Over the next 10 years, biofuel mandates will cause global demand to almost double. The US mandates alone will account for half of this global increase.
To meet these targets, large amounts of land will be needed. And more peasant families like Amalia and her kids, are likely to lose their land.
But with your help, we can put a stop to this by reforming the Renewable Fuel Standard.
In a closely watched case last month, an Arizona utility voted to impose a monthly surcharge of about $50 for “net metering,” a common practice that allows solar customers to earn credit for the surplus electricity they provide to the electric grid. Net metering makes home solar affordable by sharply lowering electric bills to offset the $10,000 to $30,000 cost of rooftop panels.
A Wisconsin utilities commission approved a similar surcharge for solar users last year, and a New Mexico regulator also is considering raising fees. In some states, industry officials have enlisted the help of minority groups in arguing that solar panels hurt the poor by driving up electricity rates for everyone else.
Utility companies take on solar power
“The utilities are fighting tooth and nail,” said Scott Peterson, director of the Checks and Balances Project, a Virginia nonprofit that investigates lobbyists’ ties to regulatory agencies. Peterson, who has tracked the industry’s two-year legislative fight, said the pivot to public utility commissions moves the battle to friendlier terrain for utilities. The commissions, usually made up of political appointees, “have enormous power, and no one really watches them,” Peterson said.
I just signed the petition "Don’t let California Backslide to More Dirty Energy" and wanted to ask if you could add your name too.
This campaign means a lot to me and the more support we can get behind it, the better chance we have of succeeding.
Our electric utility, SDG&E, plans to replace the shut down San Onofre nuclear power plant with massive amounts of new gas power – through an insider deal that doesn’t allow clean energy options to compete. This rush for more fossil power would come at a major cost to energy customers, public health and our climate. Help us urge state regulators to reject this reckless plan and send a clear message to all the utilities that California is committed to clean energy.
We can meet California’s energy needs reliably and affordably with clean energy, yet SDG&E is pushing a proposal that would lock in huge amounts of unnecessary, expensive and polluting fossil power for years to come.
This natural gas bonanza carries a big price tag for our climate. We've already seen an increase in climate pollution from natural gas generation in the wake of San Onofre closing. Permanently increasing our dependence on fossil power would put California even father behind on our carbon reduction and clean energy targets.
Sign the petition to stop this dirty energy proposal in its tracks, and send a clear message to all California utilities that energy consumers demand clean affordable energy options.
Memo to CBS: Every business is tough! In 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran an informative piece on just how tough the private sector venture-capital businesses is, headlined, “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail.”
It seems at first that this is a secret 60 Minutes is unaware of — since the show focuses almost entirely on the failures. But CBS explains that “the venture capital model is that for every 10 startups, nine go under” — except that CBS appears to see that as a bug, not a feature, failing to understand that the successes more than pay for the failures.
Moreover, 60 Minutes is apparently unaware that the DOE Loan Guarantee Program has a whopping 97 percent success rate, while the companies CBS focuses on such as Solyndra and Abound Solar were just 3 percent of the portfolio.
It’s as if 60 Minutes did a profile of the venture firm Kleiner-Perkins and focused primarily on its failed investments with only passing mention of AOL — and no mention at all of Amazon.com, Genentech, Sun Microsystems or Google! In fact, when 60 Minutes profiled co-founder Tom Perkins several years ago, they called him “the captain of capitalism” and only found time to mention the winners!
Let’s set aside the question of why 60 Minutes chose to do a hit-job on cleantech, which clearly was unwarranted, after producing widely criticized puff pieces on the NSA and Amazon’s wildly impractical delivery drones.
The key point is that the goal of DOE’s investments is not to make money. The goal is to accelerate the drop in price — and increase in deployment — of clean energy in the market, which it clearly has done in industry after industry. A secondary goal was to create jobs in this country, which it also succeeded in doing.
Inexplicably, the 60 Minutes correspondent asserts that according to “everything I’ve read there were not many jobs created” (and they even found an uninformed former DOE official to agree with them). CBS claims taxpayers have little to show for the investments when the data clearly show otherwise.
The whole segment is baffling. CBS asserts that the key cleantech investor they interview, Vinod Khosla, is “known as the father of the cleantech revolution.” He ain’t, and in fact he’s about the last person you’d want to talk to on the subject (see my 2010 post, “Is anyone more incoherent than Vinod Khosla?“).
They even found a Chinese cleantech entrepreneur to say “clean tech is not going well” — even though China is the leader in both solar and wind power. CBS complains that the Chinese have created U.S. jobs using some of the technology U.S. taxpayers supported — as if the only U.S. jobs that count are ones created by U.S. companies. CBS correctly notes that China is willing to take a long term view of clean tech — but never mentions how opposition to U.S. clean energy standards, cleantech investment, and a price for carbon by conservatives in Congress have hurt the competitiveness of U.S. companies.
Happy New Year: it looks as though California may have set a new solar record Thursday, with more than 3,000 megawatts of solar electricity flowing into the grid at noon.
The tentative news comes in the form of a graph on the website of the California Independent System Operator (CaISO), the independent agency that manages most of the state's power grid. Though the graph hasn't been reviewed by one of CaISO's actual humans for accuracy, it shows that for almost a half hour starting at noon on Thursday, January 2, more than 3,000 megawatts (or 3 gigawatts) of solar power flowed into the state's grid from its wholesale solar power generating plants.
If that tentative graph turns out to be accurate, that would mean that January 2 -- one of the darkest days of the year -- broke the record for the greatest wholesale solar output in the state's history.
(1) Under existing law, the Public Utilities Commission has regulatory jurisdiction over public utilities, including electrical corporations, as defined. Existing law authorizes the commission to fix the rates and charges for every public utility, and requires that those rates and charges be just and reasonable. Under existing law, the local government renewable energy self-generation program authorizes a local government to receive a bill credit to be applied to a designated benefiting account for electricity exported to the electrical grid by an eligible renewable generating facility, as defined, and requires the commission to adopt a rate tariff for the benefiting account. This bill would enact the Shared Renewable Energy Self-Generation Program. The program would authorize a retail customer of an electrical corporation to acquire an interest, as defined, in a shared renewable energy facility, as defined, for the purpose of receiving a bill credit to offset all or a portion of the customer's electricity usage, consistent with specified requirements. The bill would repeal the program on January 1, 2019. The bill would provide that any corporation or person engaged directly or indirectly in developing, owning, producing, delivering, participating in, or selling interests in, a shared renewable energy facility is not a public utility or electrical corporation solely by reason of engaging in any of those activities. (2) Under existing law, a violation of the Public Utilities Act or any order, decision, rule, direction, demand, or requirement of the commission is a crime. Because the provisions of the bill would require action by the commission to implement its requirements, a violation of these provisions would impose a state-mandated local program by expanding the definition of a crime. (3) The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement. This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason. Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: yes. State-mandated local program: yes.
José Alano is a model of creativity in tackling environmental problems in Brazil. In 2002, the retired mechanic transformed a pile of plastic bottles and cartons into a solar water heater. Since then, thousands of people in southern Brazil have benefited from Alano's invention, saving money while reducing waste.
There are better instructions on the source article from labioguia.
This is the Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant in Andalucía, Spain, which is a type of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant. It works by reflecting sunlight off of heliostats (sun-tracking mirrors, basically) onto a tower where salts are heated. These heated salts are then used to create steam, which in turn runs a turbine that generates electricity. It is also capable of producing electricity day and night thanks to a salt storage system that can keep the turbine going for 16 hours. For more, watch this video.
Having never even heard of this type of solar power plant until just the other week, I feel like I just took a leap into a future I didn’t even know existed. My mind = blown. And not only is this a really ingenious way of harnessing solar power, the whole thing just looks incredible too. Yay for environmentally-friendly energy without it looking like a complete and utter eyesore.
The USA seems that it could learn still more from others to implement renewable energy. The swipe at the esthetics of wind generation plants is uncalled for and short sighted. After all, this might look good as a photo on the internet, but there are enough petulant, contrarian philistines who would call any sort of renewable energy generation equipment ugly. Where solar might not make sense, there are plenty of locations where wind generation would work and is as necessary.
ALEC has already attempted to write legislation preventing targets for renewable energy on the federal level. As nothing substantive has happened nationally, it seems ALEC is now preparing to take its corporate-influenced legislation to the 29 states that actually have targets in place.
Along with promoting legislation to kill climate policies and renewable energy targets, ALEC also provided the framework for legislation currently moving through the U.S. House of Representatives that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating toxic coal ash.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Peabody Energy — the largest private coal company in the world — is a major underwriter for ALEC and sits on the organization’s Private Enterprise Board.
Americans for Tax Reform, the infamous anti-tax organization run by Grover Norquist, also says it is taking a more aggressive approach to opposing renewable energy targets. According to Bloomberg News, the group is urging its members to “speak out” against renewable energy promotion policies.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
In a small victory for the clean energy economy, the House of Representatives narrowly approved the restoration of $90 million in clean energy research out of $2.3 billion cut in the FY 2012 budget. The House energy and water appropriations bill up for consideration today had eviscerated the Department of Energy’s energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) budget by $1.9 billion and the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) budget by $450 million from the president’s request.
