It has a predicted 5.5GWh (7.4% capacity factor) in December versus 14.7GWh in July (20% capacity factor) and an annual capacity factor of around 15%. This is still a good deal better than in Northern Europe where 10% is more typical.
I don't know how common it is, but this is the first time I had seen an announcement of a large solar installation with bifacial modules. I assume that the bifacial modules are more expensive, but I don't know what goes in to the math to make them worth it or not. Does somewhere snowier get more benefit from the bifacial solar arrays because you can get a lot of albedo from the snow?
There seems to be a real interesting mix of pros and cons (total watts generated through the year, by time of day, susceptibility to dirt and hail damage, reflections, etc.), especially with regards to mounting. This guy goes into a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M
Maybe they will angle the panels differently during the winter so snow falls off, and then the back panel will become more important capturing reflections and low sun.
Land per sqft is usually a lot more expensive than panels.
Bifacial above ground capture more of solar, esp if the ground reflects solar back.
Many YouTube experiments where people have captured an extra 100-150W from back panels yielding 500W+ per panel.
And bifacial is only slightly more expensive than mono panels. With higher efficiency the price is worth it.
For residential solar with batteries, the price of panels is barely 10% of the cost. Labor, permitting, connectors, inverters, framing take a huge chunk of the cost.
I imagine utility scale has lower overhead but the tradeoff for bifacial would have given positive ROI.
First Solar is not the only cadmium telluride solar manufacturer but it is by far the biggest. It is also the only thin-film company in the list of top 10 solar manufacturers by shipments in the 2022 ranking published by California-based SPV Market Research. First Solar is also in the top 10 in the latest ranking from Taiwan-based InfoLink.
...
Paula Mints, chief market research analyst at SPV Market Research, said that First Solar had a 36% share of the United States utility-scale solar market in 2022. “I would look at their 2023 share of the US utility-scale market as similar,” she said.
It's news because the US is a big time laggard in renewables for a variety of terrible reasons. (Mostly oil/coal lobbying and utility monopolies stifling competition.)
Solar & wind are the cheapest energy sources by far, and battery tech has gotten much better and much cheaper very quickly. The free market in the US is very responsive, AFAIK we're building new renewable capacity as quickly as it can be attached to the grid.
I assume OP was talking about US manufactured solar panels. Just buying PV from China is good for China only- they keep the profits, expertise and can choose to deploy the best panels for themselves if they feel the need.
What are the implications of a zero-emission renewable grid in part of the country and carbon-intensive grid in another? (As a hypothetical.) Can we extrapolate power prices and volatility? Transmission opportunities depending on time of day?
If you're going to transmit energy it is easier to do it in the time domain than over a distance. MISO does not seem to report storage resources, so maybe they are only just getting started in terms of time shifting.
I really want solar just to power my AC in the summer – any extra production would be bonus. However, the payback period is still too long for me to justify it.
I’m waiting for a refrigerator that does this and uses grid for backup/high demand.
Refrigerator is an almost ideal use case because newer ones are inverter-drive and run around the clock. And inverter drive means it runs off DC at some level.
A fridge is the one thing I really want to have work at some degree in a grid outage. Everything else I can work around pretty well.
Yes, globally we are pretty behind on our wind targets, which have much denser output per turbine than square unit of panels. It's important because the wrong land use changes can be self defeating for some carbon accounting scenarios.
The US does not have a nationwide electric grid, so adding more solar power in Arizona or Florida can't supply Wisconsin with electricity.
Early solar farms were very concentrated in sunny states because the equipment was expensive enough that they couldn't make money elsewhere. As solar equipment has fallen in price, there are more places where a solar farm can turn a profit. That's why solar farms are now being built in places like Wisconsin. States like Arizona are still adding solar farms each year but now less sunny states are also building solar farms because falling equipment prices have made it practical.
> US does not have a nationwide electric grid, so adding more solar power in Arizona or Florida can't supply Wisconsin with electricity
The Midcontinent ISO stretches into East Texas [1]. A unified grid wouldn't solve the problem, because it's one of transmission capacity and thus cost, not integration.
