Tool offers insight into how solar and wind impact wholesale electric prices
Berkeley Lab’s Renewables and Wholesale Electricity Prices tool allows users to compare pricing trends across locations, regions, and timeframes, down to the nodal level.
Solar 101: What’s my solar system going to cost?
Think of your solar system as a custom retrofit. That means the list of unique variables and components can be long, and hardware requirements may result in a significant pricing variance.
Sunrise brief: Who’s adopting rooftop solar? Berkeley Lab report offers insights
Also on the rise: A community-based canopy solar project is under way in New Jersey, Mosaic securitizes a bundle of solar loans and Strata Solar rebrands as it looks to other cleantech offerings.
Report assesses the status of RPS goals and prices
The Berkeley Lab report describes recent legislative revisions, key policy design features, compliance with interim targets, past and projected impacts on renewables development, and compliance costs.
Water use in the West can hurt…or help…the energy sector, report says
The researchers said this is one of the first studies to show that water sector adaptation can have as large an impact on the electricity sector as the direct effect of climate change itself.
Best ways to close the income equity gap in solar adoption
Researchers from Clean Kilowatts and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed software that predicts the most important business model interventions for closing the gap of residential PV adoption between high-income and low-to-middle-income areas.
Rooftop solar in Indiana worth 13¢/kWh, not 3¢/kWh, says expert witness
A high level of distributed solar in Indiana would reduce utility costs by up to $540 million per year, a national lab has found. Fair compensation for rooftop solar power in southern Indiana would be 13¢/kWh, an expert calculated—not the 3¢/kWh proposed by a utility.
The West and Midwest favor solar-plus-storage; the East favors gas
Proposed solar-plus-storage projects far surpass proposed gas units in the West and Midwest.
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.
Recycling heat for a ‘385% efficient’ solar desalinator
MIT scientists have developed a solar desalinator which sends heat from the sun through a ten-stage process of evaporation and condensation. The group estimates that a $100 device incorporating their innovation could provide the daily drinking water needs of a family.
