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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.
Going to make an amazing difference to the marginal price of other fuels used for power generation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Get ready for federal 'tweaking' to prevent further renewable growth. Time to tax renewables so that coal can be competitive again. Now that renewables are seriously starting to cut into market share, special interests are going to pull out all the stops to make sure nothing changes.
Turns out a lot of this wind power is coming from "red" states, like Kansas for example. From the nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... "Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative state. Yet by the time the law was scrapped, it had become largely irrelevant. Kansas blew past that 20 percent target in 2014, and last year generated more than 30 percent of its power from wind. The state may be the first in the country to hit 50 percent wind generation in a year or two, unless Iowa gets there first. Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election."
Solar and wind sound great until you eliminate the subsidies. Take away those subsidies and they become far more expensive. Once that happens, nobody will want to pay the extra costs and renewables will decline again. Like everything with the climate change agenda, it's a house of cards built on deception and lies.
Fresh meat! Give me a list of the energy sources that do not get subsidized.
Oil - yes, Gas yes, Nuclear? Bitch, please.
Come back and make your argument when the only energy source left that is getting any form of subsidy is alternative.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
subsidies are everywhere, in I.T. and textiles and food and vehicles
Gasohol/Ethanol is among the dumber ideas for reducing our dependence on crude oil - the more ethanol you add to gasoline, the lower the MPG the car gets compared to 100% gasoline. Then there is the energy burned growing and harvesting the corn, processing the corn, transporting the additive, and then blending in the additive to create Ethanol.
The ONLY reason ethanol is a thing is because politicians forced it on the American consumer - it serves no other purpose than to further the goals of the politicians that keep it in place.
Ken
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.
The real cost of solar is in storage. But for peak usage during the day to prevent having to fire up more generators it's perfect. I saw one installation where they used excess solar electricity to pump water uphill to a reservoir. At night they used the water to run through a dynamo to recover the electricity. An interesting concept, using gravity to store power.
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.
I want to see the economics of this so I can judge the validity of this as a future energy source.
Renewable adoption of the world at large is not actually up to you, so your demand seems more than a bit empty. But if you really want to know the answer, Google is your friend.
Sadly, I expect you'll use your findings like a drunk uses a lamp post -- for support, rather than illumination.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It's true. Round here there was an error once and they added too much alcohol. It made the cars go backwards.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wind and solar have already become cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. Renewables have already won.
They also use it to melt salt and then extract the heat as electricity when needed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I tested in my car (we have pure gasoline stations in Texas) and I got 12 more mileage from pure gasoline than I did from "up to 10%" ethanol. That would indicate that in some cars, the ethanol is worse than a neutral filler.
Government sites estimate it should have been a 6-7% loss of mileage.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon.
That's nice but I asked about the price per watt-hour. That claim on the dropping cost per watt means nothing since so many things can affect the price of solar energy other than the price of the panels alone.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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
Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal even without subsidies. (its called technology) Yes solar plants produce energy 24/7. Wind is very reliable. Guess what ignorant one? The wind is always blowing. That's how weather works.
We get more electricity from Solar than from Oil. We get more electricity from Natural Gas than from Coal.
Solar capacity is doubling every few years. Wind capacity is doubling every 4-5 years.
Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal even without subsidies.
[citation needed]
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
http://solar-power-now.com/cos... might help you out
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
pretty much most of the solar jobs are infrastructure. why not include all the infrastructure jobs for the others as well. Is that one coal miner with a shovel or a huge digging machine that needs maintenance from a digger manufacturer who has to build the digger in the first place?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Also look up the growth curve in solar installs.
Whatever. It's easy to double the installs year over year when it can't make even 2% of total output. Also, how long can this last? It's easy to cover up for solar power shortfalls when it can't make even 2% of total output. If all that solar power capacity disappeared tonight would anyone care? I'm pretty sure they don't because it disappears every night.
Solar thermal.
But how much does that cost? Not only does it have to be available 24 hours a day but it has to be cheaper than what we already use. I don't mean cost of installed capacity because that means next to nothing. I want to know how much it costs per watt-hour because that's what people really care about.
