WORKING WITH UTILITIES FOR SOLAR

Musk’s Cousins Battle Utilities to Make Solar Rooftops Cheap; Lyndon and Peter Rive are on a quest to make sun-generated power cheap and easy.

John Lippert and Christopher Martin, April 14, 2015 (Bloomberg News)

“…[When solar advocates were fighting with Hawaiian Electric Co. for grid interconnection, they] got help from Lyndon Rive, the CEO of SolarCity. the biggest installer of rooftop solar panels in the U.S…Rive studied the situation and zeroed in on a key fact: HECO had never directly measured how much solar its grid could handle…SolarCity joined with HECO to run the tests, with help from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. They found that high-traffic circuits could absorb twice as much solar energy as the utility thought. After asking solar installers to reprogram equipment that connected them to the grid, HECO lifted its ban on new hookups late last year…Rive, 38, says the experiment in Hawaii was a step forward for him and his brother Peter, 41, and their famous cousin, Elon Musk, who helped found SolarCity in 2006. The trio is on a quest to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels—Musk with his Tesla electric cars, the Rive brothers by replacing coal- and natural gas-generated electric power with solar…” click here for more

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