ReCreate, a joint venture between the founders of U.S.-based Create Energy and EU-based Recom Technologies, announced in mid-June a plan to build a 5 GW solar module and cell manufacturing facility in Portland, Tennessee. Create Energy is the brainchild of Dean Solon, who previously grew Shoals Technologies Group from a Tennessee-based startup to a publicly listed PV BOS manufacturer in January 2021. Hamlet Tunyan is the CEO of Recom Technologies, a European module manufacturer.

pv magazine spoke with both solar entrepreneurs on the future factory at last month’s Intersolar 2024 in Munich, Germany.

“In the first quarter of 2025, we will have two module assembly lines operating at the factory, with up to 2 GW capacity,” Tunyan said. “We will then begin cell production within 18–24 months.” For the deployment of the cell lines, ReCreate will potentially acquire another building.

The company will initially source solar cells from Asia, excluding China. “We could even import cells from Korea,” Tunyan stated. “We have to meet increasing module demand in the United States,” Solon added. “Project developers are currently in trouble, and we want to provide them with reliable products.” Increased tariffs on solar modules imported from Southeast Asia threaten to limit their supply to the US downstream market. Southeast Asian manufacturers account for 80% of solar components in the US.

Solon also explained that the ReCreate modules produced at Create’s facilities will be part of a combined package from Create Solutions. This can include equipment EPCs require for their projects, such as transformers, switchgear, MBOS, BESS, and EVSE. “Create Energy along with Create Solutions, wholly owned subsidiaries of Create Holdings, are a one-stop-shop where you can source all the equipment and services needed for renewable energy projects,” Solon said.

The module production facility will initially produce TOPCon panels, although ReCreate may also consider adding heterojunction (HJT) or back contact (BC) products to its portfolio. “Wherever the module technology is going, that’s where we’re heading; we’ll always be on the leading edge,” Solon and Tunyan specified.

He also revealed that, in the future, ReCreate’s modules will be used in what they call “next-gen” PV systems. “Create’s vision is to provide solutions that navigate labor constraints and maximize system reliability at the lowest installed cost per kW,” Solon said. “This will include optimizing the interplay between modules, trackers, power stations, and other integrated systems.”

At his own venture, Create Energy, Solon is charging ahead with disrupting the energy storage and microgrid markets. NanoGrid, the company’s first product, will be the microgrid solution for a top-tier Japanese car manufacturer, extending to dealerships across North America. According to Solon, NanoGrid involves “canopy and rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and site-load monitoring tied to level 2 and level 3 EV charging solutions.”

In addition to starting Create Energy, Solon also anchored the formation of Neos Partners following the IPO and his departure from Shoals. Neos raised $830 million as a private equity fund that has invested in six companies to date, a very impressive track record for a fund that closed in spring of ’23. Solon refers to this collection of target companies as an “un-evil empire” providing transformers, switchgear, EPC, and engineering services. “Create’s clean-tech products are reimagining renewables beyond utility infrastructure to the power-starved EV, data center, and artificial intelligence (AI) markets,” said Solon.

As Solon revealed in Munich, ReCreate modules and cells are just the beginning. “Made in Tennessee” batteries seem to be in the works as well and the focus will be on providing complete EV, PV, and BESS solutions from Create Energy to the North American & EU Markets, supplying large-scale EPCs, renewable energy developers, and Commercial and Industrial (C&I).

Earlier this week BloombergNEF released its 1H 2024 US Clean Energy Market Outlook, which forecasts almost 1 TW of new solar and wind capacity in the U.S. between this year and 2035. A staggering 221 GW of grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) are also forecast for this period. Texas tops the list in terms of overall build with California taking the lead in terms of BESS deployments. These will come close to matching the solar PV deployments in the Golden State.

Texas has been a favorite among utility-scale solar PV developers for a long time, thanks to its business-friendly environment and its lack of substantial local permitting regimes.

In the RE+ Texas session entitled “Don’t Mess with Texas: Opportunities and Challenges in Local Policy”, leading utility-scale solar developers were well represented with Barb Jacobs of Lightsource bp and Susan Williams Sloan of Orsted. Rounding out the panel were Mundo de la Fuente, partner at the law firm K&L Gates, and Luke Metzger from the non-profit Environment Texas. The session was moderated by Michael Lewis of the law firm Jewell & Associates, PLLC.

While the pro-business environment and regulatory regime have attracted many renewable energy developers to Texas, the industry almost fell off a cliff in 2023, the last time the Texas legislature convened. (The Texas legislature meets only every other year for a period of 140 days. Accordingly, its next session will be in 2025.)

As the “Don’t Mess with Texas” session in Houston made clear, a number of proposals were launched in 2023 to undercut the further development of renewables in Texas. This despite the fact that Texas has historically been very friendly to oil and gas development and commercial property development. So the initiatives in the Texas legislature caught many in the solar industry off guard. There is a good chance that this will happen again in 2025.

The most problematic initiative was Senate Bill 624. Susan Sloan, Head of Government Affairs & Marketing Strategy at Orsted North America, described this proposal as follows:

“This would have the effect of putting all of the operating [renewable energy] projects on notice and to have to go through a process of getting a permit from the PUC that doesn’t even regulate renewable energy development right now. So we would be not in compliance right off the bat if the law had been passed. We would not be able to operate until we get a permit. The permitting process was not yet established and if you’re in a session where reliability is the number one issue that the legislature wants to talk about and the PUC, ERCOT are all wrestling with right now, this would be a colossal unreliability creator.”

In 2023 the Texas legislature, Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and the Texas grid operator ERCOT were still reeling from the aftermath of a devastating freeze that had blanketed Texas in February 2021. The historic freeze exposed the frailty of the ERCOT system and other energy infrastructure in the state.

Barb Jacobs of Lightsource bp, a joint venture between Lightsource Renewable Energy and the energy giant BP, called SB 624 “by far the worst siting bill I have ever seen in any state.” And at Lightsource bp Jacobs used to oversee 24 states, so she had a rather comprehensive overview of what was happening on the regulatory and permitting front across the U.S.

Jacobs cautioned the audience that the political situation in Texas has not improved since 2023. In fact, it has probably worsened. According to Jacobs, “There’s been such a dramatic shift in the political winds here for renewables. It is very alarming.”

Sloan urged the solar industry to be more proactive and communicative about what the industry is already doing: “There’s a lot of good that our companies are doing, but is not understood and not recognized. And we need to explain those things. I think that squashes a good chunk of the specific issues that the opposition has brought up.”

Measures that solar developers are already taking include measures to avoid soil erosion, to protect wildlife and the landscape, or to do specialized studies, for example if wetlands are involved. As Sloan pointed out as well, buyers of renewable energy increasingly want to know that “you have good standards of development, construction and operations.”

