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California Has Become the First State To Get Over 5% of Its Power From Solar
Lucas123 writes: While the rest of the nation's solar power generation hovers around 1%, California clocked in with a record 5% of power coming from utility-grade (1MW or more) solar power sources, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group and the Energy Information Administration. That's three times the next closest state, Arizona. At the same time, 22 states have yet to deploy even one utility-grade solar power plant, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. Meanwhile, the rest of the world saw a 14% uptick in solar power installations in 2014 for a total of 54.5GW of capacity, and that figure is expected to grow even faster in 2015. While China still leads the world in new solar capacity, Japan and the U.S. come in as a close second and third, respectively. In the U.S. distributed solar and utility-grade solar installations are soaring as the solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year. The U.S. is expected to deploy 8.5GW of new solar capacity in 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group.
There are complex issues to wide scail deployment.
First is what I think is a short term political problem. Where the energy industry is fighting the change, and lining the pockets of political parties that are willing to make sure things don't change. Technically solar power is more akin to conservative ideals, as it allows the individual to generate their own power without having to handle what big brother says.
Secondly solar requires consumers to buy in. In terms of price even with tax incentives for my home and usage it is about the same price. So there is a hidden cost for me to find a source and deal with the salesmen trying to find a good deal. So it makes it more expensive then current energy. Other forms of energy you don't need a huge buy in. They buy some land, build a plant and the community has power. Just as long there are more people benifitting from it then who are harmed society is happy.
Third trees. Contrarary to the world view of Americans, we like trees a country that is 50th in population density means a lot of us lives in more rural areas, and our homes have a fair amount of tree cover that we do not want to get rid of.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here in Portugal, my electric bill states we do at least 30% from wind sources, and overall +70% is renewable. We rarely get outages, and we have a very decent supply of fossil-fuel from North Africa. We have a lot less surface area than California (~100.000 vs 400.000 km) , and probably less sunlight time overall, considering cloudy days are like 30% of the year span. Let me know when a state gets even close to that!
It's the failure modes that are problematic.
They're also astonishingly rare. Of all the major accidents, we have:
Chernobyl: a crazy design with a strongly positive void coefficient. No one else has ever made such designs, even before Chernobyl because it was always known to be dangerous.
Fukishima: Germany is just not prone to natural disasters on that scale. It's geologically stable and free from hurricanes and tornadoes.
Three Mile Island: an excellent design from a fail safe point of view because despite a full core meltdown, it released almost no radioactivity.
Windscale: wasn't a powerplant for a start. Also a design which was known to be batshit at the time but was done in a screaming hurry for national security reasons. Even so, it's been cleaned up and the effects are basically gone.
If you look at Europe's record on nuclear stuff it is excellent. If you winnow that down and include only operational powerplants and reprocessing facilities (so ignore things like the plutonium cooker at windscale and experimental plants) the record is almost spotless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The pace of PV installations in the U.S. is accelerating as the federal government's solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year.
We've been through this before. All of the graphs on this page assume last year's growth will continue unabated. But what we're really seeing is a rush to grab as much of the subsidy as possible before the free money goes away.
You're partly wrong.
It was Italy that voted against nuclear in 1986. 2 reactors where working at that time and had to be shut down. In 2011 there was another referendum to reenter the nuclear powe production, but italians confirmed they'd like to remain nuclearless.
East Germany (not todays Germany) shut down in 1990 its last nuclear power plant due to security concerns, and no new reactors were planned or build afterwards.
In 2000 Germany (now united) decided to gradually reduce the use of nuclear power, and thus in 2003 the first power plant went offline. Others followed in subsequent years. In 2010 they decided to slow down the decommissionment and let the reactors live a few more years. In 2011, after the Fukushima tragedy, Germany decided to shut the reactors as soon as possible. 8 reactors were then shut down immediately, and the rest will be shut down in steps till 2022.
Not only that, but when you say 5%, it sounds rather small.
When taking a look at the actual numbers behind the percentages, it's a bit more dramatic. In 2013, California generated and used 296,628 GWh of energy on their grid, according to this. If energy usage was flat (not likely) than solar is now generating 14,831.4 GWh of energy in California alone.
That's hardly nothing, and definitely not "whoop de do da."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You know that Idaho got 82.9% of it's TOTAL 2014 (not just one damn day) electricity use from renewables, right?
What's embarrassing is schmucks like you getting modded up and thinking you're all insightful and the fact of the matter is that you know nothing. Get away from the "Science!" channel and get to taking a real sincere interest in this area and you'll find that while Germany is doing a great job they're far from the beacon of future electricity production.
But every single form of energy is subsidized by the government. So why are we singling out solar again?
Do you feel the same way about nuclear?
You are welcome on my lawn.