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New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again
Lucas123 writes Solar energy installations beat both wind generated and coal-fired energy for the second year in a row, according to a new report from GTM Research. While solar only makes up about 1 percent of U.S. energy, in 2014, it added nearly as many new megawatts as natural gas, which is approaching coal as the country's primary energy source. Solar capacity grew 32 percent from 2013 to 2014 and GTM is predicting it will grow 59% YoY this year. Just two years ago, in 2012, coal represented 41% of new energy capacity and solar only 10%. Last year, coal was down to 23% of new electrical capacity. Solar capacity growth last year represents a 12-fold increase over the amounts being installed in 2009. Key to solar adoption has been falling costs across market segments and states.
Whenever I hear about all the stupid comments and grandstanding from politicians trying to pander to a scientifically illiterate (American) public I despair. However when I look at the (long predicted and now achieved) strides in solar power, a see a "ray" of hope.
Finally solar power is becoming cost competitive even with coal. Hopefully in a few more years and certainly less than a decade it will be decisively so. At that point, one hopes, renewable power will no longer be a political decision but a purely economic one.
This, of course, won't solve global warming, certainly not "over night" (ha ha). The vast build up of CO2, thermal lag and feedback loops (permafrost melting) means we will be dealing with this for generations to come. But it might slow down the buildup enough so that new carbon sequestration technologies created (again by scientists and technologists) can fix the problem for good.
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power? :D as they store enough heat to run a few nights without sun.
Because neither PV plants have a gap (you don't need much power at night, or do you?) nor do thermal solar plants hang behind nuclear power
Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As is typical, this submission ignores the actual energy that can be produced from these new installations in a year and focuses on the much less meaningul "installed capacity". As we all know, 1 KW of installed gas generation can generate a lot more (3 to 8 times) electricity that 1 KW of solar in a year. Also, the total added generation really is small compared to national energy usage, so the scales have not tilted that much overall.
Why subsidize residential PV?
But what is very interesting in the source article is that residential solar installations cost more the twice as much as commercial ones. Given that fact, why in the heck would we subsidize residential solar? If the goal is to build as much as possible, and generate as much solar as possible, we should eliminate residential subsidies and build much more cost effective commerical ones. That way we get more clean energy, and everyone benefits, not just the wealthy to middle class demographic that typically installs residential solar.
Why do so many people find economical solar energy so upsetting?
Yea, I hate how when I boil water on the stove ice cubes start forming in it which makes it take longer.
*facepalm*
You really don't understand the difference between global and local climate, do you? A 4 degree C change in local climate doesn't mean that much. A 4 degree C change in the global average is a catastrophe.
It's not even all of that one political party. Just a vocal section of it.
It's pretty sad when CHINA can agree on this, but the radical right wing cannot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.
We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data.
The age of the Earth is totally irrelevant in this discussion. What you need to look at is the time constant of the relevant physical phenomena. Suppose an evil alien race injects a ray into our sun that makes it 10% weaker. How long do you think it takes for us to notice clear effects ?