Posts by John Fitzgerald Weaver

CommercialSolarGuy is a solar power developer who builds solar projects. We have a land specialist – Jason Kline – who knows the Pennsylvania market especially well, even developing his own solar power project in Wolf Township. An analysis by the College of Agricultural Studies at Penn State University has found that there’s over 1 gigawatt…

The Clean Power Hour – a weekly clean energy headline review and commentary podcast run by Tim Montague, and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuy – John Fitzgerald Weaver. To the news: The much revered International Energy Agency (IEA) put out some pretty spicy words in its most recent World Energy Outlook. These words included, ‘solar is becoming the king of electricity’, solar…

Two solar power development companies ought always have some of your energy attention – 8minute Solar Energy and NextEra. For NextEra, we’d want to look more specifically at their Energy Partners subsidiary. NextEra is one of the world’s most valuable energy companies. Recent headlines had the total value of their stock above Exxon’s. And much…

The Clean Power Hour – a weekly clean energy headline review and commentary podcast run by Tim Montague, and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuy – John Fitzgerald Weaver. Recently asked if a @Tesla would exit passing lane on cruise control if someone came up behind, answer was 'no'. Well, two days ago, they added a…

The Clean Power Hour is a weekly clean energy headline review and commentary podcast run by Tim Montague, and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuy – John Fitzgerald Weaver. Here’s a summary of the topics covered and a link to the podcast below. The topics covered in Episode #13 are: Tesla’s battery day. Here’s the slide…

NV Energy, an electric utility in Nevada, is seeking to build three solar plus energy storage power plants. The solar power plants, in total, are 478 MWac/~600 MWdc – with the energy storage being 338 MW/1.35 GWh. Roughly speaking, a 600 MWdc solar plant will cost about $540 million to build at around or under…

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…