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Posted Mar 6, 2014, 6:09 PM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: lodged against an abutment
Posts: 7,556
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India Approves 3 Billion Rupees in Solar Pump Subsidies
6 March 2014
March 6 (Bloomberg) — India approved 3 billion rupees ($49 million) in subsidies to help farmers install solar-powered water pumps to boost agricultural yields and reduce expensive diesel fuel use.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy will provide grants to install 17,500 irrigation pumping systems to 2016 funded by a carbon tax on coal, according to a notice posted today on its website.
“Solar photovoltaic pumping systems can easily meet the irrigation requirements for small and marginal farmers,” the notice said. “It will increase the cropping intensity.”
India has 26 million groundwater pumps on farms that suffer from blackouts and volatile fuel costs. Switching those to run on solar would save about $6 billion a year in power and diesel subsidies and has drawn companies including BlackRock Inc.- backed SunEdison Inc. and Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd., Asia’s top irrigation-equipment maker.
Farmers travel long distances to procure diesel for their pumps, the notice said. The project will allow them to boost output and reduce diesel consumption, it said.
The grants will cover as much as 30 percent of project costs. State governments including Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra that participate in the program will be required to match with a subsidy covering at least 15 percent of the cost. Farmers will cover the remainder. The program’s total cost is estimated at about 10 billion rupees.
India began taxing coal producers and importers 50 rupees a metric ton in 2010, raising 25 billion rupees in its first year.
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http://about.bnef.com/bnef-news/indi...p-subsidies-2/
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New Player Emerges In Battle Of Solar Vs Utilities: Storage
A battle has been brewing between utility companies and the rooftop solar industry in California, and, of course, it’s about money. They compete with each other because rooftop solar systems enable people to purchase less power from utility companies, but the companies still have a leg to stand on — the fact is that the owners of these systems rely on them for backup.
Energy storage systems are expected to increasingly come online due to declining battery costs, as well as energy storage mandates. As a result of this, utilities are losing control of the electricity market. Not too long ago, lithium-ion batteries cost a whopping $1 million per MWh of storage capacity, rendering them infeasible for cost-competitive grid storage, but now their cost has dipped well below $500,000 per MWh. This, combined with California’s energy storage mandate, is undoing the traditional utility business model, as the use of energy storage can eliminate the need for a grid connection altogether.
Unsurprisingly, utilities are fighting this transition to rooftop solar, and lately, energy storage has become a major part of that, as it is one of the biggest threats they face. Lyndon Rive, the CEO of SolarCity, recently commented at a CPUC panel discussion, stating: “It takes about eight months to connect. There is no reason for it. You can’t help but think that it’s slow because there is incentive to keep the game from changing.”
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http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/06/...ities-storage/
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Infographic: US Solar’s Best Year Ever
GTM Research looks back at 2013, a record-breaking year.
Mike Munsell, Jacob Rosenburg
March 6, 2014
This week, GTM Research and SEIA released the Q4 2013 U.S. Solar Market Insight report. The infographic below highlights some key findings from the year-in-review report.
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http://www.greentechmedia.com/articl...best-year-ever
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Facing Solar Waves, Utilities Should Learn to Surf
Richelle Elberg — March 5, 2014
In my last blog, I described the relatively rapid fall that many incumbent telephone companies have suffered as wireless technology has replaced landlines as the dominant service providers for not only our voices, but also our data communications needs.
Why, as a participant in the electric utility industry, should you care?
Because the very same thing could happen to incumbent electric utilities, and maybe sooner than you think. Solar panels and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are spreading rapidly, allowing consumers to generate and even store their own power. Prices are falling, and with or without government incentives, the penetration of renewable, distributed generation will continue to accelerate. Storage will get better, and commercial customers like Wal-Mart will put panels across thousands of acres of rooftops.
All of this creates challenges for grid operations and (especially) electric utility business models. (See my blogs on net metering and feed-in tariffs). As the fight over net metering has made abundantly clear, the century-old utility business model wasn’t designed for distributed generation – and this transformation is still in its early days.
