News on Solar Energy – Page 3

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This combination created atypically low wholesale electricity prices, with significant amounts of renewable energy being curtailed, but the blackout was not a renewable-energy-driven event.

Rather, it was the result of multiple layers of insufficient planning, inadequate voltage management, and poorly managed grid dynamics. 50% of the allocation of responsibility was to human failures in planning, 30% to legacy generation not performing as it was designed to do, and 20% to renewables exiting the system because they weren’t configured to deal with the scenario, once again a human failure more than a technology failure.

Environmental and consumer advocacy groups are seeking to reverse a 2022 decision by state regulators to slash by around 75% the rates paid to compensate customers with solar installations for the excess energy they generate. The move, intended to shield non-solar customers from unfair cost burdens, sent solar hookups plummeting.

Three environmental groups bringing the case — the Center for Biological Diversity, The Protect our Communities Foundation, and the Environmental Working Group — argue that the California Public Utilities Commission didn’t properly consider benefits to customers and disadvantaged communities when it changed the program. The commission argued the policy strikes a balance between affordability for all customers and encouraging renewable energy choices.

Renewables will make up more than of Danish 100% electricity in a couple of years time and just wind and solar not long after that. On the other hand a new study concludes that, around the world, nuclear power projects have cost overruns that are over 100%. Solar and wind have very low, if any cost overruns.

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Solar and wind power are dominating new generation capacity around the world. This is to such an extent that, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA), 90 percent of the net increase in global electricity generation capacity came from wind or solar and 93 percent from renewable energy as a whole. Solar PV provided the lion’s share of this increase, at 72 percent, with wind providing 18 percent, fossil fuels 7 percent, hydro 2 percent, bioenergy 1 percent, and nuclear power less than 0.5 percent.

By contrast the IEA grossly underestimated increases in renewable energy generation. As can be seen in the Figure 1 below, reproduced from a recently published academic paper the IEA has had a consistent habit of projecting much smaller increases in world solar PV generation than has happened in practice. The vertical axis represents annual solar PV additions in GW. The IEA projections consistently have solar pv capacity more or less levelling off in the future, whereas in reality there has been exponential growth of the technology.

The California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) Public Advocates Office (PAO) issued in August 2024 an analysis that purported to show current rooftop solar customers are causing a “cost shift” onto non-solar customers amounting to $8.5 billion in 2024. Unfortunately, this rather simplistic analysis started from an incorrect base and left out significant contributions, many of which are unique to rooftop solar, made to the utilities’ systems and benefitting all ratepayers. After incorporating this more accurate accounting of benefits, the data (presented in the chart above) shows that rooftop solar customers will in fact save other ratepayers approximately $2.3 billion in 2024.

The utilities’ “cost shift” claim is promoted by a small group of seemingly independent utility allies in coordination with the major investor-owned utilities. These include organizations who should know better, but for one reason or another have chosen to align with the utilities: the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and The Utility Reform Network (TURN)

But these groups simply repeat the fraudulent accounting methods used by the Public Advocates Office and other utility-captured groups, in many cases referring to each other in a circular pattern.

The world will keep a weather eye on the thrashing giant. Those like me who once admired many things about the country will mourn the loss of more and more checks and balances, the erosion of good governance, the continued increase of grievances of the working and middle class which Trump, his successors, and other Republicans will continue to exploit. The neighboring countries of Mexico and Canada will catch colds as the elephant sneezes.

But Europe, China, India, and the rest of the world will continue to move forward without the United States.

Even in not-always-sunny UK solar pv could provide up to 40 per-cent of annual electricity production. That is without a significant amount of curtailment of production or even the need to convert the electricity into stored energy such as hydrogen. Of course this is dependent on there being enough provision of batteries. Solar plus batteries will be the dominant energy system in the world in future decades, but they will also be centrally important in UK.