It’s getting harder to separate solar from storage. Barry Cinnamon shares his predictions on the future of these technologies.
Stephen Munro, an analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, discusses how the GOP tax plan could impact investment in solar, wind, and other clean energy alternatives going forward. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Peter Barnes on Bloomberg Radio’s “Politics, Policy, Power and Law.”
At least a dozen provisions in the final tax bill released Friday night by US House and Senate negotiators will affect transactions in the power and broader infrastructure markets.
The electricity sector’s competitive dynamic completely flipped in 2017. It is now cheaper to build new wind and solar than new coal or often natural gas. In growing swaths of the country, it’s often cheaper to build new wind (and sometimes solar) than continuing to run existing coal plants. The implications are profound.
PRESIDENT TRUMP has what might seem like an irresistible opportunity for a populist climate-change denier: to crack down on imports and harm the effort to combat climate change all at once. Yet even the briefest of looks shows that slapping tariffs on imported solar cells, as he has been urged to do, would harm far more Americans than it could possibly help.
The US International Trade Commission published on Tuesday recommendations for import tariffs on solar PV cells and modules as part of the Section 201 trade case which has been in motion much of this year, and though any tariffs are harmful, the proposals were not as bad as many within the solar industry were fearing.
As the GOP advances its tax plan, solar and wind interests consider the potential impact.
Solar financiers are receiving record market interest this year, freeing up capital for more lending.
According to Google’s Project Sunroof, seventy-nine percent of all rooftops analyzed are technically viable for solar, meaning those rooftops have enough unshaded area for solar panels.
The new 150-megawatt Mesquite 3 solar array is located in Arizona, but the electricity it generates will be sent to California’s electric grid and will power roughly one-third of the electricity needs of 14 naval installations in the state.
There’s definitely a value to storing solar energy in batteries, and then discharging that energy to meet grid and customer needs. Measuring that value — and finding a way to share it between battery-equipped solar customers and their utilities — is a trickier matter.
In December, Congress unexpectedly extended a tax credit set to expire at the end of 2016. Yet instead of energizing the industry, the extension has hurt growth, as solar companies no longer rush to meet a deadline.
Between 2010 and 2012, the first five utility scale plants in the US came into being with the support of the DOE loan program. The latest update from the Energy Department, which came out on October 14, puts the figure at 45 additional projects for a grand total of 50.
DOE has announced a new grant program solicitation for approximately $7 million in funding to support the development of sensors and modeling that allow utilities to more effectively integrate distributed clean energy sources into their power grids.
A growing number of electric industry leaders agree that it’s only a matter of time before renewable energy resources dominate their grid systems.
Backing large-scale solar farms in locales like California, Mongolia, China and Nevada may have just been a warm up for Apple’s foray into clean energy.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the latest conservative group to start spreading anti-solar messages. In an email sent to supporters on Wednesday, the chamber attacks net metering, a policy in place in many states that pays people with solar panels on their roofs for the electricity they feed into the grid. The group also posted a video on YouTube last week making its anti-net metering case. This is fairly new territory for the chamber, according to energy regulation experts.
Last July, Georgia Power launched a rooftop solar consultation service and a separate solar installation business. Together, the new offerings were designed to benefit the utility, consumers and other solar companies all at the same time.
Leading investment bank Morgan Stanley believes the Australian energy market is seriously underestimating the grow of solar and battery storage, and says the technology will be installed at rates four times quicker than the incumbent energy industry expects.
It’s a statistic that could startle an entire industry: Cost effective distributed energy resources (DERs) are expected to displace 320 GW of centralized generation from 2014-2023, according to Navigant Research.
The California utility that owns the state’s last operating nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon announced it plans to close the facility within the next decade, signaling the end of the nuclear era in the Golden State – and with it, some green advocates hope, the start of a new era of marked by surging solar, wind and other renewable energy resources.
The amount of electricity generated using solar panels stands to expand as much as sixfold by 2030 as the cost of production falls below competing natural gas and coal-fired plants, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.