Ride the Wave
But, couldn’t it also provide an opportunity? In the first 10 years of wireless telecom service (according to surveys by CTIA), subscribership grew to just under 34 million. In the second 10, it added 174 million, and since 2005, that figure has nearly doubled again. That hockey stick phenomenon will happen in the solar and PEV industries, too.
NRG Energy, a retail energy marketer based in Princeton, New Jersey, has taken a proactive stance to solar. Its NRG Solar division creates large-scale solar facilities and performs installations on commercial rooftops. The NRG Residential Solar Solutions (RSS) division leases solar systems to homeowners, providing the panels, system design, monitoring and performance guarantees, as well as several termination options (system removal, lease extension, or purchase). RSS operates in 10 states, plus the District of Columbia, and has expansion plans in more states. What’s more, NRG’s eVgo network is a privately funded electric vehicle infrastructure network of home charging stations and public fast charging stations.
NRG’s Alternative Energy division (which encompasses its solar activities) grew revenue to $83 million in 3Q 2013, up from $49 million the year before. And while it still bleeds red ink, I can assure you that telcos lost money on their wireless divisions for many years before those units became the cash machines they are today.
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http://www.navigantresearch.com/blog...-learn-to-surf
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Ecobuild: Power One’s energy storage vision for ‘next step of PV market’
By Andy Colthorpe | 06 March 2014, 12:22 Updated: 06 March 2014, 14:35
PV inverter manufacturer Power One has said that energy storage is part of "its vision for the next step of the PV market".
The company showcased a selection of its products at the Ecobuild show in London this week, including a battery-based energy storage system for use in combination with PV.
The company’s new battery storage system REACT (Renewable Energy Accumulator and Conversion Technology), has been launched so far in Germany and Italy and consists of a 4.6kW single-phase grid-connected inverter coupled with a lithium-ion battery.
Solar Power Portal spoke to Cesare Lancini, Power One’s product marketing manager for renewable energies at the show.
Lancini explained that the storage unit is not intended to enable total self-consumption or off-grid use. Instead REACT is designed to match the electricity production curve to the consumption curve as much as possible. According to Lancini, in a post-tariff world, products such as REACT will be more and more important in adding value and benefits to PV system use.
“It’s part of Power One’s vision for the next step of the PV market. At the moment in the UK for example, you still have the feed-in tariff, you are still earning money for generating electricity. In a mature market like Germany or Italy, [the removal of the tariff] has effected a change in the paradigm in the minds of people looking to own PV – they are not earning money, they are saving money.”
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http://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/ne...p_of_pv_market
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/ecobuild...p_of_pv_market
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Parliament considers solar powered Big Ben clock face
By Lucy Woods | 05 March 2014, 13:28 Updated: 06 March 2014, 16:48
As part of parliament’s energy commitment, suggestions on how to save energy have been submitted, including the idea for the iconic landmark, Big Ben to upgrade to solar power.
The idea, which has been advocated by Sir Robert Rogers, clerk of the house of commons and chief executive, will now be discussed by the environment team in parliament. A decision on what changes it should implement will be taken in a couple of months, a spokesman for parliament, told Solar Power Portal. Built in 1859, Big Ben’s clock face could be solar powered, the idea was displayed on a placard with Rogers’ approval in Port Cullis House, to gain feedback on energy saving ideas in parliament from members.
A solar powered Big Ben clock face is one of many ideas to be discussed for a programme of initiatives within the next few months. Other ideas also include plans to install solar panels to some flat roofs on the Palace of Westminster in 2015.
A spokesman said: “Parliament has committed to improving its energy efficiency by 34% by 2020/21. Throughout February, parliamentary pass-holders were encouraged to support parliament’s energy commitment by submitting ideas on how parliament could save energy.”
