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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%, in one of the sunniest states there is.
Seriously, guys, that's just pathetic. And that's considered newsworthy?
In the US it is newsworthy. "Mined energy source" lobbies are very powerful here.
Recall that Germany, at the same latitude as Maine, USA, had one day where 52% of the electricity was supplied by renewable energy sources.
So, yes, this is embarrassing news that this is news in the US, but at least it's a step in the right direction
The sad part is that states like Florida are making it harder to install solar. On top of that, Florida is fighting energy efficiency. Other states are adding fees to solar users at the behest of the utility companies.
I live in California and am getting solar installed later this week though not nearly as big of a system as I'd like due to limitations of my roof. PG&E has some of the most expensive electricity in the country because of our state's corrupt public utilities commission. Average rates are around $0.194/kwh (compared to Santa Clara $0.113/kwh). PG&E has been quietly lowering the thresholds to push people into higher tiers of power as they make their homes more energy efficient. On average I'm paying well over $0.19/kwh so solar makes perfect sense.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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 point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is this:
It's a start.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Considering the pace at which this energy was added to the grid, it is news worthy. Considering coal (and large hydro and nuclear) are all about ~9% each in California, it will only be a handful of years until solar surpasses power production from each coal, nuclear, and large hydro.
Perhaps then solar detractors will rubber neck at the remarkable progress in the industry. It will be hilarious over the coming decade as the raw economics drive us to abandon domestic resources (coal, gas) in favor of Chinese (or Malaysian) manufactured solar panels. Exporting billions of dollars to China after handing them this giant industry (inevitably one of the world's largest) on a silver platter.
I wonder how the myopic thinkers will react to this scenario. Of course, we'll have to wait a decade for them to realize what has already happened.
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.
Wow, LeVar Burton! What's the next book on today's Reading Rainbow?
That is all.
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.
It is worth noting that California is the #2 electricity consuming state in the nation (behind Texas), but has the lowest per capita consumption in the country, roughly half the average per capita consumption of the entire U.S.
A complex dilemma you've painted. :)
But it's all in the (your) mind
Yes renewable energy seems to cost more than conventional fossil but then the last has hidden costs regarding the environment now and in the future.
I'm really curious why you brought up the subject of trees, do you maybe feel we need to cut down trees for large scale PV deployment?
Like yesterday I ordered PV cells covering about half my garage roof and they'll be good for some 125% of my annual consumption and that's at 52 degs. North.
A few hundred square kilometres in some nice deserts (+ a lot of transmission infrastructure) would cover the needs of the planet.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Well, Maine promises to bring their new solar plant online just as soon as the clouds break.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
When discussing Chernobyl, one must always keep in mind the proximate cause of the incident.
Specifically, the version of the NRC decided it needed to know how much energy they could extract from a meltdown in progress to deal with the meltdown. Perfectly reasonable notion - it makes a meltdown easier to deal with if you don't have to rely on dozen/hundreds of (relatively) small emergency generators for lights, pumps, etc.
So, they picked an out-of-the-way reactor, and pushed it as far toward a meltdown condition as they considered safe to do, and started measuring the energy output of the plant in that mode.
Unfortunately, they were wrong about how "far toward a meltdown" was "safe to do"....
So, the largest nuclear disaster in history happened because someone made a goof while trying a Real World (tm) SIMULATION of the largest nuclear disaster in history....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Pathetic? Are you mad. It's fantastic. Take a look at a graph of solar power production from the 1970s to today? What do you see? Exponential growth. It goes up at roughly the same pace regardless of political party or tax incentives or gas prices. We're now at the point where the exponential growth is being seen and you say 5% is pathetic.
Look at the growth rates. The future is very bright.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Cutting CO2 is not the entire picture, though. With that in mind, it ceases to be less "dumb" than you think. Building the PV installations in Germany creates money for Germans to spend in the German economy. It also generates experience in the sectors involved. Sending money to Spain keeps the money in Spain.
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.
I'm curious. What is it about solar energy that spurs such surprising anger among this segment of Slashdot readers? What did solar energy do to you?
My theory is that admitting that solar energy works means admitting that those g_dd_mn hippies were right. After all, hippies are never right, so solar energy cannot work.
Q.E.D.
Replace 'hippies' with 'Al Gore', 'leftards', 'commies', 'alarmists' or a similar label according to taste.