PV plants lasting longer, with lower operational costs
Solar plants are now expected to last 32.5 years and have operational costs of $17 per kW/year, as shown by a Berkeley Lab survey of industry participants.
Climeworks just raised $75M to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere
Direct-air capture, along with its mythic sisters, clean coal and carbon capture and sequestration, is a process where CO2 from fossil generators and industrial sources is captured, treated and injected into underground earth formations for permanent storage or for industrial use.
Has the rooftop solar tracking market been created by Point Load Power?
Startup Point Load Power is looking to create the market for rooftop trackers, claiming that the company’s PV Booster, paired with bifacial modules, can generate 70% more energy per panel than ordinary racking.
Record low solar PPAs in the Southwest mean ‘carbon capture is not going to save coal plants’
Recently approved solar PPAs could spell trouble for proponents of retrofitting the state’s San Juan Generating Station to capture the coal-fired plant’s carbon dioxide emissions.
PVEL solar module scorecard: In a rush to innovate, some manufacturers ‘overlooked basic quality control’
PV Evolution Labs (PVEL), a test lab for the downstream solar market, just published its PV Module Reliability Scorecard. The lab notes the high level of innovation in the solar module industry and namechecks the market’s reliability leaders — but also observed a resurgence of known failure mechanisms — such as PID.
Morning Brief: Nuclear fusion startup raises $84 million from Temasek and Equinor
Also in the brief: Green hydrogen in Denmark, North Dakota solar on tribal lands, Lime Rock New Energy raises $600 million in growth equity focused on renewable energy tech.
Used EV batteries for large-scale solar energy storage
MIT scientists have suggested that used electric vehicle batteries could offer a more viable business case than purpose-built systems for the storage of grid-scale solar power in California. Such ‘second life’ EV batteries, may cost only 60% of their original purchase price to deploy and can be effectively aggregated for industrial scale storage even if they have declined to 80% of their original capacity.
Startup wants to put solar arrays on wave energy generators, along with wind turbines
Sinn Power of Gauting, Germany combines wave, wind and solar power for the “first floating ocean hybrid platform.”
A PV antenna for beaming solar power from space to Earth
Researchers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have launched the first orbital experiment with space-based solar power. They launched a 12-inch square photovoltaic module that is expected to test the viability of space-based solar power systems converting sunlight to microwaves outside the atmosphere.
Sunny places could see average solar prices of $0.01 or $0.02 per kilowatt-hour within 15 years
New research models that the price of solar will continue to drop faster than previous predictions. This would mean that building new solar would be routinely cheaper than operating already-built fossil fuel plants, even in today’s world of ultra-cheap natural gas.