Clearly, there is also more the industry can do. Mundo de la Fuente called for a greater engagement with landowners. He cited a celebratory dinner involving a new utility-scale solar project in Texas, where the developer invited dozens of landowners owning thousands of acres of land. De la Fuente is an experienced renewable energy attorney, but this kind of engagement was a novelty for him. As he pointed out, these landowners are “getting substantially more from their land than they would, for example, from grazing.” For de la Fuente, these are the “true stakeholders” of a ground-mounted renewable energy project and they need to be brought into the conversation.

Luke Metzger of the environmental organization Environment Texas also called on the industry to take the Solar Uncommon Dialogue seriously and adopt the recommendations that will come out of SUD. SUD is a cooperation between SEIA and various environmental groups to develop best practices to, in the words of Metzger, “facilitate the rapid growth of renewables while minimizing the impact on the environment.” Metzger also pointed to The Nature Conservancy, one of the groups supporting SUD, and their “Site Renewables Right” map of the U.S. The SRR map identifies the most ecologically sensitive parts of the country, so these areas should not be targeted by renewable energy developers.

Metzger also noted a University of Texas study that compared the land used for oil and gas developments in Texas to the land used for solar. Back in 2014, so before the most recent oil and gas boom in Texas, oil and gas took up 514,000 acres in the state. ERCOT forecasts that solar PV will hit 27 GW of installed capacity in Texas this year, which will take up only 162,000 acres. And the environmental impact of the latter can hardly be compared to the impact these fossil fuel projects are having.

As the 2025 Texas legislature begins its work, it will be interesting to see what proposals emerge and whether 2025 will bring the same nasty surprises as the most recent legislative session in 2023. The “Don’t Mess with Texas” session certainly provided some useful recommendations on how to better position the industry ahead of this 2025 session.

At the recent Tesla Investor Day at its Austin, Texas Gigafactory, the electric vehicle (EV) and battery storage manufacturer revealed some interesting tidbits about its Megapack energy storage business. Tesla’s energy business was one of the many parts of this three and a half hour long Investor Day on March 1st. Relegated toward the end of the conference, it provided some new insights into the rapidly expanding Megapack business.

Providing the overview was Mike Snyder, senior director, Megapack at Tesla. Snyder has worked at Tesla for nine years, so a little under the ten year track record of Tesla’s large-scale energy storage business. As on the car side of the business, the first ten years have been grueling as Tesla ramped up its Megapack production facilities in the U.S. to meet the increasing demand for its utility-scale stationary storage product. Its Megapack factory in Lathrop, California, is fittingly referred to as the “Megafactory”, though it’s the smaller cousin to the four Gigafactories Tesla runs in Austin, Fremont, Berlin and Shanghai, which together churn out 40,000 EVs per week. 

According to Snyder over 16 GWh of Megapacks have been installed globally so far with the goal being to ramp that up to 100 GWh already this year. He sees 100 GWh as the annual run rate for the next few years, so a big ramp up after just 16 GWh in the initial ten years. The latest product is the sixth generation Megapack XL, packing 3 MWh per unit of the lithium-ion battery. Snyder calls the Megapack XL the stationary battery storage product with the highest energy density on the market, capable of packing up to 300 MWh on a single acre of land. According to Snyder that’s twice the power density of a typical gas peaker plant. 

Snyder was joined on stage by Drew Baglino, Tesla’s senior vice president, Powertrain and Energy Engineering. Both Baglino and Snyder highlighted Tesla’s mastery of power electronics, with the company “delivering more power electronics than the solar and wind industries combined on an annual basis.” The cumulative output so far has been 1.4 TW across Tesla’s vehicle and stationary storage products. Coupled with Tesla’s extensive in-house capabilities in software development, the Megapack can function in “virtual machine mode”, providing synthetic inertia to the electricity grid. According to Baglino, it’s no longer simply a matter of injecting clean energy to the grid, but “adding power stability” to the mix. As Megapack costs continue to decline, these utility-scale energy storage units will replace conventional fossil fuel power plants to provide both energy and stability to power grids. 

As on the car side, Tesla’s ambitions on the Megapack side are impressive: the long-term goal is to boost annual output to 1 TWh, which would represent 25x the annual production capacity of the current factory in Lathrop. Lathrop itself was quite an achievement with Tesla transforming an existing JC Penney distribution center into a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for its Megapacks in under twelve months. The Lathrop Megafactory was completed in September last year. 

Speed is also of the essence when it comes to getting Megapack projects built. Snyder highlights the plug & play nature of the Megapack and that Megapacks can be easily strung together to form massive and intelligent power blocks that can readily connect to electricity grids across the world. In the past four years alone Tesla has increased the installation speed of Megapack projects fourfold, while at the same time reducing the required workforce by a factor of three. 

Tesla’s Investor Day also covered developments on the distributed storage front, where Tesla’s Powerwall is the flagship product. Whether it’s the Megapack and front-of-the-meter storage or the Powerwall and behind-the-meter storage, we can expect all of Tesla’s stationary energy storage products to complement what the automaker is doing on the EV front. Both are key elements in Tesla’s vision to get to a “sustainable energy earth” to use Elon Musk’s phrasing at this Investor Day. While the 2030 goal on the EV front is to produce 20 million vehicles annually, the 2030 goal on the energy storage front is to hit the 1 TWh mark. According to Tesla this will require an investment of $150 to $175 billion, which is actually less than one third of Tesla’s current market capitalization. On the other hand, it’s about five times the amount of Tesla’s cumulative investment so far ($28 billion). 

From pv magazine 01/23

At the “Forum New Energy World” conference hosted by Conexio in Berlin in September 2022, one panel session posed a provocative question: “Three thousand [GW] instead of 300 GW of solar additions – crazy idea or hard-hitting reality?”

Ten years ago, pv magazine and the forum – then both part of renewable energy consultant Solarpraxis AG – suggested a similar utopian figure by launching a campaign to reach 300 GW of annual global PV additions in 2025. Back in 2012, talk in Germany concerned solar taxes, over-subsidization, and the 52 GW solar capacity ceiling. Nevertheless, Solarpraxis founder Karl-Heinz Remmers called for Germany to hit 200 GW of cumulative PV by 2025, alongside the global 300 GW annual goal.

Since then the German government has adopted a goal of 215 GW of solar this decade and the world will probably see 300 GW of new solar installations this year. It is now widely accepted that an increased solar ambition is required to address climate change and energy security. With the electrification of heat, transport and other sectors opening up potentially huge markets for solar, what should the target be?

In my remarks in the forum, I provided the international context and tapped our global network of reporters to shed light on the situation and outlook of key PV markets.

I drew upon trade body SolarPower Europe’s “Global Market Outlook 2022-2026,” and the world’s three biggest solar markets – China, the United States, and India – were assessed by Vincent Shaw, Anne Fischer, and Uma Gupta, respectively. Pilar Sanchez, in Valencia, Spain, provided an update on Spain, Europe’s second-biggest PV market, after Germany.

