contracts being signed in all five regions — the market is spreading. Witness this map of utility-scale projects:
More and more dots over on the East Coast!
Second, PPA costs are falling: "As recently as 2011, solar PPA prices in excess of $100/MWh were quite common. Barely five years later, most PPAs in the 2015 sample are priced at or below $50/MWh levelized (in real, 2015 dollars), with a few priced as aggressively as ~$30/MWh." From $100/MWh to $50/MWh in four years. Not bad.
Third, all five regions now boast reasonably low average prices, with four of them under $50/MWh. (The Midwest is still catching up.)
Fourth, somewhat counterintuitively, there are no clear economies of scale in utility-scale solar. Bigger plants, represented by bigger circles in the chart, don’t seem to be producing cheaper power. The authors speculate that this is in part due to the increased regulatory and land-use hassles that come with plants over a certain size, which cancel out any savings. (Interestingly, there are economies of scale on the small-solar side. It seems solar power gets cheaper up to the 5 MW to 20 MW range, and then levels out. This has intriguing implications, which I’ll save for another post.)
And fifth, utility-scale solar is reaching prices, especially in California and the Southeast, that are competitive with local wind power (and cheaper at certain times of day). Natural gas is still so cheap that solar has trouble competing with existing plants, but when it comes to new gas plants, solar is getting within striking distance, especially if gas prices rise more than forecasted.
No one really has a clue what gas prices will do, of course, which helps highlight the fact that solar’s stable, fixed, long-term contracts can serve as a valuable hedge against volatile fuel prices.
Prices for small-scale solar are falling
Small-scale (under 5 MW), distributed solar falls into three categories: residential rooftops, nonresidential systems under 500 kW (think commercial rooftops), and nonresidential systems between 500 kW and 5 MW (think small, ground-mounted solar PV farms, like community solar projects).
Overall, the cost trend for distributed solar PV is clear:
Installed costs for distributed PV are headed down. Interestingly, what’s driving them down has changed over time. In its conclusion, the report provides a fascinating capsule history of recent PV prices:
Following a period of relatively steady and sizeable declines, installed price reductions began to stall around 2005, as the supply-chain and delivery infrastructure struggled to keep pace with rapidly expanding global demand. Beginning in 2008, however, global module prices began a steep downward trajectory, and those module price reductions were the driving force behind the decline in total system prices for PV from 2008 through 2012. Since 2012, however, module prices have remained relatively flat, yet installed prices have continued to fall as a result of a steady decline in non-module costs.
"Modules," if it’s not clear, are the panels themselves. "Non-module costs" are everything else. About 20 percent of the drop in non-module costs came through cheaper inverter and racking equipment. The rest came through "soft costs" — finding new customers, installation, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and various other administrative costs.
Soft costs are falling. And it’s a good thing, because module prices are holding fairly steady and are unlikely to plunge again like they did from 2008 to 2012. What’s more, state tax subsidies for PV installations are going bye-bye:
With module prices flat and subsidies declining, most future cost reductions will have to come through soft costs.
Luckily, there’s plenty of evidence that soft costs have more room to drop. First of all, there are wide variations in prices from project to project, especially in residential PV: "Among the residential systems installed in 2015, roughly 20% of systems were priced below $3.3/W (the 20 percentile value), while 20% were priced above $5.0/W (80th percentile)."
That’s a crazy wide spread. The report has several chapters devoted to explaining these variations — from installer to installer, state to state, customer-owned to third-party owned, retrofit to new build, different efficiencies and power electronics, and so on.
But the overarching point is that soft costs can be brought down much further just by everyone converging on current best practices.
Speaking of which, it’s worth noting that the US has some of the highest installed PV costs among developed countries:
Since module prices are pretty standardized the world over, almost all this international variation comes down to soft costs. The US can clearly do better.
The state of solar is strong
There’s lots more to draw from these reports — for instance, module efficiency is improving, and so is the average capacity factor of utility-scale PV plants — but that’s probably enough charts for one day.
The TL;DR version of all this is that the price of solar power continues to steadily decline in the US. There’s a good argument to be made that it needs to decline much more, and faster — there’s definitely no room to sit back and coast — but at least for now, the news is, provisionally, good.
