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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.
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 "Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.