Renewable Revolution

EcoWatch


By Lorraine Chow

Mar. 15, 2018 12:31PM EST

Tesla has started building a massive rooftop solar array on top of its Gigafactory 1 (GF1) outside Sparks, Nevada.

Once finished, the 70-megawatt system will be the largest in the world by far; the current record-holder is the comparatively shrimpy 11.5-megawatt array in India that can power 8,000 homes.

Building Tesla has posted satellite images of the GF1 construction site, showing solar panels installed on the north side of the factory.

The Gigafactory is part of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's vision to fast-track a cleaner, more sustainable future. He previously announced intentions to power the Nevada building without fossil fuels, relying instead on renewable energy and batteries.

"GF1 is an all-electric factory with no fossil fuels (natural gas or petroleum) directly consumed," Tesla said then.

"We will be using 100 percent sustainable energy through a combination of a 70 megawatt solar rooftop array and solar ground installations. The solar rooftop array is ~7x larger than the largest rooftop solar system installed today."

The Gigafactory 1 is being built in phases so Tesla and its partners can manufacture products while the building continues to expand. It officially kicked off the mass production of lithium-ion battery cells in January 2017.

The building is expected for completion sometime this year, at which point the Gigafactory stands to claim the title of world's largest building by footprint.

Impressively, Tesla touts that its current structure already has a footprint of 1.9 million square feet, which houses 4.9 million square feet of operational space across several floors.

"And we are still less than 30 percent done," the firm boasted.

Once fully built, the Gigafactory will produce 35 GWh/year of lithium-ion battery cells annually, which is "nearly as much as the rest of the entire world's battery production combined." 

https://www.ecowatch.com/tesla-solar-gigafactory-2543158034.html

March 25th, 2018 by Jake Richardson

This article is part of our “CleanTechnica Answer Box” collection. In this collection of articles, we respond to dozens of common anti-cleantech myths.

Some solar power critics 🐉🦕🦖😈 seem to enjoy trying to point out that the energy payback time for solar power is too long, and therefore this form of renewable energy is not valid. Those critics have not kept up with the times or are simply lying to you.

Years ago, when solar cells were less efficient, there might have been some truth in questioning the energy payback of solar panels because they were most likely manufactured using electricity generated from coal, natural gas, or nuclear power and were less efficiently manufactured.

Today’s solar panels are more efficient, so they produce more electricity, and this fact along with more efficient manufacturing means that energy payback periods have decreased to just a few years. Research has found, “Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1). With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that PV systems generate won’t be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources.” 


Other estimates also show solar is viable and have tremendous energy payback periods. “In Australia, the International Energy Agency[vii] calculated the energy payback period for a solar power system to be under two years. This means a solar power system takes less than two years to generate enough energy to break even on the amount of energy taken to manufacture it.

“Based on models and data examined by both the International Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy[viii], solar panels do pay back their energy investment. With solar panels lasting as long as 25 years, they make more energy over their lifetime than it takes to manufacture the panel. Since the payback times are decreasing over time, we have now reached the point that even at this strong growth, the total installed PV capacity is a net producer of energy and a net GHG sink.”


Solar power has already been used in manufacturing, so it is at least in theory possible it will eventually be used to produce solar panels (and it must be in some places). Once solar power is being used to produce solar panels, the question is, what does energy payback even matter? 

Solar cells might eventually made from cheaper and more efficient materials, which would decrease their production costs even more and perhaps increase their efficiency and energy payback period.

Misleading Metrics

Additionally, some of metrics, like energy payback, seem to be questionable in the way they are used by solar power critics and climate change deniers. For example, they don’t reference that the cost of continuing to use only fossil fuels are vastly greater than manufacturing and installing solar panels. “The share of national GDP at risk from climate change exceeds $1.5 trillion in the 301 major cities around the world. Including the impact of human pandemics – which are likely to become more severe as the planet warms — the figure increases to nearly $2.2 trillion in economic output at risk through 2025.”

The figures in the US are huge too. “Extreme weather, made worse by climate change, along with the health impacts of burning fossil fuels, has cost the U.S. economy at least $240 billion a year over the past ten years, a new report has found. And yet this does not include this past month’s three major hurricanes or 76 wildfires in nine Western states. Those economic losses alone are estimated to top $300 billion, the report notes.”

It’s very obvious that the financial costs of continuing to do business as usual 💣 are tremendous, but the human costs 😨🔫 could be even greater.

