Guest Post

By investing in factories to build zinc-ion batteries for energy storage, the U.S. can rapidly establish a complete energy storage supply chain.

As part of Aurora Solar’s Empower 2022 online solar summit, Bernadette Del Chiaro, from the California Solar & Storage Association, will moderate a talk about electric utilities and how they have abused their monopoly position to discriminate against solar in the U.S. Here, she gives pv magazine a taste of the presentation.

When combined with on-site generation assets, battery storage systems can be used to ride out the worst of the price volatility – discharging during high prices and absorbing excess energy from generation.

The lithium battery production bottleneck will block the adoption of 350 million electric vehicles by 2040 unless supply chain constraints are removed.

With energy challenges abounding, PV has emerged as a crucial part of the solution – building resiliency, creating jobs, and cutting emissions. In pursuit of energy markets and a system that embraces these features, Solar Energy Industries Association CEO Abigail Ross Hopper is advocating for more stable trade and policy settings, in order to facilitate the expansion of PV, in line with its “Solar+ Decade” goals.

Distributed solar energy systems can play an important role in increasing the resilience of the nation’s grid.

The technology is available for virtual power plants to be rolled out across the United States, argues Jigar Shah, the director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. Their implementation would result in a cascade of benefits, including extending the adoption of distributed energy resources like rooftop PV and lowering electricity costs for consumers.

Net metering reforms in the U.S. are a missed opportunity to harness residential battery storage, argue researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Compensation rules for residential rooftop solar are evolving toward a model that encourages customers to use battery storage to maximize solar self-consumption. However, is this a good thing? Galen Barbose, Sydney P. Forrester, and Chandler Miller investigate.

Industry insights on how the new source of long-term economic support from the IRA might impact business risk, investment, and M&A trends within the domestic solar manufacturing industry.

Metal roofing is the only roof type with a service life that exceeds the service life of a solar PV system.