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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.
5 percent. Sounds like a solar storm! NOT!
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It's going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.
Germany, that state and nation in europe is currently sourcing 6.2% of energy from solar and has been above 5% for some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
They made 80% of their power from renewable sources last year.
Personally I think they're cheating:
1. Their total power generation is tiny in comparison to a lot of states
2. Their geography is ideal for both hydro and geothermal.
so 1% by all the Californians, 1% Google, 1% Apple, 1% Tesla and 1% who ?
Good luck, Slashdot, you're going to lose half your readers soon, with your endless propaganda.
Aren't all their dams drying up from the drought. They probably have a higher proportion of from solar because hydroelectric isn't producing as much. Maybe they have a power deficit. We'll see in the summer.
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!
That figure may give pride to the holier than thou Masters of Silicon Valley, but it is a hardship for those poorer Californians who live inland. Coal power is much cheaper. We shouldn't let the climate shysters talk us out of it.
Solar water heating is much more common and not readily measurable in kWh.
"22 states have yet to deploy even one utility-grade solar power plant"
They seem to be implying that is a bad thing, I don't know what the distribution of those states are but it wouldn't be very smart for Northern states to build a utility grade solar plant even if they wanted to. They simply don't get the sun exposure of other states making the systems much less efficient. It would be like building a wind turbine in a valley with only intermittent wind, there's not much sense to it when you can instead install that same turbine a few miles away in an area with much more regular wind patterns. Renewable energy is great but only when used where it makes sense to do so.
Maybe they should focus more on water desalinization. Nothing sadder than seeing a drought stricken state with an ocean on its border.
Some things need to be said...
It's [solar energy] going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Sorry Bob, the devil is looking elsewhere to fill quota, and even good drink will be scarce during the Generational Purge due to a loss of the 'Just In Time' food supply chain. Modern cannibals will find scarcely a week's worth of cans on the grocery shelf and perhaps another few weeks in distribution centers, but this will serve only to swell the ranks of the migrant Cannibal Armies that will actually conduct the Purge.
The Cannibal Army is the ultimate (and last) achievement of any failed modern civilization. The only reason the history books are not chock full of 'em is that historians are delicious, and there has never been enough population to achieve the necessary critical mass, collapsed societies to this point have always left numbers few enough to live off the land, and retained enough know-how to do so. That is not true today.
Ask anyone on the street if they know how to solder a joint, sow seed, plant a cow or where delivery pizza comes from and they haven't a clue. But ask them if they could figure out how to eat someone and they will quickly nod assent. It is not only instinctive it is infused into the culture. The recurring theme of pursuit and car chases in popular movies expresses the primal knowledge necessary for cannibalism.
The cannibals will be ruthless, they will employ cleverness and the use of technology to scour the land. Your stationary survival enclaves will be the favorite feast of the first wave, where all the cherished ideals of small sustainable energy, and those who practice it, go into the cooking pot. Domestic cattle and other animals will be mere appetizers in this Moveable Feast, because cannibal armies have no patience to raise them. Disease from improper preparation will claim some, but the critical mass will persist until there is only one Cannibal Army left in California.
That last cannibal army, great in number, will then march on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to absorb and consume the small group of engineers and scientists who have gathered there to preserve the remaining fruits of civilization, and for hot showers. Cannibals are easily swayed by reason, you might say they are even attracted to it, because wherever reason exists there are yummy people to consume. And consume they will until the last corn-fed game is exhausted. And then they will turn on each other and feast until human population levels out and reaches a sustainable level of -1.
The fate of California's energy policy is foretold in Lucifer's Hammer. Devour this book.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
First of all, Germany is not replacing nuclear power with coal but with wind and solar.
Germany has targeted closing all their nuclear plants by 2022, a mere 7 years from now. Nuclear accounts for something like 17-19% of power in Germany. Do you honestly think they are going to install that much renewable capacity AND solve the baseload problem in 7 years without fossil fuels playing a role to get them there? They aren't going to use coal but they are going to use more natural gas" which isn't exactly something to be thrilled about. It's cleaner but not by much.
Secondly, german coal plants filter exhaust.
So do plants in most developed countries.
They basically exhaust cleaner air than they 'breath in', besides CO2.
Complete bullshit. There isn't an operational coal plant in the world that is that clean even if you stupidly ignore the CO2 problem.
Thirdly, the 'idea' that coal emits noticeable radioactivity is a myth from the 1960s/1970s.
A myth you say? Yeah, the facts are not backing you up on that one.
Wow, LeVar Burton! What's the next book on today's Reading Rainbow?
That is all.
Iowa was getting nearly 30% of their power from wind energy two years ago, already.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Isn't it funny how liberals, the ones who talk about saving energy and the environment, are the ones who use and waste the most energy?
Did you know that Texas, home of Big Oil, produces slightly more than 10% of it's power from wind, about 14,098 MW according to wikipedia. They're the nation's leader in wind energy. Florida does solar better than anyone else, and for overall green energy, Washington (via dams, mostly).
In a related tangent, California claims to get almost 5% of their power from wind, though they only produce 5,917 MW from theirs, and have about 10 million more people, so somewhere, something doesn't add up.
My guess is that a lot of these "% power" claims, including the one in the article, come down more to clever accounting than actual, literal green draw.
Or just stay away altogether because more than 15 years of evidence points to a lack of story writing talent making April Fool's Day less than fun on /.
