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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.
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!
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."
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