The Clean Power Hour is a weekly clean energy headline review and commentary podcast brought to you by Tim Montague and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuyJohn Fitzgerald Weaver.

First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 35!

Now, to the news!

(A quick note – the main image in this article was taken by Cosmic Perspective.)

Starship #10 managed to get to 10,000 feet and perform all three, two, and single thruster tests. The unit successfully performed its unique belly flop landing technique. The unit did bounce hard at landing, and there were additional flames coming from the unit.

After a few minutes…poof:

(US) Solar energy growth is exponential again – up 28%, 3.2% of all electricity in 2020

Do you, our readers have any suggestions for different types of data analysis you’d like to see of the EIA electricity information? Next month, we’ll clean up the original data source page, and automate one or two of the tables. We’ll then start to analyze month over month vs prior year data.

photovoltaic (solar) generation grew by more than 28%, accounting for ~3.2% of total US electricity generated for the year…since 2014, solar generation has grown 35%, 43%, 45%, 17%, and 28%…

Secure your load

…we don’t think this is covered by the standard warranty.This photograph shows a solar panel flying through the air after blowing off a truck on the highway.
Update: The driver of the vehicle involved has been located. A dark coloured ute towing a box trailer was heading south when the panels came loose at Bracken Ridge around 10.55am. It is possible the driver was unaware at the time their load had become detached. The motorist travelling behind the ute escaped serious injury.

Tesla Megapack project in Victoria gets AU$160M investment

Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) will finance the design, construction and operation for AU$160 million (USD127.24 million) at Neoen’s 300MW/450MWh battery project in Victoria, Australia.

An illustration of how CO2 to CO2 charged water underground takes place
CO2 capture to stones underground

…no article or press release, this is just Tim being interested in things.

Carbfix imitates and accelerates natural processes, in which carbon dioxide is dissolved in water and interacts with reactive rock formations to form stable minerals providing a permanent and safe carbon sink. Carbfix dissolves CO2 in water, injects it into the subsurface and turns it into stone in less than two years through proprietary technology. For the Carbfix technology to work, one needs three things: favourable rocks, water, and a source of carbon dioxide.

Jigar Shah’s Plan to Manage DOE’s $40B Loan Program

…Expect big support for the electric bus – a focus of Shah before he joined the department of energy.

“the Loan Programs Office is this bridge to bankability”…“My sense is that we need to build 100 more of these bridges for technologies we all think are mature but aren’t being treated that way,”…Shah pointed out several “not controversial” clean-energy technologies that could be recipients, such as offshore wind, geothermal energy and green hydrogen. Electric passenger vehicles are part of the program’s mandate, and Congress may be amenable to expanding that authority to supporting medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles…

Engineers propose solar-powered lunar ark as ‘modern global insurance policy’

Illustration shows cryo preservation of seeds on the moon

Rather than two of every animal, however, his solar-powered ark on the moon would store cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species…Transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species would require about 250 rocket launches. It took 40 rocket launches to build the International Space Station…To be cryopreserved, the seeds must be cooled to minus 180 C (minus 292 F) and the stem cells kept at minus 196 C (minus 320 F)…

Storage Integrator FlexGen Gains New Leadership at Crucial Time

Kelcy Pegler took over as CEO, FlexGen announced Wednesday…joined by new CFO Yann Brandt…FlexGen built its first grid-tied battery in Puerto Rico in 2016, then made a splash in the grid-scale storage market by retrofitting a 10-megawatt/42-megawatt-hour battery onto Vistra Energy’s Upton 2 solar plant in West Texas…

This picture is a rendering of floating batteries in the ocean.
Wärtsilä to install ‘first-of-its-kind’ floating battery storage solution in Southeast Asia

…floating batteries plus floating solar plus floating wind plus floating hydrogen plus kelp farm plus fish farm… see where I’m going here?

54MW / 32MWh of battery storage will be integrated with customer Therma Marine Inc’s (TMI’s) 100MW thermal power barge in the Maco municipality of the Philippines province Davao de Oro…energy storage system would help it provide fast response ancillary services to the grid…reducing the power barge’s ramping time from 15 minutes to just 3 minutes…

SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for trucks, ships, and planes

SpaceX Service’s ESIMs are electrically identical to its previously authorized consumer user terminals but have mountings that allow them to be installed on vehicles, vessels, and aircraft, which are suitable for those environments. SpaceX Service’s ESIMs will communicate only with those SpaceX satellites that are visible on the horizon above a minimum elevation angle of 25 degrees (Key West is about 25).

And now, the podcast:

Sign up for a weekly digest of solar industry news, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.