The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced that the finishing touches have been crafted on a deal to preserve 7,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert as mitigation for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System near the Mojave National Preserve. But not everyone's happy with that.
Both Germany and California set solar power production records this week, but it hardly seems fair to Germany to mention California's milestone in the same paragraph. During mid-day on Monday, the central European nation's millions of solar panels put an estimated 22.68 gigawatts of power into the German grid. Let's end this paragraph here.
California leads the nation in raw numbers of solar-power-related jobs, and is third in terms of solar jobs per capita according to a study by the Solar Foundation.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) have been sued over the recently-approved Searchlight Wind Project in southern Nevada, with plaintiffs charging that the federal government conducted an inadequate review of the project's likely effects on desert wildlife. The project, which would generate a maximum of 200 megawatts of electrical power, would place 87 turbines on almost 19,000 acres of public lands within view of the Mojave National Preserve and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
Builders of some of the largest wind power installations have come up against a problem: with more than 50 or 100 turbines in a facility, the effect of the upwind turbines on wind speed farther downwind becomes harder and harder to predict. According to an article in Wednesday's MIT Technology Review, wind facility developers wanting to install several hundred turbines at a go may be faced with disappointing power output unless our computer models get a lot better.
We got pretty excited here at ReWire the last time we heard some news about supercapacitors out of UCLA, and so did you -- almost 20,000 Facebook users "liked" our report on a breakthrough in using graphene to store electrical power.
This week, another UCLA team reports it may have found a way to address a persistent problem with supercapacitors: limitations on their effective size.
- 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
