10 Rooftop Solar and Storage Predictions for the Next Decade

By Barry Cinnamon

Predicting the future is easy; getting the exact timing is very hard — especially with all the emerging technologies and requirements facing the solar and storage industry.

So this year I’m giving myself a whole decade to get these behind-the-meter energy system predictions mostly right.

1.Storage will be standard with solar....

Solar-only installations will become the exception rather than the rule. Changes with net metering, unreliable utility power, lower battery costs, grid-services capabilities and energy management features will drive customers toward selecting more full-service solar and storage offerings. By necessity, the skill set of solar contractors will expand to backup panel and communications cable wiring, as well as complicated commissioning and configuration procedures. Timeframe: now, accelerating over the next five years.

2. ...Which means new cost metrics will be needed

For 20+ years, the solar industry has been measuring costs based on dollar-per-watt capacity and dollar-per-kilowatt-hour generation. But adding batteries to a PV system increases the cost and confuses the energy savings calculations. I’m waiting for the gurus at NREL and LBNL to figure these new metrics out.

For the rest of the story visit: https:10-rooftop-solar-and-storage-predictions-for-decade

Webinar: Targeted Coaching Skills for Instructors Preparing a Diverse Technician Workforce

Wednesday, February 26, 1:00-2:00 pm EDT

Are you ready to teach Generation Z—the most diverse generation to enter U.S. higher education and the workforce in history? Are you seeking ways to recruit and retain women—who continue to lag in participation in the technician workforce? Once you’ve recruited diverse learners and workers to your technician program or workplace, do you know what to do next? This webinar from the team at SRI International will discuss targeted coaching skills that both technician instructors and employers need to know to be successful. It will share broad research findings from both studies and interviews about effective coaching principles and methods. It will spotlight two technician education practitioners who have used these principles and methods to develop effective targeted coaching approaches. You will learn how they used design methods and key principles. You will see some models that you can use to develop your own local targeted coaching program. This webinar will build your understanding of the unique needs of diverse learners and help you understand the opportunities for building on the distinct experiences and perspectives of diversity in both classroom and work apprenticeships. The webinar will be recorded, so sign up even if you can't attend to get a copy of the recorded presentation emailed to you.

To register visit: https://PreparingADiverseWorkforceWebinar

Webinar: State of the U.S. Energy Storage Industry: 2019 Year in Review

Thursday, February 6, 2-3PM ET


Our (Clean Energy Group) annual look back at the year in energy storage will cover advances in the U.S. market, including deployment trends, policy and regulatory updates; the state of the art in energy storage technologies; and the market outlook for the coming years.

This webinar is a presentation of the Energy Storage Technology Advancement Partnership (ESTAP). ESTAP is a federal-state funding and information sharing project that aims to accelerate the deployment of electrical energy storage technologies in the U.S. ESTAP is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity, managed by Sandia National Laboratories, and administered by the Clean Energy States Alliance. Learn more at www.cesa.org/projects/energy-storage-technology-advancement-partnership.

For additional information and to register visit: https://StateofUSEnergyStorage2019

NextEra Looks to Add Batteries to Its Existing Solar Fleet

By: Karl Erik Stromsta

NextEra Energy, North America’s leading wind and solar generator, is combing through its base of existing solar facilities with an eye to retroactively adding batteries, as it adopts a more “aggressive” view on the falling cost of energy storage.

“We increasingly see storage as an important standalone business in its own right,” CEO Jim Robo said Friday on an earnings call. The company is reviewing “a number of opportunities to add storage to our existing solar sites to take advantage of the [Investment Tax Credit] and enhance the value of our existing projects for customers.”

NextEra has already set a precedent for this approach: In 2018 it added a 10-megawatt battery facility to its existing Babcock Ranch solar farm in Florida. Last March things got much more interesting when its Florida Power & Light unit announced plans to build a 409-megawatt/900-megawatt-hour battery project known as the Manatee Energy Storage Center, to be charged by an existing solar facility.

For the rest of the story visit: https://NextEratoAddBatteries

DOE unveils plan to make US global storage leader by 2030

Credit: Green Charge Networks

Plunging lithium-ion battery costs and better performance have pushed energy storage technologies to the forefront of the decarbonization movement. Lithium-ion is already reducing the need for natural gas generation, according to a report from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The group found that some existing natural gas plants could be more expensive than a mix of storage, renewables, efficiency and demand response as early as 2021.

"The department has a bunch of different workstreams on different energy storage technologies. The biggest success story is lithium-ion batteries, which have come down in cost significantly, in no small part because of DOE investment in early-stage research and commercializing those technologies. So these programs are really important," Krishnaswami said.

The DOE program will use "a coordinated suite of research and development funding opportunities, prizes, partnerships and other programs" with an eye to transforming the storage sector by 2030. Its goals include developing new technologies, carrying them from the research phase to private sector adoption and creating a value proposition for these technologies, while also reducing U.S. dependence on foreign raw material and improving the recyclability of storage components.

