The days of over-designing and over-building solar power plants to make up for unforeseen generation losses are gone. This is largely thanks to the emerging solar strategy of pursuing every tenth of a percent of system performance by better understanding the impact of equipment specifications, plant monitoring, and maintenance on the Performance Ratio, and therefore on the bottom line.
Connexus Energy and NREL are experimenting with pollinator plants that attract bees and butterflies around the solar panels at its solar power plant in Ramsey, Minnesota.
Researchers at NREL have devised a way of using discarded single use plastic to make new products. It could keep much of the world’s plastic trash out of landfills and the world’s oceans.
The National Renewable Energy Lab is building the first national database of albedo, or reflected light values, to help model the performance of bifacial solar panels, the highest-yield type of panel in the industry thus far. The database is an outgrowth of a large field test of bifacial panels at the lab, which includes a variety of fixed-mount and tracker systems and a mix of bifacial panels from different manufacturers.
The U.S. Agency for International Development is supporting a Renewable Energy and Smart Grid Suppliers Forum to help U.S. companies selling products and services for utility-scale renewable energy and smart grids to increase their sales in developing countries.
Two reports published by the US Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) show that soft costs — such as financing and other non-hardware costs — now make up the largest section of solar installation costs, coming in at 64% of the total price for residential solar energy systems. The … [continued]
Verizon and the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory announced a first-of-kind partnership aimed at finding innovative ways to reduce energy consumption in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, which currently accounts for 3% of US electrical power consumption.
GE just made a number of huge solar power announcements….
