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EGEB: China solar panel price bumps; Iran wants 1GW/year; bad farmland good for solar; more

Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news.

China makers to hike September contract prices for solar mono-Si wafers – China-based solar mono-Si wafer makers will raise supply contract prices in September by 2-3% from the current level, according to industry sources. It seems a large part of the world (India, Europe, and the USA) wants to sue China for such low solar panel prises. If all of these countries do put taxes on Chinese products, maybe China should increase their prices a bit, and keep a bit more of the profit at home for research/growth or in the supply chain to fatten up those profit margins. No point in letting all those taxes go to host countries.

For New England Farmers Looking To Make Ends Meet, The Sun Provides A Harvest – And one part of Sullivan’s property – about 15 acres – had been pretty unusable. The soil was heavy and bad for crops, he says. He tried growing corn and hay, but with no success. Another farming/solar article, and one without any specific data point other than that ‘bad’ farmland can be used for solar. Can non-arable farmland be turned into grazing land with solar panels? Or maybe – could we add bees/flowering plants under the solar panels? A hard push to find non-arable farm land ought be marketed so people don’t worry about the losses.

Iran aims at 1 GW of renewables annually – Currently Iran relies heavily on fossil fuels and has 360 MW of installed renewable power plants. The country’s total installed power capacity is 77,000 MW. In order to diversify its power mix, Iran aims to have 5 GW of renewable energy facilities by 2020, according to the Renewable Energy Organization of Iran. Like this article for two reasons 1. More oil rich middle eastern countries looking to maximize oil and build renewables. Says what the economics are here so very clearly. And 2. The relative volume of fossil fuel generation that there is – 77,000MW versus them wanting to add 1,000MW of renewables per year. That’s a lot of growth potential.

Electrification Alone Will Save 42 Percent Of World Energy Demand, Stanford Prof Says – About 13 percent of all energy worldwide is used to mine, transport and refine fossil fuels, so the elimination of fossil fuels immediately provides a savings of 13 percent. About 23 percent of energy use will be saved because electric power is more efficient than combustion. An electric car, for example, uses about 85 percent of the energy in its battery to move the car, with the rest lost as waste heat. A gasoline powered car only uses 17 to 20 percent of its energy to move the car. It seems like we’ll still mine oil for plastic, coal we might start mining for rare earth elements, and natural gas we could still use for fertilizer feedback – so maybe it won’t be the full 13% of fossil fuel mining that we save…and wouldn’t our mining of metals have to increase if we build huge solar/wind farms? Either way, pretty interesting that 13% of our energy in general, is simply for making the world’s energy.

Policymaker support key to offshore wind prospects in US – Showing this article, really because of this quote from analyzing the article – Block Island in RI has been producing power at ~60% avg. CF over past 6 months. Perhaps, off-shore wind is the new baseload? The article has a lot of great data on wind power also – but this is the highest wind capacity factory I’ve even seen. Is the east coast of the USA so windy? If so, that’s a gold mine.

No new coal for a few years, total amounts of gas way down with wind and solar really taking over. In addition to clean energy being added, we’re also see less energy overall due to efficiency. The electricity infrastructure is doing better.

Header image: Section of Hubble solar wing – This section of the NASA–ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s solar array flew for eight years in space before being returned to Earth aboard a Space Shuttle, and is now displayed at ESA’s technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. These types of solar cells are triple junction usually, and very expensive. Cool that they’re in such good shape after space.

Considering residential solar?  will connect you with local contractors. Tweet me to pick apart quote.

 

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