John Fitzgerald Weaver
Florida’s stunted customer owned solar grows 76% in 2018
The State of Florida deployed 113 MWac of net metered, customer owned solar power across 13,705 installations last year – 68% more installations and 76% more watts than the prior year.
Women in Power, solar cell pricing down, solar+bird+fire=bad: pvMB 6/28/19
The sun is up, summer is here and PG&E is still paying Topaz, LONGi is hiring in the Bay Area, and Common Energy is installing in today’s pvMB!
Los Angeles seeks record setting solar power price under 2¢/kWh
The city’s municipal utility is readying a 25-year power purchase agreement for 400 MWac of solar power at 1.997¢/kWh along with electricity from 200 MW / 800 MWh of energy storage at a 1.3¢/kWh adder, for an aggregate price of 3.297¢/kWh.
Montana solar project wins in court, will triple state’s capacity
A judge has set rates for an 80 MWac solar project at 3.833¢/kWh for 25 years after previously finding that state regulators had violated due process in intentionally setting rates too low for the facility under PURPA.
Solar plus storage virtuous cycle seeks 728 GWh gas replacement opportunity
NREL research projects that as solar power breaks 10% and 25% penetration levels across the United States, energy storage has an up to ~144 GW / 728 GWh opportunity to replace 261 GW of gas peakers.
Massachusetts solar growth a boulder strewn climb
The Massachusetts SMART program is deploying 1.6 GW. The challenges of growth include long interconnection queues in some areas, incentives tapped out in others, equipment requirements increasing system costs, and utilities circling back after approvals to re-asses project interconnections.
Can Florida solar power cook a better duck?
The North Florida Resiliency Connection, a $400 million electricity transmission line that Gulf Power and Florida Power and Light hope to build between themselves, could also be used to take advantage of the state’s 40 minutes of extra daytime due to its size.
The biggest money is on wind, solar and storage at NextEra
NextEra’s 2019 Investor Presentation is 235 slides of deep information showing the forward-looking business plans of multiple business units (FPL, NextEra Partners, Gulf Power and NextEra). These include large volumes of solar, wind, storage and transmission – as well as ideas and projections on how these technologies will evolve over the next five-plus years.
New York state is going to need 23 GW more solar power
pv magazine USA did the math on the new wind and solar capacity that will be needed to supply power to 20 million people under New York’s new 70% by 2030 mandate. In addition to 6 GW of distributed solar and the 2 GW that has already been awarded in large scale bids, the state is going to need around 15 GW more utility scale solar.
Going 10% solar would save Pennsylvania $619 million per year
Community Energy’s analysis of the Pennsylvanian electricity market showed that 7.5 GWac of solar power would save $619 million a year in wholesale electricity costs while keeping the system’s stability at 100% commercial probability.
