Free Republic

We all get them — telemarketing callers pushing home solar-energy systems that will save us from rising electric bills. Most of us generally hang up. But in 2012, Jeff Leeds, who lives in the Northern California town of Half Moon Bay, listened. His 3,100-square-foot home features 91 incandescent bucket lights, a 180-gallon fish tank, three large refrigerator-freezers and a huge entertainment system. His electric bill was averaging $350 per month. The sales pitch Leeds was hearing on the phone sounded ideal: Lease a system from SolarCity, the nation’s second-largest solar electrical contractor, for a low monthly fee and reap the...

Someone is installing a solar power system in the U.S. every four minutes. Generous state and federal tax credits for hooking up solar panels on roofs or in fields make solar energy attractive to homeowners and businesses. Another bonus is that those who generate solar energy can roll over what they don’t use as credit against their next utility bills, like rollover minutes on a cellphone bill, or sell excess energy back to the utilities. Utility companies aren’t happy. As the solar industry thrives, states are bracing for more showdowns this year between solar advocates and utility companies over how...

X-FLARE! Long-lived sunspot AR1967 returned to the Earthside of the sun on Feb. 25th and promptly erupted, producing an X4.9-class solar flare. This is the strongest flare of the year so far and one of the strongest of the current solar cycle. A movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the explosion hurling a loop of hot plasma away from the blast site: http://spaceweather.com/images2014/25feb14/redflare3_strip4.gif The source of the eruption is long-lived sunspot AR1967, now beginning its third trip across the Earthside of the sun. This region was an active producer of flares during its previous transits, and it looks like...

Lots of people have installed solar panels into their homes and businesses in an effort to help the environment and save some money, but the 22News I-Team has discovered solar panels could be dangerous in an emergency. More and more families and businesses in western Mass. are using the sun to go green, installing solar panels to generate power, but as these become more common in western Mass., fire departments are faced with new challenges. “There certainly have been examples with power being backfed into the site that have killed firefighters in adjacent states,” said Northampton Fire Chief Brian Duggan....

BERKELEY, Calif., June 4, 2012 – Solar cells do not offset greenhouse gases or curb fossil fuel use in the United States according to a new environmental book, Green Illusions (June 2012, University of Nebraska Press), written by University of California – Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. Green Illusions explains how the solar industry has grown to become one of the leading emitters of hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These three potent greenhouse gases, used by solar cell fabricators, make carbon dioxide (CO2) seem harmless. Hexafluoroethane has a global warming potential that is 12,000 times higher...

Energy: What do you call an energy source that consumes vast tracks of open land and fries birds that cross its path? If you're the president, you call it "safe," "reliable," "green" and worthy of massive taxpayer subsidies. That, at least, is the case with the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station that covers a vast area of desert outside Las Vegas and, thanks to the generous support of the Obama administration, has officially opened. The plant points hundreds of thousands of mirrors at three towers to boil turbine-spinning water. But the heat rays aren't very friendly to the area's birds,...

Colorado may be known for its abundant sunshine, but employment in the solar energy sector is looking cloudy — solar industry jobs have declined by 32 percent since 2010, according to a newly released survey by the Solar Foundation. Colorado saw a zero percent increase in solar sector jobs from 2012-2013, while such jobs increased by nearly 20 percent nationwide. The high-profile bankruptcy of Abound Solar in 2012, which cost 400 jobs, could have something to do with those numbers, but solar advocacy organization Environment Colorado lays the blame on what could have potential longer-term effects on the market —...

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Ivanpah solar-power facility is controversial because it “costs about four times as much as a conventional natural-gas–fired plant but will produce far less electricity.” Once that electricity goes online, customers can expect to pay twice as much for it, if not more. No one knows for sure, because the utilities and state regulators involved haven’t disclosed that information. Oh yeah, and the plant is apparently scorching a bunch of birds to death. Over the past several months, one of the companies behind the Ivanpah plant, BrightSource Energy, has been finding “dozens” of dead...

The Ivanpah solar power plant stretches over more than five square miles of the Mojave Desert. Almost 350,000 mirrors the size of garage doors tilt toward the sun with an ability to energize 140,000 homes. The plant, which took almost four years and thousands of workers assembling millions of parts to complete, officially opened on Thursday, the first electric generator of its kind. It could also be the last. Since the project began, the price of rival technologies has plummeted, incentives have begun to disappear and the appetite among investors for mammoth solar farms has waned. Although several large, new...

