Home Author
Author

Guest Author

Guest Contributor is many, many people. We publish a number of guest posts from experts in a large variety of fields. This is our contributor account for those special people. :D

India Shows More & More Appetite For Solar Energy
Solar Projects

India Shows More & More Appetite For Solar Energy

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

By Reinhard Bimashofer

IBC SOLAR, a global leader in photovoltaic (PV) systems and energy storage from Germany, has completed a 27 megawatt (MW) solar plant near Kesinga in the Indian state of Odisha. For IBC SOLAR, this is its largest project to date as well as its first project in Eastern-India. And it shows how fast things can change to clean energy from the sun. On my November trip to India, New Delhi and other areas there had big smog troubles. The new solar park has been finished one and a half years after the decision from the auction to getting the first megawatt to grid.

While states like Rajasthan, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh already have a large share of solar power, with more than 2 gigawatts installed capacity each, the state of Odisha lags behind with approximately 90 MW installed capacity (by autumn 2017) and has only recently begun to try and pick up speed. With the newly connected PV plant, IBC SOLAR is supporting Odisha to increase its share of solar power by around 30%. This is an important step for the economic development in Odisha and, in particular, for the district of Kalahandi where the new solar plant is situated.

Shailendra Bebortha, Managing Director of IBC SOLAR in India, explained that this project will put Western Odisha prominently on India’s solar map. He also expressed his thanks to all the Contractors, State Government departments, Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), lenders and local public for this huge success.

IBC SOLAR´s project is part of a 270 MW PV tender floated by SECI in the state of Odisha in August 2016. As a result, a 25-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) was awarded to IBC SOLAR through a competitive auction process. Project financing was concluded with L&T Infrastructure Finance Company Limited in March 2017. Following the securement of 111 acres of land in August 2017, the local electric power transformation substation had to be upgraded to manage the soon-to-be generated energy, a transmission line for approximately 8 kilometers long was built, and construction of the solar plant then started in November 2017.

“With this project, we have consolidated a strong know-how in project development, land securitisation and grid connection in Odisha, a state with a high potential for solar PV build-up”, says José María Llopis, CEO of IBC SOLAR Energy GmbH. It is not only the company’s largest single location plant, but also its first project in India that was fully developed, financed, constructed and commissioned by IBC SOLAR alone. The solar plant meets the high-quality standards of IBC SOLAR as well as it fulfills stringent international standards of health and safety. It’s the best role model to build more of in the near future, and another big step for the company, which has a success-story more than 35 years in the making, including a full range of solar energy, from e-mobility charging to solar parks like this one in India.

The 270 MW from Odisha is small compared to Tengger Desert Solar Park, the world’s largest photovoltaic plant. It is located in Zhongwei, Ningxia, China. It covers an impressive area of 16,6 mi² (43 km2 ) – that is one tenth of the size of Vienna – and produces 1,547 MW. However, many small steps into a clean-tech-future are good news for India and for our environment.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Solar & The Grid
Sponsored

Solar & The Grid

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

By Casey Moothart

Many people (including myself) have probably wondered something like the following: with solar panels becoming so cheap, why can’t we all put panels on our roofs and go 100% renewable? The obvious answer is that nobody would have any electricity at nighttime.

But the issues involving the integration of photovoltaic solar into the grid are more subtle than that. As an outsider to the industry, I struggled to understand how California could be having grid problems (i.e. the “Duck Curve”) when they were only at 6% or 7% solar. After all, 7% is a long way from 100%! I set out with some markers and some graph paper and had an “aha” moment.

Let’s start with a couple of terms which are easy to confuse with one another. The first is electrical generation capacity. Capacity is defined as the total amount of power a fleet of generators could provide if they were all running at 100% power all of the time. Obviously, this scenario never happens, because it would leave absolutely no margin for error. Nonetheless, you will often see power plants referred to by their capacity.

As an example, nuclear plants are the ones that run closest to capacity, whereas simple cycle gas “peaker” plants generally run much less than their capacity because they are only running at selected “peak” times.

Figure 1: 100% capacity

On the flip side is the amount of electricity that the power plants actually do produce on a given day, which is termed their electrical generation. So, you have capacity on one hand and generation on the other. Typically, an electrical generation system generates somewhere around 70–80% of its capacity. This, of course, varies day by day.

In Figure 1, I have imagined as if all power plants are running as hard as they can all 24 hours. I represented the total amount of electrical power produced with dots. For those so inclined, let’s say that this pretend power grid has a capacity of 20 megawatts. Therefore, each box on the vertical axis represents 1 megawatt. Each box on the horizontal axis represents 1 hour. Taken together, this means that each little box (and each little dot) represents 1 megawatt-hour. As there are 20 boxes vertically and 24 boxes horizontally and 20 x 24 = 480, this means that this grid’s capacity is 480 megawatt-hours (and there are 480 dots).

