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Thứ Hai, 1 tháng 6, 2020

This is your SolarWakeup for June 1st, 2020

Liftoff In Florida. If you’re anything like me you thoroughly enjoyed and delighted in the SpaceX Demo-2 Dragon launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida this weekend. This included staying up most of the night and watching the crewed capsule approach, dock and equalize with the International Space Station. Whether you are 38 or 3 years old like my youngest, rockets taking off for outer space brings a smile to your face. It all seems too big and too impossible (I still don’t know how they land the rocket on a drone ship) but the combined capability of humans can really do anything.

A Uniquely Terrible Business Model. National Grid published its interconnection study results for 300MW of distributed solar last week. In order to get 90MW of that capacity built, developers would have to pay $75million dollars and wait 5 to 7 years in order to get the upgrades done. This should be part of the obituary of that business, there is nothing to be said about telling customers to wait 5 years to get an upgrade done and have to pay almost $1 per watt to get it. If the infrastructure can’t handle 300MW of solar, the system needs to be rebuilt and I’ve seen most of the infrastructure in Florida rebuilt in a couple months after a hurricane.

China, Modules and More. In China, the government is imposing new restrictions on manufacturing expansion given the delay in demand globally. In the US this means that prices are dropping and catching up to the market that is coming back nicely. Over the past few months, some of you have benefitted from the Solar Module Index which publishes the April numbers this week. The module index will expand into the product index and all installers to add other parts you are buying like inverters and racking per your request. This is data that comes directly from installers and shared with each other, I only play the role to consolidate the data. For the foreseeable future, I am also making the index free to get the margin back in line for installers that are suffering from covid related slow down.

The Margin Stack. I am writing a full blog post on the topic of margin stacking because the overall cost of solar to the homeowner is much higher than it should be and the margin that the installer receives is not reflective of it. Soft costs are a problem but more than a third of the price of solar for a homeowner is neither product, labor or installer profit. More to come.

Big Picture Matters. I am glad to see that solar has for a long time and will continue to view our industry as more than just a market to product clean energy. Without getting into topics much bigger than this newsletter, I now understand more deeply why caring about the big picture matters, access for everyone matters, more diversity matters and ensuring equality matters.

Opinion

Axios: In Europe’s green recovery, natural gas faces uncertain future

Best, Yann

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Baywa’s plans for floating PV

Over the past two years, German renewables business Baywa re has developed in-house floating solar technology and installed nearly 50 MW of projects in the Netherlands. Benoît Roux, director of solar activities at Baywa re in France, said the ramp-up in project size has enabled the company to achieve dramatic cost reductions.

From pv magazine France.

“Everything went very quickly,” says Baywa re’s Benoît Roux, when discussing the German developer’s move into the floating solar market.

Baywa entered the specialist field with the acquisition of Dutch developer GroenLeven in 2018, says Roux, director of solar activities for Baywa re in France. GroenLeven had a big plant portfolio, with some projects at an advanced stage of development. “Some plants had to be built very quickly,” Roux tells pv magazine.

Roux and his team surveyed the technical solutions available for floating solar arrays but found nothing which perfectly matched the developer’s requirements. “This is why our teams started to develop, from a blank sheet of paper, a new floating photovoltaic system with [the] support of a network of industrial partners with which we had long years of cooperation, especially on ground-mounted [solar] projects,” adds Roux.

Proprietary tech

Roux highlighted concerns associated with stability, anchoring and the electrical architecture of the floating solar arrays which were being deployed when Baywa entered the field. “The overall organization of the systems did not allow for real optimization of construction costs,” he says.

The result was a bespoke solution which sees Baywa floating solar installations feature a smaller number of floats per panel. Connected by a metal structure, the floats are also larger and more widely spaced from each other, giving Baywa systems greater stability, according to the company.

The modules on Baywa re floating projects have an east-west orientation and are inclined at 12 degrees, explains Roux, who says the set-up offers advantages over south-facing systems.

Benefits

“The shading effects of one panel on the other are reduced, which allows [for] more power [from] the same surface,” says Roux. That adds up to 1.5 MW of generation capacity per hectare for Baywa re systems, compared to 1 MW per hectare for rival solutions, according to the company.

The Baywa set-up also offers greater stability and wind resistance, according to Roux, as there is very little space under the system where wind can rush, avoiding detachment effects. That means strong winds in Western Europe press the solar structure onto the surface of the water rather than lifting it. Another advantage offered by the Baywa inclination angle is better anchor control. “The specific east-west orientation allows us to optimize the size of the anchors, and therefore the costs,” adds Roux.

The Baywa re technology – which received a pv magazine top innovation award in March – also limits the impact on underwater flora and fauna.

“The water coverage is reduced as the floats are more spaced,” says Roux. “This is important, to allow better circulation of water and avoid standing water between the floats. It also prevents the development of algae, which could upset the balance of the surrounding ecosystem.” That spacing of the floats also enables better penetration of air into water under the panels, adds Roux, as well as limiting evaporation. “The first studies carried out on this subject estimate that the water lost by evaporation when the basin is covered by such a system, is almost 70%,” says the Baywa re representative.

