Chuck Eaton, Georgia Public Service Commissioner,
moderating a panel of Georgia’s Policy Makers at
Southern Solar Summit
said
Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business.He said that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it. Continue reading
They’ve done it in North Carolina:
Solar is hands down the most popular energy source across NC, across parties, ages, genders, etc. Coal and nuclear are the politically charged energy sources, and neither got a majority. Number 2 was offshore wind with 83% and number 3 was onshore wind with 82% support. Here’s the NCSEA press release. Here’s the survey.91% of voters support using solar power to meet our growing needs for energy and electricity
How did they do this? Continue reading
Nelson Hawk, after an excellent panel presentation at the
Georgia Solar Summit,
repeated the old canard that there’s not much land available for solar in the
southeast.
I couldn’t stand it, and blurted out “parking lots!”
And airports, and road rights of way, and, let me think: rooftops!
Or waste water treatment plants, like
Valdosta just used,
or barns on the north edges of fields, or the acreage
Georgia Power is wasting on nuclear plants, or….
Gretchen Quarterman and Dan Corrie |
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He directly challenged Gov. Deal and the legislature.“Stop talking about what we’re going to do in the future, and start talking about what we’re going to do in 100 days.”
“This is about goodness and light, and sound economics.”
The next speaker (didn’t get his name, sorry) ran through some statistics, including:
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Today, a number of Native tribes, from the Lakota in the Dakotas to the Iroquois Confederacy in New York to the Anishinaabeg in Wisconsin, battle to preserve the environment for those who are yet to come. The next seven generations, the Lakota say, depend upon it.Continue reading“Traditionally, we’re told that as we live in this world, we have to be careful for the next seven generations,” says Loretta Cook. “I don’t want my grandkids to be glowing and say, ‘We have all these bad things happening to us because you didn’t say something about it.’
Part of this family and spiritual obligation to preserve
As Plant Vogtle and others
have just demonstrated,
nuclear power isn’t as reliable as we might have thought.
Mark Z. Jacobson says we can generate reliable power from
wind, water, and sunlight alone.
Will that work in Georgia?
Elsevier’s policy of charging for peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals is controversial, and some people find $19.95 prohibitive to access Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi’s Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials from Energy Policy Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 1154-1169. Fortunately, the same authors wrote an earlier version for Scientific American, 26 October 2009, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here’s how
A new infrastructure must provide energy on demand at least as reliably as the existing infrastructure. WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than traditional sources. The average U.S. coal plant is offline 12.5 percent of the year for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Modern wind turbines have a down time of less than 2 percent on land and less than 5 percent at sea. Photovoltaic systems are also at less than 2 percent. Moreover, when an individual wind, solar or wave device is down, only a small fraction of production is affected; when a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant goes offline, a large chunk of generation is lost.Continue reading
Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame is a long-time environmentalist
who in recent years decided nuclear was necessary.
(He also decided
no-till was necessary, which was enough
to convince me he’s gone barmy.)
Here
at TED
he debates Mark Z. Jacobson,
whose new study says we can
power the world with wind, water, and sun.
I think Jacobson should reconsider including building more hydroelectric dams,
but his study does demonstrate that we don’t need nuclear or biomass.
But watch it and see what you think:
Here is my critique of Brand’s arguments: Continue reading
Studies like this one for Scotland and this one for the whole world.Nuclear power is a gamble we don’t need to take. Studies show that the UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the political will.
And the U.K. is way north of Georgia. Georgia gets a lot more sunlight and has plenty of wind off the coast. All that is lacking here, too, is the political will.
If Atlanta won’t lead, why not Valdosta and Lowndes County?
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Here’s a four page explanation of that table.
Coal is not the cheapest: natural gas is. Onshore wind actually costs about the same as coal, and less than nuclear. Offshore wind is currently about 2.5 times more expensive.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) currently costs a bit more than twice as much as coal, and already less than offshore wind.
The table does not take into account the environmental costs of the various power sources, or obviously coal would fare far worse, and biomass would not be rated anywhere near as good as wind.
Remember, the cost of solar is falling rapidly, so solar will rapidly become more cost-effective compared to other energy sources.
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John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham
write about
Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover:
Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy
Solar photovoltaic system costs have fallen steadily for decades. They are projected to fall even farther over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, projected costs for construction of new nuclear plants have risen steadily over the last decade, and they continue to rise. In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina. Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants. This new development has profound implications for North Carolina’s energy and economic future. Each and every stakeholder in North Carolina’s energy sector — citizens, elected officials, solar power installers and manufacturers, and electric utilities — should recognize this watershed moment.And North Carolina is north of Georgia, so Georgia should have more sun.
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