Figure 2: 100% generation

In Figure 2, I have assumed for this thought experiment that the amount of power actually produced (i.e. generated) was only 75% of the capacity. 75% is around average, but remember it can vary day to day. Our generation graph has 15 dots going up and 24 across, so it has 25% fewer dots than in Figure 1, for a total of 360 dots.

The electrical output from solar panels is nearly always described in terms of generation. After all, it’s not like the sun can shine on them 24 hours a day. Also, we don’t control things like clouds and rain, so it is not particularly meaningful to discuss the capacity of a solar panel array. Therefore, I will use only generation from here on out.

Figure 3: 6.6% generation over 24 hours

In Figure 3, I have represented 6.67% Generation. Why 6.67%? 360 dots x 0.067 = 24 dots, which looks real nice on the graph. If you had a power plant running at a constant rate that generated 6.6% of the grid’s power for the day, Figure 3 is what that power output would look like. But solar panels do not generate power at a constant rate.

Now some magic (okay, not really) — what happens if you have a power plant that produces 24 dots of power but only does so over 18 hours?

Figure 4: 6.6% generation over 18 hours

In Figure 4, there are still 24 dots, but I have “squished” the 24 dots into 18 hours instead of 24. As you can see, I have drawn some little green arrows showing how some of the dots had to move inward and stacked them toward the middle of the day. Next, let’s squish that 24 units of power even more — this time down to 8 hours:

Figure 5: 6.6% generation over 8 hours

Still 24 dots here. Count them. I dare you. Now you can see that we’re getting something very close to what Solar generation looks like — a bell curve of output centered around midday (see the light blue line). Even though this figure is still only of 6.6% generation, at its peak, solar is providing 25% of the capacity of the system! Squishing something that was 6.6% overall from 24 hours down into 8 hours makes a huge difference for how the grid deals with that electrical generation.

Figure 6: 13.3% Generation over 8 hours

In Figure 6 things get even crazier. I doubled the generation from 6.6% to 13.3%, which means there are now 48 dots. When the 48 dots are squished into 8 hours, solar peaks at 45%! Grid operation is beyond the scope of this article, but I don’t think it takes much to see that turning massive power plants way down and then way back up just a few hours later (as would be required above) could be quite problematic.

A graph from the National Renewables Laboratory shows a strikingly similar prediction for California (see page 14, figure 7). The point is you don’t need to be a statistician at the National Renewables Laboratory to understand how 13.3% suddenly became 45%.

Figure 7: 3.3% generation over 8 hours.

In the US, the vast majority of solar electricity is generated in California, so I just wanted to throw in something that is more representative of what is occurring in a state other than California (or Hawaii). Nevada (4.5%), Massachusetts (4.2%), Arizona (3.5%), New Jersey (2.6%), and New Mexico (2.4%) were all in this range as of 2015 (source: eia.gov). Figure 5 had 24 dots, so above in Figure 7, there are 12 dots. As we can see, 3.3% generation peaks around 15%!

When I was learning about the California Duck Curve issue it seemed crazy to me that what at first glance appeared to be a fairly small percentage of solar power could have such a major impact on the grid. However, laying it out on graph paper like this with my daughter’s markers made it so much clearer to me, and I hope to you as well.

About the Author: My name is Casey Moothart and I am a Primary Care Physician, husband, and father of two living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I have no connection to any electric industry nor governmental agency. I do not have any significant relationship with anyone in the Electrical Utilities, nor in the Solar Panel or Home Battery Industries. So why do I have this website? At a certain point my wife and I decided to call Cincinnati home for the long haul and started to look into building a new home. We were fortunate enough to find an ideal lot and build a very energy efficient LEED Gold home, which was completed in 2015. We really went for it in terms of energy efficiency, and initial, y my idea was to go “net zero.”  But then…  

Inspired in part by Michael Pollan’s “Ominvore’s Dilemma,” I started trying to trace Cincinnati’s electricity back to its sources. With a little research I found that approximately 68% of my region’s electricity was coming from coal. So I read up about the kind of coal plants we have in the area, learning that they are sluggish to respond to peaks or valleys in demand, taking hours or even days to change their “speed.” So that lead me to wonder… if we were to put solar panels on our roof here in Cincinnati, how much CO2 would we actually be offsetting during the time that the panels are making electricity? And would a home battery be better? My website, WhyHomeBatteries.org is an attempt to address these questions.