Do you think that solar thermal would be cheaper than, for example, nuclear? I'm certain solar thermal could ever be as "green", cheap, and reliable as nuclear. If solar thermal can't beat nuclear on carbon footprint and price then shouldn't we go with nuclear instead?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
You can buy solar panels in Phoenix for under $0.25/Wp retail. Averaged out over a year, this is less expensive than hydropower. Of course that only covers the solar panel and ignores the other power electronics that most people will want, still the remaining cost of solar is about $0.75/Wp which gives you a 100% payback period of less than five years (in Phoenix). And the system will last 30 years with about $100/year ($8/month) maintenance amortized cost.
Where does this subsidies rumor keep coming from? Yes the subsidies may have been the deciding factor at first, but they did their job and drove down costs as the new technologies gained wider adoption. It's been years now since then. Here, the Energy Information Administration publishes an annual forecast on the costs of different sources of energy. You can see that the cost ($/MWh) before subsidies is lower for onshore wind than anything save geothermal and basically tied with natural gas (but only natural gas plants which do not capture carbon emissions). And the cost for photovoltaic solar before subsidies is just above that, more expensive than hydroelectric but still cheaper than nuclear, biomass, etc.
There's some variation there depending on how you measure, you can see there are multiple charts, but in none of those are solar or wind dependent on subsidies to be more cost effective than most of their competition.
Coal gets subsidies as does natural gas....so what's your point? Go back to dirty coal instead of renewables?
In AZ, solar is currently cheaper than hydro averaged over 4-5 years including cost of money.
Oh wait. Yes it does.
I did a very detailed solar analysis as part of my EE degree. Sadly, I no longer have it, but some highlights - Phoenix gets ~2500hours of solar radiation/year for a fixed mount panel (tracking panels will produce more, but the cost is higher than the extra energy they will yield). That means for every 1wp capability you have, you will harvest 2.5kwh of energy/year. At $0.10/kwh, that is 25 cents of electricity per year. Solar panels are currently selling for less than 25c/Wp.
Wind and solar have already become cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. Renewables have already won.
Then why are we seeing things like this?
We see it because wind energy is so cheap they can't make a profit, and cover depreciation and replacement costs at he same time!
In short renewable energy isn't economically sustainable.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
USA really needs to improve that... Here in Portugal, annual wind power supply is already above 50%, with some months reaching 80-90%. Solar should be a little less than 10%
In the beginning, green energy was more expensive (so i needed subsidies to startup the market), but now its the same price as fossil energy and we do not any subsidies anymore.
Higuita
yep, it is easy to compare the already establish coal and fuel industry, with all the required equipment, jobs and know-how against the wind and solar, where you do not have anything or weak industry... that is why you get subsidies for green energy, you need to create the basic market, industry and known-how... to reduce the CO2 emissions, we all can not wait for years for the market to slowly emerge
Higuita
The biggest US "subsidy" to oil companies is not something that I, or many others, consider to be a subsidy.
The US government, in it's ever diligent attempt to grab every cent, declares that you cannot depreciate the full value of an item on purchase so they estimate the life of the object and have you depreciate it over that time. The rational way would be full depreciation on purchase and then pay taxes on the sale. But, that's not the way it works.
This is especially horrible on capital intensive projects such as building oil rigs and refineries. So, the US government created "accelerated depreciation". It's still bad, only not as bad.
I, for one, do NOT consider accelerated depreciation to be a subsidy. In fact I consider it disingenuous to do so.
I am a big proponent of alternative energy. I have no love for the oil companies. I would love to see fossil fuels become a thing of past, along with horse shoes.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I heat my house with wood you insensitive clod!
love is just extroverted narcissism
what? Here in Portugal we already have a annual 50% wind based energy and increasing each year ... i would say it scales.
We do store energy during the night by pumping water in dams... even if you lose 50% of energy doing that, it is 50% more energy to be used later. What you need is a good energy distribution system, that is what needs to scale.
Also, (for now) you still need fallback to coal, gas or fuel, do not try to imagine a 100% green energy right now, that will take many years.. but to reach the end of a long journey, you need to take the first steps
Higuita
It depends. Corn ethanol is dumb. Sugar cane ethanol make sense, but that wouldn't help US farmers.
