Solar power in some markets is already cost-competitive with power from fossil fuels or nuclear energy. It’s expected to take over more and more markets in the very near future as its costs continue to decline and the costs of other antiquated energy sources continue to rise.
There’s a nice little statistic for you.
Germany Trade & Invest (GT&I) recently reported that its latest figures show Germany’s solar photovoltaic (PV) industry employs over 100,000 ‘green’ workers now, more than the US steel industry.
If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s a pretty funny video by the folks at Nissan. Of course, the focus of the commercial is that the Nissan Leaf is 100% electric, pure (while the Chevy Volt, it’s main competitor, is not).
For bicycle aficionados, the opportunity now exists to ride chainless, to cruise about town worry-free about the pant legs getting caught.
Germany is all the talk lately. And for obvious reasons. It’s already a world leader in clean energy and now its decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 (as I reported a little more than a month ago). This has instigated political controversy, wild claims, clean energy enthusiasm, and a number of new reports. It has also helped to light a fire under other countries slower to react on the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan and slower to implement progressive clean energy policies to tackle catastrophic global climate change.
A number of stories focused on Germany have popped up this week that I thought I’d give a little extra attention to.
Germany, South Korea, Japan, and China aren’t the only countries looking to up step on the renewable energy pedal. Brazil, another major world economy, has also recently announced big renewable energy plans.
A new national 10-year plan from Brazil shows that the country will triple its use of renewable energy by 2020 and that a lot of that energy will be wind energy.
I just wanted to announce that in the past day or so our RSS subscriber total has gone over 15,000 for the first time that I’m aware of (and, yes, I sort of obsessively keep my eye on that)…
We’ve had our eye on solar shingles (and alternative to traditional solar panels) since 2009.
“Dow Chemical Company revealed a new line of solar shingles they say can be installed into roofs made of conventional asphalt shingles. The solar shingles should be available by mid 2010 in a limited supply and then readily accessible by 2011,” Jake Richardson wrote in October, 2009.
The pace of solar installations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania is ironically destroying the incentives that make such installations possible.
Clean energy is a job creator. If anyone says otherwise (or says that limiting fossil fuel pollution kills jobs), they are either smoking some serious crack or are members of the polluter-funded Tea Party (or both).
