Stephen Lacey wrote for Climate Progress 12 Feb 2012,
More than 68% of New European Electricity Capacity Came From Wind and Solar in 2011,
That’s almost a 10-fold increase over deployment in 2000, when only 3.5 GW of renewable energy projects were installed. Last year, 32 GW of renewables — mostly wind and solar — were deployed across European countries.If Europe can change its energy strategy that quickly, so can we.
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PS: Owed to William House.
The new units turn in winds of as little as eight miles an hour, and provide alternating current to operate readily-available household appliances.Hm, we often have 8 MPH winds even in south Georgia….
Here’s the video:
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PS: Owed to Scout Smith.
Matthew McDermott wrote for Treehugger 6 January 2011, Over Half of Germany’s Renewable Energy Owned By Citizens & Farmers, Not Utility Companies
Germany’s promotion of renewable energy rightly gets singled out forNot only is that more distributed, but it also may be a faster way to get solar deployed:its effectiveness, most often by me as an example of how to do things well versus the fits and starts method of promotion common in the US. Over at Wind-Works, Paul Gipe points out another interesting facet of the German renewable energy saga: 51% of all renewable energy in Germany is owned by individual citizens or farms, totaling $100 billion worth of private investment in clean energy.
Breaking that down into solar power and wind power, 50% of Germany’s solar PV is owned by individuals and farms, while 54% of its wind power is held by the same groups.
In total there’s roughly 17 GW of solar PV installed in Germany—versus roughly 3.6 GW in the US (based on SEIA’s figures for new installations though the third quarter of 2011 plus the 2.6 GW installed going into the year).Nothing prevents Georgia Power or Colquitt Electric or any of the other power companies operating in Georgia from leading the solar pack. For example, power companies concerned that solar doesn’t produce at night could still deploy solar peak load generation, thus dispensing with natural gas peak load generation.Remember, Germany now produces slightly over 20% of all its electricity from renewable sources.
While the power companies are not leading, private organizations such as Tabby Solar, founded by a pair of doctors, are forging ahead anyway.
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Elizabeth Shogren wrote for NPR today,
EPA To Unveil Stricter Rules For Power Plants.
She described new rules for coal plants EPA is going to release in the next
few weeks, including controls on mercury, “arsenic, acid gases and other pollutants.”
Southern Company doesn’t like that.
“It’s physically impossible to build the controls, the generation, theOther power companies see no problem: Continue readingtransmission and the pipelines needed in three years,” says Anthony Topazi, chief operating officer for Southern Company, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses in the Southeast.
Topazi says electricity rates will go up, putting marginal companies out of business. He says unless his company gets six years, it will not be able to keep the lights on.
“We will experience rolling blackouts or rationing power if we don’t have simply the time to comply,” Topazi says.
First Solar Inc. is selling one of its large California solar farms toThat’s more evidence there is private financing available for solar power.MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., ending the solar-panel maker’s search for a buyer.
The sale places MidAmerican Energy, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in the solar-power business for the first time. MidAmerican operates fleets of wind farms and conventional power plants.
The companies didn’t disclose terms of the deal Wednesday, but said the Topaz solar-power plant, in San Luis Obispo County, is worth more than $2 billion.
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PS: Owed to Harry DeLano.
Power utilities don’t like to reveal data about their energy sources or sales any more than Internet organizations like to reveal security problems. The key to REPS is the reporting it requires:
This is called the Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) Tracking System. It provides the data to see which utilities are providing how much of which kind of energy.“Beginning in 2009, each power supplier is required to file a compliance report, detailing the actions it has taken to fulfill the requirements of the REPS.”
According to Ivan Urlaub of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA), REC reporting enabled the solar industry in North Carolina:
Not only is North Carolina now one of the national leaders in solar energy, but 91% of NC voters want more solar power, with wind second, and everything else far behind.“The passage of the REPS law in 2007 and resulting success of the North Carolina’s clean energy market has created the rapid start-ups and expansions of clean energy businesses from installers to developers to manufacturers and the associated service sectors over the last few years.”
