Dirty Energy Utah?
Utah solar home tour provides unique opportunity to experience solar
By KSL LocalMay 29th, 2015 @ 2:00pm

Here at KSL Local, we are determined to help you find the best in regards to local information, services and much more.

This week we've teamed up with Intermountain Wind and Solar (commonly known as IWS) to talk solar home tours and their benefits.

Does solar energy really work in a home like yours? Does switching to solar energy really make sense financially? These are questions you may have asked recently.

There is no doubt that a hot topic of conversation in the United States currently is the use of solar energy. The costs associated with solar have dropped dramatically, making it more affordable for any home or business owner.

Last year, over 24 million solar panels were installed in the United States with thousands of homes in Utah choosing to switch to solar energy.

In the next two weeks several of these homeowners will open the doors of their homes so that others can experience solar firsthand. This is a perfect opportunity to learn more if you are considering investing in solar for your home.

These free home tours will be hosted by the Intermountain Community Solar Initiative and will be held on May 29 and 30, 2015, as well as on June 12 and 13, 2015.

The tours will take place in Davis, Weber and Cache Counties and will allow guests to get answers about solar from people who actually use it in their own home.

"This is a great opportunity for people to go and see real homes in their communities that have solar, with real people and real power bills," Doug Shipley, CEO of Intermountain Wind and Solar, said. "They can see producing solar systems and get an understanding of how it really works, that it works in homes just like theirs. It's not like the solar of the past."

The Intermountain Community Solar Initiative, a bulk purchasing program, was started two years ago by IWS, Utah's largest solar installation company. It travels from county to county throughout the intermountain west providing bulk purchase discounts and free educational workshops, both of which will be offered in conjunction with the home tour.

For more information and to register for the Free Solar Home Tour, visit UtahSolarHomeTour.com.

Will solar panels kill the utility companies?
Friday, May 29, 2015 by: Natural News Editor
Tags: solar panels, fossil fuels, electric grid
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/049880_solar_panels_fossil_fuels_electric_grid.html#ixzz3bUl1zUfS
NaturalNews) Ever since solar panels became popular, there has been one question the utility companies have been afraid to ask. And that is, how long before solar kills the grid? And more importantly, is it even possible? (Story by Joshua Krause, republished from ReadyNutrition.com.)
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First a commercial message...

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Let me answer that with an image.

What's being depicted here, is how much of the Earth's surface would have to be covered in solar panels to fuel the world's electricity needs. That image comes from a graduate thesis from a college student in Germany.[1] That large square titled "Welt" is all we would need to power the human race, and it's about 158×158 miles in size. Obviously, making a 25,000 square mile solar farm wouldn't be practical in real life, but it illustrates a point. Using solar to replace many of our current fuels is feasible. There's only one thing that's preventing it from happening. It all boils down to the affordability and capacity of rechargeable batteries.

And the subject of batteries has brought that aforementioned question to the forefront, with Tesla's recent announcement[2] that they're going to start producing energy storage cells. These won't be ordinary batteries that you use in your car, but huge wall mounted appliances that can store large amounts of energy. As the cost of rechargeable batteries[3] continues to drop, something like that could really be the death knell of the utility companies as we know them, and here's why.

There have always been two forces driving solar technology. The panels themselves and the batteries that store what they produce. Both are equally important, even if the solar panels tend to get all the credit. You could have the most efficient and durable panels in the world, but if you don't have some way to store their excess energy, then they'll never be able to compete with the grid. But if the battery is big enough, then obviously you can store your extra energy and use it when the sun goes down.

Tesla's battery might just be the missing ingredient in the solar revolution. Their standard unit (which is called the Powerwall) can store 7 kilowatt hours, and multiple units can be stacked together. Each one costs $3,500 and lasts about 10 years. Putting three together would be enough to supply the energy needs of the average American household.[4] While that may sound expensive they'll eventually pay for themselves, even without the solar panels. You can use them to charge from the grid at night when rates are lower.

Will this be enough to hurt the utility companies now? Probably not, but it's a start. Heck, in 10 years time the batteries might not even be made out of lithium. There are dozens of companies out there that are working on cheaper and more efficient replacements for lithium, and they could easily cut the Powerwall's cost in a big way. It's just a matter of time before solar and battery technologies improve enough to make the grid obsolete.

Eventually, both of these technologies will improve to the point where you can make and store all of the energy you need without the grid, and just about every middle class family will be able to afford it. And that trend has been well documented for some time.[5]

When that happens, the utility companies will be relegated to high population density areas where there isn't enough space for solar to supply everyone's energy needs, and large commercial/industrial applications. In that case, usage rates will be small enough, that industrial sized power generators in businesses and factories could pick up what little slack the solar panels leave behind. These "microgrids"[6] would ultimately spell the end of the utility companies.[7]

Someday, we may all have what most preppers have long sought. We may all be living off the grid.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/049880_solar_panels_fossil_fuels_electric_grid.html#ixzz3bUloDWYf

Sunlight and Graphene Could One Day Power a Spaceship
Sarah Zhang
Filed to: GRAPHENE
SPACE SOLAR SPACESHIPS 5/28/15 7:10pm

Graphene, already a plenty weird wondermaterial, has an unexpected new property that could one day play a role in space exploration: When hit with light, it propels forward. Huh!

Scientists accidentally stumbled across this discovery when studying graphene sponges, crumpled up versions of the single-atom thick sheets of carbon. As the team used a laser beam to cut the graphene sponge, the beam itself seemed to inch the sponge forward. So they set up some controlled experiments, which New Scientist describes below:

The team placed pieces of graphene sponge in a vacuum and shot them with lasers of different wavelength and intensity. They were able to push sponge pieces upwards by as much as 40 centimetres. They even got the graphene to move by focusing ordinary sunlight on it with a lens.
So what’s going on? One obvious theory would be something similar to the idea behind solar sails. Photons of light have momentum, and they transfer it to whatever they’re hitting. But with the graphene sponge, it seemed to be moving too much to be momentum alone.

Here’s how New Scientist explained the team’s alternative theory:

Instead, they think the graphene absorbs laser energy and builds up a charge of electrons. Eventually it can’t hold any more, and extra electrons are released, pushing the sponge in the opposite direction. Although it’s not clear why the electrons don’t fly off randomly, the team was able to confirm a current flowing away from the graphene as it was exposed to a laser, suggesting this hypothesis is correct.
To be clear, this is a bizarre observation about graphene that still needs to be confirmed by other scientists. And while graphene is great, it’s hard to make on a commercial scale. It’s easy and fun to dream up uses for graphene, but we’ll have to wait and see whether it lives up our imaginations.

[New Scientist, ArXiv]

Top image: An artist depiction of a solar sail, which graphene could make obsolete. NASA

The best parts of Utah are closed in winter....

"Forever Long" sold all his shares.....

How they are opening a door for solar.
Powerful forces........
Inside the war on coal
How Mike Bloomberg, red-state businesses, and a lot of Midwestern lawyers are changing American energy faster than you think.
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-coal-000002
The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.

The industry and its supporters use “war on coal” as shorthand for a ferocious assault by a hostile White House, but the real war on coal is not primarily an Obama war, or even a Washington war. It’s a guerrilla war. The front lines are not at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Supreme Court. If you want to see how the fossil fuel that once powered most of the country is being battered by enemy forces, you have to watch state and local hearings where utility commissions and other obscure governing bodies debate individual coal plants. You probably won’t find much drama. You’ll definitely find lawyers from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, the boots on the ground in the war on coal.

Beyond Coal is the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the Club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement. It’s gone largely unnoticed amid the furor over the Keystone pipeline and President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon, but it’s helped retire more than one third of America’s coal plants since its launch in 2010, one dull hearing at a time. With a vast war chest donated by Michael Bloomberg, unlikely allies from the business world, and a strategy that relies more on economics than ecology, its team of nearly 200 litigators and organizers has won battles in the Midwestern and Appalachian coal belts, in the reddest of red states, in almost every state that burns coal.

“They’re sophisticated, they’re very active, and they’re better funded than we are,” says Mike Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now heads the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “I don’t like what they’re doing; we’re losing a lot of coal in this country. But they do show up.”

Coal still helps keep our lights on, generating nearly 40 percent of U.S. power. But it generated more than 50 percent just over a decade ago, and the big question now is how rapidly its decline will continue. Almost every watt of new generating capacity is coming from natural gas, wind or solar; the coal industry now employs fewer workers than the solar industry, which barely existed in 2010. Utilities no longer even bother to propose new coal plants to replace the old ones they retire. Coal industry stocks are tanking, and analysts are predicting a new wave of coal bankruptcies.

This is a big deal, because coal is America’s top source of greenhouse gases, and coal retirements are the main reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined 10 percent in a decade. Coal is also America’s top source of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other toxic air pollutants, so fewer coal plants also means less asthma and lung disease—not to mention fewer coal-ash spills and coal-mining disasters. The shift toward cleaner-burning gas and zero-emissions renewables is the most important change in our electricity mix in decades, and while Obama has been an ally in the war on coal—not always as aggressive an ally as the industry claims—the Sierra Club is in the trenches. The U.S. had 523 coal-fired power plants when Beyond Coal began targeting them; just last week, it celebrated the 190th retirement of its campaign in Asheville, N.C., culminating a three-year fight that had been featured in the climate documentary “Years of Living Dangerously.”

Bloomberg has donated to the Sierra Club's vast war chest. | Getty
Beyond Coal isn’t the stereotypical Sierra Club campaign, tree-huggers shouting save-the-Earth slogans. Yes, it sometimes deploys its 2.4 million-member, grass-roots army to shutter plants with traditional not-in-my-back-yard organizing and right-to-breathe agitating. But it usually wins by arguing that ditching coal will save ratepayers money.
Behind that argument lies a revolution in the economics of power, changes few Americans think about when they flick their switches. Coal used to be the cheapest form of electricity by far, but it’s gotten pricier as it’s been forced to clean up more of its mess, while the costs of gas, wind and solar have plunged in recent years. Now retrofitting old coal plants with the pollution controls needed to comply with Obama’s limits on soot, sulfur and mercury is becoming cost-prohibitive—and the EPA is finalizing its new carbon rules as well as tougher ozone restrictions that should add to the burden. That’s why the Sierra Club finds itself in foxholes with big-box stores, manufacturers and other business interests, fighting coal upgrades that would jack up electricity bills, pushing for cheaper renewables and energy efficiency instead. In a case I watched in Oklahoma City, every stakeholder supported Beyond Coal’s push for a utility to buy more low-cost wind power—including a coalition of industrial customers that reportedly included a Koch Industries-owned paper mill.

