The SMH reports that SolarReserve will be building a 150MW solar thermal power plant in South Australia, following on the commissioning of the world's largest battery storage facility by Tesla in the state and in parallel with Zen Energy’s 1GW solar / storage project - South Australia planning to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant.

Following the success of the world’s largest battery, South Australia is aiming to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant. SolarReserve’s $650 million, 150 megawatt Aurora solar thermal plant has received state development approval. Construction of the facility will begin this year.

Quartz has an article noting that Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement is just an act of carbonite theatre - renewable energy is now so cheap the US will meet its target anyway - Renewable energy is becoming so cheap the US will meet Paris commitments even if Trump withdraws.

Research analysts at Morgan Stanley believe that renewable energy like solar and wind power are hurtling towards a level of ubiquity where not even politics can hinder them. Renewable energy is simply becoming the cheapest option, fast. Basic economics, the analysts say, suggest that the US will exceed its commitments in the Paris agreement regardless of whether or not president Donald Trump withdraws, as he’s stated he will.

“We project that by 2020, renewables will be the cheapest form of new-power generation across the globe,” with the exception of a few countries in Southeast Asia, the Morgan Stanley analysts said in a report published Thursday. “By our forecasts, in most cases favorable renewables economics rather than government policy will be the primary driver of changes to utilities’ carbon emissions levels,” they wrote. “For example, notwithstanding president Trump’s stated intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, we expect the US to exceed the Paris commitment of a 26-28% reduction in its 2005-level carbon emissions by 2020.”

RNE reports that solar PV installations in Australia are now well above their feed-in tariff driven peak of 2013 - Record half year for rooftop solar after another bumper month.

The new statistics, released by industry analyst Sunwiz, follow a new report released last week that showed that the average uptake of rooftop solar in Australia had now reached 25 per cent, and above 31 per cent in Queensland and South Australia. The Sunwiz data shows that Australia now has 5.83GW of rooftop solar installed on 1.71 million homes and businesses. Queensland leads the way with 1.77GW – bigger in capacity than the state’s largest coal fired generator.

Businesses are the biggest mover in the uptake of rooftop solar – possibly because they are being hit with even bigger rises in electricity bills, and accounted for a record 33 per cent of installations in the last month, and more than 40 per cent of installations in states likes South Australia.

Dave Roberts at Vox has an interesting look at the problem cheap battery storage is posing for utilities trying to stop the spread of solar power - Utilities fighting against rooftop solar are only hastening their own doom.

As they get cheaper, batteries make sense for more commercial applications. As new markets for storage grow, demand for batteries increases. As demand increases, economies of scale kick in and batteries get cheaper. Rinse, repeat.

The McKinsey analysis shows this dynamic playing out within the power sector, both “behind the meter” (batteries inside a customer’s home or building) and “in front of the meter” (batteries assembled into large-scale storage installations). Batteries are soon going to disrupt power markets at all scales.

The whole analysis is interesting, but I want to focus in on the way batteries will affect rooftop solar. Across the country, intense battles are being waged as utilities push back against the rapid spread of rooftop solar. (See, as the latest example, Nevada.) Batteries, McKinsey reveals, are going to scramble those battles, making them effectively unwinnable for utilities. The existential crisis they hoped to avoid by slowing rooftop solar is going to slam into them twice as hard once batteries enter the picture.

Stunningly wrong, year after year...

PV magazine reports on a new floating solar PV plant in China - World’s largest floating solar PV plant connected to grid in China.

Chinese PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow announced that a 40MW aquaculture project, the world’s largest floating PV power plant, had been grid connected with its SG2500-MV central inverters in the flooded coal-mining region of Huainan, China.

The power plant is located on a lake that formed in this coal-rich area as a result of gradual subsidence and floods caused by heavy rains. Its water depth today ranges from to 4 to 10 meters.

Elon Musk recently had a TED talk with Chris Anderson covering a wide range of topics, including the Tesla Semi and expanding the Gigafactory fleet - What will the future look like? Elon Musk speaks at TED2017.