Air pollution in China is so severe it may be contributing to 1.6 million human deaths per year. “Outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people in China every year, or about 4,400 people a day, according to a newly released scientific paper.”

In the US, climate change actually may do severe financial damage to people who are already struggling. “The poorest third of US counties will likely lose up to 20 percent of their incomes, and regions such as the Pacific Northwest and New England will gain economically over the Gulf and Southern states, if climate change continues unmitigated through the end of the century, according to a new study co-led by two UC Berkeley researchers and published today in the journal Science.”

The critics 🐉🦕🦖🦀😈 of solar power fail to mention these fossil fuel costs over and over and over again. How could the fossil fuel industries even begin to pay for all the damage they have caused to human health and the planet? First of all, they wouldn’t do it, and they couldn’t afford it, so the fossil fuel damage payback time would be never. 

What is the premature death payback time for coal power, or how about the oil spills payback time for petroleum companies? The Deepwater Horizon spill damage may very well still be occurring. “For those long-lived things like turtles and sperm whales and dolphins … they’re still in the middle of this. And we may not know for another 30 or 40 years where the impacts are,” said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University. He made that remark in 2017, so perhaps we won’t know the full extent of the damage until at least 2047. By that time, will BP still be in business and will the company pay more than it has so far?


It is simply ludicrous to try to apply an energy payback standard to solar power, and yet, somehow, fossil fuels which have had an enormously damaging impact for years get off scot-free? Continuing to fail with only fossil fuels isn’t an option.

Images by Vinaykumar8687 •• CC BY-SA 4.0, by SUNGROW Power Supply Co., and by Asia Chang on Unsplash.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/25/solar-power-energy-payback-time-now-super-short/

Quote

AG: I guess Palloy thinks pollution costs are "irrelevant". LOL!

Hypocrite!

The pollution costs of FFs are not irrelevant to the ecology of the planet, but are not included in the system boundaries for the ERoEI of PV question because they are not energy invested or received in PV.  Capitalism claims the atmosphere is an externality, so you can dump CO2 in it for free.  We are a long way from changing that.

Really? My, my, if it wasn't for your willingness to clear up my "misunderstandings", I might have never known about Capitalism and ERoEI and all those other areas you are such a "world class expert" on. 

I have posted SEVERAL times over all those issues over the years, Palloy, what liars claim about this and that has no bearing on the laws of thermodynamics, greenhouse gases, energy payback time and REAL WORLD ERoEI.

Even the ERoEI figures for nuclear and coal and natural gas and other fossil fuels are totally fabricated exercises in happy talk bullshit, though you are also quiet as DEATH on those realities. Just the energy AND pollution produced to build the concrete towers on a nuclear power plant alone knock out any ERoEI or "carbon neutral" claims for nuclear power, even before the mining and refining of yellow cake and the manufacture of fuel rods and the storing of used fuel rods for a CENTURY or so are figured in.

Oh, but you don't like to talk about those "inconveniences", do you? It's a "tough world", RIGHT?

Do you know how much energy it takes to strip out the oxygen from crude oil (there is a LOT of OXYGEN in that "hydrocarbon" when in crude form) before they begin the refining process? No, you don't. And, GUESS WHAT, the 500 plus degrees F they need to cook that crude in while they get rid of the oxygen is NOT EVER considered "part of the ERoEI" of gasoline. HOW CONVENIENT!

And, my, how "thermodynamically" MATHEMATICALLY "logical" it is to claim that the fuel used by tankers in the ocean and on the highways to get the hydrocarbons to refining points and customer gasoline stations is "irrelevant" to oil ERoEI.

Also, all those subsidies for "national security" which are SUBTRACTED from the cost of the exploration and exploitation MONETARY INVESTMENT for the machines that expend ENERGY (you know, the ENERGY that is INVESTED) to get the crude are also "just part of Capitalism NON-externalities" to help those poor fossil fuel loyal servants get Da Job Done. LOL!

I could spend all day explaining to you what a BAD, SICK JOKE the ERoEI figures for fossil fuels have been from the beginning, but you would dance around with your "externality" claims and such.

And then, when you are tired of all this reality about GAME OVER for humanity with the continued burning of fossil fuels, you would retire to your "Collapse will save us" meme. 

By Kelly Pickerel | January 29, 2018

Weather patterns have always been considered when determining solar system lifetimes and performance. Safety is also considered when establishing installation guidelines and product standards. The recent intensity of natural disasters across the country—a direct result of climate change—brings the adequacy of safety and performance standards into question. Are solar installations prepared for the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events of the future?

