Out with the Old, In with the New -- Solar replacing Coal

The investment in solar by Elon Musk and others is paying off.

For the first time ... First Solar Inc. is making panels for less than China’s biggest producer, justifying more than $3 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government.

After investing $775 million in technology, First Solar is producing panels for as little as 40 cents a watt, or about 15 percent less than China’s Trina Solar Ltd. In 2019, First Solar’s module cost could be as low as 25 cents a watt, according to analysts’ models.

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Jobs from the last two centuries go away, and new ones emerge. In this case, solar workers who once were coal workers...

A solar energy company has announced a new project in Southern Illinois that will retrain former coal industry workers in renewable energy. Solar Alliance Energy Inc., based in San Diego, says it plans to build a 500 kW community solar generation and battery storage project in Southern Illinois over 2.5 years starting in 2017. The pilot project will include a workforce redevelopment program to provide skills training and jobs to 30 unemployed and underemployed coal industry workers.

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Electric Utilities Change Rate Schedules to Rob You of Solar Savings

Electric utilities change the rate schedule so owners of solar arrays pay a higher rate during the evening, and can only sell power back to the grid at a lower rate than previous.

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Solar for everyone -- Elon Musk will make Tesla Car Company a broader brand

By snapping up Solar City, Elon Musk plans to provide Solar for everyone, and will make Tesla Car Company a broader brand. Plus - you can make your Tesla part of the autonomous fleet, when you are not using it...!

You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Porsche Completes Photovoltaic Monolith

At StackOverflow, we read about Porsche's commitment to electrifying vehicles. While the car maker is not so keen on autonomous drive, they are interested in the performance and reliability of electric motors.

The company is making significant investment in photovoltaics demonstrates Porsche’s drive for additional electric car research, as well as conservation of resources. Porsche announced that its first all-electric car would be available by the end of this decade.

According to this article, Porsche does not plan to develop self-driving vehicles.

Bridge Your Solar Load at Night with a TeslaMotors Battery

Tesla is offering a consumer battery, called the Powerwall, priced starting at $3,500, and derived from the batteries the car company uses in its Model S vehicles.

So when it is nighttime, or cloudy, your solar panels are not doing anything. When becalmed, your wind powered generator is idle. With a battery to store the energy produced during peak times, your home will be free of the grid more often. The device, which Tesla will start producing later this year, will be installed by licensed technicians

Read more... TreeHugger

What to do when the wind "don't blow an' the sun don't shine"

Solar and wind are the most talked about renewables when it comes to alternate energy sources. But when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun "don't" shine, how does one meet one's power needs?

A logical approach is to store electricity when those types of generators are out peak output, for consumption later. Batteries can be environmentally unfriendly, costly, and not meet performance goals.

Vanadium flow batteries offer the kind of low cost, high capacity energy storage solutions that will help transform the wind and the sun into power sources that rival fossil fuel plants for stability and reliability, but as always there are a couple of obstacles: where to get the transition metal vanadium, at a reasonable cost? One possibility is to recover the metal from other industrial activities, such as oil/gas production, or from recycling.

On a related note, why is the cost of solar so much less in Germany compared to the US? One possibility is that this s primarily due to Germany's more mature market, so market scale and associated learning-induced "cost reductions" are at work. However, as this article discusses, it seems the tax structure in the US is skewed away from adoption-incentives, resulting in higher costs for American buyers of solar over German ones.