Showing a concept photo of a house with a Tesla in the driveway, Powerwalls on the side of the house and a solar glass roof, Musk talks about his vision for the home of the future. Most houses in the US, he says, have enough roof area for solar panels to power all the needs of the house. “Eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof,” he says. “Fast forward 15 years from now, it’ll be unusual to have a roof that doesn’t have solar.”

And to store all that electricity needed to power our homes and cars, Musk has made a huge bet on lithium-ion batteries. Moving on to a discussion of the Gigafactory, a massive diamond-shaped lithium-ion battery factory near Sparks, Nevada, Musk talks about how power will be stored in the future.

“When it’s running full speed, you can’t see the cells without a strobe light,” Musk says as a video of the factory pumping out Li-ion batteries plays behind him. Musk thinks we’ll need about 100 such factories to power the world in a future where we don’t feel guilty about using and producing energy, and Tesla plans to announce locations for another four Gigafactories late this year. “We need to address a global market,” Musk says, hinting that the new factories will be spread out across the world. ...

Sustainable energy will happen no matter what, out of necessity, Musk says. “If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy … The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur,” he says.

But becoming a multi-planet species isn’t inevitable. “If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 we were able to send somebody to the moon. Then we had the space shuttle, which could only take people to low-Earth orbit. Now we take no one to orbit. That’s the trend — it’s down to nothing. We’re mistaken when we think technology automatically improves. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”

Tesla have also released their "solar roof" product, with Bloomberg declaring it "better than anyone expected". RNE has a summary - Tesla’s solar roof sets Musk’s grand unification into motion.

Production of the tiles will begin at Tesla’s Fremont solar plant in California and then shift this summer to its new factory in Buffalo, New York, with additional investments from Tesla’s partner, Panasonic. Musk said initial sales will be limited by manufacturing capacity. As production ramps up into 2018, sales will begin in the UK, Australia, and other locations, along with the introduction of sculpted terracotta and slate versions of the solar roof.

The tempered glass in Tesla’s tiles is designed to conform to the toughest durability standards for both roofs and solar products, according to Tesla. The roof itself is guaranteed to outlast your home, while the power production of the solar cells is covered under a 30 year warranty, according to the company’s website. Glass, as Musk likes to point out, has a “quasi-infinite” lifetime, though the underlying solar cell will degrade over time.

Tesla’s basic premise is to make solar ownership more attractive and affordable by eliminating the need to install both a roof and solar panels. Tesla will manage the entire process of solar roof installation, including removal of existing roofs, design, permits, installation, and maintenance. The company estimates that each installation will take about a week.

PV Magazine has an article on the now unstoppable transition to solar power - Solar to attract more investment than coal, gas and nuclear combined this year, says Frost & Sullivan.

Analysts expect global renewable power investment to reach $243bn this year, with solar PV the fastest-growing segment and non-hydro renewables to account for 65% of all global power investment by 2020.

RNE looks at some multiple land use in China for a solar power plant - China completes 200 MW solar facility on top of fish farm.

In an online statement, the Cixi municipal authorities hailed the project as a “new model” for solar-aquaculture projects, as the PV modules were deliberately spaced far apart to allow enough sunlight to penetrate the water, which is critical for the growth of the fish beneath the surface. Construction started in late June and wrapped up in December. The project is expected to annually generate about 220 GWh of electricity, or enough to cater to the needs of roughly 100,000 homes.

RNE has a look at the ever-decreasing cost of renewable energy - Turning point: solar power now cheaper than wind energy.

The BNEF’s accompanying chart, which shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 recently completed projects and/or auctions in places such as China, India, and Brazil suggests that the solar’s steep price drop since 2010 has caught up with wind – which has more or less held steady in the recent past.

“Solar investment has gone from nothing—literally nothing—like five years ago to quite a lot,” said Ethan Zindler, head of BNEF’s US policy analysis, who attributes “a huge part” of this to China, which has not only been rapidly expanding its own solar capacity but actively promoting and/or financing other countries to do the same. As the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world, there is a lot at stake in how fast solar capacity is installed beyond China’s own borders.

