A very handy tool for landowners and solar developers alike may disappear with the new infrastructure bill, so the idea is to take advantage of it now. A 1031 exchange allows a landowner to exchange property for another similar in value – allowing them to use tax advantages from selling solar leases. Developers purchase the land that hosts their solar farms and then sell the leases to fund the purchase of new land for future solar farms.
NREL finds that overall costs for installed PV solar will actually decline, as will the costs for battery storage systems. This is the case for res, commercial and utility-scale systems—by 3%, 11%, and 12%, respectively. BOS costs did increase or remain flat from last year though higher BOS costs were offset by a 19% reduction in module cost.
There are factors in solar that create significant supply risks for the long term such as the fact that the Xinjiang issue could mean one-half of the planned 2022 solar projects will stall. However, Chinese manufacturers are expanding their capacity in response and policymakers here and abroad are moving legislation forward to compensate.
The CEO of Arcadia Power shares how he and his company raised $100 million to democratize clean energy access in this Suncast podcast. He talks about how they created a data platform that allows retail consumers to more easily purchase renewables based electricity in a way that also benefits utilities and developers. He also touches on how to create a power-team and attract mission oriented employees.
A new study of the grid impact of 24/7 carbon-free electricity procurement finds that it eliminates emissions associated with a buyer’s electricity consumption, is preferable to 100% annual matching, promotes early adoption of clean energy generation and long-duration energy storage, and forwards significant levels of the retirement of natural gas power generation.
Informative content creation is a strong marketing tool for attracting prospects. Once again Aurora curates some of their articles about this tactic: 4 Ways to Get More Solar Leads Without Increasing Budgets, The Solar Sales Follow Up Kit, Decoding the Solar Buyer: Insights from Aurora’s 2021 Homeowner Research, Common Residential Solar Myths and How to Overcome Them.
The National Center for Appropriate Technology has created the first US AgriSolar Clearinghouse to bring together farmers and ranchers, land managers, solar developers and researchers with high quality, useful information to increase solar and agriculture co-location. The clearinghouse includes peer-reviewed info, videos, podcasts and a user forum.
Global energy storage deployment will reach 358 GW and 1,028 GWh by 2030, 20x more than 2020 amounts. The U.S. and China will represent more than half of this deployment due to supportive policies, strong climate goals and the push for flexible resources. In short, global energy storage market is experiencing an entirely new rate of growth.
Enphase Energy has released an all-in-one Enphase Energy System with IQ8 solar microinverters. IQ8 can form a microgrid during a power outage via sunlight, providing backup power even without a battery. It has four configurations: solar only, sunlight backup with no battery, home essentials backup with a small battery, and full energy independence with a large battery.
The pres of the Energy Policy Research Foundation urged Congress and other leaders to develop new mineral resources to meet growing demand for EV batteries, clean energy and storage without abandoning fossil fuels too soon, as they “remain important longer than some expect.” Democrats questioned him about recycling and minimizing impact on the environment while Republicans focused on how Democratic policies caused the current energy crisis.