Repowering solar power plants for need and greed
Alencon’s silicon carbide-based SPOT allows for repowering solar power plants that need to replace 600V inverters with newer 1000V/1500V gear, or for those that wish to maximize electricity generation at ageing and imperfect facilities with creative engineering techniques.
2,000 gigawatts of solar power needed for 100% renewables
Stanford researchers have a plan that would balance 2,000 GW of solar capacity and 2,300 GW of wind power with 3,300 GW of battery capacity and a large amount of flexible load. Consumers would save 64% on total energy bills, partly from electrification of transportation and heating.
Hardware brief: mobile military microgrid, $2500 EV tax credit, solar module pricing down, more!
It’s the start of the near year, it’s the start of new gear! Solpad offers an on-the-roof energy storage solution that can easily be scaled upward; Northern Reliability has been chosen to develop a easily movable battery and controllers for the US Navy; Solarrainframe has a mechanical solution to keeping dry under carports, more!
Delmarva Power’s demand charges beaten by Delaware man
State regulators have sided with a man who filed a protest against the power company over an unlisted $500+ demand charge on his monthly electric bill.
The future of the solar-plus-storage industry will look like the air conditioning business
The solar industry will evolve from component brands to system brands and service, according to Barry Cinnamon in this industry perspective.
Ten research teams aim for long-duration storage at 5¢/kWh
To get long-duration storage costs down to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, research teams funded by ARPA-E are pursuing breakthroughs in flow batteries, hydrogen storage and other technologies—even thermovoltaics.
Transitioning Silicon Valley residential PV to solar-plus-storage: optimizers or microinverters?
Barry Cinnamon, a Silicon Valley solar installer, details the transition to energy storage, profiles early solar adopters and notes the challenges of getting to 200-amp residential service.
Six-year-old solar power plant partially repowered with new trackers and bifacial solar modules
OCI Solar Power has upgraded a portion of its Alamo 1 solar power plant in Texas from 295 watt solar modules on ERCAM single- and dual-axis trackers to bifacial modules on Array Technologies trackers.
Installing residential solar and storage in Silicon Valley
“I kind of compliment PG&E because they’re our best marketing department when it comes to battery storage,” says Barry Cinnamon of Cinnamon Energy Systems in the first part of our interview.
Enphase prepping commercial inverters and a small-scale, off-grid solar-plus-storage box
Enphase also showed off a 640-watt, two-module commercial inverter and a solar-plus-storage package for two solar modules at its analyst day.