China, the U.S., India, and Spain contributed 54.9 GW, 27.3 GW, 14.2 GW, and 4.8 GW of new solar capacity in 2021, respectively. The global total in the year was 167.8 GW, 21% more than 2020, when the pandemic hit. If the industry maintains the 25% average growth rate recorded over the past decade, an annual addition of 3 TW per year could be achieved within 10 years.

IEA, IRENA forecasts

SolarPower Europe expects continued strong growth and its most ambitious scenario predicts more than 300 GW of solar this year. “No single energy technology ever in history has grown as massively steeply as photovoltaics,” said Christian Breyer, professor of solar economics at Finland’s LUT University, in reference to the PV learning curve in the past 20 years.

As a result, institutions underestimate solar’s growth potential, even SolarPower Europe itself, as executive advisor Michael Schmela admitted. Breyer pointed to frequent failures by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) to anticipate the meteoric rise of PV. In view of the proven dynamism of the industry and pressing need to address climate change, it is incomprehensible how IRENA can expect annual global PV installations to plateau at around 440 GW per year of new solar from 2030 to 2050.

As Silicon Valley venture capitalist-turned solar entrepreneur Bill Nussey explained in his 2022 book, “Freeing Energy,” “economies of volume” are at play in the solar and semiconductor industries. In the US alone, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to lead to the installation of 950 million solar modules. This massive scale drives solar’s exponential growth. By comparison the global number of coal- and gas-fired power plants is tiny and this fundamental difference makes forecasting PV adoption all the more complicated.

Solar, though, needs suitable conditions to flourish and help cap the rise in average global temperature this century at 1.5 C. As LUT’s Breyer points out, it’s not just a matter of replacing fossil-fuel power plants with renewables but also of electrifying – and thus, decarbonizing – sectors including transport and industry, as part of renewables-driven power-to-X. For such a vast undertaking, 3 TW per year of solar may be too little. That’s why Breyer ventured even further in the 3,000 GW session by asking the audience whether 3 TW is “crazy, realistic, necessary, or maybe even too low.”

Breyer said 15 to 20 years ago the world did not have 5 TW of power plant generation capacity, full stop. No one then was mulling power-to-X and decarbonizing supply chains.

IRA as catalyst

The IRA addresses the upstream solar industry of component manufacturing as well as the downstream market of PV installations. Previously, US solar manufacturing was marked by ugly bankruptcies such as Solyndra or German business Solarworld’s Oregon subsidiary, as American companies followed in the footsteps of their European peers.

The IRA introduces a ten-year investment tax credit of 30% with “adders” to raise the credit even further, such as an extra 10% for using American components. Upstream companies can claim advanced manufacturing production credits. For example, European module maker Meyer Burger will receive $0.07 per watt for each module from its new Arizona plant. The IRA – which also opens doors for Canadian and Mexican manufacturers – creates perfect conditions for a long-term PV boom.

Similar efforts are needed in Europe and elsewhere to tackle the climate crisis and reach or exceed 3 TW of annual additions.

pv magazine caught up with the U.S. team of the inverter manufacturer Ginlong Technologies (doing business in the U.S. under the “Solis” brand) at the Solis booth at last week’s RE+ trade show in Anaheim, California. According to Terence Parker, Senior Application Engineer at Solis U.S., the ample provision of backup power is becoming an important requirement for many households in the U.S.  Solis now offers a “whole home solution power hub” to provide power to every device in the home in the event of an outage.

Parker is a veteran of the U.S. solar energy market and the Chinese manufacturer provides a wide range of solutions to not only the residential market, but also to the C&I and utility-scale segments. In the residential market, the severe multi-day outage in Texas in February 2021 brought home the need to be more prepared in severe weather events. PV is ideally suited to provide rooftop generation to households, but in cases of grid outages, conventional grid-tied PV systems are not sufficient to provide power to these homes. What is needed is adequate battery storage and an inverter that can island the home from the electricity grid.

But Solis is going even further than that. Parker describes the conventional backup solution that provides power to a critical load panel, with only loads connected to this panel receiving backup power in an outage.  At RE+ Solis presented their “whole home solution power hub” that aggregates Solis inverters to supply not only critical home loads with electricity. Adequate battery storage is obviously required as well and here too modular components can be stacked together to provide the punch in case the grid drops away.

The whole home solution power hub cannot only integrate PV generation, but also other sources of power, including conventional backup generators that fire up when all else fails. In the typical whole home backup system, the conventional generator is connected to the Solis Powerhub, which in turn is connected to the Solis Residential Hybrid Storage Inverter. The power range for this solution goes from 3.8 kW to 11.4 kW. Six inverter models cover this range and all six are referred to as S6-EH1P(3.8-11.4)K-H-US in the Solis product catalog. Each inverter is stackable up to ten inverters in parallel, providing ample power in case of need. Up to 80 kWh of storage capacity can be provided per inverter and the Solis S6 inverter is UL 9540 certified to work with multiple battery brands.

Efficient performance is ensured by a maximum PV input current up to 16A per string along with a high DC to AC ratio of 1.6 for more PV power capacity. A single S6 can generate up to 50A/11.4 kW of continuous backup power and the transfer time is below 10ms for all backed up loads. Finally, DC to DC battery charging provides for optimal utilization of PV generated electricity.

At RE+ Solis also showcased its C&I and utility-scale solutions and here too, Solis provides a wide range of output from 25 kW to 100 kW and for the largest projects 125 kW to 255 kW. Parker pointed to an expansion of this range to 350 kW in the near future as PV power plants in the U.S. continue to gain in size. Parker also points to the unique 75 to 100 kW product that occupies a niche that other inverter manufacturers have not addressed. The S5-GC(75-100)K-US inverter series boasts up to 10 MPPTs with a maximum efficiency of 98.8% (CEC efficiency 98.3%). The MPPT voltage range stands at 180-1000V.

Just as backup power has become an important application in the U.S. and other countries, repowering has emerged as an attractive opportunity in mature PV markets like North America. Inverters need to be swapped out to boost the performance of older plants and Solis’ wide range of highly efficient inverters provides the right recipe to retrofit these older systems with a wide range of operating voltages and input currents. Finally, Solis has developed AI technology to further boost the performance in repowering scenarios.

Tony Seba was among the first to recognize the disruptive potential of solar PV with the publication of his book “Solar Trillions” in 2010. His think tank, RethinkX, recently published a report titled “Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 – 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries is Just the Beginning.”

In early December, pv magazine publisher, Eckhart Gouras, interviewed Seba and Adam Dorr, the two authors of this report. As Seba and Dorr make clear in the interview, a 100% solar-wind-battery system is not only possible, but the cheapest way to build an electricity system in the U.S. by 2030. (Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

In the initial interview, they introduce the concept of the “Clean Energy U-curve,” which shows that the cheapest system is actually one that involves a lot more solar PV and wind power capacity than the peak power demand profile.

