Buried lead : Los Angeles Utility to pay a premium for peak watts to Distributed Generators

First off DUH. From page 2 of this Inside Climate News story. (never heard of them either but this story had a pretty good level of detail.)

"Farrell pointed to programs by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Austin Energy in Texas as leading examples. The Los Angeles utility recently rolled out a 100-megawatt feed-in tariff program for distributed solar projects, with a twist. The utility will pay developers 17 cents for every kilowatt-hour of solar electricity. But solar power produced in the middle of the day and during hot summer months—peak demand periods—will earn extra money on top of that, as much as 2.25 cents more per unit."

I mean really, duh. If you don't pay users for those watts they'll just use them themselves and you'll have nothing to resell, and you'll have to get back on that grid building treadmill - in a time when more folks push back and say "don't charge me for long transmission lines - I don't use them." And they are finally right to a degree and that degree is growing.

Counting - what do we count? watts? watts peak? Wm^2? GWhr/Acre/yr? $/W? LCOE? ROI?

Moving targets everywhere when it comes to counting and accounting for solar.

Here is a summary of land use rates for solar power:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/What-Is-The-Best-Solar-Power-Plant-Technology-to-Cut-Land-Costs

Really neat to have it run together in one place. It has a huge utility bias of course. Rooftops have so many other services they are offering that disentangling the cost of land for those installations is a no go. There might be some way to compare by using parking cover structures... Anyhow, lots to learn here I think:

First was something called Direct Area

 

which is weird... (you can't build without ancillary-land slop so why analyze direct?)

  

so instead lets attend to the TOTAL AREA. (shown next)

That right-hand column is the meat and seeing the direct (whatever that is) vs total land. I think total land is more important. And 2-Axis CPV is looking pretty impressive. Even to me a CPV skptic (unhybridized at least) it is neat to see aperture (basically) given some respect.

OK... there is plenty more there to read and learn. More when I have had some digestive time.