2 comments
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Pvilion’s Solar Fabrics Could Help Put Solar Everywhere
BIPVPVSolar ModulesThin Film Solar

Pvilion’s Solar Fabrics Could Help Put Solar Everywhere

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on Nexus Media.
By Owen Agnew

Solar power used to mean large, heavy panels mounted on a roof or spread across a field. But the sun falls on everyone — and everything — and as materials have gotten lighter, cheaper and more flexible, photovoltaic cells are showing up in the most unlikely of places. In bustling New York City, you can buy a sandwich at a solar-powered food cart, eat it while sitting at a solar-powered bus stop, all while charging your phone using your solar-powered jacket.

Solar power is becoming more distributed, generating power closer to where it’s needed. That can mean buildings with their own solar arrays, or, on a smaller scale, clothing that features solar panels.

The Solar Fabric Carport. Source: Pvilion

Brooklyn-based solar company Pvilion is leading the charge to put solar everywhere. Their projects range from building covers to small consumer items. “We’re looking at solar as a building material that can be used in a lot of different contexts,” says CEO Colin Touhey.

Touhey and his partners have collaborated with Tommy Hilfiger to make solar-powered jackets, and now they’re working on a line of bags with built-in solar panels. While coats can’t generate nearly as much power as larger arrays, every person with a smartphone is a potential customer.

“It’s really cool to plug in your phone and charge it with the sun,” says Touhey.

Researchers are developing woven solar fabrics that have photoactive dyes coating individual threads, so each fiber is a miniature solar panel. But for now, flexible solar panels must be laminated on top of fabrics.

Pvilion has also designed building facades using heavy-duty solar fabrics. You can see their handiwork in a planned expansion at the Artists for Humanity Epicenter in Boston. The building’s photovoltaic facade will generate power and provide shade, helping to keep the interior cool. This and other energy-smart technologies will make the Epicenter the largest commercial building on the East Coast to produce more power than it consumes, according to Pvilion.

Integrated solar designs like Pvilion’s awnings and canopies have another cost-saving advantage — they need fewer materials. “The fundamental idea of sustainability is doing more with less,” Touhey says. “If you can span a forty-foot distance with half the amount of weight and produce electricity, that’s a better deal than using a traditional framed structure that might use more materials.”

If you can install a facade that doubles as a solar array, then you can save on labor as well as material costs. It’s the same idea behind Elon Musk’s solar roof tiles, which look like high-end slate, ceramic or glass tiles, but function like photovoltaic panels. According to Musk, his solar roof will cost less than a conventional roof.

Like Tesla’s solar roof, Pvilion’s large-scale projects, like its parking lot canopies, feed surplus electricity into the power grid. Its small-scale projects are designed to work unplugged from the grid.

The firm is working on a new project for the the U.S. Army — a solar-powered robotic tent that can set itself up with the press of a button. Todd Dalland, another of Pvilion’s co-founders, has been designing tents for the Army for decades. “They’re one of the most interesting tent clients in the world,” Dalland says. “We’re often getting into situations where our buildings are so lightweight they can travel, and here’s one that almost walks!”

Pvilion is just one company dreaming up new applications for solar technology. Other firms are developing transparent photovoltaic cells that could be used in windows or smartphones. Researchers have even developed solar cells that are thinner than a human hair. As solar costs continue to drop, it’s not hard to imagine a future where almost everything under the sun is powered by the sun.

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Solar + Storage Already Cheaper Than Grid In Australia, Says LG Chem
Energy StoragePV

Solar + Storage Already Cheaper Than Grid In Australia, Says LG Chem

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on RenewEconomy.

LG Chem, the South Korean battery storage maker that has so far claimed the biggest share of the nascent Australian market, says that solar and battery storage is already beating grid power in most states.

The assessment by LG Chem follows similar analysis by private energy consultants, and suggests that the market for battery storage could be about to take off, even with looming threats of restrictions.

According to Jamie Allen, the marketing head in Australia for LG Chem, a 5kW rooftop solar system and a 10kWh battery storage device (such as LG Chem’s own 9.8kWh offering) can be purchased and installed for around $15,000.

Based on the assumed output of around 22kWh a day from the solar array, that makes the cost per kWh of solar power at around 22c/kWh over 10 years.

Given that most flat rate per kWh tariffs start at around 23c/kWh or 24c/kWh – even in NSW where there are high fixed network charges on top of that – the solar power is still on the money, although the battery storage is essential to ensure that much of that output is used directly, or stored for later use at night.

Of course, the actual cost per kWh of the solar output would be less than half the 22c/kWh cited here, because the panels would last well beyond 20 years.

But the 10 year time frame is used because that is the warranty period for most battery storage and it is the “combo” package that is being promoted. And without storage, then much of the output would have to be exported, with tariffs in NSW as low as 6c/kWh or non-existent for some.

