California

Solar workforce development can help combat systemic racism in the industry.

The latest PV finance report released by Mercom Capital had solar investment falling almost entirely across the board with the number of new solar funds launched in the last three months offering a rare piece of good news.

With electric vehicles starting to gain traction, the International Energy Agency’s updated, ten-year e-mobility forecast has suggested geopolitical and economic concerns will trump environmental niceties when it comes to encouraging recycling. But what price ever-cheaper batteries?

Industry body SolarPower Europe is trying to stay bullish about the lingering effects as the continent starts to come out of lockdown and one analyst has predicted a healthy large scale solar market will carry the US through the crisis.

Analysts appear divided on the effects the public health crisis will have on the EV market even as sales of petrol-engined SUVs soar in China. And Portugal is plowing on with its Covid-delayed national solar tender, an exercise which may help establish whether clean energy thinktank Ieefa is right to predict PV prices will continue to fall.

MIT scientists have suggested used electric vehicle batteries could offer a more viable business case than purpose-built systems for the storage of grid scale solar power in California. Such ‘second life’ EV batteries, may cost only 60% of their original purchase price to deploy and can be effectively aggregated for industrial scale storage even if they have declined to 80% of their original capacity.

The solar learning curve usually applied to panel costs has been extrapolated to the larger, non-module element of the price of solar electricity generated by big projects, leading one commentator to predict new solar projects could be cheaper than legacy fossil fuel plants within 10-15 years in certain markets.

The cash injection from Tech CU will fund the installation of ‘tens of thousands’ of the Californian manufacturer’s solar panels on residential rooftops over four years, according to the company.

The unfolding effects of the Covid-19 crisis, and fears of a possible second wave, have split analysts trying to guess how the unsubsidized renewables market will emerge as slumping demand continued to distort power markets. pv magazine rounds up the week’s coronavirus developments.

Matt Harper, chief commercial officer of newly-merged British-Canadian vanadium redox flow battery business Invinity Energy Systems has spoken to pv magazine about the VS3-022 Battery Unit it is marketing for grid scale solar-plus-storage projects and why it may be a better bet than lithium-ion.