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- Peak Menhaden
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- Why towns have a hard time adding EV, solar, heat pumps
- Building a national super grid in America
- The Mayflower from the book The Barbarous Years
- Deep Sea Oil
- Book review of “Livewired. The inside story of the ever-changing brain”
- The conveyor belt may be slowing down — Yikes!
- Battery Energy storage batteries (BESS) too complex to ever be commercial
- New war and energy alliances over next resource wars
- Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”
- Why do people vote for Trump?
- Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
- The evolution of the Republican party from 1960 to 2024: from moderate democracy to extreme authoritarianism
- Why some people are conservative and others liberal
Category Archives: Solar
Renewable costs don’t include transmission & energy storage backup from Nat Gas & Coal plants
Preface. Wind and solar advocates don’t include transmission and backup costs in their net energy and cost calculations. But without fossil backup, the electric grid will come down due to lack of storage. There is almost nowhere left to put … Continue reading
Posted in Electric Grid & Fast Collapse, Energy Storage, Solar, Solar EROI, Wind, Wind EROI
Tagged energy storage, fossil fuel backup, renewable, solar, wind
2 Comments
Concentrated Solar Power is dying out in the U.S.
Preface. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) contributes only 0.06 % of U.S. electricity, mainly in California (64 %) and Arizona (24 %) because extremely dry areas with no humidity, haze, or pollutants are required. Of the 1861 MW power they can … Continue reading
Movie review of Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans”
Preface. This documentary was made by Jeff Gibbs, a writer and environmentalist, with Michael Moore as the executive producer. This movie is worth watching, and an entertaining and quick way to understand why rebuildable “renewables” are neither green or a … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Biomass, Coal, Natural Gas, Solar, Wind
Tagged green power, Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, renewables, solar, wind
15 Comments
Wind, solar, and natural gas are driving nuclear power out of business
Preface. I’m no fan of nuclear power because we may already be at peak uranium, there’s nowhere to store nuclear waste, and a spent nuclear pool fire could harm millions of people. But renewable wind and solar and natural gas … Continue reading
Can concentrated solar power be used to generate industrial process heat?
Preface. The bright future of solar thermal powered factories, makes some important points about using concentrated solar power to generate heat: “…A large share of energy consumed worldwide is by heat. Cooking, space heating and water heating dominate domestic energy … Continue reading
Pedro Prieto: many solar panels won’t last 25-30 years, EROI may be negative
Preface. Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall wrote the definitive book on the EROI of solar power, “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment” and has built many commercial facilities himself and witnessed the failure of solar panels long before … Continue reading
Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration
Preface. This overview of challenges for wind and solar written in 2010 is still true today. We are far from being able to reach even a 50% renewable grid (excluding hydropower from the total) given the lack of storage, the … Continue reading
Posted in Electric Grid, Solar, Wind
Tagged electric grid, energy storage, forecasting, intermittence, smart grid, solar, wind
Comments Off on Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration
Solar PV requires too much land to replace fossils
Preface. This is a brief summary of the Capellan-Perez paper that calculates the land needed to use solar to replace electricity as well as the land needed if solar were to replace all of societies use of energy (i.e. transportation, … Continue reading