Tag Archives: capacity

Wind and Solar 77% of New U.S. electricity generation in November 2014

And more new capacity year to date than natural gas in 2014,
according to FERC’s own numbers, despite FERC betting on the wrong horse.

Joshua S. Hill, CleanTechnica, 23 November 2014,

Wind & Solar = 77% Of New US Electricity Generating Capacity In November (Exclusive),

The United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC)
Office of Energy Projects released its monthly “Energy
Infrastructure Update” on Tuesday, and the big winners from
the month of November seem to be wind and solar, which combined
added up to over 70% of all new electrical generating capacity
placed into service during the month. If you add in our estimate for
non-utility-scale solar, the market share of solar and wind rises to
77%.

Continue reading →

As predicted U.S. solar capacity grew more than 400% in 4 years

This month’s eia report confirms that solar did exactly what

former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff predicted:
“That’s what is happening in solar. It could double every two years.”
Wellinghoff’s further prediction remains on the money:
“…at its present growth rate, solar will overtake wind in about ten years. It is going to be the dominant player.”
Because of exponential growth like compound interest caused by ever-falling
solar PV costs,

solar will win like the Internet did.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (eia) wrote 22 April 2014,

Solar-electric Generating Capacity Increases Drastically in the Last Four Years,

U.S. solar capacity increased significantly in the last 4 years. In
2010, the total solar capacity was 2,326 MW which accounted for a
comparatively small fraction (0.22%) of the total U.S. electric
generating. capacity. By February 2014, this capacity increased 418%
to 12,057 MW, a 9,731 MW gain, and now accounts for almost 1.13% of
total U.S. capacity. Reported planned solar capacity additions
indicate continued growth

12,057 / 2,326 = 5.18 times, which is more than 2 * 2 = 4,
ergo Wellinghoff was right. Continue reading →

ALEC solar tax

Arizona, Virginia, and

now they’re trying in Georgia:
ALEC wants to tax your solar panels.
ALEC is trying to legislate buggy whip requirements in an age of
affordable electric cars.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Ed Pilkington wrote for the Guardian 4 December 2013,

ALEC calls for penalties on ‘freerider’ homeowners in assault on clean energy,

Documents obtained by the Guardian show the core elements of its
strategy began to take shape at the previous board meeting in
Chicago in August, with meetings of its energy, environment and
agriculture subcommittees.

Further details of Alec’s strategy were provided by John Eick, the
legislative analyst for Alec’s energy, environment and agriculture
program.

Eick told the Guardian the group would be Continue reading →

European utilities scared of renewable energy

Another reason

Southern Company needs to get on with a smart grid,
using its

biggest private R&D outfit in the U.S.
Now that

solar has reached grid parity with everything
including

natural gas
(and years since

it passed nuclear), if the utilities
don’t get out in front, they’re going to be left behind.

Derek Mead wrote for Motherboard yesterday,

European Utilities Say They Can’t Make Money Because There’s Too Much Renewable Energy,

Renewable energy has been on a tear the past few years, with growth in many countries spurred by subsidies for
wind and solar power. Now the heads of 10 European utility companies
say EU subsidies should end, because they've got more renewable
energy than they know what to do with.

The 10 CEOs in question, who refer to themselves as the Magritte
group because they first met in an art gallery, represent companies
that control about half the power capacity of Europe. The group gave
a press conference today—

Reuters says that 10 such executives
giving a joint public statement is “unprecedented”—to hammer
home a message they’ve been trumpeting ahead of an EU energy summit
in 2014: There’s too much energy capacity, which has driven prices
down so far that they can’t make any money.

As long as there are nukes or coal plants, there’s too much capacity.
European utilities need to get on with things like Continue reading →

Solar power will win like the Internet did

Remember BITNET, FidoNet, or UUCP?
Nope, the Internet overtook all of those.
And in 20 years that’s how young people will remember coal and natural gas plants,
although the waste-disposal costs of nukes will be with us for ten thousand years.
Solar power is going to overtake all other power sources within a decade.
Here’s why I think that.

Jerry Grillo quoted me in Georgia Trend July 2013,

Sun Dancing: As Georgia’s solar capacity shoots skyward, a new state utility is proposed,

“Solar power is the fastest-growing industry in the world, and
it’s growing along in the same way the Internet did,” says
John S. Quarterman, a Harvard-educated author and Internet pioneer
who launched the first commercial online newsletter, among other
things, and who lives in rural Lowndes County.

