RE+ live blog: Thursday (original) (raw)

Closing time! You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

RE+ bears a distinctly chill vibe this morning. It looks like more people are catching flights than exhibition hall sights- but no worries, my dear Renewable Energy World reader, I’m still around.

If you missed my coverage of the event on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday you can catch up in the preceding hyperlinks. With that out of the way, let’s get to bloggin’!

Opportunity knocks

One idle day, a Mormon kid doing his mission in California knocked on the door of Luigi Resta’s house. Resta told him he wasn’t interested in any proselytizing, but the missionary was welcome to join his family in the backyard and have some food. They became friendly, and when the young man finished his mission and returned to Utah, he asked Resta if he could come back with his entire family to show them the hospitality of Northern California. Resta obliged. He made them pasta.

As fate would have it, the father of that missionary became a county commissioner back in Utah. Then a state senator. As a sustainability farmer, he was big into renewable energy, which jived with Resta, now the president of rPlus Energies. Resta grew up in a self-described off-grid “hippie town” in NoCal

That one door knock eventually snowballed into the Utah Red Hills Renewable Energy Park, the first large-scale solar farm in the state. The missionary’s father passed before he could see the 104 MW project come online in 2015, but it was dedicated in his honor.

A foot in the door of the Utah market has since been kicked wide open by rPlus Energies, which now operates the 80 MWac Graphite Solar in Carbon County and the 200 MWac Appaloosa Solar 1 in Iron County. The company is constructing a couple more Utah projects too- the 400 MW Green River Energy Center and Appaloosa Solar 2 + BESS.

“It’s something that we’re very proud of,” Resta told me. “It’s a continuation of a legacy that created the community and the culture that was there and where we’re doing the work, and the fact that we can go in and be a part of that fabric. It takes time because there’s resistance to renewables if you’re in a coal community, but with time and a focus on stakeholder engagement and the fact that it will be another 40-50 year addition to the fabric of the community is really exciting.”

Green River Energy Center is expected to break ground next week.

A van down by the plaza

There are a lot of interactive booths and exhibitions here at RE+, including the Enphase training van, which has been parked in the Convention Center’s plaza this week. I met up with Andy Newbold, head of corporate communications at Enphase, who gave me a tour of what the company is touting this week.

Andy Newbold shows off the Enphase training van at RE+ 2024.

Newbold says Enphase is involved in about a dozen virtual power plant projects right now, including one in Puerto Rico with Sunnova.

“It’s all pilots, but we’re ready to break out of that,” he said. “We want to be playing in the bigger energy market space. We want to be players in the wholesale marketplace.”

“We believe because of where our systems are located- in the home, where electrification is happening- we’re providing a ton of value to the entire system.”

Setting a realistic Standard

Standard Solar VP of engineering CJ Colavito has some strong opinions about the dynamics of domestic solar manufacturing. He told me he met with eight key manufacturers before RE+, and many told Standard Solar that they won’t bother going for a U.S. cell, citing too much uncertainty.

“I’ve been disappointed to learn that we will never be able to get to 100% domestic,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s actually possible, even if you wanted to. It would require a lot of development of manufacturing of subcomponents of PV modules that does not exist in the U.S. today.”

Colavito highlighted a lack of solar glass manufacturing, in addition to junction boxes, frames, and other components. He doesn’t expect to see a U.S.-made cell available until late 2026, perhaps not commercially available widely until 2027… At best.

“We have let manufacturing exit this country over the last 50 years and a lot in the spaces where we needed it in the last 10 years, and it’s very hard to bring it back. We will get some stuff back, but I don’t forsee a 100% domestic content solution in the foreseeable future at all.”

I’ll be sharing more insight from my conversation with CJ in a later article about domestic content bonuses (and whether they’re actually fair and reasonable to meet) in a future article on REW.

Wait and see?

The VP of strategic operations at DSD Renewables took a similar tone as Colavito did in my chat with him this morning. While he has been encouraged by the “maturation” of the business on the contracting, construction, and development side, he too is frustrated by the narrative that domestic solar manufacturing is anywhere close to ready to support the needs of the industry.

“I think there was an over-optimism for how long it was going to take to build out,” Newton said. “These were companies that aren’t domestically headquartered, and I think they really underestimated the permitting and build out of these facilities. And I think, fundamentally, there’s some hesitation to continue with the investment until after the election. That’s not a political statement, that’s just the facts… It’s hard to sink a couple billion dollars into a cell manufacturing facility if you don’t know what’s going to happen in the market.”

“And I think the trade legislation that’s in the works is not going to benefit that build-out,” he added. “I think people expect it’s going to boost the U.S. prices, but it’s just going to stall the industry, and if the demand isn’t there, nobody is going to build out these facilities.”

Newton shared Colavito’s frustration with the way the domestic content bonuses are structured within the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), arguing they’re unnecessarily strict and don’t make sense in some aspects.

“If you look at domestic content in any other industry, it’s not to the level (as the IRA requires),” he told me. “You have to certify that it’s 100% domestic. It’s impossible. Do you think the automotive industry could do that? No. We know they can’t, we saw what happened during Covid.”

A bit of a lightweight

Behold, the smile of a man introducing a lightweight solar module to the U.S. market!

That’s Mick McDaniel, general manager of Bila Solar, which is building a factory in Indianapolis, Indiana to manufacture a lightweight solar module for rooftop applications. The factory should be pumping out product by December, he told me today. The 157,000-square-foot facility has a 1 gigawatt capacity; phase one of production will be 150 megawatts annually.

Bila Solar’s 520-watt panel doesn’t use glass or an aluminum frame. Instead, the solar cells are protected by a patented polymer and a non-traditional back sheet. It weighs just 17 pounds, significantly lighter than traditional panels at that wattage rating, which can weigh 50-60 pounds or more. It sacrifices a little efficiency (19.3% versus the more common 20.5-21%) but allows for solar in all sorts of places it couldn’t be previously installed.

“We are looking for those roofs that can’t support a traditional solar system,” McDaniel shared. He says a lot of creative applications have come out of the woodwork since Bila Solar introduced its lightweight panel.

“We’ve had the typical Tesla owner that wants to put panels on top,” he said. “We also have a strawberry growing company… They are developing these little buggies that are solar-powered to harvest strawberries.”

McDaniel says Bila’s panels are being eyed for a lot of off-grid applications, perhaps best exhibited by partner Southern Beams.

“They have a product called Dragon Wings, and it’s basically a container with batteries that has our panels mounted in frames that unfold like winds,” McDaniel explained. “They have been using these at Burning Man the last couple of years. Put them out in the desert, open them up, and people go over there and charge their phones.”

The end is just the beginning

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for following along on my first RE+ experience. I tried to cram a lot in, and I hope that has been reflected in these live blogs. It’s time for me to brave the traffic to LAX and catch a flight, but keep your eyes on Renewable Energy World for future stories stemming from the conversations I had this week, particularly surrounding domestic content, virtual power plants, and battery energy storage.