They go one step further by introducing the concept of “SuperPower”: by investing in even more solar PV and wind power than the lowest-cost system defined by the “Clean Energy U-curve,” the gain in additional energy, or “superpower,” is exponential to the money invested.

The conversation continues below.

pv magazine: Your report highlights the fact that conventional analyses and forecasts of the electricity sector and energy transition start from the peak electricity demand profile and then build the generation to fit this profile. Instead, your analysis starts with the supply side and comes to the radical conclusion that the supply of clean energy (primarily solar PV) needs to be over-dimensioned by a significant factor to provide the lowest-cost clean energy system. To what extent is this radical idea gaining traction in the power sector and state and federal regulatory authorities?

Adam Dorr (AD): We agree this is still a new idea. It’s still quite radical. It’s only been recognized at all in the scientific community for at most about two years. And the full implications of this were not recognized before.

Seeing the implications of the clean energy U curve and superpower make the full impacts of this idea clear. But what we are seeing, and what’s very encouraging … [is that] there is now a small but quickly growing group of researchers worldwide who are converging with different methods on the same conclusion. So we are not alone.

If you think beyond the existing system to what a new system would look like, and you’re not constrained to just a one-to-one replacement, that new system will have a very different structure, and it will have much more generating capacity. This reduces the energy storage requirement in a non-linear way, and you find that the optimal combination is much more affordable than you realize.

This is going to be the mainstream idea a couple of years from now. Quite soon we will see the research community begin to coalesce into a shared voice.

Tony Seba (TS): We’ve already been contacted by policy makers in several countries. It’s a new lens, a new formula. Once you have a new lens, there’s shock, they attack you, and then you’re right. It’s a classic paradigm shift in the way we see the world.

pv magazine: Oversizing the solar PV deployment yields the “superpower” that you reference, which seems to be another radical concept tied to your focus on the supply side of the electricity sector. But if grid capacity is already a bottleneck in states like Hawaii with a relatively high PV penetration, how can this overbuild be accomplished with the old grid infrastructure that’s in place?

TS: If you look at most disruptions, they make the existing value chain obsolete. When we were building the new Internet [in the 1990s] we did not look at how to bolt the Internet on to this 100-year-old landline telecom infrastructure. That made no sense. And now the ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle value chain is being obsoleted by the electrification of transportation, by EVs and so on. It happens every single time that the existing value chain basically becomes obsolete.

When we studied this, we did not start with the idea of how can we bolt on solar, wind and batteries to the existing grid. What we wanted to study is first, is it possible? And that’s the only way you can find all of these interesting insights that we found such as the clean energy U curve and superpower.

And there’s more … if you had, for instance, the idea that there is a non-linear trade-off between generation and storage, that there’s also a trade-off between transmission and storage? The more storage you have, the less transmission you need and the better you can utilize the transmission. If you put that together, you have a three-dimensional decision making process, which would have made the report more complex. We constrained the system on purpose to see what the new generation and storage looks like, then we would go on to design the right grid for that new system.

AD: Keep in mind that it is only an assumption from the incumbent perspective that these changes will require a new additional, very costly infrastructure investments for transmission and distribution. This is an assumption, and it’s not clear if that’s going to be true everywhere.

I’ll give you one example: recent research into the costs by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO (Australia’s national science agency), showed that for very high penetration of solar, wind and storage systems the cost of transmission and distribution is a small percentage of that, less than 10%. Even with a very high percentage, there is already research showing that the actual costs of the transmission and distribution infrastructure are not going to be extremely onerous and too difficult to achieve and are not going to be a deterrent.

pv magazine: Your report focuses on the U.S. and in particular California, Texas and New England. Here in Europe we are keen to transition to a decarbonized energy sector, and your report mentions the parallels between a region like New England and northern Europe. For a 100% solar-wind-battery (SWB) system in northern Europe, the time period December and January is the most challenging, given that these months include many days with weak solar and wind resources. The onus would be on the B part in the SWB system. Would the 89 average demand hours (or 1,232 GWh of battery storage) be sufficient to keep the lights on over here?

AD: That’s a great question. We don’t have the specific numbers for Europe as a whole or for any countries in Europe yet. However, our methodology allows us to produce at least preliminary numbers for an individual country, as long as we’re able to get high quality data.

We don’t see any reason to expect that there will be large differences or major problems for a region like Europe that we did not already encounter and cover in our analysis with New England.

New England’s solar resources and wind resources are really quite comparable to northern Europe – not southern Europe, which is much more like California and Texas. Now, without running the numbers we can’t say for sure, but we have no reason to believe that Europe will be somehow twice as difficult…five times as difficult…anything like that.

We chose those regions of the United States precisely because they represent other geographies and we can draw conclusions from that. California is very sunny, but not much wind. Texas has lots of sun and lots of wind. New England has not much sun and not much wind.

pv magazine: I just mentioned the drive to decarbonize the entire energy sector in Europe, so not only electricity. Can we expect RethinkX to also look at the overall energy system, and to what extent can this even bigger beast be decarbonized in the next 10, 20 or 30 years?

AD: The most important thing to keep in mind is that we can do all of this at once. We are not looking at a sequence, one step and then another step and another step. We don’t have to do electric power first and then transportation and then industry, and then residential and commercial heating. We’re going to do it all at once.

That’s why the disruption is going to affect all energy all at once. And the thrilling part about superpower: even if you don’t make the additional investment, even at the lowest cost–the very optimal part of the U curve–you still get some superpower: In California, for example, as much superpower as all of the normal electricity generation. That’s a huge amount of energy compared to what is used in California in transportation, and in residential and commercial heating. Even in the very lowest-cost system, you still are going to have a situation where you can begin to electrify, and therefore decarbonize, the rest of the economy at the same time.

But wait, there’s more. If you make that additional investment, 10%, 20% more, and you 5X, 10X your superpower, it’s incredible what you can achieve in the rest of the economy in terms of decarbonization.

There is going to be competition as soon as one or two regions begin to show what is possible. The entire world is going to see this as a race to the top. And this is something that we see again and again, throughout the history of disruptions, we don’t have to wait and do things one at a time. It’s going to happen all at once.

TS: Countries will find that they cannot compete with energy that is vastly more expensive and that they’d have to import. So they’re going to have to do this for purely economic reasons. Once they figure it out (and with super-abundant, super-cheap superpower), you can decarbonize everything: transport, heat and so on.

AD: The incentives are going to be enormous to take advantage of ultra-low costs, perhaps, in some cases, free energy. If you are a smart region–we use the example of Texas in our report–and you say “we are going to attract manufacturing to boost the economy, we are going to make super energy from superpower available for free for some part of the day.”

If a region did that, there would be enormous incentive to go through the process of innovation and business model development to take advantage of that superpower. There’s going to be enormous incentive for industry to find ways to use superpower because it’s almost free. It’s so close to zero cost. This changes everything.

