Solar Energy Show

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon My wife complained to me last week that it cost $80 to fill up her car (I was oblivious since I drive an EV). But I wasn’t surprised since the price of gas in San Jose is about $5/gallon. Gas prices are definitely higher than they used to be, but the reality is that prices have been rock stable on an inflation-adjusted basis for over 30 years. In 1978, gas prices were $2.44/gallon compared to $2.24 in 2020. Over the same time period the average gas mileage of a car has gone up from 15 mpg in 1978 to 25 mpg in 2020. Adjusting for inflation and gas mileage, it cost $0.16/mile to drive in 1978 and $0.09/mile in 2020. Even at the U.S. average price of $3.42/gallon, it is still cheaper to drive a car in 2020 than it was in 1978. Nevertheless, gas station signs advertising $5/gallon gas are jolting. And get this: in May, June and July of 2021 U.S. gas refineries exported record amounts of gasoline! Drilling for more oil in the U.S., releasing petroleum from the St

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon So… regarding global warming, are we doomed? Or are there practical decarbonization paths to limit the impact of global warming? I am an optimist (otherwise I would not have been in the solar business for over 40 years). There is a clear path to limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees celsius by 2100. However, the necessary actions to achieve this goal creates “winners and loser,” resulting in political risks — regardless of the underlying social and economic needs. To be clear, the winners will be various clean energy technologies, including wind, solar, EVs, building electrification and energy storage. The “losers" will be the incumbent fossil fuel industry, as well as their downstream customers. Unfortunately, the incumbent losers have much more lobbying money than the upstart clean energy winners. Fortunately, except for industrial process heat, electricity generated from clean energy sources is cheaper than fossil fuel power generation. But

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Are you worried about blackouts and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS)? Are you sick of getting ripped off by rising electric rates from your local utility? Then you’re one of the millions of homeowners and businesses who are interested in a battery backup system designed to work with your solar system. It can be confusing to determine which battery and inverter system will be the best for your particular application, whether you are just adding a battery to your existing solar system, or installing a completely new solar and battery system. So this week’s Energy Show is all about selecting the best battery system for your home or business. Major battery suppliers include LG, Tesla, Enphase, Generac and SolarEdge. However, unlike solar panels, which can be mixed and matched with different inverters, batteries are designed to work only with certain inverter systems — most commonly SolarEdge and Enphase. It’s like cars: you don’t get to pick the manufacturer

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Not from a real nightmare, just worrying about external issues affecting the solar and storage industry. We jokingly refer to our industry as the “solar coaster,” characterized by unexpected ups and downs. The ups are typically expected events -- things for which we can usually plan in advance, such as changes to tax credits and incentives, continued unreliability of the electric grid, and increases in electricity costs. The things we can’t plan for are the solar coaster downs. These are usually unexpected events, coming at us from left field. Over the past 20 years we have managed through the Y2K non-crisis, the silicon shortage in 2004, the housing crisis and recession in 2007, solar tariffs in 2012, and of course the Covid pandemic in 2020-2021. My biggest nightmare right now relates to PG&E and other utilities trying to kill rooftop solar and storage so they can continue to sell their overp

Copyright 221 - Barry Cinnamon, The Energy Show About 15 years ago the solar and fire protection industries worked together to improve the safety of rooftop solar panels. With the increased popularity of lithium ion batteries for backup power, the solar and fire industries are now focusing on battery safety. Here’s the issue: anything that stores energy can be dangerous if that energy is released in an uncontrolled way, as in a fire or an explosion. It’s important to consider battery safety in the context of other forms of high density energy storage. Here on earth, uranium has the highest energy density at 80 million mega joules per kg. We call the sudden release of uranium energy an atomic bomb. From a theoretical standpoint, the energy density of antimatter is a thousand times higher than uranium, but so far only on Start Trek have the warp engines experienced an antimatter explosion. Here on earth, chemicals with high energy densities are much more practical, especially for transportation. Hydrogen has

Copyright 2021 The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon About 15 years ago the solar and fire protection industries worked together to improve the safety of rooftop solar panels. With the increased popularity of lithium ion batteries for backup power, the solar and fire industries are now focusing on battery safety. Here’s the issue: anything that stores energy can be dangerous if that energy is released in an uncontrolled way, as in a fire or an explosion. It’s important to consider battery safety in the context of other forms of high density energy storage. Here on earth, uranium has the highest energy density at 80 million mega joules per kg. We call the sudden release of uranium energy an atomic bomb. From a theoretical standpoint, the energy density of antimatter is a thousand times higher than uranium, but so far only on Start Trek have the warp engines experienced an antimatter explosion. Here on earth, chemicals with high energy densities are much more practical, especially for transportation. Hydrogen has

