Clean Edge Finds Global Solar Deployment Exceeds Wind for First Time
The global clean-energy picture for 2013 was a classic good news-bad news story, according to the Clean Energy Trends 2014 report issued today by clean-tech research and advisory firm Clean Edge, Inc. The industry saw dazzling growth, success, and rising stock prices in some sectors – most notably solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment – but downward trends and policy and finance hurdles in others.
Last year also marked a significant transition in the history of clean energy: for the first time since Clean Edge began tracking global markets in 2000, the world installed more new solar PV generating capacity, 36.5 gigawatts, than wind power (35.5 GW). Record levels of new solar deployment in China, Japan, and the U.S. combined with a down year in the wind industry to create this unprecedented crossover.
The global solar market's continued double-digit growth of 15 percent, plus a modest uptick in biofuels' market size, was not enough to overcome the wind industry's lackluster performance. As a result, combined global revenue for solar PV, wind power, and biofuels held nearly steady at $247.6 billion, down just slightly from $248.7 billion in 2012.
The full Clean Energy Trends 2014 report can be downloaded for free at www.cleanedge.com.
Siemens to construct factory for offshore wind power in Great Britain
Siemens is investing more than EUR190 million (GBP160 million) in new offshore production facilities in Great Britain. Production of rotor blades for offshore wind turbines of the 6-megawatt class is planned, with a new logistics- and service centre slated for Hull. The British Prime Minister David Cameron and Michael Suess, member of the managing board of Siemens AG and CEO of the Energy Sector will reaffirm their common dedication to these projects this afternoon in Hull.
"Our decision to construct a production facility for offshore wind turbines in England is part of our global strategy: we invest in markets with reliable conditions that can ensure that factories can work to capacity. The British energy policy creates a favourable framework for the expansion of offshore wind energy. In particular, it recognizes the potential of offshore wind energy within the overall portfolio of energy production", stated Michael Suess, member of the managing board of Siemens AG and CEO of the Energy Sector.
The offshore wind market in Great Britain has high growth rates, with an even greater potential for the future. Wind power capacity has doubled here within two years, to roughly 10 gigawatts. By 2020, a capacity of 14 gigawatts is to be installed at sea alone to combine the country's environmental objectives with secure power supply. Projects for just over 40 gigawatts are currently in the long-term planning.
GE Taps Into The Coolest Energy Storage Technology Around
Batteries are far from being the only new energy storage technology out there and one of the more obscure and unlikely initiatives has just received a massive vote of confidence from GE.
A tiny UK company called Highview Power stores energy by using cheap, off-peak energy to cool air to -196°C using a conventional industrial refrigeration plant, turning 700 litres of ambient air into a litre of “liquid air” that can be stored in a simple insulated tank. When you need the energy, you simply open the tap, the liquid air turns back into a gas, expands in volume, drives a turbine and creates electricity. If you add heat when you release the gas, you make the process more efficient.
Highview says liquid air energy storage (LAES) has advantages over other emerging storage technologies in that it uses well-established technologies and doesn’t require any inputs such as the lithium that batteries need – the most exotic material involved in the process is stainless steel, the company says, while the extra heat can come from the process of cooling the air or from the waste heat of other industrial processes, including power stations. It is not geographically constrained like pumped hydro, it is long-lasting unlike many battery technologies and there is an existing global industrial gases infrastructure it can tap into. And unlike for a gas such as hydrogen, the storage tanks do not have to be specially reinforced or highly pressurised.
Fresh Breeze for Wind Power in China
Chinese wind-power stocks, once given up for dead in the investor doldrums, have roared back to life in recent weeks on expectations of government support for the renewable energy sector and overseas demand.
Investors are betting on future Chinese government policy directives and subsidies that boost profits for manufacturers of wind power turbines, gearboxes, blades, towers and transmission equipment.
They're also betting that multinational wind energy companies such as Vestas, Siemens,General Electric and Senvion will step up orders for the Chinese-made equipment and parts that are used to build offshore and onshore wind energy farms worldwide.
