solar thermal power

How current GHG policy distorts capital allocation

As we think about how to price GHG emissions, it’s often (and accurately) cited that having a meaningful conversation about GHG pricing first requires that we remove all the existing subsidies so that we can stop irrationally allocating capital. Clearly, we can’t provide insurance liability waivers to nuclear and ratepayer guarantees to regulated utilities and […]

The energy tax credits in the bailout bill, part 1

The bailout legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on Friday has a $17 billion energy tax package. This post will focus on the clean energy credits. Part 2 will focus on the dirty ones. The biggest winner is certainly solar. As Scott Sklar, former head of the Solar Energy Industries […]

Sharp to boost thin-film solar capacity six-fold to 6,000 MW by 2014

The world’s second-largest maker of solar batteries plans a massive increase in capacity to meet soaring demand. Bloomberg reports: The company will raise the capacity to 6 gigawatts as early as 2014, from 1 gigawatt estimated for 2010 … Sharp, which lost its market-leading position to Thalheim, Germany-based Q-Cells AG last year, is focusing on […]

Maroon 5 has a message for you

It’s been viewed over 15,000 times already. We’d have to commit acts illegal in most southern states to get that kind of viewership. On the subject of energy legislation, there’s a ton of action on energy this week. Particularly promising is news of a Senate compromise on tax relief — including a long-term extension of […]

A purely local approach would double or triple costs

This is one more attempt to kill a zombie myth: the notion that local generation of renewable electricity can substitute for long-distance transmission. I can see where this comes from — the sun shines almost everywhere, and the wind blows strong within a few hundred miles of most places where it doesn’t, right? If we […]

Where do candidates stand on solar?

People have questions, Solar Nation has answers.

Nature magazine gives short-shrift to baseload solar

Nature recently ran an article ($ub. req’d) on “Energy alternatives: Electricity without carbon.” Like most discussions written by people who don’t follow clean energy closely, the article lumped baseload solar (also known as concentrated solar thermal power) in with solar PV and generally treated it as an afterthought. Here is everything that they wrote about […]

A choice of primary energies: renewable electrons win the gold

As you might expect from an analyst who has written a series about the (renewable) electron economy, I believe that the mainstay of our future energy system will be electric generators powered by renewable energy. However, I hope to show here that this choice has a basis largely in economic, scientific, and technological reality rather […]

‘Major discovery’ from MIT unpractical, and ignores present advances in solar baseload

I have gotten bombarded by too many people asking me if the story headlined above is true. It isn't. Not even close.

Science magazine, which published the supposedly "major discovery" by MIT's Daniel Nocera, headlined their story, "New Catalyst Marks Major Step in the March Toward Hydrogen Fuel" ($ub. req'd). Doh! But who needs a major step towards hydrogen?

And Science seems to be having problems with the laws of physics, as we'll see. I thought I had explained this to Scientific American, but given their puff piece -- the findings "help pave the way for a future hydrogen economy" -- I obviously failed. Let me try again.

MIT had the sexier headline on unleashing the solar revolution. Too bad that headline isn't accurate for two mains reasons: The solar revolution already has been unleashed, and if it hadn't been, this technology wouldn't do the trick even if were near commercial, which it isn't. MIT reports: