By Evolution Solar Sunshine Coast

This week has shown that renewables are continuing to grow and thrive despite 2012’s rebate slashes and global uncertainty. Solar power and other renewables continue to get better technologies and cheaper prices, therefore breaking previous renewable records and growing in popularity around the world.

Germany announced that it has broken yet another record with 7.6GWs of new solar installed in 2012. This is almost triple the installations of some of its previous years. With so many installations in recent years, Germany is facing its lowest demand for electricity ever. With such low demands, energy companies are being forced to lower prices in order to remain competitive. From early this year, Germany is set to provide incentives for grid-connected solar power storage systems. These are said to help reduce pressure on the grid during the hours of peak demand as well as effectively increasing the size of the grid without any grid expansion. (Click here to read the full article.)

There have been more studies done showing that renewables are becoming more and more competitive with fossil fuel power plants. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) in Sydney have released a report showing that unsubsidised renewables are now cheaper than new coal or gas-fired power plants. They say that even without the cost of the carbon tax, wind power is still about 14% cheaper than coal and 15% cheaper than gas. With the cost of solar power continuing to decrease it is expected that it too will be cheaper than all fossil fuels well before 2020 as forecast. Studies have also shown that major banks are unlikely to finance new fossil fuel power stations as supporting such high emission investments will damage their reputations. If they were to finance such projects, one would expect a high premium would be implemented making fossil fuels even more expensive. (Click here to read the full article.)

The European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) has released a report showing that the massive numbers installed in 2012 have taken the global installed capacity over the 100GW mark. The global solar installed is the equivalent of sixteen coal power plants or nuclear reactors of 1GW each. This saves us of an enormous 53 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year and growing! Small scale PV installations, such has rooftop solar panels, account for 2.3GWs of the total figures. (Click here to read the full article.)

Conergy have secured a huge 31.5MW order for three projects in Thailand. Siam Solar Energy, who worked with Conergy on two similar projects towards the end of 2012, has again chosen to go with the solar supplier as they trust the quality and standards at which they operate. The two projects started in 2012 and the three projects now approved bring a combined total of 52.5MWs. Thailand imports over half of its power demands making renewables a clear choice. Conergy hope that these projects will increase their market share currently sitting at 10%. (Click here to read the full article.)

Even with the few bits of rain we have seen this week, we have had a very productive week. Evolution Solar Sunshine Coast has commenced work on the Beachcomber on the Spit Apartments in Mooloolaba and is expecting completion of the job early next week depending on the weather. We are also going to be installing our first ‘Enphase Energy System’ this year as a display for the new solar product which becomes available through RFI Solar this month. Stay tuned for all the latest news and developments.