The year-end spending bill in the US extended the tax credit for wind projects by one year. The solar tax credit is down to 10% for developer-owned systems.
Just a slight correction
Solar tax credit = 26% in 2020
2021 = 22%
2022+ = 10%
A little annoyed at the wind extension, since my education and first career was in the energy industry in TX. Solar is perfect for TX because of all the high demand, hot days that align perfectly with solar's generation profile, but since it's a "competitive" market, and PPAs are still the main vehicle for helping reduce risk in renewable installations (companies buy certain amounts of output, and electricity is cheap in a competitive market so developers + finance are hesitant to just play the market with solar since there really isn't a whole lot of precedent on big projects. playing the market is typically called a "merchant" project), the PTC has made wind extremely cheap in TX. $18-20/MWh, solar can't beat that yet, so all the companies who just want the cheapest electricity they can get, decide to just sign PPAs for wind offtake instead. That's why TX is going to have about 30GW next year (or soon after), and a criminal amount of solar, considering it's the fastest growing electricity demand in the US and reserves have been tight in the summer.
Was hoping with the wind credit coming to an end you'd see some of the 50-60GW of solar in the interconnection queue get financed. But, probably be a trickle in 2020 now. Oh well, silver lining, when solar does boom in TX, and it will, there will be a ton of wind (wind actually generated 22% of all TX electricity in 1st half 2019, there was about 30% of that amount of wind under construction or advanced development a couple months ago), and solar will be even cheaper. Won't even need "storage" for storage sake for a while, and the sheer amount of wind will help cover more of the 24hr load.
One reason wind got extended was undoubtedly because fossil groups much prefer it. Classic generators and interest groups in TX, who pay the pencil pushers 200k in the capital to lobby, don't want to give up those high demand daytime hours where they overwhelmingly meet demand and soak up the reserve adders (they get $7,000-$9,500/MWh when reserves are tight during TX summer days). Wind typically generates early evening through the night. Why yes, solar would be perfect for all of these days, and as much as people love to talk about "capacity factors" as some sort of detriment, even the modules currently installed are pumping out 80%+ nameplate during 100+ degree days. But, if wind is cheaper for companies to buy electricity from, it's hard to get a bunch of solar installed, currently anyway (finance + developer risk). TX is pretty unique in its market, but I wouldn't be surprised if similar factors were at play in other states, like the midwest. You get to say you're not against renewables, you get to be "pro business" with companies buying cheap offtake from wind, and you get to prolong all the classic fossil generators most profitable hours (and by extension, the fossil suppliers + pipelines).
But, 2020 solar credit at 26% won't change much. 2021 at 22%, maybe. It wouldn't if we didn't have such high tariffs disabling us from taking advantage of the ridiculous changes that happen basically quarterly in China. Hard to say, because if the orange turd is defeated, obviously it changes the game. On that note, hopefully whoever it is realizes is semi-competent and realizes rooftop is much more expensive than it should be. I actually am in the works preparing for something like that, as an energy professional turned software/web guy. I'll let you guys know if it works out
. I'll give you a hint, "customer acquisition" can be 20-30% of an installation's cost to generate profits, and who really wants to plan to have 3-4 solar idiots coming to their place, not knowing if they're full of crap or not? Seems like it'd be much easier to have one person come out, and handle it like a real estate agent, using their expertise to find you the best deal. Solar companies can then pay the "agent" saving $$ on customer acquisition, at no costs to the person getting them installed. Solar companies already pay commission to their own sales teams. Design a web portal, keep tally of what companies actually do good work, in the future when battery costs come down or they want an EV charger, you can help arrange that too. On that note, if you have kids, electrical engineering/electricians in the future will probably have more work than they can handle, especially when EVs are common and solar panels are 500-600W, weigh 10 pounds, cost about $.80c/watt to install, and can get a rooftop install done before lunch with just a couple of hands, batteries become more common, smart homes, HVAC + appliance adoption/replacement.
Oh, and Ken, i do peruse this thread every so often. One thing that is drastically underrated, is petrochemicals. These are massive sources of emissions. And yes, the electricity game is changing (very quickly in the big scheme of things, but not quickly enough unfortunately, the convergence and material, computing/modeling age we're entering is going to be very interesting indeed, as well as the bi-directional grid and demand response adaptation of the grid. btw if anyone's interested in something neat, watch "perovskite" development.), however, as countries develop like SE Asia, demand for a bunch of stupid crap goes up. Look around you right now, look in your cabinets, petrochemicals used in production of material goods are all over the place. Electricity generation and transportation are two huge areas of the energy industry, and it's great that we're seeing them develop, but industry + chemicals is also a massive emitter, and "developing countries" consumption of these are going to increase.
Hydrogen as a feedstock is a no-brainer (which is why it's getting attention, you can also inventory it and fire it off in turbines for extreme weather events), but genetically engineered biofuels and recycling are absolutely 100% going to have to evolve. You can't create matter from nothing, after all. And this is a major challenge. I only mention this because you seem genuinely interested, so maybe you feel inclined to check updates on developments in this area. If there's a "promising" outlook for this sector, it's that genetic research is advancing pretty quickly, and the nanomaterial arena like interfaces, handling, observable data, is leading to a lot of very interesting and novel catalyst research. And the computing + modeling (ML/AI), with the breadth of research data is helping things a lot. But, these are "musts", and replacing countries' established petrochemical value chain that powers cheap material goods is going to be a heavy lift.
Anywho, sorry for the long diatribe, i might post more if people want. Here's something fun, increasing silicon wafer size -> goes into solar cell manufacturing is an easy way to increase power. The biggest producer marginally increased size and wanted everyone to adopt it, so the 2nd biggest producer said, "DIS.. IS.. CHINA", and increased that size about 30%, so there's going to be a 500W utility scale panel in Q1-Q2 next year, thinking they can take it up to 600W. Wafer wars? Other producers will probably go up to that size, so no telling what the biggest producer ends up doing. 500W bifacial panel is a good chunk of power though. If you're interested in solar the trends over the next year or two are going to be wafer size, and interest in "passivated contacts". The rate of scale and iteration in China is unreal. Just for reference, in 2018 the average module from top producers was about ~340W, and a small segment of bifacial (~8-15% gain). 2019 saw 415-430W and a bigger adoption of bifacial, and 2020 will see plenty of 500W+ and bifacial will be pretty standard, all while the entire industry basically shifted to a specific type, monocrystalline PERC. Production lines are basically turnkey 5GW-10GW now. And there's still headroom from better quality wafers and passivation, like TOPcon, HJT (these are what's considered passivated contacts, because they use an "n-type" wafer, which is of better quality, but equipment hasn't evolved to be more cost effective vs the current ridiculous throughputs of the "p-type" PERC products, which managed to corner a 100GW market in 12 months).
Okay, i'm done