U.S. president Jimmy Carter had a dream,
thirty six years before Pope Francis spelled out why we all need to escape a dark hot nightmare,
and Jimmy Carter’s sunny dream is now coming true.
Continue readingToday, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we’re taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
It’s not just us gnats anymore, Southern Company now has yellowflies
giving it the business about converting from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
That’s smart business, since SO
called out solar power in its own 2014 Annual Report
for increased revenues in both 2013 and 2014.
Tomorrow at Callaway Gardens, stockholders including me will vote.
Dave Williams, Atlanta Business Chronicle, 15 May 2015, Southern shareholders to consider ‘green’ vote, Continue reading
The carbon bubble is popping faster than most people imagined,
and renewable sun, wind, and water power is taking over.
Ari Phillips, ThinkProgress, 15 May 2015, It Only Took Four Months For China To Achieve A Jaw-Dropping Reduction In Carbon Emissions,
China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, so small decreases in its emissions seem like monumental feats when compared to other countries. According to a new analysis, in the first four months of 2015, China’s coal use fell almost 8 percent compared to the same period last year — a reduction in emissions that’s approximately equal to the total carbon dioxide emissions of the U.K. over the same period.
The analysis, published by Greenpeace and Energydesk China, reviewed data from a number of sources, including China’s industrial output, and found that China had reduced its coal output by 6.1 percent in the first four months of 2015. The research team calculated that the drop in coal use translates into a nearly 5 percent drop in domestic CO2 emissions.
Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst who worked on the Greenpeace report, told RTCC that the report shows that China’s industrial output and thermal power generation are falling while renewable energy sources like hydro, wind, and solar are growing fast.
Niall McCarthy, Forbes, 12 May 2015, China’s Revolution In Wind Energy [Infographic], Continue reading
Changing the world is hard and takes courage, but that’s why we will win. Bill Sargent had given up on global projects and turned to smaller local problems where it seemed there was a greater change of making a real difference. He wrote for Harvard Heat Week 27 April 2015, Heat Week: Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks,
But then I met Divest Harvard. Here was a group of bright, eager, sleep-deprived young undergraduates and grad students — free of such skepticism and willing to take on both Big Oil and the richest University in the world in one fell swoop.
He listed a number of ways Divest Harvard is winning because they chose the biggest targets under adverse conditions. For example: Continue reading
Not even Al Gore saw that the continually decreasing price of solar power was causing exponential deployment growth that will win within a decade. But now he does. Since solar is going to win, building destructive and hazardous petroleum pipelines for short-term profit for a few executives and investors would be short-sighted at best. Let’s stop those pipelines, LNG export, and fracking, and plug in to sun, wind, and water power for a clean and prosperous future.
Experts predicted in 2000 that wind generated power worldwide would
reach 30 gigawatts; by 2010, it was 200 gigawatts, and by last year it reached nearly 370, or more than 12 times higher. Installations of solar power would add one new gigawatt per year by 2010, predictions in 2002 stated. It turned out to be 17 times that by 2010 and 48 times that amount last year.
And you ain’t seen nothing yet: Continue reading
A Middle East bank says:
Renewables accounted for 57 per cent of global power investment in new generation in the period 2000-2013.
And that’s even with all the legal and financial roadblocks thrown up by entrenched fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The report recommends aligning policy and finance:
To deliver a sustainable energy system for the long term, the financial community and policymakers need to work collaboratively: stimulating and de-risking investment, and developing innovative structures which can support the financing of future energy.
With that collaboration, the Middle East and North Africa could see this kind of energy deployment scenario: Continue reading
Elon Musk’s recent reminder that Tesla is working on a house-sized battery has caused quite a stir, but not enough. Tesla alone isn’t the significant part: Tesla opening a market for inexpensive home solar storage methods is. And not all those methods will be batteries: also coming are capacitors, organic vats, compressed air, and water pumped up towers, for storage to car- and house- size to municipal- and utility-scale, all of which will drive solar and wind deployment even faster.
John McDuling, QZ, 30 July 2014, How solar energy storage could make Tesla much more than an automaker,
How lucrative could the solar energy storage business be for Tesla? Almost as lucrative as selling cars.
That’s according to Morgan Stanley, which this week Continue reading
Let’s stop wasting money on the slide-rule technology of Keystone XL or Sabal Trail: they’re both bad investments, either short-term or long-term.
Andrew Winston wrote for Harvard Business Review 30 January 2015, Why the Keystone Pipeline Is the Wrong U.S. Energy Debate,
In the short run, with oil at $50 per barrel, Keystone will connect refineries to oil that may be unprofitable to extract. In the long run, as the world turns away from fossil fuels aggressively, the pipeline will be moot — a relic of the past.
Either way it’s a poor investment.
What, then? Continue reading
Batteries are just one of many reasons, including electric vehicles, smart grid, solar and wind power (including pass HB 57 and you can profit by getting financing for your own solar panels), plus massive savings on health care and electricity bills; batteries are one of many reasons that fixing climate change will save us all money, clean up our air and water, expand our forests, preserve property rights, and make some people rich:
In fact, a recent report suggests that revenue from the distributed energy storage market — meaning battery packs and other storage devices located directly at homes and businesses (many of which now generate electricity through solar) — could exceed $16.5 billion by 2024. Another report predicts $68 billion in revenue in the same time frame from the grid-scale storage market. This includes large-scale battery packs, hydro-storage systems that use cheap abundant electricity to pump water uphill to drive turbines later on, or even solar thermal systems that store energy as heat in molten salt.
And it’s all happening fast, so fast your jaw will drop if you’re not paying attention. So let’s stop talking about the costs of fixing climate change. It’s not just no-cost and free, not just in the future but right now; we’re all actually going to be better off through fixing climate change: healthier and more prosperous.
Sami Grover wrote Continue reading
Will you bet on the blinkered money-only policies of the current TVA Chair, or the accurate clean solar future predictions of former TVA Chair S. David Friedman?
Seven years ago S. David Friedman wrote:
“As a substitute for oil, coal, and nuclear energy, the sun can replace the three poisons with inexhaustible fuel.”
The former TVA Chairman wrote that in 2007 his boook Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How, which also says (page 4):
There are breakthroughs in new technology that promise to make the cost of solar power as low as that of coal, nuclear, and oil. Almost simultaneously in South Africa and the Silicon Valley in the United States, companies are building huge new solar factories to manufacture a paper-thin solar coating that can generate electricity that could actually lower our electric bills. These breakthroughs promise solar power at 75 percent less than today’s price. Continue reading