Contractors building big wind farms, particularly those off the European coast, often buy lower-rung products such as steel towers from China. And tower fabricators such as China's Titan Wind (002531:Shenzhen) are making good money on that demand.
Shenzhen-listed Titan, which is only nine years old and listed in 2010, has seen its stock value climb 55% since the beginning of the year. The company has gotten major contracts from Vestas and GE. And it's currently planning to build a factory in India to complement existing plants in China and Denmark.
Pilots complain that glare from the world's biggest solar power plant is blinding them
Airplane pilots reported that they were blinded by the intense sunlight reflecting off some of the 340,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System on the California-Nevada border. Yet six months elapsed before their reports reached the regulator that oversees the plant, which is located near the Las Vegas airport.
The mirrors, called heliostats, focus the sun on 459-foot-high (140 meter) towers that contain water-filled boilers. The concentrated sunlight boils the water to create steam, driving turbines that generate 377 megawatts of carbon-free electricity. The heat is so blistering that it has melted the feathers of b irds in mid-flight .
Planes fly far too high to be affected by the heat—but by not the light. “From the pilot’s seat of my aircraft the brightness was like looking into the sun,” reported one pilot as his small plane climbed from 6,000 to 12,000 feet after taking off from the Boulder City, Nevada, airport. In a report he filed with the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), the pilot wrote that, “In my opinion the reflection from these mirrors was a hazard to flight because for a brief time I could not scan the sky in that direction to look for other aircraft.”
A Peek Into The Astonishing Future Of Wind Power
“What if you could scoop the air? Scoop it and move it downward, amplifying its kinetic energy along the way, concentrate it to a single point of intensity, the way a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight to a single incendiary point?”
Dr. Daryoush Allaei, an engineer and founder of Sheerwind, an innovative wind power company, is concentrating his unique thought process on harnessing wind energy in new ways.
“And assuming you could do this technically, could you do it on a large enough scale to make it economically feasible?” Allaei writes in his company description. “More to the point, could you generate energy so inexpensively that it stages a renaissance?”
Sheerwind is pushing the boundaries of wind power innovation with its bladeless wind turbine, called INVELOX. The turbines funnel wind into ground-level generators through a tapering passageway that squeezes and accelerates the air. The units are about half as tall as traditional wind towers, which rise up to 260 feet into the air, and the ground-based turbine blades are more than 80 percent smaller than conventional wind turbine blades, which are about 115-feet long. The device resembles a giant gramophone that sucks in wind instead of blurting out sound. Cont'd..
How crowdfunding solar power is democratizing the way we finance clean energy
Less than 24 hours after Oakland-based Mosaic allowed crowdfunding campaigns in January 2013 in which investors could pitch as little as $25, they raised enough money to fund four clean energy projects in California for affordable housing projects. More than 400 investors raised $313,000. The investors, on average, paid about $670 each.
Last week, Mosaic launched a new platform on their site, allowing people to finance solar arrays on homes, in addition to the commercial projects already being funded. Since its initial launch in 2010, company has raised more than $7 million in investments through crowdfunding with a 100 percent payback rate. In its seed rounds, Mosaic raised $3.4 million from venture capitalists. In 2012, Mosaic received a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy.
The biggest project to date is installing solar panels on 1,500 military homes in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Another successful project included installing a solar roof on Pinnacle Charter School in Denver, Colorado, which doubled as clean energy education for the students. Full Article.
California ISO Breaks New Solar Production Record
Solar power production hit a new record of 4,093 megawatts on Saturday, March 8, 2014. The previous record was 3,926 megawatts (MW) set the previous day on March 7. Electricity generated from solar has more than doubled from June 7, 2013 when the ISO recorded 2,071 MW of peak production — and output has more than quadrupled from the summer of 2012. The new record generation can instantaneously power about 3 million homes.
Meanwhile, when combining ISO wind resources of 5,890 MW* and solar resources of 5,231 MW, the two resources now account for 11,121 MW interconnected to the ISO grid. In total, all renewables (including geothermal) make up about 15,000 MW of the ISO generation mix. The current wind production record stands at 4,302 MW set June 23, 2013.