Heralding the new age of solar, BNEF’s colorful chairman Michael Liebreich declared, “Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting” fossil fuel prices. He said he was basing his statement on numerous solar projects completed in 2016 with more to follow in 2017. When the data are tallied for the year, it’s likely that the total solar PV capacity added globally in 2016 will exceed that of wind for the first time. The latest BNEF projections call for 70 GW of newly installed solar compared to 59 GW of wind for 2016. What is stunning about these figures is that both are significant, but solar appears to have overtaken wind. ...

The BNEF’s Liebreich acknowledges that, “… the overall shift to clean energy can be more expensive in wealthier nations, where electricity demand is flat or falling and new solar must compete with existing billion-dollar coal and gas plants,” adding, “But in countries that are adding new electricity capacity as quickly as possible, renewable energy will beat any other technology in most of the world without subsidies.”

RNE has a report on a Queensland zinc refiner that is building its own solar power plant - .

Australian zinc metals producer Sun Metals is to build a 100MW solar PV plant to supply its refinery located near Townsville, in northern Queensland, in a landmark development in the Australian renewable energy landscape.

The project marks the biggest intervention yet in Australia by a major energy user to source some of its electricity needs from renewable energy. While major international corporate players – such as Google, Apple, Amazon and others – have long had a 100 per cent renewable energy target, little has been done in Australia.

The Economist has a post on research from the Utrecht University into the energy investment required for solar panels and the amount of carbon emissions involved - How clean is solar power?. You can see how far solar PV has come in terms of energy return on investment when the numbers being quoted for new panels are around 15 now (taking less than 2 years to return the initial energy investment).

Wilfried van Sark, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his colleagues have ... calculated the energy required to make all of the solar panels installed around the world between 1975 and 2015, and the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with producing that energy. They also looked at the energy these panels have produced since their installation and the corresponding amount of carbon dioxide they have prevented from being spewed into the atmosphere. Others have done life-cycle assessments for solar power in the past. None, though, has accounted for the fact that the process of making the panels has become more efficient over the course of time. Dr Van Sark’s study factors this in. [The team] found that solar panels made today are responsible, on average, for around 20 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of energy they produce over their lifetime (estimated as 30 years, regardless of when a panel was manufactured). That is down from 400-500 grams in 1975. Likewise, the amount of time needed for a solar panel to produce as much energy as was involved in its creation has fallen from about 20 years to two years or less. As more panels are made, the manufacturing process becomes more efficient. The team found that for every doubling of the world’s solar capacity, the energy required to make a panel fell by around 12% and associated carbon-dioxide emissions by 17-24%.

RNE has a look at progress for AGL's South Australian "virtual power plant" experiment - creating a cluster of buildings with solar panels, energy storage and software controlling when power is drawn from the storage systems - World’s largest virtual power plant trial a big hit with SA consumers.

AGL first announced plans to develop the ambitious VPP project in August – a centrally controlled network of 1,000 residential and business battery storage systems with a combined total of 7MWh capacity that would both store rooftop solar power and help manage grid stability in the state.

The hardware for the VPP – the 1,000 battery systems – and the energy management software are being supplied by US-based energy management company, Sunverge, which got the job through competitive tender.

AGL has said the finished product, which will have an output equivalent to a 5MW solar peaking plant, will work by using a cloud-connected intelligent control system that will allow the batteries to be directed in unison: a strategy aimed at helping both consumers to maximise solar self-consumption, and the broader community to manage state-wide peaks in electricity demand.

AGL chief Andy Vesey has said on various occasions that he believes such centrally controlled networks of rooftop solar and battery storage will be a key ingredient of energy systems of the future – systems that will be centred around the consumer.

Inhabitat has an article on some interesting CPV (concentrating solar photovoltaic) technology claiming to generate 20x as much power as a regular solar panel (presumably per unit of area occupied rather than per area of silicon) - V3Solar’s spinning solar cells generate 20 times more electricity than flat photovoltaics.

The V3 Spin Cell was developed through collaboration with industrial design team Nectar Design. The company believes that the Spin Cell could be a game-changer in its market. On their website V3 explains that if one places a 20x solar concentration on a flat, static solar panel then “the temperature quickly reaches 260 degrees F, the solder melts within ten seconds, and the PV fails. With the same concentration on the Spin Cell, the temperature never exceeds 95 degrees F.”

