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Sungevity Sees Grid
Parity Gains In Europe

California-based Sungevity has inked a partnership deal with Netherlands utility E.ON Benelux to jointly offer solar energy services. Under the arrangement, Sungevity will use its solar design and marketing platform to reach the utility’s customers on a co-branded basis.

In preparation for the partnership, E.ON made an investment in Sungevity in April. The following month, Sungevity used the capitalization from this and other investors, including GE Ventures, to expand its holdings in Dutch solar company Zonline into full ownership. The latter entity will operate as Sungevity Netherlands.

According to Sungevity CEO Andrew Birch, the Netherlands is an example of a market where solar power has achieved at least grid parity with other power sources. This is the culmination of decades of falling solar costs, combined with retail electricity rates rising by 4% to 5% per year for 40 years.

“Obviously, the lines have to cross,” Birch says. “What is fascinating for somebody like myself, who has been in the industry for over 10 years, is seeing how we are now live in markets that are at parity.”

This is especially pronounced in Europe, Birch says, and the Netherlands represents the bridgehead of a long-term strategy to enter other European grid parity markets. Citing his company’s research, Birch says eight of 11 markets it studied in Europe are at parity.

“The reason this deal is live in the Netherlands and not somewhere in the United States is that Europe is further along the curve on solar,” he says. “They are about three to five years ahead in terms of penetration and deployment of megawatts. And so the utilities are much more affected by it - more so than utilities have been affected by the shift to distributed energy in the U.S.”

In the U.S., Sungevity has a partnership with Lowe’s to sell solar power systems to its customers through its retail locations. Birch says his company is in discussions with utilities in the U.S., but no partnerships have yet been forthcoming. U.S. utilities just have not felt the need, he says. On the other hand, European utilities are already living with the reality of extensive penetration of distributed energy sources, including solar and wind.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wiped off their market capitalizations because of the penetration of distributed generation,” he says. “So they are much more empowered to make this transition.”

This is where partnerships come into play. Even in a grid parity market such as the Netherlands, Birch says direct marketing is an incredibly expensive and inefficient way to grow a business and grow a market. E.ON has 20 million customers, he says, with an interest in cost-effective energy. For its part, Sungevity has spent seven years developing its ability to sell solar power systems - a capability E.ON will be able to use to sell electricity in new ways.

“Selling distributed energy is a very different thing than selling centralized power,” Birch says. “That’s the value we bring.”

Birch says Sungevity expects its partnership with E.ON to expand to other grid parity markets in Europe in the near future. - Michael Puttré

 

Mosaic Expands
Residential Solar Loans

Mosaic has launched expanded solar loan products and services for residential installers that will enable them to offer homeowners the ability to have photovoltaic power systems with no upfront costs.

In March, Mosaic partnered with California-based RGS Energy to offer its first loan program for the latter’s residential system customers. The new loan products build on that partnership.

Billy Parish, Mosaic’s president, says his company has received demand from installers wanting to incorporate the home solar loan into their financing options as a product that will benefit their customers. The home solar loan products vary in term and interest rates, with options to maximize cash flow or maximize lifetime savings.

“Mosaic has an online portal that is integrated into the solar sales process with installers, so homeowners can get their panels and a zero-dollars-down loan on one phone call,” Parish says.

Mosaic will manage the loans through its existing online platform. Investors will finance the home solar loans. Homeowner borrowers will make monthly payments to Mosaic, which the company will distribute back to investors.

The Mosaic home solar loan is intended to compete with leasing programs offered by national installers. Parish cites financial analysts of the solar sector who predict loans will play a larger role than leases long term.

“The major benefit is that homeowners can build equity in their system and get to 100 percent ownership by the end of their loan term,” he says.

Mosaic is currently offering its loan product only to homeowners in California but has plans to expand into other states this year. It is seeking installer partners to sign up.
- Michael Puttré

 

DOE Awards $10M For Thermo-Chemical Storage

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $10 million through its SunShot Initiative to six research teams in order to develop a new generation of storage technologies that could be incorporated into concentrating solar power (CSP) stations.

Unlike technologies currently employed involving heat-transfer fluids or molten salt, the award recipients are tasked with developing techniques for storing solar energy collected from CSP plants in the form of chemical bonds for weeks or even months. Energy stored in this way is also stable and even transportable, much like fossil fuels. When electricity is desired, the bonds are broken, releasing the energy as heat, which in turn boils water to drive the turbines in the power block.

Ranga Pitchumani, program manager for CSP at SunShot, says one of the factors motivating the technology development awards is a desire to achieve significantly higher density energy storage than what is currently available with sensible or latent energy storage technologies.

“One of the advantages of CSP is that in the process of converting sunlight into electricity, there is an intermediate step of turning it into heat, which can be stored very cost-effectively for later use,” Pitchumani says.

From a utility standpoint, instead of looking at thermal storage with a duration of hours, perhaps overnight, thermo-chemical storage raises the possibility of creating storage products that might be kept for several months. That presents an interesting option of seasonal storage or even generating solar thermal storage in one part of the country and transporting it for use in another.

Although the technologies covered in the latest CSP storage awards may be considered foundational, SunShot is an applied technology program. Pitchumani says his group was very conscious about the application and commercial developments of the proposals they considered.

Two of the winning teams - Colorado School of Mines and Sandia National Laboratories - are pursuing research based on sand-like particles called perovskites; two teams - Southern Research Institute and the University of Florida - are researching carbonate chemistry; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is researching hydride chemistry; and the University of California, Los Angeles is researching ammonia chemistry.

In each case, Pitchumani says, the research projects are promising from the standpoint of producing practical thermal storage results while being based on abundant materials that leverage the existing infrastructure of the chemical process industry. “We are hoping that these will lead to viable solutions for next-generation CSP plants,” he says. - Michael Puttré

 

DG And Storage Set
To Boom

According to a new report from Navigant Research, worldwide revenue from all forms of residential distributed generation (DG) and energy storage will grow from $52.7 billion annually in 2014 to $71.6 billion in 2023.

Solar photovoltaic panels are the most visible form of the broad disruption caused by distributed energy resources (DER), Navigant says. The growing affordability of DER technologies is altering utilities’ traditional relationship with residential customers by giving customers greater control of their energy consumption.

One key driver for this sector, according to the report, is continuing advances in new technologies, such as more efficient energy storage systems (ESS). These advances, along with government subsidies for ESS, often in the form of feed-in tariffs, are enabling the combination of rooftop solar PV systems and residential energy storage in order to collect and store energy for use when sunlight is unavailable or there is a power outage.

 

Southern Research Opens Solar Center

Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Ala., has completed the Southeastern Solar Research Center (SSRC), dedicated to the study of solar photovoltaic systems in the region.

The facility includes multiple configurations of solar panel arrays, trackers, micro-inverters and an advanced energy-monitoring system. The SSRC will host research efforts, including an Electric Power Research Institute project focused on PV system orientation, tracking and aging. Southern Research Institute says a number of utilities, including Southern Co. and its subsidiary Alabama Power, are interested in evaluating the performance and operating characteristics of different configurations for solar PV systems.

 

RBI Solar To Acquire Renusol

Cincinnati-based RBI Solar has signed an agreement to acquire Germany-based Renusol GmbH, which is currently owned by Centrosolar Group AG. The acquisition includes the Renusol America subsidiary.

RBI Solar designs, manufactures and installs solar mounting systems for commercial- and utility-scale PV projects. Renusol specializes in mounting systems for residential and commercial PV installations. R