Editor’s note: This is the third part of a three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Tony Seba was among the first to recognize the disruptive potential of solar PV with the publication of his book “Solar Trillions” in 2010. His think tank, RethinkX, recently published a report titled “Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 – 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries is Just the Beginning.”

In early December, pv magazine publisher, Eckhart Gouras, interviewed Seba and Adam Dorr, the two authors of this report. As Seba and Dorr make clear in the interview, a 100% solar-wind-battery system is not only possible, but the cheapest way to build an electricity system in the U.S. by 2030. (Read Part 1.)

In the initial interview, they introduce the concept of the “Clean Energy U-curve,” which shows that the cheapest system is actually one that involves a lot more solar PV and wind power capacity than the peak power demand profile.

And they go one step further by introducing the concept of “SuperPower”: by investing in even more solar PV and wind power than the lowest-cost system defined by the “Clean Energy U-curve,” the gain in additional energy, or “superpower,” is exponential to the money invested.

The conversation continues below.

pv magazine: The CEO of Vistra Energy, America’s largest integrated generator and retailer of electricity in competitive markets, recently said that President Joe Biden’s plan to decarbonize electricity by 2035 would be “prohibitively expensive for consumers.” Curt Morgan went on to say that: “I think reality will set in when he has serious people sit around the table talking about what is achievable and what is not.” IPPs like Vistra produced 2 out of every 5 megawatt-hours generated in the U.S., so getting these players to participate will be critical to decarbonizing this sector. How can this uphill battle be won?

Tony Seba (TS): Classic incumbent: fear, uncertainty and doubt, right? Happens with every disruption. When faced with the reality of disruption–and it’s now a reality–it’s not out there, it’s here, it’s now. Basically, incumbents go through the five stages of grief, including denial, anger and attacking the messenger.

We saw that not long ago in transportation with the CEO of Daimler, for instance, poo-pooing Tesla and saying that electrification was decades out and Tesla was building toys, right? And now they’re running for their lives.

So this is classic incumbent fear, uncertainty, doubts. Microsoft said there was no chance in hell that the iPhone was going to be successful, right? No chance, and so on. It’s classic.

pv magazine: But with the iPhone you have that big pull from the consumer, which once they realized what the smartphone could do, a much bigger market was created and classic disruption. But how do you get that pull from the consumer with electricity? It might be the cheapest, but you won’t have people rushing online or in stores to get this gadget. So it seems to be a very different dynamic?

TS: I would disagree with that. Essentially, the move to solar, wind and batteries is being constrained by the monopolies. They have no incentives for the world to go 100% solar, wind and batteries. None. They’ve had this cushy rent extraction system for 100 years. They don’t want to let it go, right?

If you give consumers and businesses their right to generate, store and trade electricity, just like we have the right to information, for instance; I mean, we didn’t ask anyone else for permission to have this conversation … we can sell and buy anything on eBay.

But for some reason, electrons are all monopolies. If you give consumers that right, and businesses, then you’re going to get competition. And if you make the electricity market competitive, then you’re going to see a different dynamics. What you’re going to see is the Walmarts of the world giving away electrons. Electrons are going to be so cheap that a Walmart would give away electrons for somebody to come in and shop right at their store.

Adam Dorr (AD): Another source of competition is entire regions are going to be able to compete once superpower is recognized for the opportunity it is. Today, in places like Germany and California that are early adopters of solar and wind, there already is some superpower being generated for some small part of the time: when it’s very sunny out and you have a surplus of output from solar.

But today, the incumbent system, the old system has an irrational response to this essentially free electricity, almost zero marginal cost, clean energy. What could be better? The irrational response to the existing system is: this is a problem, it’s a threat, and we need to curtail this output of electricity – let’s flush it down the drain. It’s completely crazy, but this is the current system. A clear sign the disruption is imminent, if you have irrational system behavior like this.

Historically, disruptions are led from the outside, not by the incumbents. We will see examples emerge, where a region says “we’re going to lead this disruption, take advantage of this incredible opportunity that superpower presents. It’s not a problem. It’s an opportunity. And watch: we can give electricity at an extremely low cost, maybe even free for some time, part of the day, if manufacturers move to our regions to take advantage of that.”

Regions will end up competing with one another with entirely new business models and ways of creating value because the new system produces electricity in such a different way than the current system does. With zero or near zero marginal costs, this changes the game completely. We are going to see competition, whether the incumbents like it or want it or not. It may not be from individual consumers who are pulling the market with demand, but we’re likely to see competition at different scales. And that will push the entire system towards disruption.

pv magazine: According to Vistra it would take an investment of $7 trillion to decarbonize the electricity sector in the U.S. and then only by 90% by 2050. What accounts for this massive disconnect between Vistra’s figure and your analysis?

AD: There is a prevailing myth that 90% is somehow better than 100%. It’s better economically. It’s more affordable. It’s more feasible. This is a mistake, it is an error.

What we’ve discovered with the clean energy U curve, and especially with superpower and disproportionate returns, is that a 100% system has much better benefits and a lower cost of electricity than a 90% system does. This is very un-intuitive and really flips the existing narrative. The idea that we need to only go to 90% and it will be a struggle and a mistake or a problem to go to 100 is backwards. It isn’t just wrong. It would be a mistake to only go to 90%.

Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series. Read Part 1 here. Read Part 3 here.

from pv magazine Global

Tony Seba was among the first to recognize the disruptive potential of solar PV with the publication of his book “Solar Trillions” in 2010. His think tank, RethinkX, recently published a report titled “Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 – 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries is Just the Beginning.”

In early December, pv magazine publisher, Eckhart Gouras, interviewed Seba and Adam Dorr, the two authors of this report. As Seba and Dorr make clear in the interview, a 100% solar-wind-battery system is not only possible, but the cheapest way to build an electricity system in the U.S. by 2030.

They introduce the concept of the “Clean Energy U-curve,” which shows that the cheapest system is actually one that involves a lot more solar PV and wind power capacity than the peak power demand profile.

But they go one step further by introducing the concept of “SuperPower”: by investing in even more solar PV and wind power than the lowest-cost system defined by the “Clean Energy U-curve,” the gain in additional energy, or “superpower,” is exponential to the money invested.

pv magazine: Achieving 100% clean electricity by 2030 seems very ambitious, but getting there would certainly be a very big step in limiting carbon emissions and climate change. Describe how you uncovered this truth that a pure SWB [solar, wind, batteries] electricity system could already be implemented in the continental United States by 2030 at a reasonable cost of under $2 trillion?

Tony Seba (TS): We focus in on technology disruption and its implications for humanity, for society. For the energy sector, the question that we asked ourselves was this: Is an electricity system composed purely of solar, wind, and batteries, with all of the other constraining assumptions that we can talk about, is it possible at all?

