Solar and Wind become cheaper to install and generate electricity in the U.S. and Fossil Fuels are only competitive with subsidies.

From 2013...
From article, (In 2012, renewable energy accounted for 55 percent of all the new domestic energy created in the U.S. For the first time in history, renewable energy (primarily wind and solar) has become the dominant electrical energy of choice within this nation.

Over the past ten years, wind energy capacity within the U.S. has grown by more than 960 percent. Last year wind  alone accounted for 42 percent of the total new U.S. electrical capacity installed, and wind energy capacity grew an astounding 22 percent in 2012 alone.

One reason for this remarkable growth can be found in the declining price of renewable energy installations. Since 2008, the price of commercial wind turbines has declined by nearly 30 percent. In 2011,  the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) published that wind power production costs had reached parity with the cost of producing electricity with coal (traditionally considered the cheapest source of electicity). And while the cost of wind power continues to decline, the cost of energy produced by coal continues to rise.

The U.S. currently has about 6,500 megawatts of installed solar capacity, enough to power more than 1 million homes. This represents a growth in generating capacity of more than 1,200 percent in just five years. 

Once again, this exponential growth can be traced to declining prices. Over the past five years, the price of installed systems has been more than cut in half. And in recent years, declines in the cost of solar panels have resulted in even more dramatic price reductions.  From the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2012, the average cost of an installed PV system dropped by 33 percent, and the average price of a solar panel declined by 58 percent. 

Should the growth of wind and solar slow and  only double each year, within five years they would account for more than 50 percent of all the energy consumed within the U.S. While this dramatic growth rate seems highly unlikely, given production limitations and inherant barriers to market (hard to convert a natural gas power plant to solar just because it is a cheaper process)—should give one pause. The transition may take place much faster than most industry watchers imagine.

In a marketplace dominated by headline stories of visible failures such as Solendra, few Americans realize that (according to the Government Accountability Office) the electricity generated by fossil fuels receives $5 in federal subsidies for every $1 received by the renewable energy industry.)

Fact vs. Fiction: How Renewables Outshine Fracking

While Australia worries over how to pay for its Central Electrical Transmission system, when everybody is going solar. Arizona has come up with an interesting idea.

From 2013... From article, (Arizona's biggest power utility, Arizona Public Service (APS), has announced their intention to implement what would effectively be a tax on the sun. The whole idea behind net-metering is that if you install a solar system on the roof of your house or business, you can buy power from the grid when you need it, and sell extra power when you have a surplus. Often these rates are advantageous to provide an incentive for renewable energy adoption, a very fair thing considering all the subsidies, direct and indirect, that fossil fuels have had for decades. But APS would like to start charging a monthly fee to sell clean power back to the grid (in their Orwellian language, they call it a "convenience charge"). A source says that that the fee could be of around $100/month or $1,200/year, enough to change the economic attractiveness of small systems. It's not entirely clear if the fee scales up for larger systems, but that seems likely.)

 Me, "It's going to take ideas like this to figure out how to pay for the central transmission system that provides power when solar can't. Sure, some of the fee will cut into what people sell back to the utility during the day. But at least its the first idea that can find a way of paying for the transmission system when solar power customers need it."
  No more free sun: Arizona's biggest power utility wants to tax solar

While Trump was taking down Obama era energy policies a funny thing happened out West.

From article, (While President Trump and the Republican-led Congress have been working to undermine environmental protections throughout the country, the Midwest has taken big steps to advance groundbreaking clean energy policies and investments.
 From the Future Energy Jobs Act in Illinois to the record-shattering wind generation levels in Iowa, it’s clear that the heartland states―and their Republican governors―realize what the Trump administration does not: Good clean energy policies just make sense, promoting strong economic development and a healthy environment. In the weeks following the 2016 election, something remarkable happened in the Midwest: Several sweeping clean energy victories took place in Republican-led states―with bipartisan support.
Midwestern states have some of the cheapest wind prices in the country, allowing the region to become a leader in wind energy investment. More than 29,250 MW of wind capacity is installed across 12 states, and four states place in the top 10 for installed capacity nationwide: Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, and Minnesota. And with that investment comes thousands of jobs: Nearly 569,000 workers in the Midwest are employed in clean energy sectors, primarily in energy efficiency and renewables. Many major utilities are taking advantage of the low wind prices: MidAmerican Energy announced that, largely due to the low cost of wind investment, the utility is aiming to reach 100 percent renewable energy while keeping its customers’ rates frozen until at least 2029. After announcing plans for a multistate wind investment, the CEO of Xcel Energy declared: “We’re investing big in wind because of the tremendous economic value it brings to our customers.)

