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Fox News: US Solar Energy Investment Less Than Germany Because US Has Less Sun
Andy Prough writes "Apparently those wise folks at Fox have figured out America's reluctance to invest as much money in solar energy as Germany — the Germans simply have more sun! Well, as Will Oremus from Slate points out, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Solar Resource map comparison of the U.S. and Germany, nothing could be further from the truth — Germany receives as much sunlight as the least lit U.S. state — Alaska."
Fox News
It's the very first time Fox has said anything that's factually incorrect.
They mentioned briefly that the US tried to subsidize solar but the Chinese kept undercutting our manufacturers and we just couldn't beat their prices. What is Germany doing differently that allows them to beat Chinese prices? Tariffs? Import restrictions? Why does that kind of market manipulation work for Germany and why do we allow subsidies to happen in the states but not that sort of competition restriction?
... which still doesn't answer how their solar products compete with the Chinese. I like how they named dropped 'natgas' several times because the US has so much of it! No problems worth mentioning about natural gas!
Oh, right, they have more sun
My work here is dung.
So I know this is Fox News we're talking about here, but where exactly does one draw the line between a failure to check your sources, and becoming a tabloid?
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Actually, if you look at Fox over the past few weeks, they've run a series of anti-solar articles. I guess somebody wants to sell more oil.
Bruce Perens.
The sun has a well-known liberal bias, therefore the US gets less sunlight than a socialist European welfare state.
I am envious of the deep suntans that most Germans flaunt in my face.
It's a morning show; they all suck. It doesn't have to be FOX News.
-SaNo
That's a liberal canard. Actually, Fox is Fair and Balanced. Says so right on the tin.
Their followers, however...will be outraged that the USA has less of something (anything!) than some other country.
No sig today...
Sun comes up. Sun goes down. You can't explain that.
I am not a crackpot.
Germany has advanced its clean energy capacity because it has maintained a clear and consistent policy of incentivizing it for over a decade. It is paying off. Last year they set a record by generating half of weekend electricity demand with solar. Denmark has managed something similar with wind power, getting 24% of its electricity that way.
Of course, Germany and Denmark have strong green constituencies who support those policies, but there are realpolitik concerns at work too. A few years back Russia shut down the natural gas pipeline that ran through the Ukraine to Germany and central Europe because they wanted to play politics with the Ukrainians. Natural gas prices spiked in Europe overnight and put a serious crimp in its economy. The Germans, Danes, and many others got the wake up call and have been driving toward energy independence hard.
There are longer term benefits for those economies who move their energy base off fossil fuels: predictable energy costs. In economic terms, when you increase the predictability and stability of key inputs businesses can better plan and grow, in the same way that low inflation means businesses can better know what their borrowing costs and real revenues will be.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Not to nitpick, but no one said "US getting less sun than US". I feel a bit queasy when people substitute the word "Germany" for "US".
According to a recent study by LBNL the soft cost associated with installing the panels are more than three times as high in the US compared to Germany.
http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/german-us-pv-price-ppt.pdf
Page 26: Costs that are not module costs. 4.46$/W in the US compared to 1.18$/W in Germany.
Higher cost results in lower volume.
Maybe they could spin it the other way saying that the US receive more darkness than any other country in the world! Take that, you German tree-hugging faggots!
But you've hit on the fundamental issue. If you just wait around for things to "get cheaper on their own" you wait a lot longer. One could argue that China has waited a bit too long for electric vehicles and over their densest cities they have "air you can chew." For the commuter vehicles for which they worked, electric cars in the US did not break even on the cost of electrics on the year the Volt was introduced. The $7,500 tax credit made them break even. Once they were justifiable to the consumer they sold like mad. This in turn causes the cost of manufacturing to drop and means that by the time the next generation of batteries hits, there will have been two generations of Volt working out all the bugs. If we get a 50 mile electric range out of the next gen (as opposed to 35 today), this will actually double the people for whom this technology is viable, if by then the cost of manufacturing the Volt had gone down 10% we might not need the subsidy to sell out of all the Volts GM can produce in a year.
Even with the subsidy, my commute didn't fall into the break even range. I bought one anyway because I thought it was the right thing to do.
So, I must disagree. We'll have better electrics on the road ~3 years sooner due to that "evil government subsidy." That was money well spent.
As for centralized solar, there are lots of viable-sounding technologies for making that work, the sooner we try 10 of them on a large scale, the sooner we find the clear winner. Paying for the 9 runners up, is part of that cost. If you can do this sort of science and have all your test results come out positive each time, you aren't actually doing science.
