Mexico’s phenomenal solar expansion over the last three years makes it one of the fastest growing solar nations on the planet. Much of this growth has been financed by a host of multilateral development banks, including several from the United States. Four of these banks have just committed to an 80 megawatt project in Chihuahua state being developed by Spain’s X-Elio.
Collins Electrical, a leading solar contractor in California, has forged a strategic partnership with Mechatron Solar, and has installed a demonstration model of the M18KD next to its corporate headquarters in Stockton. The contractor/developer will recommend the Mechatron tracker for commercial and industrial solar projects because of its high energy yield and low levelized (total lifetime) cost of energy, says Gene Gini, CEO of Collins.
The ancient air bellows has been repurposed once again, to drive solar tracker arrays created by Sunfolding, of San Francisco, in a 39 megawatt installation at an undisclosed California location. The cost-saving design has attracted the attention of the ARPA-e program, DOE’s SunShot program, and several venture capitalists.
Researchers at Stanford University have managed to create a map of almost every solar rooftop in America, pulling together satellite images and extracting the information. The DeepSolar data, based on Google’s Inception V3, is the first publicly available, high-fidelity solar installation database in the contiguous United States, the researchers say.
Rooftop solar communities may soon become the latest line of cybersecurity defense for America’s vulnerable electric utility industry, providing emergency power for local consumers while supporting the grid in the event of an attack-based outage.
Alta Devices’ record-setting solar cell has just begun a one-year test by NASA in the latest Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-X) flight investigation, launched in November on board the NG CRS-10 mission. NASA is testing Alta Devices solar technology at the Space Station in order to evaluate the technology for future NASA low-Earth orbit missions, including powering CubeSats, a trending, small, inexpensive satellite design.
Ron Corio, the founder and chief innovation officer at Array Technologies, has been named a Lifetime Achiever within the 2018 S&P Global Platts Global Energy Awards. In a black tie affair, Corio, who has built and delivered 25 gigawatt-years of solar tracker generation to sites around the world, was honored Dec. 6 in New York as a godfather of the solar tracker industry.
If other states follow the California proposal to require solar on all new home builds, the United States could have three times as much solar power as it does now, reckon analysts at Environment America who have produced a new report on the issue.
Advances in thin-film and other new solar technologies are expected to be driven by the demand for lightweight, high-power solutions in the EV, aerospace and wearable solar markets, reckons Matthew Reese, the author of a new study on the evolution of the technology.
Panasonic Eco Solutions, home of the HIT solar panel, is aggressively building out its residential solar installer network on a national basis, seeking to compete more evenly with the likes of Tesla, Sunrun, SunPower, Vivint, and others.
