Sanders dreams of electric sheep, Sungrow considered 100% bankable: pvMB 8/20/19

Bloomberg NEF gives Sungrow 100% bankability – “Sungrow, the global leading inverter solution supplier for renewables, announced that it was rated “100% bankable” by BloombergNEF among inverter firms in its latest survey, demonstrating that projects using Sungrow inverters are more likely to obtain non-recourse debt financing from banks compared to other competitors.” Source: Sungrow

Bernie Sanders: The Electric Man – “Sanders’ latest idea to fight climate change? Electrify everything. A climate plan being crafted by the Vermont senator to aggressively transition the nation away from fossil fuels will include a focus on electrification — a growing movement that seeks to electrify technologies powered by combustion, a senior campaign aide said. The concept has been getting a second look from environmentalists and climate experts who say powering everything from hot-water heaters to school buses from electricity generated using carbon-free sources like renewables instead of natural gas and other fossil fuels will be necessary to reach the greenhouse gas reductions required to avert a global warming crisis. It remains to be seen when Sanders, who is said to be working on major climate legislation, will release his proposal, though the pressure is on for him to do so. Sanders, a backer of the Green New Deal who has called for banning fracking and new fossil fuel projects, is one of the last remaining Democratic candidates to release a detailed plan for dealing with global warming.” Source: Bloomberg

NEC to install more than 20 MW of energy storage in New England – NEC Energy Solutions has announced six new battery storage projects totaling 20 MW across Maine and Massachusetts. One of the projects is in Madison, Maine while the rest are in Ashburnham, Templeton, Wakefield, Middleton and Taunton, Massachusetts. The Taunton project is NEC’s most recently signed and will be for 3 MW/6 MWh of storage. Source: NEC Energy Solutions

Biomethanation – The nation’s first scalable biomethanation reactor system has been commissioned at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Energy System Integration Facility in Golden, Colo. For those like this author who are entirely new to the world of biomethanation, it is a technology which uses renewable electricity to convert hydrogen into pipeline quality methane for use in homes, businesses and in transportation. In more detail, electricity generated by the sun, “passes through an electrolyzer where water molecules are split into hydrogen and oxygen, storing the renewable electricity as hydrogen gas.  The newly-created “green” hydrogen is combined with carbon dioxide and piped into the reactor where archaea microorganisms produce renewable natural gas by consuming hydrogen and carbon dioxide and emitting methane.” Source: SoCalGas

Neo Volta N14 can operate DC and AC simultaneously – “On August 14, NeoVolta successfully connected its NV14 energy storage system (ESS) to an existing AC string inverter solar system. The homeowner wanted to replace their 10-year-old string inverter and install more solar panels. The result was installation of a new AC micro-inverter solar system, conversion of the existing AC string inverter system to DC, and installation of an NV14. The homeowner now has plenty of solar power and a highly capable and efficient ESS. For this AC and DC solar installation, both AC and DC solar systems awake with sunrise and begin powering the critical loads first. Once those critical loads are fully powered, the excess solar recharges the NV14 battery system while powering the critical loads… This setup maximizes both home loads and battery charge simultaneously. This also helps to ensure that the battery is fully charged sooner in the morning, which decreases the risk of a grid outage on low batteries.” Source: NeoVolta