Posts by John Fitzgerald Weaver

Recently, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published a research paper modeling operations and maintenance costs at solar power plants. Embedded in the PDF presentation of that research paper is the spreadsheet model developed on the back of the equations created in the operations and maintenance (O&M) modeling. These equations, and the assumptions that built…

Riddle me this – if India is the cheapest place to install solar panels globally, why is it that they aren’t at the tippy top of our Top ten list of lowest solar power prices in the world – but instead an honorable mention? Well, it’s complicated how these ‘lowest prices’ come to be. The…

It seems the world has seen a new record low solar+storage electricity price bid at 1.316¢/kWh, noted by Jenny Chase of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and confirmed by pv magazine. This price happens to be lower than the current lowest solar alone price in the world. I think (if I heard Pedro Amaral Jorge right)…

I think it’s time we let ourselves free of the shackles of energy storage pragmatism, and embrace some futurism. What once was true: “There aren’t enough resources, the prices are too high, the density is too low, it can’t scale, too short a lifetime, etc.” is no longer. Let us consider a new response to…

Vistra Energy has received approval from the local building authority to install a 1.5 GW/6 GWh energy storage system at Moss Landing in California. The approval, technically, was to expand the prior approved energy storage facility that was 300 MW/1,200 MWh. No contract for the facilities energy has been announced. This battery, if it was…

Energy storage safety is not a game: UL has released its report on the energy storage fire at the McMicken Energy Storage facility located in utility Arizona Public Service territory just outside of Phoenix. Julian Spector, whose been reporting on this event from early on, covered the report from the utility’s perspective (which includes a…

For some, solar power is about clean electricity, while others find the financial aspects of it most compelling. Still others, a very important batch of people, want the independence that distributed electricity generation offers. With independence comes responsibility though, and one responsibility is that your solar system needs to be able to handle the rough…