“They’re not burning bras. They’re fighting dollar to dollar,” says attorney Jim Roth, who represented a group of hospitals on Beyond Coal’s side in the Oklahoma case. “They’ve become masters at bringing financial arguments to environmental questions.”

As the affordability case for coal has lost traction, the industry’s defenders have portrayed the war on coal as a war on reliability, an assault on 24-hour “baseload” plants that provide juice when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. They ask how the Sierra Club expects America to run its refrigerators around the clock—since it also opposes nuclear power and has a separate Beyond Gas campaign. Duncan’s group started a Twitter meme warning that Americans could end up #ColdInTheDark, and even Bloomberg suggested to me in a recent interview that the Club’s leaders seem to want Americans to wear loincloths and live in caves.

In fact, neither the decline of coal, nor the boom in renewables has blacked out the grid, and Beyond Coal’s leaders are confident electricity markets can handle much more intermittent power. In any case, they see coal as the lowest-hanging fruit in the struggle to stabilize the climate, not only our dirtiest fossil fuel but the one with the cheapest alternatives. In the long run, combating global warming will depend on a multitude of factors, from electric vehicles to carbon releases from deforestation to methane releases from belching cows, but for the next decade, our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff. Coal retirements have enabled Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of up to 28 percent by 2025, which has, in turn, enabled him to strike a climate deal with China and pursue a global deal later this year in Paris.

“We’ve found the secret sauce to making progress in unlikely places,” says Bruce Nilles, who leads Beyond Coal from the Club’s San Francisco headquarters. “And every time we beat the coal boys, people say: ‘Whoa. It can be done.’”

The Sierra Club can’t claim full credit for the coal bust. It didn’t ratchet down the prices of gas, wind and solar or enact the flurry of EPA rules ratcheting up the price of coal, although its lobbyists and lawyers have pushed hard for government support for renewables while fighting in court over just about every coal-related regulation. It didn’t produce the energy efficiency boom that has reined in electricity demand, either. Still, a Bloomberg Philanthropies analysis found that at least 40 percent of U.S. coal retirements could not have happened without Beyond Coal’s advocacy. The status quo wields a lot of power in the heavily regulated power sector, where economics and mathematics don’t always beat politics and inertia. The case for change keeps getting stronger, but someone has to make the case.

When Mary Anne Hitt, Beyond Coal’s national director, first visited Indianapolis to fight an inner-city plant, the headline in the Star was: “Beyond Coal’s Director Faces Tough Sell in Indiana.” But after two years of door-knocking, phone-banking and educating officials on the new realities of electricity, the Sierra Club and its local partners helped shut down the plant. Hitt has seen the same kind of miracle in Chicago, in Omaha, alongside a Paiute tribe reservation in Nevada, even in coal strongholds like Kentucky. It’s starting to feel more like a pattern than a miracle.

“David is fighting Goliath every day, and David keeps winning,” Hitt says.

Energy analysts have a way of making Goliath’s new underdog status seem inevitable. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that their burning question about the U.S. coal industry was not how fast it would go away, but how fast it would grow.
The story of coal is a rich vein in the American story, powering our industry, our railroads, our politics. For decades, the work of extracting coal after millions of years underground—so dangerous for some, so lucrative for others—was seen as God’s work. The alchemy of converting coal into valuable energy was seen as a fulfillment of America’s destiny to exploit nature for the benefit of mankind, even as the smog spewing out of coal smokestacks was seen as part of the dystopia of urban life.

These days, growing concerns about climate have heightened concerns about coal, which produces 75 percent of the power sector’s carbon, and more emissions than all our cars and trucks combined. But even at the dawn of the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration’s main concern about coal power and fossil energy in general was that the U.S. wasn’t producing enough of it. In 2001, an energy task force led by Dick Cheney, after a series of secret meetings with fossil-fuel executives, called for a new power-plant construction boom, warning that the alternative was a national reprise of the rolling blackouts that had just roiled California. Utilities quickly proposed about 200 new coal plants, and faced no organized national opposition. Coal plants have a useful lifespan of at least 40 years, so the U.S. was poised to lock in a new generation of dirty power. And all that new capacity was poised to destroy any incentive to develop clean wind or solar power.

That’s when the Sierra Club got into its first big coal fight over a proposed billion-dollar plant south of Chicago, a welcome-to-the-NFL episode. The Chicago area already had poor air quality—the coal plants around the Loop were known as the Ring of Fire—and local volunteers, led by an indefatigable German immigrant named Verena Owen, were desperate to block the project. Their cause seemed hopeless, but for Owen, who is now Beyond Coal’s lead volunteer, it was personal. Her best friend had struggled to breathe whenever the air was hazy and eventually died of lung disease, leaving behind a daughter in kindergarten. “I don’t know how many people we ended up saving, but I know one we didn’t,” Owen says.

The first time Nilles, at the time a lawyer for the Sierra Club’s Midwest office in Chicago, tried to attend a hearing about the plant, union members who supported the project came early and packed the hall while the Club was holding a news conference. Illinois regulators soon rubber-stamped the permit. Owen and Nilles can still recite the date and time of the news dump: Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 5:10 p.m., so the bureaucrats could ignore their calls and escape for the weekend. And the industry had an even easier time of it elsewhere. Nilles later reviewed the record for another billion-dollar plant that broke ground in Iowa about the same time, and discovered there hadn’t been a single public comment in opposition.

“Everything was going full speed in the wrong direction, and we had no capacity to fight,” he says. “We realized we needed a strategy. Fast.”

The strategy that Nilles devised was to fight every new plant from every conceivable environmental, economic and political angle. The Sierra Club began organizing boot camps to teach lawyers and volunteers around the region how to block coal permits. Demand for the seminars was so intense that, at one point, Nilles’ boss had to remind him that Texas was not part of the Midwest. But he figured Texans who breathed air and drank water had as much to lose from exposure to coal-fired pollutants as Midwesterners had. Some of the Club’s funders thought his fight-everything-everywhere approach was unrealistic during a national coal rush, but every proposed plant was in someone’s backyard, and the Club had members in every corner of the country. Nilles couldn’t imagine telling any of them their communities would have to be sacrificed for the greater tactical good.

Environmentalists have always been good at blocking stuff, and over the next few years, the kitchen-sink strategy produced some improbable victories. Nilles exploited threats to an endangered clover to delay the Chicago-area plant, and the utility eventually abandoned it. A local Sierra Club chapter stopped a massive plant in Kentucky coal country after a 63-day hearing, convincing regulators that the proposal had inadequate pollution controls, and that adequate controls would be exorbitant for ratepayers. These were shoestring crusades with expert witnesses crashing on the couches of volunteers, but the victories felt contagious, spreading hope to activists in other states who read about them on the Club’s coal listserv.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club was canvassing its members to develop a new long-term strategic plan. To the surprise of then-Director Carl Pope, they overwhelmingly wanted climate and energy to be the top priority, a major shift for a group that had emphasized wilderness conservation since its creation by the legendary outdoorsman John Muir. At a meeting in Tucson in early 2006, the Club’s board voted to build the fledgling Midwestern anti-coal effort into a national campaign. Climate activists are often accused of wasting energy on symbolic movement-building efforts with relatively limited impact on emissions, like their crusades to stop Keystone and get universities to divest from fossil fuels. Beyond Coal’s leaders do oppose the pipeline and support the divestment movement, but the rationale for the campaign was all about hunting where the ducks are.

“It was existential necessity: Look how many coal plants they want to build. Look how much carbon they’d produce. Well, it’s game over if we don’t stop them,” Pope recalls. “If we were going to focus on climate, we had to focus on coal.”

In a bow to political realism, the initial goal was to make sure coal was “mined responsibly, burned cleanly and disposed of safely.” But the campaigners didn’t really believe coal could be burned cleanly. The original mouthful of a mission soon evolved to “Move Beyond Coal,” then just “Beyond Coal.” It was a much simpler message, helping to unite a variety of activists—working for specific neighborhoods, Indian tribes, mountains targeted by mining outfits, public health, environmental justice, clean energy, and the climate—against a common enemy. The Sierra Club would be the one constant presence in the war on coal, but it began partnering with more than 100 local, regional and national groups in its battles around the country.

The campaign was remarkably successful. Nilles and his team scoured every permit application for vulnerabilities and managed to block all but 30 of the 200 plants proposed in the Bush era. The nice thing about fighting new plants was that they didn’t exist yet, so it only took one deal breaker—too much smog in a high-smog area, too close to a national park, too expensive for ratepayers, whatever—to break a deal. Some of the plants that did get built still haunt Nilles, but those defeats did not doom the decarbonization of America. The game was not over.

By 2008, with the economy crashing and power demand slumping, utilities had stopped pushing new coal plants. That’s when Nilles began plotting to go after old ones—an even tougher challenge, but a vital one to avoid the game-over scenario. He had moved to the liberal college town of Madison, and he was amazed that an old coal plant a mile from his home still had no pollution controls; it was way dirtier than the new plants he was fighting around the country. The nation’s fleet of existing coal plants was still emitting nearly 2 billion tons of carbon and causing an estimated 13,000 premature deaths every year. It felt good to stop projects that would have increased those numbers, but Nilles wanted to use the Club’s newfound expertise to reduce them.

“It’s a lot easier to throw ourselves in front of bulldozers to stop something than it is to shut something down that’s already part of the community, paying taxes, generating power, providing jobs,” Nilles says. “But that’s where the emissions are.”

That was also the year Obama won the presidency, creating hope for stricter EPA regulation of sulfur, soot and ozone, plus the first-ever regulations of mercury, coal ash and carbon. As difficult as it would be to kill plants that had been operating for decades—two-thirds of the coal fleet predated the Clean Air Act of 1970—Nilles thought the combination of top-down rules from Washington and bottom-up pressure at state and local hearings could force utilities to confront investment decisions they had been delaying all those decades. Most utilities would need approval from their financial and environmental regulators before they could install expensive pollution controls. And while the utilities might be happy to charge their customers tens of millions of dollars for upgrades in order to comply with one new rule—plus a tidy profit they’re usually guaranteed for capital improvements—utility commissions might not let them start down that road if they faced hundreds of millions of dollars in additional compliance costs from rules still to come.

