pvMB: sPower’s 500 problems, local politics support solar, $5b more for batteries in Georgia, more!

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Brookfield Renewables announces quarterly dividendThe quarterly dividend rate in respect of the February 1, 2019 to April 30, 2019 dividend period will be 1.04484% (4.285% on an annualized basis) and the dividend, if declared, for such dividend period will be $0.261210 per share, payable on April 30, 2019. Source.

 

SK Innovation will be investing up to $5 billion more in their planned $1.76 billion electric vehicle battery plant in North Georgia. SK will begin construction this year on the plant in Commerce, Ga., about an hour northeast of Atlanta, with plans to employ 2,000 workers and produce an annual volume of lithium ion batteries equal to 9.8 gigawatt-hours by 2022. SK Innovation supplies Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Kia. In November, Volkswagen named SK as a battery supplier for its EVs. Source.

 

Duke sells out of North Carolina residential solar rebates (already). In the first three days after Duke opened the window for its solar rebate program in North Carolina more than 2,000 applications flooded in, fully subscribing the residential portion of the program for the entire year, as well as the tranche for non-residential customers in Duke Energy Carolinas’ service area. As of last Friday there were still more rebates available for non-residential customers in the Duke Energy Progress service area, and there are still three more years of rebates available for all customer classes starting in 2020.

 

sPower’s 500 MWac Spotsylvania, Virginia project is slowly moving through the local approval process. However, there has been definite push back by immediate neighbors to the solar project. The project’s next step will be on January 16 in front of the Spotsylvania County Planning Commission, with county staff already approving the project based on changes made by sPower. The county, the solar developer, and the public have been discussing various aspects of the project.

 

Wyoming has its first community (sorta) solar project online, with Wyoming law prohibits private entities profiting from public assets, the facility opted to include only government agencies in the virtual net metering program. Even though the community cannot use the new solar farm directly, Ziem said it will allow Lower Valley Energy to dip its toes into the world of virtual net metering and adopt the necessary software, priming it for private projects in the future.  Source.

 

Sunpin Solar to bring large-scale solar to rural Illinois. Sunpin Solar has reached an economic development agreement with the town of Greenville, Illinois, towards the construction of a 30-40 MW solar project.

 

Regarding the tweet below, based on research from Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2018, an interesting thread on the 3,007 counties in the United States: all of them have 75% of the population supporting funding renewable energy research, all of them have 65% supporting regulation of CO2 as a pollutant, and all of them have 70% supporting rebates for solar and EVs.

https://twitter.com/AbelGustafson/status/1080946598824284161

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