Energy Providers Must Engage Millennials Today Or Risk Losing Them As Customers
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2016/08/25/energy-providers-must-engage-millennials-today-or-risk-losing-them-as-customers/#5f1f5d142441
Conventional wisdom might suggest there’s no need for energy providers to rush to embrace millennials as a priority demographic. After all, many of them live with their parents who largely pay for the new products and services their household adopts.
However, energy utilities need to take action now to capitalize on millennials who are already flying the nest and becoming energy customers.
In the United States alone, there are about 80 million millennials, spending some $600 billion every year, and this is only set to increase. Millennials will truly come into their own by 2020, when our projections suggest their spending in the U.S. will reach $1.4 trillion annually, representing 30 percent of total retail sales.
It’s apparent, then, that this group is swiftly becoming the largest and most influential U.S. demographic group. For energy providers, ignoring them just as they become energy consumers could mean losing this group to an increasingly complex set of new competitors and market entrants, eagerly waiting in the wings.
Indeed, our recent research showed that these consumers will drive the most future value for energy utilities.
For a start, millennials want to adopt new energy-related products and services, like applications to remotely monitor and control home elements for example, but, not only that, they want to be the first to do so. We found 24 percent were classified as early adopters, significantly more than for other age groups.
Energy Source
Voices from the world of energy.
Post written by
Jean-Marc Ollagnier
The author is Group Chief Executive of Accenture’s Resources industry group.
Daniel Kleinman
Daniel Kleinman, Forbes Staff
Shutterstock
Conventional wisdom might suggest there’s no need for energy providers to rush to embrace millennials as a priority demographic. After all, many of them live with their parents who largely pay for the new products and services their household adopts.
However, energy utilities need to take action now to capitalize on millennials who are already flying the nest and becoming energy customers.
In the United States alone, there are about 80 million millennials, spending some $600 billion every year, and this is only set to increase. Millennials will truly come into their own by 2020, when our projections suggest their spending in the U.S. will reach $1.4 trillion annually, representing 30 percent of total retail sales.
It’s apparent, then, that this group is swiftly becoming the largest and most influential U.S. demographic group. For energy providers, ignoring them just as they become energy consumers could mean losing this group to an increasingly complex set of new competitors and market entrants, eagerly waiting in the wings.
Indeed, our recent research showed that these consumers will drive the most future value for energy utilities.
For a start, millennials want to adopt new energy-related products and services, like applications to remotely monitor and control home elements for example, but, not only that, they want to be the first to do so. We found 24 percent were classified as early adopters, significantly more than for other age groups.
Recommended by Forbes
Millennials, it seems, also have a strong interest in solar, which is in line with their generation’s focus on the green agenda. More than half of them are likely to sign up for solar panels in the next five years, double the proportion of baby boomers. Low-carbon energy-sources like solar power are clearly very popular among this generation, and energy providers will need to take note of these preferences.
n fact, it’s crucial that energy utilities act now, giving millennials the flexibility to adopt distributed energy resources (DER) like solar, and offering associated products and services.
However, simply offering new products and services will not be enough.
Energy providers must interact with this generation differently than with their older counterparts, when looking to secure them as customers. That’s because switched-on millennials engage with their providers in a different way. They want information and services that are accessible on their terms.
For example, a vast majority (87 percent) of this demographic are far more likely to consider DER after receiving relevant information. This indicates, that as demanding as this generation has proved to be, they are also very receptive, and energy providers need to be the first to respond to this appropriately.
Similarly, they have high expectations for what energy providers should deliver through digital channels.
To me, that’s not particularly surprising, especially when you consider how much time the millennial generation spends on their smartphone and social channels, be it on Twitter, Instagram, or even Pokemon Go. When their banks, retailers and other providers already give them a multichannel experience, it makes sense they’d want to embrace this for energy management too.
Indeed, a majority log into their energy provider’s website using their social media credentials, and more than half are interested in smart home technology. Yet, what really demonstrates just how important customer experience is to millennials is the fact that almost four-fifths of them would consider switching energy providers if a seamless experience was not provided.
This is a wake-up call for the energy utilities industry, which begs an important question: Is there a risk millennial customers might cut their ties altogether with energy utilities, if they don’t get the services and the technologies they want from their existing energy providers?