Once again, the campaign produced some inspiring early wins, including the retirement of that antiquated plant near Nilles in Madison. He also filed a lawsuit against his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, to get it off coal. The Club quickly found that when it could stop investor-owned utilities from getting a blank check to charge ratepayers for coal upgrades, they would usually shut down the plants rather than risk shareholder dollars. That was even true in coal country, where homeowners, businesses and regulators were just as allergic to pricey upgrades—and utilities were just as reluctant to foot the bill themselves. As Nilles’ new deputy, Hitt, a West Virginia activist who had spent years trying to stop mining companies from blowing up mountains in Appalachia, found she could do more to protect the mountains by shutting down the plants that used their coal.

Beyond Coal had grown from three staffers to a 15-state operation, but it still lacked the scale to fight 523 plants all over the country. It needed to get a lot bigger. That’s when the combative billionaire who has financed his own wars on guns, tobacco and Big Gulps took an interest in the war on coal.

Beyond Coal’s pivotal moment came at a meeting in Gracie Mansion about, of all things, education reform. Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street savant-turned media mogul-turned New York City mayor, was looking for a new outlet for his private philanthropy. It quickly became clear that education reform would not be that outlet.

“It was a terrible meeting in every way, and Mike was angry,” recalls his longtime adviser, Kevin Sheekey. “I said: ‘Look, if you don’t like this idea, that’s fine. We’ll bring you another.’ He said: ‘No, I want another now.’”

As it happened, Sheekey had just eaten lunch with Carl Pope, who was starting a $50 million fundraising drive to expand Beyond Coal’s staff to 45 states. The cap-and-trade plan that Obama supported to cut carbon emissions had stalled in Congress, and the carbon tax that Bloomberg supported was going nowhere as well. Washington was gridlocked. But Pope had explained to Sheekey that shutting down coal plants at the state and local level could do even more for the climate—and have a huge impact on public health issues close to his boss’s heart.

“That’s a good idea,” Bloomberg told Sheekey. “We’ll just give Carl a check for the $50 million. Tell him to stop fundraising and get to work.”

Bloomberg had never thought of himself as a Sierra Club kind of guy. But he saw coal as a killer, as well as the main threat to the climate, and the Club was in the field doing something about it. His only demand was a more analytical approach to the war on coal, with measurable deliverables, complex predictive models for vulnerable plants, and KPI—Key Performance Indicators, as Pope later learned.

“The Sierra Club had never heard of KPI,” Pope says. “We just had a gut instinct for what would work. The mayor said: ‘Oh, no, no. This will be data-driven.’”

On a sweltering day in July 2011, Bloomberg announced his gift to the Club on a boat he had chartered on the Potomac River, in front of a 63-year-old coal plant he had always noticed on flights into Washington. He saw it as a perfect illustration of the city’s inability to get anything done.

“You’d think the politicians would at least care about the air they breathe themselves!” Bloomberg marveled to me in a recent interview.

That plant on the Potomac is now closed. So is the Massachusetts plant that Mitt Romney once said “kills people,” a line Obama actually used against him in coal-state campaign ads in 2012. So are all of Chicago’s plants, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel boasted in his first campaign ad in 2015. Overall, the 190 plants that U.S. utilities have agreed to retire will eliminate about one fourth of America’s coal-fired capacity, a total of 79 gigawatts. And for every watt of coal capacity they’re taking out of commission, they’ve already installed a watt of wind or solar capacity. The Clean Air Task Force estimate of coal-fired premature deaths is down to about 7,500 a year, a decrease of 5,500 since Beyond Coal went national. And Bloomberg’s early support has helped attract more than $100 million from top foundations and wealthy individuals like the Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Steyer, the climate movement’s top political donor.

“It’s a reminder that you can do a lot with no help from Congress,” Bloomberg says. “I just wish we could point out the specific people who were saved.”

To coal backers, Beyond Coal is pure urban elitist lunacy, the kind of nightmare you get when a nanny-state mayor from New York hooks up with eco-radicals from San Francisco and a liberal president in Washington. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma—chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, author of “The Greatest Hoax,” thrower of a Senate-floor snowball designed to highlight the folly of global-warming alarmism—told me it’s hard to believe some Americans actually want to keep our abundant energy resources in the ground.

“It’s a war on all fossil fuels, and coal is the No. 1 target,” Inhofe says. “You got a president who doesn’t care how many jobs it costs, and rich people who don’t care how much money they spend. They can do a lot of damage.”

I got to watch the war in Inhofe’s state, and the damage wasn’t getting done the way Inhofe imagined. The job creators were siding with the environmentalists. Economics was the most powerful weapon in the Sierra Club’s arsenal.

At a dry hearing in a drab courtroom in Oklahoma City, a methodical Beyond Coal attorney named Kristin Henry, whose bio identifies her as “one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” was pinning down an Oklahoma Gas & Electric executive with a barrage of wouldn’t-you-agrees, isn’t-it-trues, and would-it-be-fair-to-say’s. The power company was out of compliance with a federal air-quality rule called “regional haze,” so it was offering to convert one of its two coal plants into a natural gas plant. Henry knew she couldn’t stop that. But OG&E also wanted to install massive new scrubbers on the other plant so it could keep burning coal for decades to come. Henry was determined to stop that.

In the 90 minutes Henry spent cross-examining OG&E’s Joseph Rowlett in early March, she didn’t ask a single question about climate or public health. She focused exclusively on OG&E’s request for the largest rate increase in state history, a 15 percent hike to finance the utility’s $700 million compliance plan. Through her deadpan, leading questions, she portrayed OG&E as a company desperate to get its customers to foot the bill to prop up an inefficient plant, pursuing retrofits it would never consider if its own shareholders had to swallow the costs, operating in a dream world where regional haze was coal’s only challenge. At one point, she got Rowlett to admit his calculations assumed there would be no additional coal regulations for the next thirty years, even though the EPA intends to finalize at least four new coal regulations this year alone.

“Isn’t it true you’re assuming zero over the next 30 years?” Henry asked.

Rowlett paused a few seconds. “That’s right,” he replied.

The Sierra Club, even though it didn’t sound much like the Sierra Club, was clearly in hostile political territory. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a conservative Republican who has spearheaded a national campaign to protect fossil fuels from legal challenges, had joined OG&E in fighting the EPA haze rule all the way to the Supreme Court. Now he was supposed to be representing consumers at the OG&E hearing before the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, but he hadn’t even filed a brief about the record rate hike. “That’s unheard of,” one commission official told me. Pruitt didn’t attend the hearing, either—the day it began, he was in Tulsa with Mike Huckabee raising money for his PAC—but one of his deputies who did attend occasionally raised objections when OG&E witnesses were asked uncomfortable questions.

But if the political deck seemed stacked against the Sierra Club, Henry held the economic cards. In Oklahoma, coal imported from Wyoming now costs more per kilowatt hour than the abundant gas under the ground or the wind that famously comes sweeping down the plain. In another recent haze case, the Sierra Club cut a deal requiring Oklahoma’s other major utility to phase out its only coal plant and buy 200 megawatts of wind—and the bids came in so low, the utility ended up buying 600 megawatts of wind. That’s why Wal-Mart, the hospital group and the coalition of industrial ratepayers all supported Beyond Coal’s push for more wind in the OG&E case. Cheap electricity has a way of scrambling political alliances.

Henry and the lawyers for OG&E’s corporate customers formed a kind of tag team, taking turns blasting the company for refusing to even study new wind power. They repeatedly pointed out that in-state competitors as well as Florida and New Mexico utilities were buying Oklahoma wind for just 2 cents per kilowatt hour, even cheaper than coal without pollution controls, while OG&E hadn’t purchased new wind in four years—even though its ads boasted about its commitment to wind. When its witnesses claimed their transmission lines were too congested to add new wind, Henry produced internal documents suggesting the congestion could be fixed for about 3 percent of the cost of the new coal scrubbers. As she pointed out, other Oklahoma utilities have much higher percentages of wind power on their systems.

Closing coal plants can sound radical, but Henry framed it for the Republican utility commissioners as the conservative response to EPA rules, avoiding the risk of “stranded” investments in outdated plants that might have to be shut down anyway. The most economical way to meet haze limits, she suggested, would be to stop burning the coal that causes the haze. Al Armendariz, who was Obama’s Dallas-based regional EPA administrator and is now Beyond Coal’s Austin-based regional representative, says the Club’s victories in states like Georgia, Mississippi and Kentucky have helped normalize the idea of abandoning coal in Oklahoma.

“We get respect because of our track record,” Armendariz says. “When we say a utility isn’t acting prudently, people can’t just dismiss us as ‘Oh, of course the Sierra Club says that.’ They see how we keep winning. They see these big industrial customers agreeing with us. Then they look at the numbers and see we’re right.”

Still, there’s no denying the war on coal is leading America into uncharted territory. The Sierra Club wants to eliminate all coal power by 2030, but what will replace it? Wind and solar, despite their rapid Obama-era growth, still make up just 5 percent of U.S. power capacity. And while technologies to store renewable energy (such as Tesla’s newly announced battery packs) are getting cheaper, they’re still a rounding error on the grid. Beyond Coal’s leaders are content to push cleaner power and let utilities figure out how to deliver it, but as OG&E Vice President Paul Renfrow told me: “That’s easy for them to say. We have to keep the lights on.”

Inhofe thinks the Sierra Club is simply obsessed with rooting out fossil fuels, citing “the guy who wants to crucify people” as an example of its extremism. He meant Armendariz, who left the EPA after he was caught on tape suggesting that harsh sanctions for law-breaking oil and gas companies could scare others into compliance, just as public crucifixions helped keep the peace in Roman times.

“The Sierra Club wants to stop coal now?” Inhofe asked. “You’ll see, they’ll be after gas next.”

Long-term, he’s right. While the Club accepted some donations from natural gas interests under Pope, it is now formally committed to eliminating gas as well as coal by 2030, and it has helped block new gas plants in cities like Austin and Carlsbad, California. After its victory last week in Asheville, Beyond Coal vowed to keep fighting to overturn Duke Energy’s decision to build a new gas plant to replace its 50-year-old coal plant. Even Bloomberg thinks the Club’s opposition to the fracking boom that has helped replace so much domestic coal with domestic gas is silly.

