Power Is In Our Hands: What you can do to promote distributed generation of solar electricity
Posted In economics & Industrial solar & public lands issues & rooftop solar & subsidies & transmission | By Janine Blaeloch
Pass this information along to your friends and networks, so we can get our message spread far and wide and get renewable energy policy turned toward a real solution to the climate crisis.
Federal Government Betting On The Wrong Solar Horse
Posted In economics & Industrial solar & public lands issues & rooftop solar & subsidies & transmission | By Bill Powers
The United States is wasting billions of dollars of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) cash grants and loan guarantees on very large, high-cost, high-environmental-impact, transmission-dependent desert solar thermal power plants that will be obsolete before they generate a single kilowatt-hour of electricity.
A solar strategy that would have been stateof-the-art in the 1990s, prior to the advent of low-cost solar photovoltaic (PV) power, is now being executed. This is a victory for the broad government, utility, and environmental organization support that solar thermal technology has gained over the last few decades. It is also a victory for the lobbying power of this coalition over economic common sense. Solar thermal has lost the cost-effectiveness race to solar PV. The federal government has not yet absorbed the significance of this important development.
[First published in the National Gas And Electric Journal. Reprinted with permission of the author.]