Because the local power economics favors some solar everywhere, due to congested transmission. Compare to Antelope Valley in SoCal, where one ranch is 230 MW, and to total CA solar, which has almost 50,000 MW and is projected to grow 50% over the next 5 years, according to https://seia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/California-1.pdf
Anecdote: In Portland, distribution is the most expensive component for peak time. The rest of the time, generation is usually more expensive. Transmission is the smallest component by far. The ratios between the three are not consistent between off/mid/on peak. I don't know what the flat rate ratios are, because my billing rate is time-of-use due to late night EV charging.
Yep. Wholesale electric contracts for electricity producers in California are as low as 3-4 cents per kilowatt hour. Many prices at the meter are closer to 45 cents per kilowatt hour.
It certainly doesn't help that our monopoly transmission companies are regulated by price caps set on a cost plus basis. They have every incentive to drive up their costs and make transmission as expensive as possible.
>Would note that both New York and California have absolutely garbage transmission economics.
Is that as compared to other places in the US? Around the world?
That's not a gotcha question, as I've lived in NY for most of my life and more than the last 25 years, so I don't really know how utility companies in other places operate. Although I'd expect it would be pretty similar across the US, no?
Yes, my rural Wyoming electricity is like 6 to 7¢. Per capita, it’s much more expensive to transmit in Wyoming than New York. (For non-bullshit reasons.)
One lights the state on fire every fifteen seconds. (For comparison, look at power prices in Santa Clara, a bastion from PG&E’s incompetence.) The other has every community board provide input to move a power line two inches.
Owner of residential solar in snowy state and snow isn't even worth expending the effort to clear off. It doesn't block as much light as you'd think, and if there's enough light to generate power the panels will heat themselves up and the snow will slide off.
But.. someone has to go out and remove that snow, unless they have something like the Starlink dishes, but I question the reliability of that in such a cold environment. It might end up costing more to keep the panels clean than the energy they produce.
Also, if the modules are put in at high angle, up to vertical, they work better in winter when the Sun is low in the sky, and snow does not accumulate. In the summer one can even grow things between them. If the modules are bifacial, light scattered off the snow or sky behind them can be captured on the back surface.
Because people need power in Wisconsin and even there solar is cheaper than fossil fuels. Also snow isn't a big deal for solar. Clouds are the problem.
Roughly speaking https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=45.346354,-92.69989,9... .
It has a predicted 5.5GWh (7.4% capacity factor) in December versus 14.7GWh in July (20% capacity factor) and an annual capacity factor of around 15%. This is still a good deal better than in Northern Europe where 10% is more typical.
Polk County, Wisconsin is at a 45.46 N.
That is the same latitude as Milan, Italy and Southern France!
I don't know how common it is, but this is the first time I had seen an announcement of a large solar installation with bifacial modules. I assume that the bifacial modules are more expensive, but I don't know what goes in to the math to make them worth it or not. Does somewhere snowier get more benefit from the bifacial solar arrays because you can get a lot of albedo from the snow?
There seems to be a real interesting mix of pros and cons (total watts generated through the year, by time of day, susceptibility to dirt and hail damage, reflections, etc.), especially with regards to mounting. This guy goes into a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M
Almost the same cost. It seems the frames and connections are decisive. Let alone mounting system. ( Ref: Just recently priced 20kw options.)
Maybe they will angle the panels differently during the winter so snow falls off, and then the back panel will become more important capturing reflections and low sun.
Land per sqft is usually a lot more expensive than panels.
Bifacial above ground capture more of solar, esp if the ground reflects solar back.
Many YouTube experiments where people have captured an extra 100-150W from back panels yielding 500W+ per panel.
And bifacial is only slightly more expensive than mono panels. With higher efficiency the price is worth it.
For residential solar with batteries, the price of panels is barely 10% of the cost. Labor, permitting, connectors, inverters, framing take a huge chunk of the cost.
I imagine utility scale has lower overhead but the tradeoff for bifacial would have given positive ROI.
This is really small scale compared to elsewhere in the world. Is this news because of the climate of Wisconsin being unusual for solar energy?
It's news because new solar farms are one of the things this site reports on. See this story from a few weeks ago for example: https://electrek.co/2024/10/21/a-solar-farm-comes-online-on-....