That said, Beyond Coal’s leaders, including Armendariz, understand that Beyond Gas is more aspirational than practical for now. They deeply prefer renewables to gas, but they almost as deeply prefer gas to coal. In Oklahoma City, Henry grilled OG&E witnesses about why they wanted to spend $500 million on scrubbers for coal boilers that could be retrofitted to burn gas for just $70 million. She shredded the implausible assumptions OG&E had made in its economic models to make scrubbing coal look cheaper than converting to gas, forcing one witness to admit gas prices were already 25 percent lower than his low-cost scenario. I sat in on one friendly lunch the Club’s legal team had with lawyers for a Conoco Phillips front group; they all hoped to move OG&E beyond coal, and gas is clearly part of the short-term solution.
We want to be principled but pragmatic,” says Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, who stopped the Club’s gas-industry gifts when he took over in 2010. “We’ve wrestled with this, and there’s a definite disagreement with Bloomberg. We don’t see gas as an environmental fix. But we acknowledge that we still need some gas.”

Coal is different. Bloomberg calls it “a dead man walking.” When he made his initial gift to the Sierra Club, the goal was to secure the retirements of one third of the coal fleet by 2015. The Club is only slightly behind schedule, and in April, Bloomberg came to Washington to announce another $30 million donation, with a new goal of retirement announcements for half of the fleet by 2017. “We’re doubling down on an incredibly successful strategy,” Bloomberg said.

The campaign’s leaders believe coal has already passed a tipping point toward oblivion. Coal giants like Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Walter Energy are struggling to stay afloat. Just last week, in addition to the retirement announcement for the Asheville plant—as well as another for a Milwaukee plant that wasn’t official enough for Beyond Coal to count as #191—the insurance giant AXA announced that it will sell off more than $500 million worth of coal investments, the largest financial institution to flee the space to date, while the EPA announced it was closing a loophole that allowed virtually unlimited emissions from malfunctioning coal plants, a response to yet another Sierra Club lawsuit. And the more dirty plants get shut down, the more residents near other dirty plants are asking: Why not ours?

It’s hard to change the status quo, no matter how compelling the economic logic. Beyond Coal does not just deploy data. It organizes rallies and petitions and float-ins on kayaks; it shames utility executives on billboards and airplane banners; it mobilizes its members to show up at boring hearings where showing up can make a difference. If the Oklahoma City case displayed the war on coal as a numerical dispute, another hearing I watched south of Detroit was more like a street fight.

River Rouge is a depressed community at the city’s edge, a blightscape of boarded-up bungalows, overgrown lots and pawn shops. There’s no grocery store and virtually no medical services, but there is a nice little park where kids play at the playground and adults fish in the Detroit River. Unfortunately, the park smells like rotten eggs, thanks to sulfur dioxide from a DTE Energy coal plant overlooking the playground. Michigan health officials have called this area “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.” The fish aren’t safe to eat, either, though people eat them.

“It’s just an unhealthy situation,” says Alisha Winters, a local resident and mother of seven children, two with asthma. “They figure they can get away with dumping on us.”

The EPA has called out this area’s elevated sulfur dioxide levels, and last year Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s administration floated a compliance plan that would have required DTE to upgrade the coal-fired River Rouge Power Plant or (more likely) close it. But DTE proposed an alternative plan with no costly upgrades, and the state quietly accepted it. The Sierra Club has been mobilizing opposition ever since, drawing an unusual coalition of local whites, African-Americans, Latinos and Arab-Americans—as well as a busload of white liberals from Ann Arbor—for an environmental hearing in mid-March. The hearing had to be moved from City Hall to a school auditorium to accommodate the groundswell of protests, a far cry from that Chicago-area hearing over a decade ago where the Sierra Club got frozen out.

“We’re getting people to cross borders, physical and imaginary,” says Rhonda Anderson, a sharecropper’s daughter who is now an organizer for Beyond Coal.
If the Oklahoma City hearing was financial, the River Rouge hearing was political, a multiracial show of force in “I Love Clean Air” T-shirts. Every speaker opposed the DTE plan, including an Indian-American medical student, an Arab-American law student, an African-American asthma educator, a Latina anti-poverty activist and a white nun. Ebony Elmore, a child care provider who lives a block from the plant, talked about her four siblings and three nieces with asthma, as well as her two parents with pulmonary disease. I happened to ask Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who was watching the testimony from the side of the hall, why she was there, just as another resident started telling a story about an 11-year-old local girl who died because she couldn’t get to her inhaler in time.

“That’s why I’m here,” Dingell whispered.

A few days later, Governor Snyder—whose top campaign supporters included one Michael Bloomberg—announced a new effort to cut Michigan’s reliance on coal. That would have been a huge political burden for Snyder if he had run for president in a GOP primary, where “anti-coal” will be an epithet like “anti-gun” or “anti-freedom,” but he decided not to run, and coal is becoming a huge economic burden for his industrial state.

The already frenetic national pace of plant retirements will have to double for Beyond Coal to meet its 2017 goal, but utilities will face daunting investment decisions over the next two years. The EPA recently settled a sulfur lawsuit with the Sierra Club that could replicate the River Rouge dilemma across the nation. The agency has also imposed regional haze plans that already are replicating the Oklahoma dilemma in Arizona, Arkansas and Texas. Today, Beyond Coal has more than 100 legal cases pending over power supply. Meanwhile, it’s pursuing a new strategy on the power demand side, pushing blue states like Oregon to stop importing coal-fired electricity, which could shutter plants in red states like Montana. Even inside Texas, the Club has worked with relatively progressive cities like Austin, San Antonio and El Paso to replace their coal power with renewables.

Beyond Coal is also continuing to lobby and litigate in Washington, pushing Obama to drop his “all-of-the-above” approach to energy and formally enlist in the war on coal. Obama has not been as maniacally anti-coal as the industry suggests, punting on ozone rules in his first term to avoid alienating voters in Ohio, issuing relatively weak restrictions on coal ash, taking a lenient approach to mining on public land, floating carbon rules with mild targets for the most coal-reliant states. Still, when you add up all he’s done and all he’s doing, you get a tremendously uncertain regulatory environment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—whose wife, Elaine Chao, recently quit the Bloomberg Philanthropies board over coal—has urged states to defy the Clean Power Plan, but utilities with fiduciary responsibilities don’t engage in much civil disobedience. They have already shut down dozens of plants to comply with mercury rules the Supreme Court could still strike down, and they’re starting to think about carbon, too.

Some coal advocates still hold out hope that the decline can be reversed if Republicans can win the presidency and keep Congress. “We’ve got a Congress that’s sympathetic, but we’ve still got a bureaucracy running amok,” says Mike Duncan, the RNC chairman-turned-coal advocate. “That will play in 2016. Obviously, anytime you elect a leader, it’s important to this industry.”

If the EPA stands down under the next president, the pace of retirements could slow. But it probably won’t stop. The trends are too strong. Nilles recently met with leaders of the utility Southern Company, which has slashed its dependence on coal in half over the past five years. Its executives rejected his vision of a coal-free America by 2030, but some of them suggested 2050 could be realistic. In any case, the Sierra Club won a lot of coal fights during the pro-coal Bush administration, because they were ultimately local fights over local air.

The fights also have a global context. The Earth is already getting hotter, and the death of American coal would not avert a climate catastrophe if the rest of the world did not follow our lead. But the decline of American coal emissions will help U.S. negotiators insist that other countries do their part in the global negotiations in Paris. And while critics of climate action often grumble that it would be foolish for the U.S. to make sacrifices when China is still building a new coal plant every week, that’s no longer true. China actually decreased its coal use last year, and is shuttering all four plants in smog-shrouded Beijing. The trends killing coal in America—cheap gas, wind and solar; more energy efficiency; stricter regulations—are trending abroad as well. Cash-strapped U.S. mining firms are desperate to solve their domestic problems by selling more coal in foreign markets, but the Sierra Club has helped lead the fight to block six proposed coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest, which will help keep even more coal in the ground.

There will be no formal surrender in the war on coal, no battleship treaty to mark the end. But Beyond Coal’s leaders believe they can finish most of their work setting the U.S. electric sector on a greener path over the next five years. The next phase of the war on carbon would be to try to electrify everything else—cars and trains that use oil-derived gasoline and diesel, as well as homes and businesses that rely on natural gas and heating oil. Nilles hopes power companies like OG&E and DTE that Beyond Coal has spent the last decade fighting with—but then cutting deals with—can become allies in Phase Two. And allies will be vital, because if King Coal seems like a rich and powerful enemy, it’s a pushover compared to Big Oil.

“Once we’ve taken out coal, we’ll need to take on oil, and who better to help than our new friends in the utility sector who can make money from electrification?” Nilles says with a grin. “It’s a long fight. This is how we win.”

Authors:

Michael Grunwald mgrunwald@politico.com

Solar, Wind Account for 100 Percent of New Generation Capacity in April
by Andrew Burger on Thursday, May 28th, 2015

http://www.triplepundit.com/2015/05/solar-wind-100-aprils-new-electric-generation-capacity/
The latest Energy Infrastructure Update from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Office of Energy Projects reveals just how much traction renewable energy is gaining as a source of electricity around the nation. Wind and solar accounted for 100 percent of newly-installed generation capacity in the U.S. in April, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) highlights in its latest Sun Day Campaign update.

New solar, wind, geothermal and hydro power installations, moreover, have accounted for 84 percent of the 1,900 megawatts of new generation capacity installed in the U.S. during the first four months of 2015, FERC reports.

“Renewable energy sources now account for 17.05 percent of total installed operating generating capacity in the U.S.,” ASES points out. Hydropower accounts for 8.55 percent of capicty; wind, 5.74 percent; biomass, 1.38 percent; solar, 1.05 percent; and geothermal steam, 0.33 percent. The total is up from 13.71 percent of capacity in December 2010, when FERC released its first monthly Energy Infrastructure Update.

Swimming against renewables’ rising tide
Collectively, wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower provided just over 84 percent of the 1,900 megawatts of new generating capacity the U.S. placed into service during the first third of 2015. The nearly 1,600 MW of new renewable capacity installed across the country from January through April includes:

1,170 MW of wind (61.5 percent)
362 MW of solar (19.1 percent)
45 MW of geothermal steam (2.4 percent)
21 MW of hydropower (1.1 percent)
“The balance (302 MW) was provided by five units of natural gas,” ASES notes.