What does this tell us? Allen says it is that storage is crucial to maximize the value of that solar output. Every kWh that can be consumed on site will beat the cost of production.

Of course, this is not the only benefit. Allen notes that the solar system will likely last at least another decade, possibly two, and the cost of battery storage to replace the current system will also be cheaper, while grid costs are likely to rise.

And, on top of that, the solar and storage system offers other benefits: back-up power for when local or wider blackouts occur, and increasing property values, not to mention the environmental and climate benefits.

So far, LG Chem has found the NSW and Queensland markets to be the strongest for battery storage, with consumers in regional areas, particularly interested because of the potential of batteries as a back up.

“The market is looking very positive,” Allen says. LG Chem, along with other battery storage developers, is watching the roll-out of the new Tesla Powerwall 2 with interest, but is confident its product is competitive.

And while Tesla focuses on proprietary models with in-built inverters, LG Chem is partnering with a range of companies including SMA, Solar Edge, Selectronics, Redback, Sungrow, Goodwie, Ingeteam, and Victron.

But Allen is also worried about moves by regulatory authorities to restrict the installations of battery storage devices, and effectively ban them from homes and garages and require them to be installed in a separate enclosure.

He says LG Chem safety tests have been exhaustive, and more than 30,000 LG Chem residential systems supplied globally with no fire or safety related issues.

A further 500,000 EVs and hybrid vehicles have used the company’s battery cells, again with no fire or safety related issues, and LG Chem lithium products are approved to be shipped via air. Yet Australian authorities want to ban them inside homes.

“That would go far beyond anything else in the world,” Allen says. “It looks like Australia is going to overcook (the regulations), and it will end up costing the consumer more.”

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Rooftop Solar Installations In Australia Are Up 43% In 2017
Rooftop Solar

Rooftop Solar Installations In Australia Are Up 43% In 2017

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on RenewEconomy.
By Sophie Vorrath

A summer of record high temperatures, heat waves and unplanned electricity outages appears to have put a rocket under the Australian rooftop solar market in 2017, with installations at end of February nearly 50% up on the same time last year.

According to the latest monthly insights report from SunWiz – based on data from Solar Choice – February was an excellent month for solar PV growth, and registrations have been clocked at 43 per cent better than 2016 YTD, driven largely by residential installs.

The February rebound marks the second best month for solar PV installs in Australia since 2013 – the best month since 2013 being December 2016.

For both those months, market growth was no doubt spurred by consumer concern and frustration, as peak power prices soared, and record-breaking heatwaves combined with fossil fuel outages to cause black-outs and load-shedding.

As we reported here on Thursday, this trend is evident in data of the final few months of 2016 in South Australia, following the statewide blackout event there in September.

In an analysis of Clean Energy Regulator data, Solar Citizens noted that monthly solar installation rates jumped 17.65 per cent from October to December, compared to installation rates from January till September.

But as the chart below shows, growth in rooftop solar installs has not been limited to South Australia, with all of the major states rebounding, while Western Australia remained fairly steady, consolidating its position as third-largest installer, behind Queensland and NSW and ahead of Victoria.

Commercial solar, which SunWiz notes is traditionally quieter over the summer holiday period, continues to grow in the minor states and territories, the report says.

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
SolarReserves Bids 6.3 Cents Per KWH In Chile For Dispatchable 24-Hour Solar
CSPSolar Records

SolarReserves Bids 6.3 Cents Per KWH In Chile For Dispatchable 24-Hour Solar

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on CleanTechnica.
By Susan Kraemer

In Chile’s last auction for power, SolarReserve bid a world-record-breaking low price at just 6.3 cents per kWh ($63/MWh) for dispatchable 24-hour solar.

SolarReserve’s CSP technology with integrated thermal storage provides 24-hour solar power, and is ideally suited for Chile’s grid with round-the-clock power needs due to its huge mining industry. To bid 24-hour solar at 6.3 cents per kWh is a world record for CSP (Concentrated Solar Power), a form of solar utilizing heat from the sun that can be stored thermally. Chile has open auctions for both fossil energy and renewables, and no subsidies.

CleanTechnica spoke today with SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith about the firm’s next Chilean bids:

SK: You bid Crescent Dunes in Nevada at 13.5 cents, then Redstone in South Africa at 12 cents. Your bid in Chile was 6.3 cents. How are you able to come down so low for solar that includes thermal storage so it can be dispatched any time — 24-hour solar for just 6.3 cents/kWh? 

KS: SolarReserve has made substantial advances in our technology that has increased efficiencies and brought down capital costs since our first project in Nevada.

