Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Powered by solar panels and biomass, microgrids are spreading slowly across India, where 300 million people live without electricity. But can these off-grid technologies be scaled-up to bring low-carbon power to tens of millions of people?
…there were some major developments this week at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that are critically important to solar and renewable energy.
It’ll soon take just one day to get a solar permit in Chicago, thanks to a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Solar power is here, and it isn’t just environmentalists saying it anymore.
Following on my recent post bidding Farewell to The Oil Drum, I’d like to have a look at what I view as our longer term future for energy production and consumption.
The team’s dream was to build a solar-powered house that could not only compete with the most cutting-edge technologies out there, but was actually affordable and something ordinary people would want to live in.
To what degree is it necessary, possible or desirable to rely on a massive, state, national or global-scale infrastructure build-out to save us from climate catastrophe and energy depletion?
The world installed 31,100 megawatts of solar photovoltaics (PV) in 2012—an all-time annual high that pushed global PV capacity above 100,000 megawatts.
This week John Farrell and Wade Underwood talk with Paul Spencer, President and founder of the Clean Energy Collective (CEC) in Carbondale, CO.
A person might wonder how images of a bunch of mirrors in a desert would yield beautiful – and important – photography. Welcome to the work of Jamey Stillings. In January 2013, our friends at the Forward Thinking Museum launched a gorgeous permanent online exhibit of Jamey Stilling’s images of the ongoing construction of the Ivanpah Solar project in the Mojave Desert.
U.S. businesswoman Katherine Lucey is working with a network of women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa to sell inexpensive, household solar energy systems. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Lucey explains how solar electricity can transform lives, particularly those of rural women and girls.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of solar and wind power is their intermittency. In locations like Hawaii, where I live, wind and solar power are already competitive on price. My fossil-fuel supplied electricity typically costs above 40 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind and solar power can compete with that. But since they can’t supply power that is available on demand (firm power) they must be backed up by power sources that can provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