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http://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/ne...owered_big_ben
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News
Home | ORNL | News | Features | 2014
Solar surprise
Multidisciplinary ORNL team discovers unexpected effect of heavy hydrogen in organic solar cells
Photovoltaic spray paint could coat the windows and walls of the future if scientists are successful in developing low-cost, flexible solar cells based on organic polymers. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently discovered an unanticipated factor in the performance of polymer-based solar devices that gives new insight on how these materials form and function.
“One of the dreams is to bring home some polymer paint from the hardware store, spray it on a window and make your own solar cell because it self-orders into a structure that can generate electricity,” ORNL’s David Geohegan said. “But right now there are many unknown things that happen when you spray it down and it dries. Changing the electrical property of a polymer also changes its structure when it dries, so understanding this process is one of our big science mysteries.”
When ORNL scientists Kai Xiao and Kunlun Hong analyzed neutron scattering data obtained at the lab’s Spallation Neutron Source to measure the structure of seemingly identical polymer-based solar devices, they stumbled upon a new piece to the scientific solar puzzle.
The key to their finding was deuterium, also known as “heavy hydrogen,” which is commonly used in neutron scattering analysis. Scientists use the isotope as a labeling tool, replacing hydrogen with deuterium in organic samples because deuterium’s extra neutron helps reveal soft materials’ structure.
“Normally scientists assume that the deuteration doesn’t change the electronic structure at all,” said Xiao, a materials scientist at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. “But when we used it to study conducting polymers in solar cells, the devices’ electronic performance changed significantly.”
To understand the mechanisms behind deuterium’s effects, the team turned to ORNL’s Bobby Sumpter and another lab strength -- supercomputer simulation. Modeling the system through quantum calculations helped the researchers determine that heavy hydrogen changes the molecules’ vibrations, which indirectly but significantly affects the material’s electronic properties.
In the case of the team’s organic solar cells, deuteration turns out to have a negative impact, decreasing the devices’ electrical efficiency. But the ORNL researchers note that other organic electronics such as organic spintronics or light emitting diodes (OLEDs) could benefit from deuterium’s effects.
“Overall, deuterating polymers helps us understand how energy flows in organic electronics so we can improve and optimize them in the future,” Xiao said. “It’s opening our eyes to the fact there is an impact.”
The researchers’ unexpected results could also inform future neutron studies in the organic electronics field. Xiao notes, for instance, that the precise position of deuterium in the polymer chain determines whether the overall electrical properties will be altered.
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http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/featur...solar-surprise
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/03/te...ic-solar-cells
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Mosaic Offering Peer-to-Peer Loans for Residential Solar
By Justin Doom Mar 5, 2014 5:31 AM PT
Mosaic Inc., the operator of an online financing system that lets individuals invest in commercial solar plants, is introducing a peer-to-peer network for people to directly fund residential projects.
The company will introduce the system in California in the first half of the year for clients of developer Real Goods Solar Inc. (RGSE), Oakland, California-based Mosaic said today in a statement. People who want rooftop panels may solicit loans through Mosaic’s site and will own the power systems with little to no upfront costs required.
That compares to popular leasing models from companies including SolarCity Corp., which also provide solar energy at no initial cost and then own the systems on clients’ rooftops. Ownership provides more financial benefits for homeowners, according to Billy Parish, Mosaic’s president.
“For zero dollars upfront, the homeowner keeps much of the value of the solar system,” he said in in an e-mail yesterday. The peer-to-peer lending network is expected to be available nationwide by year-end.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...ial-solar.html
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/mosaic_t...ip_loans_in_us
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/05/...me-solar-loan/
http://www.theecoreport.com/green-bl...me-solar-loan/
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NY-Sun Helps Reduce Solar Prices By Supporting Collective Purchasing In New York
Kit Kennedy
Posted March 6, 2014 in Curbing Pollution, Green Enterprise, Living Sustainably, Solving Global Warming
This week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced $28.6 million in solar grants to be awarded under New York’s innovative NY-Sun Initiative, the governor’s landmark effort designed to build the state’s solar industry and drive down costs—to make solar more affordable for all of us. (A pivotally important attempt to extend NY-Sun through 2023 is now before the New York State Public Service Commission. More on that further down in this post.)
