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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.
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.
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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!
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.
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.