Commenting on the latest statistics, Sun Day Campaign’s executive director, Ken Bossong, stated:

“Members of Congress and state legislators proposing to curb support for renewable energy, such as Renewable Portfolio/Electricity Standards and the federal Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit, are swimming against the tide. With renewable energy’s clear track record of success and the ever-worsening threat of climate change, now is not the time to pull back from these technologies but rather to greatly expand investments in them.”

Individuals and corporations fully vested in oil, gas and coal such as the Koch Brothers are spending unprecedented sums to influence federal, state and local legislators, regulators and the broad public in order to stem the fast rising renewables’ tide.

Just one example: More solar power generation capacity was installed in North Carolina last year than in any other state barring California, yet a proposed bill would cut the state’s renewable portfolio standard by 50 percent.

While Duke has said it isn’t taking a position on the rollback, former CEO Jim Rogers lambasted the sponsors of the bill, including its primary booster Mike Hager, formerly a Duke engineer who now serves as North Carolina House Majority Leader.

“Shame on us,” Rogers said during a speech he gave in Charlotte recently, the Charlotte Observer’s Bruce Henderson reported May 21.

During his speech, Rogers highlighted North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association reports that green energy companies have created 23,000 jobs and $4.8 billion in annual revenue since North Carolina’s RPS went into effect.

“They are not focused on the future,” Rogers said in referring to state legislators. “They are focused on the past.” Later he added that: “It’s just something we need to get behind and figure out how to educate those who claim to be leading us into the 21st century,” according to Henderson’s report for the Charlotte Observer.

Works great with solar!
Wind Power: A Great American Resource
Ken KimmellKen Kimmell, president
May 27, 2015
http://blog.ucsusa.org/wind-power-american-resource-749
Wind Power: A Great American Resource
I don’t usually go to trade association conferences. I’m not a big fan of the back patting, the bland “inspirational” speeches, or the exhibit booths populated by eager salespeople.
But when I was invited to speak on federal policy at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) conference in Orlando this week, I put all that aside.

I’m glad I did. Here are some key things I took away:
Wind energy can be a great American success story. Just as our country has taken advantage of its rich farmland and vast natural resources, we are now reaping the bounty of our wide open spaces and the strong steady winds that blow across them. The United States is the largest generator of wind energy in the world, with enormous expansion potential.
Wind power is cost-effective and getting cheaper. I learned about long-term contracts for wind power at 2 1/2 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s well below the price for energy from a new natural gas or coal plant. And these contracts typically last for 15 to 20 years, so the power is not only cheap, it is stable and predictable.

The benefits are widespread. Wind energy is not just good for consumers who like low energy prices, or climate hawks like me who want clean, carbon-free sources of electricity. I heard from farmers and ranchers who are holding on to their family businesses by leasing some of their land for wind turbines. And veterans who have come home from military service and are manufacturing wind turbine components and building, operating and maintaining wind farms all across the country.

This industry doesn’t expect a long-term hand out. For a number of years, the wind industry has benefitted from a federal subsidy. This subsidy helped reduce the cost of wind power by giving a young industry a foothold to grow and innovate, and establish domestic manufacturing capacity. But the CEO’s I heard at this conference acknowledged that this subsidy cannot last forever, and they are not asking for that. They are focused on finding new ways to cut more costs so wind energy is competitive without subsidies.

This is quite a contrast from the fossil fuel industry, which enjoys enormous subsidies, including the ability to spew carbon pollution into the atmosphere without paying a cent for the harm this causes. And the fossil fuel industry has no intention of letting this subsidy go and is fighting with all its might to keep it.

We need a level playing field. I left this conference full of optimism about an industry that is maturing and offering a cost-effective way for the United States to cut its emissions of heat-trapping gases. But, the potential for wind energy remains constrained by the fact that the price of fossil-fueled energy doesn’t reflect its true cost. We need to fix that, first with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and ultimately with carbon pricing. Then we can truly unleash this great American resource.

Posted in: Energy, Global Warming
About the author: Ken Kimmell is president of the Union of Concerned Scientists and has more than 30 years of experience in government, environmental policy, and advocacy. He is a national advocate for clean energy and transportation policies and a driving force behind UCS’s “Power Ahead” campaign to build a large and diverse group of clean energy leadership states. Prior to joining UCS in May 2014, Mr. Kimmell was the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), and served as chairman of the board of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. See Ken's full bio.

Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.

A 80KWH Supercapacitor sounds pretty explosive and dangerous in an accident....

BUCKY! Nice day for us on CABN and SLTD!
They need our solar panels....
COAL is dying Today! YES!
ACI
ANR
WLT!
COAL IS DEAD!
Hope this continues. We need news....
SLTD is doing the NAS closing bell tonight....

50-50
Same odds as the lottery.
Either we do or we don't...
Smart arse mark!

This grid battery startup is raising funds to ramp up in a competitive market
by Katie Fehrenbacher MAY 26, 2015, 5:22 PM ED
https://fortune.com/2015/05/26/advanced-microgrid-solutions-funding/

Meet a young startup with a huge utility deal and a lot of promise.

Tesla is only the most well-known company that’s using low-cost batteries and software to potentially change how the power grid operates. There are a half dozen others, and one of those is a startup called Advanced Microgrid Solutions that hopes to raise $18.8 million to compete in the space, according to a filing.

The San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2012, has closed on about $7 million of the round. The filing says there are 14 investors participating in the funding, and previously the company has only disclosed that it has been “funded with private equity from undisclosed sources.”

Advanced Microgrid Solutions takes lithium-ion batteries and uses smart software to manage battery banks for both commercial and industrial customers as well as utilities. These types of battery farms can provide services like backup power for the power grid during peak grid use, energy at night when paired with solar panels, or battery energy for a building when electricity rates from the power grid are high.

Attendees take pictures of the new Tesla Energy Powerwall Home Battery during an event at Tesla Motors in Hawthorne, California April 30, 2015. Tesla Motors Inc unveiled Tesla Energy – a suite of batteries for homes, businesses and utilities – a highly-anticipated plan to expand its business beyond electric vehicles. REUTERS/Patrick T. Fallon – RTX1B28Q
Photograph by Patrick Fallon — Reuters
Tesla is also selling its Powerpack batteries to provide similar services, also using lithium-ion batteries. And so is Stem. As is Greensmith Energy, Greencharge Networks, and Coda Energy. It’s a crowded space.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions emerged in the spotlight late last year after it managed to win a whopping 50 megawatt deal (across four contracts) with utility Southern California Edison. To picture how large this is, there were less than 10 megawatts worth of energy storage installed across the entire U.S. in the first quarter of this year.

The startup is reacting to a market that’s starting to explode. The state of California has a mandate that says that the big three utilities (SCE included) need to collectively deploy over one gigawatt of energy storage by 2020 (1,000 megawatts equal 1 gigawatt). Many of the companies that won deals with SCE were large, public companies, and Advanced Microgrid Solutions was one of just a couple of startups.

SolarCity workers install solar electrical panels on the roof of a home in Palo Alto, Calif. in 2011.
Photograph by Tony Avelar — Christian Science Monitor Christian Science Monitor—Getty Images
Advanced Microgrid Solutions also stands out because it was founded by two women and boasts more female than male executives. The company was co-founded by political operative Susan Kennedy, who was a chief of staff to California Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis, as well as a former commissioner for the California Public Utilities Commission. Co-founder Jackalyne Pfannenstiel previously chaired the California Energy Commission, worked at utility PG&E for twenty years, and was the assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy in charge of its energy strategy.

The startup plans to deploy the first 10 megawatt portion of the battery deal with SCE at commercial buildings in Orange County, Calif. by the beginning of 2017. The entire SCE project is meant to be done by the end of 2017. The startup will face a penalty if it can’t deliver what SCE needs.

DBL Investors Managing Partner Nancy Pfund, a early investor in Tesla, is listed on the funding filing as a “director,” and Pfund has previously disclosed that she’s an advisor to the company.

Ground zero in the solar wars: Nevada
Reem Nasr | @reemanasr
10 Hours Ago
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102704602

Jacob Kepler | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Solar panels at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada.
The Nevada Legislature has been intensively lobbied for months by both solar advocates and their allies on the one hand, and the state utility on the other, over how home solar users are credited for electricity they generate and give back to the power grid.

Current law mandates a limit of 3 percent on residential solar production, as a percentage of the utility's historical peak load, as being eligible for so-called "net metering" credits. In other words, consumers who add solar panels to their homes are eligible for credits from the utility as long as the state's total solar-generated energy falls under that 3 percent cap. But if the state's solar energy begins to exceed the 3 percent limit—as it's likely to do soon—then new solar panel users won't get a credit.

On Monday, utility NV Energy and The Alliance for Solar Choice (TASC) announced a compromise that will slightly increase the size of the cap through the end of 2015 by defining "3 percent" as 235 megawatts. It also will push the decision on the future size of the cap to the state's public utilities commission rather than its legislature.

The solar industry and its allies support a higher cap, saying a failure to boost it will put 6,000 Nevada solar-industry jobs at risk. The state's electric utility, on the other side, wants to keep the cap as is. (Tweet This)
Both sides have lobbied strenuously for the Legislature to rule in their favor, in turn sparking both sides to trade accusations about the other's lobbying tactics.

Read MoreSolar firms, power companies battle over 'net metering'

"This argument has been so muddled and filled with hysteria, if it wasn't so important to a community, it would almost be comical," former Nevada State Sen. Randolph Townsend said.

The solar industry told CNBC last week that it expected the state's growing solar output to exceed the cap by late summer. NV Energy puts its own estimate later, saying the cap could be reached sometime during the first quarter of 2016. The utility was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 2013.
The stakes are high in Nevada, said Bryan Miller, co-chairman at The Alliance for Solar Choice (TASC).

He sees solar's chief opponent in Nevada not as NV Energy, but Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, which he says has spent "an enormous amount" on ads and lobbying against rooftop solar.


"When you get the fifth-largest company in the world with 6,000 families in the cross hairs, that's bullying," he said. According to a census conducted by The Solar Foundation, Nevada leads the country in the number of solar jobs per capita. The industry employed about 5,900 Nevadans in 2014, up 3,500 from the previous year.

Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to CNBC requests for comment. But in the past, Berkshire has touted its commitment to developing "solar, wind, hydro and geothermal projects that deliver safe, reliable and cost-effective energy.

