U.S. Reverses Climate Bill, China’s Solar Surge & 7-Year Turbine Backlog
1.) The biggest energy story of the week, and the year, is the passage into law of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that essentially reverses much of the renewable energy and industrial policy enshrined in the Biden-era IRA. This capacity will not immediately be replaced with gas turbines: the turbine majors – GE Vernova, Mitsubishi, and Siemens are sold out, with wait times in some cases up to seven years, and costs reportedly up as much as 50% over the past 10 months.
2.) South Central Texas cooperative Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative to work with distributed battery storage developer Base Power to create a 2-MW virtual power plant, with battery systems deployed in new houses built by national homebuilder Lennar.
3.) California’s Turlock Unified School District takes delivery of nine electric Blue Bird buses and charging infrastructure to be charged by mixture of AC and DC chargers taking electricity from solar canopies over the school parking lot as well as utility power. Software from vehicle to x vendor Mobility House will optimize the use of on-site solar.
4.) New Jersey’s State Senate unanimously passes smart solar permitting legislation to expedite and simplify the permitting process for residential solar and battery storage systems with online, automated permitting platform.
5.) China reportedly installs a record 93 GW of solar capacity in May, equal to adding about 100 solar panels every second. To put that figure in perspective, the first three months of Q1 installments in the U.S. totaled 10.1 GW.