The lost opportunity could be a costly one. Research we conducted revealed the continued growth of distributed energy resources and energy efficiency technologies can risk driving down utilities revenue by up to $48 billion a year in the United States and €61 billion in Europe based on load reduction by 2025.
The demand disruption caused by the growing adoption of these new technologies is poised to disrupt utilities’ traditional business models.
However, the notion of a looming utilities “death spiral”, where consumers migrate off the grid or use it as backup, is very unlikely, as for most, it would be financially unfeasible, due to natural limitations on viability and cost constraints.
From what we’ve heard, the majority of utilities executives believe that it won’t be cost-effective for consumers to go off-grid without any subsidies until 2030 or beyond. Yet it can’t be ignored that for some customers and locations, the deployment of distributed generation and energy storage already makes economic sense.
It is becoming increasingly important for energy utilities to rise to this challenge to avoid being left behind, as the market opens up to new competition for emerging value pools and energy products and services.
Indeed, if energy providers recognize the strategic importance of these new energy consumers now and tap into this new and highly profitable market, they could benefit financially from it. Beyond simply selling their core product of electricity as a commodity, they should deliver energy-related services like energy monitoring to customers or partner with communities and individuals to help them access locally generated low-carbon energy, for example.
Indeed, we found 65 percent of millennials had either already signed up to or planned to sign up to a community solar program in the next five years. Yet, while traditional energy utilities were their preferred provider for this kind of service, millennials were more likely to turn to alternative, non-traditional providers than older generations.
And the good news....
http://www.ecowatch.com/solar-price-chile-1982242311.html?platform=hootsuite
Solar Cost Hits World's New Low, Half the Price of Coal
Energy Aug 22, 2016
Chile awarded a contract to sell solar power for $29.10 per megawatt hour (MWh), the lowest ever across the planet.
This surpasses the record set in May of a $29.90 per MWh bid in Dubai for an 800 megawatt (MW) solar project.
"This is the lowest price ever seen, for any renewable technology," an analyst told Bloomberg. The low price is possible due to the rapid fall in cost of solar technology and the 12 MW solar plant's location in the ideal conditions of Chile's Atacama Desert.
---------------------------
Chile Producing So Much Solar Energy It’s Giving Electricity Away for Free
Lorraine Chow Lorraine Chow
http://www.ecowatch.com/chile-producing-so-much-solar-energy-its-giving-electricity-away-for-f-1891161839.html?utm_source=CR-TW&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=ClimateReality
Thanks to Chile's major investments in renewables, the Latin American country is seeing an incredible solar boom.
In a new Bloomberg report, Chile Has So Much Solar Energy It’s Giving It Away for Free, solar capacity from the country's central grid has increased four fold to 770 megawatts since 2013. Another 1.4 gigawatts will be added this year with many solar power projects under development.
Thanks to an economic boost from increased mining production, Chile now has 29 solar farms and another 15 in the pipeline. Enel Green Power Chile Ltda. recently commissioned Chile's largest solar PV project connected to the grid. The 160-megawatt facility will be located in the northern part of the country in the municipality of María Elena, about 1,300 kilometers north of Santiago.
With so much clean power available, the price of solar has cost absolutely nothing for certain regions in recent months. As Bloomberg stated:
Spot prices reached zero in parts of the country on 113 days through April, a number that’s on track to beat last year’s total of 192 days, according to Chile’s central grid operator.
However, the article points out that Chile's rapid solar expansion isn't all good news. Due to the nation's bifurcated power grid, the central and northern grids are not connected.
PV Insider noted that most of the demand is in the central grid, yet the best solar resource in the country resides in the Atacama desert in the north. The northern grid represents approximately 24 percent of installed capacity whereas the central grid holds the majority of capacity at 74 percent of installed megawatts.
The northern grid is where solar prices are going to zero, Bloomberg noted. Meanwhile, the main population centers in the south are not seeing the same benefits.
Chile, therefore, must invest in its transmission infrastructure in order for the whole country to tap into the north's glut solar power and stabilize demand.
"Chile has at least seven or eight points in the transmission lines that are collapsed and blocked, and we have an enormous challenge to bypass the choke points," Energy Minister Maximo Pacheco told the publication. "When you embark on a path of growth and development like the one we've had, you obviously can see issues arising."
The good news is that the Chilean government is addressing the problem with its planned 1,865-mile transmission line that will link the two grids by 2017.
This is why Solar.....
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/beijingers-unsurprised-by-coal-burning-pollution-deaths-report-1.2765956
Beijingers unsurprised by coal-burning pollution deaths report
Concerns death toll will rise after study finds more than 360,000 died in China in 2013
Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:21 Updated: about 5 hours ago
Beijing residents long used to hazardous smog were unsurprised by the findings in a new report showing that burning coal was the cause of 366,000 deaths in 2013, making it the worst cause of pollution-related deaths.
The report, which was carried out by China’s Tsinghua University and the US-based Health Effects Institute, also found deaths related to fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 – for which coal combustion is a major culprit and contributed to 916,000 premature deaths in China in 2013 – could rise by as much as 40 per cent to about 1.3 million by 2030.
For years one of the biggest signs of the onset of autumn was the delivery of coal bricks to the homes in the hutong laneways, a sight that is increasingly rare these days.
China is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, and although output fell in 2014 after 15 years of consecutive growth, coal still makes up 66 per cent of the country’s energy consumption.
Beijingers have developed a grim humour when it comes to dealing with pollution. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg raised a few smiles in March when he posted pictures of himself on Facebook (which is banned in China) jogging in Tiananmen Square, on a day when the air pollution reading was “hazardous”.
“To be honest, everyone in China already knows that most of the pollution is caused by coal-burning. But the coal industry is rich and powerful and they don’t seem to mind causing waste and pollution. Nor are they willing to spend more to make better processes to burn coal,” said one Beijing resident, Wang Ming.
Emissions
The report finds that many of the deaths come from industrial sources, with 155,000 deaths from coal emissions and 95,000 from non-coal emissions, which comes to about 27 per cent of PM 2.5 deaths.
But household solid fuel combustion, of both coal and biomass, is not far behind, and is responsible for 19 per cent of deaths from ambient pollution.
ADVERTISEMENT Click here!
“Based on Chinese data, we found that outdoor air pollution was the fifth leading cause of premature death in China in 2013,” said Zhou Maigeng of the China Centre for Disease Control.
Shaking China’s dependence on coal is not going to be easy. A report by the environmental group Greenpeace in March showed the rate at which coal-fired power plants are being approved by governments in the provinces was alarmingly higher than in 2014.
Growing unhappiness
But generally coal consumption is falling and there is greater use of hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and gas power.
Amid growing unhappiness with pollution among the general populace, President Xi Jinping has made combatting air pollution one of the pillars of his government’s policies, and he has signed up to international efforts to combat global warming.
The report gives the government credit for its efforts to cut emissions, and says that Beijing should continue to focus on cutting emissions in the industrial and domestic sectors.
“Because domestic combustion also leads to a large disease burden due to household air pollution exposure, reductions in domestic biomass and coal emissions would be particularly beneficial to public health,” the report said.
Even under the most stringent energy-use and pollution-control future scenario, coal will remain the single largest source contributor to ambient PM2.5 and health burden in 2030, it said.
“This finding highlights the urgent need for even more aggressive strategies to reduce emissions from coal combustion along with reductions in emissions from other sectors, strategies that are beginning to be incorporated in the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan,” it said.
One Beijing resident, Bei Chen, said that demographics were a factor, and this means that things will get worse before things get better, because of the size of the population and the fact that it is ageing rapidly.
“China has larger population so the number of premature deaths makes sense,” said Bei.
The researchers also find that an ageing population will contribute to greater numbers of deaths, because the number of older Chinese with heart and lung diseases related to pollution will inevitably increase.
What I noticed in the Qtrly Report, JN mentioned new tech coming without mentioning the cell....
Word is going to zero
wonder if coal assets will be worth more under Trunp, sure looks like it
More Coal Families starving:
Hey, Cali guys.....
Our business is Cali. With all the drought and fires is Cali going to survive?
Sunworks Inc (NASDAQ:SUNW) Receives Consensus Rating of “Strong Buy” from Brokerages
August 15th, 2016 - 0 comments - Filed Under - by Latisha Jones
http://www.dailypolitical.com/2016/08/15/sunworks-inc-nasdaqsunw-receives-consensus-rating-of-strong-buy-from-brokerages/
Sunworks Inc (NASDAQ:SUNW) has been given an average broker rating score of 1.00 (Strong Buy) from the two analysts that cover the company,Zacks Investment Research reports.
Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a strong buy recommendation.
Analysts have set a one year consensus price objective of $5.25 for the company, according to Zacks.
In other Sunworks news, insider Abraham Richard Emard sold 11,600 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, August 3rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $3.33, for a total transaction of $38,628.00. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 775,842 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $2,583,553.86. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this link.
"....What God has given a state..." More like, "...what God has given an average homeowner!" The gov't should not have any say in private ownership/usage of solar panels for residential buildings. They do not own the sun.
Alabama regulator votes against solar net metering – now seeking $250,000/year in solar lease payments
Nice how money changes things!
https://electrek.co/2016/08/14/alabama-regulator-votes-against-solar-net-metering-now-seeking-250000year-in-solar-lease-payments/
A member of the Alabama Public Service Commissions (PSC), the group that regulates the state’s power companies, who voted against net metering solar power recently sought an opinion from the same PSC as to whether or not a Community Solar Power plant, paying him approximately $250,000/year for 20 years on his family’s land, would be an ethics violation. This clown basically helped block residential solar in one of the sunniest US states but wants to take $5M to put a solar installation on his family’s land.
The PSC (sorta) voted against commissioner Chip Beeker’s solar plans:
“The Commission has held that business relationships with entities that intend to do business with entities the public official regulates create conflicts of interest,” Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Albritton wrote.
The commissioner, whose son earns money from the monopoly approved power company, has doubts about climate change: “I believe that no matter what you call it, a myth is still a myth, and the so-called ‘climate change crisis’ is about as real as unicorns and little green men from Mars.”
Mr. Chip Beeker has been quite outspoken regarding coal power, Barack Obama, the EPA, solar power and God. In late 2015, as the PSC was approving two solar power plants, Mr. Beeker has stated at various times:
“Who has the right to take what God’s given a state? I am concerned somewhat that if we did not approve this measure that our vindictive, liberal president would probably try to punish Alabama and those members of the military who honorably serve in our great state at the Anniston Army Depot and at Fort Rucker by transferring them to other bases outside of the state. I am honored to be a member of a commission that is committed to long-term job creation and retention.”
In the United States, solar power jobs out number coal extraction jobs – and those solar jobs are growing at 20% a year.
While running for the position on the PSC, when asked about whether or not the general public should be part of Public Service Commission meetings where electricity rates are decided,
“Do not have them (environmentalists) come to present their cause. When you do that they take over. I will never vote to give them a platform here.”
The main argument put forward to decline net metering, other than Green Little Men and Unicorns, by the Alabama PSC is that solar power owner’s have been taking advantage of non-solar users when they’re allowed to net meter. The logic is that these solar power users are not paying their fair share of the costs required to keep up the power grid. Many studies have shown this not to be the case (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 – I could go on).
As a result of this flawed logic – Alabama Power charges residential solar customers an extra fixed fee to use solar power and pays customers much less for solar energy sold back to the grid than other utilities. The fixed fee costs customers five dollars per kilowatt based on the size of their solar array. Because residential arrays are typically between four and five kilowatts, the fee costs solar customers twenty to twenty-five dollars a month. Additionally, Alabama Power customers have to sell three to four kilowatt-hours back to the grid to offset the charge of one hour used when their systems are not producing.
A solar power plant that is being built at scale, hundreds of acres, could side step the issues presented by the Commission (individuals taking advantage of the power grid) by selling energy directly to the power company, at a fixed contract rate, and taking into account the interconnection costs (hardware/powerlines to connect to the power grid) in the original contract. This logic was put forth by Warren Buffet when he pushed the State of Nevada to scrap net metering.
Technically, the PSC has not said that Beeker cannot enter in the agreement with the Community Solar company, but that if Beeker signed the lease agreement, Beeker understood that he would have to abstain from any PSC decisions involving any agreement between Coronal Development Group and Alabama Power.
Sun power: a new solar policy has risen
By Pallavi Rebbapragada
Published: 14th Aug 2016 08:36:49 AM
http://www.newindianexpress.com/thesundaystandard/Sun-power-a-new-solar-policy-has-risen/2016/08/14/article3578437.ece
NEW DELHI: “We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun, you don’t have to do anything, it just works.” Anand Srivastava reiterates this Elon Musk quote to himself and to everyone around him.
