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Electrek green energy brief: Battery plus solar pricing from NREL, South Australia with largest battery plus solar, more

New NREL report details installed costs and deployment barriers for residential solar+storage – If you really want to do some research on what your battery system is going to cost, and why, start here. NREL reports are always top notch – I distribute them often (and maybe some of you should download this stuff before Pruitt deletes it).

South Australia getting 100MW energy storage plus 330MW of solar – Is 100MW the largest battery system connected to a power grid? How do they go from announced last night to built before end of year? Or that’s right – solar + storage. And, most interestingly, it isn’t Elon Musk doing the deal. These Australians move fast when the electricity stops running.

Energy Department not allowed to use phrase ‘climate change’ – When you fear the truth, you are the lie. Employees have been told it is better to use phrases like ‘jobs’ and ‘infrastructure.’ This is how crooks rule.

China creating solar and wind renewable energy certificates – In essence, if you create 1MWh of clean energy you will be able to sell that on a marketplace. Right now, the market is voluntary. Eventually – much like the northeast USA – manufacturers will have to pay for the right to pollute. In the short term, this drives investment in renewable energy. In the long term – the value of these certificates crash and green energy proliferates and polluters can pollute. Useful for now though.

A breakdown, by region, of module production capacity, more – The article breaks down how solar panels move through the supply chain from manufacturer through end user. More interesting to me is the breakdown of manufacturing capacity of solar panels across the world. China obviously leads – but with only 52 out of 90+GW of capacity (of course much of the volume in Malaysia, Vietnam, etc is Chinese to skip out US tariffs).

10 states with 100MW battery storage pipelines and 21 states with 20MW or more – Energy storage is going to come on faster than solar because it is more easily deployed, the clean energy industry has been primed to let the capital flow and the manufacturers are ready to scale. Solar will then be able to come on faster because we’ll have the appropriate energy storage resources deployed. Navigant is tracking thousands of storage systems across many different project types. Virtuous cycle coming – and it hasn’t even begun.

Concurrently – what are behind the meter commercial battery installations going to look like in Europe? – For right now, the market looks like a slowly increasing peak shaving focus until the politicians properly code and refine the regulatory market. Residential energy storage will mean tens of thousands of systems this year (maybe 50,000?) – 25,000 last year. 100MW/year by 2020 (it’ll grow faster).

When the US industry was sucked up into large commercial entities who didn’t have the payroll of vision of the year 2000, solar manufacturing died.

 

Cool numbers on the system from clean, professional corporate folk – camera goes back and forth on front of cabinet a lot showing off hardware:

Leading technology types for floating offshore wind power. How big is this going to happen? We could build giant floating turbine systems off the coasts of manufacturing regions and float them to the coasts of anywhere.

Main image of a 650kW ground mount in Massachusetts built by Beaumont Solar with myself as project developer in 2016.

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