Explaining recent renewable energy auction outcomes in Europe

This webinar highlighted two winning programs from CESA’s 2018 State Leadership in Clean Energy Awards: Massachusetts’ Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) Program, and Rhode Island’s Block Island Offshore Wind Farm.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) produced a report on net energy metering (NEM) in response to a request from Congress. To gather information for the report, DOE conducted a Request for Information (RFI) and tasked ICF, Inc. to review 15 recent cost-benefit studies related to NEM. DOE’s report is a 10-page letter that summarizes the conclusions it drew from the responses to the RFI and from ICF’s report. ICF’s analysis for DOE, Review of Recent Cost-Benefit Studies Related to Net Metering and Distributed Solar, highlights the different value categories, approaches, and assumptions used in NEM cost-benefit analysis, value of solar studies, and broader DER valuation frameworks, emphasizing commonalities and differences between them, and how they are evolving over time. A short summary is available on ICF’s blog. The National Regulatory Research Institute released a Review of State Net Energy Metering and Successor Rate Designs, which summarizes state public utility commissions’ actions to find alternatives to the more commonly used net metering rate design. These alternative proposals include compensating for energy delivered to the grid at a price other than the retail service rate; increasing fixed charges and sometimes also minimum bills; time-varying rates; and adding demand-charges to bills for customers who did not have them previously.

Join our pv magazine webinar, in partnership with Soltec, for solutions to prepare again extreme wind loads, through an exploration of the aeroelastic effects in tracker design analysis, including real case studies. As studies have shown, certain wind-design code standards applied to solar trackers are insufficient. With climate crisis induced extreme weather events, from hurricanes to tropical cyclones, trending to increase, new analysis methodologies are needed to improve the design of reliable tracker structures. This webinar will discuss the importance and impact of wind design tracker improvements, and how these can be realized. Join Matthew Brown, technical director of wind consultants RWDI, together with Pablo Pajarón and Sergio Prado from Soltec, as they present a new method for comprehensive dynamic analysis in tracker wind-design. Developed in collaboration between RWDI and Soltec, benefit from the expertise of RWDI as the world leader in wind engineering and principal consultant on seven of the world’s 10 tallest buildings, and Soltec proven technical reliability as tracking specialists, together.

The IEA’s newly-enhanced Tracking Clean Energy Progress (TCEP) provides a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of a full range of energy technologies and sectors that are critical in a global clean-energy transition. It includes the most up-to-date information for where technologies are today and where they need to be according to the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario, a pathway to reach the Paris Agreement well below 2°C climate goal, deliver universal energy access and significantly lower air pollution.