Because there is a mythology out there that it’s not possible, or if it’s possible, it’s going to cost zillions of dollars. Is it possible at all? And if so, is it possible by 2030? Essentially, those were the questions that we asked ourselves. So, we started from first principles. Our methodology that we have used to analyze other disruptions over the last 15 years.

Adam Dorr (AD): I would just echo what Tony said. We proceed from the basis of having a sound theoretical framework. We have a set of first principles that allows us to understand all disruptions, all technology disruptions, historically and today, and we apply that framework, the Seba Technology Disruption Framework, to this particular question of the energy disruption facing the 2020s.

What we find when we do that, is we see that all of the signs are there. That disruption is inevitable. In fact, it has already begun. This disruption of energy is sure to become a textbook example of disruption, and Tony has been pointing this out since the mid 2000s. What we discovered in this particular analysis are some of the interesting nuances of the dynamics themselves.
When we apply our approach and we use Systems Dynamics to model the relationships between solar generation, wind power generation and battery energy storage, we discovered some very interesting relationships.

One of the most profound of these is that there is a trade-off, there is a balance between energy generation and energy storage, and you can have many different combinations of the two that will give you a functioning system.

So, the answer to the first question we asked, is it possible, is it physically possible? We discovered that “yes”, there are many, in fact, there are tens of thousands of ways to have a different mix of energy generation and energy storage that will in principle function. The question then is what is the correct balance? What is the optimal balance that will give you the most affordable, the most practical system?

pv Magazine: And that’s the “Clean Energy U-curve” you describe in your report, right?

AD: That’s exactly correct. This was a fascinating finding and confirmed research that is already beginning to see quite clearly that the correct balance, the optimal balance, between generation and storage actually has more generation than the prevailing mythology believes and less battery capacity than the prevailing mythology believes.

There’s this idea that we would need weeks, or even more than one month of long-term energy storage, in order to make a system with 100% solar and wind work. That is not true. What you need is more solar and wind power, which allows you to trade off less battery energy capacity, and when you strike the optimal balance, the correct balance, which is the bottom of the U-curve, because U-curve is a cost function. It’s telling us what different functioning, different 100% solar, wind and battery systems, what they would cost.

We find that the least expensive system is the cheapest electricity system that we can build with any technology, the bottom of the U-curve for solar, wind and batteries, is cheaper than any other conventional electricity generating technology, for example coal or natural gas.

pv Magazine: The other radical concept you discovered is that if you actually add to the investment and build even more solar and wind, you get this wonderful superpower effect. Can you describe this in more detail?

AD: Yes, you got it exactly. And that is not an obvious property of the system. That was the realization that there is a non-linear, a disproportional return on investment in superpower and that this creates extraordinary opportunities for societies that make the decision to embrace disruption, to lead with disruption. They can capture an enormous amount of value if they understand these dynamics.

pv Magazine: Well, $2 trillion is still a very large sum, but it happens to be the same amount President-elect Biden is ready to invest as part of his $2 trillion climate proposal. Is this a coincidence, or have you been in touch with members of the Biden team?

TS: We do our work independently, but by coincidence, there is a small number of researchers out there that essentially have looked at the idea of 100% clean energy and the numbers seem to be converging around $2 trillion. Everyone uses different technologies. We use solar, wind and batteries. Some folks use water, some folks use different kinds of storage and so on, but there seems to be a convergence around that number.

It’s good news that [$2 trillion] seems to be the number – not what is being bandied about by the incumbents, whether it’s five or seven or $10 trillion or even not possible. So, it is coincidental, but for a good reason: that the right methodologies are converging around that number.

pv Magazine: A report by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, builds a case to decarbonize the electricity system by 90% by 2035 for a price tag of $1.7 trillion. While their target is five years later and not 100% clean energy, they criticize the fact that most decarbonization models stretch all the way to 2050, when we are running out of time in combatting climate change.

TS: The most interesting finding is that the 100% SWB system we describe is the cheapest possible system. On a purely economic basis, there is no excuse not to do it. Keeping the existing system is more expensive than basically building the [SWB] system, without considering any of the other factors. The implication of climate makes it more urgent, but on a purely economic basis, there’s no excuse not to do this by 2030.

Incumbents are going to put up all kinds of excuses, but from a real perspective there isn’t a good excuse.

AD: Another interesting thing to think about is that sometimes the derivative of a forecast is as interesting as the forecast itself. And what I mean by that is, it’s interesting to look at the way that forecasts are themselves changing over time. And what we see is that the timelines to get to 100% clean energy are moving forward. So, that’s the derivative. First, it was 2100, then 2070, then 2060, 2050, then 2040, then 2035. So you can see that this is a separate phenomenon from the individual forecasts themselves.

pv Magazine: What struck me in the Goldman report was its forecast of clean energy cost declines. Goldman sees on average a 40% to 50% drop in the cost of solar, wind and batteries by 2035. But you are saying by 2030, we will see a drop of 70% in the cost of solar PV, 40% for onshore wind, and 80% for lithium-ion batteries. That’s a very different experience curve.

AD: If you look at that particular report, the forecasts for the growth of the market are linear or nearly linear and the improvement in costs is directly related to the expansion of the market. If the market expands linearly, the cost will not improve as quickly as if the market expands exponentially. There’s no evidence that the market will suddenly stop growing exponentially for any of these technologies.

We know of other forecasts, other projections, that said “well, next year, it’s going to turn into a linear growth trajectory, it is going to stop being exponential.” People have been saying this every year for 10, 15, 20 years. The onus is on the naysayers, I would say. We have every reason to believe that the exponential growth of the markets for solar, wind and batteries – globally, which is what controls costs (the global market) – will continue through the 2020s.

One last point to consider, and this is very important: There’s a difference between our work and other analyses. We know from the history of disruptions throughout human history, that when a disruption happens the new system that is created is almost always much larger than the system it replaces. What this means is that, even if you understand there is an S-curve, the exponential growth eventually slows down. If your new system is much larger than the old one, the exponential growth portion of the S-curve, the exponential part, will be larger than the whole old system.

And this is why the exponential growth can continue for longer than people imagined. People are stuck thinking “We are simply going to one-to-one, replace the existing system with a new technology.” This is not how disruption works. Digital cameras did not replace film cameras one-to-one. There are 10X, 100X, 1000X more digital cameras now than there ever were film cameras.

TS: We call that the “faster horse syndrome.” I mean folks thought that the car was going to be a faster horse, and in fact, it was that 10X superior technology.

pv Magazine: Or the smartphone?

TS: Yes. They thought it was basically just a slightly different cell phone, or the cell phone was a slightly different kind of landline telephone and so on. They were completely different products and systems with completely different capabilities, and that happens every single time.

It’s a phase change to a new system that is larger and cheaper in terms of per-unit price, and it totally has different metrics and behaviors. It’s never a one-to-one substitution.

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series in which Tony Seba and Adam Dorr discuss their newest insights. Read Part 2 here. Read part 3 here.