They report on other countries as well, here's a story about a much larger project in China from yesterday: https://electrek.co/2024/11/14/china-worlds-largest-open-sea....
One reason this one could be notable though is that the panels are US-made, I think that is somewhat unusual.
The solar panels are made by First Solar, which has a significant market share for panels in large US solar farms.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/18/weekend-read-the-frui...
First Solar is not the only cadmium telluride solar manufacturer but it is by far the biggest. It is also the only thin-film company in the list of top 10 solar manufacturers by shipments in the 2022 ranking published by California-based SPV Market Research. First Solar is also in the top 10 in the latest ranking from Taiwan-based InfoLink.
...
Paula Mints, chief market research analyst at SPV Market Research, said that First Solar had a 36% share of the United States utility-scale solar market in 2022. “I would look at their 2023 share of the US utility-scale market as similar,” she said.
That is a lot more than I realized, I guess US-made is not really noteworthy then.
It's news because the US is a big time laggard in renewables for a variety of terrible reasons. (Mostly oil/coal lobbying and utility monopolies stifling competition.)
> the US is a big time laggard in renewables
Could you clarify this statement?
For Solar, the US seems to be doing fine. Not leading, but not a laggard by any definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
And in total capacity:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267233/renewable-energy-...
Solar & wind are the cheapest energy sources by far, and battery tech has gotten much better and much cheaper very quickly. The free market in the US is very responsive, AFAIK we're building new renewable capacity as quickly as it can be attached to the grid.
I assume OP was talking about US manufactured solar panels. Just buying PV from China is good for China only- they keep the profits, expertise and can choose to deploy the best panels for themselves if they feel the need.
PV themselves aren’t the most expensive part and US PVs aren’t double the cost of China.
Competition is progress.
What are the implications of a zero-emission renewable grid in part of the country and carbon-intensive grid in another? (As a hypothetical.) Can we extrapolate power prices and volatility? Transmission opportunities depending on time of day?
If you're going to transmit energy it is easier to do it in the time domain than over a distance. MISO does not seem to report storage resources, so maybe they are only just getting started in terms of time shifting.
Are they going to build it in the shadow of the Foxconn factory?
Why choose a state that gets heavy snowfall? Is the solar potential in all the sunny states saturated?
Overbuilding & batteries in snowy areas is cheaper than an HVDC line from a sunny area. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
It’s hard to wrap your head around how cheap solar is getting. Only get 1/4 as much sunlight? Just deploy 4x the panels!
I really want solar just to power my AC in the summer – any extra production would be bonus. However, the payback period is still too long for me to justify it.
2-4 years is too long? That's what it currently is in Germany where 1kwp now costs 350 EUR/USD including inverter.
Roof install in US with permitting is a loooooot more expensive. Around $2/watt.
I’ve seen quotes of $50k for 10KW 24 panel array without batteries.
20k EUR for 10 kwp including 8 kwh battery seems a new normal for roof installations.
The batteries in particular are gotten much cheaper. < 2500 EUR for 8 kwh
https://geizhals.de/byd-battery-box-premium-lvs-8-0-a2948979...
Panels have reached incredible low prices. < 2000 EUR for 36 panels (16 kwp)
https://geizhals.de/trina-solar-vertex-s-tsm-440neg9r-28-a31...
have you looked at the mini split units by EG4 that take MC4 connectors straight in from a bank of PVs? it might be cheaper than you think.
I’m waiting for a refrigerator that does this and uses grid for backup/high demand.
Refrigerator is an almost ideal use case because newer ones are inverter-drive and run around the clock. And inverter drive means it runs off DC at some level.
A fridge is the one thing I really want to have work at some degree in a grid outage. Everything else I can work around pretty well.
> Just deploy 4x the panels
This is where we're having issues. Solar production is ramping up spectacularly. But if we're going solar only, we need to move our 2050 targets out.
Yes, globally we are pretty behind on our wind targets, which have much denser output per turbine than square unit of panels. It's important because the wrong land use changes can be self defeating for some carbon accounting scenarios.
That's how it is in Factorio as well!
