Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (834738)	2/6/2015 6:25:29 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 1575938

If you raise the panels you can put the batteries underneath them. Storage Is the New Solar: Will Batteries and PV Create an Unstoppable Hybrid Force? by Stephen Lacey Once a dominant force in solar, batteries were pushed aside in favor of grid-tied systems. But that dynamic may be changing. “We’re trying to apply the things that we learned in the solar development world to storage.” — Tom Leyden, Solar Grid Storage When Wes Kennedy started engineering solar systems in the mid-1990s, he pretty much had one integration option: batteries. At that time, Kennedy designed and installed systems for Jade Mountain, a Colorado-based distributed energy retailer that eventually merged with Real Goods Solar. With very little policy support from utilities, the off-grid market was the dominant driver of business in the U.S. and globally. The vast majority of PV was paired with lead-acid batteries and sold to people who wanted to disconnect from the grid, or who had no other choice for electricity. Photo Credit: Wes Kennedy That’s the way it was from the 1970s onward for a couple of decades, until a steady march of state-level policies and interconnection laws made tying solar into the grid more attractive. In typical first-mover fashion, California offered some of the first U.S. incentives for solar systems connected to utility wires in 1996. A handful of other states followed, extending net metering to solar and creating state rebate programs. At that time, Germany and Japan also beefed up promotion laws, creating a strong burst of activity for the grid-tied market globally. In 1997, nearly two-thirds of worldwide solar deployment was off-grid. Three years later, grid-tied installations outpaced off-grid installations globally for the first time. In 2005, the market finally flipped for the U.S. as state promotion policies blossomed. Over the last decade and a half, battery storage went from being the core enabler of solar PV to a marginal technology. Battery-based systems now only represent around 1 percent of yearly solar installations in America and throughout the world. “Sometimes people forget that storage was the roots of the solar industry,” said Kennedy. But the industry is getting back to those roots and embracing storage once again. As lithium-ion batteries get cheaper and more abundant, solar penetration reaches high enough levels to worry utilities, and electricity markets evolve to reward storage, attention has suddenly turned back to batteries. This time, interest in the technology isn’t coming from backwoods pioneers and off-grid enthusiasts -- it’s coming from technology pioneers in Silicon Valley and savvy industry veterans who see it as the next big business opportunity. “Storage is a big deal for our industry,” declared SunPower CEO Tom Werner during a keynote address at a recent Energy Storage Association conference. In Germany, as feed-in tariff rates dipped below retail rates from the grid, batteries have become more popular to serve self-consumption. In the U.S., solar service providers like SolarCity and SunPower see batteries as a way to enhance their long-term relationships with customers, while also utilizing net metering and ancillary service payments to increase the value of the solar system.... greentechmedia.com