Enlarge (credit: Iberdrola Renewables)
The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab has taken on the task of doing an annual evaluation the state of solar and wind power in the United States. With the data in hand from 2015, it recently completed a look at the trends in the two renewable power sources, both of which appear to be booming. Thanks to a restored tax break, wind installations have returned to levels last seen in 2012. But that’s tame compared to solar, where 2016 is on track to see more than double the previous record for utility-scale installations.
As a result of the booming market, state renewable energy standards are now lagging behind the time. To meet them, we’d only need to install 3.7GW of solar and wind energy a year; last year saw over 40GW of wind installed alone.
Trends in solar
There are a number of interesting changes mentioned in the report on solar energy. One is that the price of photovoltaic panels has dropped so much that it’s changing the way the plants are set up. We’re seeing more installations where the total direct current output can exceed the installation’s capacity to convert it to alternating current, which is needed before the electricity can be put on the grid. In other words, it now makes economic sense to buy more panels than are strictly needed, just to make sure your DC-to-AC hardware is kept at full capacity when the generating conditions aren’t ideal.
Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – US renewables: Dropping in price, growing in significance