Copyright 2021 The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon 6/30/21 News Story: “PG&E just asked regulators for a $3.6b rate hike to reduce fires from their own power lines” Another “in your face” profit grab from a utility that blames rooftop solar for high electric rates. This rate increase works out to $36 per month for every homeowner in California! Do they think we’re stupid? The biggest threat to rooftop solar and storage is not political. It’s not tariffs. Or product shortages. The biggest threat is from aggressive lobbying (which we pay via our electric bills) and outright lies from monopoly utilities. It’s pretty simple: utilities are trying to prevent businesses and homeowners from installing their own solar and battery systems so they maximize their profits. They lie about rooftop solar and storage. Adding insult to injury, they are also trying to increase fees for customers who already have these systems. It’s an outright, blatant, anti-competitive profit grab that will harm all current and future solar +

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon This week’s Energy Show was recorded on Earth Day 2021, 51 years after the very first Earth Day in 1970. When Earth Day was established our country was concerned about water and air pollution — not global warming. There were two environmental disasters that year: a drilling rig leaked millions of gallons of oil off the coast of Santa Barbara, and the Cuyahoga River on the southern shore of Lake Erie started burning as oil and other industrial materials dumped into the river literally burst into flames. There was widespread acknowledgment throughout the country that we should not be polluting our environment for the sake of convenience. Anyone watching TV in 1970 probably remembers the crying Native American in the “Keep America Beautiful” PSA. Since then we’ve made tremendous progress reducing water, air and toxic waste pollution. While we are still focused on these issues, the bigger issue is global warming. All of the World’s governments — including the U

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Riddle me this: what is the most common element in the universe, comes in various colors, and was not the subject of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by The Rolling Stones? Here are a few more hints. Over 100 million metric tons of this gas are produced per year globally, and nearly all of that is made from fossil fuels. In its most common form, this element has one proton and one electron. It was the combustion source for the demise of the Hindenburg. And if you take two of these atoms, add an oxygen atom, you’re all wet. OK, it’s hydrogen. Almost all of the world’s hydrogen is made from natural gas. The best hydrogen is green, produced by the electrolysis of water, using electricity from renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro). The worst hydrogen is brown, made from coal from a gasification process. Gray hydrogen is produced from natural gas using the steam-reforming method. Both brown and gray hydrogen production results in large quantities of CO2 emitted into the at

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon We did a recent podcast on the Texas power failures, with a focus on practical solutions to these weather-related events. This week I’m happy to have a first-hand perspective of this extended Texas blackout with Jeff Wolfe, CEO of Veloce Energy. Jeff will share his uncomfortably cold experiences for three days — complete with almost- frozen pipes, lack of water, minimal driving, and limited food choices. But Jeff and his family didn’t suffer at all…they had a solar system with battery backup. His lights never went out. He had heat as long as there was natural gas pressure. His water pipes didn’t burst. The food in his fridge stayed cold. His computer and internet continued to function. Please listen up to this week’s Energy Show for Jeff's practical insights on what Texas can do to solve their structural and political electricity problems. And, naturally, specifics about how a solar and battery system can keep your home and business powered up during the ne

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon We all know about the devastating blackouts that hit Texas last month. Millions of people were without power for a week. People were miserably cold, pipes froze causing flooding damage, and most people were without potable water. Sounds eerily like the blackouts that occur in California. Been there, done that for three years in a row…and there is no end in sight. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and DOE Secretary, said: “Texans would rather be out of power than connect to the grid outside of Texas.” I’m pretty sure he is not talking about the people who’s lives were disrupted from this latest blackout. The causes of the blackout are fairly obvious. It was unexpectedly cold — note that Texas has had cold weather like this every ten years or so. Energy systems were not “weatherized” to withstand freezing temperatures, so all types of power plants failed to generate sufficient power. The Texas electric grid is isolated from eastern and western electric gri

Copyright 2021, The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon This week we’re talking about carbon capture and storage, or CCS (sorry, these TLAs are not my fault). Here’s why carbon capture and storage is a hot topic. If we could only capture the CO2 that is emitted when we burn fossil fuels, we could keep burning fossil fuels forever. Hooray - especially if you’re in any business related to fossil fuels, which is a pretty big chunk of our economy. Taking it one step further, if we could capture the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, we could potentially reverse the earth’s global warming trend. CCS is a fairly straightforward technology, and has been in use for about a hundred years. Billions of investment dollars have been going into scaling up various CCS processes for decades. CCS works best at the source of emissions, such as electric power plants and industrial processes (making steel and cement). When I look at CCS from a thermodynamic, economic and technological maturity standpoint, it is a dead end. Here

Copyright 2021 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon This week we’re focusing on the most common question we get after someone has installed solar and energy storage: “How do I read my electric bill?” Standard electric bills are hard enough to read, but when you have solar and storage you almost need a degree in forensic accounting to figure them out. At a high level -- and forgive my cynicism -- we are pretty much stuck with a ridiculous array of random charges from utilities. The good news is with a properly designed solar and battery storage system you can completely eliminate your electric bill. The bad news is that with the majority of the population working and schooling at home over the past year, our electric bills are at an all-time high. The added electricity consumption (measured in kwh), plus annual rate increases (those $/kwh numbers add up), plus Community Choice Aggregation electricity providers cross-billing, make it almost impossible to determine how well your solar and storage system is wor

