electricity generation

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We Must Reduce Energy Use, Not Just CO2 Emissions, To Prevent Catastrophic Global Warming

July 15, 2009 in analysis, carbon mitigation, energy generation, solar electricity, solar thermal by nils | 1 comment

playing with fire

Playing With Fire (image by charles chan, CC 2.0 license)

An article in Sunday's Science Daily reports on research showing that more than half of the Earth's warming since the dawn of the industrial age is due to the heat released from our energy use, not atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect.

While the greenhouse effect is still a significant contributor - and will become more so as GHG levels in the atmosphere rise - simply the heat released when burning fuels is also being stored in the atmosphere, as well as in the earth, sea, and arctic ice.

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Running Gore’s Numbers: An Edifying, If Simplistic, Analysis

September 4, 2008 in analysis, solar electricity by nils | 1 comment

Photo: Bill Gantz

Photo: Bill Gantz (Creative Commons License: Some Rights Reserved)

In his galvanizing speech a few weeks ago Academy Award and Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore exhorted the United States to "produce all electricity from “carbon-free sources” by 2018." This is a pretty abstract goal, in those terms - Gore (appropriately) didn't go into great detail about how this should be done or even what it means in specific practical steps. Depending on your point of view and background knowledge about energy, the goal may seem easy or incredibly difficult, or even impossible, especially without further analysis.

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Efficiency profitable for energy-independent Denmark

August 11, 2008 in energy efficiency, jobs, policy, profits by nils | Add your comment

Thomas Friedman's OpEd on Sunday describes how Denmark has achieved energy independence, and illustrates the numerous benefits for the country, including a very low unemployment rate and a large new export market.

When the 1973 oil shock hit, Denmark got 99 percent of its energy from the Middle East. Now they get zero. The country has combined massive energy efficiency programs, such as using waste heat from power plants to heat homes (known as "cogeneration"), with alternative energy sources like windmills (20% of their energy comes from the wind now), effective use of their own petroleum resources in the North Sea, and incentives for lowering energy use via high taxes on gasoline.

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Is this solar energy analysis is too simplistic?

August 8, 2008 in solar electricity by nils | Add your comment

According to this analysis from Clean Edge, (which I saw originally in the San Jose Mercury News, Solar energy cost may rival other forms soon, study says - SiliconValley.com):

Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a decade, a report released Tuesday suggests. By then, the price parity could propel solar adoption so that it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2025

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