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A decade ago, Google came out with its RE<C initiative. That formula: Renewable Energy less than Coal In short, an announced plan to invest to spark innovation and deployment of clean energy systems that would be less expensive than coal in traditional economic terms — without requiring inclusion of the substantial externality costs from exploiting […]

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200 gigawatts of solar… Wow … Saudi Arabia and Softbank have signed a memorandum of agreement to pursue 200 gigawatts of new solar projects in Saudi Arabia over the next 10 years in what could amount to a $200 billion deal. For a little perspective, that 200 gigawatts is more solar than existed worldwide in […]

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For years, going solar and/or buying wind came at a financial cost in most situations. Putting aside off-grid or unreliable grid situations, people ‘went solar’ because they saw it as the right thing to do even if those electrons would end up costing them more. Solar installations were so expensive that the invariable advice, from […]

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Telecommunications firm Switch just announced plans for the largest U.S. solar installation: a gigawatt solar farm in Nevada. Not only will, with this attention capturing number, this Gigawatt installation be twice the largest existing US solar facility, the Switch Gigawatt project will deliver electricity to consumers at very low prices: Customers will pay $0.049/kWh, an […]

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The latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook has been released and one’s hope, on first glance, is that this forecast is just as off as so much of energy forecasting has been because, if this is accurate, the simplest summary of this might be: The United States and humanity is EFFed when it […]

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While many reasons exist for this, a simple reality: every single major forecasting institution (both public and private) has consistently, since roughly the turn of the century, under forecast future progress in solar and wind energy. (See after fold for a sampling of the literature on this.) Forecasts have consistently (and often quite significantly) projected […]

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For decades, those advocating for a clean-energy revolution had to advocate for better analysis and calculations to demonstrate that going clean (solar, wind, efficiency) was the better, smarter choice.  Traditional financial structures and analysis favors dirty solutions: emphasizing upfront (rather than life-cycle costs), discounting heavily future benefits, stove-piping analysis without considering systems implications, discounting (typically […]

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Writ large, there is relatively small overlap between “budget hawks” and “climate hawks”.  Yet, as highlighted in a just released Oil Change International (OCI) report, there is reason for the two to find common ground (beyond a carbon fee/tax). OCI identified $20B in Subsidies … where the government gives financial incentives to artificially lower the […]

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Scenes of the Cajun Navy, CNN rescues, Waffle House and other businesses acting decently to great, and basic human decency (even heroism) seem to dominate ‘the’ story as to helping Houstonians amid and after Hurricane Harvey’s (still probably inconceivable for all of us who were under its) 50 inches of rain. AJ+  ?@ajplus As emergency […]

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The decades-long stark separation of ‘transportation’ and ‘stationary’ energy markets is breaking down in multiple ways. While one of the prime ways is transportation electrification (rail and automotive), there has been significant growth in the use of liquid fuels for electricity generation: primarily in oil producing nations but also areas with inadequate to non-existent electricity […]

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