Technical reviews of solar+storage news

The commercial and industrial solar market is broad – from a few panels on a storage facility, to a 500 acre solar power facility built to feed a Colorado steel mill, to the largest solar facilities in the world signing virtual power purchase agreements (PPA) to offset electricity usage hundreds of miles away. Big solar…

The State of Rhode Island offers a twenty year electricity purchase contract to commercial rooftop owners that install solar power. Essentially, CommercialSolarGuy will build a small power plant on your building, and National Grid will purchase all of that electricity.  Payments are made through a monthly electronic deposit as National Grid sells that electricity into…

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. First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 29! Now, to the news! Big banks looking hard at renewables mean money will become available. Goldman Sachs says…

Tesla reported their fourth quarter earnings. The company earned $752 million in revenue from energy generation and storage, but they spent $787 million to earn that. The company noted during the earnings call that SolarRoof ramp costs were weighing on the energy department profitability. Total energy storage deployment, 3,022 MWh, was up 83% for the…

Using computer simulation to reach far into the depths of our power grid, the digital tendrils of algorithms one might say, show that the further out we place intelligent and distributed energy resources, the more money we save. VibrantEnergy, showing off their new power grid simulation modeling tool – WIS:dom-P, has released a report –…

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. First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 28! Now, to the news! Many around the world are aggressively pushing hydrogen to compliment the intermittency of wind…

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. First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 27. Now, to the news! Per the EIA we’re expecting 15.4 GWac of utility scale, and 4.1 GWac of small scale solar (~25 GWdc total…

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. First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 26. Now, to the news! The new GE offshore wind turbine platform is huge – the NYTimes artiles here covered their 13 MW unit. Since…

The purpose of this post is to cover some of the on the ground work done, machines used, and one company’s techniques – Ernst Pollinator Service – when seeding a solar power plant to be local pollinator and sheep grazing friendly. CommercialSolarGuy visited a solar power plant that was near completion located in south central…

Second half covering Berkeley EMP Lab’s Distributed Solar 2020 Data Update, first half covered here… It is of course, very hard to parse data across hundreds of thousands of installations per year, across varying structure types, weather regions, electricity costs, incentive structures, etc – and come up with salient all encompassing generationzalitons to guide us…