True to NY-Sun’s mission to drive down the so-called soft (non-hardware) costs of solar—costs that are a fraction in Germany of what they are here in the U.S.—on Tuesday, the Initiative announced several exciting projects that involve collective purchasing in New York City, Westchester, the Capital area and the Finger Lakes.
Collective purchasing is the aggregating of interested customers to build community support for installing solar, to provide technical expertise, cut costs and ensure quality. Around the country, programs like these, many of them based on the Solarize model, have reduced the cost of solar for participating customers by an important 10-20 percent, making clean energy surprisingly affordable for homeowners and others who thought it far out of reach.
Sharing one of these NY-Sun grants are two New York City solar powerhouses—Solar One, whose mission is to help create more sustainable and resilient urban environments, and Sustainable CUNY, which harnesses the City University of New York’s brainpower to help make New York a healthier, better place to live. (You can see that brainpower in action by checking out its mind-blowing NYC Solar Map. The map allows anyone in the five boroughs to type in their address, and, with the click of a mouse, calculate their home or business’ solar potential, along with annual energy cost savings, return on investment, local, state and federal incentives, and carbon reductions. It’s stunning.)
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http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kk..._governor.html
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Batteries May Vie With U.S. Oil Boom as Energy Changer
By Bradley Olson and Mark Chediak Mar 5, 2014 11:21 PM PT
The rapid development of rooftop solar and battery storage technology could be as transformative to the economy and modern life as the U.S. oil and gas boom, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said.
“It’s pretty dramatic,” Moniz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg News at the IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston. “They are growing very, very fast.”
Batteries allow customers with solar panels to store energy during the day and then tap the excess overnight when the sun goes down. The widespread use of electric vehicles could reshape the development of cities, and applying the same battery storage technology to transform the U.S. energy system has “huge potential,” Moniz said.
Battery storage advances could threaten the 100-year-old monopoly utility business model that books about $360 billion in annual power sales. An increasing number of customers are reducing their dependence on the grid, turning to solar panels and battery storage as a way to reduce their bills.
“Storage is a huge deal,” Moniz said.
*snip*
Disrupt Oil
Exxon Mobil Corp. researchers involved in studies of the impact of new technology in 2008 identified batteries that could store energy such as those used in electric vehicles as the most disruptive potential energy breakthrough, according to “Private Empire,” a 2012 book by journalist Steve Coll.
“If there was one emerging energy technology that seemed to have the practical potential to disrupt the oil industry’s assumptions about the transportation economy, this was it,” Coll wrote.
Exxon ultimately concluded battery use in electric vehicles hadn’t advanced to the point of being transformative, he wrote.
Homeowners might use battery storage, combined with solar power, to further reduce their dependence on utilities and sell electricity back to the grid, a new business model known as distributed generation.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...y-changer.html
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/...oniz?cmpid=rss
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Liebreich: Historic shift to cheap clean energy is being held back by over-regulation
5 March 2014
Clean energy technologies are reaching a tipping point where they are competitive with incumbent fossil fuel solutions. However, statist regulatory approaches which mandate their use and stifle competition are keeping their prices unnecessarily high and holding back adoption.
In most sunny parts of the world it is cheaper to generate power from photovoltaic modules on your roof than to buy it from your utility. The best newly-built wind farms are selling power at the equivalent of 0.03/kWh ($0.05) before subsidies, which neither gas, nor coal, nor nuclear power can match. Light-emitting diodes, or LED bulbs can be bought for a few pounds, providing home-owners a quick and cheap way of cutting their utility bills.