The US does not have a nationwide electric grid, so adding more solar power in Arizona or Florida can't supply Wisconsin with electricity.
Early solar farms were very concentrated in sunny states because the equipment was expensive enough that they couldn't make money elsewhere. As solar equipment has fallen in price, there are more places where a solar farm can turn a profit. That's why solar farms are now being built in places like Wisconsin. States like Arizona are still adding solar farms each year but now less sunny states are also building solar farms because falling equipment prices have made it practical.
> US does not have a nationwide electric grid, so adding more solar power in Arizona or Florida can't supply Wisconsin with electricity
The Midcontinent ISO stretches into East Texas [1]. A unified grid wouldn't solve the problem, because it's one of transmission capacity and thus cost, not integration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midcontinent_Independent_Syste...
Because the local power economics favors some solar everywhere, due to congested transmission. Compare to Antelope Valley in SoCal, where one ranch is 230 MW, and to total CA solar, which has almost 50,000 MW and is projected to grow 50% over the next 5 years, according to https://seia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/California-1.pdf
Transmission isn’t free.
Also, there are usually only a few really heavy snowfalls a year. The rest would presumably melt off pretty quickly, though I’m no expert.
In California we pay a lot more for transmission than generation. Is that true in most places ?
Anecdote: In Portland, distribution is the most expensive component for peak time. The rest of the time, generation is usually more expensive. Transmission is the smallest component by far. The ratios between the three are not consistent between off/mid/on peak. I don't know what the flat rate ratios are, because my billing rate is time-of-use due to late night EV charging.
As a data point from another country (Switzerland), transmission is between 1/2 to 2/3 in most places here I'd say.
>In California we pay a lot more for transmission than generation. Is that true in most places ?
I can't speak for anywhere else, but had my bill handy and it's 2/3 delivery/transmission and 1/3 electricity here in NYC.
Would note that both New York and California have absolutely garbage transmission economics.
Yep. Wholesale electric contracts for electricity producers in California are as low as 3-4 cents per kilowatt hour. Many prices at the meter are closer to 45 cents per kilowatt hour.
It certainly doesn't help that our monopoly transmission companies are regulated by price caps set on a cost plus basis. They have every incentive to drive up their costs and make transmission as expensive as possible.
>Would note that both New York and California have absolutely garbage transmission economics.
Is that as compared to other places in the US? Around the world?
That's not a gotcha question, as I've lived in NY for most of my life and more than the last 25 years, so I don't really know how utility companies in other places operate. Although I'd expect it would be pretty similar across the US, no?
Yes, my rural Wyoming electricity is like 6 to 7¢. Per capita, it’s much more expensive to transmit in Wyoming than New York. (For non-bullshit reasons.)
One lights the state on fire every fifteen seconds. (For comparison, look at power prices in Santa Clara, a bastion from PG&E’s incompetence.) The other has every community board provide input to move a power line two inches.
Owner of residential solar in snowy state and snow isn't even worth expending the effort to clear off. It doesn't block as much light as you'd think, and if there's enough light to generate power the panels will heat themselves up and the snow will slide off.
Snow doesn't really matter if you remove it.
And solar cells work way better if it is cold due to silicon having a lower resistance at lower temperatures.
So it's not all bad if it is not overly dark.
Snow doesn't really matter if you remove it.
But.. someone has to go out and remove that snow, unless they have something like the Starlink dishes, but I question the reliability of that in such a cold environment. It might end up costing more to keep the panels clean than the energy they produce.
"You periodically have to remove some snow" is a reality for basically everything in Wisconsin. Stuff still seems to get built there.
Also, if the modules are put in at high angle, up to vertical, they work better in winter when the Sun is low in the sky, and snow does not accumulate. In the summer one can even grow things between them. If the modules are bifacial, light scattered off the snow or sky behind them can be captured on the back surface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M Video linked earlier in the thread that gives a visual on what exactly this looks like.
Why not both? I don't think solar panels are scarce, no need to hold back investment up there.
Because people need power in Wisconsin and even there solar is cheaper than fossil fuels. Also snow isn't a big deal for solar. Clouds are the problem.
It’s profitable everywhere right now. The limit is whether you can build.