"This shows that California is making remarkable progress in not only getting new resources approved and connected to the grid, but making meaningful contributions in keeping the lights on as well," says Steve Berberich, ISO President and Chief Executive Officer. "The milestones illustrate that we are well into a new era when clean, renewable energy is shouldering its share of our electricity needs — and that is exciting."
GE Introduces Smart, Powerful 2.75-120 Wind Turbine
At the European Wind Energy Association's annual conference, GE) announced its 2.75-120 wind turbine, a smarter, more powerful turbine. Part of GE's brilliant wind platform, the 2.75-120 provides 5 percent more annual energy production than GE's 2.5-120 model and is available with various tower technologies, ranging between 85-139 meters, and optional energy storage.
"As we accelerate our platform's growth in Europe, we will continue to invest in technology such as the 2.75-120's flexible tower and other energy storage options, making GE's wind turbines more customizable for developers and operators," said Cliff Harris, general manager of GE's renewable energy business in Europe.
The 2.75-120 is available on a steel, hybrid or space frame tower, helping to tailor the turbine for unique site conditions and bring wind power to new places across the continent. The range of tower height spans 85-139 meters tall.
Short-term or long-term energy storage is available with the 2.75-120, making wind power more predictable, flexible and fast responding through battery software applications. Short-term storage is integrated at the turbine level and long-term storage is centralized for the wind farm. These options further customize GE's offering based on-site or operator needs.
New Report: U.S. Solar Market Grows 41%, Has Record Year in 2013
Continuing its explosive growth, the U.S. solar industry had a record-shattering year in 2013. According to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association's (SEIA) Solar Market Insight Year in Review 2013, photovoltaic (PV) installations continued to proliferate, increasing 41percent over 2012 to reach 4,751 megawatts (MW). In addition, 410 MW of concentrating solar power (CSP) came online. Solar was the second-largest source of new electricity generating capacity in the U.S., exceeded only by natural gas. Additionally, the cost to install solar fell throughout the year, ending the year 15 percent below the mark set at the end of 2012.
At the end of 2013 there were more than 440,000 operating solar electric systems in the U.S. totaling over 12,000 MW of PV and 918 MW of CSP.
The U.S. installed 2,106 megawatts in the fourth quarter alone, 44 percent of the annual total. This makes Q4 2013 by far the largest quarter in the history of the U.S. market, exceeding the next largest quarter by 60 percent. Cont'd
Follow The Money: Who Is Funding Energy Storage And Why
To understand how the energy storage in the United States – particularly California — is heating up, just follow the money.
Green Charge Networks, a Silicon Valley storage installer, announced Tuesday that it has lined up a $10 million fund from TIP Capital to finance projects. Green Charge installs lithium-ion batteries for businesses, who could forgo owning the storage equipment and pay for energy storage as a service via a long-term contract instead.
“Energy storage is what a lot of clean energy financing companies are working toward,” said Vic Shao, CEO of Green Charge Networks, which was founded in 2009. “Everybody realizes that this is what’s coming and they need to get on board.”
This leasing model has succeeded in expanding rooftop solar panel installations at homes and businesses, which could use solar electricity without paying tens of thousands of dollars upfront to own the equipment. Installers often market solar electricity as being cheaper than the electricity from utilities, though that saving usually isn’t guaranteed for the duration of the contract.
Storage installers tend to pitch their services to businesses and government agencies that want to reduce the so-called “demand charge.” A utility collects the fee to help pay for its readiness to generate and send power to meet its customers need, especially when demand is high. Cont'd
Trina Solar and ANU Jointly Develop High Efficiency Solar Cell
Trina Solar a global leader in photovoltaic modules, solutions and services, announced today that researchers from Trina Solar and the Australian National University have jointly developed a new high-efficiency solar cell.
