DWP approves deal to buy record-cheap solar power

By Sammy Roth; Photograph by Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times

For a long time, there were two big knocks against solar power: It’s expensive, and it can’t keep the lights on after sundown.

A contract approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shows how much that reality has changed.

Under the 25-year deal with developer 8minute Solar Energy, the city would buy electricity from a sprawling complex of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries in the Mojave Desert of eastern Kern County, about two hours north of Los Angeles. The Eland project would meet 6% to 7% of L.A.’s annual electricity needs and would be capable of pumping clean energy into the grid for four hours each night.

The combined solar power and energy storage is priced at 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour — a record low for this type of contract, city officials and independent experts say, and cheaper than electricity from natural gas.

For the rest of the story visit:Record-cheap solar

Webinar: Battery Energy Storage System Safety: Critical Steps for the Maturing Storage Market

Date: September 19th, 2019 at 2pm ET / 11am PT

Duration: 1 hour

With the rise of variable renewable energy sources comes the need for dispatchability and grid stability. Offering unprecedented flexibility, the battery energy storage solution is being recognized more and more as the “missing link” in the electricity value chain. Just within the past few years alone, gigawatts of battery energy storage systems have been installed across the globe, and the industry is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as battery costs continue to decline and favorable regulatory policies are implemented.

For more information and to register visit: Battery Storage Webinar

Webinar - Grid Modernization: Solving the Question of Where

September 17th, 2019 - 1:00PM ET

Enterprise-level GIS has the ability to help planners, grid operators, marketing, and customer experience professionals coordinate their efforts. GIS gives each of these departments a view of how customers interact with the grid. As the utility business becomes more distributed the ability to visualize the grid, analyze data, and improve operational decision making will make GIS an even more critical tool for the industry.

This webinar will explore:

• How to use GIS to drive a more effective grid modernization strategy.

• How spatial data can help utilities address challenges related to DER.

• How to use spatial data more effectively to understand their customer’s needs.

To Register: Grid Modernization Webinar

Renewables Top Coal For Second Month In A Row

Posted by Betsy Lilian - Solar Industry

Renewable energy sources – biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar and wind – accounted for more than a fifth (20.3%) of net domestic electrical generation during the first five months of 2019, according to a SUN DAY Campaign analysis of recently released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The latest issue of EIA’s “Electric Power Monthly” (with data through May 31) reveals that solar and wind both showed continued growth.

Solar, including small-scale solar photovoltaic systems, increased by 10.9% compared to the first five months of 2018 and accounted for 2.6% of the nation’s total net generation. Small-scale solar (e.g., distributed rooftop systems) – which increased by 20.2% – provided a third (33.3%) of total solar electrical generation.

U.S. wind-generated electricity topped that provided by hydropower by 2.7%. Wind’s share was 8.0% of total electrical output versus 7.8% from hydropower.

Combined wind and solar accounted for 10.6% of U.S. electrical generation through the end of May. In addition, biomass provided 1.5%, and geothermal contributed a bit more than 0.4%.

Moreover, for the five-month period, electricity from renewable energy sources surpassed that from nuclear power. In May alone, renewable-generated electricity exceeded nuclear’s output by almost 10%.

Also in May, for the second month in a row, renewable-generated electricity exceeded that from coal.

For the rest of the story visit: Renewables top coal

Farmers harvest the sun

By Sammy Roth
MARICOPA, Calif. — Jon Reiter banked the four-seat Cessna aircraft hard to the right, angling to get a better look at the solar panels glinting in the afternoon sun far below.

The silvery panels looked like an interloper amid a patchwork landscape of lush almond groves, barren brown dirt and saltbush scrub, framed by the blue-green strip of the California Aqueduct bringing water from the north. Reiter, a renewable energy developer and farmer, built these solar panels and is working to add a lot more to the San Joaquin Valley landscape.

“The next project is going to be 100 megawatts. It’s going to be five times this size,” Reiter said.

Solar energy projects could replace some of the jobs and tax revenues that may be lost as constrained water supplies force California’s agriculture industry to scale back. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, farmers may need to take more than half a million acres out of production to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will ultimately put restrictions on pumping.

Converting farmland to solar farms also could be key to meeting California’s climate change targets. That’s according to a new report from the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.

Working with the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics, the conservancy tried to figure out how California could satisfy its appetite for clean energy without destroying ecologically sensitive lands across the American West. The report lays out possible answers to one of the big questions facing renewable energy: Which areas should be dedicated to solar panels and wind turbines, and which areas should be protected for the sake of wildlife, outdoor recreation, farming and grazing?

For the rest of the story visit: Farming sun

How Japan became the world leader in floating solar power

By Douglas Broom

How do you increase your solar energy output when you need all your land for agriculture and for housing? Answer: take to the water. That’s just what they are doing in Japan.

The world’s first floating solar plant was built in Japan, in Aichi Prefecture in central Honshu. The country’s many inland lakes and reservoirs are now home to 73 of the world's 100 largest floating solar plants and account for half of those plants’ 246 megawatts of solar capacity.

Hyogo Prefecture in southern Honshu has almost 40,000 lakes and already hosts nearly half the floating solar capacity of the world’s 100 largest plants. Many plants are small scale, helping the region to kick-start the move to distributed local power generation which the World Economic Forum has identified as the key to transforming the world’s power supply.

For the rest of the story visit:Floatingsolar

NAWEA/WindTech 2019 Conference

The NAWEA/WindTech 2019 Conference will take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 14th–16th, 2019.  This will be an opportunity for wind energy academics and researchers to discuss the Grand Vision for Wind Energy and its implications. Thought leaders from around the world will present on the pivotal role these technologies will play in the transition from a system based primarily on fossil fuels to one primarily supported by renewable energy. The conference will discuss the grand challenges in wind energy science needed for technological advancements as well as social science and policy aspects related to the transition to the renewable-dominated energy system of the future. This conference joins the longstanding North American Wind Energy Academy (NAWEA) Symposium and the International Conference on Future Technologies in Wind Energy (WindTech) and is developed in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the European Academy of Wind Energy.

For additional information visit: https://www.naweawindtech2019.org/

Siemens inaugurates world’s largest electrothermal energy storage system

By Renewable Energy World Editors - June 12, 2019
Michael Prinz, Managing Director Hamburg Energie GmbH, Andreas Feicht, State Secretary, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, Peter Tschentscher, First Major of Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Markus Tacke, CEO Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Gerhard Schmitz, Technical University Hamburg (TUHH) in front of the ETES. Credit: SGRE

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) said that is has begun operation of its electric thermal energy storage system (ETES), a milestone in the development of energy storage solutions, according to the company.

The heat storage facility is located in Hamburg-Altenwerder and contains around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock as an energy storage medium. It is fed with electrical energy converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that heats the rock to 750°C. When demand peaks, ETES uses a steam turbine for the re-electrification of the stored energy. The ETES pilot plant can thus store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week. In addition, the storage capacity of the system remains constant throughout the charging cycles.

The aim of the pilot plant is to deliver system evidence of the storage on the grid and to test the heat storage extensively. In a next step, Siemens Gamesa plans to use its storage technology in commercial projects and scale up the storage capacity and power. The goal is to store energy in the range of several gigawatt hours (GWh) in the near future. One GWh is the equivalent to the daily electricity consumption of around 50,000 households, said Siemens in a press release.

For the rest of the story visit: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2019/06/siemens-inaugurates-worlds-largest-electrothermal-energy-storage-system.html?cmpid=&utm_source=enl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=energy_storage_news&utm_content=2019-06-18&eid=291094128&bid=2469154

The World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Just Came Online

By: Brian Kahn
6/03/19 6:01pm

The UK is quickly becoming the epicenter of the offshore wind industry. Point in case: On Monday, the first part of the world’s largest and furthest offshore wind farm came online.

The first workers were shuttled 75 miles off the east coast from Grimsby, UK, to the Hornsea One wind farm, which is partially operational. When it comes fully online next year, it will be capable of generating enough electricity to power a million homes. Right now, it’s “only” capable of powering up to 287,000 homes. But the opening of the farm coupled with plans to construct a twin behemoth nearby shows that offshore wind is growing in leaps and bounds.

The massive wind farm currently has 50 of its 174 turbines spinning. When completed, the project will have a generating capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, more than double the capacity of the current largest offshore wind installation (which is also in the UK). Because of its distance from shore, the team responsible for operating them will spend four weeks at sea before returning to port where another team will head on out and take their place.

For the rest of the story visit: https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm-just-came-online-1835215479?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=gizmodo_email&utm_campaign=top

U.S. Energy Storage Market Breaks Record for Megawatts Deployed in a Single Quarter, Growing 232% Year-Over-Year

BOSTON Mass. and WASHINGTON D.C. (June 4, 2019) The United States non-residential storage market had its strongest quarter ever in Q1 2019, according to the new U.S. Energy Storage Monitor from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the U.S. Energy Storage Association (ESA). Q1 2019 was also the second strongest quarter on record for the U.S. residential storage segment.

Overall, Q1 2019 was the largest ever single quarter for U.S. energy storage deployments in megawatt terms, an increase of 232 percent year-over-year. The quarter was the second largest ever in megawatt-hour terms. The U.S. saw 148.8 megawatts of energy storage deployed in Q1 2019, breaking the previous megawatt record set in Q4 2018 by six percent.

“These first quarter numbers indicate that 2019 will be a banner year for energy storage in the United States,” said ESA CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman. “It’s become clear that states are already unlocking the potential of storage by passing legislation and creating regulatory frameworks to encourage energy storage deployment. The industry is responding by developing storage projects and creating jobs in their states.” 

For the rest of the story visit: http://energystorage.org/news/esa-news/us-energy-storage-market-breaks-record-megawatts-deployed-single-quarter-growing-232