Me, "We stand at a time when renewable energy is just too good an energy source to be passed up."

Trump Can't Stop This: Climate Action in the Midwest

This post was written by my colleague, Elisheva Mittelman. Welcome to the second blog in our monthly series highlighting the clean energy achievements and climate action continuing across the United States―despite the Trump administration's efforts to roll back federal climate policies. Each blog will focus on a different region of the country.

A Party at Odds with clean energy.

From 2016... From article, (A new analysis from the U.S Department of Energy reveals that despite GOP opposition to wind and solar incentives, many of their home states, such as Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, have benefited the most from the shift to renewables. In 2015, two-thirds of the country’s new electric generation capacity came from wind and solar. Last year was the second-straight year in which wind and solar projects outpaced fossil fuel. The trend is expected to continue in 2016.)

Me, "It amazes me that the Republican Party, whose members are against solar and wind incentives come from states that are benefiting the most from them. This doesn't make sense. You'd think they would be for them. This is one of the odd things about the Republican Party. The other thing is they are supposed to be a job creation party, renewable energy creates jobs. So they would rather kill these kinds of jobs for fossil fuel jobs. Odd."


Wind and Solar Outpaced Fossil Fuels Again Even in Republican-Led States Fighting Climate Action

Kite power? A new kind of Wind Power option is being funded by Google to tap into the strong upper winds.

From 2013...
From article, (Google is officially a technology empire, as it expands its domain into an ever-increasing number of markets. The latest area that Google is toying with is renewable energy, as the company has acquired Makani Power, a company that Google has apparently been investing in since 2007. To be more specific, the wing of Google that bought Makani Power is the somewhat mysterious Google X lab (birthplace of Google Glass), which is Google’s moonshot think tank and makes the acquisition all the more intriguing.
Makani Power makes autonomous unmanned wind turbine aircraft that are tethered to a terrestrial source--in other words, kite power. The company has just recently been making successful flights of its Makani Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT), which flies between 800 and 1,950 feet off the ground; the higher winds at those altitudes forces the propeller blades to rotate rapidly, which produces electricity via a generator.
The prototype they recently tested, the Wing 7, can generate some 30 kW of power, but the company already has plans drawn up for a 600 kW AWT. With Google’s brains and financial backing, they’ll presumably be able to push forward technologically leaps and bounds.

Me, "It seems that all that talk about floating a wind turbine up into the jet stream to produce unlimited wind power is no joke." Google Gets Into Power, Acquires Makani Wind Power

Australia, could be looking down the path to the end of a centralized power grid, and it is scaring traditional power providers.

From 2014... From article, (Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day. For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar. “Negative pricing” moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output. The stories you need to read, in one handy email Read more That's not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, factories are in production. That's when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money. The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2m buildings across the country). It is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to make hay (while the sun shines). The impact has been so profound, and wholesale prices pushed down so low, that few coal generators in Australia made a profit last year. Hardly any are making a profit this year. State-owned generators like Stanwell are specifically blaming rooftop solar. Coal, of course, will never be free. And the rapid uptake of rooftop solar – dubbed the democratisation of energy – is raising the biggest challenge to the centralised model of generation since electricity systems were established more than a century ago. Advertisement Network operators in Queensland, realising the pent up demand for rooftop solar, are now allowing customers to install as much as they want, on the condition that they don’t export surplus electricity back to the grid. Households and businesses have little incentive to export excess power. They don't get paid much for it anyway. Ergon Energy admits that this will likely encourage households to install battery storage.The next step, of course, is for those households and businesses to disconnect entirely from the grid. In remote and regional areas, that might make sense, because the cost of delivery is expensive and in states such as Queensland and WA is massively cross-subsidised by city consumers. The truly scary prospect for coal generators, however, is that this equation will become economically viable in the big cities. Investment bank UBS says this could happen as early as 2018.)

Solar has won. Even if coal were free to burn, power stations couldn't compete | Giles Parkinson

A Road That Pays for Itself.

