systems

LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) – “This year, Consumers Energy has made a major commitment to clean energy,” said Consumers Energy Spokesman Brian Wheeler.

The goal of the company’s new clean energy plan is to expand solar power throughout the state, Wheeler said.

This 20-year plan was put together to meet Michigan’s changing energy needs.

“By 2040, more than half of the energy we supply to homes and businesses in the next generation will come from solar,” Wheeler said.

And for that to happen, Wheeler said Consumers will need some land.

“Whether it’s in the Lansing area or really in the lower peninsula. We are looking for large tracts of land where we can develop solar energy that can provide this clean energy,” Wheeler said.

The consumer action comes at a time when many people in mid-Michigan are somewhat skeptical about whether installing solar panels would be beneficial to their land, with some calling it an eyesore and others saying the panels would take up too much space. .

“Many communities and many solar developers will plan projects with landscape buffers and vegetative screening so that residential areas or roadways do not directly see that solar installation,” said Brad Neumann, MSU senior extension lecturer.

The sun is not only good for the climate, but also for your finances.

“Some of the other impacts of solar, or the benefits of solar, could be tax breaks that could be available to the local community that hosts these projects,” Neumann said.

Problems arise when officials fail to plan these projects ahead of time, leaving communities at a disadvantage, he said.

Apollo Energy appears to have closed its Northwest Arkansas location and is not providing the services it promised.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – 5NEWS received several messages from viewers after a Northwest Arkansas solar panel company could not be reached and failed to deliver what was promised to customers.

“It’s embarrassing, but you know you think it’s all lined up,” Yolanda told Olivera.

It all started in May when someone from Apollo Energy knocked on the door of Yolanda Olivera’s Springdale home to sell them solar panels. After calling the electricity provider, he felt comfortable going forward.

“We made the loan agreement over the phone. So it was all done with a Zoom meeting that took place that day. From there, they set up an appointment to see when the home permits were actually done. So they can start installing the panels.”

In September, he had 11 solar panels installed on his home, but when the power company came out to make sure the solar panels were producing electricity, he found out they weren’t working. After no one heard from Apollo, he called the company his loan company, stopped paying, and filed suit.

“I haven’t lost any money so far. But I know there are other people, I know my sister has overpayments and her solar panels don’t work. “I personally can’t pay for something that doesn’t work,” he said.

They didn’t want to go on camera, but we also spoke to people who worked at Appolo Energy and were never paid for several weeks of work.

Apollo Energy has an office on Garland Avenue in Fayetteville. 5NEWS went there Wednesday, Dec. 14, and it appears to have been abandoned. Neighboring businesses said they had not seen anyone in that office for about a month. They also have a warehouse space in Springdale, but no one was there. We also called the number listed online and no one answered and there was no option to leave a voicemail.

Apollo Energy applied for accreditation in April 2022 and has been operating since 2021, according to the Better Business Bureau. Director of Communications Cara Carlin says they ran background checks, had their licenses checked and had no complaints, but that all changed this month.

“Our first complaint was received on December 1 this year and since then we’ve received a total of six complaints and still no response from the business,” Carlin said.

As the BBB begins to receive new complaints, it says businesses still have time to respond, but it’s highly unusual to receive six complaints about a company in 14 days, so they’re trying to launch an active investigation.

“It’s a very unique situation, but it happens. So the documents and everything should be in place. It’s unfortunate, but you don’t usually have this problem when someone is on the up and up. That’s why it’s strange,” he said.

The Arkansas Attorney General’s Office said it has received nine complaints about Apollo Energy.

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The renewable energy movement still has a ways to go to meet the ambitious climate goals set by the Biden Administration. But we celebrate victories where we can.

The United States is currently the second largest producer of solar energy in the world, behind only China. As of the end of 2021, the US had generated 95,209 megawatts (MW) of solar energy – enough to power 18 million households.1

We have American companies to thank for much of this progress. We know EcoWatch doesn’t usually applaud big corporations for helping the planet. We are not saying that their adoption of solar energy also erases their climate violations.

But we still celebrate victories where we can. And American companies are installing a record number of solar installations to power their operations. According to the Solar Means Business 2022 Report, these corporations currently account for 14% of all installed solar capacity in the United States – a total of more than 19 gigawatts (or 19,000 MW).