The laboratory scale Interdigitated Back Contact cell was developed at the Australian National University Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems under a research and development contract with Trina Solar through a collaboration contract with the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore. After two years of research, funded by Trina Solar, the ANU has developed, with contribution from Australian consulting firm PV Lighthouse, an IBC silicon solar cell, which was independently tested by the Fraunhofer CalLab in Germany to be able to deliver an efficiency of 24.4%, putting it among the most efficient solar cells to date.
Trina Solar is now developing a commercial version of the IBC solar cell as well as an IBC PV module. The commercial cell has already reached an efficiency greater than 22% for a 125mm by 125mm IBC solar cell, and 238W for an IBC PV module (based on 72 cells), which was independently tested by the National Center of Supervision and Inspection on Solar Photovoltaic Products Quality of China. Though it is currently in laboratory scale, the new solar cell will soon be ready for industrialized mass production.
Tesla to raise $1.6 billion for 'Gigafactory'
Tesla's grand expansion plans will be funded in part by raising $1.6 billion through a bond issue that the automaker announced Wednesday.
The money will be used to build what its founder Elon Musk has dubbed the "Gigafactory" and for production of a more affordable, new mass market vehicle.
The massive factory is expected to produce more lithium ion batteries annually by 2020 than were produced worldwide in 2013. Those batteries, and the reduction in their cost, are vital to Tesla's ability to produce a cheaper car in numbers that could catapult the company into the ranks of the major automakers.
The electric car maker's current model, the Tesla S, has a starting price of $69,000 and can go more than 200 miles between charges.
The new factory, expected to cost $4 billion to $5 billion, could be located in either Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico or Texas, the company said Wednesday. It could take up between 500 and 1,000 acres, employ about 6,500 people, and produce batteries needed for about 500,000 cars per year, Tesla said. Tesla recently increased its sales forecast for 2014, saying it expects global sales to reach 35,000 vehicles.
Construction expected to start later this year and production at the plant due to begin in early 2017.
SMA acquires Danfoss' solar inverter business
Germany-based SMA Solar is to acquire Danfoss’ solar inverter business.
Danfoss will acquire 20% of SMA’s shares with a value of €302 million (US$415 million) in return for selling its inverter unit.
It will receive SMA shares at a price of €43.57 50% premium on the average price during (US$59.86) the past 60 days.
The alliance between SMA and Danfoss brings together respectively the world's largest and seventh largest inverter manufacturers by market share, according to an IHS study published in May.
“The strategic alliance with Danfoss strengthens SMA’s leading position in the global photovoltaic market. We are faced with a highly competitive market environment and increased price pressure,” said Pierre-Pascal Urbon, chief executive of SMA.
“In this context, SMA will benefit from Danfoss’ years of experience in automated drives. This market has been characterised by fierce competition for a long time. Accordingly, the strategy of the Danfoss group targets continuous cost improvements through global sourcing and cost down initiatives. By establishing a close cooperation there is significant potential to improve the cost position in both companies,” added Urbon
The inverter market has been hit by the emergence of bigger utility projects that require larger but fewer inverters, and the rise of new players in the microinverter market that have stolen share in the residential sector.
Seattle Company Plans First Offshore Wind Farm on Pacific Coast
The nation’s first offshore wind farm on the Pacific Coast cleared a crucial federal hurdle after Seattle’s Principle Power received approval to move forward on a commercial lease for the proposed $200 million, 30-megawatt project.
Principle Power received the go-ahead this month from a Department of the Interior agency to lease 15 square miles of federal waters, 18 miles from Coos Bay, Ore. If the lease request gets final approval, the WindFloat Pacific project would anchor the first offshore turbines in federal waters on the West Coast. It also would be the first in the nation to use triangular floating platforms instead of single piles driven into the ocean floor.
At this stage of the complicated federal process, Principle’s plan is considered a demonstration project. DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) released a finding that there are “no competitive interests for the offshore area of Oregon” where the company has requested the commercial lease. That finding clears the way under BOEM’s non-competitive leasing process for Principle Power to submit an implementation plan for the project. WindFloat Pacific will demonstrate floating offshore wind technology; it is one of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) seven Offshore Wind Advanced Technology Demonstration Projects.
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