POWER November 2016 - 56

RENEWABLES
The State of Solar: New Tech,
Outdated Rate Designs
As installed capacity in the U.S. continues its breakneck growth, the solar photovoltaic
sector is poised for another leap forward with a variety of new
technologies-if increasingly ill-suited regulations and rate designs can
be updated to keep pace.
Thomas W. Overton, JD
T
he global solar market has moved beyond
its early, uncertain days. The
luxury of behaving like start-ups has
passed, and major firms in solar need to
" grow up. " That, at least, was the message
from top executives at Solar Power International
(SPI), the industry's largest trade show,
held September 12 to 15 in Las Vegas.
David Crane of Pegasus Capital, who left
his position as CEO of NRG Energy late last
year, told attendees at the opening session that
too many solar firms were still behaving like
Silicon Valley start-ups, going public much
too soon and trying to grow too fast. That's
not the sign of a mature industry planning for
the future-something investors want to see to
have long-term confidence in solar.
" Public markets don't like lurches in strategy, "
noted Crane. " They don't even like exponential
growth. "
C.J. Colavito, director of engineering for
Standard Solar, told POWER that the highprofile
failures that have hit the industry
recently were often the result of companies
straying too far outside their core competencies
in pursuit of new business. That
stemmed in part from a failure to recognize
that the utility-scale, commercial and industrial,
and residential solar markets have very
different business models.
" Look at SolarCity. They've dominated
residential. They're really good at it, " he noted.
" But now they've gone very aggressively
into the commercial [distributed generation]
space. They've had a really hard time picking
up on it, and they've lost a lot of money on a
lot of earnings. "
Much of succeeding in solar, he said, " is doing
what you're good at and not trying to do
what you're not good at and don't understand. "
Yet the news and views were far from
universally negative. Steve Malnight, vice
president of regulatory affairs for Pacific Gas
& Electric, who spoke at the same session
as Crane, praised the industry's growing sophistication.
He noted that buyers large and
small are increasingly looking for integrated,
56
plug-and-play packages of solar, storage, and
smart controls, and vendors are lining up to
supply them.
" Solar may not be the iPhone, " he said,
" but it can enable customers to do more without
having an environmental impact and do
it guilt free. "
That mix of views-optimistic about the
industry's potential but concerned about
looming roadblocks-characterized much of
the discussion during the four days of SPI.
Big Data Comes to Solar
Almost no one would argue against the idea
that solar is booming. The Solar Energy Industries
Association (SEIA), one of the two
organizing groups behind SPI, reported as
the conference opened that the U.S. added
2 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity in
the second quarter of 2016 alone, with another
7.8 GW expected in the second half of
the year-both new records, the SEIA noted.
One sign of maturation in the PV industry
is growth in the breadth and sophistication
of support services available to generators to
help them increase efficiency and profitability.
Just as fossil generators are beginning to
turn to advanced data analytics to help keep
their plants competitive, solar project owners
are no longer at the complete mercy of the
sun: While generation still depends on solar
irradiance, predicting and working with it is
no longer the guesswork it once was.
Adam Adkins, a meteorologist with environmental
data firm Vaisala, explained to
POWER how the company has developed
a decades-long data set of solar irradiance
trends as well as real-time monitoring and
forecasting to help solar plants have a much
clearer view of what their output will be over
the short and long term.
" Pre-construction developers typically
use it to understand what the average output
of their project will be, " he said. " In an operational
sense, it's more of a reconciliation
tool. Developers can look at what the sun is
doing, what the clouds are doing, and comwww.powermag.com
pare
that to the actual output of their plant. "
In addition, owners can use past trends
and forecasts to schedule maintenance outages
during periods when overcast skies are
likely and avoid missing periods of peak irradiance.
That makes for much more predictable
output, which makes it more attractive to
investors and utilities.
" Having additional data sets only reduces
your risk, " he said. " The closer you are to
actual output, the closer your revenues are
going to be to your projections. Even a 1%
deviation can be a substantial hit. "
One point that is often missed, Adkins
noted, is that solar irradiance is more than
just sun and clouds. Other factors such as
atmospheric dust, and environmental events
such as wildfires and volcanic eruptions, can
affect irradiance, sometimes substantially.
Data Vaisala released in early September
showed that solar irradiance fell measurably
in California during a series of recent wildfires.
A major fire in Kern County in inland
1. Hazy skies. A major wildfire in inland
Southern California in June contributed to
lower solar irradiance that month compared to
July and August. Courtesy: Vaisala
POWER | November 2016
http://www.powermag.com
POWER November 2016

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