The fact is that wind and solar have joined a long list of clean energy technologies – geothermal power, waste-to-energy, solar hot water, hydro power, sugarcane-based ethanol, combined heat and power, all sorts of energy efficiency – which can be fully competitive with fossil fuels in the right circumstances. What is even more important is that the cost reductions that have led to this point are set to continue inexorably, far out into the future.
For the past 10 years, my team at Bloomberg New Energy Finance has been documenting “experience curves” for clean energy technologies: the rate at which their costs drop for each doubling of cumulative installations. We have had privileged access to data from clients, many of whom are manufacturers and project developers. What the data tell us is that clean energy technologies benefit from strong experience curves. Where Moore’s Law has given us dirt-cheap electronics and phones, Liebreich’s law is going to give us abundant, cheap clean energy.
FOSSIL FUELS
Meanwhile, over the past decade, the world has been waking up to the true cost of fossil fuels. It is not just the half-a-trillion dollars a year or more of direct subsidies to fossil fuel consumers. What is becoming increasingly clear is that further hundreds of billions of dollars in energy costs are borne not by the fossil fuel industry or directly by energy consumers, but by the general public. These so-called externality costs include medical costs of air pollution, the negative economic impact of commodity price spikes and the cost of defending our energy supply chains. They pop up in our medical bills, our unemployment figures, and our defence budgets. And that is before bringing the environment or climate change into the equation, or the heightened geopolitical risk caused by dependence on some of the world’s most volatile countries, or the corrosive effect on our political life caused by fossil fuel stakeholders fighting to preserve the status quo.
*snip*
FUTURE ENERGY SYSTEM
We will, of course, have to learn how to manage the intermittency of renewable energy. That means improving resource forecasting and interconnecting the power grid over larger areas to smooth out the variability of individual renewable energy assets. It means power storage, currently mainly in the form of pumped hydroelectric power but in future most likely in the form of batteries for electric vehicles. But the killer app is a digitally-controlled smart grid, which will provide the ability to shift demand to match supply in ways either imperceptible to the consumer or else remunerated by the energy provider.
This energy system of the future is not a pipe dream. Worldwide over a quarter of a trillion dollars a year is being invested annually in renewable energy, energy efficiency and supporting technologies. Germany derives over 25% of its electricity from renewable energy. Texas, synonymous with the oil and gas industry, generated nearly 10% of its electricity from wind last year. China is the world’s largest player, with around half of its new power capacity over the next 20 years expected to be renewable, rather than coal, gas or nuclear.
CHALLENGES
The problem for the political right is that this epochal shift to clean energy has completely wrong-footed it. For too long it has allowed the left to claim ownership of the environment, despite its own achievements in the area. For the left, being pro-environment and anti-business are one and the same: its approach to environmental protection is based mainly on controlling or blocking enterprise. The mistake of the right has been to implicitly accept that protecting our environment is in opposition to achieving a prosperous and free society.
In particular, the right has allowed the left to make all the running on clean energy. Feed-in tariffs are nothing less than state price controls. Renewable energy targets are indistinguishable from Soviet five-year plans. Over-regulation and complex planning requirements add costs, slow down projects, reduce transparency and increase risk. Green investment banks are the very embodiment of state capital allocation. Capacity payments and carbon price floors are evidence of failure in the design of markets. Do not get me started on price caps.
We have seen the results of these approaches. Germany may have reached over 25% renewable electricity, but at what excessive cost to its household energy users? Spain reached 42%, but its retroactive policy U-turns have left its entire economy all but uninvestable. Around the world the energy industry – fossil fuels as well as clean energy – is in the grip of a pandemic of rent-seeking, subsidy-farming, inefficiency, misallocation of resources, and the inevitable picking of losers.
The big mistake of the right has been to leave unchallenged the assumption that leftist tools are the only ones available to manage the transition to clean energy, instead of coming up with good conservative solutions – ones which have improved services, lower costs, competition, wealth creation, pricing in of externalities, personal responsibility and freedom at their heart.
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http://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich...er-regulation/
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How the IEA exaggerates the costs and underestimates the growth of solar power
March 4, 2014 - Author: Terje Osmundsen
The International Energy Agency (IEA) consistently entertains much too pessimistic assumptions about the growth potential and cost development of solar power, writes Terje Osmundsen, Senior Vice President of the Norwegian-based international solar power company Scatec Solar. According to Osmundsen, the cost assumptions used by the IEA are 100% higher than even current market prices. He notes that as a result of the IEA’s misleading information, policymakers are under the false impression that the spread of solar power will require huge subsidies. He calls on the IEA to get together with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) to conduct a joint study on the real economics of solar power.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), probably the most influential energy think tank in the world, is not an overt enemy of renewable energy. The IEA often has nice words to say about the importance of renewables. Yet its flagship publication, the World Energy Outlook (WEO), foresees only rather moderate progress of renewables – and of solar power in particular. But how reliable is the WEO’s assessment?
In various parts of the world – US, Chile, South Africa, India among others – utilities are these days signing Power Purchase Agreements with solar power producers at tariffs competitive to the cost of electricity from new-built gas and coal power plants. But according to the IEA this can hardly be true, because their analysis claims that the cost of large-scale solar PV is more than the double that of the alternatives. Therefore, the substitution of fossil fuels with solar PV will be slow to materialise and it will be very costly, states the World Energy Outlook (WEO).
With cost assumptions 100% above current market prices, it’s perhaps not surprising IEA’s model projects such a modest market development of PV compared to benchmark studies It is high time that this fundamental shortcoming of the WEO is corrected, as it spreads the deceptive message that for every MWh of solar PV being generated, taxpayers or consumers will pay on average 130 US dollars in subsidy per year over the next 20 years.
In reality, we are already at the point in some markets where solar PV has started to compete against fossil fuel alternatives without subsidies, a situation that will spread to ever more markets as the cost of solar continues to fall and the cost of fossil fuels continues to rise. In this article I will focus on solar PV, but I am aware similar criticism has been raised regarding the WEO’s market forecasts for other kinds of renewables.
*snip*
IEA and IRENA should join forces
I think there’s a good chance IEA will review its model before next year’s Outlook. The main reason for my optimism is that now also government-related agencies and energy experts are beginning to paint a quite different picture than the mainstream view we are used to from the IEA. In January this year, the government-sponsored International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) published its first comprehensive REmap 2030, based on an in-depth review of 26 countries which account for 74% of projected global total final energy consumption in 2030 (IRENA 2014).
The IRENA Roadmap shows that the world can double the share of renewables as part of total energy consumption by 2030 at limited substitution cost – on average 2.5$ per gigajoule (GJ) – for the countries concerned. Taking externalities like health and cost of emitting CO2 into account, the net savings for societies in doubling the share of renewables are estimated between 3-15$ per GJ. In addition, the REmap scenario will lead to an annual average of 900,000 additional direct jobs. In IRENA’s analysis, renewables are at least as important as energy efficiency in CO2 reduction in potential terms, and their importance will only grow after 2030.
In the power sector, the IRENA roadmap projects a trajectory of renewables increasing from 18 to 44% of total generation by 2030. Not surprisingly, wind and solar PV will play the key role, increasing at least five- and twelve-fold, adding about 70 and 60 GW, respectively, of new wind and PV capacity on average each year between today and 2030. But perhaps more important: IRENA calculates that the average substitution costs for this twelve-fold increase of solar PV will be in the range of 2.5$ per GJ. This equals around 8.5$ per MWh – ca 7% of the “PV subsidy” calculated by the IEA. Taking health and the costs of CO2 emissions into account, IRENA estimates the savings related to replacing fossil fuels with renewables to be in the range 1.7-20$ per GJ, or 6-70$ per MWh.