But there are a number of other factors that influence power prices and the Chilean market appears to be ideally suited for solar thermal with storage. In addition to the best solar resource in the world, the country’s stable financial status along with US dollar denominated power contracts results in excellent financing and investment terms

Interestingly, our thermal solar bids were lower than all but one new-build natural gas project bid into the last tender. Chile has no indigenous fuels, so natural gas needs to be imported in the form of LNG, which is much more expensive than natural gas costs in the US, and is susceptible to spikes in supply pricing in the world markets.

SK: How do you ensure that you can deliver solar power around the clock? Does that require operating at something less than full capacity? [Background explainer: How CSP works: CSP with integrated thermal storage makes solar dispatchable at any hour 24 hours a day.]

KS: Our bulk storage capabilities utilizing molten salt give us tremendous flexibility, without having to consider the degradation issues associated with batteries or the replacement cost issues.

We’re designing the projects in Chile for full capacity 24 hours a day. To do that we put in about 14 hours of storage. That will give us the full capacity of the project essentially 24 hours a day.

We could design it for three times the power for 8 hours a day or twice the output for 12 hours a day, but since Chile’s load is really a 24-hour load we design the storage to handle that.

It really comes down to the design of the steam cycle and turbine capacity, the storage tank capacity, and the size of the heliostat field, which dictates how much additional power you can store when its sunny.

SK: You seem to do all the permitting before you bid, not just in South Africa which requires it, but even in the US and Chile that do not — why? [SolarReserve just received the environmental permitting for its 450 MW Tamarugal CSP; the second of three thermal solar projects it is developing in Chile. Copiapó was permitted in 2015. A new CSP project, Likana is in development.]

KS: I think we’re a bit out front in the way we operate. We like to move forward on permits and make sure we have a fully developed project that’s ready to go. That provides confidence to the offtaker, that the project will be built on the time frame expected in the bid.

For SolarReserve, obtaining the permits certainly minimizes the development risks of the project. So the fact that we’ve got two of our main projects fully permitted we think is an advantage to us, certainly for a risk standpoint for SolarReserve.

SK: Yes, I’d think that must also help the offtaker, by making it more likely that new generation it contracts for really will happen. 

KS: Right. I believe in the last round some of the winning bids didn’t have fully permitted sites and I think they’re still selecting sites. We actually think the Chilean government should take the development risks of the selected projects more into account — how developed a project is — because that will impact the ability of the developer to get the project done. We think it should come into play in their analysis.

[South Africa’s success in speeding renewables growth was because the REIPPPP limited bidders to those with fully permitted projects and likely financing. By contrast, the US allowed a disorganized rush to simultaneous permitting, financing and contract negotiation, so that many of the big California solar projects listed by the Department of the Interior failed to materialize, while “using up” places in the interconnection queue.]

SK: Chile has open auctions with competing bidding from both renewable and legacy generation. So why is coal not winning any bids?

KS: There are two blocks of power that the government was asking for: the majority was for 24-hours per day supply, and then there was a block that was allocated for daytime only supply only, which is more geared towards PV.

New coal just isn’t competitive with renewable energy any more in addition to the pollution issues related to coal. Some of the utilities do have existing generation from coal that isn’t fully contracted and we expect some of those projects will continue to be bid into the tenders.

It’s highly unlikely that new coal projects will be built in Chile. New coal projects have been turned down for permitting, so to bid a coal project that isn’t permitted yet and assume that “well I’ll get it permitted” would be a high-risk strategy.

Our view is that our advanced storage technology is suited for 24-hours a day generation as opposed to wind and PV which aren’t. PV with battery storage can supply short term storage or ramping capabilities, but isn’t a good fit for true bulk energy storage, due to the degradation and replacement cost issues associated with batteries. We think Chile’s 24-hour block a good fit for us, so we’re going to bid what we believe is the right way for the system to operate – which is adding true capacity into the market.

SK: Did any other renewables bid into the 24-hours block?

KS: It was interesting and surprising that one of the winning bids in the last round for the 24-hour block was a wind project developer that bid wind plus “spot” electricity supply. Their strategy is to operate their wind project for its expected capacity, say a 30 capacity factor when the wind blows, and then when they can’t supply from their wind facility, they would purchase excess power from the grid in order to meet their contract obligations.

Our view is that that is very difficult to manage and finance, and for the most part, that doesn’t really help the Chilean power system. Chile needs real 24-hour a day power, and are not looking for companies that are in some sense just putting together a financial bid that really takes flexibility out of the grid.

While this might be a reasonable short term strategy since there is modest additional capacity in the system, on a medium or long term basis it could result in substantial power price spikes during low supply periods. It’s interesting that the bid requirements, as structured, didn’t actual have real capacity requirements in order to bid 24-hour blocks of energy.

Take that strategy to the next step: if everybody did that, there would be limited new power projects built in the near term. Spot prices rices would quickly rise and they would have shortages on the market.

