Here’s a great little video if you love seeing wind turbines being installed. This one is huge and getting placed off shore into the North Sea off the coast of Belgium, one of the toughest environments for wind turbines to operate.
The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. It’s filled with journals that have articles with titles like “Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of electrons from heavy flavor…
According to the latest report from GTM Research the U.S. solar energy storage market will expand rapidly over the next 4-5 years. The report, The Future of Solar-Plus-Storage in the U.S., forecasts the nation to install 318 cumulative megawatts of behind-the-meter solar-plus-storage capacity through 2018.
FIGURE: U.S. Solar-Plus-Storage Annual Market Size Forecast
Between California’s recent mandate for the state to procure 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage for its grid and the announcement of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the energy storage market is nearing a tipping point. Paired with solar, energy storage becomes even more attractive given its ability to take advantage of the 30 percent federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) in certain situations. It also allows the owner to scale down the size of the system, as opposed to installing a stand-alone system, resulting in lower effective upfront costs.
The report identifies several trends helping solar-plus-storage grow to a billion dollar business in the U.S. including strong solar PV growth, falling battery costs, state incentives, net energy metering (NEM) changes and resiliency needs.
However, significant barriers do remain. While the cost for lithium-ion storage is falling by 20-30 percent annually, the price-point for both lithium-ion and other technologies is still high. Additionally, the report expresses concern about the ability of solar-plus-storage to participate in multiple use cases such as demand response and ancillary services. “Currently only PJM and a handful of other pilot programs allow participation of aggregated solar-plus-storage in wholesale markets or for grid services,” said Senior Energy Storage Analyst and report author Ravi Manghani.
The report provides a detailed state-level forecast, breakdown of the vendor ecosystem, market drivers and barriers, and an economic analysis for residential and non-residential end customers.
By 2018, GTM Research expects that one in ten new commercial solar customer will pair its installation with solar. “The key driver for this growth in commercial solar-plus-storage deployments is attractive end-customer economics,” said Manghani. “In this report, we quantify end-customer economics for three end-customer types across multiple utilities and conclude that for some of those customer-utility combinations, the economics look promising even today.”
Additional Key Findings from the report:
• Behind-the-meter solar-plus-storage in the U.S. will be a 169 MW market in 2018
• The annual market value in dollars will grow from $42 million in 2014 to more than $1 billion by 2018
• California will have the largest market share of solar-plus-storage through 2018, largely due to the fact that it will continue to be the biggest behind-the-meter solar market
• For a typical commercial end customer, solar-plus-storage systems can provide electricity bill savings of 20% to 30%, depending on system size
• Solar-plus-storage penetration for commercial customers is set to grow from 1% in 2014 to 11% by 2018
Throughout 2014, SunPower has invested in integrated technology solutions to help home and business owners manage their cost of energy. According to the company, these moves aim to reinforce SunPower’s evolution to offering Smart Energy solutions for its residential, commercial and utility customers. Recent key activities include:
- Yesterday, SunPower announced an exclusive agreement with Sunverge for residential and utility energy storage solutions in the United States and Australia. SunPower and Sunverge expect to make combined solar and storage solutions commercially available in early 2015.
- Earlier this week, SunPower announced a $20 million growth capital investment in Tendril to license the company’s Energy Services Management (ESM) Platform software. Enhanced by SunPower’s vast amount of solar related data, the ESM Platform will power the development of new Smart Energy applications for a broader set of consumers and utilities.
- Last month, the company announced its acquisition of SolarBridge, a leader in integrated microinverter technologies for the solar industry. SunPower will utilize this technology to develop next generation microinverters for use with its high efficiency solar panels.
While none of these investments are as big as Google’s acquisition of Nest earlier this year, this activity by SunPower does send a strong signal that being a vertically integrated solar manufacturer is no longer good enough on it’s own and that comprehensive energy solutions on the customer end will lead to greater success for selling solar energy in the future.
According to a new report, up to 650,000 people are working within the bicycle economy in the European Union. With the right incentives, these figures could reach a million jobs by 2020 according to the European Cyclists’ Federation.
As The Guardian noted :
If cycling’s 3% share of journeys across Europe were doubled, the numbers employed could grow to over one million by 2020.
(…) The study, which the Guardian has seen, finds that cycling has a higher employment intensity than any other transport sub-sector. Growth in the cycling economy should thus have a higher job creation potential than in the automotive industry for example, which employs three times less people per million euros of turnover.
The ECF calculated that the annual economic benefit of cycling in the EU27 is of at least 205 billion euros (256 billion US Dollars). This includes among other benefits savings on fuels, the various health benefits, the lower traffic congestions and air pollution…
If health benefits are the largest – ranging from 114 to 121 billion euros – tourism is another major positive impact as the impact is believed to be of 44 billion euros.
What if the future of transportation within cities were surprisingly low tech ? Bikes are economical, do not emit carbon dioxide or pollution, keep us fit, enable us to avoid traffic congestion and take almost no place to park. It is high time cities and businesses alike promote this transportation mean to make it the norm.
A study by the World Health Organization points out that 10,000 lives could be saved each year and 76,600 jobs would be created in 54 major cities around the world if their citizens biked as much as the Danes do.
To conclude this article, it is worth noting that in Europe, for every car sold, almost two bicycles currently find a new customer as 20 million bikes are sold per year. If these trends were to continue, cities in the near future would have more bikes than cars. This would free a huge amount of space that would be ready for more
Those of you who always have to be on the cutting edge, and will spare no expense to be there, will twinkle with excitement when you hear about the latest in holiday lighting technology. With 16 million color options and a smart phone app, you will have hours of entertainment (and frustration)! RGB (Red, Green, and…
