Tesla Powerwall + Solar, SolPad, Gigafactory Solar Roof … (Top 20 CleanTechnica Stories of the…
The most popular CleanTechnica stories of the week were…
The most popular CleanTechnica stories of the week were…
I’m not going to attempt to identify which CleanTechnica stories of 2016 were my favorites, but below is a top 50 list of our 50 most popular articles in 2016 based purely on pageviews. After that, there’s a top 30 list for December (also purely based on pageviews).
A way to incentivize the use of clean energy like solar after dark — instead of gas peakers — to cover peak loads has been proposed in a white paper commissioned by Arizona’s Residential Utility Consumer Office
We’ve seen a lot of commentary on the fact that utility-scale solar power has become the least expensive source of electricity in many places. There is more than that to be found in the data in Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis, Version 10.0, however, and what it tells us is that solar and wind power have benefits apart from the simple facts that their costs are low.
Ice Energy has announced a new model of its thermal energy storage in ice, designed purely with the solar homeowner in mind.
Glorious blue skies and endless sunshine. Warm, balmy breezes. Isn’t that how you envision Hawai’i? Like the slogan, “Everything’s better in Hawaii,” right? Oops, one thing does dampen the impression of Hawai’i, though: its high cost of living, especially for energy.
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.
Last night, on a back lot at Universal Studios, Tesla unveiled the most promising facet of its impending merger with SolarCity — solar shingles as chic and efficient as their cars. These were paired with new Powerwall home batteries that have double the energy density of Tesla’s first Powerwall product. You can watch the full video of the presentation in Steve’s article or further down in this on. The event was primarily for Tesla owners, so it took me longer to get up the hill from the studio gate than it did to ride my Zero from Vernon at rush hour. But I did get to hitch a ride in a swanky Model X, which was a lovely way to start the Tesla world experience.
On October 28, Elon Musk played ringmaster while Tesla and SolarCity showed off their new line of glass solar tiles that generate electricity but look like conventional roof shingles and tiles. Musk told an audience of several hundred invited guests that between 4 and 5 million new roofs are installed in America every year and many times more than that are installed worldwide. If the cost of a solar roof was less than what a homeowner would spend for a conventional roof plus utility bills that wouldn’t have to be paid over the roof’s 30 year useful life, “Why wouldn’t you?” Musk asked.
Three US-based Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) startups are now making the leap to gigawatt-scale CSP projects at the global level. Two — SolarReserve and BrightSource Energy — were recipients of Department of Energy federal support through the Loan Guarantee Program and subsequent ARPA-E awards for R&D that helped them refine their innovative technologies. The third, Glasspoint Solar, took a different approach.