Now this is an audacious campaign! On the heels of the announcement by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) that it's weaning itself from coal as an energy source by 2025, a coalition of environmental and business groups wants the municipal utility to get 20 percent of its power from L.A. rooftop solar panels by 2020.
Construction has launched on a solar project its developers are calling the world's largest, on more than 3,200 acres straddling the Kern-Los Angeles county line west of the Antelope Valley town of Rosamond. Antelope Valley Solar I and II are being built for MidAmerican Solar, a Phoenix-based energy development company indirectly owned by financier Warren Buffett.
A photo making the rounds of social media may prove embarrassing to Pattern Energy, the developer of the huge Ocotillo Express Wind project in Imperial County. The photo, which we've embedded here, shows a recycling truck for one of the project's contractors dug in to the rims on land clearly marked as a BLM habitat restoration area.
Despite a growing consensus that the era of utility-scale solar on public lands is slowly drawing to a close, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has announced that it's taking measures to ensure that applications for solar and wind projects on the lands it manages are given higher priority than other potential uses. A new regulation to be adopted this week could ban new mining claims and other non-energy proposals from land on which the BLM is considering a solar or wind proposal.
Follow the energy industry long enough and you learn that certain people in that industry usually have things to say that are both interesting and entertaining. NRG Energy's CEO David Crane is one of those people. At an energy summit this week in New York, Crane lauded distributed solar power, calling the trend toward larger solar installations "idiotic."
The Board of Supervisors of the Bay Area's semirural Sonoma County has voted 4-1 to launch a publicly owned electrical utility, starting in unincorporated areas but eventually encompassing the entire county. If successful, the new utility would eventually take 220,000 home and business customers away from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E.)
- Wind Power
- PV and Solar Thermal
- Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)
- Watts and Watt-Hours, Kilo and Mega
- 'Enough To Power X Thousand Homes'
- The Grid
- Distributed Generation
- Conservation and 'Negawatts'
- Grid Storage
- PACE Loans, Feed In Tariffs and Net Metering
- Base Load and Peaking Power
- Capacity Factor
- Renewable Portfolio Standards
- Biomass
- Transportation and Renewable Energy
- Geothermal
