Latin America

In developing its resource plan, NorthWestern Energy apparently used modeling assumptions that favor gas-fired generation, says the Sierra Club. The group has filed a legal motion requesting access to the modeling inputs, and to the model itself.

Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau has its hands full in ensuring the island’s utility gets the grid working well at a reasonable cost, while moving to 40% renewables by 2025. Sunrun and environmental groups point a way forward.

In this op-ed for pv magazine, Roy Torbert and José Juan Terrasa-Soler, of Rocky Mountain Institute and Resilient Power Puerto Rico, respectively, analyze the cost of energy recover in Puerto Rico and the role that microgrids play in reconstruction and resiliency.

Utilities routinely make modeling choices that disadvantage low-cost solar in their 15- or 20-year resource plans. With transparent modeling, states and intervenors could easily see those biased choices. And if they also have access to the same model used by the utility, they can fix those errors by running the model themselves, as recommended by a modeling expert. Considering all states, billions of dollars are at stake.

Happy Wednesday and welcome to the pvMB. Today we’ll be checking out Three 10 MW installations coming to Missouri, Baker University’s 1 MW project, a SEIA permit process survey and more!

Sunnova has put some numbers on how much it expects to raise as it goes public.

A finding that Mexico and China are subsidizing the structural steel products that they export to the United States could have impacts on racking and tracking systems makers.

This Swiss giant is following a trend as large multinational high-tech companies see their role as redesigning infrastructure rather than supplying inverters at ever lower margins. Schneider Electric has pulled out of large scale solar, Siemens’ Kaco acquisition and Junelight launch show increasing interest in the C&I and residential markets, and GE is likely to divest its power conversion business due to low profit margins in that sector.

In today’s brief we also feature conditions on Dominion’s future IRPs and some tax benefits recognized from Georgia solar.

Of the nation’s installed operational PV capacity, 3,364 MW is in the form of solar parks while distributed generation contributes around 693 MW.