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“Renewable” energy is unreliable, and can never replace secure base load sources like coal, natural gas, and hydro. And now a bunch of greenies have embarrassed themselves and proved the point. Attempting to show how wonderful solar power is, a band of self-righteous greenie demonstrators in Madison, WI, the Berkeley of the Midwest, instead demonstrated that reliance on renewables means brownouts and blackouts. Protesting a proposed rate increase by the local utility, Madison Gas & Electric, they made utter fools of themselves, and showed by reliable power from hydrocarbons is the only way to have secure energy supplies. The MacIver...

A new MIT study offers a way out of one of solar power's most vexing problems: the matter of efficiency, and the bare fact that much of the available sunlight in solar power schemes is wasted. The researchers appear to have found the key to perfect solar energy conversion efficiency—or at least something approaching it. It's a new material that can accept light from an very large number of angles and can withstand the very high temperatures needed for a maximally efficient scheme. Conventional solar cells, the silicon-based sheets used in most consumer-level applications, are far from perfect. Light from...

If you ask the people who run America's electric utilities what keeps them up at night, a surprising number will say solar power. Specifically, rooftop solar. That seems bizarre at first. Solar power provides just 0.4 percent of electricity in the United States — a minuscule amount. Why would anyone care? But utilities see things differently. As solar technology gets dramatically cheaper, tens of thousands of Americans are putting photovoltaic panels up on their roofs, generating their own power. At the same time, 43 states and Washington DC have "net metering" laws that allow solar-powered households to sell their excess...

NEW YORK — Environmentalists worship solar energy and wind power as Earth-friendly answers to their ecological prayers. Tortoises, bats, butterflies, and bald eagles beg to differ.Perhaps because solar panels and industrial wind farms lack emissions, they seem “clean.” Despite their pristine appearance, however, these “green” electricity sources hammer Mother Nature — often fatally. Consider the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave Desert. As Carolyn Lochhead wrote in September 7’s San Francisco Chronicle, Ivanpah occupies 3,500 previously untouched federal acres. It features 300,000 mirrors that focus sunlight on three 40-story towers of power. Inside, 900-degree temperatures yield steam, propel...

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...