#distributed solar

"New York is marking the early achievement of its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act statutory goal a year ahead of schedule, announcing that 6 gigawatts (GW) of distributed solar have been installed across the state, enough to power more than one million homes.

New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) president and CEO Doreen M. Harris broke the news onsite at a distributed solar project in New Scotland, NY today. The project, developed by New Leaf Energy and owned by Generate Capital, participates in the state’s Solar for All pilot program with utility partner National Grid, meaning its generation benefits low-income households. The site’s 5.7 MW solar array will generate 6.7 million kilowatt-hours of solar energy annually, powering about one thousand homes.

“New York State has provided a replicable model for others to deliver clean, low-cost renewable energy to more consumers,” asserted Harris. “Our public-private partnerships are the catalysts which have helped us to achieve our 6-GW goal well ahead of target, trailblazing New York’s path to an equitable energy transition.”

Governor Kathy Hochul says this achievement brings New York one step closer to a reliable, resilient, zero-emission grid. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act contains goals to generate 70% of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040.

“Distributed solar is at the heart of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, expanding the availability of renewable energy, and delivering substantial benefits for our health, our environment, and our economy,” Hochul added.

New York achieving its distributed solar goal of 6 GW has generated approximately $9.2 billion in private investment across the state, according to NYSERDA, creating more than 14,000 solar jobs from engineering to installation. Three years ago, Governor Hochul directed to expand the goal to 10 GW by 2030.

“While we’re incredibly proud of the work and partnerships that have led to this achievement, we’re more excited that it can be repeated and multiplied. With the State’s continued leadership, we’re confident we can get to 10 GW and beyond,” predicts New Leaf Energy director of policy and business development Sam Jasinsk.

The state says it has another 3.4 GW of distributed solar projects already in development, making a 10 GW goal quite feasible.

“Customers and consumers are asking for access to clean energy, and New York state is listening,” Generate Capital Investments managing director Peggy Flannery said. Generate Capital operates 69 projects and counting in New York.

In 2023, New York installed more community solar capacity than any other state. Last year was also the state’s most productive year ever for solar installations, with 885 MW of capacity installed.

In April, NYSERDA was selected to receive nearly $250 million from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Solar for All program to enhance New York State’s existing portfolio of solar deployment, technical assistance, and workforce development programs for the benefit of over 6.8 million residents that live in low-income households and disadvantaged communities. As part of the grant funding, the New York State Housing and Community Renewal, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and New York City Housing Preservation and Development, will implement new programs that target specific barriers to solar deployment for this population."

The International Energy Agency has a new forecast that projects “spectacular growth” in worldwide solar power by the mid-2020s. The report is interesting not just for what it says — but for who is saying it.

Paris-based IEA, a partnership run by 30 member countries — including the United States — has spent much of its existence producing forecasts focused on managing the global oil supply. The agency’s reports have been criticized by some analysts for underestimating the growth of renewable energy.

So it is notable that IEA’s latest annual forecast, issued on Monday, says worldwide renewable energy capacity will grow by 50 percent from 2019 to 2024, adding about 1,200 gigawatts, which would account for two-thirds of new electricity generation capacity. Most of this increase would be solar power.

The forecast shows a big shift from last year when IEA said renewables would grow 40 percent from 2018 to 2023. The change is largely because of the decreasing prices of renewable energy components, the agency says.

“As costs continue to fall, we have a growing incentive to ramp up the deployment of solar PV,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, in a statement.

Renewable energy would grow from 25 percent of the world’s electricity generation in 2018 to 30 percent in 2024, according to the IEA forecast.

The report shows rapid growth in distributed solar power, which are systems owned by residents and businesses. As costs continue to drop, distributed solar will be increasingly attractive as a way for consumers to control their energy bills.

This is the sort of “distributed solar” power system that many environmentalists have been promoting in California as an alternative to the continued development of industrial solar and wind facilities in the desert wilderness areas.

Excerpt:

South Australia—already home to the world's largest battery—will soon host the world's largest virtual solarplant under a landmark plan from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the state government.

The plan involves installing a 5-kilowatt solar system and a Tesla Powerwall 2 battery on roughly 50,000 homes across the state over the next four years. The setup will be installed at no charge to the households and financed through the sale of electricity.