Well, do you eliminate all the various ways the governments of the world subsidize fossil fuels? I'm not just talking about allowing oil companies to externalize their environmental costs, I'm talking cash, like the 21 billion dollars in tax breaks the US gives oil companies to encourage domestic exploration and production.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No that Wind and Solar is 10% generated, so solar is 2% * 15% = 0.3% of the Total US energy Consumption
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
simply... fox news and oil lobbies
Higuita
ethanol taken from corn is stupid, i agree... but cars tuned for ethanol works just fine... just look to Brazil
even if in ethanol you may get less "MPG", it have a lower cost... you need to compare $PG and CO2PG
looking only to the MPG, nuclear have a much higher MPG!! :D
Higuita
So Big Oil isn't just wallowing in depreciation allowances. And I could be wrong about horse shoes; I didn't check.
Which third party?
No. We don't do that for any business anywhere. That's a false flag.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
The subsidies nonhydro renewable energy receives account for about 2 of the 10 cents per kWh while all other forms account for fractions of a penny. That's the problem, renewable subsidies are significantly higher then the profits, they would literally be loosing money if not for subsidies.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Depends on the ECU. The vehicle I have senses how much booze is in the gas tank, and adjusts mixture accordingly. It is happy up to E-85, and with E-85, it will add a few (5-10) horsepower... but the overall MPG loss (because alcohol doesn't have the energy density per gallon as gasoline) makes it not worth the bother.
I find it funny watching the soccer moms fight over the E-85 pump when their vehicles are not Flex-Fuel rated, though.
What a load of crap. Oil is subsidized even more, and you pay for that with increased taxes AND increased healthcare costs AND increased military costs. Kickstarting solar/wind is a smart long term thinking solution. Oil is on the long downward slope now. And the NDP was not killed by bad policies but by big banks and corporations who stood to lose when the gov't put people first, rather than corporations.
... they forget the much worse stuff, mercury, lead, cadmium and other neurotoxic stuff. Especially mercury.
Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
(Or at least until the planet falls into a sun or black hole, or perhaps near the heat-death if it turns out protons DO decay. By which point, of course, it won't matter that it wasn't really forever.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So for example, if corn farmers exclusively used solar and wind powered electric tractors, and didn't dump fertilizers on that have a fossil-fuel intensive production process, then maybe corn ethanol would also make sense. But that doesn't happen, so it doesn't make sense.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'll have to check CEI. I respect them. They do good analysis.
I don't usually consider foreign tax credit as a subsidy and I need to look into the others you mentioned such as the definition of non-conventional fuels. (Is that a subsidy for non-carbon based fuels?)
We were talking about tax breaks for energy types (carbon v non-carbon) not companies. (If Exxon gets one of the tax breaks for developing a wind farm it's still a subsidy for alt-energy even though it's going to Exxon.)
As far as 3rd Party. I'm a libertarian so if you think you own your own body, in favor of freedom of speech and in think that individual freedom is a foremost priority then I would persuade you to vote libertarian. If freedom is less important than equality of outcome then vote Green or Socialist. Regardless it's time to end the two party system. Now, in practice, there would coalitions, but that's fine. It's the nature of things.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Storage solutions would benefit the entire provider market, and the cost of any program to boost that sector should be attributed fairly. They and other grid improvements aren't as sexy as panels and windmills, so they don't attract as much serious investment.
Also, where is this vaunted "invisible hand of the free market" that's supposed to make companies that schedule their industrial power consumption to match when electricity is cheaper do better and thus grow to dominate the market?
Someone had to do it.
Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
I was under the impression that radioactives were heavy metals. They're heavy and metallic, do they not qualify?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That should have said 12% more mileage.
I average 265 miles long term with a max of 268. I tested twice and got 300 and 305 miles.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
No, I'm thinking of issues with reliability and transmission. Your citations even point out that the costs of storage and transmission was not part of the cost computations. If solar is going to grow beyond irrelevancy then it needs to have storage to deal with night time. That costs money.
