Green Power Network News

PG&E Corp.’s woes are spreading to the East Coast.

In early December, I put out a call to the online energy professionals community to find participants for the world’s first Fantasy Energy League. Perhaps I saw the pending end of the 2018 fantasy football season and I wanted something to fill the coming void, or maybe I was just curious to see who else wanted to approach energy projections from a gamified lens. Either way, I put out my energy-industry bat signal for the Fantasy Energy League only to see my email inbox and my Twitter feed blow up.

The initiative aims to install more than 30 million solar panels by 2030 and the project will be the largest including solar installation by a regulated utility in the world.

Utilities and renewable-energy advocates have long had a complicated relationship. Yet the prospect of PG&E Corp. tipping into bankruptcy by the end of January has sent shivers through the solar-and-wind sector.

The fallout from California power giant PG&E Corp.’s looming bankruptcy has been both sudden and widespread: Its electricity suppliers have seen their debt cut to junk. Banks are facing liabilities as buyers of last resort for more than $760 million of bonds the utility issued through California. And the rest of the state’s utilities have tumbled.

Global funding for clean-energy projects sagged in 2018 after China’s decision to curb subsidies dragged down installations in the world’s biggest solar market.

China has approved construction of the 2,000-MW Lawa hydropower station on the Jinsha River, multiple news agencies are reporting.

Here we are in 2019, with more than 100 U.S. cities and 140 large corporations having established 100 percent clean, carbon-free and/or renewable energy goals. In several states, newly seated governors campaigned on goals of 100 percent renewable energy, and congressional representatives have arrived in Washington positioning for a like-minded national proposal.

It’s hard to find a common thread between the business models of Gap, Bloomberg, Cox, Salesforce and Workday but today they are announcing that they all have one big thing in common: their desire to clean up their organizations’ energy supply by using renewable energy.

As part of its acquisition of Maximum Solar, Ameresco said, it will further develop in-house services to operate and maintain solar facilities. Maximum Solar currently manages about 150 MW of solar throughout the northeastern U.S.

Abstracts that include and guarantee utility participation are going to get higher consideration than those that do not. 

Edify Energy and Octopus Investments selected Signal Energy Australia to build the 333-MWdc/275-MWac Darlington Point Solar Plant on 2,000 acres in western New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

GE Renewable Energy and Future Wind said this week that they have signed an agreement to install the first Haliade-X 12-MW wind turbine prototype in Maasvlakte-Rotterdam this summer. The deal includes five years of testing and a 15-year full service Operation and Maintenance agreement.

UK peer-to-peer ethical investment company Abundance announced it closed its largest fund raise to date, raising £7 million (US$8.9 million) for Scottish tidal energy company Orbital Marine Power.

The recent trends in the energy industry such as the rise in prosumerism and increasing deployment of smart meters have resulted in better data analytics, storage and communication solutions to the energy industry.

This week, clean energy developer Invenergy said that it completed, in just four months, the construction of a 4-MWh battery storage system in Knoxville, Iowa for MidAmerican Energy. The system began commercial operation in December.

2018 was another defining year for the lithium supply chain as the global population continued to make remarkable strides towards the implementation of clean energy and transportation. Although the clean energy and transportation industries are only in their early days, it has become apparent that renewables and electrification of transportation are an irreversible trend, one that has begun to disrupt many established industries.

Last week EDF Renewables and Masdar (the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company) announced that they won the bid to build the 400-MW Dumat al Jandal wind farm, located 560 miles from north of Riyadh in the Al Jouf region of north-western Saudi Arabia.

Arizona State University researchers have set a new record for solar efficiency, 25.4 percent. Working with tandem photovoltaics, or stacking different materials in a solar cell, the ASU team has continued to improve solar efficiency and lower costs.

While it’s well known that corporations were some of the earliest trailblazers of large-scale renewable energy purchasing — they’ve closed over 14 gigawatts of deals in the past six years, according to tracking by Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewables Center — higher education has also made impressive strides. In fact, a report released last fall showed that the top 30 renewable energy-buying universities are using around 3 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually. That’s enough to power 276,000 homes.