solar power
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India aims for 20 gigawatts solar by 2022
We’ve seen that the “New U.S.-India Green Partnership improves prospects for global climate deal.” But Treehugger has more on the world’s most populous democracy (and the photo is B Balaji via flickr). First,”It’s Finally Official – India’s National Solar Mission Aims for 20 Gigawatts Solar Power by 2022“: Rumors and draft reports have been circulating […]
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New Energy Finance: Solar power 50% cheaper by year end
By the end of 2009, there will have been a 50% drop in the levelized cost–i.e. the lifetime cost per kWh before subsidies–of solar power, and a 10% reduction in the levelized cost of other sources of renewable energy sectors compared to the end of 2008. This prediction is a result of detailed quarterly […]
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Freeing the grid
It’s that time of year again … no, not when turduckens appear on dinner tables nationwide and it becomes somehow acceptable to call the marshmallow a vegetable. It’s time for the 2009 edition of “Freeing the Grid,” an annual report card to states on their net metering and interconnection standards. Together, these two key policies […]
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Solar’s rapid evolution makes energy planners rethink the grid
Photo courtesy OZinOH via Flickr California’s ambitious goal of obtaining a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 has spawned a green energy boom with thousands of megawatts of solar, wind, and biomass power plants planned for … the middle of nowhere. And therein lies the elephant in the green room: transmission. Connecting […]
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New York passes clean energy financing bill
The New York State Legislature has not, of late, been able to agree on anything — the budget, same-sex marriage, and even, for awhile, which party was in the majority. But there is one thing they are unanimous about: clean energy finanancing. Last night, by a vote of 192-0, the famously combative body passed S66004-a/A […]
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Why solar energy trumps coal power
The color of solar cells — and their short energy payback — are trivial factors when considering the huge climate benefit they provide in avoiding the release of CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels. That was a central point in my first post debunking the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics. By failing to retract the many […]
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SolarReserve’s 24/7 solar power plant
Photo: SolarReserveAt Rocketdyne’s San Fernando Valley headquarters outside Los Angeles there’s a whiff of the right stuff — of crew-cut guys in short-sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties — in a vast room that holds the massive rocket engines that propelled John Glenn and the Apollo 11 crew into space. In one corner of […]
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Solar power when the sun goes down — with help from United Technologies
Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload) remains “The technology that will save humanity.” And we are seeing more and more plants in various phases of construction (see “World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in […]
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A solar energy future: Maybe you can get there from here
Almost anything that happens in our nation’s capital can be explained by a quote from Alice in Wonderland. Usually, that’s a bad thing. In the case of the Solar Technology Roadmap Act which the U.S. House of Representatives passed last week, however, invoking Alice is all for the good. Lost in a land where nothing […]