This electrical engineer from IIT-Delhi is the co-founder of SunSure, a company that builds solar energy assets for industry, commercial and utility sectors. He left his job at JP Morgan in Brazil to work towards developing the solar sector in India. Entrepreneurs like him, with plans of solar-electrifying villages and making urban homes sustainable, fight structured norms that can’t tap the potential of the alternative energy source. For instance, as Anand puts it, the lack of tax exemptions on equipment increases the building cost and makes the pricing uncompetitive. The government also imposes an eligibility criterion that only a company with an annual turnover of a crore can secure their orders, thereby slashing scope of innovation.
“Why don’t offer financing for a solar installation, like they do for cars,” asks Jasmeet Khurana, a Market Intelligence Consultant at solar consultancy Bridge to India. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy offers a 30 per cent subsidy to domestic consumers. “But people don’t know how and where to apply and are also unaware that they can’t apply for one after having installed the system,” says Khurana. Delhi has 300 sunny days and the rooftop space available for solar panels is estimated to be 31 sq/km, giving Delhi a solar energy potential of 2500 MWp2. The cabinet approved Delhi’s Solar Energy Policy in June. It aims to make Delhi a solar city through generation of 1,000 megawatt of power by 2020. Rajneesh Srivastava, who heads energy efficiency and renewal energy management centre, Department of Power, Govt of NCT of Delhi, says the new solar policy is going to facilitate group and virtual net-metering.
In the former, if one has high-connected load in one house but no space, panels can be set up on another property where there is less load and both places can draw power from the same grid without any transportation charge. In virtual net-metering, public buildings that don’t have much connected load can install solar panels on your behalf. It will be mandatory for all government buildings with a minimum shadow free rooftop area of 500 m2 to install a solar PV plant. Also, a plant that is up to 3 meters won’t be considered an addition to the height of the building and won’t be taxed.
Namit Arora, member of the Delhi Dialogue Commission think tank, says the net-metering laws passed by Delhi will help people save power and money, but they require smart metres that can only be supplied by BSES who may or may not have them. Even subsidies and generation-based incentives are given on a first-come-first-serve basis, which encourages bribery. It seems, only a handful know what the sun is really worth.
Solar-power developer is ‘hopelessly insolvent,’ with debts outweighing assets by $1 billion to $2.5 billion
SUNEQ 0.065 -45.92%
Makes JN's plan look pretty good....
SunEdison Shareholders Lose Fight for Say in Bankruptcy
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sunedison-shareholders-lose-fight-for-say-in-bankruptcy-1471004122
By Peg Brickley
Aug. 12, 2016 8:15 a.m. ET
Shareholders won’t get an official voice in the bankruptcy of SunEdison Inc. because the company is “hopelessly insolvent,” with debts outweighing assets by at least $1 billion, a bankruptcy judge has ruled.
The decision from Judge Stuart Bernstein followed a court fight aimed at proving the solar-power developer has enough value left to offer hope that shareholders would avoid a wipeout in bankruptcy.
Judge Bernstein, who has presided over SunEdison’s chapter 11 case from its start in April, said it is “substantially unlikely” the company would be able to pay off its debts. Even working with book values on paper and estimates of what asset sales would bring, SunEdison would come up from $1 billion to $2.5 billion short of debts, the judge said.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
The judge turned down a request for an official committee to represent shareholders in SunEdison’s bankruptcy case, a bid that was driven in part by shock over the rapid decline in value in the company. Signed on Thursday, the ruling was filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
SunEdison’s market capitalization plummeted in 2015 and 2016, as investors and business partners lost confidence amid mounting debt, incomplete deals and doubts about the company’s finances.
Shareholders “have lost money on their investments, and hope that an official committee will capture value for them in the end. The appointment of an Equity Committee, however, will not create value where it does not exist,” the judge said.
The dim outlook for SunEdison’s bankruptcy isn't news to bond investors, who have been trading the company’s debt for 6 cents on the dollar or less. That price reflects their conviction that SunEdison’s bankruptcy won’t produce enough value to pay them.