For the rest of the story visit: https://GlobalStorageLeader2030

Webinar: Financing Resilient Power in Under-Resourced Communities: A Foundation’s Comprehensive Financing Initiative for Solar+Storage Projects

Tuesday, January 28, 2-3pm ET
Financing Resilient Power is a new, groundbreaking philanthropic effort—a $3.3 million initiative of The Kresge Foundation to accelerate the market development of solar PV plus battery storage (solar+storage) technologies in historically underserved communities. The Foundation’s financing initiative—developed with Clean Energy Group that will manage the effort—represents the first time a U.S. foundation has committed to use both its grantmaking and endowment resources in a comprehensive strategy to bring these new clean energy technologies to affordable housing and critical community facilities.

New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation (NYCEEC) is the lender selected to participate in the loan guarantee initiative. The new financing partnership consists of three key elements: a $3 million loan guarantee that provides borrowers and the participating lender a first-of-its-kind payment guarantee to help borrowers avoid default by keeping loan payments current, as well as capacity-building grants to the nonprofit participating lender, and technical assistance grants for eligible project owners and developers to assess the technical and financial feasibility of new solar+storage projects.


To sign up visit: Webinar Registration

Energy Educators Meet to Learn SCADA Systems

Jan 10, 2020

Twenty eight educators representing 17 U.S. states took time out of their winter break to participate in the CREATE Supervisory Controls and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Workshop delivered by Indian River State College.  The workshop featured a day of programming hosted by NextEra Energy Resources, the world's largest generator of renewable energy.  CREATE faculty met with NextEra power generation engineers and subject matter experts to learn about SCADA technology.  The day included a tour of the Renewable Operations Control Center (ROCC), which serves as the monitoring and operations center of NextEra Energy Resource's wind, photovoltaic solar, and battery energy storage fleet.  Participants learned about ROCC Operations processes including plant Start-Up/Shutdown, Curtailment, Daily Work Management, Troubleshooting and Outage restoration, and Energy Market Communications.  The workshop participants also contributed to a draft SCADA job task analysis to identify key knowledge and skills necessary for the energy workforce.  A curriculum scoping activity also laid the groundwork for forthcoming SCADA curriculum development that will be completed in spring 2020.  The group also received the first glimpse of the new Open Source SCADA platform being developed by experts from Indian River and NextEra.  The Open Source platform will be distributed in the year ahead for free access by community colleges participating in the project.

Webinar: How Solar Knowledge Spreads: Who learns what, from whom, and how?

Wednesday, January 22, 1-2pm ET 

Non-hardware “soft” costs now account for about 60% of the cost of a residential solar PV system. As part of the US Department of Energy Solar Energy Evolution and Diffusion Studies 2 (SEEDS2) program, a team of researchers led by the University of Texas at Austin has worked to understand how best practices related to solar installation, permitting, and customer acquisition are transmitted. The project examined how solar information and best practices spread through knowledge “spillovers,” what kind of solar knowledge is most likely spillover, and how decision makers can design policy to facilitate the spread of solar knowledge and drive down solar soft costs. This webinar, hosted by the Clean Energy States Alliance, will present the findings of this research, including network structures and strategies that promote solar knowledge transfer, organizational capacity building, and innovation.

To Register and for more information visit: Webinar Registration

5 Tangible Advances for Long-Duration Energy Storage in 2019

Julian Spector

December 30, 2019

Following long-duration storage is like rooting for a home team that’s always about to win next year.

Lithium-ion batteries utterly dominate grid storage deployments these days. That’s great for the cost decline narrative, in the way that cheap Chinese photovoltaic cells produced a massive expansion in solar deployments. But cost obsession results in technology lock-in, boxing out other tools that could prove useful or even better if given the time and space to grow.

It also makes for homogeneous storylines: In other news, the latest energy storage plant looks and performs exactly like all the other ones; check back as this story develops.

There are good reasons to root for the scrappy upstarts challenging the conventional wisdom and building alternative technologies to store clean energy for days, as will be needed for renewables-heavy grids. But the last decade has seen the long-duration storage field make outlandish promises and instead deliver bankruptcies or a slow-rolled smattering of small demos.

For the rest of the story visit: 5 Tangible Advances Long duration Storage 2019

How Energy Storage’s Growth Trajectory Differs From the Early Days of Solar

December 4, 2019

By Julian Spector

DENVER — It's become a cliche to compare today's energy storage market to where the solar industry was a certain number of years ago. But storage's trajectory differs from the early growth dynamics of solar power in a crucial respect: It transcends the geographic boundaries, dictated by sunshine and policy, that constrained solar's rise.

Fast-acting battery technology performs many roles: frequency regulation, capacity, deferral of wires upgrades, resilience, firming renewable generation and more. It does not rely on a geographically specific weather pattern or any one set of state policies to become valuable, and it's already asserting itself across the U.S., said Daniel Finn-Foley, energy storage director at Wood Mackenzie, speaking Tuesday at GTM's Energy Storage Summit in Denver.

For the rest of the story visit: Energy Storage Growth Trajectory