The entire system will function as an interconnected power plant all while cutting power bills for participants by an estimated 30 percent.

The trial phase, which has already commenced, will start with 1,100 public housing properties. After the trial period, another 24,000 public housing properties will receive the systems before opening up to other South Australian households.

A short video (one minute, 45 seconds) explaining the program clearly and succinctly:

Kathmandu: The power purchase agreement (PPA) process initiated by the Nepal Electricity Authority for the development of solar energy projects under local government investment has come under controversy. Stakeholders have raised concerns over the transparency and fairness of the process after the pathway for company registration and share ownership was opened only as the application deadline…

The linked article, written by David Roberts of Vox, tells us about distributed solar as a solid solution to the continued development of large centralized power generation plants and a electricity distribution network that, as we have learned from the California experience, can cause its own problems. The article has a lot of infographics and technical information, but is worth a read. Absent a read, this short video explains distributed solar.

Here’s an excerpt from the story that tells us what distributed solar/energy is:

Since it first started growing in earnest in the early 20th century, the grid has worked according to the same basic model. Power is generated at large power plants and fed into high-voltage transmission lines, which can carry it over long distances. At various points along the way, power is dumped from the transmission system into local distribution areas (LDAs) via substations, where transformers lower the voltage. Local distribution grids then carry the electricity to customers.

Distributed energy is different from the conventional model in that its origin lies within an LDA. That’s where it is generated, stored, and managed; no transmission lines are involved.

At the edge of a local distribution grid, the utility hands power off to customers through a meter, which tracks consumption. (Meters are mostly analog, but these days digital “smart meters” are becoming more common.) Once power is “behind the meter,” it is in the customer’s hands. The utility has no visibility into or control over it.

Some distributed energy is located in front of the meter, within the distribution grid itself. Think, for instance, of a community solar park or a small local wind farm. We will return to front-of-the-meter distributed energy later.

But for now, when most people talk about distributed energy, they are referring to the kind located behind the meter, like solar panels on roofs and batteries in garages.

The power from the panels is stored by the batteries or used by the customer directly. Utilities are not involved. They only have access to aggregate consumption data from meters. If a customer’s solar panels generate so much power that it turns their aggregate consumption negative — they produce more power than they consume — utilities will, at least in California, buy that power from the customer, a policy known as “net metering.”

(It’s important to note that the most common form of behind-the-meter distributed energy, in California and across the world, is the old-fashioned diesel generator, which is unfortunate for a wide variety of reasons — more on that in a moment.)

By arguing that rooftop solar is a better approach to solar energy than utility-sized solar plants, zinke is agreeing with a sector of the environmental movement that agrees, and argues that we should favor “distributed solar” over utility-sized solar. So, zinke may find some sympathetic ears with this latest odd statement.

Excerpt:

Despite saying in speeches that he happens “to love the coal miners” but that wind power “kills all the birds,” the Trump administration’s official policy is ostensibly to pursue an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

Under such a policy, as it’s described, the government does not pick winners and losers in the marketplace. Private firms are free to develop the energy source they determine to be the most economical. The more sources of electricity and fuel there are domestically, the thinking goes, the less dependent the United States is on other nations to meet its energy needs.

Or as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke put it in a March television interview: “Producing energy domestically and reasonable regulation is far better than watching it being produced overseas with no regulation.”

All of which is why solar energy advocates were scratching their heads after a recent comment Zinke made in a speech during National Clean Energy Week were a poor use of publicly owned land.

In the comments, Zinke seemed suggested that utility-scale solar projects were a poor use of publicly owned land — and that solar companies should look away from Interior's land and toward the roofs of homes and businesses for solar panel space instead.

“If I see solar cells out on land, that land is no longer useful for anything else but energy, but there's a lot of roofs when you fly over,” Zinke said, according to Politico. “And I think the greatest opportunity, quite frankly, for the solar industry is look at all the roofs in America.”

“If you’ve been outside of Las Vegas and looked at that solar field, it kind of looks like a scene from Mad Max,” Zinke said of the Ivanpah solar plant in Nevada during a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an influential Washington's  business group. “Is that the future of having these three or four 80-foot towers with reflector cells the size of garage doors where it makes this cone, this sphere of death, so as birds go through it they get zapped?” he asked.