“Think back 20 years to 1993. How many people had heard of the
Internet? And look at how far we’ve come. What I’m seeing with solar
energy is the same kind of exponential growth. It’s clean energy
that works, and it generates jobs.”

Here are 1992 ten-year graphs of Internet
growth from that newsletter, Matrix News,
using Continue reading →

SO’s plan to make the Southeast a net exporter of the energy from solar and wind? –John S. Quarterman @ SO 2013-05-22

SO CEO Tom Fanning didn’t budge from nuclear and coal,
but he did announce a tiger team to get on top of
distributed solar and wind through a smart grid,
headed by SO’s COO,
at the

22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder Meeting.

Mr. John S. Quarterman from Lowndes County, Georgia, and he holds
220 shares of Southern Company.

TF: Hello, John. Good to see you again this year.

jsq: Hi. I’ve come to compliment Tom Fanning and Paul Bowers. Last
year, Tom Fanning was so persuasive I ran out and bought $10,000
worth of stock.

TF: Bless you.
[Applause]

However,
apparently because of

SO’s admission a few minutes before in that same meeting
that it was going to have to eat Kemper Coal cost overruns,

SO stock tanked that same day,
causing my stock to stop out,
and Standard & Poor’s downgraded SO the following day
because of Kemper Coal, noting that if the same thing happened
with SO’s nuclear project at Plant Vogtle, S&P’s would probably Continue reading →

Does SO have a business model for energy conservation? –Dan Everett @ SO 2013-05-22

SO has done a lot about energy efficiency, but can it do more,
and how will it profit by doing so?
Prof. Dan Everett asked this
at the

22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder Meeting.

I have Mr. Dan Everett from Athens, Georgia, and he holds 11 shares of
Southern Company.

TF: Talked to Dan earlier today. Dan is a professor at the University of
Georgia, right?

DE: Right.

He’s
Daniel M. Everett,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UGA Athens.
The SO Annual Stockholders Meeting apparently doesn’t get many professors.

TF: Fantastic. Well, welcome.

DE: Oh, thank you very much. And as a guy who has some professional
interest in this stuff, I totally applaud the research that y’all
are doing on energy technologies and renewable
energies and efficiency technologies because it does take a while to
deploy those.

My specific question is about energy conservation.
I’ve noticed Continue reading →

Interactive charts: U.S. nuclear power reactors (NRC data)

Why are all these “dependable” baseload capacity nukes down so much?

See for yourself in these interactive graphs of

NRC Power Reactor Status.
They’re in Google annotated timeline format,
with all the zoom and pan features used by Google finance for stock charts.
But these

Reactor Status charts show seven years of
daily NRC power percentage data.
Want to see last month, six months, any 7 days, or some other period?
Now you can, for all 104 reactors, including
the ones recently removed by NRC from status because they’ve closed
permanently.

You can view your own local reactors

in any of 20 charts.
Why so many graphs? Google annotated timeline charts apparently were
meant for comparing a few stock prices, and don’t handle more than about
seven curves well.
But you can see things in these graphs that are hard to spot in
NRC’s daily tables.

Example: Southern Nuclear Operating Co., Inc. (Alabama, Georgia)

Continue reading →

The cloudy day doesn’t last for an entire month –John S. Quarterman @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

The disruptive challenge electric utilities face
is like

telephone companies faced years ago, as Edison Electric Institute recently pointed out.
Circuit switching 20 years ago is like distributed solar power and
the smart grid it needs now;
this is what I described
at

the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

Hi, I’m John Quarterman, I’m from Lowndes County, down near the Florida line.
These videos I’ve been taking are with Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange
and you’ll find them on YouTube later.

Now I’d like to commend Georgia Power for helping fund our Industrial Authority
down in Lowndes County to do a strategic plan.
And in the focus groups they did with that, they discovered there’s
at least

two things everybody wants: business, education, health care, the
people in general: Continue reading →

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the

WWALS Watershed Coalition letter
at

the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….

There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more
baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan,
Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water
and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off
the Georgia coast.

You can read

the complete letter.
Here’s

the video:

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS

Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,

Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),

Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),

Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),

244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

-jsq

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange