A new report by Global Data, a market intelligence company, says the cost of generating clean, alternative energy such as solar power is increasingly closer to the cost of generating energy from traditional, non-renewable sources.
The report focuses on the US and China cases,
BELECTRIC, a German solar power company, has helped the solar industry achieve a historic milestone with the installation of more than 1 GW of photovoltaic solar power. The amount corresponds to the system output of a large conventional power plant.
“This is an outstanding event for BELECTRIC and the
Palo Alto-based One Million Lights’ mission is to deliver solar power to those people in rural communities who still depend on dirty kerosene for lighting. By giving them solar lights, students can study more at night and improve their prospects. Now the organization has teamed up with SunPower Foundation on a project called One Million Students. The aim of the project is to educate
Introduction: Vote Solar’s Annie Carmichael recently sat down with Stan Greschner, Director of the Single-family Affordable Solar Homes Program (SASH) at GRID Alternatives. We learned some surprising facts about who’s going solar in California.
Annie Carmichael, VS: Can you tell us about GRID Alternatives and California’s SASH Program?
Apple Inc. has received approval to build two solar power installations at its main data center in North Carolina, allowing the technology giant to run the center entirely with renewable energy by next year.
The two solar farms, which will cover 250 acres near its core data center in Maiden, N.C., will utilize
Three student housing communities will be powered with solar power thanks to an agreement between Campus Crest Communities, a developer of student housing, and SolarCity, a provider of alternative energy. The student communities are located in Greeley (Colorado), Flagstaff (Arizona) and Las Cruces (New Mexico). They will be fitted with more
For much of renewable energy’s history, consumers adopting renewable energy systems faced have two very different options when it came to solar power. They could remain tied to the power grid and use their renewable energy source to offset their electricity use. Or, if they were brave enough, could take the plunge and try going completely off-grid.
Let’s face it: we’re obsessed with mobile technology. Smart phones give us access to the internet while on a road trip, and tablets make it possible to watch our favorite basketball team while suffering through an airport layover.
Although the price of these technologies is dropping
Planning a solar PV power plant to make them efficient is a complex task, but German researchers have developed a software that makes conceptual design simpler.
Researchers at the Fraunhoger Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern, in conjunction with Siemens Energy Photovoltaics, have a
I recently wrote a post critical of radical environmentalists who take rigid positions and refuse to make the tough choices that confront us all in the real world. In particular, I stand in disagreement with people’s unwillingness to exile the tortoises from 4613 acres (about five square miles) in the California desert that would have been used for a gigawatt of solar photovoltaics, an almost
According to the French utility EDF, the French solar PV capacity reached in March 3,000 MW, with over 2,672 MW in mainland France and 339 MW in Corsica and overseas.
According to the data: the total capacity grew by 15 percent this semester in metropolitan France. An additional 1,581 MW are already installed but are waiting to be plugged to the grids.
Not all of this massive capacity may be linked to the grids as most of them have to be connected prior to June to benefit from the local feed-in tariffs. The industry is facing a darker future.
France has seen in recent years a spectacular rise of solar photovoltaic as the capacity grew from 40 MW in 2006 to 81 MW in 2008. Things accelerated afterwards as by the end of 2010 it reached 850 MW.
2011 was an impressive year for solar PV as Enerplan – the local French solar industrial organization – notes in its report. Local capacity in march 2011 was of 1,336 MW, in June it was of 1676 MW, in September 2232 MW.
At the end of the year it had reached 2643 MW. You read that right: the French solar capacity doubled in nine months.
In 2010 I noted in a previous article here that the 5,400 MW objective originally planned for 2020 could be reached in 2013. Given the impressive increase, this well could be the case. However the future for the industry is not that bright:
In 2011, half of the 25,000 jobs that had been created in this industry had been destroyed. The investment bubble created by the high feed in tariffs has boomed and busted as there have been several cuts in FIT since 2010.
What will François Hollande, the new President elected earlier this month, will do about it ? Will the industry be given a sustainable roadmap for the next five years?
Excellent news for solar in Arizona: late last week, the State Legislature put the final kibosh on a bill that would have permanently capped the amount of clean energy used by Arizonans. With your help we’ve been working to defeat the dangerous and misguided HB 2789, which would have prevented any future increase in the state’s clean energy standard.
The Green Deal is a UK Government initiative aimed at reducing C02 emissions and increasing Green technology in UK homes and businesses. The Green Deal is going to be launched in October 2012.
The big driving force behind the Green Deal is the commitment that Tony Blair made to cutting CO2 output by 80% of 1900 levels by 2050. Some have speculated that Mr Blair didn’t actually know what he was signing up to at the time. An 80% reduction in anyone’s eyes is a large figure and what the current Government have realized is that this isn’t something easily achievable simply through tax incentives and red tape, hence the Green Deal was born. The idea is to give loans which are paid back through your energy supplier and there is no up-front cost to the loan. The loans will also be linked to the property and no the occupier.
Green Jobs
The Green Deal is going to create 65,000 jobs over the coming years and we all know that politicians just love a job creation scheme. If the Government can get all the proper structure in place before the initiative is launched there is a chance that a lot of new shiny jobs will be created. The politicians will be falling over themselves to be photographed with a young man fitting a solar panel, saying ‘we created these jobs’.
The only fly in the ointment is that the UK Governments track record, they made a huge error over the first time they incentivized Green technology. The UK Government was paying 42p per kWh to people who fitted solar voltaic panels, which lead to a boom in the up-take of solar panels and created thousands of jobs. But it wasn’t sustainable, ironic, and the scheme was slashed to 21p per kWh causing some firms to scale back and make redundancies. The solar industry took the Government to the high court to challenge their discussion and the word ‘fiasco’ was attached to the whole of the Governments Green credentials.
Green Loans
One huge thing that the UK Government can champion is that the Green Deal loans will have no upfront costs, this will be an incentive to people who are struggling in these times of austerity. To be able to fit these new technologies and save money on their energy bills is going to be a driving factor. There is a caveat of course, the loans have to be lower than ones currently available. No one is going to take out a loan if they can get a better deal from there bank. So the loans associated with the Green Deal need to be competitive against the open market.
Green Apathy
One of the biggest problems that western Governments and environmentalists have been facing over the past few years is apathy both for politics and for Green issues. In the UK people are much more concerned about jobs and their finances than they are about green issues. This is an area that the Government really needs to focus on because if people don’t take up the initiative it might all collapse.
The UK Green Deal is a huge opportunity to revolutionize the Green industry in the UK but there are some hurdles in the way as we have observed in this article. With some good incentives and some hard selling the UK Government can produce the jobs and cut carbon in the UK. One thing that does come out of these large scale Government schemes is that the costs for green technology comes down. Economies of scale dictate that cost prices will fall when there is a large take up of an emerging technology, so we can all look forward to lower prices. The knock on effect can be innovations in the technology itself as well as competition within the market which can further drive prices down.
Only time will tell if the Green Deal is going to be a success but what is evident over the last few years is that if you pitch it properly Green technology can create jobs and build sustainable markets.
Article by Ciaran Oliver.
Just over a week ago, the largest solar park in New England was inaugurated by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, when he switched on Westford Solar Park, a 4.5 MW solar farm in Westford, developed by Cathartes Private Investments and Nexamp.
The park, spreads across 22 acres and features