Could the U.S. Cut Household Electricity Use by Two-Thirds?
Your mind-blowing chart of the day, courtesy of Arne Jungjohann at the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source for U.S. use; source for German use; used U.S. average household size of 2.6.
Your mind-blowing chart of the day, courtesy of Arne Jungjohann at the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source for U.S. use; source for German use; used U.S. average household size of 2.6.
In lieu of smarter policy, schools, libraries, and city buildings hoping to install solar power have to resort to complex public-private partnerships to access federal tax incentives. One common strategy is the power purchase agreement (PPA). In essence, a PPA allows the public building owner to buy solar electricity on contract from a third party (instead … Read More
If you haven’t heard yet, there’s a “rule” that precludes distributed renewable energy projects from supplying more than 15% of the power to most “distribution circuits” (part of the low-voltage electric grid that brings power into homes and businesses). With the rapidly falling cost of solar power, many places in the country are starting to push … Read More
In a forthcoming report on U.S. feed-in tariff programs, I’ll provide a comparison of solar feed-in tariff (FIT, a.k.a. CLEAN Contract) rates across the United States. Comparing published rates is not particularly helpful, however, because contract lengths vary (from 15 to 25 years) and the solar resource also varies widely. For international comparisons (e.g. Germany), it’s also … Read More
In the next two years, the U.S. may get a lot less solar and wind power than it could. It’s not a shortage of solar panels or the cost of turbines. Rather, it’s a problem of the perverse nature of federal incentives for renewable energy. Right now, the owner of a solar or wind energy project … Read More
Local ownership of a wind project accounts for half of its lifetime economic value to the community!… Read More
The editor’s column from the March 2012 edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly describes how policy inertia can hamper distributed renewable energy development. To illustrate, Michael T. Burr draws on the history of the automobile: When the first Model-Ts sputtered down the street, few people could’ve imagined the remarkable transformations they’d bring. Instead, they only saw a … Read More
ILSR Senior Researcher John Farrell launched the Energy Self-Reliant States blog in late 2010 to provide hard data and analysis on the economic and political advantages of focusing on distributed renewable energy and local ownership. For a while, it lived off our website, due to technical and aesthetic limitations. Today, we’re happy to repatriate the blog. … Read More
ILSR Senior Researcher John Farrell gave this presentation remotely to the Ontario Power Perspectives conference on April 16, 2012. He was supposed to be there in person, but he forgot to renew his passport. The presentation highlights how Ontario’s “buy local” rule, bonuses for community ownership and focus on distributed generation make their feed-in tariff program … Read More