Editor’s note: We at pv magazine are big fans of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). For years, NREL’s reports have informed our coverage by providing highly detailed technical insights into many aspects of renewable energy, including everything from the composition of PV system soft costs to issues of integrating very high levels of wind and solar on the grid. As such, it is a great honor to present an interview with Dr. Peter Green, who serves as the deputy laboratory director for Science and Technology and the chief research officer for NREL.

pv magazine: NREL has so many different program areas, and produces work on so many different facets of renewable energy. For our readers, can you summarize the main areas of work that NREL engages in, and how they relate to each other?

Peter Green: So let me do that. The lab as a whole is one of seventeen national labs in the United States, and we are generally focused on renewable energy and energy efficiency. The laboratory, which was founded in 1977 as the Solar Energy Research Institute and later becoming NREL in 1991, engages foundational scientific research, technological innovation and energy analysis.

One key area is building energy efficiency – residential and commercial buildings, and communities.. The first net zero-energy office building in the United States was built at NREL.

With regards to renewable power generation, the major areas are solar, wind and water, geothermal, bioenergy and hydrogen. In fact the first  wind turbine-specific air foils were developed by NREL, in collaboration with a number of industrial partners. Today NREL leads collaborative efforts to develop the next generation wind turbines and wind farm efficiencies. In the area of solar, we hold the world record for the most efficient multi-junction solar cells. We have made significant advances in improving the stability of perovskite solar cells (over 1000 hours) and developing manufacturing capabilities for roll-to-roll production of perovskite-based solar cells. This could be a game changer, with regard to the availability of truly cheap solar power.

Another area of research is bio-energy, where we work on the conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. Interestingly we are working on optimizing the performance of fuels for internal combustion engines and powertrains, with other labs; this is the DOE co-optima program. There is also work at NREL on the hydrogen economy: hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles, in collaboration with other labs and industry.

From the point of view of energy systems, we are working on the grid modernization initiative with a number of other national laboratories, utilities and private companies. We are looking at deployments of distributed energy resources, within the United States as well as in remote places, places like Alaskan villages and even parts of South America and Africa. NREL is also seriously engaged in the future generation autonomous energy grid, where artificial intelligence will be used to guide operational decisions, instead of humans. This should lead to a more resilient and secure grid.

Companies spend a lot of time at NREL, working with staff. For example Eaton has employees who are at NREL permanently, working in our state-of-the-art, one of a kind, energy systems integration facility (ESIF). ESIF is a facility dedicated to advancing the integration of clean energy technologies. 

And there are other areas of interest outside of renewable energy. We have collaborative  projects in the areas of oil and gas and nuclear energy, with other national labs. This is important because the globe is in the midst of an energy transition. Renewables aren’t ready to meet current global energy demands. So it makes sense to work with partners to understand how to increase the penetration of variable renewables (wind, solar) into the energy system which relies other non-renewable sources. Our goal is to increase efficiency, reliability, security, resiliency and reduce costs as much as possible for consumers.

To give you a sense of NREL’s impact, we are a lab of 1800 full-time employees, and about 500 non-permanent staff, and we have established over 800 partnerships, with cities (such as Los Angeles), towns, utilities, corporate entities in the US and around the world. We publish an average of 500 scientific papers, and approximately 200 other reports etc. Our economic impact just exceeded one billion dollars, annually, for the first time, in the history of the lab.

pv magazine: To delve more deeply into those partnerships, NREL has been working with Mexico’s INEEL in particular. Why are these partnerships a priority for NREL and what role do they play in the organization’s work?

Green: That’s a very good question. We have engaged with countries, cities and towns around the world for a very long time. This has involved, for example, disaster relief efforts in the US and abroad, helping people to develop more resilient energy systems.

Now with regards to Mexico our interactions go back almost three decades with IIE – that’s Mexico’s electric research institute – where we have done collaborative work on wind mapping in Oaxaca, for example. There have been collaborations on off-grid solar and wind installations; we’ve worked on microgrids, PV and water pumping systems – even training initiatives in Mexico collaboratively with IEE, going back more than two and a half decades.

Our work with INEEL is a natural evolution of our relationship. We are hoping to work in all areas of renewable energy, if possible. Regarding the energy grid, we’d like to continue to expand our activities on distributed energy resource  projects. We have significant activities with other national labs and utility companies in this areas. We are working with partners on solar installations in various places, as well as understanding markets, and educating the consumer.

pv magazine: So NREL has conducted a number of studies on integrating very high levels of renewable energy on the grid over the last decade. How has the understanding of integrating higher levels of wind and solar changed over time, and why is it important for NREL to do this work on this issue?

Green: Based on our knowledge the science and technology of various renewable power generation sources, our high performance computing facilities and our expertise on techno-economic analysis, we’re in a unique position to do this kind of work.

With the integration of larger penetrations of variable renewables (wind, solar) into the energy grid, many questions including voltage stability (two-way energy flow because consumers can sell power generated at their homes back to the grid) and indeed grid stability need to be addressed. We performed a study a few years ago – the EGRIS study – where we considered a realistic number of consumers across the eastern United States, a huge number of generation facilities (renewable and non-renewable) and their operations, and using realistic time intervals, we performed the world’s most sophisticated computer simulations to understand potential challenges for power generation. These kinds of studies provide insights into planning for future infrastructural needs, including power electronics device performance requirements, for high penetrations (>50%) of variable renewable energy.  NREL has since published other papers on this topic.

pv magazine: I think we’ve all noticed the calls by certain politicians to cut funding to both renewable energy and basic research, yet NREL has retained relatively stable levels of funding in the recent budgets that have gone through the U.S. Congress. Can you talk about the base of political support that NREL has, and why it is so broad?

Green: Yes, the good news for us is that our operational budget right is in excellent shape and we hare hiring additional researchers for a diverse range of our programs. I think that the large number of meaningful partnerships with power utilities, industry and academia have proven that we add value. The administration understands what we actually we bring to the table.

Hosting visits from the Energy Secretary Perry, the deputy secretary and the under-secretary, have enabled us to demonstrate our capabilities and actual impact and to tell them about the serious work that the laboratory actually performs on behalf of the nation. They have all been pleased, and that has really helped.

In short,  there is a lot of support from people, and organizations, with whom we have worked, and this has been helpful.

pv magazine: You’ve talked about how NREL is very active in looking into how to boost the penetration of renewables, including solar. How do you see battery storage developing? What kind of pace of adoption can we expect next year and the years that follow?

Green: All indications are that the adoption is going to increase because battery prices are continually dropping, at a more rapid pace than expected, due to scientific and manufacturing advances. There is a wide range of battery chemistries, beyond lithium ion batteries, being investigated by labs across the globe. We anticipate a continued trend towards prices reductions and increased reliability; as prices drop there is going to be more adoption.