The one meter-diameter cones feature a layer of hundreds of triangular photovoltaic cells positioned at an angle of 56 degrees, encased in a “static hermetically-sealed outer lens concentrator.” The photovoltaic cone spins with the assistance of a “small amount” of its own solar-generated power which feeds a Maglev system, intended to reduce the noise generated by the cones as well as any required maintenance.

Bloomberg has a report on the continuing decline of the cost of solar power - World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind.

This year has seen a remarkable run for solar power. Auctions, where private companies compete for massive contracts to provide electricity, established record after record for cheap solar power. It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. That’s record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal power. “Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting” fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.

Those are new contracts, but there are plenty of projects reaching completion this year, too. When all of the 2016 completions are tallied in coming months, it’s likely that the total amount of solar photovoltaics added globally will exceed that of wind for the first time. The latest BNEF projections call for 70 gigawatts of newly installed solar in 2016 compared with 59 gigawatts of wind.

The Economist has an article on "the power of the Andean sun" - Latin America is set to become a leader in alternative energy.

BESIDE the Pan-American Highway, almost 600km (375 miles) north of Santiago, Chile’s capital, lies El Romero, the largest solar-energy plant in Latin America and among the dozen biggest in the world. Its 775,000 grey solar panels spread out across the undulating plateau of the Atacama desert as if they were sheets of water. Built at a cost of $343m by Acciona Energía, a Spanish company, last month El Romero started to be hooked up to the national grid. By April it should reach full strength, generating 196MW of electricity—enough to power a city of a million people. A third of its output will be bought directly by Google’s Chilean subsidiary, and the rest fed into the grid.

El Romero is evidence of an energy revolution that is spreading across Latin America. The region already leads the world in clean energy. For almost seven months this year, Costa Rica ran purely on renewable power. Uruguay has come close to that, too. In 2014, the latest year for which comparable data exist, Latin America as a whole produced 53% of its electricity from renewable sources, compared with a world average of 22%, according to the International Energy Agency.

RNE has an article on another solar power research success at UNSW - UNSW smashes solar cell record, predicts doubling in 12 months.

In a presentation to the Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference in Canberra on Friday, UNSW team leader and senior research fellow at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, Anita Ho-Baillie revealed her team had achieved 12.1 per cent efficiency for a 16 cm2 cell. This gives UNSW claim to the largest single perovskite photovoltaic cell, at least 10 times bigger than the current certified high-efficiency perovskite solar cells on record, certified with the highest energy conversion efficiency. ...

Perovskite – named after the Russian mineralogist who discovered it, Lev Perovski – is a red hot area of solar research, and moving at a break-neck speed, largely because the crystal-like compound is cheap to produce and simple to manufacture. As the video below illustrates, it can even be sprayed onto surfaces.

RNE has a post on the role of energy storage in transforming Australian energy generation to 100% renewables by 2050 - How much storage is needed in solar and wind powered grid?.

The CSIRO and Australia’s electricity network owners this week released a study that showed the best to deliver reliability, bring down costs and lower emissions in Australia was through a national grid powered almost exclusively by wind and solar. The cost savings over business-as-usual – a grid powered primarily by coal and gas – were significant, with consumer savings of between one-quarter and one-third of their bills.

But it does beg a question: If the grid is powered by “variable renewable energy” (or VRE), such as wind and solar, what will happen when, as the detractors say, the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine? The answer, of course, is storage. But not nearly as much as the cynics suggest. And at not nearly the cost.

RNE has an article on how to transition South America to 100% renewable energy - 100% renewable energy system cheapest for South America.

Transitioning to a fully renewable energy system, with over 50% coming from solar PV, would be the cheapest option for South America and it is possible in the next 15 years, according to research conducted by the Lappeenranta University of Technology.

As an ever-present accomplice to South America’s dramatic scenery, heavy sunlight could also be the dominant source of energy for the region by 2030, according to a new study from Finnish Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. But this is not the only clean energy source that the region should adopt, as the study finds that a 100% renewable energy system, including numerous renewable technologies, would be the cheapest energy system option for the region, due to its rich solar, wind and hydro resources.