Editor Blogs

December 2018

Tesla Promises to Cover Tax Credits for Delayed Orders

Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Good news if your Tesla is delayed – Elon Musk promised that customers who miss out on the full EV tax credit would be reimbursed the difference. We previously noted that Tesla moved 200K units, so the $7,500 tax credit for their vehicles would drop to $3,750 by January 1, before dipping another 50% on July 1st. T

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Date:

12/26/2018

Finding Every Solar Panel in the Nation with 90% Accuracy

Stanford

Examples from the satellite images

Finding Every Solar Panel in the Nation with 90% Accuracy

Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Here’s a national cataloguing project that’s only 10% creepy. The DeepSolar project aims to map every solar panel in the country using machine learning. And if you’re deeply intrigued and mildly disturbed at the idea of pinpointing the exact locations of a specific commodity across 3.5 million square

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Date:

12/20/2018

British Prime Minister David Cameron

Brexit Caused Higher Energy Prices for Britain

Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Here’s an interesting bit of blowback – a study claims consumers paid an average of £75 more for energy the year after Brexit. The University College London researchers blamed a weakened pound for the overall energy hike of £2 billion in 2017. At the end of 2016, the British pound equaled $1.23, while

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Date:

12/12/2018

Storing Renewable Energy With Molten Silicon

Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Reliable energy storage is indispensible for photovoltaics, and a new conceptual design from MIT could deliver energy on-demand more efficiently than batteries. Energy storage mitigates the most obvious problem with solar power – can’t harvest energy when it’s dark (or overcast). But the most popular me

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Date:

12/06/2018

Is Solar About to Get a Lot More Expensive?

Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

A new MIT report studies the plummeting costs of solar, and it also serves as a not-so-subtle warning. The paper by MIT Associate Professor Jessika Trancik, postdoc Goksin Kavlak, and research scientist James McNerney zeroed-in on the years 1980-2012, which saw a dramatic 97% price dip for solar modules, a

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Date:

12/03/2018