John Fitzgerald Weaver
SPI Day 3: solar tools, solar modules, electrical panel upgrades, future inverters, more!
Nineteen thousand people walked the floor at the United States’ largest *energy conference* – not just solar power conference – and it is a bit sad to end, but the education, handshakes, and hardware were great.
SPI day 2: Virtual reality, energy storage, big machines, ping pong & more!
Walking the floor at Solar Power International means swimming in new hardware, smart company representatives, and new ideas. Here are a few.
On the floor at SPI – touchless snow removal, perovskite tandem cells, gapless solar modules, more!
pv magazine USA is at Solar Power International in Salt Lake City, Utah this week and showing off some hardware from the floor. And most impressive is that innovation is still happening in solar modules, but also in many other complementary technologies.
Single-axis solar tracking for the next 30%
NEXTracker has refined its successful NX Horizon single axis tracker into the rugged two-in-portrait NX Gemini. The new design opens up land once considered too rough to be developed to generate near comparable amounts of electricity, while easing land use stresses.
Small solar is getting bigger, cheaper and more efficient
LBNL’s annual Tracking the Sun report, comparing 2017 to 2018, saw module efficiency rise almost 10%, system prices decrease 5-7%, median system size increases, and significant variability in all of those data points across the 1.6 million systems surveyed.
Hardware: Q Cell and Solaria all black, Sunfolding’s summer body, NY sheep services, more!
Hardware, get your fresh hardware! SunPower is releasing energy storage, solar module pricing looks flat, and make sure to shake pv magazine hands as we walk the floor at Solar Power International in Salt Lake City next week!
Solar power installation techniques – don’t do this! (w/pictures)
Solar installation inspection results of 100 sites in Rhode Island found 50% of large-scale projects had issues, while 83% of small projects had them – with 30% and 26% of those systems having “critical” issues, respectively.
Michigan utility seeks 775 MW of wind and – maybe – solar power
DTE Energy has issued a request for proposals for 775 MW of renewable energy to be built in state, and turned on sometime between the beginning of 2021 and the end of 2023.
Fitch sees a decade of corporate wind and solar power procurement growth
Growth in U.S. solar and wind generation capacity will average 7.9% and 3.9%, respectively, between 2022 and 2028 according to Fitch Solutions, who projects almost 120 GW of solar power to be deployed in that period. Corporate clean energy buyers are to be a large part of the trend, and to accelerate deployments during the period.
MISO seeks to make solar a dispatchable, intermittent resource
MISO is seeking input as it transitions solar power to being more highly integrated into its energy forecast modeling. This is happening as the volume of solar is booming, and follows on the grid operator’s success with wind power.
