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Category: Solar News

The Inflation Reduction Act Good news for Nonprofits Going Solar

Posted on by D.Smith

The Inflation Reduction Act, was recently passed. One of the major points in this legislations is that it will make it easier for nonprofit organizations to go solar. This legislation allows nonprofit organizations to take advantage of the same solar tax credits that are available to businesses, making it more financially viable for them to switch to clean, renewable energy.

One of the main barriers that has prevented many nonprofits from going solar in the past is the upfront cost of installation. Solar panel systems can be expensive to install, and many nonprofit organizations simply don’t have the budget for it. The Solar for Nonprofits Act addresses this issue by allowing nonprofits to claim the solar investment tax credit (ITC), which can significantly reduce the cost of going solar.

The ITC allows organizations to claim a credit worth up to 26% of the cost of their solar panel system. This can make a significant difference in the affordability of going solar, and it’s a game changer for many nonprofit organizations that may have previously been unable to afford the upfront cost.

In addition to the ITC, the Inflation Reduction Act also includes other provisions that will help make it easier for nonprofits to go solar. For example, it allows organizations to claim the credit even if they don’t have a tax liability, which is a common issue for nonprofit organizations. This means that they can still claim the credit and use it to offset the cost of their solar panel system, even if they don’t owe any taxes.

Renewable energy is becoming a key priority for many lenders. To support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals of affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, climate action and partnerships, many banks are developing specialized commercial loan products designed to encourage the use of solar energy. These loan products include loans for rooftop solar systems, loans for energy efficiency improvements, sustainably certified commercial real estate financing, and sustainably certified construction loans.

Banks focused on accelerating the transition to clean energy are best positioned to help nonprofits secure advantageous funding for their solar installations. There are specialist lenders that have the institutional knowledge and technical know-how to develop innovative funding structures with favorable rates and terms designed to help nonprofits finance these installations.

There is no doubt that the IRA coupled with financing tools that provide funding support for clean energy projects will catalyze nonprofit organizations to deploy solar energy and speed their transition to a net-zero emissions future. Going solar will offer these organizations long-term cost savings while providing the benefits of combatting climate change, creating jobs and bringing new investment into their communities.

Summing up the bottom-line benefits of the IRA, a blog post by Candace Vahlsing, associate director for climate, energy, environment, and science with the White Houses’ Office of Management and Budget, said “the Inflation Reduction Act will help ease the burden that climate change imposes on the American public, strengthen our economy, and reduce future financial risks to the Federal Government and to taxpayers.”

Overall, the Inflation Reduction Act is a major win for nonprofit organizations that are looking to switch to clean, renewable energy. It removes many of the financial barriers that have previously made it difficult for these organizations to go solar, and it makes it more financially viable for them to make the switch. As a result, we can expect to see more and more nonprofit organizations going solar in the coming years, which is great news for the environment and for the future of renewable energy.

‘Water batteries’ could store solar and wind power for when it’s needed

Posted on by D.Smith

The San Vicente reservoir in San Diego County stores water from as far away as the Colorado River. Pumping water into a smaller
reservoir in the surrounding mountains could store excess solar power until it’s needed, when the sun sets.
Dan Charles for NPR

The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project, and others like it, could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps a decade from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby canyon about 1100 feet higher in elevation. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir.

It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive turbines capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130,000 typical homes.

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly vital as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, unbothered by the demands of consumers.

Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California, I believe, got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The alert worked; People stopped using so much power, and the grid survived.

Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators “curtailed,” or turned away, more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted, and there was no way to store it for later, when grid operators desperately needed it.

“We have a problem if we’re going to have these continuous heat waves,” Kuzmich says. “We need a facility to store energy so that we don’t need to turn off our appliances.”

Pumped hydro has a history

The technology that San Diego is proposing, called pumped hydro energy storage, is already operating at more than 40 sites in the United States. Some of the largest ones, which can generate more than 1000 MW for up to eight hours, were built during the 1970s and 1980s to store electricity that nuclear power plants generated during the night. But few new plants have been built over the past 30 years in the U.S. China has continued to build such plants.

Now, the need to store power from renewable sources is reviving interest in this old technology in the U.S.

“Just in the past several years, 92 new projects have come into the development pipeline,” says Malcolm Woolf, president and CEO of the National Hydropower Association. Most of the projects, however, are in the planning stages and still need regulatory approval and financing.

Thanks to the climate bill that President Biden signed in August, these projects now qualify for the same 30 percent tax credit that solar and wind projects enjoy. “That is an absolute game-changer,” Woolf says. “A number of these projects that have been in the pipeline for a number of years now suddenly are a whole lot more bankable.”

Water batteries have a lot of competitors, when it comes to storing energy. Some companies, including the car company GM, are exploring ways for the electric grid to draw emergency power from the batteries in millions of privately owned electric cars. Others are working on ways to store electricity by compressing air or making hydrogen. Still others are focused on ways to manage the demand for electricity, rather than the supply. Electric water heaters, for instance, could be remotely controlled to run when electricity is plentiful and shut down when it’s scarce.

Pumping water, however, has some advantages. It’s a proven way to store massive amounts of power. The San Vicente project would store roughly as much electricity as the batteries in 50,000 of Tesla’s long range Model 3 cars. Water batteries also don’t require hard-to-find battery materials like cobalt and lithium, and the plants can keep working for more than a century.

The biggest problem with them, at least according to some, is that it’s hard to find places to build them. They need large amounts of water, topography that allows the construction of a lower and higher reservoir, and regulatory permission to disturb the landscape.