SK: Might you bid a Hybrid PV/CSP like Copiapó in Chile’s Next Round?

KS: We permitted Copiapó for PV as well as CSP, but actually in the current situation, we’re not sure of the value of adding PV into the mix, because daytime power prices are low. We can take the PV out as we’re not required to include it. We could always come in later and add the PV in the future if it makes economic sense, but we think it has limited value in the Chilean sector right now: there has been an oversupply during the day because of all the PV.

The spot prices when PV is available are coming down and so it’s less valuable, and some of the merchant projects that were built are not performing very well because of these lower power prices.

So in the last round we bid Copiapó purely as CSP with SolarReserve’s tower and molten salt storage technology. We had already made that decision that the PV wasn’t adding any value to the bid, so we did not include the PV, and we bid that at $63/MWh. [Ed: 6.3 cents per kWh]

Images: SolarReserve and Wikimedia

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Here’s What An 850 Megawatt, 4 Million Panel Solar Farm Looks Like
Uncategorized

Here’s What An 850 Megawatt, 4 Million Panel Solar Farm Looks Like

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on Climate Central.
By Brian Kahn

On the Tibetan Plateau in eastern China, 4 million solar panels silently soak up the sun as part of the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park. It’s the largest solar farm in the world, spreading over 10 square miles of the high desert landscape.

The complex sprung into existence in 2013 and has been rapidly expanding ever since. Satellite imagery curated by NASA’s Earth Observatory chronicles its growth from a cluster of panels to a sprawling solar farm that looks like a giant, angular thought bubble as of January 2017.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Unlike the world’s largest ball of twine, it’s more than just a roadside attraction. The installation currently has the capacity to generate 850 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power roughly 140,000 U.S. homes.

The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park is one piece of the massive renewable energy revolution taking place in China. The country invested $103 billion into renewables in 2015, the last year with data available. That helped the world set a renewable investment high water mark of $286 billion.

According to Greenpeace’s Energydesk, preliminary 2016 data show China installed the equivalent of one and a half soccer fields of solar panels every hour. That puts the country on track to meet its 2020 renewable goals sometime in 2018.

The renewables targets line up with China’s international climate commitments. The government previously announced it would lower the carbon intensity of its economy 40-45 percent below 2005 levels. Under the Paris Agreement, China has pledged to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.

Looking ahead, the government announced in early January that it plans to spend $361 billion on renewable power generation from now through 2020. The influx of cash is expected to help China produce a total of 110 gigawatts of solar power and 210 gigawatts of wind power by 2020.

The increase in investment coincides with a 40 percent drop in the cost of installing utility-scale solar in China since 2010. Solar is expected to become even cheaper in the coming years, further creating more bang for China’s buck (or yuan as the case may be).

Despite the growth in capacity, China has struggled to balance demand and production. An economic slowdown has caused some solar and wind farms to sit idle or produce energy that can’t be used. Local governments and strong coal interests also present obstacles to China’s transition from the world’s biggest carbon polluter to an economy largely powered by clean energy.

China continues to see its emissions rise due largely to heavy coal use, which will increase the risks associated with climate change. The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park is a step toward ensuring China has the capacity to change that.

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Australian Homes With Sonnen’s Solar + Storage System Will Get Free Electricity
PVRooftop Solar

Australian Homes With Sonnen’s Solar + Storage System Will Get Free Electricity

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on RenewEconomy.
By Sophie Vorrath

Just months after launching its residential battery storage offering onto the Australian market, Germany battery maker Sonnen has flagged the introduction of a household solar and storage deal that threatens to disrupt the traditional retail electricity model.

The deal, called “Sonnen flat,” offers free power to households using the company’s integrated solar and storage system, including for any electricity drawn from the grid when the sun goes down and stored energy is used up.

In return, Sonnen has access to its customers’ installed battery storage capacity to use as a sort of virtual power plant, to provide grid balancing services to network operators – most of the time, without any discernible impact at the customer’s end.

“The deal is, you buy a Sonnen battery to go with your solar and don’t pay for electricity any more,” Sonnen Australia head Chris Parratt told One Step Off The Grid in an interview this week.

“It’s like a mobile phone plan, where the customer purchases the phone up front and gets a plan, if you like. Or, if you use finance, you pay nothing up front, and pay monthly installments instead.

“That’s the way we see the market going,” Parratt added. “Eventually your electricity costs will look like a mobile phone plan.”

Meanwhile, Sonnen starts to look less like a battery business and more like energy retailer, with any losses incurred by giving customers free power more than compensated for through revenue made on the balancing power market – known in Australia as Frequency Control Ancillary Services, or FCAS – where prices are higher than in the regular markets.

