Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico’s power system hard enough that, for awhile, 100% of grid power services were cut off. Not a single utility customer was receiving power from the grid. That bleak reality doesn’t mean that 100 percent of Puerto Ricans (or, well, crypto buds avoiding taxes by residing in Puerto Rico) were without […]

[Read more →]

Five years after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island is dark. Five years after Hurricane Maria and, despite billions spent (hard to write “invested”), the grid is devastated. This did not have to be. It should not have been. Between Trump grandstanding (paper towels anyone?), profiteering and corruption, (racist) indifference, incompetence, misguided thinking and […]

[Read more →]

“What was your solar installation’s ROI?” This was a question recently posed to me packaged with context issues (is solar financially sensible, discussing Chinese panels, solar panel production pollution (without mention of coal’s pollution), and otherwise). When I began to a typically geekish ‘it all depends’, the interjection: no, what was YOUR solar system’s return […]

[Read more →]

In seeking to legislate paths to achieve a “clean economy”, one thing legislators do not lack are substantive and thoughtful roadmaps to look at and leverage. As per a post the other day, For decades, people have been working on and considering how to get Virginia on the path toward a clean energy future. And, […]

[Read more →]

Looking back a decade, solar photovoltaiic (PV) prices were over 20 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh), uncertainty existed as to polysilicon pricing (one of the reasons why Solyndra, potentially, seemed to make sense if silicon prices wouldn’t drop), and the future seemed extremely bright for concentrated solar power (CSP) leveraging solar power for heat to […]

[Read more →]

India’s accelerating moves to a clean energy economy has received inadequate attention at this blog (and, well, in much of the world).  From leveraging plunging solar prices to enable a viable path to eliminating (the lowest level of) energy poverty to trains with solar panels for powering auxiliary demands to significant reductions in projected coal […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

Nuclear power was going to provide electricity ‘too cheap to meter’.  Many around the world, decades ago (many today), viewed peaceful nuclear power as the path forward to, well, solve more or less all the world’s problems.  While nuclear power provides over 10 percent of the world’s electricity, those dreams remained dreams (if not utter […]

[Read more →]