Autonomous vehicles (AV) are making their way on our public roads. In order to help the industry, California took the unlikely decision to reduce their crash liability. Should you be concerned? To be fair, you should be concerned driving anywhere these days. Just riding over to our favorite coffee shop … [continued]
Yesterday the Mayor of Los Angeles unveiled a proposal for a Carbon Reduction Surcharge to raise an estimated $170 million a year to be placed into a Renewable Energy and Efficiency Trust Fund set aside to provide dedicated revenue for renewable energy and efficiency investment. The trust fund will specifically … [continued]
BrightSource got a boost from the Department of Energy this week with a loan guarantee of $1.37 billion to help build three concentrated solar thermal power plants producing 400 MW of clean solar power in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California. [social_buttons] However, it is predicated upon BrightSource meeting the … [continued]
First Solar’s utility-scale PV plant has now been up and running, in Blythe, California, for its first full month. Once it got a go-ahead in the summer It only took three months to build.
Private solar installations are really taking off nationwide. In just two years, (about the same length of time it takes to get a pair of 250 MW solar power plants approved in California, for example), homeowners and businesses have added that much power to the Californian grid, just from individual rooftops throughout the state.
China has certainly made some startlingly bold and draconian moves into a sustainable new future. You might say that their One Child policy did more to slow future climate change than anything that any other nation has tried. That’s one example of their outside-the-box thinking about the future.
When you look at the entire desert area available in the map of the California desert (below), you see that most of the red dots that signify a solar application under review are actually outside the two areas that Senator Feinstein proposes to set aside.
When the 30% tax credits as cash grants were instituted with the American Recovery Act, I was doing solar estimates for a small start-up in California. I was surprised to find that the 30% tax credit (available as a cash grant for businesses) for solar, was applicable to solar thermal only if it was not used for swimming pools.
People typically don’t think of installing solar thermal when they build or retrofit their homes. Most people just don’t follow renewable energy news and have just have never thought of it. Just like most people wouldn’t know to build their homes to be earthquake-proof either if it wasn’t in our building code.
Solar power is one of the solutions to stop climate change; by ending fossil fuel use, yet ironically, is itself constrained by climate change that is creating increasing desertification. Water is most scarce in the desert; What’s more: it’s getting worse throughout the Southwest, including California, right where insolation is best for maximum solar yield.