For the most part, it seems like we’re faring OK. When bad weather hits, there are more solar success stories than major failures. Rooftop arrays are surviving multiple hurricane hits and panels barely feel hailstorms. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned as natural disasters get worse.

Global safety and testing organization UL is paying attention. A good baseline for product standards today may need to be adjusted in the future. UL factors the full lifespan of a project, including any potential climate changes in year 20 or 35, into how arrays should perform.


“We certainly look at safety margins and evaluate if they’re adequate for potential changes in weather events,” said Bruce Bailey, vice president of renewable energy for UL. “We don’t see any chinks in the armor or fatal flaws [right now], but there needs to be an industry awareness of these issues, and there’s clearly a willingness to respond to them.”

We’re seeing the greater impact of disastrous weather every day. Renewable insurance provider GCube found that 50% of solar claims (from 2011 to 2015) came from weather-related incidents, far outpacing the electrical failures we’ve come to expect most.

“Average solar claims severity in the last five years has increased by 87%, predominantly as a result of the greater impact of weather-related losses,” GCube said in its 2016 Cell, Interrupted report.

Clearly extreme weather is affecting the solar industry already. Here’s a look at how solar installations are coping with natural disasters today and how we’ll survive severe events of the future.

Wildfires 🔥

Huge sections of California felt the increased intensity of wildfires last year, and it feels unrealistic to expect a solar array to make it through the flames when entire homes are destroyed. But what is expected is that solar panels won’t contribute to a fire or be a danger to the surrounding area.


When traveling in the San Francisco Bay area, Solar Power World editors heard stories of residential solar panels exploding into pieces after the wildfires across Northern California in October 2017. Suddenly solar panels installed in fire-prone areas seemed like a dangerous decision.

If those exploding solar panel stories were true, they were probably freak accidents and not a result of poor solar panel standards, said UL principal engineer Ken Boyce.

“Fire is a living thing—it eats, it consumes fuel, it breathes, it needs to consume oxygen and it doesn’t want to die. When you bring that to bear on any piece of electrical equipment or building material, you can have a different range of responses,” he said. “That experience [of exploding panels] may have to do more with the intensity of the wildfire than the response of the PV panels to a particular condition.”

UL testing has done a good job making sure panels and mounting systems won’t encourage the spread of flames. It’s difficult to even find statistics on solar panels involved with fires, let alone starting or spreading them. Still, major fire events aren’t downplayed when building a safe and reliable industry.

“It’s the type of thing that we monitor,” said Boyce, who participates in SEIA’s Codes & Standards Working Group. “We talk about these types of things all the time to make sure we’re bringing the right thought to the building and fire codes and the electrical codes and that we’re managing that interface with product standards.”



Hurricanes  and tornadoes

While Puerto Rico and other islands saw unbelievable destruction from the 2017 hurricane season, one piece of good news shined through the devastation—a 645-kW array on a medical center roof in San Juan survived and was functioning at 100%. Florida-based contractor Valor Construction installed the system at the VA Caribbean Healthcare System in 2015 using Sollega ballasted mounting systems supported by Anchor Products attachments.


The key to that installation’s success (and many others across the Caribbean) was its use of attachments, said Anchor Products president Joel Stanley.

“When you have an attached system, it’s just not going to move. It can’t; it’s attached,  ” he said. “Racking manufacturers are adapting racking systems that better accommodate attachments. When attachments are designed properly with the proper racking system, we can design wind load capacities to easily exceed 200 mph.”

Racking manufacturers becoming more comfortable with attachments is a result of experience in the industry and a commitment to tested and verified systems. The trend toward better testing and engineering of systems will continue to improve system success rates in hazardous weather areas.

“It comes down to engineering and designing systems properly,” Stanley said. “If structural engineers can maintain control, we’ll be able to design systems that withstand the forces that Mother Nature is going to have. We’ve done a lot of individual testing with Sollega; they have understood the results and that’s what’s allowed them to design systems like they did in Puerto Rico and St. Maarten and those jobs that have withstood so well.”


On the ground, solar arrays can still be at risk of wind damage. Trackers have gotten better at handling high-wind events because of improved designs and advanced sensors. Instead of depending on heavy steel to keep systems in place, control sensors can optimize stow angles in relation to wind strength to safely position tracking arrays during storms.

