You too can model solar, wind and storage deployment
NREL has made its capacity planning model freely available for anyone to use. The model can optimize the amounts of solar, wind and storage to be added to the U.S. electric grid. Documentation is included, but a powerful computer and additional software are required.
SPI Day 3: solar tools, solar modules, electrical panel upgrades, future inverters, more!
Nineteen thousand people walked the floor at the United States’ largest *energy conference* – not just solar power conference – and it is a bit sad to end, but the education, handshakes, and hardware were great.
Los Angeles still has a feed-in tariff. And it’s growing.
The California city’s municipal utility has approved an expansion of the largest feed-in tariff in the nation by 300 MW, with 50 MW to come online next year.
Microsoft buys more solar from ENGIE, Lightsource raises $140 million in U.S. solar funding: pvMB 9/26/19
Hello once again friends and welcome to the pvMB. Today we’ll be looking at Amp reaching a GWh in in large-scale solar+storage projects, SmartFlower debuting SmartFlower +, ABB debuting the Universal 10/4 Residential Storage System and more!
The slow, inexorable rise of green hydrogen
The International Renewable Energy Association says the integration of hydrogen into the energy transition will not happen overnight and electrolysis costs will not be halved until the 2040s. But that hydrogen and related products could revolutionize the world energy landscape is not in doubt.
On the floor at SPI – touchless snow removal, perovskite tandem cells, gapless solar modules, more!
pv magazine USA is at Solar Power International in Salt Lake City, Utah this week and showing off some hardware from the floor. And most impressive is that innovation is still happening in solar modules, but also in many other complementary technologies.
Small solar is getting bigger, cheaper and more efficient
LBNL’s annual Tracking the Sun report, comparing 2017 to 2018, saw module efficiency rise almost 10%, system prices decrease 5-7%, median system size increases, and significant variability in all of those data points across the 1.6 million systems surveyed.
The Open PV Project goes offline
The U.S. Department of Energy has shut down the site for its Open PV Project, which supplied cost and installation data. Is this the winding down of a project whose time had come, or part of a more disturbing trend?
The blackest black for more efficient solar cells
MIT scientists claim to have created a material 10 times more black than anything witnessed to date. It is said to be able to absorb more than 99.96% of incoming light and reflect 10 times less light than other superblack materials. The invention may be interesting for the development of black silicon PV technology and carbon nanotube-based solar cells.
San Diego demands clean community energy
The San Diego City Council has voted 7-2 to bring community choice aggregation to the city, becoming the 26th local government in California known to pv magazine to do so.
