Facebook’s solar fake news, Recurrent secures $50 million and more: pvMB for 4/3/19

Hello and welcome to the slightly-retooled pvMB. Today we’ll be looking at commercial development coming to southern Virginia, Dynapower’s new 500 kW DC-DC converter, the development of PJM and Argonne National Lab’s solar guidelines and everything else you need today.

April 3, 2019 Tim Sylvia

A Recurrent Energy solar installation.

Image: Recurrent Energy

Recurrent secures $50 million letter of credit – I’ve got some truly reality shattering information that you may not be ready for, but need to know: developing large-scale solar projects is not cheap. And because developing huge power plants isn’t cheap Recurrent Energy, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar, announced that the company has secured a $50 million letter of credit facility to support development projects in the U.S. and Canada. The deal was made with Natixis, making this Canadian Solar’s fifth successful transaction with Natixis. Source: Canadian Solar

Commercial development in coal country – After the fights and the hooting and hollering over the proposed 500 MW solar farm in Spotsylvania county, maybe smaller C&I solar doesn’t look so bad in comparison. At least that could be what the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia is banking on, as the group has issued a request for proposals to develop 12 projects in the southern part of the state, totaling 2.7 MW. The projects are anticipated to be located in Lee, Scott, Tazewell, Washington and Wise counties. Proposals are due by May 21. Source: Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia

Dynapower releases 500 kW DC-DC converter – “The patent-pending DPS®-500 is a new bi-directional 500 kW DC-to-DC Converter designed specifically for interfacing battery energy storage with new and existing 1000V and 1500V central inverter based PV power plants. The PCS is capable of operating in voltage, current and power control modes with the capability of on-the-fly switching between these modes. Additionally, advanced automatic excess PV energy recapture and time-shift of PV energy may be realized using the DPS®-500 in solar plus storage installations.” Source: Dynapower

Even the solar industry isn’t safe from fake news – Tupac is alive and running a gas station in Cuba, the moon landing was staged on a closed set in Los Angeles and now, apparently national tax incentives allow you to profit immediately off of solar installations, in every state in the Union. The sad truth, or happy in the case of a faux moon landing, is that none of these are true, but they’re all harmful. In the case of the solar ads, they linked directly to websites that harvested personal information used for future ad targeting and potentially even phishing operations. These ads have found a comfortable home on Facebook, where they are so narrowly targeted that they can go undiscovered by those who would know the ads’ falsehoods. Source: CBS San Francisco

PJM, Argonne National Lab fine-tuning solar guidelines – “PJM has joined forces with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to support the integration of distributed energy resources such as residential and commercial solar into the region it serves. Under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, Argonne is supporting PJM’s Distributed Energy Resource Ride-Through Task Force, which is developing guidelines for “ride through” and “trip” requirements. These guidelines are important for PJM to be able to integrate the increasing number of solar installations into its footprint. This trend is an energy boon, but it also creates challenges to safeguarding the electric grid. Argonne and PJM are analyzing ways to maintain system reliability as the share of distributed solar and other distributed energy resources in the fuel mix increases.” Source: PJM

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