THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for July, 2010

What is being billed as one of the world's largest solar power plants is about to start construction in Thailand, with support from Sharp and Mitsubishi.

What is being billed as one of the world's largest solar power plants is about to start construction in Thailand, with support from Sharp and Mitsubishi.

The Spanish government, faced with runaway success in the rapid scale-up of solar power in the country as a result of its extremely generous Feed-in tariff payment, is now faced with a financial problem caused by the same extremely generous Feed-in Tariff payments.

It had offered as much as ten times the price per megawatt hour for these solar power plants, and was (rather surprisingly) surprised by the overwhelming response. Entrepreneurs built nineteen of the fifty biggest solar projects in the world there, lured by this largesse. So the problem is twofold. They are paying at too high of a rate, but even worse: they are paying for many more megawatt-hours of power than they expected to at that high rate.

So even though these new solar plants are helping Spain (and the globe) by producing so much clean energy for electricity (and once paid for will add to Spain’s wealth by providing free energy) for now they are just costing too much for the government to continue to buy power from them at such high rates, because there are so many more of them than expected. (more…)

Two San Francisco-based companies, Cleantech Law Partners and CleanTechies, have just announced a new online service for addressing pressing and constantly changing cleantech and renewable energy legal and policy issues.

The free online service (at http://law.cleantechies.com) allows anyone to submit legal questions which Cleantech Law Partners’ attorneys will then review and answer online.

(more…)