Without further ado, here are the top 10 corporate solar adopters of 2022:

Meta: 3,588 MWAmazon: 1,115 MWApple: 987 MWWalmart: 689 MWMicrosoft: 551 MWTarget: 515 MWCargill: 342 MWKaiser Permanente: 303 MWAnheuser-Busch: 301 MW Evraz North America: 300 MW

1. Meta Platforms Inc.

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Meta is a leading corporate supporter of the solar world. As of June 2022, the company has installed more than 3,588 MW of solar power, or about 3.59 GW. That’s three times more solar power than the next closest company, Amazon.

If you’re not familiar, Meta is the company formerly known as Facebook, Inc. The multinational technology company owns most of your favorite phone apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, along with a host of other products and services.

2. Amazon

Headquarters: Seattle, WA

More than 2,400 megawatts behind Meta, Jeff Bezos’ empire ranks second in terms of Amazon solar installations. The rooftop solar power is part of Amazon’s Climate Pledge plan to become carbon neutral by 2040.

In addition to solar power, Amazon has set a goal of 100,000 electric trucks and plans to source 80% of its energy consumption from renewable sources within five years and to go net-zero by 2030.3

3. Apple

Headquarters: Cupertino, California

The two-time former solar champion has fallen down the ranks this year due to bigger pushes from Amazon and Meta, but Apple is still among the top three corporate solar adopters for 2022 with 987 MW installed.

Although we expect Apple to rise again in the coming years. Earlier this year, 213 of the company’s key manufacturing partners pledged to supply all Apple production in 25 countries with renewable electricity. Like Amazon, Apple aims to be carbon neutral by 2030. 4

4. Walmart

Headquarters: Bentonville, AR

At 689 MW, retail megastore Walmart produces the most energy of any non-tech company. In 2019, Walmart actually increased its use of solar by 35% – more than any other US company.

In addition to solar energy, Walmart is also a big investor in wind energy, acquiring the most wind energy of any company in the United States in 2019. The big-box retailer also has a goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy by 2035.5

5. Microsoft

Headquarters: Redmond, VA

Microsoft doesn’t have as much solar power as its big rival, Apple, but 551 MW is enough to put it in fifth place.

The tech company announced a partnership with Volt Energy in 2021 to reach its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025.6 Microsoft has a large solar installation on its Silicon Valley campus, allowing the company to save more than $100,000 a year on electricity. gives 7

6. Target

Headquarters: Minneapolis, MN

With 515 MW of solar installed, another big retailer is just behind Microsoft: Target.

In 2020, Target reached its goal of adding rooftop solar panels to 500 locations over five years. The retailer is more than a quarter of the way to its goal of sourcing 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

7. Cargill

Headquarters: Wayzata, MN

This is probably the first company on the list that you don’t immediately recognize. Agricultural giant Cargill, Incorporated is a privately held American global food corporation that delivers food, agricultural, financial and industrial products to people in need around the world.

Cargill has installed 342 MW of solar power by June 2022, helping it move toward its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by 2025.9

8. Kaiser Permanente

Headquarters: Oakland, CA

Healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente installed a massive 2.3 MW of solar panels at its Sacramento facility in 2020, the largest of the company’s 41 solar projects. As of mid-2022, Kaiser Permanente currently has 303 MW of solar capacity.

In addition to installing solar panels, Kaiser Permanente has taken other steps to support solar energy, including a $150,000 grant to GRID Alternatives.10

9. Anheuser-Busch

Headquarters: St. Louis, MO

One of America’s favorite brewing companies has already reached its goal of getting 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025 – thanks in part to its 301 MW solar installation.11

Anheuser-Busch has a 222 MW solar farm in Texas, as well as a 152 MW wind farm in Oklahoma.

10. Eurasian North America

Headquarters: Chicago, IL

Behind Kaiser Permanente and Anhuser-Busch is Evraz North America, which has installed 300 MW of solar capacity. Evraz is a leading manufacturer of engineered steel products for the rail, energy and industrial markets.