IEA and IRENA are both international organizations with a mandate from governments to provide policy-relevant advice on how to speed up the required transformation to a low-carbon energy system. However, as shown in this report, IEA’s World Energy Outlook and IRENA’s REmap are two worlds apart. Governments and stakeholders would be better served if the two organizations put their heads together, and published a joint study on the economics of and potential for renewables in the power sector.
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http://www.energypost.eu/iea-exagger...h-solar-power/
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22 MW Philippines solar park spurring local PV market
06. March 2014 | Markets & Trends, Global PV markets, Applications & Installations | By: Hans-Christoph Neidlein
Construction work at the largest solar park in the Philippines is making good progress, with a nationwide ripple effect expected.
Construction work on the largest solar park building site in San Carlos City on the island of Negros Occidental in the Philippines is progressing well, as pv magazine learned during an exclusive tour of the site.
The first 13 MW phase of the San Carlos Solar Energy 22 MW solar park is to be completed by early April. SACASOL is a joint venture of the Thomas Lloyd Group and the Philippine project developer Bronzeoak, with Germany's Conergy as the prime contractor. Early indications suggest that the project will have a ripple effect on the development of the Philippine solar market.
Tens of thousands of modules, mounted on module tables with concrete foundations, are already lining the street and the sugar cane fields of San Carlos City's economic zone. It is here that, on an area of 350,000 square meters, construction on the biggest solar park in the Philippines (22 MW) to date, began in October last year.
Up to 1,200 mainly local workers are currently employed on the site, busy constructing more bipedal aluminum module tables from Mounting Systems, assembling modules from Conergy, digging trenches for cables and installing concrete formwork for the central inverter distribution stations from SMA, and assembling yet more modules.
The first phase of 13 MW is 70% completed and should be finished by early April, according to Mike G. Airey, Director of Project Finance Asia Pacific at Thomas Lloyd. Construction work is now progressing well after heavy rains in January left the site partly underwater. On the other side of the street a former sugar cane field has been cleared and leveled and concrete foundations for the framework have already been partially laid. A security camera on a tower specifically erected for the purpose documented the progress of the second 9 MW phase of construction. According to Airey, this second phase should be completed as soon as May. The Philippine President, Benigno Aquino III, has already been invited to the official opening ceremony.
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http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/deta...ket_100014431/
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Canadian Solar’s shipments near 2GW on return to profitability in 2013
By Mark Osborne - 06 March 2014, 12:35
In News, Fab & Facilities, PV Modules, Power Generation, Finance
A strong spike in PV module shipments in the fourth quarter of 2013 supported Canadian Solar closing in on 2GW of shipments for the year and secured a return to profitability in 2013.
Canadian Solar reported full-year net revenue of US$1,654.4 million, compared to US$1,294.8 million in 2012. The company reported a gross profit of US$275.6 million and a net income of US$45.5 million in 2013.
Benefiting from the rush to complete PV power plant projects in China, Canadian Solar’s shipments to the Chinese market amounted to 42.9% of total shipments in the quarter, an undisputed transformation from the prior quarter when shipments failed to account for 1% of the total and just below 10% when compared to the same quarter of 2012.
Canadian Solar reported PV module shipments in the fourth quarter of 2013 of 621MW, significantly higher than any quarter in the year. Third quarter module shipments had been 478MW, compared to 455MW in the second quarter of 2013.
PV project business therefore took a back seat in the last quarter, with net revenue from the total solutions business accounting for 23.4% of total net revenue, compared to 41.1% in the previous quarter.
Strong module shipments in the fourth quarter resulted in net revenue of US$519.5 million, compared to US$490.9 million in the prior quarter. Gross margin was 19.5%, compared to 20.4% in the third quarter of 2013, a reflection of lower module ASPs in China compared to other regions.
Canadian Solar reported a gross profit in the fourth quarter of US$101.3 million, compared to US$100.2 million in the prior quarter due to higher module shipments and a US$14 million reduction in warranty cost to reflect the general decline in module prices according to the company.
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http://www.pv-tech.org/news/canadian...bility_in_2013
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