Indeed, in Australia’s primary frequency response market – currently dominated by gas peaking plants – prices have been known to surge past $5000/MWh when the grid suffers a sudden shortage of supply and/or surge in demand, or when gas generators game the system.

As we reported here, the Australian Energy Regulator last year found that re-bidding by leading gentailers Origin Energy and AGL Energy in the South Australian electricity market in August and September caused price spikes that loaded more than $17 million of additional costs onto consumers and other generators.

Little wonder, then, that Sonnen –  which first rolled out its flat rate model in Germany in September last year and now has 6,000 battery systems in the German balancing market – is targeting Australia, with plans to offer the deal to customers here in the next two months.

Coupled with retail electricity prices that have pushed up consumer bills by more than 100 per cent over the past 10 years; a world-leading rooftop solar uptake; and the removal of premium solar feed-in tariffs, Australia’s is a market that’s ripe for disruption.

“We only started installing Sonnen at the back end of last year in Australia,” Parratt says, “but we expect to be within the top three in the market this year. Especially with (this offer). We expect to be a key player in a market that installs 10-15,000 units per year.”

Sonnen’s battery storage systems will start in Australia at about $6000 fully installed and range up to $25,000, depending on the size of the system.

Parratt has estimated that customer paybacks in Australia will run at six to nine years, depending on the size of the system installed and the solar it is coupled with.

“We have a modular system that starts at 2kWh and goes to 16 kWh in 2kWh increments,” he said. “We actually fit the battery size to the house’s consumption, that’s why we can get the six-year pay back in places like South Australia.”

And what of reports Standards Australia, along with other state regulatory bodies, are considering restricting lithium-ion battery installations inside houses and garages?

Parratt notes that while Sonnen uses Sony-made lithium iron phosphate batteries – a different chemistry to lithium-ion and purpose-built for use in homes – he’s not sure why Australia appears to be going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world on battery installation guidelines.

“There is a standard being released in Germany that allows for lithium-ion batteries to be installed in homes. So why Australia appears to be going the opposite way, I don’t know,” Parratt told One Step.

That said, he added, standards do “need to get into the nitty gritty of battery chemistries” and work out what is safe to hang on your wall and what is not.

“Ours is a very, very safe battery,” Parratt told One Step. “In Europe, we have 30,000 installations and some of those have been around since 2010, and not one fire has happened, no one has been injured. Germany has proved that they can be safe.”

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Australian Solar Headed For A “Huge Year” In 2017
Solar $

Australian Solar Headed For A “Huge Year” In 2017

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on RenewEconomy.
By Sophie Vorrath

Solar power is headed for a “huge year” in Australia in 2017, a new report has predicted, on the back of a boom in the large-scale market and a home solar and storage market that is expected to treble.

The Climate Council’s State of Solar 2016, published on Thursday, confirms solar is now the cheapest form of new large-scale power generation, as costs of the technology tumble and investment soars.c036b63d5f554990ba3781b2dd0d7914

According to the report, solar costs have plummeted by 58 per cent in just five years and look set to continue to fall by somewhere between 40 and 70 per cent by 2040.

Already, however, solar plants are delivering electricity for cheaper than new coal, gas or nuclear, the report says, at prices of around $110/MWh – a price that is expected to come down further, “significantly”, over time.

This compares to the price of new coal power – a generation source recently championed by Australia’s Turnbull government – which the report notes is on the rise, potentially reaching $160/MWh for cost of electricity. It has been put at more than double that cost with added carbon capture and storage technology.

For Australia, which has endured a few false starts on large-scale solar, the report said development was now “surging”, with 20 projects coming online in 2017 and another 3700MW in the pipeline.

On this path, the Climate Council predicts Australia will surpass 20GW of solar PV in the next 20 years, equivalent to about a third of Australia’s current total power generation capacity.

The distributed solar market was also headed for major growth, the report said, with the installation of rooftop PV and battery storage systems for households and businesses expected to treble over the course of the year.

Currently, more than 6,500 Australian households have a solar and storage system installed, the report says.

On rooftop solar, the report says South Australia and Queensland are currently competing for top installation rates, with both states reaching around 30 per cent of households with PV.

In WA, 24 per cent of households have solar PV systems, followed by Victoria and New South
Wales on 15 per cent. According to the report, the current average small-scale solar system
size is 5.34kW.

“Australia adds more solar power every year than the combined capacity of South Australia’s (recently closed) Northern and Playford coal-fired power stations,” the report says.

The report also notes that roughly 8000 Australians are now employed in solar, a sector that, globally, employs 2.8 million.

Labor’s shadow climate and energy minister, Mark Butler, has welcomed the report’s findings, describing it as good news for affordable, stable, and clean energy in Australia.