From article, (Solar Roadways is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Scott and Julie Brusaw from Sagle, Idaho, who want to bring the humble road surface into the electronic age. Solar Roadways are comprised of rugged hexagonal glass plates in which are embedded solar cells, electronics, and LEDs. Where asphalt roads must be continuously patched and repaved, the panel making up a Solar Roadway simply would be swapped out if they fail. And where today's highways and parking lots just sit there soaking up the sun, Solar Roadways would produce energy. "Unlike the asphalt system, a Solar Roadway pays for itself through the generation of electricity," Scott Brusaw tells PM.
"Assuming the technological promise is as it appears, I think it might have a shot," Levine says of Solar Roadways. "And here's why: it's readily deployable at a small scale. Unlike...inductive charging in roadways, it's actually not dependent on what other people do, or what other agencies do, or what other municipalities do.
"So let's say I'm a municipality, I've got a big parking lot, and I want to say, 'Hey, you know what, let's give this a try, in this big parking lot. We're not going to go over to the roadways quite yet, we're going to do the parking lot.' And if I can demonstrate that it does what they say it does and it quickly pays for itself and then starts generating a surplus, then wow—the logic becomes pretty impeccable.") We Could Build a Solar-Powered Roadway-But Will We?

A Giant Tower could be the Hover Dam of the Desert.

From 2014... From article, (The idea goes like this: Water is sprayed at the top, causing hot air to become heavy and fall through the tower. By the time it reaches the bottom, it’s reaching speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, which is ideal for running the turbines. The advantage over standard solar and wind energy is the plant runs continuously, day and night. There are no intermittency issues from the sun failing to shine, and you don’t need to dust off any solar panels to keep things going. As long as the air is warm enough (which is likely in Arizona), the tower will keep creating draft effects. The plant itself runs under its own generated energy: about 11% of output goes to pumping the water to the top again, and about three-quarters of the water is collected at the bottom, according to Ron Pickett, CEO of Solar Wind Energy Tower, the Maryland company behind the design. “This is totally clean energy that actually makes money,” he says in an interview. “It makes energy at a cost comparable to if you were using natural gas to power a plant. ”In a sense, the technology is the least complicated thing. People have been working on variants of solar wind towers for more than a century. In the 1980s, engineers in Spain built a 640-foot test tower that pushed air upwards through turbines (by warming the air). It generated power for seven years until it fell over in a storm. The tougher issue is the enormous expense. To start generating meaningful amounts of power, you need something very large, and very large things tend to be costly. The Arizona project is likely to cost as much as $1.5 billion, according to Pickett.)
 Me, "A version of this technology I posted a while back. Its nice to see the technology is being considered possible and could be brought into reality." This Giant Tower In The Desert Could Generate As Much Power As The Hoover Dam

Even in 2012... Solar Power was having a good year.

From 2013...
From article, (1. Solar energy capacity has reached 7,374 megawatts (MW) by the end of 2012. This is enough energy capacity to power over a million homes.

2. Over 3,300 MW of solar capacity came online in 2012 — that’s an 80 percent increase on the previous year.

3. California, Arizona, New Jersey, Nevada and Massachusetts respectively round out the top five solar states in 2012.

4. Solar made up 12 percent of new generation capacity installed in 2012. Wind power was the top technology with 41 percent of the new generation installed — beating both coal and natural gas.

5. Per capita, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada and New Jersey respectively top the list with over 100 Watts installed per person.

6. California remains the solar market leader with over 2,500 MW installed, cornering 35 percent of the market.

7. 283,000 of the 316,000 solar installations that are connected to the grid are residential customers.

8. As a whole, solar generation made up 0.3 percent of all electric generation in the US.

9. In 2012 alone, over 80,000 residential customers installed solar panels making up 90 percent of all solar installations for the year.

10. The Solar Foundation’s National Solar Jobs Census found that the solar industry currently employs nearly 120,000 Americans.

Future So Bright: 10 Facts about the State of Solar

Another win for Clean Energy from an unlikely source.

From 2011... From article, ("Brazil, China and India are expected to fuel global investments in clean energy in 2011 that are expected to reach $240 billion, the head of a United Nation's green economy initiative said on Wednesday." Three of the world's fastest-growing nations are doubling down on clean energy while the world's richest nation, well, isn't. Despite the absence of the good ol' US of A's absence from the list of top investors in clean energy, this is good news nonetheless. If that $240 billion sum seems higher than usual, that's because it is -- the UN is projecting a significant uptick in clean energy investment from previous years in 2011. Reuters reports that "The U.N.'s environmental unit (UNEP) said investment in renewable energy hit $180-$200 billion in 2010 up from $162 billion in 2009, driven by the three countries." So it's really nothing new to see the three foremost developing nations in the world leading the clean energy charge -- and to see the US still dragging its feet relatively speaking. And can anyone out there wager a guess as to what's spurring the increased investment? Yup, rising oil prices: "The increased investments are because sustainable energy is gaining momentum as governments seek cheaper sources -- such as solar, wind and ethanol -- to cushion against rising oil prices.")
Me, "Its one of those crazy things. Increase oil prices to make more money and in reality your driving away your customers." Global Investments In Clean Energy to Hit $240 Billion in 2011

Solar and Wind are starting to shine as affordable fuels as compared to fossil fuels.

