Get Energy Smart! NOW!

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, […]

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France has decided to accelerate, significantly, its offshore wind program for a very simple reason: offshore wind will provide reliable, low-cost, clean electrons to power the French economy. Just announced, a new offshore wind project that will deliver electricity to the French grid for 44 Euros per megawatt hour (mWh) (e.g., under $US50 per mWh […]

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One of the canards against wind turbines: it will hurt tourism. While my personal perspective, discussions with others, and ample evidence that this is not the case, a just-released analysis of rental activity near a new installation supports the contrary: wind turbines could well foster booming tourism. In analysis of AirBNB activity on Block Island […]

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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 […]

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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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A simple truth is that, when it comes to wind power, size matters. The taller the tower, the better the wind conditions. The larger the blade length, the more energy captured. When it comes to wind, economies of scale are both in the number of turbines getting deployed and in terms of the energy production […]

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This guest post from Martin Smith provides a taste (and, truly, just a taste)  of the things happening around the world, related to clean energy and reducing fossil foolish dependences. If Team Trump would get their minds out of promoting 19th century energy, leveraging knowledge of 20th century energy, and turn to 21st century realities […]

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There is an old adage: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.  With an advocacy piece, with heavy over tones of analysis and citations with reams of numbers, it is hard to work through a series of statistics to understand whether the basic material is truthful or contrived and manipulated to support a preconceived notion.  This poses […]

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Weirdly, while spending many pages detailing how the Energy Information Agency (EIA) failed to predict accurately fossil fuel trends, the report’s authors failed to highlight that the real-world performance of renewable energy (notably wind and solar) has greatly outperformed baseline forecasts. With the President’s call for more solar energy, highlighting that renewables have been doing so well (in price reductions and speed of market penetration) would seem something strongly support of Administration objectives rather than for something to be ignored in a 42-page White House report.

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Another guest post from the very thoughtful BruceMcF. Several points: Key:  If viewed as “portfolio” (and combined with advancing smart grid and storage options as penetration increases), clean energy can phase into replace 100% of the fossil-foolish electricity grid. Second, BruceMcF violates the cardinal law of debunking myths (here):   Don’t lead with the myth because, […]

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