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Wind, Solar Surpassed 10 Percent of US Electricity In March, Says EIA (thehill.com)
According to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, wind and solar produced 10 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. for the first time in March. The Hill reports: The Energy Information Administration's (EIA) monthly power report for March found that wind produced 8 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. that month, with solar producing 2 percent. The two sources combined to have their best month ever in terms of percentage of overall electricity production, EIA said. The agency expects the two sources topped 10 percent again in April but forecasts that their generation will fall below that mark during the summer months. Due to the way geographic wind patterns affect the generation of electricity, the two sources typically combine for their best months in the spring and fall. Annually, wind and solar made up 7 percent of electric generation in 2016, EIA said.
How often do people ask why solar is so unpopular?
Almost never since about 2005, because solar has actually become extremely popular.
After being subsidized heavily in the USA for decades this is all we have to show for it. Perhaps we need to stop and think if this is in fact a good use of our tax money.
The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon. If you don't like the price this year, wait until next year. If you don't like solar power period, at any price, that's fine too -- the world will continue to adopt solar power at an ever-increasing pace, with or without your support.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Oil is the reason we war in the Middle East, sacrificing lives and tax payer money; it's another form of subsidy. War a racket, as the great Major General Smedley Butler pointed out. We have reached peak oil, and future dependency on oil projects a bleak future, with more war, scarce resources and dire prices. Raytheon, Academi/Xe/Black Water, Lockheed Martin and others would love such a Dystopia. Not me.
Subsidizing alternate energies is a good idea. Wind, solar, water and yes, even other energy sources like fusion should be subsidized, encouraged and exploited.
So, we see wind and solar combined to reach an arbitrary goal of 10% so that it is worthy of a headline apparently. One question that I'd like answered is how much this electricity cost. Not how much the consumers were charged for it, because that would include the government subsidies. I want to see the economics of this so I can judge the validity of this as a future energy source.
...In reality, it’s not a good thing at all, and certainly not a positive trend. In fact, as Climate Depot and the Washington Examiner point out — citing an American Enterprise Institute study — the job numbers actually underscore how wasteful, inefficient and unproductive solar power actually is.
That is glaringly obvious when you look at the amounts of energy produced per sector. (This tally does not include electricity generated by nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants.)
398,000 natural gas workers = 33.8% of all electricity generated in the United States in 2016
160,000 coal employees = 30.4 % of total electricity
100,000 wind employees = 5.6% of total electricity
374,000 solar workers = 0.9% of total electricity
It’s even more glaring when you look at the amount of electricity generated per worker. Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker.
In other words, producing the same amount of electricity requires one coal worker, two natural gas workers — 12 wind industry employees or 79 solar workers.
Even worse, whereas coal and gas electricity is cheap, affordable, and available virtually 100% of the time — wind and solar are expensive, intermittent, unreliable, and available only 15–30% of the time, on an annual basis. Wind and solar electricity is there when it’s there, not necessarily when you need it.
In truth, about the only thing solar and wind companies do well is collect billions of dollars in subsidies from taxpayers and billions of dollars in much higher electricity rates from consumers. And when you look at the overall picture, solar and wind power generation is far worse than this. ...to continue reading (and links to sources): http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-06/more-solar-jobs-curse-not-blessing
More to the point, it aids the farm lobby, which, in a rarely photographed mating ritual, causes three-way co-recursive "backscratching" between farmers, lobbyists, and congress people. The bastard sproggs of this unholy activity include higher food prices, higher energy prices, bad land management, never dis-elected congress people, and extra congressional aids to keep track on ledgers of who is doing what to whom and how good it feels.
The problem is largely one of engine design. Most cars sold in the US are fairly low compression. Under those conditions, the burning ethanol just adds heat, no real power.
In a high compression engine, especially with a turbo is where ethanol works well. Australia sells a fuel mix that's 85% ethanol which is really popular with performance car owners as you get a lot more power from the same engine.
It depends. Corn ethanol is dumb. Sugar cane ethanol make sense, but that wouldn't help US farmers.
I suspect that solar power advocates don't like to talk about the cost of the solar watt-hour because if they did that then the charts would not look so great.
Utility-scale solar power is now selling for less than three cents per kWh. So that would be less than $.00003 per watt-hour.
This compares favorably to coal and other forms of traditional power generation.
My suspicion is that when you think about solar power, you are thinking only about residential rooftop solar power, which is indeed more expensive to due lack of economies of scale. That would be an error, since utility-scale solar power is where the advances in cost-effectiveness are occurring.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.