50 MW in a year

Over the past two years, Baywa has installed several projects in the Netherlands: from a 2 MW pilot facility at Weperpolder to the nation’s largest floating solar plant to date, the 27.4 MW Bomhofsplas installation. The German company has also achieved record construction times: only six weeks to build the 14.5 MW Sekdoorn power plant, and seven weeks for Bomhofsplas.

“We have a very optimized mounting system,” says Roux. “The ‘boat’ systems, with four floats linked by a metal structure, are assembled with a chain to a platform on the shore of the lake. All these boats are then assembled together, then slid into the water and brought to the intended place in the water by simply being towed by a few zodiacs [inflatable dinghies]. Our latest, 27.4 MW project at Bomhofsplas, had to face storms during construction and everything went very well, as evidenced by the speed of completion of this park.”

Lower costs

Baywa president Benedikt Ortmann in November described floating solar as still a niche sector, with costs 20-25% higher than those of conventional, ground-mounted PV projects. “However, having already installed 50 MW we have seen fairly spectacular cost reductions, particularly in construction costs,” says Roux. “When we have installed 100 MW, 500 MW or even when we have surpassed the gigawatt bar, we will have even more significant gains in scale. They will allow us to reach a level of competitiveness comparable to other technologies that we are deploying today more massively, in France in particular.”

Baywa said it is already competitive on 20 MW-plus, large floating projects, particularly in southern latitudes. The levelized cost of energy produced by such arrays is expected to fall further in the next 2-3 years, as economies of scale are realized.

“In France, there is … very interesting potential for floating photovoltaics,” says Roux, of a technology which can be deployed at scale on man-made bodies of water, especially in countries lacking land for conventional solar.

Baywa re plans to install an additional 100 MW of floating solar in the Netherlands this year, with a 40 MW plant expected to start construction in the coming months in the northern province of Drenthe. The developer’s floating solar installations would then add up to 150 MW.

Renesola warns of Covid-19 project disruption

The solar plant developer, which is now based in the States, was upbeat in its first-quarter figures but balance sheet borrowings remain a concern.

U.S.-based solar developer Renesola has warned shareholders of Covid-19-related delays of “several months” at project sites which are suffering supply chain disruption.

However the developer, which has its roots in China but shifted to a new headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut last year, insisted it was weathering the coronavirus storm with work at projects which already have all their components proceeding as planned. The company also made the surprise claim in Friday’s first-quarter update that none of its global workforce has yet tested positive for Covid-19.

The company touted a 62% rise in revenue to $21.2 million from the first three months of last year, for gross profit of $1.4 million. Subtract the operating expenses, though, and that added up to a first-quarter loss of $4.68 million.

Renesola was understandably keen to highlight the diversified nature of its solar project business, by market and scale, but the balance sheet once again provided a sobering note.

The bottom line

The business had cash and equivalents of $15.5 million at the end of March, versus short-term borrowings of $33.5 million – which may or may not have included a $28.8 million loan which pv magazine has previously highlighted which was due to fall for repayment in March. That debt figure could explain why, having sold off projects in Canada and Hungary – albeit with the latter transaction slipping into April thanks to Covid-19 – Renesola is still trying to sell off 600 kW of micro systems in the latter nation.

Longer-term borrowings of $8.5 million might indicate a light at the end of the tunnel if the company can negotiate its more immediate financial liabilities. They might, that is, but for a huge $44 million long-term liability for failed sale-and-leaseback and finance leases related to the company’s rooftop solar business in China.

In outlook terms, Renesola said it expects revenue of $22-25 million in the current quarter, for a full year return of $80-100 million, on the back of second-quarter gross margin of 17-20% and an annual figure of 18-20%.

Why Have Home Battery Forecasts Been Staggeringly Wrong For Years?

When I was a kid, the past wrote checks for the future reality couldn’t cash. I never got a flying car, let alone a jetpack, and a picture book I had promised me the 2020 Olympics would be on the moon. Well, it’s 2020 now and we don’t even have an Olympics, let alone a […]

The post Why Have Home Battery Forecasts Been Staggeringly Wrong For Years? appeared first on Solar Quotes Blog.

Community Batteries Benefit The Grid More Says Latest Research

The ACT government reckons there’s a gap between the household battery and grid-scale batteries: community batteries, either owned by or at least serving the needs of collectives of households. In the case of the ACT, the new 700-home development of Jacka is designed to have solar panels on every house, so the government and Evoenergy […]

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More Australian Support For Solar Power In Tonga

The Australian Government has kicked in another $2.9 million for new renewable energy infrastructure in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga. The kingdom of Tonga, home to around 103,000 people, consists of more than 170 islands and is situated approximately 3,200 kilometres from the closest point in Australia. Like many island nations Tonga has been heavily […]

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Sungrow Commits To 100% Renewable Electricity

China’s Sungrow, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of solar inverters, has pledged to switch to 100% renewable energy for its electricity requirements by 2028. The announcement coincided with the firm joining the RE100, a global initiative led by The Climate Group that is bringing together major businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. “Sungrow will […]

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