At California's Ivanpah Plant, Mirrors Produce Heat and Electricity—And Kill Wildlife A giant solar-power project officially opening this week in the California desert is the first of its kind, and may be among the last, in part because of growing evidence that the technology it uses is killing birds. U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is scheduled to speak Thursday at an opening ceremony for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, which received a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. The $2.2 billion solar farm, which spans over five square miles of federal land southwest of Las Vegas, includes three towers as...

The world’s largest solar plant is officially online in the Mojave desert — and it is causing some dismay.That’s because the technology the $2.2 billion Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station uses could be a threat to wildlife — it generates heat so intense there’s growing evidence it is scorching birds, according to The Wall Street Journal.

(CNSNews.com) - Solar power, which President Barack Obama promoted in his State of the Union Address, accounted for 0.2 percent of the U.S. electricity supply in the first nine months of 2013, according to data published by the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration. That is up from the 0.02 percent of the total electricity supply that solar power sources provided in 2008, the last calendar year before Obama took office. “Now, one of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy,” Obama said in the State of the Union. “The all-of-the-above energy strategy I...

Solar installations have been taking off in many areas of the Midwest, but perhaps nowhere more so than in farm country. “It’s a huge buzz now throughout the agriculture industry,” said Todd Miller, sales director for CB Solar in Ankeny, Iowa. In Washington County, Iowa, for example, farmers with access to an unusual and lucrative combination of federal, state and utility incentives were anticipating payback periods of as little as two years, according to Ed Raber, director of the county’s economic development corporation. In Washington County, Iowa, for example, farmers with access to an unusual and lucrative combination of federal,...

These are interesting times in the automotive and electric-utility businesses.

2014-01-09 12:36 UTC Awaiting CME Arrival The ongoing Solar Radiation Storm peaked briefly just above the S3 (Strong) threshold but is now in decay and currently at S2 (Moderate) levels. Enhancement back across the S3 level is possible with the anticipated coronal mass ejection (CME) arrival. The CME, originally expected to arrive around 0800 UTC (3:00 a.m. EST) today, January 9, is now slightly overdue. However, pre-arrival signatures from EPAM data on the ACE spacecraft still show this transient en route. G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm activity is still expected on January 9 and 10. Updates here as this event unfolds.

Video At: http://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2014/01/CMAX-solar.mov/jcr:content/renditions/cq5dam.video.firefoxhq.ogg

Solar electricity is growing, promoted, and most importantly, heavily subsidized. The promoters of solar electricity claim that it is close to being competitive with conventional sources of electricity. That is a fantasy. Solar electricity is expensive and impractical. If it weren't for government subsidies, some explicit and some disguised, the solar industry would collapse. The many claims of competitiveness are always based on ignoring subsidies provided to politically correct renewable power, ignoring the costs associated with unreliability, and ignoring the cost of backup fossil fuel plants. An example of a hidden subsidy is the California Renewable Portfolio Standard that mandates...

For use in windows, solar cells need to absorb enough light to produce sufficient energy, but let enough pass through to be transparent. Organic photovoltaic materials can absorb infrared light and pass visible light, but they have very low efficiencies. Inorganic semiconductors, such as amorphous silicon, absorb strongly in the visible part of the spectrum, so the films have to be very thin to be transparent, thus decreasing the amount of photons they capture. They also tend to give windows a brownish or reddish tint, which architects dislike. The Oxford team, led by physicist Henry J. Snaith, made their solar...

Solar power is popular nowadays as a “renewable,” non-polluting energy source. It helps California comply with AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which mandates a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases in the state by 2020. “Even on short winter days, California is breaking solar energy records,” declared environmental writer Chris Clarke on the website of KCET, America’s largest independent public TV station, which broadcasts across Southern California. Clarke was jubilant that solar power had generated more than 2,800 megawatts of electricity just before noon on that day. There also was 1,898 megawatts of rooftop solar power generated...

U.S. policy regarding green energy investment is troubling. As Congress struggles to pass a budget, green energy programs should be the first to go. A newly-released Reason Foundation report by Victor Nava and Julian Morris, Stimulating Green Electric Dreams, highlights problems with the government’s green “investments.” The report focuses on the Department of Energy’s $16 billion Section 1705 Loan Guarantee Program— part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The loans suffered from rampant cronyism: those with the right political connections and highest lobbying contributions received the most money. Further, the report found taxpayer dollars were essentially thrown away....