In an email, NV Energy pointed out that it provides its customers with 247 megawatts of solar power currently, and will serve another 110 megawatts when the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project comes online in Tonopah, Nevada, later this year. Separately, NV recently broke ground on its first company-owned solar project, the 15-megawatt Nellis Solar Array II.

Generally, the utility industry claims that limits on net metering ensure fairness among all customers using the power grid, whether they have solar systems or not.
"It's a system created to make sure that customers without solar will not be paying for customers who have solar," NV Energy told the Reno-Gazette Journal earlier this month. Since the 1990s, the Nevada cap has been raised a couple times, from 1 percent to its current 3 percent.
Casinos join forces with solar power
The push to raise Nevada's cap has created unusual business alliances in the state, with large energy consumers such as the casinos joining the solar side, for instance. Earlier this month, Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, Sunrun, SolarCity and Switch joined forces with TASC to boost the cap.
Robert Utihoven, a lobbyist for TASC who represents solar-using utility customers in Nevada, said he does not see any threat to utility jobs from a higher cap, which is something some U.S. utilities have suggested in the past. "No one at NV Energy is going to lose their job if the cap is bumped up," he said. "Utilities are playing defense to large and small ratepayers who want some relief from these high-cost projects."

Read More Solar energy's unexpected conservative backers
In general, utilities generate a lot of revenue from government contracts to construct power plants, said former Sen. Randolph Townsend. The Republican businessman has been involved in most of the energy legislation in that state over the last 30 years.
"We are trying to keep the utilities healthy in terms of not overbuilding, which is their natural tendency to do," he said. "In order to survive, they tend to overbuild."
Townsend argues that the cap on solar is arbitrary and unnecessary in today's energy environment. Solar makes sense in a place like Nevada, he said, and a lot of people are starting to look to it as a viable solution

To be sure, NV Energy and Berkshire aren't the only ones being accused of aggressive lobbying. At a public hearing on the issue last week, lawmakers called out the solar industry itself for "aggressive" emails that lashed out at individual representatives.

The CEO of SolarCity, Lyndon Rive, was present at the hearing and publicly apologized for some of his staff for sending the emails. But SolarCity's director of public affairs, Will Craven, said that Rive's apology shouldn't be the highlight of the meeting. "He did apologize, but also said that the consequences of this are massive," Craven said.
For Lawrence Cunningham, a professor of law at George Washington University, the drama in Nevada illustrates the rapidly changing nature of the U.S. energy scene.
"The question is how fast we should move as a society in transition from fossil fuels to renewables, because there will be a transition eventually," he said.
Cunningham authored a book about Berkshire Hathaway called, "Berkshire Beyond Buffett." "Berkshire are capitalists who are interested in returns," said Cunningham. "But at the same time, [Buffett] has scruples and the company has a conscience."
The bill to raise the cap on net metering has already passed the Nevada Senate and is being debated in the House. If no decision is reached by the end of the week, the issue will wait until the next legislative session, which begins in 2017, as Nevada's legislature meets every other year. In the meantime, the cap will hold steady at 3 percent.

Reem Nasr
News Associate

Solar as Fastest Growing U.S. Power Source Rivals Shale Boom

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/solar-as-fastest-growing-u-s-power-source-rivals-shale-boom
Move over shale. The sun is now the fastest growing source of U.S. electricity.
Solar power capacity in the U.S. has jumped 20-fold since 2008 as companies including Apple Inc. use it to reduce their carbon footprint. Rooftop panels are sprouting on homes from suburban New York to Phoenix, driven by suppliers such as SolarCity Corp. and NRG Energy Inc.
Giant farms of photovoltaic panels, including Warren Buffett’s Topaz array in California, are changing power flows in the electrical grid, challenging hydro and conventional generators and creating negative prices on sunny days. The surge comes after shale drilling opened new supplies of natural gas, contributing to the 47 percent drop in oil since June.
“Solar is the new shale,” Michael Blaha, principal analyst of North American power at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in Houston, said April 8. “Shale has lowered cost and enabled lower natural gas prices. Solar will lower costs for electricity.”
Solar capacity surged 30 percent in 2014 to more than 20 gigawatts and will more than double by the end of 2016, according to the Washington-based Solar Energy Industries Association. That’s enough to power 7.6 million U.S. homes, up from 360,000 in 2009. The biggest gains will be in California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, New York and New Jersey.
Rate Review
Even with the rapid growth, solar still accounts for less than 1 percent of total U.S. power production, behind coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear and hydroelectric, according to the government’s Energy Information Administration. Because output suffers on cloudy or hazy days, grid operators have to keep conventional plants on standby.
New York State’s Public Service Commission is overhauling its rate system to keep transmission owners profitable as more consumers produce their own power. Solar production has more than tripled in New York City and Westchester County, a northern suburb, in about two years, according to Consolidated Edison Inc., which owns the city’s utility.
Ripples in the power market can already be seen from installations including Topaz, the world’s largest solar farm, the newest member of the Route 58 energy highway that extends dozens of miles inland to the Bakersfield oil and natural gas fields.
Antelope Lanes
The 550-megawatt array, with grass lanes to let the pronghorn antelope roam, houses 8.4 million glass covered thin-film photovoltaic panels on California’s Carissa Plains. Billionaire Buffett’s first push into solar, through his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., energy unit, will be followed by the even larger 579-megawatt Solar Star Projects about an hour’s drive away.
Topaz gets the most sunlight from about 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. almost every day, reducing the need for supply from gas-fired plants, or from hydroelectric dams hobbled by California’s four-year drought. Even though some solar farms operate only about a quarter of the year, they can turn wholesale prices negative during the sunniest hours of the day, squeezing profits for conventional generators.
Negative Prices
On April 23, spot wholesale prices at Southern California’s SP15 hub, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego, averaged minus $60.94 a megawatt-hour for the 10 hours from 8 a.m., with solar accounting for as much as 23 percent of power generation in the hour ended at noon. The negative price meant that the selle
r, wanting to keep its generator running, paid the buyer to take the power.
“I was here before we broke ground and seeing it then and now amazes me at how quickly we were able to build the project and coexist with the environment and generate 550 megawatts of green power,” Gary Hood, project manager for Topaz, about 250 miles southeast of San Francisco, said as he showed a visitor around.
Berkshire is already producing power at Solar Star, which will be fully operational in the third quarter. Apple said in February it is investing $850 million in a plant that First Solar Inc. is building nearby.
“We will see renewables increasingly make up part of the resources stack just because it makes economic sense,” Jonathan Mir, head of North American power and energy at Lazard Freres & Co. LLC in New York, said by phone May 13.
“Appreciating that there are important qualitative differences between non-renewables and renewables, I don’t think people can simply say with a straight face anymore that renewables are more expensive,” he said.

Solar bargains hit home
May 26 2015 12:01 am

http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150526/PC1002/150529519/1021/
Sunnier summer days ahead might have more to offer South Carolinians than beach trips and backyard barbecues. They could bring big savings on power bills.

That’s because legislation passed last year makes it much easier — and more profitable — for the state’s residents to install solar panels on their homes and businesses.

And that law, worked out between electrical utilities and environmental groups earlier this year, ensures that people who generate excess solar power can sell that power back to the utility at a one-to-one rate.

With such powerful new financial incentives, solar power isn’t just an environmentally responsible option. It’s an economically responsible one as well.

And a new initiative called Solarize South Carolina seeks to make the process of installing residential or commercial solar power systems as painless as possible. Solarize partners with vetted local solar panel installers to connect them with potential customers and offers zero down loans through a specialized lender to help cover the cost.

Through intensive community campaigns, Solarize has helped exponentially increase solar panel ownership in other states.
In Connecticut, for example, Solarize-assisted installations jumped six-fold in a two-year period compared to single digit increases in independent installations.

But there are plenty of other options available for Lowcountry residents considering going solar.

Some companies allow customers to lease panels, with monthly payments often less than half the average electrical bill.

And even without a loan or a panel leasing program, South Carolina and federal tax credits make solar power an attractive option comparable to other major investments like buying a car or renovating a kitchen. State law offers residential solar generators tax credits of 25 percent of the system cost, up to $3,500 per year, and federal law offers a 30 percent tax credit.

Based on the average cost of a residential solar power system, most customers could break even within about eight years.

Considering that most systems can last for up to 30 years, they can end up turning a profit for many homeowners.

And the economic advantages ultimately pale in comparison to the environmental value of reducing dependence on polluting fossil fuels.

While South Carolina generates only about half of its electricity from coal and natural gas — the other half comes from nuclear — every watt of cleaner energy from a home rooftop can make a huge difference.

Thanks to forward-thinking laws passed by state leaders and the efforts of environmental groups, non-profits, private businesses and electrical utilities, that option is now open to a lot more South Carolinians.

We are putting the finishing touches on coal today.....
WLT .45 down 6% BK warning
ACI .59 down 11% facing delisting needs debt restructuring...
ANR .592 facing delisting, dilution,BK warning
BTU crossed below $1B market cap today....

