Price Shock For Solar Panels Not So Shocking After All — Here’s Why
China is eyeballing a sharp increase in the price of solar panels this year, but the solar field is wide open for expansion in other areas.
China is eyeballing a sharp increase in the price of solar panels this year, but the solar field is wide open for expansion in other areas.
Households and businesses played a key role in reducing peak demand and capping wholesale electricity costs in South Australia last month, with data showing that rooftop solar played a major role in reducing and deferring demand peaks in the midst of the heatwave.
SolarReserve has opened its Australian headquarters and a field office near where it will build a 150MW solar thermal power plant.
The state of South Australia has announced approval for the construction of the world’s largest single-tower solar thermal plant to be built near Port Augusta, a 150 megawatt beast that, in the wake of the successful development of the world’s largest Li-ion battery, serves to solidify South Austalia’s role as a world leader in renewable energy.
The South Australia government has contracted the US company SolarReserve to deliver all its power needs, which will be supplied by a 150MW solar tower and molten salt storage facility to be built in the former coal town of Port Augusta.
Originally published on RenewEconomy. By Sophie Vorrath As the South Australian government basks in the glow of procuring a second world-leading and game-changing renewable energy technology project for the state, attention is turning to the finer details of the deal; in particular, how a solar tower power plant with molten … [continued]
In Chile’s last auction for power, SolarReserve bid a world record breaking low price at just 6.3 cents per kWh ($63/MWh) for dispatchable 24-hour solar.
The US-based developers of the world’s leading solar tower and storage technologies has expressed surprise that Australia’s federal government is pursuing “new coal” plants, saying that solar towers with storage beats coal on just about all fronts.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is the form of solar that can store the sun’s energy thermally for on-demand electricity generation. CSP is clean energy, like solar PV or wind, but the back end or the power block works like any thermal energy power station (coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants are thermal energy power stations). The difference is that instead of digging up a finite fuel from the earth, CSP harvests sunlight to make thermal energy.
It seems that the CSP industry is just steamrolling right past the doubters. In the latest development, the company SolarReserve let out word that it is eyeballing the construction of a 2,000 megawatt CSP plant in Nevada, to be dubbed Sandstone.