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.
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?
Is the Trump Administration blocking the science on a renewable-powered future?
A study on reaching high levels of renewable energy has been removed from the NOAA website, and an energy writer says that the release of another study has been blocked.
How the cash flows when we electrify buses, agriculture and more
The Brattle Group has developed a Total Value Test to help determine a more accurate economic valuation of energy efficiency programs historically, including case studies of city bus electrification, indoor agriculture and water heating.
120 MW project goes on-line in North Carolina, solar industry documentary to release in 2020: pvMB 9/3/19
Hello one and all, hop you enjoyed Labor Day Weekend and welcome back to the pvMB. Today we’ll be taking a look at the health co-benefits of sub-national renewable energy policy in the US, the national solar tour 2019, California ISO data to date and more!
Yotta gotta lotta $$, module pricing down, insurance for C&I, SMA’s 4.6 MW inverter, more!
As SPI approaches and hardware announcements speed up – we’ll work to keep you up! NREL speeds up ultra-efficiency solar cell manufacturing, SolaRack has a new rooftop attachment seal technique – and it uses 18% less product , APA Solar Racking’s Titan system doing well this year, more!
Solar met 2.7% of U.S. electric demand during the first half of 2019
Marginally higher solar output and lower electricity use allowed the share of solar in the overall mix to rise. California met more than 17% of its demand with solar during the six-month period, and solar + wind met 10.4% of the nation’s demand.
‘New and strange properties’ provide a boost to energy storage
MIT scientists have developed a class of liquid electrolyte with properties they say could open up new possibilities for improving the performance and stability of lithium batteries and supercapacitors.