If some unit of nuclear energy costs $5 and that same unit of solar energy costs $4 then nuclear still wins because no where are you going to find storage through the night for $1. For solar to compete we'd have to see $1 for that unit of energy, for a doubling of capacity we'd see another $1 since the sun will not shine for more than 12 hours per day, $1 for the storage through the night, and another $1 to account for the additional transmission lines to account for clouds here and there. That is over simplified round numbers math but I hope it makes the point.
Advancements in storage and transmission costs alone cannot save solar because those advancements can be applied to wind, nuclear, coal, or whatever too. If we can store energy for $1 then we'll use cheap coal and nuclear at $5 so we don't have to use gas turbines at $8 per energy unit for peak loads. If we can ship noontime solar energy from the east cost to the west coast for $1 then we can ship nighttime nuclear energy from the east coast to the west coast for $1.
The error in claiming solar is cheaper than coal is not taking storage and transmission costs into account. This can be ignored so long as solar is less than something like 10% since that is well within natural daily and seasonal variations. For it to get to something like 30% then these costs start to become very important because now that means building more infrastructure that we would not need with reliable energy like nuclear, coal, and natural gas.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The subsidies nonhydro renewable energy receives account for about 2 of the 10 cents per kWh while all other forms account for fractions of a penny. That's the problem, renewable subsidies are significantly higher then the profits, they would literally be loosing money if not for subsidies.
So anyhow, here is the question. Actually a couple. Are the non renewable energy sources going to last forever? Or if they aren't, we just fold up the tents and kill ourselves?
As well, should the US go to the concept of - if it doesn't work from the very beginning, doesn't spring like Venus from the ocean, fully formed, it must not be done? Not everything works right from the beginning, and susidies have allways been used, either through regular or th eultimate technology driver, total war.
In other words, allow the rest of the world to subsidize promising technology, and only adopt them after they are fully realized and in practice, which means no subsidies at all for anything, and America ceding technological leadership to the rest of the world.
Sounds like the USA's path to becoming a third world nation. Let China build the solar panels and energy efficient products, and the people in the US who can afford them can buy them, and be grateful that someone else is doing the hard work.
I know that it doesn't fit in with the marriage of fossil fuel interests and free market libertarians, but there is definitely a place for Government to encourage promising energy technologies. Because whether direct, or University driven research on all forms of energy generation, it's subsidies all the way down.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That, and thanks to Obama, eliminating coal fire powered plants making up the difference.
The infrastructure for gen/load time gaps is indeed real. However, you may want to compare that infrastructure to oil, gas and nuclear infrastructure for storage and waste disposal / containment. When a municipality builds a battery bank, it is hooked to the general market. Thus, they can buy off -peak power and begin to normalize the competition.
This cascades into prices for renewable power going up, increasing the investment returns per field. Some companies will spend more for "exploration" in wind & solar areas than others, sure. But these compete much the same as oil, coal & gas contractors - with one exception: Once a field is developed, it's performance graphs are highly predictable, and processing costs are negligible (vs carbon refinement/transportation/waste)
I'd also like to mention that the per-unit service of these solar and wind fields is more like per-well or per-mine, skipping the per-generator intermediate. Essentially, we're removing a point of inefficiency in the distribution. This also allows new transmission paths - which is a huge sticking point across the market regardless. Each field has a tie-in to the grid, but also services localized areas. Essentially, we're benefiting from solar & wind fields being more distributed than wells/mines.
Lastly, servicing the nighttime battery banks is also highly distributed - from muni all the way to per-home. You'd possibly be surprised to find that one can easily heat a home overnight from a battery bank with a moderate investment. This is going to make the future of "outages" in neighborhoods more like what we have in data centers: a slower ramp-down and homeowner conservation strategies for getting thru outages: Skip the hot water but keep the fridge cool. This is already the case for phones, laptops, routers and most mobile light sources (headlamps).
