Today from the Clean Power Hour, we discuss an electric school bus making money by stabilizing the grid, the DOE’s infatuation with Perovskite, and more! This excessive commentary is brought to you by Tim Montague and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuyJohn Fitzgerald Weaver.

First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 38!

North America’s First-Ever Commercial Application of Vehicle-to-Grid Technology in Electric School Bus Partnership

Nuvve’s V2G platform allows the school bus batteries to store energy, including renewable energy generated from sources like wind and solar, when the grid doesn’t have immediate need for it. This allows fleets to sell stored energy from the school bus batteries to the grid when demand calls for it.

As the Tim has said, ‘Badass animation of STI Nordland tracker’ and so it is!

For me, exploded hardware animations are among the most educational of things. Seeing the pieces come together gives me just enough information to really get the gist of it.

Sunseap Completes One of World’s Largest Floating Solar Farms

Sunseap said the floating solar farm at Woodlands took close to a year to set up amid movement restrictions during the COVID-19 lockdown. It involved a total of 13,312 panels, 40 inverters and more than 30,000 floats. The installation is expected to produce an estimated 6,022,500 kilo-watt hours (kWh) of energy per year, potentially offsetting an estimated 4,258 tons of carbon dioxide, bringing Singapore closer to decarbonization.

Electric cars being charged in 1907

A lot of folks get upset when they hear that electric cars were a thing before gasoline cars, and that gasoline somehow took over. Personally, I don’t see this as an issue because the batteries we needed weren’t ready yet, and gasoline was. Yes, fossil companies slowed the development of EVs later on – maybe come the 70-80-90s – but I think natural competition killed off EVs in the early 1900s.

https://twitter.com/alvinfoo/status/1375823658443104263

America installs 100 GW of solar power

Per Wood MacKenzie Power & Renewables, the US had installed 97.7 GW by the end of 2020. In the month of January, per the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, the country installed 0.334 GWac of solar inverters – which is at least 0.400 GWdc of modules (FERC suggested greater than 700 MWac of solar was installed or upgraded in January). While it took roughly 20 years for the US to built the first 100 GW, it will take only a little over 3 years to build the next 100 GW.

100% Clean: How DOE’s Solar Investments Will Help to Achieve Ambitious Decarbonization Goals

The United States had a SunShot program which had a goal of supporting solar getting to $1/watt install on the utility scale. Many things came together to make that happen outside of the USA. Now though they’ve got a new goal – solar at 3¢/kWh – and they’re throwing down on perovskites to do this.

Gov. Wolf Announces Largest Government Solar Energy Commitment in the U.S.

Solar arrays will be built in seven locations in six counties: Columbia, Juniata, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and York. When completed, the total 191-megawatt project is expected to deliver 361,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, supplying 100 percent of electricity for 434 accounts across 16 state agencies, or about half the electricity used by state government.

The Foundation of California’s Rooftop Solar Market – net metering – is Under Attack (Again)!

This is more of a rant from the CommercialSolarGuy  about how net metering, generally, is a super important policy. That’s because it keeps monopoly power electricity utilities – which are regularly criminal – in check. Remember, a power company just got caught bribing a politician with $60 million in Ohio, and a gas utility in Southern California threatened the local city with germ warfare if they took up a democratic vote on new gas hookups. Oh yeah, and the electricity companies have explicitly known about climate change, but lied and paid politicians to lie as well. Protect net metering – protect yourself.

And now the podcast:

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