We are not born yesterday and it is getting to be irritating, these April fools jokes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do they take into account the fact that the sun isn't shining all day, every day and that we are using electricity non stop?
you got me
Have they looked at the MMDSU ... massive multiple distributed solar units?
The trend in the Southwest is to lease existing real estate (house roofs, commercial roofs, parking lot shade covers) for installing solar panels. Look at Google maps satellite for Phoenix AZ and you will see the black squares on rooftops all over town.
Property owner gets lowered electricity cost, solar company gets some money, and the utility companies get a boost during the day, when we have our peak load. There is not need to have a massive panel farm and equally massive link to the utility company's system. They have thousands of small co-generating installations feeding back to the grid.
And that start is growing with double-digit percentages. AND, the majority of new power generation projects in the US (and worldwide) is already renewables (solar/wind/etc), so the trend is only going to accelerate.
Naively projecting that 5% solar power forward at 14% growth per year leads to 50% solar power in 18 years and 100% solar power in 23 years. Of course, that's not an accurate model of what will happen -- a better model would be an s-curve, with the maximum currently unknown -- but it does give a good idea of the rough time scale involved. Around 2 decades until solar power is saturated? That's not so long.
It took a while to get going, with the required government support for the basic research costs, but now this is a self-sustaining free-market endeavour which means it's a trend that now cannot be stopped, thankfully.
Raw economics is going to drive solar? Really?
This is a subsidy based land rush that will die as soon as the free lunch expires.
And if "raw economics" is driving this, why are California electricity rates so high?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the-price-of-electricity-in-your-state
Soylent News is even worse today, not a single damn legit story on that page.
CAPTCHA: irritant
No wait, seriously?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Just kidding! April Fools! You proles will still have to live in mud huts.
Hawaii has more Mw per person. And a higher adoption rate - 1in 8 houses in Hawaii have roof top solar.
I always thought California got its power from the people.
Also, the headline is wrong, to put it mildly. As they normally do, the solar-electric propagandists came up with that 5% number by doing math that makes no sense - using POWER USED for the numerator and ELECTRICITY GENERATED for the denominator. Most power isn't electricity, so the number is bogus. Also, California uses a lot more power (and electricity) than they generate, so it's double bogus.
I say the number is "wrong", but MOST solar-electric stories on Slashdot make the exact same "mistake". When someone making an argument consistently screws up the math in the same way, after the error has been pointed out the them many times, that could be called "lying".
The useful number is "how much of the power we use can be generated from ________?" In the case of solar-electric in California, it's less than 2%. That's good in the sense that it's about the correct amount to generate in terms of resources used vs power generated. More would wasteful and hurt people's standard of living. For example:
It would be silly to use the sun to heat water, in order to drive a turbine, in order to generate electricity, in order heat a coil, in order to heat water for your shower. If you want hot water for a shower and you have bright sun, just pipe the water for the shower through a large black pipe and heat it directly. That's much more efficient than the Rube Goldberg approach of adding turbines, generators, etc. to it. If you want hot water and have hot water, just use the hot water - it's wasteful to convert it into electricity and back again. Under that kind of analysis, solar electric SHOULD be about 2%. Other sources are better for most of the needs of most of the people in most places, for most of the year.
> 5% of the total energy use is still
The 5% neither of total energy, nor of use.
It's 5% of electricity generated within the state.
Most of the energy isn't electricity, and a large percentage of the electricity they use is generated in Arizona, where regulation has allowed new power plants that generate reliable electricity to be built.
In other words, it's really just how many new electric plants were built in California (only solar ones) as a percentage of the plants that California already had prior to them shutting down development and forcing any new plants capable of providing reliable electricity to be built across the state line in Arizona.
Given that the population of California has increased by 10% in the last 15 years, the fact that their electric capacity hasn't kept up, that they've become more dependent on power from Arizona, isn't actually a good thing.
Makes sense California would invest more into a completely government subsidized industry like solar power, being that its a welfare state. Without tax rebates on solar, the break even occurs at approximately the same time as the panels die (25 years). Wind, hydro, and geothermal are really the only widely adopted cost effective "alternative" energy sources.
Rates:
/kWhr /kWhr
/kWhr
/kWhr for all kWhr per month.
/kWhr
CUSTOMER CHARGE:
Single-Phase Service - per month $ 9.00/month
Three-Phase Service - per month $18.00/month
NON-FUEL ENERGY CHARGE (To be added to Customer Charge)
First 350 kWhr per month-per kWhr 8.1034
Next 850 kWhr per month-per kWhr 9.2569
All kWhr over 1,200 kWhr per month - per kWhr 11.1343
WAIVER PROVISION:
For customers receiving bill credits under Low Income Home
Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), the Non-Fuel Energy
Charge is 8.1034
BASE FUEL ENERGY CHARGE (To be added to Customer Charge
and Non-Fuel Energy Charge)
All kWhr per month - per kWhr 13.6062
Minimum Charge:
Single-Phase Service - per month $17.00/month
Three-Phase Service - per month $23.00/month
Solar energy has always "worked." But it has not always been cost-effective.
Slashdot readers who held nuanced views that mass adoption should wait until it was cost-effective, have been characterized by other, un-nuanced Slashdot readers as "angry."
And it's not "hippies" who were right about solar; credit goes to the semiconductor scientists who kept upping the efficiency of PV cell designs, while reducing manufacturing costs.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.