Green Energy

Swedish engineering consultancy company Sweco said it would design one of Europe’s largest battery energy storage systems, called Green Turtle, in Belgium. Sweco is designing the battery park on behalf of the company GIGA Storage Belgium.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Sweco said the park would make a significant contribution to the energy grid by providing stored renewable energy during periods of low solar and wind energy production — thereby reducing Belgium’s reliance on gas power plants.

Residential solar and battery storage marketplace EnergySage just released its latest insights report for H1 2024 – here are 3 of its top-line findings.

EnergySage* provides quotes to solar shoppers across 50 states and Washington D.C., so it gets great insight into what’s happening in the residential solar and battery storage sector.

The “19th EnergySage Intel Solar & Storage Marketplace Report” analyzes millions of transaction-level data points from homeowners shopping on EnergySage.com from January through June 2024 for solar panels, inverters, batteries, and more.

After a challenging but record-breaking year in 2023 for residential solar installations in the US, the first six months of 2024 have been characterized by near-record-low solar prices, persistently high interest rates, surging homeowner demand for storage, and shifting shopper motivations. These factors, along with recent interest rate cuts, suggest the industry is at a turning point, with the potential for lower solar and storage pricing, higher-quality equipment, and better financing options in the second half of the year.

Below are three key insights from EnergySage‘s latest report:

Residential solar prices approach all-time lows, while storage prices reach new record lows

Solar prices fell for the second six-month period in a row, reaching $2.69 per watt and nearing the all-time lowest quoted prices EnergySage has seen since beginning to track data in 2014. Quoted storage prices also dropped, setting a record low of $1,133 per kilowatt-hour stored.

“We’re at a pivotal moment for solar pricing, where ongoing cost reductions are enabling more homeowners to make the switch to clean energy,” said Spencer Fields, EnergySage’s director of insights. “The combination of near-record low prices and more consumer-friendly financing options is creating new opportunities for wider adoption.”

Battery storage purchase skyrockets

The percentage of US homeowners purchasing a battery with their solar panels on EnergySage.com climbed to 34% in the first half of 2024. California was a key driver, with an attachment rate of 70% following the implementation of the Net Billing Tariff in April 2023. However, the attachment rate outside California also rose steeply to 22%. For the first time, the report includes highlights from a consumer resiliency survey and a homeowner product interest survey, featuring insights on battery interest, setup, and consumer satisfaction.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in storage adoption, driven by evolving policies, lower lithium prices, and consumer demand for energy resilience,” said Emily Walker, senior research analyst at EnergySage. “The high attachment rates across the country signal that more homeowners are prioritizing energy independence alongside solar as they become more economical.”

Installers are quoting higher-interest rate, lower-cost loan products

From H2 2023 to H1 2024, the median interest rate in quotes increased from 5.5% to 7.49%, while the average loan fee dropped from 47% to 40%, respectively. The most-quoted loan product in H1 2024 was a 7.99%, 20-year loan with no fees, driving the spike in the median interest rate and drop in average loan fee.

“EnergySage was created to drive maximum transparency and help consumers find high-quality suppliers on our platform,” said Charlie Hadlow, president and COO of EnergySage. “This report is just one piece of that puzzle and serves to help industry stakeholders separate the signal from the noise and fact from fiction. With high-profile solar bankruptcies like SunPower and Titan Solar Power, along with more attention on a subset of players using aggressive sales tactics, EnergySage’s approach has never been more crucial to the sustainable growth of these industries.”

The UK government on Friday announced investment of nearly £22 billion ($28.8 billion) in projects to capture and store carbon emissions created by industry and energy production.

The money will fund “carbon capture clusters” in Merseyside, northwest England, and Teesside, northeast England.

The new Labour government has launched a new public-owned body, Great British Energy, to spur investment in domestic renewable projects and quicken the pace of the move to cleaner power.

