I was reading one of their reports on progress to the NREL. Serious development on many fronts. But being beholding to fickle investor pools and on what I call the "wrong side of the meter" finally caught up with this pretty classy outfit.
more over at PVMagazine
Here is the report I was reading. I wonder what IP they have and for what price?
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Monday, October 21, 2013
CPV leaders, we need better answers than this! I'm looking at you Amonix and SolFocus...
From the fine folks at PV-Insider' recent round-up "is CPV meeting expectations?"
No water use, Lower acreage of land and prevents permanent land shading? Wow. LCOE is nowhere to be seen...
I was going to grouse about the shade issue but in stand alone settings consistent shade is not necessarily a benefit like it is on a building top. Keeps dust down to have plants growing below. Maybe goats to keep them in check and provide some dual use. Still. This is weak medicine.
Here is a more comprehensive report on tangential costs and considerations for CPV vs others
Berkeley CPV Environmental Report_05_16_2012
Been too long between posts. Sorry fans.
(OH I know... SolFocus is gone so they have nobody to answer the call)
According to Amonix, benefits of this installation include the zero percentage of water used in power production, flexible scalability enabling quicker energy and revenue generation, and the minimal usage of land – only five acres were used per MW of installed capacity. In addition, the dual-axis tracking that was employed prevents permanent land shading.
No water use, Lower acreage of land and prevents permanent land shading? Wow. LCOE is nowhere to be seen...
I was going to grouse about the shade issue but in stand alone settings consistent shade is not necessarily a benefit like it is on a building top. Keeps dust down to have plants growing below. Maybe goats to keep them in check and provide some dual use. Still. This is weak medicine.
Here is a more comprehensive report on tangential costs and considerations for CPV vs others
Berkeley CPV Environmental Report_05_16_2012
Been too long between posts. Sorry fans.
(OH I know... SolFocus is gone so they have nobody to answer the call)
Sunday, September 15, 2013
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.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
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
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.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Seeing around corners - NYT opinionator on letting go of nukes
I'm back at the grindstone.
first up:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/the-new-nuclear-craze/?src=recg&_r=0
I'm not sure about all the cost figures but the overall gist "let's remember nuclear has many many expensive and unsolved problems" strikes me as right on.
It makes me think about how by now, if it were going to really be safe we'd have seen the cost and risk curves go in the right direction but nobody in the private sector is interested in underwriting the risks of new plants both energy wise nor disaster wise. The formula is supposed to be
1) we produce a product/service for X and
2) sell it for X+
where X+ is enough to justify the risk of doing it in the first place.
YES that is an over-simplification. But if we get too far from it... we get in trouble. I do see there is a place for keeping the door open to innovation by stimulating experiments and disturbing monopolies. But the long history of subsidizing nuclear power plants and putting off the disposal issues strikes me as not the same thing. I could be wrong. But the point of the opinionator piece I think lands either way: renewables and distributed power and conservation are all growing fast are mutually reinforcing and could just fill in to address our load with carbon neutral juice and leave conventional plants with less and less to do. If those plants have, wrapped up in their fundamentals a bunch of thousand year poison - that we get if we run the plant or not... seems like we should think twice or thrice.
first up:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/the-new-nuclear-craze/?src=recg&_r=0
I'm not sure about all the cost figures but the overall gist "let's remember nuclear has many many expensive and unsolved problems" strikes me as right on.
It makes me think about how by now, if it were going to really be safe we'd have seen the cost and risk curves go in the right direction but nobody in the private sector is interested in underwriting the risks of new plants both energy wise nor disaster wise. The formula is supposed to be
1) we produce a product/service for X and
2) sell it for X+
where X+ is enough to justify the risk of doing it in the first place.
YES that is an over-simplification. But if we get too far from it... we get in trouble. I do see there is a place for keeping the door open to innovation by stimulating experiments and disturbing monopolies. But the long history of subsidizing nuclear power plants and putting off the disposal issues strikes me as not the same thing. I could be wrong. But the point of the opinionator piece I think lands either way: renewables and distributed power and conservation are all growing fast are mutually reinforcing and could just fill in to address our load with carbon neutral juice and leave conventional plants with less and less to do. If those plants have, wrapped up in their fundamentals a bunch of thousand year poison - that we get if we run the plant or not... seems like we should think twice or thrice.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Just got to keep your eyes out for groovy reports... like this one
Working through the ARPA-E FOE FOCUS Funding Opportunity Announcement and this turns up:
THE THERMAL SPECTRUM OF LOW-TEMPERATURE ENERGY USE IN THE UNITED STATES
Just read the abstract. I'll wait...
Pretty darn cool no? It was done with 2008 data but it is not terribly time sensitive information. And I think it over simplified the uses temperature vs the advantageous delivery temperatures (you'll want to have, in most cases a higher temp on the sources to deliver energy to the "thing to warm." You can touch the hot toast (thing to be warmed) but not the toaster element. But still, the high quality dense energy we generate at such losses (energy system losses are huge - see the report!) are misused when we drive even "efficient" low-temp loads. Solar thermal is a great (zero emissions) source for low temp heat and a good source for medium temp heat. This report shows how broad the need is for low and medium temp heat and is enticing as to how much in the way of greenhouse gas displacement it can accomplish.
THE THERMAL SPECTRUM OF LOW-TEMPERATURE ENERGY USE IN THE UNITED STATES
Just read the abstract. I'll wait...
Pretty darn cool no? It was done with 2008 data but it is not terribly time sensitive information. And I think it over simplified the uses temperature vs the advantageous delivery temperatures (you'll want to have, in most cases a higher temp on the sources to deliver energy to the "thing to warm." You can touch the hot toast (thing to be warmed) but not the toaster element. But still, the high quality dense energy we generate at such losses (energy system losses are huge - see the report!) are misused when we drive even "efficient" low-temp loads. Solar thermal is a great (zero emissions) source for low temp heat and a good source for medium temp heat. This report shows how broad the need is for low and medium temp heat and is enticing as to how much in the way of greenhouse gas displacement it can accomplish.
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