The City University of New York (CUNY) released a solar map of New York City last week, allowing building owners in the city to determine the amount of solar power their roof could host. The cumulative impact is enormous, with city rooftops capable of providing half the city’s peak power, and 14% of its annual electricity consumption.
I can hear the nuclear power lovers coming my way now. They’ll be in the comments soon after I publish this. But publish it I think I should.
I know, solar panel records are set almost everyday these days, it seems. One reason solar power costs have already dropped over 20% this year. But who doesn’t love a “new solar panel record set” story?
A lot of wind critics assert that wind power isn’t reliable. The wind power video above, however, does a great job of pointing out the differences between wind power variability and variability of traditional power sources, among other things. Paul Gipe of Wind-Works also recently got into this topic, in more detail, as compared to nuclear power…
As the United States struggles to add jobs on a consistent and robust basis, we are always on the look-out for success stories on the job front. Well, one glimmer of hope comes from the state of Colorado, which has seen tremendous job growth in the clean energy space, well ahead of the national average.
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.
Just the other day, Cleantechnica reported that GE foresees the cost of solar power falling below that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy within the next five years, and the tech giant has wasted no time positioning itself to ride that transition. Its latest move is a foray into solar power installations at parking lots, and true to form the company pulled out all the stops for this one.
In order to advance solar technology and the competitiveness of U.S. solar companies, a whole slew of U.S. solar industry players have banded together to form the U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC). Its founding members were announced on Friday.
Solar Junction, a company headquartered in San Jose, California has once again broken the efficiency world record for production-ready solar cells, which was confirmed by the United States’ National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) last week. The new record, 43.5%, is 1.2% higher than the previous record.
Offshore wind power is not in place in most countries still, but it is in some places (especially the EU) and it is expected to grow considerably in the coming years. Let’s take a quick look at what’s in place now and what is being planned around the world.
