Arizona utility signs game-changing deal cutting solar power prices in half
Joe Romm for ThinkProgress: Tucson Electric Power to buy new solar power at under 3 cents per kWh, a "historically low price."
Solar Power To Threaten Conventional Power By 2020
Leonard Hyman & William Tilles for OilPrice.com: By 2030, solar-plus-storage could threaten the economic relevance of their distribution grids by making less necessary the connection with the local electric utility.
The US is using so much solar power that it will have to prepare for the August eclipse
Michael J. Coren for Quartz: As the shadow of the moon passes over North America, the eclipse is expected to knock out about 70 megawatts a minute- two to three times faster than the typically daily drop, reports the California Independent System Operator.
Unsubsidized wind and solar now the cheapest source for new electric power
Lucas Mearian for Computer World: Between 2015 and 2021, China is expected to install 40% of all worldwide wind energy and 36% of all solar
India Gets Record Low Bid to Build Solar Power, Minister Says
Anindya Upadhyay for Bloomberg: The price of solar power in India fell to a record low of 3.15 rupees (5 U.S. cents) a kilowatt-hour in a competitive tender where French firm Engie SA's local arm won rights to develop 250 megawatts.
The World's Biggest Solar Energy Storage Farm Is Set to Launch in Australia
David Nield for Science Alert: Construction will soon be underway on a gigantic solar farm in South Australia that's set to be the biggest of its kind in the world - thanks to 3.4 million solar panels and 1.1 million individual batteries.
The project is expected to be completed by the end of the year, at which point the huge plant should outdo all other solar farms in terms of overall battery capacity - although other solar facilities are larger in terms of land area.
How drones are helping design the solar power plants of the future
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Katie Fehrenbacher for T he Guardian:   At the edge of a plot of muddy farmland, a few miles down the road from the University of California at Davis, an engineer takes a few quick steps across crop rows and lets go of a three-foot drone. Within seconds, the device - which weighs less than 2lbs and carries a powerful camera - ascends hundreds of feet into the cold, clear, blue sky and begins to snap detailed photos of the ground far below, including a long row of large solar panels mounted on steel poles.
This flight is just a test, demonstrated by Kingsley Chen, the drone fleet coordinator for SunPower at the solar company's research and development center, which is under construction and about a two-hour drive northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area. The drone will enable SunPower to survey a wide region and help design a solar power farm that can fit more solar panels on a piece of land, more quickly and for lower costs than it previously could. Â Con'td...
Saudi Arabia Plans the World's Cheapest Power With Solar and Wind
Wael Mahdi for Bloomberg: Saudi Arabia will award its first tender to build 700 megawatts of solar and wind energy in September, with the cost of power forecast to be the lowest in the world, Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said.
OPEC’s biggest oil producer plans to build 300 megawatts of solar plants in the al-Jouf area in northern Saudi Arabia and 400 megawatts of wind projects in nearby Tabuk, he said. Requests to qualify for bidding will be issued Feb. 20 and bids will be on April 17.
“The terms on renewable contracts will be motivating so that the cost of generating power from these renewable sources will be the lowest in the world,” Al-Falih said Wednesday at a press conference in Riyadh. Cont'd...
Arab gulf firms set their sights on the region's growing appetite for solar power
Tom DiChristopher for CNBC: Some of the world's top oil exporters want to be major players in solar power, too.
Middle East and North African countries, blessed by ample sunlight and open space, are increasingly adopting solar power. But it's not European, Chinese or American companies taking the lead on some of the region's largest solar parks. It's local firms that are relatively new to renewable energy.
Analysts say meeting solar demand at home is just the start. Some of these companies could become global competitors in the fast-growing market for large solar power plants. Cont'd...
The World's Largest Solar Plant Is Now Online in India
Avery Thompson for Popular Mechanics: The world's largest solar power plant has just been completed in Kamuthi, in Tamil Nadu, India. The new plant adds 648 MW to the country's generating capacity.
The Kamuthi Solar Power Project takes the title of world's largest solar plant from the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which was completed two years ago and has a capacity of 550 MW.
The Kamuthi Solar Power Project was built in only 8 months, and cost $679 million to complete. It contains 2.5 million individual solar panels, covers an area of almost 4 square miles, and is expected to power 150,000 homes. Cont'd...
