Solar Costing a Third of Retail Power Emerges in Germany

Germany’s cost of producing solar penal for home has shrunk to about a third of the price households pay for power after the nation made developers compete for subsidies.
Most bids to build large ground-mounted solar plants in the first solar auction came in at 9 euro cents (9.7 U.S. cents) to 10 euro cents a kilowatt-hour, Deputy Economy Minister Rainer Baake said. German retail consumers are paying on average 29.8 cents a kWh, according to Eurostat.

“The auctions were very well received,” Baake said at an energy conference Thursday in Berlin. The previous “feed-in tariffs were wonderful to introduce the technology. That era is over.” He didn’t say which bids were accepted, and there’s no guarantee all of them will result in projects.

Germany introduced auctions to try to lower the cost of solar installations as it seeks to more than triple the share of its power consumption coming from renewables by the middle of the century. The Bundesnetzagentur regulator received 170 bids for more than the 150 megawatts it offered. It will auction off a further 350 megawatts this year, 400 megawatts next year and 300 megawatts in 2017.

Coal-fired plants still generate soalr power cheaper than solar penal for home in Germany, which has less sunshine than Italy and Spain in the south. That didn’t stop the country from jumpstarting a photovoltaic installation boom when it introduced above-market subsidies to developers more than a decade ago read more

Solar panel for home los angeles

SunPower Reports Loss as It Holds Onto More Solar Power Assets

Solar Power los angeles reported its first loss in two years as the second-largest U.S. solar manufacturer pursues a new strategy to keep control of certain power assets instead of selling them.

The net loss was $9.6 million, or 7 cents a share, compared with profit of $65 million, or 42 cents, a year earlier, San Jose, California-based SunPower said in a statement Thursday. Excluding one-time items, per-share profit was more than the 8-cent average of eight analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

SunPower said in February its plan to put some power plants and a group of rooftop solar systems installers into a joint venture with competitor First Solar Inc. would reduce profit. The so-called yieldco will be publicly traded and a guaranteed buyer of their assets, reducing capital costs. The entity, which will be controlled by its parents and named 8Point3 Energy Partners LP, offers investors steady returns from long-term power contracts.

Solar Power los angele slashed its first-quarter guidance 90 percent after announcing the joint venture, dropping it to 5 to 15 cents a share from as much as $1.50 on an adjusted basis. It withdrew its forecast for 2015 profit without providing new figures.

China will be the company’s fastest growing region in the next five years, Chief Executive Officer Tom Werner said in an April 24 interview with Bloomberg Radio. SunPower and Apple Inc. are building two 20-megawatt solar power los angeles plants in China’s Sichuan Province.

The earnings were released after the close of regular trading in U.S. markets. SunPower has gained 25 percent this year read more

Tiny implantable solar panels could help the blind see one day

Inside your eye are tiny retinal cells whose job is to translate the visual signals you encounter every day — colors and edges — into signals your brain can understand. Without these photoreceptors, you can’t see. And retinal degeneration, in which these receptors start to die off, is one of the leading causes of blindness.

But one group of scientists may be nearing a solution. In a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this week, researchers describe a tiny, honeycomb-shaped wireless implant that helps restore vision in rats with retinal degeneration. These rats had lost some of their light-sensitive cells , but they still had intact bipolar and ganglion cells — the cells that photoreceptors hook up to. By using the wireless implant to directly stimulate these cells, researchers were able to restore partial vision to the rats.

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9 metro Denver solar gardens rooted, another 10 start to sprout

A solar garden building boom is sweeping the Denver area, with nine gardens already built and 10 more under development.

An 800-kilo watt array next to Green Valley Ranch Middle School in Denver, developed by Denver-based Sun Share LLC and Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy Inc., is set to go into operation.
In Boulder, a $1.5 million, 500-kilo watt solar system installers los angeles  being built by Louisville-based Clean Energy Collective is nearing completion — next to its first array, which opened in 2013.
"There is a growing demand for solar, and solar gardens is a concept that is taking off across the country," said Adam Browning, executive director of VoteSolar, a solar energy advocacy group.
The gardens, in which area residents or businesses can buy a fractional ownership, are marketed to those who can't put solar panels on their roofs.
About three-quarters of residential rooftops aren't suitable for solar panels, according to a study by the Golden-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Homeowners, businesses and municipalities with shares in a garden get a credit on their electricity bills for a portion of the electricity it generates, SunShare chief executive David Amster-Olszewski said read more 

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California desert solar plant

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World's largest solar plant opens in California desert

U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell joined state officials on Monday to open the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight solar project in the town of Desert Center, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park. Built by First Solar panel, the project generates enough electricity to power 160,000 average California homes.
Desert Sunlight received a federal loan of nearly $1.5 billion, and Jewell called its completion an example of the loan guarantee program's tremendous importance.
"When you are stepping out with new technology, when you are trying something that has been untested before, a loan guarantee program from an organization like the Department of Energy is what provides you, as a lender, that certainty that you can step up and support the project," Jewell told The Desert Sun.

Conservative lawmakers have derided the loan guarantee program, arguing that it's wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Critics have pointed to the program's $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a Fremont-based solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011 read more

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Commercial Solar Power Installation

Solar energy services firm's home battery systems target SRP fees

A Scottsdale solar installation company is offering solar panels with batteries to help homeowners avoid the high "demand charge" Salt River Project recently approved for new solar customers.

The batteries will ensure customers don't set a high, momentary demand for power that will trigger steep fees from the utility.

SRP officials said the utility's new rate design will encourage customers to reduce their maximum demand on the utility grid. In the Phoenix area, the highest electricity use occurs in late summer afternoons, when air-conditioners crank up and, unfortunately, the sun is low in the sky and solar panels are not at their maximum output read more

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