“It is always a challenge to face extreme climatic conditions,” said José Alfonso Teruel, R&D manager for tracker manufacturer Soltec. “Our R&D team has re-designed the control electronics, and a new high-speed motor design moves the tracker from the maximum tilt (60˚) to the horizontal position (0˚) in less than three minutes for rapid stowing.”

Residential solar installations in tornado zones are also surviving because of good product selection and common-sense engineering.

“We make a point to select quality equipment and install with good craftsmanship to resist the heavy weather we get in our area, but there will always be outlier events that cannot be planned for,” said Chris Rogge, director of solar services for Cromwell Solar in Lawrence, Kansas—an area known for its higher concentration of tornadoes. “We did have a system take a glancing blow from a tornado, and it stayed in place. A few panels were punctured by flying metal debris, but so was the metal roof of that building.”

Flying debris does seem to be the larger concern. Even when a solar mounting system does its job and keeps panels mounted to roofs and the ground, an airborne lawn chair or rock could be what pulls a system down. In those situations, homeowner’s insurance should take care of the damaged panels.

Hailstorms

It’s also difficult to hide from hail. An April 2016 hailstorm in Texas damaged 4,000 panels at a 4.4-MW site. Baseball-sized hail hit Alamo 2 solar farm near San Antonio, and some panels saw multiple points of impact. The tracking system stowed horizontally when high winds came through, but that left the panels more exposed to falling hail. It was ultimately decided to replace all 18,000 panels in case there were undetected microcracks.


Texas Green Energy was hired to replace the panels, and president Adam Burke said he wanted to prove to solar naysayers that damaged panels only have to be a slight inconvenience.

“I wanted to prove a point that these things happen and there are mechanisms in place to repair this just like anything else,” he said. “It’s minor downtime and the whole plant is renewed and restored.”

Freak accidents aside, hail damage is not a huge concern. NREL analyzed 50,000 solar systems installed between 2009 and 2012 and found the probability of damage from hail was below 0.05%. Solar panels are tested and certified to withstand 25-mm (1-in.) in diameter hailstones flying at 23 m/s (51 mph). And for the most part, hail doesn’t often fall larger or faster than that.

“We do get our fair share [of hail] around here. We’ve probably seen less than five panels with visible hail damage, though. We have seen great coverage from these customers by homeowner’s insurance,” said Cromwell Solar’s Rogge. “We had a good amount of hail this past spring, but it just led to a lot of removal and reinstallations for roof replacements. The arrays have been fine.”

Blizzards ❄  ☃   

Earlier this winter, Erie, Pennsylvania, received an astounding 65 in. of snow in 60 hours—34 in. came on Christmas Day alone. While communities in the Great Lakes’ snowbelt are used to heavy snow, this was still a record-breaking event. No one wants 5 ft of snow sitting on top of solar panels.


The weight of that snow will probably not harm a solar array, especially since tilted solar panels help to shed snow blankets (just watch your head below). Buffalo, New York’s CIR Electrical Construction always includes partial snow cover in customer solar production plans, and the installation company tells its customers to just let nature do its thing.

“We do not recommend our customers to clear snow off their panels,” said Ashley Regan, director of business development for CIR. “Using a shovel, brush or similar item could damage your panels and system. Your system warranties do not cover any c r a c k e d glass or disturbed electrical wiring that may result from a homeowner trying to remove snow, so it’s best to let them be.”

CIR installs solar year-round and can often be found shoveling snow off roofs and using leaf blowers to warm roofing shingles before beginning work. That’s where snow affects solar most: installation speed.

“Winter and other intensive weather conditions may slow down installation time due to additional steps and safety precautions,” Regan said. “If it’s too cold we don’t force our staff to stay out, especially on the roof. In severely bitter cold, we try to do inside work, including mounting the balance of system, mounting inverters, interior conduit runs and structural attic work if necessary.”

CIR uses power optimizers so each panel can produce independently, which helps with shading from snow coverage. The company also prefers elevated flashing to increase water mitigation from penetrations in case of heavy snowfall.

Snow is just as common as rain, and building codes and product tests account for that. While no one wants great amounts of snow to fall in a short period of time, the good news is that it’s not a permanent weight solar panels have to carry. Snow melts eventually.

Floods 💧🌊

Rising sea level maps show southern sections of Florida swallowed by the effects of global warming by as soon as 2100. New buildings in Miami are preparing for increased water and storm surge. The plaza level of the new Frost Museum of Science sits 21 ft, 8 in. above sea level, and the 66-kW solar system on its roof should never experience flood waters.