REC enabled not only a renewable energy industry, but also selection within that industry for what works.
How did this happen? Continue reading
Cobb EMC wants to build a coal plant in Ben Hill County,
about as far from here as the smoke blows as the Okefenokee Swamp.
They’ve run into some resistance at the polls.
Tod Rehm wrote for Peach Pundit 12 November 2011, CobbEMC Owners Association 3 for 4 with one runoff in board elections
TheHm, 4 to 1 odds! That reminds me of another recent election. Apparently when the people get organized fat cats can lose big. Cobb EMC’s incumbents already lost a special election back in September, that one about mail-in voting.CobbEMC Owners Association, a group of customers dedicated to the reform of the EMC’s Board of Directors has made great steps in returning control of the utility to its customers. CEOA-endorsed candidates took three out of four seats today, with the fourth candidate narrowly missing a majority with 49.47% of votes cast.
Only 1.3% of eligible customers voted, with 2471 votes being cast. Winners were:
Area 1, Ed Crowell 79%
Area 6, David Tennant 68%
Area 10, Cheryl Meadows 80%
About the Cobb EMC runoff, Kim Isaza wrote for MDJonline.com today, EMC members elect 3 new directors; Area 7 goes to runoff Continue reading
Among regions, the South has the largest number of clean economy jobs though the West has the largest share relative to its population. Seven of the 21 states with at least 50,000 clean economy jobs are in the South. Among states, California has the highest number of clean jobs but Alaska and Oregon have the most per worker.
A per-county map is included, on which you can see North Carolina
and Atlanta, but nothing in south Georgia.
Let’s put Lowndes County on the clean energy map!
The gigaom article recommends:
To help boost the clean energy economy even more, the Brookings report suggests that Congress could pass a national clean energy standard, put a price on carbon, use the government as a chief customer of cleantech goods (Obama has been strong on this), find more ways to help proven clean technologies pass the so-called Valley of Death, as well as increase funding for basic science and early-stage high risk projects (like the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program).
That’s good stuff, but we don’t have to wait for the feds.
The
Wiregrass Solar plant
sets a precedent that we can build on.
That plant is readily
expandable to an additional megawatt.
It can also be used to attract financing for other projects,
projects that can use local labor, for example
solar electricity and hot water like the example in Quitman.
Lots of places have forged ahead into real clean energy on their own, such as Birmingham, England and San Antonio.
Sure, we’re not nearly as big as those places, or so local “leaders” remind me. So let’s find some projects of our scale that we can do, and let’s do them! A real leader might say, as Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio did, that renewable energy is
That opportunity is right here in south Georgia, waiting for us to seize it.“…the nexus between sustainability and job creation. Every now and then, perhaps once in a generation, there presents itself a moment, an opportunity, for those cities that are willing to seize it, to truly benefit the region for generations to come.”
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Katie Fehrenbacher wrote 12 July 2011 for gigaom, The clean economy employs more workers than fossil fuels,
Qualified because Brookings includes not only wastewater and mass transit (good stuff, albeit a bit odd fit) but also biomass (ick).The green technology and clean power industries are currently employing more workers than their dirty fossil fuel peers. That’s according to a report released from the Brookings Institution, which has crunched the numbers of jobs created in the U.S. by sectors like solar, wind, waste water recycling, public transportation and energy efficiency retrofits.
However, even during the recession,
…newer clean economy establishments— especially those in young energy-related segments such as wind energy, solar PV, and smart grid—added jobs at a torrid pace, albeit from small bases.
Not just jobs, but good-paying jobs:
The clean economy offers more opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole. Median wages in the clean economy—meaning those in the middle of the distribution—are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages. Yet a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.
Yeah, but what does that mean to us? See next post.
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Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain? by Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany, Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University, Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research. That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south, with much more sun.
Let’s cut to the chase:
The sun supplies solar power when you need it: at the same time the sun drives heat waves.The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010 and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time: the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August 2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8 billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500 MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et al., 1997).
In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand, is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential of nearly 375 GW in the US.
The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies: Continue reading