solar
Reading Amory Lovins’ Classic Soft Energy Paths
If you think or write about alternative energy now, there is no doubt that you’ve got some Amory Lovins in your DNA. He’s like the Genghis Khan of the alt energy tribe; almost every one of us is sort of a descendent. Hell, he even got made into a comic book character (above) in the [...]
1977 Ad: “Exxon believes solar energy’s future is bright.”
While the 1962 Humble Oil advertisement declaring that “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!” became a meme in the green blogosphere, I find this one more interesting.
It appears that Exxon ran a competition for solar house designers, then took out ads showcasing their work in major newspapers (at [...]
A Pilgrimage to the Solar Electric Generating Stations
Out there, where lots of things are happening at the scale of the global economy, it’s just not that weird to have a 250 acres of mirrors making steam to turn a turbine. Or at least not much weirder than the Zappo’s warehouse run by quasi-autonomous robots near Vegas.
Have renewables performed as well as people hoped?
In a word, no. Renewable technologies haven’t achieved anywhere close to the market penetration proponents hoped, according to some of the best work I’ve seen on the topic from the thinktank Resources for the Future.
BUT, solar and wind technologies have been chasing moving regulatory and cost targets while dealing with very inconsistent government research, [...]
Solar Industry CEO Roundtable
Solar Power Engineering magazine has a transcript of a roundtable of five solar CEOs moderated by NBC’s Anne Thompson. It’s long and detailed and if you’re a particular kind of nerd, you’re going to love it.
I found one bit fascinating. Freeman Ford, chairman and founder of FAFCO Inc, is from a long line of solar [...]
Imagining Coal-Scale Solar
Spotted a really nice post over at the Green Mountain Engineering blog looking at metrics for solar scalability. There’s a lot to the post, and the links it sits on top of are first rate, including studies on solar’s historical growth curve, cost learning curve, energy payback time, and material availabilities.
Tyler Williams does a great [...]
Prodigal Sun
Back in 2000, Mother Jones delivered a really solid article on solar history and policy from the oil crises through the 1990s. Particularly noteworthy were the references to the book The Sun Betrayed and Who Owns the Sun?. The two books both argue that the vision for solar power originally proposed by decentralization and appropriate [...]
The Solar Space Race That Never Was
Congressional treatment of solar energy hasn’t exactly been charitable, but it has been funny sometimes.
In 1963, Polykarp Kusch, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, went before a Senate subcommittee on space and aeronautics. He was testifying against the form and scale of the American space program. The scientific objectives, he told them, were “limited” — and [...]
links for 2009-11-21
Solar 101 – History of Solar Energy in California
The California Energy Commission on the state’s solar history is lacking some pretty key elements of the story.
(tags: solar california energy photovoltaics PV)
More Links about Luz, Seed of the Solar Thermal Industry
Everybody Loves Solar Energy, But… – The New York Times
“The remaining 10 percent Federal energy tax credit is due to expire on Dec. 31, but Congress is considering a bill that would extend it for five years. Many legislators, however, see the measure as an unnecessary tax break for Luz’s power-plant investors. ”I don’t know [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