I agree. They don't put in care of our solders into the financial cost of war. And most of those in congress have not fought in war(me either), We dump them and leave them like trash.
But they will do lip service to get political contributions, then forget them after the election....
They say we can't afford to help them, but don't care that without them we wouldn't have a country...
Can't pony up a few billion to make sure that they have a home or care...
6 cents per citizen. $22Mil.... We can't afford this! Slime!
Clay Hunt Veteran Suicide Bill Blocked in Senate by Coburn
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/16/clay-hunt-veteran-suicide-bill-blocked-in-senate-by-coburn.html

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, has successfully blocked a vote on a veterans' suicide bill, leaving it to backers to re-introduce the legislation next year.
Coburn, who is leaving the Senate, said he opposed the $22 million Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act because it duplicated existing Department of Veterans Affairs programs and was not paid for by offsets elsewhere in the budget.
Coburn's move was immediately blasted by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, whose founder and chief executive officer said the delay caused by Coburn will translate into veterans' deaths.
"It's sickening to think another 22 veterans will die by suicide today and every day we fail to expand mental health care for our vets," said Paul Rieckhoff in a statement. VA figures state that, on average, 22 veterans a day commit suicide.
Rieckhoff called it "a shame" that Coburn, who is leaving the Senate after 20 years in Congress, "will always be remembered for this final, misguided attack on veterans nationwide."
n a statement released through IAVA, Hunt's mother, Susan Selke, called it "shocking to see this bill blocked because of one lone senator's agenda."
"I am grieving thinking of those young men and women who will be delayed receiving help because of this inaction," she said. "The VA's mental health care system needs urgent change as more veterans die from suicide than on the battlefield, and Senator Coburn's action today just delays that reform."
Coburn argued before the Senate late Monday that "almost everything that's in this bill has already been authorized and approved with the $10 billion [Veterans Choice Ac t] that we sent to the VA."
"I object to this bill not because I don't want to help save [veterans], because I don't think this bill's going to do that," he said.
Coburn also criticized Congress, including himself, for failing to better oversee the VA.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who argued for passage of the bill, said it would be refilled when Congress reconvenes next year.
"And we will win, and we will leave no veteran behind," Blumenthal said.
The Clay Hunt Act called for speeding up access to mental health care to veterans, including reservists, boosting VA efforts to hire more psychiatrists, and review all current VA mental health programs for effectiveness.
Hunt was a Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He came home wounded and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He became active in helping other veterans, including as a member of Team Rubicon, a non-profit group organization that puts skilled veterans together with first responders to aid in national or international catastrophes and emergencies.
Hunt was 28 when he committed suicide in March of 2011.
VA Secretary Bob McDonald endorsed the legislation earlier in the day, issuing a statement saying it would compliment other actions initiated by the White House to improve delivery of VA healthcare.
McDonald's endorsement was a departure from the qualified support offered only last month by Dr. Rajiv Jain, assistant VA deputy under secretary for health for patient care. Jain told a House Veterans Affairs Committee panel on health that some provisions in the bill would duplicate existing VA actions or programs.
These include a provision requiring an outside evaluation of the VA's mental health and suicide prevention programs and a pilot program establishing community-oriented peer support networks and community outreach teams in five VA regional health systems.
Organizations including The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, as well as professional military groups such as the Military Officers Association of America, Association of the United States Navy and Air Force Sergeants Association have all endorsed the bill.
The House passed the bill with bipartisan support. The bill picked up 21 co-sponsors -- 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats -- including GOP lawmakers Richard Burr of North Carolina, ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee; Roy Blunt of Missouri; Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; Dean Heller of Nevada; Jerry Moran of Kansas; Mike Johanns of Nebraska; Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire; Mark Kirk of Illinois; John Cornyn of Texas; Jeff Flake of Arizona; and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Democrat senators backing the legislation included Blumenthal; Joe Manchin of West Virginia; Mark Begich of Alaska; Richard Durbin of Illinois; Joe Donnelly of Indiana; Kirsten Gillibrand of New York; Robert Menendez of New Jersey; Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; John Reed of Rhode Island and Chuck Schumer of New York.
-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at bryant.jordan@military.com.

Guess who I ran into......
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=113996816

Yes, I went to the Memorial Day Parade....
The Fish, we miss you in the SLTD board!

As much as I want to see Graphene/CABN succeed, I don't them to be the only ones. I want NO monopolies....

He announced storage inSeptember. He needs a visible system soon if he wants to be a solar leader.
We have the $3 mil project. Get it done early and under budget.
If we get the Fresno project. Get it done early and under budget.
Get the Cell done!


Yes it's good, but also average for the industry.......


So can falling behind too.
So can limiting yourself..
Technology is a fast moving industry.

Breakthrough for electric cars: Supercapacitors from miracle substance graphene charges batteries in 4 minutes
By Peter Carty
May 25, 2015 12:27 BST

The problem of limited range has been an important factor curbing the wide-spread adoption of electric cars. But scientists in South Korea have developed a new technology which could solve the problem.

The lithium-ion batteries used in most of the current generation of electric cars have limitations. They are expensive and store insufficient power for the needs of many drivers, requiring frequent top-ups. And when they have to be recharged the charging process is time consuming.

The technological breakthrough could solve these problems. And in the process, Dr Lu Wu of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea has discovered a new use for the miracle substance graphene.

Strictly speaking the new battery technology uses a supercapacitor, rather than a battery, but both supercapacitors and batteries store electricity. A supercapacitor stores energy on the surfaces of materials in the form of static electricity.

Graphene is a form of carbon which is a single atom thick. It is therefore particularly suitable as material for a supercapacitor, because a small amount of it has a staggering surface area: one gram can cover 2,675m sq.

In theory, graphene supercapacitors could be used to store much more energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries.

Dr Lu has managed to produce sufficient quantities of graphene in a form that can be used in a supercapacitor, The Economist reports. First he produced graphite oxide. Next, he heated it to split the graphite into graphene sheets. Then he removed the surplus oxygen. Finally he incorporated the graphene sheets into a supercapacitor.

The supercapacitor worked well. It stored as much energy per kilogram as a lithium-ion battery and could be charged up in less than four minutes. It is likely that a refined version of the supercapacitor will exceed lithium-ion batteries' storage capacities in due course.

The next stage will be to scale up the technology and commercialise it.The problem of limited range has been an important factor curbing the wide-spread adoption of electric cars. But scientists in South Korea have developed a new technology which could solve the problem.

The lithium-ion batteries used in most of the current generation of electric cars have limitations. They are expensive and store insufficient power for the needs of many drivers, requiring frequent top-ups. And when they have to be recharged the charging process is time consuming.

The technological breakthrough could solve these problems. And in the process, Dr Lu Wu of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea has discovered a new use for the miracle substance graphene.

Strictly speaking the new battery technology uses a supercapacitor, rather than a battery, but both supercapacitors and batteries store electricity. A supercapacitor stores energy on the surfaces of materials in the form of static electricity.

Graphene is a form of carbon which is a single atom thick. It is therefore particularly suitable as material for a supercapacitor, because a small amount of it has a staggering surface area: one gram can cover 2,675m sq.

In theory, graphene supercapacitors could be used to store much more energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries.

Dr Lu has managed to produce sufficient quantities of graphene in a form that can be used in a supercapacitor, The Economist reports. First he produced graphite oxide. Next, he heated it to split the graphite into graphene sheets. Then he removed the surplus oxygen. Finally he incorporated the graphene sheets into a supercapacitor.

The supercapacitor worked well. It stored as much energy per kilogram as a lithium-ion battery and could be charged up in less than four minutes. It is likely that a refined version of the supercapacitor will exceed lithium-ion batteries' storage capacities in due course.

The next stage will be to scale up the technology and commercialise it.

MIT has a new method for producing large quantities of graphene
By Chris Wood
May 21, 2015

The new technique involves wrapping a substrate around an inner tube and passing gas through an outer tube (Credit: MIT)

A team of MIT and University of Michigan researchers has a new method for manufacturing graphene that it believes could take the material out of the laboratory and into commercial products. The method involves forming the strong, conductive material in a chamber consisting of two concentric tubes.

Graphene is a material with some serious potential. It's strong, highly conductive and could be used in solar panels, flexible light sources and more. Unfortunately, it's also rather difficult to fabricate, with most existing solutions unable to produce patches of the material large enough for widespread commercial uses.

A new technique pioneered by MIT researchers could make things significantly easier. It's similar to the existing chemical vapor deposition method, but makes use of a chamber consisting of two concentric tubes – one placed inside the other. The technique requires the chamber to be heated to around 1,000 °C (1,832 °F).

The substrate on which the graphene forms is wound around the inner tube, with gases flowing through the larger tube and out of a set of holes halfway along the inner tube. This allows the process to be split into two stages, with the first part of the chamber used to prepare the substrate, and the second used to grow the graphene upon it.

The MIT team built and tested a lab-scale version of the chamber, finding that when the substrate is moved through at a pace of 25 mm (1 in) per minute, a high-quality, uniform layer of graphene is formed. Turning up the speed to 50 cm (20 in) a minute produces a lower-quality coating that would still be useable for certain applications. The researchers claim that the technique is scalable, with the resulting graphene samples only limited by the width of the rolls of foil and the size of the chamber used.

This isn't the first time we've seen an innovative technique for making graphene come out of MIT. Back in May 2014, the same collaborative team detailed a method that allows for the formation of the material on both sides of a film, binding it directly to a substrate. As with the new research, it's thought that the technique could be used on a large scale.

As for the new tube-chamber method of graphene production, the team is now working to tweak the process to allow for the production of high-quality graphene layers at higher speeds, improving the potential of the technique.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: MIT

Short term MAYBE. Long term, solar is a winner.
Coal is really in trouble. We have an opportunity. We have to do EVERYTHING to move and take market share.

IMO JN needs more of sense of urgency. He knew in Nov that he was acquiring MD. He could have gotten it done By Jan 1... IMO anyway.... One thing that I like about Elon. He sets a tough schedule and budget, and expects it to be done right. If somebody says that that they can't do it. He will either take over the job himself and put them on another job, or he will just fire them....
They had a $10M computer job and they got it done for $10,000......
That is my opinion.....

The problem with "exporting gigawatts" it getting cheaper to produce them onsite!
That is what I want!

The plan and the REALITY!
Power for All Shows Peabody a Real Plan to End Energy Poverty
By Ben Jervey • Friday, May 22, 2015 - 16:22
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/05/22/power-all-shows-peabody-real-plan-end-energy-poverty
Peabody Energy would like you to believe that coal is the only way to light up the homes of the roughly 1.1 billion who still live in energy poverty.

A new campaign launched Thursday at the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy For All Forum in New York City offers a much different solution. Clean, distributed energy sources, argue the groups behind Power for All, can eliminate energy poverty more quickly and for a fraction of the cost of centralized electric grids anchored by fossil fuels. And, of course, without poisoning the air of communities and lining the atmosphere with even more greenhouse gases.

If the world were to invest just $70 billion, energy poverty could be virtually eliminated from the globe within a decade, with renewable energy filling the void.

The battle for the “energy poverty” high ground

“Energy poverty. It’s the world’s number one human and environmental crisis.”

If spoken from the podium at the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy For All events this week, this line would’ve garnered applause. Rather, it’s copy from an ad for the world’s largest privately held coal company, Peabody Energy, which has poured millions into promoting the fossil fuel as the solution to energy poverty through their Advanced Energy for Life PR campaign.

Peabody: Advanced Energy for Life

Which is why this coalition of clean energy companies, non-profits, and policy groups behind Power for All is seeking to reclaim the term from the jaws of fossil fuel industry propaganda, and to promote the healthier, more effective, and cheaper alternative of distributed, off-grid clean energy.

On Thursday, the last day of the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) forum, groups officially unveiled the campaign, which “outlines a plan to achieve universal energy access faster, cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels,” and offers a clear pathway to do so with distributed off-grid clean energy solutions within the next decade.

