Half a year after Elon Musk said, in July 2020, that Tesla would not launch an under-250-mile-range Model Y Standard Range, the company did just that, rolling out the cheaper Model Y on its website on Thursday, January 6.
A big part of Livingston and Conroy’s pitch to the DoE was to leverage soon-to-be-commercialized oscillating disk technology in a mostly continuous tunneling model. This would entail not only having the oscillating disk cutter, but also automated ceiling bolting and shotcreting for tunnel stabilization.
Pumped storage hydro has far more resource potential than required for a fully decarbonized grid and it’s cheap per megawatt-hour (MWh) of storage. The downside is that it’s slow to build, capital intensive, and heavily regulated right now in the United States. The Department of Energy FAST program aims to change that.
Commercial solar has significant untapped potential in the USA. Innovative companies such as OnSwitch Energy are working to maximize that, regardless of federal policies.
Today, there’s a battle brewing across the US to reinvigorate a little-used law and bring it into alignment with a modern marketplace riper than ever for small-scale renewables. Like other policies that present compelling local economic value — among them net metering and community solar — PURPA lives or dies by its implementation.
Circumventing a decades-old pact providing a market monopoly in exchange for public oversight, an investor-owned utility has proposed legislation to allow it to build a new natural gas plant criticized for its financial and environmental impact, and then stick customers with the tab.
It’s simple to promote solar power as a money saver and clean alternative to fossil fuel generation. But it sells solar short to focus only on savings, when it also gives Americans the freedom to generate their own energy and to challenge the economic and political power of big corporations.
As state regulators restricted the ability of home and business owners in Nevada to receive sufficient compensation for solar on their rooftops, some large companies started looking towards other options.
Incentives designed to make rooftop solar feasible for a wider range of consumers are under attack nationwide, threatening new solar development as well as the consumers that already have rooftop panels. The staunchest opponents? Utilities which say, despite a growing body of research to the contrary, that rooftop solar hurts other ratepayers and their bottom lines.
Everyone is fully on board with the idea that the digital future is a central part of the future of their industries. They expect enormous changes, new business opportunities and new competitors. There seems to be a consensus that this is a new animal that requires an approach that is different. So far, so good. Yet, most are quite unsure about the specific likely implications and the best approach to take moving forward. There is a sense of gambling, a sense that traditional strategy development will not apply.
