My long-time colleague Lindsay Oliver writes, Hi Craig; Have you seen this (The Solutions Project) yet? This is more than interesting: Yes, Mark Z. Jacobson (professor at Stanford) is a legend to us renewable energy people.
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Interesting Approach to Hydrokinetics
A reader asked for my comment on this technology: turbines installed inside of municipal water pipes that converts some of that hydrokinetic energy into electricity. First, let’s start with the most obvious: this doesn’t apply to water that is flowing …
Government Subsidies for Renewable Energy Are Needed Now, But Probably Not for Long
Yesterday I made a flippant and slapdash remark to a reader who questions the role of government support for renewable energy, where he was commenting on my piece about “Big Wind.” In my apology, I wrote: I should have taken the …
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Cheap Wind and its Value To Humankind
In the United States, there are now 50,000 wind turbines, generating 70 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, enough to power 19 million homes. The cost of wind-generated electricity is down 66% since 2009. It is now nearly 5% of American electricity, …
Our Energy Policy and the Malthusian Trap
With respect to my recent post on Malthus (pictured), a college professor in Arizona writes: Craig, is there a Malthusian Trap for energy? Do we run out of energy or a habitable environment first? I’m confident that our civilization will turn …
Feasibility of Widespread Concentrated Solar Power
My friend I mentioned earlier writes: I had the plant construction cost at $600 million per square mile. I figured a few hundred billion more for infrastructure improvements like HVDC grid upgrades and storage. It seems the nationwide CSP solution is …
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Powering the Country with Solar: It's Not Going To Happen–But Fortunately, It Doesn't Have To
A friend asks: By your lights, has anything changed substantively – positively or negatively – with regard to the viability and cost of CSP, molten salt energy storage, and HVDC? Are we still fully capable of satisfying the entire US …
Renewable Energy World, Azerbaijan, and the Harsh Truths of Realpolitik
Here’s the note I dictated into my phone this morning when I sat up in bed a few minutes pre-dawn and went through the features stories at RenewableEnergyWorld. I wrote, “This story on Azerbaijan is typical of ‘news coverage’ of things …
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Dubious Market for Small Wind
A reader who claims to have a great improvement in wind-turbine design on a per-kW basis sent me a fairly detailed treatment of his invention. I respond: Thanks for this very interesting analysis. Here’s the problem, to stay with your …
Advancements in Solar Energy
Senior energy analyst Glenn Doty shares my euphoria about the recent advancements in solar energy and suspects that the levelized cost of energy (“LCOE” — one of the most important metrics of the value of an energy source) of the …
