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On November 30th President Obama will join hordes of our ecological betters from around the world at the Paris Climate Summit. Weighty topics of how to save the planet will be discussed and agreements are expected which will further push the cause of eliminating carbon, fossil fuels and everything else we rely on to keep civilization chugging along. One of the leaders in the field of green energy and allegedly reduced carbon emissions has been Great Britain, which makes it all the more odd that just before the big confab kicks off, they’ve , preferring to focus on converting...

The government is going to pull the plug on the solar industry’s key tax credit as evidence mounts that the often touted renewable source cannot compete with traditional energy. “Solar power’s value as a grid resource is limited because we simply can’t count on it to meet peak demand in the evenings,” Travis Fischer, economist at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In fact, solar power could cause major problems if implemented on a wide scale due to its daytime-only production profile.” Solar power has been on the rise in the U.S. and is often...

Phil PlaitNovember 16, 2015 A new study says that violent space weather that could cost $2 trillion in damage is more common than previously thought In the years 774 and 993, the Earth was attacked from space. Not by aliens, but by a natural event—and it was very, very powerful. Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have...

According to an Old English manuscript chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons, a mysterious "red crucifix" appeared in the "heavens" over Britain one evening in A.D. 774. Now astronomers say it may have been the supernova explosion that sprinkled unexplained traces of carbon-14 in tree rings that year, halfway around the world in Japan. Jonathon Allen, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made the connection this week after listening to a Nature podcast. He heard a team of Japanese scientists discussing new research in which they measured an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings...

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped...

New studies flip climate-change notions upside down The sun will go into "hibernation" mode around 2030, and it has already started to get sleepy. At the Royal Astronomical Society's annual meeting in July, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK confirmed it - the sun will begin its Maunder Minimum (Grand Solar Minimum) in 15 years. Other scientists had suggested years ago that this change was imminent, but Zharkova's model is said to have near-perfect accuracy. So what is a "solar minimum"? Our sun doesn't maintain a constant intensity. Instead, it cycles in spans of approximately 11 years....

Home owner insurance companies exempting solar panels and associated equipment from coverage. Have you received notice? Do you care?

Posted : 2015-11-02 16:29 Updated : 2015-11-02 20:33 NK tries out solar-powered bus North Korea's solar-powered bus / Yonhap By Kim Hyo-jin North Korea is operating a solar-powered bus in the western city of Nampo, the North's state media said Monday. "Nampo created a bus powered by solar energy and it is now being used for public transport," the state-run Korean Central Television (KCTV) said, quoting a member of the city's science and technology committee, Jeong In-sung. According to Jeong, the bus uses 32 100-watt solar panels, 50 batteries and a direct-current motor. "It has run 800 kilometers so far,...

No aircraft were allowed to take off from airports in southern and central Sweden due to a massive geomagnetic solar flare storm causing problems for radar systems. Ulf Wallin, press spokesperson at Swedavia, the organization managing Sweden's airports, told TT that airports at Landvetter in Gothenburg and Arlanda and Bromma in Stockholm were affected. "Those airplanes that are in the air are allowed to land at the airports they're going to, but no planes are taking off," he said. The problems began at around 3.30pm on Wednesday. An hour later, traffic had begun to return to normal, but it was...

A recent study reveals an aspect about solar energy we never expected or thought possible - it contributes to climate change. The study, conducted by climate change research scientist Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that solar panels tend to cause regional cooling when converting sunlight into electricity and increase urban area temperatures when said electricity transforms into heat. Researchers conducted climate model sensitivity experiments to look at the effects of solar panels placed in various regions.

Solar Update October 2015 Anthony Watts / 1 day ago October 8, 2015 Guest essay by David ArchibaldIntroductionWhile Solar Cycle 24 is well into its decline in terms of F10.7 flux and sunspot number, several types of solar activity have risen dramatically over 2015. The solar wind flow pressure, for example, is now at a two decade high. That in turn means that the low in neutron count for this cycle may be more than a year out. This also means that the expected, much-awaited solar-driven cooling could be put off for at least year, with the consequence that the...

Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is an Economist in the Center for Fiscal Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, TX, one of the top free market, state-level think tanks in the nation. Prior to joining the Foundation in September 2013, Vance was a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at TPPF in 2011 and anxiously awaited his return to fight for liberty. In 2006, he interned for a U.S. Texas Congressman in Washington, D.C. and received his B.B.A. in Economics and Accounting with minors in Political Science and Mathematics before earning his Ph.D. in Economics from Texas Tech University in...

From the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR)New perspectives for long-term climate predictions? This image shows a time series of solar activity (bottom) and the North Atlantic Oscillation in two model simulations, without (blue) and with (yellow) solar forcing. Credit, GEOMAR.  Are climate predictions over periods of several years reliable if weather forecast are still only possible for short periods of several days? Nevertheless there are options to predict the development of key parameters on such long time scales. A new study led by scientists at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel shows how the well-known 11-year cycle...

Abengoa, a renewable energy multinational company headquartered in Spain, has been a favorite of the Obama administration in getting federal tax money for clean energy projects. Since 2009, Abengoa and its subsidiaries, according to estimates, have received $2.9 billion in grants and loan guarantees through the Department of Energy to undertake solar projects in California and Arizona—as well as the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas. But in the space of less than a year, Abengoa’s financial health has become critical, leading investors to worry whether the company can survive. The company’s stock price on NASDAQ has swooned—from...

An Inspector General of the Department of Energy report that picked over the bones of the Solyndra green energy fiasco placed most of the blame on Solyndra executives for losing more than $500 million in taxpayer money. But a close reading shows DOE made plenty of mistakes as well. The report authored by DOE Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman came just short of calling Solyndra’s highest officials liars, saying their actions during the loan process were “at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.” While the 13-page report...

A four-year investigation has concluded that officials of the solar company Solyndra misrepresented facts and omitted key information in their efforts to get a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. government. Solyndra was the first company to get federal loan guarantees under a program that was created in 2005 and expanded by President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. The company’s failure soon after receiving the loan guarantee likely will cost taxpayers more than $500 million. Republicans and other critics cite it as an example of wasteful spending under the stimulus program. The report by the Energy Department’s inspector...

President Obama is having a hard time with the definition of free market. The most recent example came from his remarks at the National Clean Energy Summit, an event hosted by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to promote solar power. Obama told a crowd in Las Vegas that solar and renewables now make economic sense and blasted conservative think-tanks for being insincere when it comes to the free market. He said, “Now, it’s one thing if you’re consistent in being free market. It’s another thing when you’re free market until it’s solar that’s working and people want to buy...

I need Freeper expertise. Does anyone have the generator pitched on Glenn Beck's show or the my solar backup (are they the same?). I know it can't back the entire house up but we are looking for one that can run the fridge and/or freezer. I just finished reading the survivalist series by A. American and Morgan (lead guy) had a solar generator. Thanks in advance for your help!

A new energy boom is taking shape in the oil fields of west Texas, but it’s not what you think. It’s solar. Solar power has gotten so cheap to produce—and so competitively priced in the electricity market—that it is taking hold even in a state that, unlike California, doesn’t offer incentives to utilities to buy or build sun-powered generation. Pecos County, about halfway between San Antonio and El Paso and on the southern edge of the prolific Permian Basin oil field, could soon host to several large solar-energy farms responsible for about $1 billion in investments, according to state tax...

It turns out that because of the emissions of extraordinarily potent greenhouse gases NF3 and SF6 and energy during the manufacture of solar modules, solar energy ends up being worse for the climate than burning coal (assuming the global warming hypothesis is valid). A Swiss engineer has made a thorough analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the manufacture, transport and operation of solar panels. His conclusion: Ferrucio Ferroni writes here how China is the number 1 manufacturer of solar panels globally and that the production of solar panels there requires immense amounts of electricity, which in China is...