It hopes the new projects will create 4,000 jobs and support another 50,000 over the next 25 years and help the UK meet its climate targets by removing 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the projects were “reigniting our industrial heartlands by investing in the industry of the future”.

Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is a technology that seeks to eliminate emissions created by burning fuels for energy and from industrial processes.

The carbon is captured and then stored permanently in various underground environments.

The International Energy Agency believes it could be a crucial weapon in the fight against emission-driven climate change.

The £21.7 billion will subsidize three projects in Teesside and Merseyside—two areas of the UK that have suffered from the decline of heavy industry.

It will also help fund transport and storage networks to move the carbon to geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.

The first carbon dioxide is set to be stored from 2028.

“Today’s announcement will give industry the certainty it needs—committing to 25 years of funding in this ground-breaking technology—to help deliver jobs, kickstart growth, and repair this country once and for all,” said Starmer, who was to unveil the plans with climate minister Ed Miliband and finance minister Rachel Reeves.

Greenpeace UK’s policy director, Doug Parr, criticized the plans, saying they would “extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production.

“The bulk of this cash should be invested instead in creating new jobs in the green industries of the future, like in offshore wind, or rolling out a nationwide home insulation program that will keep our homes warmer, energy bills lower and less dependent on gas,” he added.

But independent government advisers the Climate Change Committee welcomed the move as “very reassuring”.

Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of trade body Energy UK, said CCUS was a “tool in our armory of technologies which we need to decarbonize parts of energy that we currently can’t do with clean electricity, such as major industrial processes”.

Climate change has been viewed almost universally as a burden, a hot potato to be passed from country to country at annual climate change conferences. Although it’s widely known that climate-friendly solar and wind energy have become cheaper and easier to produce, most don’t realize that they are very likely to get even less expensive and grow quickly. That will have enormous political and business consequences, creating not just hazards but also tremendous opportunities.

Because technological progress depends on unforeseen innovations, it is to an extent unpredictable. No one knows what the next innovation will be. Nonetheless, the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable.

The best-known example is Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that microchip density would double every two years, a projection that has proved accurate to this day. As the density of these components has increased, their relative cost and energy consumption has fallen and their speed has accelerated.

As a result of this exponential improvement in efficiency, today’s computers are about a billion times more powerful than they were when Moore made his prediction.

Like computer chips, many other technologies also get exponentially more affordable, though at different rates. Some of the best examples are renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, lithium batteries and wind turbines.

The cost of solar panels has dropped an average of 10% a year, making them about 10,000 times cheaper than they were in 1958, the year of their pioneering use to power the Vanguard 1 satellite. Lithium batteries have cheapened at a comparable pace, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped steadily too, albeit at a slower rate.

Not all technologies follow this course, however. Fossil fuels cost roughly what they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation, and nuclear power is no cheaper than it was in 1958. (In fact, partly due to heightened safety concerns, it’s somewhat more expensive.)

The global deployment of technologies follows another pattern, called an S curve, increasing exponentially at first and then leveling out. Careful analysis of the spread of many technologies, from canals to the internet, makes it possible to predict the pace of technological adoption. When a technology is new, predictions are difficult, but as it develops, they get easier.

Applying these ideas to the energy transition indicates that key technologies such as solar, wind, batteries and green-hydrogen-based fuels are likely to grow rapidly, dominating the energy system within the next two decades. And they will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, making energy far more affordable than it has ever been.

This will happen in electricity generation first and then in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, including aviation and long-range shipping. Green-hydrogen-based fuels are particularly important as they have the potential to provide long-range storage to power the grid when wind and sun are not available.

Although the technology is still in its early stages and presents challenges, it has already dropped substantially in cost, and studies of similar technologies suggest these fuels could improve as rapidly as solar energy.

All of this is great news for the climate.

The transition has up-front costs, but the long-range benefits are huge. The future savings more than offset present investments to the extent that the transition would make sense from a purely economic standpoint even if people weren’t worried about climate change.

