The US Department of Energy last week awarded $13 million for five solar projects aimed at strengthening domestic solar manufacturing and speeding the commercialization of even more efficient, and even more affordable photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies. The $13 million in awards comes from the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, and they … [continued]
Advocates for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline got a roller coaster of a ride this week when the White House announced the appointment of well known Keystone opponent John Podesta to be White House counselor, only to follow up with an indication that Podesta would recuse himself … [continued]
The US Department of Energy (DOE) and many others have identified the “soft costs” of solar as the biggest cost barriers that need to be knocked down in order to unleash a true solar revolution in the US. As I’ve noted previously, the soft costs of solar are enormously larger … [continued]
The last time we checked, solar cell hardware accounted for only half the cost of a typical solar installation. Well, that’s nothing. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has come out with two new studies demonstrating that non-hardware “soft costs” now account for a whopping 64% of the total. The … [continued]
Originally published on the Rocky Mountain Institute. By Dan Self and Jesse Morris. After RMI launched our Roadmap to 2020 on soft cost reductions with NREL, we realized the U.S. solar industry needed to double down on the most challenging areas identified in the roadmap. At the Solar Power International conference this … [continued]
The cost of solar energy has already plunged a whopping 70 percent in just three years, and it is set to dive right off the charts. The Department of Energy has just announced a new round of $60 million in grants from the innovative solar funding program that has been … [continued]
Sunrun is one of America’s leading home solar companies, and on Tuesday it was announced that the company had been awarded $1.6 million from the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative fund. The money is targeted towards furthering the development and implementation of the solar industry’s first “end-to-end workflow automation … [continued]
Originally published on Rocky Mountain Institute. By Jesse Morris Clean energy advocates are almost universally guilty of a certain level of reverence for Germany—myself included. Often heard are declarations such as, “Of course we can transition to renewable energy in the U.S.—just look at the Germans!” or “Did you know … [continued]
Originally published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory The Energy Department’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently issued a new report,“Non-Hardware (‘Soft’) Cost-Reduction Roadmap for Residential and Small Commercial Solar Photovoltaics, 2013–2020”(PDF) funded by DOE’s SunShot Initiative and written by NREL and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The report builds off … [continued]
Originally published on the Sandia National Laboratory website. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, along with partner institutions Georgia Tech, Bucknell University, King Saud University and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are using a falling particle receiver to more efficiently convert the sun’s energy to electricity in large-scale, … [continued]