From 2014... From article, (A new study suggests that wind and solar plants are already competing with fossil fuel costs in Europe. Soon, even household rooftop solar PV systems will generate electricity cheaper than coal. And it won’t have the delivery costs. The study from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems says the cost of rooftop solar in the southern parts of Germany is already as cheap as €0.08c/kWh ($A12c/kWh). Even in northern Germany, where there is little sun, solar can be generated at €0.14c/kWh, half the cost of grid-based electricity. By 2030, the study says, the levellised cost of energy (LCOE) from rooftop solar PV will have fallen to around €0.06c/kWh. In sunnier countries, such as Australia, the Middle East, southern Europe and western US, not to mention Africa and Latin America, the cost of solar will be lower still, at around €0.043c/kWh. It says onshore wind in Germany already between €0.05c/kWh and €0.11ckWh, although this is unlikely to achieve significant further cost reductions. Fuel costs for fossil fuel plants, however, are likely to rise. “Even small roof-installed PV systems will be able to compete with onshore wind and also with the higher generation costs in the future from brown coal, hard coal and combined cycle gas power plants,” Fraunhofer ISE director, professor Eicke Weber said in the report) Rooftop solar PV will soon be cheaper than coal

Iceland tries out a new way for Geothermal Power.

From 2016... From article, (In the world of clean energy plants, geothermal is not as well known or as widely used as solar or wind. Geothermal heat pumps use hot rocks deep in the ground as a heat source to generate electricity. But if you could build a heat pump that taps liquid hot rocks, or magma, then you might really be in business. In 2009, the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) accidentally drilled into a magma reservoir about 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) below the surface when it was planning to construct a conventional geothermal well. As an experiment, the IDDP poured water down the magma well to see how much energy it could generate, and they ended up creating the most powerful geothermal well ever drilled, generating some 30 megawatts of power. Now the project is hoping to do the same thing, except intentionally and on a larger scale. The drilling of a hole that will be 5 kilometers (3 miles) deep in southwestern Iceland began in August at a geothermal facility dubbed Thor. The IDDP intends to tap a landward extension of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two of Earth's tectonic plates meet, and create the hottest hole ever drilled. In this subterranean zone, magma that is released from volcanic activity heats seawater up to temperatures between 400 and 1000 degrees Celcius (750 to 1800 degrees Farenheit). The intense pressures at that depth—about 200 times atmospheric pressures—force the superheated water to form "supercritical steam," which is neither liquid nor gas and holds more energy than both. If the IDDP can tap a reservoir of supercritical steam, a geothermal plant could be constructed with a power capacity of 50 MW, which is 10 times more than the 5 MW a conventional geothermal plant puts out.) Iceland Is Drilling a 3-Mile Hole to Tap Magma Power

People wonder why there has been an increase in solar installations. This is one reason...

From 2014...

From article, (The U.S. is planning to train veterans to become solar panel installers in the next six years, the White House said Thursday.

The jobs training program is among a host of initiatives the White House says will cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 300 million tons through 2030, plus save billions of dollars on energy bills for homeowners and businesses. It will launch this fall at one or more military bases and train a total of at least 50,000, including veterans.)

White House announces plan to train 50,000 people, including veterans, to install solar panels

The UFO that Wasn't

From article, (For almost two years, Canadian Marcelo da Luz has been driving his solar-powered car, the Power of 1 (Xof1 for short) across North America in an attempt to set a world distance record for a solar vehicle. When he reached Alaska earlier this week, the admittedly off-the-wall looking car was spotted by a concerned citizen, who dialled 911 to report a UFO sighting. Alaskan police quickly took off in hot pursuit, and pulled poor Marcelo over for interrogation.)

Me, "I don't think it is a UFO if it has wheels and is driving down a road but..."


Alaska Police Pull Over Solar Powered Car, Think It's a UFO - Gas 2

The Danger of Drought on Power Production....

From 2010...
The dangers of drought can affect Power Production as the Hover Dam almost showed.
 Low Water May Halt Hoover Dam's Power - Circle of Blue