At a court hearing Thursday, SunEdison lawyers said the company is working on a business plan that could lead to a reorganization around assets that aren't sold in bankruptcy. Some of the solar power company’s projects have been sold, others are going up for auction, and talks are under way about finding a buyer for SunEdison’s control stakes in two separate public companies, TerraForm Power Inc. and TerraForm Global Inc.
Write to Peg Brickley at peg.brickley@wsj.com
It's still early. Could get worse; could improve.
...And were making money!!!",
City of West Sacramento goes solar
Aug 9, 2016, 1:43pm PDT
The city of West Sacramento is spending $4 million to mount solar panels on roofs around municipal locations including City Hall, the fire station, the water tower and on land near the port.
The city began work on the project in May after securing a $3.8 million loan from Bank of America. Construction is expected to finish in November.
Solar panels on West Sacramento City Hall at 1110 West Capitol Ave.
Curtis Winchester | City of West Sacramento
The loan is expected to be paid off after 15 years, at which time the city may have saved a total of $78,500 on its electricity bills. But after the loan is paid off, the city expects savings of $406,600 annually.
“This just made sense when they crunched the numbers,” said Curtis Winchester, construction manager for the city of West Sacramento.
The project is part of the city’s “ green and sustainable community strategy,” a 2008 municipal policy that promoted the use of renewables whenever possible.
In October 2015, the city hired Arc Consulting to perform a feasibility study that looked at solar projects.
The city then entered into a design-build contract in February with SunWorks Inc., a Roseville-based company that designs, sells, installs and maintains solar systems.
Sunworks Inc (SUNW) Insider Sells $38,628.00 in Stock
August 6th, 2016 - - Filed Under - by Mark Dietrich
http://www.watchlistnews.com/sunworks-inc-sunw-insider-sells-38628-00-in-stock/907220.html
Sunworks Inc (NASDAQ:SUNW) insider Abraham Richard Emard sold 11,600 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, August 3rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $3.33, for a total transaction of $38,628.00. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 775,842 shares in the company, valued at $2,583,553.86. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website.
Abraham Richard Emard also recently made the following trade(s):
On Tuesday, August 2nd, Abraham Richard Emard sold 15,200 shares of Sunworks stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $3.27, for a total transaction of $49,704.00.
Shares of Sunworks Inc (NASDAQ:SUNW) opened at 3.29 on Friday. The firm has a market capitalization of $65.02 million and a P/E ratio of 36.15. Sunworks Inc has a 12 month low of $1.84 and a 12 month high of $4.07. The company has a 50 day moving average of $2.57 and a 200-day moving average of $2.60.
Sunworks (NASDAQ:SUNW) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 11th. The company reported ($0.02) EPS for the quarter. The company earned $19.60 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $5.70 million. Analysts predict that Sunworks Inc will post $0.19 EPS for the current year.
A number of research firms have issued reports on SUNW. Chardan Capital began coverage on shares of Sunworks in a research report on Thursday. They set a “buy” rating and a $5.00 target price on the stock. Zacks Investment Research upgraded shares of Sunworks from a “sell” rating to a “hold” rating in a research report on Thursday, July 14th. Finally, TheStreet upgraded shares of Sunworks from a “sell” rating to a “hold” rating in a research report on Friday, June 3rd. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the company’s stock. The stock has an average rating of “Buy” and a consensus target price of $4.58.
Sunworks, Inc, formerly Solar3D, Inc, provides photo voltaic (PV) based power systems for the residential, commercial and agricultural markets in California and Nevada. The Company, through its operating subsidiaries, designs, arranges financing, integrates, installs and manages systems ranging in size from 2 kilowatt (KW) for residential loads to multi megawatts (MW) systems for larger commercial projects.
Receive News & Ratings for Sunworks Inc Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Sunworks Inc
Powering PAWS With Nature
http://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/270992/powering-paws-with-nature.html
08/06/2016 8:24 am PST
Tracey Petersen, MML News Reporter
San Andreas, CA – The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) sanctuary in San Andreas has gone green to light up its 2,300-acre ARK 2000 natural habitat refuge.