So, fox news has turned into a joke over the years, and the worst of it is the morning show. The hosts are idiots, they do little research and make a lot of false claims. BUT... watched the video. The quote was taken completely out of context. She said "Germany has a lot more sun than us. You could do solar power in places like California and out west, but on the east cost here it's just not going to work well." That's a far cry from what Slates claiming. It's still probably wrong, but it's not nearly as idiotic as Slates claiming and it was clearly an off the cuff remark and not a statement of fact. The real direction the interview was taking was that China is undercutting our solar panel production, and the only way to compete is with subsidies. Which is true. Also, she went on to say our money would be better invested in developing cleaner methods of using Natural Gas, which is also true. My own opinion is that, we're going to use that natural gas, period, it's a fact. So lets make sure we at least use it in as clean a way as possible.
There are plenty of reasons to talk shit about Fox news. This single comment is not news worthy.
According to "Current Results", the total annual sunshine in Germany (hours):
Berlin 1625
Bremen 1483
Hamburg 1557
Hannover 1501
Kiel 1627
Magdeburg 1609
Potsdam 1692
Rostock 1687
Total annual sunshine in Alaska:
Anchorage 2061
No US city/state gets less sunshine than Anchorage AK, though Syracuse NY is close at 2120, Seattle WA at 2170, and Columbus OH at 2183.
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
I appreciate the 'murkin spin. I was feeling less exceptional for a moment.
Not to nipick but nobody substitued the word "Germany" for "US", the grandparent substituted "US" for "Germany". It was quite the opposite of what you say makes you feel queasy actually so I guess you are feeling really good right about now.
So, basically, Germany is Canada.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
But without mosquitoes and maple syrup.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is not meant to nickpick
I know "US getting less sun than US" means "US getting less sunlight than US", but I still feel a little bit queasy when people substitute the word "Sun" for "Sunlight"
Maybe that's just me ...
So, when people use the phrase, "fun in the sun", do you correct them with, "fun in the warmth and light of the Sun"? Do you tell people, "No, you are not getting some sun. You are receiving some sunlight!"
If only you had been around to prevent the Beatles from making fools of themselves by singing, "Here Comes the Sun", instead of, "Here Comes More Direct Sunlight".
Or maybe you are just a little too caught up in misplaced pedantry to notice the usage of the word "sun" has a common and accepted usage to denote the light or warmth of the sun.
Merriam-Webster.com: sun"
I have to agree: The problem really has nothing to do with Fox news. It has to do with the entire profession of journalism. With very few exceptions, journalists have zero grasp of issues relating to science, engineering or technology. Too often, their idea of research is to talk to their equally clueless colleagues in the lunchroom. Alternatively, they just make up "facts" that sound right to them.
The entire profession is spiraling towards the drain. With the rise of the Internet, fewer people are willing to pay for news of any sort. Less income, budgets are cut, fewer journalists have to churn out more material, quality goes in the crapper, so even fewer people are willing to pay for news...
Just look at the quality of coverage on scientific/technical issues like nuclear power, health care, climate change. Find some specific bit of information, any factoid that seems fairly unique, and start searching. Most likely you will find a lovely merry-go-round: journalists copying from journalists copying from journalists. If you manage to find the original source of the factoid, likely as not it has been taken totally out of context and/or has been completely misunderstood.
Alternatively the entire article may be basically a copy of a press release. Companies and governmental organizations know the journalists are under time pressure, so they provide pre-written "articles" that can be used directly, no thinking required.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Even then, if you cover California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas you have a population that's probably a bit larger (than Germany), and much more sunlight, where it would make sense for the investment in research just to cover this area... Let alone grid feeds to neighboring states, and combined with water pipelines, excess generation can be stored as Hydrogen.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
This is not meant to nickpick
I know "US getting less sun than US" means "US getting less sunlight than US", but I still feel a little bit queasy when people substitute the word "Sun" for "Sunlight"
Maybe that's just me ...
So, when people use the phrase, "fun in the sun", do you correct them with, "fun in the warmth and light of the Sun"?
No, I think the the Fox commentator meant that Germans are brighter than the Americans when it comes to solar energy policy.
I love how this seems to work. One company failed (Solyndra). And it was allowed to fail, not propped up endlessly (which I think is how this stuff should work). The poster was all for using government subsidy to jump start a newish industry. But now that ONE company failed, it magically gets extended to all of them, and it's government fraud, and we should stop everything.
One company fails = "As for direct investment into "Green" companies the government shouldn't be trusted on that ever again."
A few points: