Tesla’s SolarCity’s Installations Crash Nearly 40%

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Tesla’s SolarCity reported a drop of nearly 40 percent in solar installations for the first quarter on Wednesday, the latest sign of a reversal in fortunes for the once high-flying residential solar industry.

In an earnings report this week, Tesla said it deployed 150 megawatts of solar generation in the first quarter of 2017 compared to 245 MW in the first quarter of last year.

The company, which announced last week it was curatiling door-to-door sales, said it had prioritized higher-margin projects that generate cash up front rather than trying to sell as many installations as possible. But the dramatic drop in sales for a company that had consistently delivered double-digit growth puts it in line with a broad trend affecting the rooftop-solar industry.

Across the sector, installers report more difficulty finding customers. Subsidies have dwindled or been eliminated in some states, and many of the easiest consumers to sell to – environmentally conscious homeowners with disposable income – have already purchased rooftop systems.

“The trendsetters are kind of gone,” Tammy Goad, vice president of corporate development for California-based Valley Energy said at a solar industry conference in San Diego on Tuesday.

Stiff competition in the industry has pushed some companies out of the market, or forced them to scale back. One of the nation’s biggest rooftop solar companies, Sungevity, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

“Two years ago I thought I was a brilliant marketer. Today, I’m looking for answers,” said Kathi McCalligan, director of marketing for San Diego installer Baker Electric, at the conference. The gathering focused on customer acquisition and was put on by the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Rooftop solar, a novelty in many neighborhoods just a few years ago, has enjoyed dramatic growth in recent years, including a 66 percent rise in installations between 2014 and 2015, according to SEIA and research firm GTM Research.

That growth rate slipped to 19 percent last year, and the trend has worsened significantly in 2017. Not only did SolarCity post its worst quarterly solar deployments in nearly two years, residential interconnection requests at California’s three investor-owned utilities were down 35 percent in January and February, according to state data. California makes up about half the residential solar market.

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May 4, 2017 at 10:29PM

Today In The Annals Of Science

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The science community, if such as thing can be said to exist as a singular entity, wonders why public regard for science has slipped. Maybe it has to do with stories like this, included in this week’s Nature magazine news roundup:

Controversial microplastics study to be retracted

The authors of a high-profile paper about the dangers of fish consuming small particles of plastic say that they will retract their study, after an investigation found them “guilty of scientific dishonesty” and raised the possibility that some of the research described “was not conducted”. . .

The controversy centres on a 2016 paper in which the authors reported experiments showing that fish that ate tiny ‘microplastics’ grew more slowly and were more likely to be eaten by predators.

Soon after the paper’s publication, a group of researchers raised a complaint about the study. They said that not all the data underlying the results were available. And some of the critics who worked at the same research station as Lönnstedt — on Gotland, a Baltic Sea island — said that there were discrepancies between experiments described in the study and eyewitness reports of the researchers’ activities.

Uppsala University investigated those allegations last year and found no evidence of misconduct. But an expert group of Sweden’s Central Ethical Review Board was also tasked with investigating the allegations, and in a statement dated 21 April, said that the paper should be recalled. It also describes Uppsala’s conclusions as “remarkable”.

Or this one:

Researchers frustrated by Italian misconduct probe

More than five years ago, Italian police began investigating allegations of research misconduct in papers by Alfredo Fusco, a prominent cancer scientist in Naples. Researchers frustrated by the case’s slow progress have now told Nature that there is strong evidence that dozens of papers may contain manipulated data — and that a commercial photography studio was called in to cut and paste images.

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May 4, 2017 at 10:15PM

Climate Change, Tornadoes and Junk Science at Michigan State!

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By Paul Homewood

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Today’s junk science comes from Michigan State University:

Tornadoes and mobile homes don’t mix to begin with, but throw in the volatility of climate change and the potential for massive property damage and deaths is even higher in coming decades, indicates a new study by Michigan State University researchers.

The number of mobile homes in the United States has risen dramatically in the past 60 years, to about 9 million currently. Meanwhile, the U.S. is the most tornado-prone country in the world, with an average of 1,200 twisters per year, and scientists predict climate change will continue fuelling more unstable weather events including tornadoes.

The annual impact of tornadoes is expected to increase threefold over the next few decades due to the "twin forces of increased climate variability and growth in the human-built environment," according to the study, which is published online in the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics.

"If the climatologists are right about the continuing effects of climate change," said Mark Skidmore, MSU economics professor and co-author of the study, "then people living in mobile homes could be particularly vulnerable to tornadoes in the years to come."

The researchers investigated underlying factors of tornado fatalities in the U.S. from 1980 to 2014. There were 2,447 tornado-related deaths during that period; the bulk occurred in the "tornado alley" region of the Midwest and Southeast.

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Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth:

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May 4, 2017 at 10:09PM

Why India and Pakistan Are Renewing Their Love Affair with Coal

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Much of the world agrees: burning coal is bad, and we ought to do less of it. But not everyone sings from that sheet…

… including Pakistan’s Water and Power Ministry. As part of a large infrastructure investment project with China, it’s committed to spending $15 billion on as many as 12 new coal power plants over the next 15 years. Reuters reports that the figure is almost half of the $33 billion being invested into energy projects as part of the initiative, and that around 75 percent of the extra generation capacity will come from new coal plants.

The government insists that the new plants will use technology to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But the nation’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, sounds downright Trumpian in his view of the nation’s future energy policy: “Pakistan must tap [its] vast underground reserves of 175 billion tonnes of coal, adequate to meet the country’s energy needs for several decades, for powering the country’s economic wheel, creating new jobs, and fighting spiking unemployment and poverty.”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports (paywall) that India will fail to meet its own targets to reduce emissions from its coal power plants. India’s struggle to clean up its energy act is well-known. But it’s currently unable to meet its own power demands, so it’s not really that practical to shut down plants—and given that no penalties will be imposed for failing to reduce emissions, there’s little incentive to do so.

To anyone who would criticize the move, Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, had this to say: “India is not a polluter,” he told the Financial Times. “It’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting.” There’s a grain of truth to that: America and Europe did a lot of coal burning during their development, and now have strong economies to leverage in order to clean up their acts. Developing countries aren’t so lucky. And developed countries still emit far more greenhouse gases per citizen than India and Pakistan. As of 2013 the annual per capita CO₂ emissions of India and Pakistan were 1.59 and 0.85 metric tons respectively. In the U.S., the figure is 16.39 metric tons.

The recent trend has been for that figure to fall year-on-year in the U.S., but the Trump administration certainly isn’t making its continuation a priority. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. coal industry was enjoying an uptick thanks to Trump’s relaxed regulations and reduced production in China. While coal is unlikely to come roaring back in America, there is still scope for the industry to rebound modestly over the coming years.

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May 4, 2017 at 09:24PM