Morning brief: Oil billionaire pursuing perovskites, energy storage market to grow to $546 billion
Also in the morning brief: Arizona mandatory solar panel recycling bill, Sumitomo invests $46 million in long-term energy storage from Highview Power, and more.
Sunrun responds to PG&E’s gas procurement by modeling a decentralized grid
Directly challenging the bankrupt utility’s system reliability request for proposals, Sunrun has released a paper outlining a renewable alternative: distribution islands with solar and battery backup.
The duel for the future of Indiana’s energy identity
While state legislators decide the fate of a bill aimed at adding restrictions to the retirement of existing generation plants, the state’s second-largest utility has issued the results of an unprecedented solar solicitation.
How Canadian hydro could save New England and New York $5.4 billion
MIT researchers model how 4 GW of powerlines connecting the northeast USA to Quebec hydroelectric facilities eliminates the need for up to 60 GW of wind, solar and storage as the two regional power grids approach 100% clean energy.
Morning Brief: South Dakota’s largest project has a buyer, largest solar-plus-storage project in the Caribbean
Also in the brief: Safari Energy completes 60th commercial solar development, a 28 MW installation in New Jersey, Nautilus Solar acquires 3.5 MW Rhode Island project, solar aircraft designed to stay aloft for a year makes maiden flight.
Yotta Energy is putting batteries under solar modules — in the same spirit as microinverters and optimizers
Yotta has a potential solution for solar-plus-storage in the urban environment. Will the micro-storage startup become the next SolarEdge or Enphase? Or the next JLM energy? And whatever happened to SolPad?
The futurology of solar power: robots, hackers, 5G, cheaper modules, repowering, and really cheap electricity
Module efficiencies will continue to increase, while the price of an individual module will stay the same. Not only will this hardware produce more power, it’ll work far longer — with predictions of 30-year module warranties, roughly the projected lifetime of gas assets.
Fuel cell builder Bloom Energy continues streak of business math errors and lack of profits
A likely profitless 2019 will bring Bloom’s streak to 76 profitless quarters. Its most recent business math error has the firm restating years of earnings.
Software can drastically improve the economics of commercial solar
Jigar Shah of Generate: “Load flexibility is the giant issue nobody is talking about…Extensible Energy’s load-flexibility software is a win-win for the solar contractor and the building owner. Building owners get a higher ROI and faster payback time, and the solar contractor can offer an easy-install demand charge solution with or without batteries.”
The inner workings of a lithium battery
An international group of scientists has developed a method to track the microscopic processes at work in lithium batteries. Employing a ‘virtual unrolling’ model developed for ancient manuscripts too sensitive to be opened, the group peeked inside the layers of a commercial battery to gain a better understanding of the processes at work and the degradation mechanisms affecting them.