Butler has also used the occasion of the report’s release to take a pot-shot at the Turnbull government, for a policy approach he says has “threatened the creation of thousands of new jobs and an affordable and secure energy future.”

“This week we have seen the energy minister Josh Frydenberg once again trash renewable energy and continue the government’s push for taxpayer funded expensive and polluting new coal-fired power stations,” he said.

“As Andrew Stock from the Climate Council put it; ‘The government’s energy rhetoric does not match reality… global investment has moved firmly to renewable energy.”

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Australia Now Has World’s First Exchange For Stored Home Solar
Rooftop Solar

Australia Now Has World’s First Exchange For Stored Home Solar

by Guest Author
written by Guest Author

Originally published on RenewEconomy.
By Sophie Vorrath

The Australian energy market is set for a major shake-up with the launch of a major new government-backed initiative to create an open marketplace for locally generated and stored rooftop solar power to be traded between households, businesses, communities and network utilities.

Unveiled on Thursday, the Decentralised Energy Exchange — or “deX” — is being hailed as a revolutionary digital marketplace that will change the way energy is produced, traded and consumed at a local level in Australia.

The project, which is currently at the pilot phase, is being funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and led by energy tech startup GreenSync, in collaboration with network operators United Energy and ActewAGL, energy management start-up Reposit Power, and new energy retailer Mojo Power.

It will, for the first time in Australia, create an open marketplace for the value of energy generated by solar panels and stored in battery packs to be traded on a mass scale.

“Homes and businesses will be able to monetise their solar and storage assets by essentially renting them to the grid when they’re most needed,” said GreenSyncy CEO Phli Blythe.

“Imagine a single marketplace where consumers can connect and configure their energy resources, and all of the upstream value generated by these assets are automatically paid into a bank account or digital wallet.”

But perhaps most importantly, the project will shift the Australian energy market from a centralised to a decentralised model — transforming the way electricity grids are used, and removing the need for multi-billion dollar network infrastructure upgrades.

“deX will revolutionise peak electricity management and drive more effective investment in energy infrastructure,” Blythe said.

“We have lots of small ‘power plants’ on more than 15 per cent of the roofs in Australia. Getting all of these working together to support the grid is a powerful proposition for the widespread adoption of renewable energy technology and will fundamentally improve the reliability and reduce the intermittency of these resources in the energy mix.

This comes at a key time for Australia, with energy security dominating political debate and media commentary as the nation’s ageing electricity grids limp through another hot summer.

As we have reported on RenewEconomy, a number of outages in South Australia and load-shedding in New South Wales have highlighted these problems, while simultaneously deepening the political divide over renewables, and how quickly the inevitable transition to clean energy generation sources should be made.

At the crux of this divide is the political hot potato of electricity costs, which the have increased by more than 100 per cent across Australia, with some of the highest power bill increases recorded in the eastern coal-dominated states.

The Coalition argues that the Labor Opposition and many Labor state governments’ high renewable energy targets will drive electricity prices up further, while the pro-renewables camp, including many industry analysts and market participants, argue that the cost of of the shift to renewables will be much cheaper than business as usual.

GreenSync said on Thursday that deX would work to drive investment in renewable energy, while allowing utilities to avoid unnecessary, multibillion dollar investment in underutilised infrastructure.

“This is a world-first, market defining innovation that will support how energy markets work with intermittent renewables, encouraging growth in such resources,” GreenSync said in a statement.

“For GreenSync, this will be an important global transition point, evolving its load management platform into an energy marketplace.”

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the Agency’s backing of projects like deX went to its primary goal of accelerating Australia’s shift to renewable energy.

“To smoothly transition to a renewable energy future, we need new technologies and markets,” he said.

“This could encourage more investment in solar and batteries, supporting the grid, reducing the need for infrastructure investment and ultimately reducing the cost of renewables in Australia.”

ACT climate minister Shane Rattenbury notes that deX is particularly good news for the nation’s rooftop solar households, many of whom would argue that the true and fair value of their contribution to the grid has not been properly accounted for.

“DeX will help us understand how distributed energy services like solar and battery storage can be valued, reflecting when and where the service is provided, and how that value can be shared fairly between customers and network businesses. This knowledge will inform our transition to a high-penetration renewables grid, both in Canberra and nationally.”

United Energy’s Greg Hannan said the exchange would bring Australia a step closer to having the kind of localised or “mini markets” that would optimise value for all parties, while managing the key issues of reliability and stability.

“This is key to creating value for energy customers in the grid of the future,” he said.

An industry discussion paper will be released ahead of the first pilot projects.

Reprinted with permission.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterGoogle +Pinterest
Newer Posts
Older Posts