Although Evraz has just dropped into the top 10 list, we expect this company to rise in the ranks after the construction of a 300 MW solar farm in Colorado is completed.12

Top 25 Corporate Solar Applications

Corporate Solar adoption continues to grow

Commercial companies have installed about 19 GW of solar in the US by June 2022, but half of that has been installed since 2020 alone.

Much of this recent growth can be attributed to the rapid expansion of foreign corporate solar purchases, which now account for 55% of all commercial solar use. Over the past 2.5 years, almost 70% of all corporate solar power has been brought online.13

Credit: Solar Energy Industries Association

With more solar projects in the works and the company’s climate goals with deadlines between 2025 and 2050, we can expect those numbers to continue to grow. SEIA estimates that total commercial solar installations will double again over the next three years, with about 27 GW of offsite projects involving corporate layoffs by 2025.14

Arizona energy technology company Erthos, which makes Earth Mount Solar PV, a mounting system that attaches solar panels flat to the ground, has signed an agreement with renewable energy developer Industrial Sun for a 100+ megawatt (MW) solar project in Texas. It will be the only utility-scale solar farm installed flat on the ground to date.

Erthos writes that “the project has an expected interconnection capacity of 100 MWac, and Industrial Solar is looking to use all of this,” as the exact size of the solar farm has not yet been disclosed.

Industrial Solar faced the challenge of land constraints for this particular project, and that’s where Earth Mount Solar PV came into play. Conventional solar mounting technologies typically require more than five acres of land for each megawatt of capacity. But Earth Mount Solar PV only needs less than 2.5 acres for each megawatt of capacity. Thus, according to Erthos, its flat-mount technique allows solar farms to achieve energy density twice that of conventional utility-scale solar farms.

Erthos claims that its flat-mount solar farm can be built in half the time at half the cost of conventional mounting systems. It also says it uses 70% less cable and needs 70% less trenching, and its system is hurricane-proof.

In September 2021, PV Magazine Australia explained how Earth Mount Solar PV works:

The “ErthCompatible” specification licensed by Erthos calls for the use of IP68 glass-to-glass modules. Module vendors have mostly used duplex modules to meet this requirement. Another feature of the specification is the use of an aircraft cable that runs through the sides of the module to prevent both up, down and side-to-side movement. The safe and flatness of the panels allows the use of another Erthos innovation: the autonomous cleaning robot. A robot or a fleet of robots works every night, and a single robot can clean up to 2 MW of energy every day.

Educational site Solar Tech Advisor explains what IP68 solar panels are:

The highest rating a solar panel can achieve for waterproofing is IP68. This price means that the product is dustproof and can stay in water for a long time. IP68 rated solar panels can be used in areas with high water pressure such as permanent underwater solar applications.

Erthos says its robots take care of dirt and bird droppings. The company’s CEO, Jim Tyler, told PV Magazine Australia:

The estimated cost of cleaning a tracer unit once is about 50 cents per kW. We clean our solar plant for 50 cents per kW for a year.

He also addressed concerns about high temperatures in the same interview:

I did a fatal flaw analysis on the idea. The only fatal flaw that bothered me personally was the temperature. So, after proving the temperature readings of the module’s maximum cell temperature, I was satisfied. I happen to live in Phoenix, one of the hottest places on the planet. When I ran our first plant in 2019, it reached 118 degrees (47.8 C) outside. And I’m pretty sure the module cell temperatures don’t even come close to the maximum cell temperature. I said: Here is the answer.

In March 2022, Erthos closed a $17.5 million Series B funding round led by Capricorn Investment Group, which has also invested in Tesla and SpaceX.

What do you think about installing solar farms flat on the ground? Let us know in the comments below.

Read more: The largest solar landfill project in North America is now complete

Photo: Erthos

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MIT researchers have created ultra-thin, flexible solar cells that can be printed using semiconductor inks and scalable manufacturing techniques. They’re thinner than a human hair, 1% heavier than conventional solar panels, and produce 18 times more energy per kilogram, according to an MIT blog post.

Attached to a strong, lightweight fabric, it is easy to mount on any stable surface. They can provide power on the road as portable power supplies or be transported and rapidly deployed to remote locations for emergency assistance. Because they are so thin and light, these solar cells can be laminated to many different surfaces, from boat sails to tents and tarps used in disaster recovery operations. They could even be used to travel around Australia. The researchers claim that this lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.

“Measurements used to evaluate new solar cell technology are typically limited to their energy conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars per watt. Equally important is integrability—the ease with which new technology can be adapted. Lightweight solar panels provide integration that drives current work. says Vladimir Bulovich, head of MIT’s emerging technology and Laboratory of Organic and Nanostructured Electronics (ONE Lab). He is also the director of MIT.nano and senior author of a new paper describing this breakthrough work on ultrathin solar cells.

Its co-authors are Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and Jeremiah Mwaura, a research scientist at MIT’s Electronics Research Laboratory. For readers who want to delve deeper into the technical details of this discovery, you can find more in Small Methods, which published a research paper on December 9. anyone with an internet connection.

The road to ultra-thin solar cells

Traditional silicon solar cells are fragile, which means they must be encased in glass and encased in a thick aluminum frame. This makes them heavy and inflexible, which in turn limits where and how they can be placed.

The search for printed solar cells began more than a decade ago. Six years ago, the ONE Lab team at MIT produced solar cells using thin-film materials that were light enough to sit on a soap bubble. But these ultrathin solar cells are made using complex, vacuum-based processes, which can be expensive and difficult to scale up.

Nanomaterials in the form of printable electronic inks are used to produce these new ultra-thin, flexible solar cells. Working in the MIT.nano cleanroom, researchers coat the solar cell structure using a slot-die coating that deposits layers of electronic materials onto a release substrate made just 3 microns thick. Using screen printing (a technique similar to adding designs to silk-screened shirts), an electrode is placed on the structure to complete the solar module. The researchers can then create an ultralight solar device by extruding a printed module about 15 microns thick from a plastic substrate.

Such thin, self-contained solar modules are difficult to handle and can easily tear, making them difficult to deploy. To solve this problem, the MIT team looked for a light, flexible and high-strength substrate to which they could attach solar cells. They identified fabrics as the optimal solution because they provide mechanical stability and flexibility with little added weight.

They found the ideal material—a composite fabric known commercially as Dyneema that weighs just 13 grams per square meter. This fabric is made of fibers so strong that they were used as a rope to raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea (it hit a rock and sank after the captain brought it too close to shore to wave to family and friends). They attach the solar modules to those fabric layers by adding a layer of UV-curable adhesive just a few microns thick. This creates an ultra-lightweight and mechanically robust solar structure.

“While it may seem simpler to print solar cells directly onto fabric, this would limit the choice of possible fabrics or other receptive surfaces to those that are chemically and thermally compatible with all the processing steps needed to make the devices. Our approach decouples the manufacturing of the solar cell from its final integration,” explains Saravanapavanantham.

Unusual Solar Panels

MIT researchers testing the device found that it can generate 730 watts per kilogram freestanding, and about 370 watts per kilogram when placed on high-strength Dyneema fabric. That’s about 18 times more than conventional solar cells on a power-per-kilogram basis.

“A typical rooftop solar installation in Massachusetts is about 8,000 watts. To generate the same amount of energy, our fabric photovoltaics would add only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) to the roof of a house,” explains the co-author. When tested for durability, the ultra-thin solar cells retained more than 90% of their original power generation capacity after being rolled and unrolled more than 500 times.

Although MIT’s solar cells are lighter and more flexible than traditional cells, they must be surrounded by another material to protect them from the environment. The carbon-based organic material used to make the cells can be altered by interacting with moisture and oxygen in the air, which can degrade their performance.

“Encasing these solar cells with heavy glass, as is standard with traditional silicon solar cells, will minimize the cost of current development, so the team is currently developing ultra-thin packaging solutions that will only slightly increase the weight of existing ultralight devices. ” says Mwaura.

“We are working to remove as much non-solar active material as possible while maintaining the form factor and performance of these ultra-lightweight and flexible solar structures. For example, we know that the manufacturing process can be further simplified by printing releasable substrates, which is equivalent to the process we use to make other layers in our device. This will accelerate the translation of this technology to the market,” he adds.

We know that the “go to market” part is often the hardest part. A review of CleanTechnica’s library reveals two never-before-seen stories about printed solar cells by companies — one in 2009 and the other in 2016. As Tom Petty once told us, “The waiting is the hardest part.”

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