Copyright 2021 - Barry Cinnamon, The Energy Show I’m starting off the year with my Ten Solar and Storage Trends for 2021. But first, a recap from Dave Barry, my favorite chronicler of all that is crazy and warped in this world: “2020 was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper.“ Looking ahead to 2021: The solar investment tax credit was extended at the last minute by President Trump Home electric bills went through the roof in 2020, and will stay high for most of 2021 The President, Senate and House of Representatives are committed to accelerating transition to clean energy So here are my predictions for solar and storage trends in 2021: All roof orientations are fair game for solar Buildings will be designed to be carbon negative Skill levels for solar and storage contractors will increase Module level power electronic

Copyright 2020 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Sometimes I think that the last thing we need is more electric utilities (except for the mini-utility our customers have with solar and batteries). But I make exceptions for new Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) utilities that are striving to reduce electricity costs in a sustainable way, including Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE). One of the founding board members of SVCE, Howard Miller, is our guest on this week’s Energy Show. Howard wears two hats: both as Mayor of the city of Saratoga, and Chairman of the Board of SCVE. Howard is also an adjunct professor of West Valley College. I've known Howard for almost 20 years, both as a friend and customer. No surprise that he is passionate about the environment, as well as new solar and battery storage technology. Silicon Valley Clean Energy was born in the second wave of CCAs following an expensive legal battle simply to get state authorization to operate. In fact, PG&E spent over $46 million to oppose CCAs in

Copyright 2020 - Barry Cinnamon, The Energy Show Why is Electricity So Expensive? We can complain all we want about the absurdly high price of electricity, but this situation is likely to persist for two reasons. First, electric companies are government-sanctioned monopoly utilities. There is usually only one electricity supplier, just as there is one water and natural gas supplier. Telephone services — and phones themselves — used to be a monopoly; it took years of legal battles leveraging the Sherman Antitrust Act to break the telephone monopoly. Now there is a competitive market for phone services and handsets, just as there is the potential for a free and competitive market for electricity. Second, the cost of electricity is primarily affected by the local cost of living; factors such as electric company wages, real estate costs, taxes, etc. So locations with a high cost of living — such as Hawaii, California and New York — have high electricity prices. And these high electric prices are likely to per

Copyright 2020 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Unless you’re totally off the grid -- both literally and figuratively -- you know that there are power shortages in California. With California experiencing hotter weather, people working at home, dirty power plant retirements, fires, and Public Safety Power Shutoffs, power outages have become a fact of life. But the solution to these problems does not have to exclusively be more power generating capabilities. Demand Response is a concept that describes the reduction in power consumption by utility customers to better match the available supply of power. An example would be if homes and businesses reduced their air conditioning needs — by simply raising the set point on their thermostats — during a peak power demand event at 4 PM on a hot summer day. There are challenges to implementing Demand Response programs, including communicating to customers when they should cut back their power usage, compensating these customers for their inconvenience (keep in mind

Copyright 2020 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon You just invested in a brand new EV charged by your rooftop solar and battery. Then, a year later, your utility adds a $50/month fixed charge to your bill just because you have rooftop solar. How would you feel? This scenario is not just hypothetical. Utilities all over the country are lobbying to change rates for solar and battery customers by adding large fixed fees, eliminating net metering, delaying interconnections, and deliberately mismanaging incentive programs. This anti-competitive behavior should be no surprise. Businesses don’t like competition; it hurts their profits. Homes and businesses can generate electricity for much less than their utility charges. So rather than find ways to be more efficient, competitive and environmentally friendly, utilities spend hundreds of millions of dollars suppressing competition from rooftop solar and battery storage and diminishing your solar and battery storage rights. To add insult to injury, the money they are

Copyright 2020 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon Solar panels are long term assets - guaranteed by every manufacturer for at least 25 years. Lithium ion batteries are guaranteed by most manufacturers for at least 10 years. But there are no major solar panel manufacturers have been in business for 25 years, and no major battery manufacturers for 10 years. So how can a homeowner, building owner or financing company assess the reliability of solar panels and batteries? The best way is to scientifically gather and assess reliability data for these components. To be objective, this reliability analysis must be done by an independent organization - not by manufacturers. PV Evolution Labs is the leading independent lab for equipment testing. They assess the bankability of PV modules, inverters, storage, and other balance-of-system equipment. Joining us on this week’s Energy Show is Jenya Meydbray, CEO and co-founder of PV Evolution Labs. Please Listen Up to this week’s Energy Show as Jenya talks about the foundi