Renewable Energy Focus
Renewable Energy World - Apr 5 Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe, and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That’s also been a boon for struggling U.S. family farms that must contend with floundering commodity prices. The rise in solar comes as the value of crops in the Southeast, with the exception of tobacco, has dropped. Solar companies, meanwhile, are paying top dollar, offering annual rents of $300 to $700 an acre, according to the NC Sustainable Energy Association. That’s more than triple the average rent for crop and pasture land in the state, which ranges from $27 to $102 an acre, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Press-Enterprise - Apr 5 Despite objections from environmentalists, the Obama administration last week approved the 287-megawatt Soda Mountain solar energy plant for a remote part of the Mojave Desert. The 1,767-acre project being developed by Bechtel is located on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), about six miles southwest of Baker. The project is consistent with BLM’s landscape approach for the California desert, which supports careful development of renewable energy while protecting the resources and places that make the desert special, BLM Director Neil Kornze said in a statement. The project will provide enough power for more than 86,000 homes and help Obama’s Climate Action Plan goal of 20,000 megawatts of power derived from renewable energy projects on public lands by 2020, the BLM statement said. The agency said it spent more than three years consulting and working with a variety of federal and state partners, members of the public, and others to develop a “comprehensive environmental analysis” of the Soda Mountain project area and devise a project design that preserves scenic vistas, reduces potential impacts to wildlife in the area, and protects groundwater. Last year, the project was reduced from the originally proposed 2,222 acres.
Bloomberg - Apr 4 Chinese solar panel maker Yingli Green Energy Holding Co Ltd. reached a settlement with Solyndra LLC, closing an antitrust and unfair-trade practice lawsuit filed in California. The companies agreed that Yingli will make an immediate payment of $7.5 million to Solyndra LLC, dismissing the lawsuit, according to a statement from Yingli. If the Baoding, China-based company or any of its affiliates sell 800 megawatts of solar panels or more in the U.S. and Canada in a single calendar year between 2016 and 2018, it must make an additional payment of $10 million to Solyndra.
Solar Industry Magazine - Apr 5
TerraForm Global has filed a lawsuit against its parent company, troubled clean energy firm SunEdison, claiming that SunEdison misappropriated funds intended to complete renewable energy projects in India. In the lawsuit, the subsidiary charges that it gave SunEdison $231 million in cash to complete certain India-based projects and deliver them on schedule, but instead, SunEdison “diverted the funds to prop up its flagging liquidity position rather than to fund the projects in India as promised.” According to the filing, the projects were left under-funded and behind schedule as a result.
PV-Tech - Apr 7 Government officials released a plan of action this week to address the power outage concerns created by the four-month long Aliso Canyon gas leak in southern California. Media reports forecast power generators, particularly those in the surrounding Los Angeles area, to be bracing for potential blackouts of as long as 14 days this summer, as a result of the gas shortages triggered by the methane leak. In order to mitigate predicted power disruptions, regulators are calling for alternative measures to aid in offsetting the lost gas supplies, with solar PV and solar thermal forming part of those plans.
Bakersfield Californian - Apr 8 Caltrans is partnering with a Dutch company to explore the possibility of installing solar panels beneath one of the state's busiest highways, recreating a project that thus far has been tested only on a bike path in the Netherlands, officials announced this week. The state transportation agency's director, Malcolm Dougherty, signed a letter of intent with Netherland officials looking into SolaRoad. The Dutch technology has been tested on a 236-foot bike path in Krommenie, Holland, but nowhere else. It cost $3.7 million and is still in a three-year test phase until 2017.
SolarServer - Apr 4 8point3 Energy Partners LP, the joint venture formed by SunPower and First Solar, has entered into agreements to acquire an interest in the 50-megawatt Hooper PV project from SunPower and the 40-megawatt Kingbird PV project from First Solar. These drop-down acquisitions are expected to generate approximately $9 million in combined annual pre-tax cash flow and have a 20 year average contract life, according to the press release.
North Bay Business Journal - Apr 4 Petaluma-based Lagunitas Brewing Company awarded a new solar project, which will be the third-largest solar installation at a brewery in the world, to Sonoma’s Westcoast Solar Energy. Beginning in the next couple of months, Westcoast will install 2.1 megawatts of solar power for the $5 million project.