For those unplanned, temporary floods, solar developers are adapting. Mauricio Añón, brand ambassador at utility-scale contractor Inovateus Solar, said civil engineers will suggest raising array heights or redirecting flooding channels to allow for ground-mounts to work in floodplains, but it really comes down to costs.

“We get an audit when there is land with potential problems,” he said. “Sometimes [the solution] is just finding different land or a different place and moving the project. If the outcome is not promising, you don’t want to do all that work and not have the warranties [for system protection].”

Executives with Soltec claim that its SF7 tracker has the highest mounting height for the tracking motor and electronics in the industry at a minimum of 5.9 ft, which should keep equipment high enough even in floodplain applications. Soltec also uses torque tubes to protect wires from external threats. Flood-level sensors will activate a tracker to adjust to safe angles in case water levels start to rise.

“The standard height of the tracker, together with additional sensors and an improved tracker control algorithm, allow the tracker rotation to adjust to the flood stage and prevent the tracker from the harmful action of water runoffs while the plant keeps functioning,” said Soltec’s Teruel.

For residential installations, flood waters affect the inverter more than the panels.

“The flooding that we normally see is a few feet and typically will not reach the solar inverter that is wall-mounted on our homes,” said David Dixon, business development manager for Texas installer NATiVE. “Because homeowners are not typically building in flood plains, this has not been a major issue for us, yet.

“I do see this becoming more problematic with coastal installations and the more and more frequent occurrence of extreme weather that we see,” Dixon continued. “Because our equipment is up on walls and roofs, it is usually out of harm’s way. I am beginning to think about battery systems though, which are typically heavy and mounted on grade. They will be vulnerable to even minor flooding events.”

Richard Sherwood with Houston-based installer Adaptive Solar said the region’s four days of heavy rain (peak accumulations reached 60.58 in.) from Hurricane Harvey in late August 2017 really opened up the conversation of battery backup.

“I was bracing for the worst; I didn’t think anyone would be looking at solar for the next three months. [The hurricane] has piqued interest, and we’re seeing a lot more leads but almost exclusively with the battery backup right now,” he said.

Where to house these energy storage technologies may be the next big concern when considering disastrous weather.

As extreme weather events continue to plague the United States, solar installers will have to keep innovating to ensure systems last through hurricanes, hail and tornadoes. Perhaps an increase in solar panel installations will mean a decrease in climate change and wild weather, but only time will tell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Pickerel is managing editor of Solar Power World.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/01/solar-industry-responding-increasing-intensity-natural-disasters/

Richard Aguilar

Published on Jan 11, 2018

April 24th, 2018 by Joshua S Hill

China’s National Energy Administration announced on Tuesday that the country installed an impressive 9.65 gigawatts (GW) of new solar PV capacity in the first quarter of 2018, up 22% on the same period a year earlier and up on analysts’ projections.

At a press conference held on Tuesday, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) published new data revealing the country’s solar PV performance for the first quarter. The data comes to us courtesy of Asia Europe Clean Energy (Solar) Advisory, (AECEA), based in Beijing, which covers the Chinese solar industry closer than many non-Chinese analysts are capable of doing.


Specifically, China installed a total of 9.65 GW worth of new solar PV capacity in the first quarter, made up of 1.97 GW worth of utility-scale solar capacity, and 7.68 GW worth of distributed solar capacity. This represents a 22% increase on the same quarter a year earlier, however, this doesn’t tell the whole story.

Frank Haugwitz, Director of the AECEA, explained that China’s utility-scale segment actually decreased by 64% in the first quarter, as compared to a year earlier, while the country’s distributed solar segment increased by a mind-boggling 217%.

AECEA also hinted at the fact that grid curtailment issues, which have plagued China’s solar industry for several years now, is beginning to improve — especially in regions such as Xinjiang and the province of Gansu, where grid curtailment levels in 2017 had stayed above 20% for the whole year.

It’s a strong start to the year for China’s solar industry, which broke all sorts of records in 2017 by installing a massive 52.83 GW worth of solar capacity after a year of repeated revisions to analyst expectations. Looking forward, there is no communal agreement on how much solar China will install in 2018, but AECEA currently expects China to install between 40 GW and 45 GW.     

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/24/china-installs-nearly-10-gigawatts-of-solar-in-first-quarter-up-22/