Energy from the sun through solar panels on the roofs will provide electricity to offices and barns for the sanctuary’s eight Asian and African elephants along with other animal buildings. “With this solar energy system, PAWS will dramatically reduce the amount of fossil-fuel generated power we use and set an example of good environmental stewardship,” said PAWS President Ed Stewart. “PAWS is committed to providing a better life for captive exotic animals, as well as conserving our planet and its wildlife.”
It will also help the sanctuary’s pocketbook with an estimated $1.5 million in electricity savings over 25 years.
The 132kW system, which supplies 97% of the sanctuary’s electricity, was installed by California-based SUNWorks. On the roof tops of the 20,000 square-foot Asian elephant and 8,000 square-foot bull elephant barns sit 420 solar panels.
Jim-Bob votes no on TSLA/SCTY deal....
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-sells-solar-20160807-snap-story.html
“It doesn’t make any business sense at all,” says Jim Nelson, chief executive at Sunworks, a SolarCity competitor and a corporate customer of Tesla’s Powerwall. “The solar business and the electric car business are unrelated businesses. They are artificially connected.”
California Powers 6 Million Homes With Solar Energy, Slays Record
Sunny news!
07/22/2016 10:10 am ET | Updated Jul 23, 2016
A new renewable energy record has come to light.
Thanks to a heat wave, California was able to shatter a state solar record. On July 12 at 1:06 p.m., several large solar plants dotted throughout the state produced 8,030 megawatts of electricity, according to the California Independent System Operator — and it would know. The organization runs most of the state’s power grid.
According to San Francisco Gate, that’s enough energy to power more than 6 million households.
This record is more than double the amount produced in May, when solar power impressively generated a little more than 50 percent of demand.
“I can tell you we had a great solar day,” Steven Greenly of California ISO told Good News Network.
Not to mention that this new record was set solely by large solar plants. It doesn’t even take into consideration the 537,637 smaller solar panel arrays installed on private homes and business’ rooftop
Lawrence Goldman via Getty Images
An aerial photograph of the Solar One Energy Plant in the Mojave Desert near Daggett, California.
A new renewable energy record has come to light.
Thanks to a heat wave, California was able to shatter a state solar record. On July 12 at 1:06 p.m., several large solar plants dotted throughout the state produced 8,030 megawatts of electricity, according to the California Independent System Operator — and it would know. The organization runs most of the state’s power grid.
According to San Francisco Gate, that’s enough energy to power more than 6 million households.
This record is more than double the amount produced in May, when solar power impressively generated a little more than 50 percent of demand.
“I can tell you we had a great solar day,” Steven Greenly of California ISO told Good News Network.
Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
An array of solar panels in the desert in Victorville, California.
Not to mention that this new record was set solely by large solar plants. It doesn’t even take into consideration the 537,637 smaller solar panel arrays installed on private homes and business’ rooftops.
Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
Solar panels in a parking lot near downtown Los Angeles, California.
The San Francisco Gate does point out a downside, however.
Just like the sun, solar power tends to peak mid-afternoon then plummets in late afternoon when the sun starts to go down. At that point California wind farms pick up the slack from late afternoon into the night. Problem is, electricity demand peaks at 6 p.m., which is the time when the green energy is shifting from solar to wind power.
Yet the state is committed to embracing renewable energy.
California set a mandate that by 2020, 33 percent of its electricity generation would come from renewable sources. In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that ups the Golden State’s renewable energy game, requiring that 50 percent of all state-regulated utilities be sourced from solar, wind or hydro by 2030.
Lawrence Goldman via Getty Images
An aerial photograph of the Solar One Energy Plant in the Mojave Desert near Daggett, California.
A new renewable energy record has come to light.
Thanks to a heat wave, California was able to shatter a state solar record. On July 12 at 1:06 p.m., several large solar plants dotted throughout the state produced 8,030 megawatts of electricity, according to the California Independent System Operator — and it would know. The organization runs most of the state’s power grid.
According to San Francisco Gate, that’s enough energy to power more than 6 million households.
This record is more than double the amount produced in May, when solar power impressively generated a little more than 50 percent of demand.
“I can tell you we had a great solar day,” Steven Greenly of California ISO told Good News Network.
Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
An array of solar panels in the desert in Victorville, California.
Not to mention that this new record was set solely by large solar plants. It doesn’t even take into consideration the 537,637 smaller solar panel arrays installed on private homes and business’ rooftops.