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Solar Is Top Source of New Capacity On the US Grid In 2016 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. electric grid continued to transform in 2016. No new coal plants were added, and solar became the top new source of generating capacity. Combined with wind, a small bit of hydro, and the first nuclear plant added to the grid in decades, sources that generate power without carbon emissions accounted for two-thirds of the new capacity added in 2016. These numbers come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which asked utilities about what sources they expected to have online at the end of the year. These numbers typically show a burst of activity in December, as projects are raced to completion to take advantage of the tax benefits of reaching operational status in the current year. Overall, the EIA recorded 26 GW of new capacity added to the grid in 2016. This includes a small amount (0.3GW) of new hydropower and a smattering of projects collected under "other" that produce a similar magnitude. Notably absent from the list is coal. Also absent is distributed solar, meaning panels installed on homes and other small-scale projects. Distributed solar accounted for about 2GW of new capacity in 2015, and the EIA notes that the incentives for these projects haven't changed considerably in 2016. Even without that 2GW, solar comes out on top, with 9.5GW of new additions this year. At 8GW, natural gas comes in second place on the EIA's list, followed by wind at 6.8GW. Thanks to the opening of a new reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee, nuclear also joins the list for the first time in years, adding 1.1GW of capacity. Combined, wind, nuclear, hydro, and solar account for 68 percent of the new additions, making 2016 a low-carbon year for the U.S. grid. Assuming distributed solar this year is similar to its 2015 levels, the percentage of new non-fossil generation goes up above 70.
A new administration is coming to town. In 2017, other sources of power will become legal again.
Not total delivered.
So when you see that 9.5 gigawatts of solar compared to 8 gigawatts of natural gas, it's more like 3 gigawatts of average solar output versus 7 gigawatts of gas...
Want to guess why? Because one is subsidized and the other was successfully taxed and regulated out of existence.
Ken
You know, how Solaren promised they would do in 2016?
Florida voters narrowly (and surprisingly, to me) defeated a constitutional amendment that was funded by Florida Power & Light and other very interested parties that would have made it difficult and expensive to install solar power in the home. A rare victory for common sense in Florida.
http://www.miamiherald.com/new...
Google tells me that a ballot initiative by the Good Guys failed to achieve enough signatures to make the 2016 ballot (due to some scam artistry by the polling company they hired) so they will try for the 2018 ballot.
https://ballotpedia.org/Florid...
I'm not comfortable with amending the Constitution for something as specific as this, but I suppose they figure the legislature could be bought out by the incumbent power companies if it were a mere lowly law on the books.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Climate change is all a hoax designed to rip billions of dollars of income from the calloused hands of well deserving descendants of petrochemical entrepreneurs.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The U.S finally managed to open it's first offshore wind farm. A whole of 5 turbines producing a paltry 30Mw of power, by comparison Europe added some 419 turbines producing over 3000Mw last year alone.
Lord Trump will end this abomination. We will burn coal again as God intended.
But there's nobody there to use the power. So we'd have to move 2-3 million people in a forced exodus and therd just aren't that many Native Americans we can move.
Argh, the comments section of Slashdot is getting completely unreadable when the subject is something that is even vaguely related to global warming. Hordes of trolls rush to tell us that the globe is not warming, that this is all just a vast conspiracy by all the scientists in the world to get more research money.
Come on, can't we get something interesting? I remember that even last year there would be plenty of comments talking about insolation, capacity, load balancing, grid-level storage, price, subsidies, etcetera. Now it's just this nutjob shitfest.
entropy happens
in light of the Trump Administration. Solar is very cost effective when you account for all the externalities (e.g. pollution). But with enough deregulation that could easily change. Not that coal had been doing that will pre-Obama (a lot of it is used to make steel, and there's a glut of the stuff from China) but I could see a resurgence.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Possibly a stupid question, but can't the DoE provide their own information? Can't both be folded into one organization?
Seems there may be some duplication here, Yes, it's a shocking idea,
New shmeu ... cause the actual amt of USA non-carbon energy produced and used is 3.78%. Better blow-off a few-dozen BIG nukes in snowflakeville ... put the work done as **culling the herd**. "Course Trumps in, so some believe that culling task just became a lot easier hehehe ...
ca8 no lon6er be
It didn't lose. The "antimatter" universe is still alive and well.
Now lets figure out how to contact them.
Yet nukes don't produce about 40% of the time, and you aren't complaining. So do the others. Moreover, the capacity of a solar plant is based on what you can get out on average. That's why it's not rated at ~300W/m^2 but somewhere around 40-100W/m^2 when talking installed capacity.
Just like with any steam generator, where the losses in producing electricity is calculated in to the capacity, and with a CHP plant, where the "waste" is added in as heat generation, the installed capacity *for the same size generator* is higher.
But you never complain about that, do you.
So there's bugger all reason to insist that there will be oceans of sludge (cf strip mining or on-site uranium processing), unless you insist on using designs that use them, rather than other designs that don't.
PS your mobile phone is only as small as it is because of rare earths. Better never buy one again.
I have my doubts that solar is tops. I've seen at least around where I live that wind generators far out pace solar. Which from what I have seen has only achieved some success regionally. The primary supply fuel for electricity is natural gas, nuclear, and coal. The practical nature of what fuel is used to produce electricity comes from the cost of that fuel. Nothing else matters except how much people pay for that electricity.
I hope that by the time coal becomes competitive again, I can move to a newly-terraformed Mars or Venus (or maybe even farther out).
While the sun doesn't shine, electrical power is still needed. Hence, the amount of non-solar power has to be the same with or without solar plants. However, many of the non-solar power plants cannot easily be started or stopped (excluding the turbines possibly used to burn the natural gas). Now that standby capacity has to be running, to cover nights and clouded days. While its running, and the electrical power is not used, it has to go somewhere. Heating water is quite efficient at using surplus power...
Breakthrough in storage would be much more interesting than yet another few % on some electrical, wind, ...
Coal plants haven't "spewed soot" since the 60's, and haven't "spewed sulfuric acid" since the late 80's.
Stop lying.
Yet nukes don't produce about 40% of the time, and you aren't complaining.
Nuke's produce about 90% of the time in the US. You need to try to at least be believable when you lie.