Essentially the future looks like tiers of electrochemical power storage and consumption, with delivery times being unimportant. From this viewpoint, renewables are an obvious choice; nobody will want to deal with the mess of mines, wells, rods and all their trucks and waste. I say this completely apolitically - nobody really gives a hoot what party supports what. The system is vastly more efficient, even if not flawless: Battery tech will continue to march forward and transmission continues to be a headache.
> (tracking panels will produce more, but the cost is higher than the extra energy they will yield
That's no longer true for utility installations, where a single tracker moves a whole row of panels. The daily power output goes up 30%, while the installed cost only goes up 10%, so it is a net win.
Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels. These currently supply about 10% of US electricity, and nuclear supplies about 20%. There is no reason for them to stop. Electric cars will supply additional storage once they exist in larger numbers.
The US consumes about 4,000 GWh per night in total. That would be 60 million Tesla automobile's worth of capacity. Since we have other sources of night-time power, millions of electric cars would make a significant contribution.
Solar and wind sound great until you eliminate the subsidies. Take away those subsidies and they become far more expensive. Once that happens, nobody will want to pay the extra costs and renewables will decline again. Like everything with the climate change agenda, it's a house of cards built on deception and lies.
Fresh meat! Give me a list of the energy sources that do not get subsidized.
Oil - yes, Gas yes, Nuclear? Bitch, please.
Come back and make your argument when the only energy source left that is getting any form of subsidy is alternative.
So tired of this ignorant argument. Check the EIA website. In their latest report (2013) Coal, gas, and nuclear combined received less than $200 million in direct expenditures, Renewables received $8,363 million in direct expenditures. Pretty big difference.
You're probably looking at the tax expenditures column, which means tax breaks for asset depreciation, not spending. In any case, the tally for tax expenditures reaches $5,453 million for renewables and $4,128 for everything else combined (the everything else produces the vast majority of our energy and is a bargain compared to solar).
Please read this and get back to us: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/r...
This is in no way intended to diminish the undeniable fact that solar and wind are really great for a variety of reasons, but if you think nuclear and fossil fuels are subsidized anywhere near as much as renewables you are deluded.
Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels.
I know that the grid has lots of storage, it's called nuclear, coal, and natural gas. The energy is stored in the fuel they use.
Since we have other sources of night-time power, millions of electric cars would make a significant contribution.
Are you saying that the grid would be so unreliable that people would have to run their houses off the batteries in their cars? Or, are you saying that the grid would be so unreliable that people would have to buy a battery pack for their house in addition to the one in their car? If people have a choice between an electric car and a non-electric car in this world then why would they choose the electric car?
I lived on a farm and electricity is vital. We needed it to pump our water, keep the animals warm and dry, and so on. We deal with this by having a generator on the farm and diesel fueled tractors to run it. If the power was out then we'd have a tractor run the generator for the well pump and some lights and another tractor to mill corn instead of the electric mill. You think that people would buy an expensive battery pack instead of using cheap diesel fuel and natural gas to generate that electricity? It's possible that batteries could get very cheap but nothing compares to hydrocarbons in their ability to store and transport energy, and that translates to costs.
We kept fuel tanks on the farm, one with diesel for the tractors and another with gasoline for the car and truck. If electricity is so unreliable that people have to run their house on the batteries in their cars then why would they buy an electric car? What are they supposed to do if the power does not come back in the morning because of a storm or something and they need to drive to work? Or, school? Or, the hospital?
What you describe is a world in such poverty that they must often choose between driving and keeping the lights on in their home. I don't want to live in that world.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Some are, some aren't. (Elemental tritium, for instance, is a VERY light gas.)
They nearly always change what atom they are when they decay. (Exception being those, such as tecnetium-99m, where the nucleus is in an excited state and decays to a non-excited state by emitting a gamma - though it then becomes tecnetium-99 which eventually decays further.)
Some decay processes make heavy atoms lighter - e.g. by emitting alpha particles or by spontaneous fission.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
thanks, good to know. For me,overall installation hardware (non-professional) was under $0.10/watt. About $120 /2kw. I'm getting ready to install 6.5 more kw for ~$2000.
Our recently installed solar panels seem to now be struggling to get sun!
Perhaps we now need to push for climate change remediation, as more and more cloudy days are affecting our production!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.