The sooner investments are made and policies adopted that enable the transition, the sooner the long-term savings will be realized. And the transitions will bring many other bonuses, including better energy security, less pollution, improved health, reduced environmental harm and more stable energy prices.

Although energy accounts for only about 4% of global output, the rest of the economy depends on it. A rapid transition will create winners and losers, shaking up global commerce and geopolitics. Fossil fuel producers that don’t pivot quickly will go out of business, and petrostates will suffer.

This is a great example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” It’s bad for incumbents but an enormous opportunity for challengers vying to take their place. Those who rise to the occasion will prosper, and those who ignore it will perish.

Just as Moore’s Law helped chip designers predict and plan for the future, its generalizations provide guideposts that can help us ensure that the energy transition proceeds not just quickly but also smoothly and profitably.

Climate change has been viewed almost universally as a burden, a hot potato to be passed from country to country at annual climate change conferences. Although it’s widely known that climate-friendly solar and wind energy have become cheaper and easier to produce, most don’t realize that they are very likely to get even less expensive and grow quickly. That will have enormous political and business consequences, creating not just hazards but also tremendous opportunities.

Because technological progress depends on unforeseen innovations, it is to an extent unpredictable. No one knows what the next innovation will be. Nonetheless, the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable.

The best-known example is Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that microchip density would double every two years, a projection that has proved accurate to this day. As the density of these components has increased, their relative cost and energy consumption has fallen and their speed has accelerated.

As a result of this exponential improvement in efficiency, today’s computers are about a billion times more powerful than they were when Moore made his prediction.

Like computer chips, many other technologies also get exponentially more affordable, though at different rates. Some of the best examples are renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, lithium batteries and wind turbines.

The cost of solar panels has dropped an average of 10% a year, making them about 10,000 times cheaper than they were in 1958, the year of their pioneering use to power the Vanguard 1 satellite. Lithium batteries have cheapened at a comparable pace, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped steadily too, albeit at a slower rate.

Not all technologies follow this course, however. Fossil fuels cost roughly what they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation, and nuclear power is no cheaper than it was in 1958. (In fact, partly due to heightened safety concerns, it’s somewhat more expensive.)

The global deployment of technologies follows another pattern, called an S curve, increasing exponentially at first and then leveling out. Careful analysis of the spread of many technologies, from canals to the internet, makes it possible to predict the pace of technological adoption. When a technology is new, predictions are difficult, but as it develops, they get easier.

Applying these ideas to the energy transition indicates that key technologies such as solar, wind, batteries and green-hydrogen-based fuels are likely to grow rapidly, dominating the energy system within the next two decades. And they will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, making energy far more affordable than it has ever been.

This will happen in electricity generation first and then in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, including aviation and long-range shipping. Green-hydrogen-based fuels are particularly important as they have the potential to provide long-range storage to power the grid when wind and sun are not available.

Although the technology is still in its early stages and presents challenges, it has already dropped substantially in cost, and studies of similar technologies suggest these fuels could improve as rapidly as solar energy.

All of this is great news for the climate.

The transition has up-front costs, but the long-range benefits are huge. The future savings more than offset present investments to the extent that the transition would make sense from a purely economic standpoint even if people weren’t worried about climate change.

The sooner investments are made and policies adopted that enable the transition, the sooner the long-term savings will be realized. And the transitions will bring many other bonuses, including better energy security, less pollution, improved health, reduced environmental harm and more stable energy prices.

Although energy accounts for only about 4% of global output, the rest of the economy depends on it. A rapid transition will create winners and losers, shaking up global commerce and geopolitics. Fossil fuel producers that don’t pivot quickly will go out of business, and petrostates will suffer.

This is a great example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” It’s bad for incumbents but an enormous opportunity for challengers vying to take their place. Those who rise to the occasion will prosper, and those who ignore it will perish.

Just as Moore’s Law helped chip designers predict and plan for the future, its generalizations provide guideposts that can help us ensure that the energy transition proceeds not just quickly but also smoothly and profitably.