Solar Power International landed in Salt Lake City, Utah this year and CleanTechnica was on the ground meeting with the change makers, the disruptors, the doers, the movers, and the shakers. We’ve been diving into some of the companies we talked with, but having covered SPI for several years now, we wanted to highlight one of the newer arrivals at the show: electric vehicles.
Utility companies and grid operators in Western Australia are taking down poles and wires and replacing them with standalone systems that use solar panels, inverters, and batteries to create local microgrids.
We connected with Generac’s Chief Marketing Officer and president of its new clean energy business, Russ Minick, at SPI 2019, to talk about its big pivot into energy storage products to learn more about where that strategy came from. Right off the bat, Russ said that Generac had been eyeing the residential energy storage market for quite some time, but until recently, felt that, “it wasn’t worth the diversion of focus.”
Warren’s climate plan is a progressive patriot’s dream plan. Unions, supply management, the moonshot and WWII are all present. And jobs. Lots of jobs.
While there is so much news about Tesla’s vehicles, and sometimes its US rooftop solar business, it’s easy to forget that Tesla continues to bring stable electricity to many parts of the world that rely on diesel or have unstable access to electricity.
SHS are micro-power plants with integrated energy storage that provide electricity to individual buildings or households. SHS typically provide DC power that can be used without any problems for lamps and mobile phone charging. For newly electrified households, these are typically the main power needs. The electricity from SHS is not fully comparable to AC power that we know in developed countries.
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.
Less than two years ago, Tesla built and installed the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in Hornsdale, South Australia, using Tesla Powerpack batteries. Since then, the facility saved nearly $40 million in its first year alone and helped to stabilize and balance the region’s unreliable grid.
Wildfires in California are prompting utility companies to shut down portions of the grid during times of high risk. That is giving a boost to renewable energy and storage companies like Tesla, Sunrun, and Bloom Energy.
Trading excess generation with neighbors is no longer science fiction, writes independent energy expert Fereidoon Sioshansi, publisher of the newsletter EEnergy Informer. An experiment in Switzerland shows that peer-to-peer trading is ready to be scaled up.