Woolf, however, says the perception of pumped hydro’s limited prospects “is a myth that I am working hard to disabuse folks of.” Pumped hydro facilities, he says, don’t have to be as massive as those of the past century, and they don’t need to disturb free-flowing streams and rivers. Many proposals are for “closed-loop” systems that use the same water over and over, moving it back and forth between two big ponds, one higher than the other, like sand in an hourglass.

Three of the proposed projects in the U.S. that appear closest to breaking ground, in Montana, Oregon, and southern California, all would operate as closed loops.

Kelly Catlett, director of hydropower reform at American Rivers, an environmental advocacy organization that has highlighted the environmental harm caused by dams, says that “there are good pumped storage projects, and there are not-so-good pumped storage projects.”

Her group won’t support projects that build new dams on streams and rivers, disrupting sensitive aquatic ecosystems. But San Diego’s plan, she says, “looks like something that we could potentially support” because it uses an existing reservoir and doesn’t disturb any flowing streams. Also, she says, “I’m unaware of any opposition by indigenous nations, which is another really important factor, as they have borne a lot of the impacts of hydropower development over the decades.”

The board of the San Diego County Water Authority, and San Diego’s city council, are expected to vote soon on whether to move ahead with a detailed engineering design of pumped hydro storage at the San Vicente reservoir. The state of California is chipping in $18 million. The design work, followed by regulatory approvals, financing, and actual construction, is likely to take a decade or more.

Texas power prices jump 100% as record heat wave sends demand soaring across the State

Posted on by D.Smith

  • Texas power prices soared 100% on Tuesday amid a massive heat wave that broke some records.
  • The price shot up to about $5,000 per megawatt-hour from $2,500 earlier in the day.
  • Temperatures topped 110 degrees in parts of Texas on Tuesday.

Texas power prices doubled on Tuesday as record high temperatures in parts of the state sent demand for cooling soaring.

By the evening, power cost about $5,000 per megawatt-hour, up from $2,500 earlier in the day, according to state grid operator the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

On Tuesday, San Angelo in western Texas set a new record high temperature of 114 degrees, topping its prior record of 111 degrees.

And in the Rio Grande Valley, Del Rio hit a new high of 113 degrees. Meanwhile, Dallas and San Antonio also set new records.

Adding to the demand on Texas power supplies and prices is the tropical-level humidity in the state that worsens the heat effect, making it feel like 120 degrees or more.

The heat wave is expected to last longer than a week, meaning the power grid will be under extended strain.

In fact, ERCOT has predicted that Wednesday will see a new record high for power use, which should rise to 80,458 megawatts from 79,203 MW on Tuesday. That would exceed the current all-time high of 80,148 MW that was set in July 2022.

The heat wave is expected to continue toppling records next week, when ERCOT sees demand reaching 82,080 MW on Monday and 83,555 MW on June 28

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Solar peaks at 5.3% of US electricity in May, up 26% for the year

Posted on by D.Smith

The US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its most recent Electric Power Monthly, which provides data through the end of May 2021. The report notes that for the month, solar photovoltaic generation (solar) grew 25% over May 2020. Solar accounted for just over 5.3% of total US electricity generated for the month versus 4.41% last year.

Total US electricity use for the month increased by 4.5% versus May of last year. For the year through the end of May, total U.S. electricity usage is up 3.49% versus last year.

Solar produced 26.4% more in the first five months of the year than it did in the same period of 2020, covering 3.7% of all U.S. electricity demand.

Solar Photovoltaic as a % of US Electricity

The solar generation this May appears to have set a record for highest percentage of all US electricity -beating out last month’s number, and highest overall volume generated at just over 17 GWhrs in any one month (beating last month’s 15 GWhrs).

We here at Caldus Energy were hoping to see solar electricity hit 6% of all electricity for the first time, which did not occur. May remains the highest producing month as a percentage of total solar electricity in the United States. May through the end of August is expected to produce similar total generation – with July making up the highest quantity by volume.

Electricity by source, USA, May 2021

One reason U.S. solar production missed our 6% target was the increase in electricity use this summer, which also precluded the other milestone we were hoping for: 50% emission-free electricity. In fact, this year’s clean electricity peak probably already occurred in March, because generation as a percentage of US electricity has declined ever since.

There is encouraging news for combined renewable energy sources, with annual wind generation up 14% over 2020. When we factor in solars’ 26.4% increase we see a combined generation increase of 17.3%.

And as a percentage of 2021’s electrical demand, solar and wind managed to cover a little over 14.1%. The peak month for wind and solar generation in the last two years occured in April, with nearly 17% of generation met – while 15.3% was covered in May.

Wind and Solar as a % of all Electricity, USA

For the year, new utility scale solar power tracked by the EIA totaled 3.8 GWac of capacity across 163 unique projects. In the last month we saw 27 unique facilities come online, totalling 638 MWac/~798 MWdc.

Among the facilities to come online in May were a series of 2 MWac projects coming from the Illinois community solar program. There was a batch of facilities from Florida as well, all sized at 74.5 MWac.

New Solar Facilities, 2021

The EIA-860 chart contains “generator-level specific information about existing and planned generators and associated environmental equipment at electric power plants with 1 megawatt or greater of combined nameplate capacity”. Data is available starting from 2001. During those years, 4,749 operating solar power plants have been entered into the data. They total 50,447 MWac of capacity.

The largest project listed is the 300 MWac Prospero Solar plant in Texas that came online last summer. The smallest listed are a series of thirty two ~100 kWac projects, mostly from the early 2000s.

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