Free Republic

You can visit solar homes near you.

Besides the obvious advantage of a free heating source (as long as the sun continues to rise and set) we have discovered a few more advantages:

The U.S. is planning to train veterans to become solar panel installers in the next six years, the White House said Thursday. The jobs training program is among a host of initiatives the White House says will cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 300 million tons through 2030, plus save billions of dollars on energy bills for homeowners and businesses. It will launch this fall at one or more military bases and train a total of at least 50,000, including veterans. …

"The bottom line is solar works here," said Pete Wirth, whose 18 solar panels supply all of his Fayetteville home's electrical power. "It would probably work better if you had no cloudy days, but solar works perfectly fine in Central New York." The only way solar works here, or just about anywhere, is with heavy government subsidies. Wirth's system cost $24,000 when it was installed two years ago, but after tax credits and rebates, he paid about $6,200. That means taxpayers pick up about 75 percent of the cost of solar systems.

With billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in hand, the Obama administration set out five years ago on a grand experiment in the California desert. The goal: Open public lands to renewable-energy development to wean the nation from fossil fuels. The results haven't been pretty, a fact the administration has tacitly acknowledged by devising a new plan, expected to be released this month, to find better places to put industrial-scale solar farms in the California desert.

Wintershall's head of exploration and production warned Thursday that Germany's 'Energiewende' (or Energy Transition) dream of pursuing an economy powered by the wind and the sun is in danger of turning into a nightmare. Speaking to energy journalists at the ONS exhibition in Stavanger, Norway, Wintershall Executive Director Martin Bachmann said he was concerned about figures recently published by Statistics Norway that showed overall investment in Norway's petroleum sector will drop by EUR 6 billion ($7.9 billion) next year. "That is actually bad news for Europe's security of supply and I think Germany – as the biggest market in Europe...

(CBS/AP) – Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Death estimates range from 1,000 to 28,000 per year The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. Unlike many other solar plants, the Ivanpah plant does not generate energy using photovoltaic solar panels. Instead, it has more than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Together, they cover 1,416 hectares. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce...

In 2009, then Gov. Jennifer Granholm hailed Suniva as a company that would help turn the state into the “epicenter” of manufacturing green energy products. She said Suniva was opening a photovoltaic plant in Saginaw Township that would create 500 jobs over the next five years. That plant never came to fruition, joining several other solar projects that didn't work out in Michigan. But the process is starting again with more job predictions and state subsidies if they come through this time. Suniva, a Georgia-based company, was going to invest $250 million in 2009 and would get a $15 million...

The Tonopah Solar Company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million "loan" from Obama's D.O.E. The Project will produce a 110 Megawatt Power System, and employs l45 permanent workers. That's costing us a mere $5.1 million per job. One of the Investment Partners in this endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG). The PCG Executive Director is Ron Pelosi, who is the brother to Nancy's husband. First Nancy gets her husband's cannery exempt from minimum wage laws and now this for her brother-in-law. Please, Mr. Obozo, tell me about this transparency in government again.

The sun is the most important energy source on Earth. Solar energy powers the growth of all trees, grasses, herbs, crops and algae; it creates the clouds and powers the storms; it is the source of all hydro, photo-voltaic (PV), solar-thermal, bio-mass, and wind energy. Over geological time, it also creates coal. PV solar panels are useful in remote locations and for some portable applications. With enough panels and batteries, standalone solar can even power homes. But solar energy has five fatal flaws for supplying 24/7 grid power.

Two years ago we were all going about our daily business blissfully unaware that our planet almost plunged into global catastrophe. A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012 Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), from the most powerful solar storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it. Err, what? Well that’s a sobering bit of news. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado. We managed to just avoid the...

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA. Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban...

For proponents of renewable energy, it seems like every time a technology is primed to save the world, it gets dogged by some ironic bit of environmental unpleasantness. Wind turbines can be dangerous to birds and bats. Biofuels require so much land, fertilizer, and water that they may use more energy to produce than they provide. Hydropower dams screw up a whole lot of river habitat and stop fish from spawning. The latest on this list of “dark green” technologies is thermal solar power, which is coming into vogue in the southern California desert. [snip]U.S. Fish and Wildlife employees and...

Veterans Administration hospitals have spent at least $420 million on solar panels and windmills while vets wait months — or even lay dying — to see a doctor. In total, VA hospitals reported 23 deaths due to 76 instances of delayed care, an April 2014 VA fact sheet said. Then on June 5, Acting Veteran Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson revealed that at least 18 Phoenix patients died while waiting for treatment on a secret list kept off the books. It is not clear if that number is in addition to the 23 deaths reported earlier. During the past month, the...

Photovoltaic (PV) power is created from a burst of coal-sourced energy priced at 4 cents/kWh, which you get back as an intermittent and declining dribble over the following 20 years at 15 cents/kWh. The numbers vary with location, but the basic relationship remains the same – at best, the energy produced by PV panels is at least four times the cost of the power consumed in making them. That is one thing. The main thing is that over their lifetimes, PV panels now produce slightly more energy than what it took to make them. So a civilization that relies upon...

Rasheed Wallace gained notoriety during his 16-season NBA career for being a hot-headed power forward. If called for a foul (or, as was often the case with him, a technical foul) that he thought was undeserved, and the opposing team missed the ensuing free-throw attempts, Wallace would often holler, “ball don’t lie,” as if the basketball itself was pronouncing judgment on the ref’s call. The “ball don’t lie” expression has gained fame and is even the title of a popular basketball blog. I’d be inclined to adopt a variation on Wallace’s catchphrase for whenever energy use or energy policy is...

Ronald Ace, photographed at his home in Laurel, Maryland, May 4, 2013, said his flat-panel "Solar Traps," which can be mounted on rooftops or used in power plants, will shatter barriers that have stymied efforts to make solar energy cheap, clean and reliable. His claimed discoveries, which exist only on paper so far, would represent such a leap that they're sure to draw skepticism.

Video about a new solar panel technology.