A couple weeks ago the Salt River Project in Arizona announced a plan to replace a 2.25 GW Coal plant, the Navajo Generating Station, with a facility involving a large solar array (250 MW) and a large battery-based energy storage system. The storage system is sized at 1 GW and…
Earlier this month a group of 22 US Senators co-authored a Letter saying the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should preserve the ability of local electricity providers to maintain control over the electricity grid. At issue is whether Distributed Energy Resources, a.k.a. DER’s, can sell electricity to the wholesale electricity market.…
Today SunSpec held a developers meeting for the Orange Button data taxonomy. This is a Department of Energy project, led by the SunSpec Alliance, aiming to reduce some of the “soft costs” in solar power – specifically, the processing of financial and investment documents related to solar power systems. The…
The Blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are catching a lot of attention, and not just because of the phenomenal rise in Bitcoin’s value this year. Because each Blockchain is a “distributed ledger” where there’s a huge degree of security, thanks to an ingenious application of cryptography, many folks think…
I think there may be overly high expectations of what solar panels can do. I came across a project idea to develop a product that can be added to any car, using solar panels to somehow reduce gasoline consumption. The project write-up did not propose a given solution, but instead asked…
The electricity grid is facing an interesting challenge: Solar and Wind energy is catching on faster than expected, forcing a rapid change change in how the grid operates. It’s extremely excellent that renewable electricity is growing so quickly, and in many places is directly cost competitive with fossil fuel electricity. The problem…
Yesterday the Solar Impulse 2 (HB-SIB) finished its around-the-world journey when pilot Bertrand Piccard flew it from Cairo to Abu Dhabi. This is certifiably a big historical achievement ranking up there with Lindbergh’s first flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Where Lindbergh’s flight opened the door to what’s now routine, taking airplanes…
Every day the trees wake up, watch the sunrise, and spread their leaves to capture the energy needed to live another day while storing excess energy away so the tree makes it through the winter. Trees, and other plants, have done this for millions of years. It is a natural…
At The Long Tail Pipe, we’re all about clean energy stuff and getting into the middle of technology to understand how to improve all our lives. With that in mind the last couple months I’ve been studying how to do solar design, and recently wrote a resource page on…
Next week is the 8th edition of Sen. Harry Reid’s National Clean Energy Conference (NCES 8.0). This year the Keynote will be delivered by none other than President Obama. The agenda is a whats-what of great clean energy ideas – rooftop solar – clean energy investment ideas – the advantages…
In the iPhone age we’re not repairing things or building things from scratch any longer. Manufacturers build us preconfigured gizmos and do their best to make them opaque boxes we can’t open or hack on. That would put us at the mercy of the manufacturers, and leave dumbing down society to…
I’m excited that the solar power field is moving towards mass scale adoption. The cost for solar power is falling rapidly, and the installation rate is rising quickly. The quicker this happens the more likely it is to change the energy mix enough to change the path of climate change. However,…
This week the two top stories of the Intersolar US 2015 trade show were – Tesla Motors CTO JB Straubl giving the Keynote address, giving the Solar industry fair warning the Solar City / Tesla Motors duo was planning to shake things up – and that in the previous 12…
Let’s face it, the $7,500 federal tax credit for the Tesla Model S is hard to defend. Only the wealthy can afford a $100,000 car, and the wealthy hardly need the tax credit. This factoid opens the door to criticism against the whole project of electric vehicle adoption. I…
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are taking off in a big way, in the U.S.A. That’s not just a claim by a random meme picture on Facebook, the latest Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reports say so. According to the recently-released “Energy Infrastructure Update” report from the Federal Energy…