EVs are continuing to be adopted at a rapid rate, across the globe, with China providing the largest markets. The Chinese have developed policies to ensure the growth of the markets. All the big auto makers have plans for increased EV adoption. 

pv magazine: You actually see that various battery technology are going to be involved? It won’t be dominated by lithium ion? What’s your sense?

Green: For the next decade of so lithium ion batteries are going to be dominant. But there are new opportunities out there. For example, new battery chemistries are available and others are soon be discovered. This is clear from the scientific literature.

The work on flow batteries for grid storage applications, is promising. Vanadium flow batteries is a good example. NREL is engaged in all of these areas, including next generation batteries -beyond lithium ion – and battery safety and performance.

pv magazine: It is very interesting how NREL is also involved on the automotive side. You mentioned your partnership with big auto companies. So you really have an understanding of how storage and lithium ion is being deployed, and what these carmakers need. So you can also factor that into your simulations, in terms of what batteries have to deliver, what energy storage has to deliver, to really pump up the share of renewables in power generation.

Green: When I think about renewables in the transportation system, three things typically come to mind. First, bio fuels – produced from plant waste (not corn) – will play an important role.  This will particularly be true for heavy-duty vehicle long distance transport (not withstanding short-haul electric trucks used on some European cities). 

The second case involves hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles. Hydrogen powered vehicles (many of which are driven in southern California), have a range of up to 400 miles. Such vehicles are available on the NREL campus. NREL has significant activities in this area, collaboratively with other national labs and the auto industry.  The challenge is cost and the lack of a large-scale fueling infrastructure; this will be solved with time.

Finally, most automobile manufacturers expect that the cost of ownership of EVs will be sufficiently cheap, by 2023 , that most people will want to own EVs. The cost of maintenance of EVs is also cheaper than the internal combustion engine vehicles. Of course, the widespread adoption of EVs will be limited by the charging infrastructure.

pv magazine: I wonder how that will pan out, because you know it’s difficult to invest in charging infrastructure if you don’t have that many EVs, but you also don’t want to be pushing EVs if you don’t have charging infrastructure. It’s kind of a chicken/egg problem.

Green: Actually, this is more straightforward than it would appear. NREL has published work that evaluates different scenarios of electric vehicle adoption and the charging infrastructure that would be required. States like California and Colorado are making plans for an eventuality of widespread EV use. We have also published  a study that evaluates the effects of different percentages of adoption of EVs and the effect of uncoordinated charging on the performance of the electric grid. Research in this area will provide the appropriate guidance to community planners.

pv magazine: What would be your main recommendations for developing countries that could benefit from PV?

Green: Virtually all places around the globe recognize the importance of PV. The price has dropped, and continuing to drop, to the point where it is competitive with basically every other form of power generation. So it is becoming more and more affordable everywhere. Customers are going to use PV only as long as they can realize savings, and they certainly can.

pv magazine: I have one more question. The bigger picture now, one is increasing the penetration of renewables like solar, the other is, we haven’t gotten too good of feedback lately, the meeting now happening in Katowice to continue what happened in Paris, and you had that rather negative assessment from the IPCC on staying below 2 or 1.5 degrees Celsius. The IEA has even said that there are more coal-fired power plants coming along in Asia and other regions.

Do you think we can still stop this warming? Do you think that solar and other renewables can play an even bigger part to help out here?

Green: Solar and wind will play a bigger part, in the future. The research on the next generation wind energy (much larger and more efficient wind turbines, and more efficient wind farms), and cheap, stable, and more efficient solar cells (e.g.: perovskites and low cost high efficiency multi junction solar cells), will provide terawatts of power needed to provide energy for the globe.  Other renewable sources, together with new cost effective storage technologies, are eminent. Researchers across the globe are highly motivated.  I believe that the final analysis, the economics will drive decisions.

The other good news is that in cities and towns around the world, the behavior of individuals is influenced by local policies. In other words, grassroots efforts around the world are proving to be effective.

In short, it is not for lack of ideas. The ideas are here. The technologies are here. It is only a question of whether we can make things sufficiently cheap and will people adopt it at a sufficiently high rate.

It is going to take an effort on the part of everybody, in every part of the globe -literally every single person.

Interview conducted by pv magazine Managing Director Eckhart Gouras, pv magazine Americas Editor Christian Roselund and Energía Hoy CEO Santiago Barcón Palomar.

Calgary-based battery storage manufacturer Eguana Technologies Inc. announced last Friday that it has appointed former Mercedes-Benz Energy executive Marcus Brunner as Chief Sales Officer to drive the company’s global growth. According to Eguana’s CEO Justin Holland “Mr. Brunner, the former Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Mercedes-Benz Energy, has an extensive history of sales and marketing execution including Mercedes-Benz, General Electric, Zumtobel and Avnet Technologies. Under his leadership we expect to accelerate growth in all global markets.”

At the recent AllEnergy exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, pv magazine interviewed Holland about the company’s solutions and global expansion. In the U.S. and Australia the key product is the Evolve Residential Energy Storage System, which starts at 13 kWh battery capacity and runs in modular fashion to 39 kWh. Eguana’s AC coupled topology is designed for compatibility with any solar PV string or micro inverter. LG Chem’s battery modules with integrated battery management system warrant a 19.2 MWh energy throughput per 6.5 kWh module.

According to Holland, Eguana’s unique selling point is multi-pronged: “We have a number of stackable values that the other products don’t have. One of the reasons we have so much value-add is because our product was originally designed for the aggregation markets. We thought the U.S., which is our home market, would go into aggregation very quickly being led by some of the utilities, so we built the full suite of grid services into the product: frequency regulation, voltage control, aggregation for spinning reserve, etc. A lot of the other products only support backup power and self-consumption, but we had those features already built in. So that’s some of the value that we bring as the market gets more sophisticated.”

Another advantage is the fact that Eguana’s proprietary power controls can handle battery module scale-up without the need to purchase additional power control functionality. For example, the Evolve system can go from 13 kWh to 39 kWh without the need for the customer to make further investments on the power control front. Instead the customer pays only for the additional LG Chem battery modules.

In addition to Marcus Brunner, Eguana is bringing on another Mercedes-Benz Energy executive to lead European sales. Dr. Andreas Rueckemann will serve as Director of Sales Europe after heading European sales for the Mercedes-Benz Energy. In Europe Eguana’s residential solution is the Enduro product, which starts at 6.5 kWh and offers the same unique selling point as the Evolve product. As stated in the company’s October 12 press release, Eguana also “confirmed that its 3-phase commercial system, Elevate, will be certified for European and Australian markets” and expects rollouts to begin in the spring of next year.

For the Calgary-headquartered manufacturer bringing on board these senior Mercedes-Benz Energy executives is a noteworthy coup to bolster their global team and drive further growth around the world. With manufacturing facilities in Europe and North America and two decades of experience delivering grid edge power electronics for fuel cell, PV and battery applications, Eguana Technologies should gain even more traction and visibility in the coming months in a wide range of markets.