Your Source for Energy Jobs & Industry News
Energy experts think solar power still has a bright future, even as challenges impact the industry. Power generation from solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has increased dramatically over the past few years thanks to the need for less-costly power, and for cleaner forms of energy.
The post Innovation Continues to Drive Growth in Solar Power Sector appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The U.S. was one of the world leaders in solar equipment manufacturing a few decades ago, but then the Chinese stole the show. Now, however, American companies are finding a lot of new opportunities as a
The post Federal Policies and Incentives Drive Demand for American-Made Solar Power Modules appeared first on POWER Magazine.
I’ve come to depend on the navigation system in my car. It predicts traffic jams, gives me the fastest route, informs me of store hours, and even tells me where to get a burger. To give me this experience, the navigation system draws on multiple data sources, puts it into context, and presents it through a single interface.
In order to efficiently navigate the energy transition, operators in power and utilities must reach the same level of maturity with their data. With multiple sources of data from sensors, to outage logs, to images—all stored in various enterprise systems—this industry won’t be able to unlock the full value of its data until it’s combined, contextualized, and available with less effort. Only then can we use it for a reliable, resilient, green energy future.
Getting to this point will require power and utilities companies to conquer the first challenge: bringing all their data together. Data and information are still extremely siloed in this industry; tucked away in legacy systems, deliberately locked in vendor point solutions, or stored inside the minds of domain experts.…
The post Economic Factors Drive Wind and Solar Growth appeared first on POWER Magazine.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have found that a combination of lower capital, operating, and finance costs, in addition to better equipment performance, and longer useful lives, have driven power purchase agreement (PPA) prices and the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for utility-scale wind and solar projects to all-time lows. The findings were presented by Mark Bolinger, research scientist in the Electricity Markets and Policy Department at LBNL, during a webinar focused on trends in deployment, cost, performance, pricing, and market value for utility-scale wind and solar.
Bolinger noted that from 2006 to 2019 wind power capacity operating on the U.S. grid had grown by nearly an order of magnitude—from 11.5 GW to 106 GW. The percentage increase in utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity, which researchers define as ground-mounted systems with capacities greater than 5 MWAC, has been even greater, increasing from 1.7 GW in 2012 to 29 GW at the end of 2019.…
The post Economics Drive Design of DER Systems appeared first on POWER Magazine.
Distributed energy systems are transforming the way power is produced and distributed. The decentralized model of power generation, where energy is produced closer to where it will be used, rather than at a large plant elsewhere and sent through the traditional grid, has several advantages, including reducing transmission losses and lowering carbon emissions.
An Oct. 1 session of Experience POWER, supported by POWER magazine, titled “Economics of Distributed Energy Systems,” brought together a panel of industry executives to discuss the many economic factors that need to be considered when developing a distributed energy project. The session provided an overview of those considerations, beginning with the design of cost-effective distributed generation systems. It also looked at the economics and carbon trade-off of enabling photovoltaic integration with storage, along with systems that integrate renewables with hybrid energy storage.
The panel of industry executives included Peter Lilienthal, CEO of HOMER Energy, and developer of HOMER’s hybrid power optimization software.…
Nevada law has included net metering provisions for more than 20 years. Net metering is an arrangement that allows energy generated by a customer’s leased or purchased solar system to offset monthly power bills. It also permits excess energy supplied to the grid to earn credits, which are then automatically applied to future billing periods in which more energy is consumed than produced.
Historically, net metering was a one-for-one transaction in Nevada. For every kWh supplied to the grid, a credit was given to the customer for one kWh in the future. The scheme changed in 2015 when the Nevada Public Utilities Commission (PUC) created a laddered approach that ratcheted down the value of customer-generated energy over a period of years to about 2¢/kWh, which was much less than the retail rate of about 11¢/kWh. The change effectively stopped all construction on new residential rooftop solar systems.
Through Assembly Bill 405 (AB 405), the Nevada Legislature modified the net metering rate structure effective June 15, 2017.…