Want to boost wind and solar power? Bring them together
Ben Jervey for GreenBiz: What’s keeping solar and wind power from fully taking over the electric grid? For starters, the sun only shines during the day. Wind blows intermittently, is seasonally variable, and is not always blowing when the energy is needed.
But what if solar and wind work together? "Wind resource tends to complement solar resource," said Sarah Kurtz of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "Here in Colorado, for instance, the windiest time is during the winter and spring months. In winter, we don’t have as much sunshine, but we tend to get more wind and stronger wind."
A handful of enterprising renewable energy developers are exploring how solar and wind might better work together, developing hybrid solar-wind projects to take advantage of the power-generating strengths of each — with the two technologies in tandem serving as a better replacement for climate-warming fossil fuels than either could be alone. Cont'd...
World's Largest Solar Project Would Generate Electricity 24 Hours a Day, Power 1 Million U.S. Homes
Lorraine Chow for EcoWatch: The race to build the world's largest solar power plant is heating up. California-based energy company SolarReserve announced plans for a massive concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Nevada that claims to be the largest of its kind once built.
SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the $5 billion endeavor would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1 million homes. That amount of power is as much as a nuclear power plant, or the 2,000-megawatt Hoover Dam and far bigger than any other existing solar facility on Earth, the Review-Journal pointed out.
"It's a big project," Smith told the publication. "It's an ambitious project." Cont'd...
Chernobyl is to become the world's largest solar power plant
ALEXANDRU MICU for ZME Science: The Ukranian government plans to turn Chernobyl, the site of the world’s most famous nuclear meltdown, into a sprawling solar power plant — the largest in the world.
Since the meltdown on April 26, 1986, no one’s been able to find any good uses for Chernobyl. A 1,600 square mile area was drenched in radiation and deemed an “exclusion zone,” so everyone was evacuated after the clean-up efforts were concluded and the plant was sealed in its ubiquitous sarcophagus. The buildings, goods, and infrastructure in the area were abandoned so fast that the city looks like time froze there 30 years ago — albeit with a Falloutesque look. Since we left, nature took over, and for the most part, is thriving in our absence (though the microbes that decompose dead organic matter seem to be having a hard time living here.)
In a recent interview, however, Ukraine’s ecology minister Ostap Semerak said that the government is negotiating with two US investment firms and four Canadian energy companies to develop Chernobyl’s solar potential. The area is uniquely suited for the purpose — the land is extremely cheap, much of the required infrastructure, such as roads are already built. Even better, the power lines that served the old 4GW reactor are still useable. Cont'd...
Electric Utilities Prepare for a Grid Dominated by Renewable Energy
Julia Pyper for GTM: A growing number of electric industry leaders agree that it’s only a matter of time before renewable energy resources dominate their grid systems.
In California, it’s already a reality, said Steve Berberich, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator Corporation. On a typical day, CAISO will pull about 30,000 megawatts of energy production, with around 6,500 megawatts from solar, 5,000 megawatts from wind and another 5,000 from geothermal and other services on the system. In addition, California’s grid system has roughly 4,000 megawatts of behind-the-meter solar, which is growing at a rate of about 70 megawatts per month.
In any given day, California gets more than 30 percent its electricity from renewable energy. On many days that amount climbs to 40 percent, and on some days renewables reach 50 percent, said Berberich.
“Now we have to think about the system as a renewable energy-based system complemented by other things,” he said, speaking at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention this week in Chicago. Cont'd...
Morocco to Build World's Largest Concentrated Solar Power Plant
Cole Mellino for EcoWatch: Morocco imports 97 percent of its energy, and yet it has one of the highest rates of solarinsolation of any country—about 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, according to the Solar GCC Alliance. To put that in perspective, the Guinness Book of World Records puts Yuma, Arizona as the sunniest place on Earth with an average of 4,055 hours of sunshine per year (the theoretical maximum is 4,456), whereas the sunniest place in Germany, which still has a robust solar industry, gets a mere 1,800 sunshine hours a year. So it’s no surprise that Morocco is tapping into its abundant sunshine for energy.
Morocco is building “a complex of four linked solar mega-plants that, alongside hydro andwind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020,” reports The Guardian. When the entire project is finished, it will be the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. The first phase, Noor 1, will go live next month. Cont'd...
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