What Peabody won’t tell you

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that universal access to electricity would require the generation of an additional 952 terawatt hours by 2030. If coal were to make up the difference, that’d be another 150 to 170 new coal-fired power plants, a climate catastrophe to the tune of at least 103 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent spewed into the atmosphere every year.

On the human scale, coal has an ugly track record of providing energy access in the developing world. China has relied heavily on fossil fuels to provide energy access, and the dirty impacts can be seen every day in its cities’ smoggy skylines. The public health implications — 670,000 premature deaths in one year alone — are just beginning to be fully comprehended.

Health and climate aside, there are also decades of evidence that the rural poor waiting for a fossil-fueled grid are doing just that—waiting.

“Since the dawn of electric grids there have been about a billion people without electricity,” said Dan Kammen, Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Labat the University of California, Berkeley at the SE4All forum.

“If we’re going to build out the grid in Africa in all these countries, it’s going to take too long and cost too much money,” added Sam Goldman, founder of d.light, a distributed solar business serving rural Africa and one of the organizers behind Power for All.

Centralized coal simply isn’t practical or economical for providing energy access to the rural poor.

The stunning hypocrisy of Peabody’s Advanced Energy for Life campaign was laid bare by a report released last fall by The Australia Institute, covered here on DeSmogBlog by Graham Readfearn.

Yet intriguingly, when TAI asked Peabody and other coal groups if they were actually giving any money to support energy poverty projects, they found that none of the coal companies were actually using coal projects to solve energy poverty.

Rather, none of the coal companies who were supporting projects in developing countries – including Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Banpu - were actually using coal, and were mostly supporting projects based on renewables.

Peabody Energy’s entire charitable giving amounted to just $5 million – or, as the report points out – just 0.07 per cent of the company’s revenue last year, none of which went to on-the-ground projects. The TAI report notes:

Contradicting Peabody’s claims that coal is the most useful fuel for addressing energy poverty, no programs supported by coal companies use coal.

Why does Peabody persist with this Advanced Energy for Life? PR, plain and simple.
“They’re one breath away from bankruptcy,” Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign told Dan Zegart and Kevin Grandia for an article about the launch of Advanced Energy for Life. “This is really their last gasp. They tried to hoodwink folks that coal is either cheap or somehow clean. Now they’re wrapping their product around addressing world poverty. It’s just the latest gimmick they’ve dreamed up on Madison Avenue.”

“A better path to universal energy access”

Power for All not only presents a clear alternative pathway out of global energy poverty, it also shatters the current expectations for its cost and timeline.

In a 2010 report, the IEA laid out a plan for universal energy access. It figured costs of $700 billion, or $33 billion per year from 2010 through 2030, to electrify all the [then] 1.2 billion still living in energy poverty.

Of those numbers, said Kristina Skierka, Campaign Director for Power for All, “The financial costs are daunting and the opportunity costs are unacceptable. It is time to challenge the $700 billion mindset.”

Power for All’s plans focus “on key accelerators that will help leapfrog ‘business as usual’ energy delivery–just as mobile phones leapfrogged telephone landlines in the developing world–we believe that we can achieve universal energy access in half the time for a fraction of the anticipated costs.”

Power for All's cost and timeline for deployment. Credit: Power for All, The Energy Access Imperative

”We shouldn’t have to wait a generation for universal energy access,” added Koen Peters, Executive Director of the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA), and a founding member of the Power for All campaign. “Decentralized, renewable market-based solutions can deliver energy access today.”

A report to support the Power for All launch highlighted the various ways in which distributed, renewable energy sources are already leapfrogging the standard grid. Rapidly decreasing costs for household solar systems are driving much of the growth.

From the report: “Component prices for photovoltaics (PV) have dropped 80 percent in the last 5 years; energy storage costs are falling while density is rising; and prices for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have fallen 90 percent in the last decade, while they have dramatically increased in efficiency and lifetime.“

With costs of clean energy tech – from solar panels to LED lights to batteries – rapidly dropping, Power for All advocates see a clear path to universal energy access in a decade, a timeline that closely resembles the breakneck spread of mobile phone technology in the rural, developing world.

First cell phones, now household solar kits? Credit: Power for All, The Energy Access Imperative

“The market for solar light and power in the developing world is growing quickly to meet demand, and already reaching millions of households,” said Peters. “Several [Global Off-Grid Lighting Association] member companies are already outpacing the world’s traditional electrical utilities in terms of number of customers.”

Innovative financing models and payment plans, like mobile banking, are bringing these clean energy solutions even more easily within reach. A recent World Bank report found that mobile payments “catalyze clean energy uptake among off-grid users.”
What will it take?

The pathway laid out by Power for All won’t happen on its own. And Power for All is, by its own description, an education and advocacy campaign. Ultimately, it’s up to governments, non-profit groups and businesses to follow the path to universal clean energy access by 2025.

Power for All’s launch came just a couple days after the World Bank released a report about the state of sustainable energy access. The report found that 222 million people gained access to electricity between 2010 and 2012, as the world population grew by 138 million.

We are heading in the right direction to end energy poverty,” said Anita Marangoly George, Senior Director of the World Bank’s Energy and Extractives Global Practice, “but we are still far from the finish line. We will need to work a lot harder especially to mobilize much larger investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Leveraging public finance to mobilize private capital is imperative in achieving these goals.”

Coincidentally, on the very same day the International Monetary Fund released a report about that latter point: public finance. The IMF found that governments internationally were subsidizing fossil fuel consumption by a “shocking” (their word!) $5.3 trillion per year. That’s $10 million every minute.

By comparison, the $70 billion for Power for All's distributed renewable plan is a pittance.

Solar-powered Ecocapsule lets you live off-the-grid anywhere in the world
by Lucy Wang, 05/22/15
http://inhabitat.com/ecocapsule-lets-you-live-off-the-grid-anywhere-in-the-world/

Is your dream to live off-grid in any place of your choosing? The tiny egg-shaped Ecocapsule could be the low-energy home you’re looking for. Designed by Bratislava-based Nice Architects, the Ecocapsule is a micro-shelter that packs an impressive sustainable punch—the ultra-portable house is powered by solar and wind energy, and also includes rainwater collection and filtration.
The compact Ecocapsule fits all the home necessities within an egg-shaped space measuring 4.5 meters (14.6 feet) in length, 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in width, and 2.5 meters in height (8.2 feet). The total usable floor space is eight square meters (86 square feet). Despite its small footprint, the designers say the micro-shelter can comfortably fit two adults. The portable home includes a folding bed, two large operable windows, a working/dining area, shower and flushable toilet, storage space, and a built-in kitchenette with running water.
A built-in 750W wind turbine and a 2.6-square-meter array of high-efficiency solar cells (600W output) power the Ecocapsule. The dual-power system and high-capacity battery (9,744Wh capacity) ensures the shelter will stay operable even during times of low solar or wind activity. The rounded shell is optimized for rainwater collection. Each Ecocapsule weighs 1,500 kilograms and can fit inside a standard shipping container.

Currently, only renderings and diagrams of the Ecocapsule are available; however, Nice Architects plans to unveil a prototype at the Pioneers festival in Vienna on May 28. A seven year project in the making, the Ecocapsule is expected to be available for sale later this year, with the first produced units delivered in the first half of 2016.

Thanks. I guess I should have a better eye on this!
That should help with the numbers. Maybe we could sign up a big casino...
Reno should be good, with all the expansion from the gigafactory......

This is what you do. Adapt. SLTD might have to do that in the future too.....

For those who have a tighter eye on this...
Are we selling/installing in Nevada yet?
What is the timeline? If anybody knows?

I have bought $10 worth at the ask in SLTD just to move it. I have moved the marketcap Millions with $10+fees.....
Gives you a feeling of power...

I think that everybody started the holiday early...

Solar is the new world, coal execs told at Paris summit
22. MAY 2015 | APPLICATIONS & INSTALLATIONS, GLOBAL PV MARKETS, INDUSTRY & SUPPLIERS | BY: IAN CLOVER
Coal and renewable energy executives at climate conference in Paris clash over future energy mix, value of storage brought to the fore.
Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/solar-is-the-new-world--coal-execs-told-at-paris-summit_100019547/#ixzz3arsZMu5Y

Renewables, led by solar, are perfectly capable of providing baseload electricity to most large markets, the coal industry has been told.
wwwuppertal/Flickr
Leading executives from the solar and wind industries went on the offensive this week at a climate conference in Paris, telling coal executives that renewable energy is the future, and that they had better get used to it.

Responding to comments from Tony Hayward – chairman of mining company Glencore – that "solar is not the answer to broad scale industrialization", SkyPower chief executive Kerry Adler retorted: "Solar is the new world. You’ve got to get used to it."

The power executives were attending a Paris business summit on climate change, six months prior to November’s highly anticipated UN conference on global climate change, which is set to be represented by 200 countries.

Glencore’s Hayward told the audience that it is simply not possible to remove coal from the energy mix, particularly in growing countries such as India, which will require a steady, reliable power supply if the economy is to reach its potential. To that, SkyPower’s Adler pointed to the falling costs of storage, arguing that solar and wind could “easily supply” large amounts of cheap and reliable power to countries like India.

Adler’s stance was backed by the chief executive of Acciona group, Jose Manuel Entrencanales Domecq, who remarked that it was "absolutely possible for renewable to provide baseload electricity in emerging markets" provided electricity grids were properly integrated.

The coal industry is evidently feeling the pinch as the world continues its slow but noticeable pivot away from fossil fuels. Hayward said that coal is the best choice for meeting the power needs of countries such as China and India right now, adding that wealthier countries must help developing nations transition from polluting to clean technology.

"Unless what we deploy allows China and India to complete their industrialization in a different way to the way we industrialized then we are simply shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic," he said.

Rachel Kyte, a climate envoy for the World Bank, revealed that China is hoping to have in place a national emissions trading system by next year – a development that could potentially prompt many other countries to follow suit.

A report by the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA) published earlier this week revealed that solar PV is the largest employer within the renewables sector, with more than 2.5 million people working in the industry, and that renewables now employ 7.7 million people worldwide – an 18% increase in the space of one year.

Read more: http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/solar-is-the-new-world--coal-execs-told-at-paris-summit_100019547/#ixzz3arsvQtLW

Nice Video (AU)
Could solar power be about to transform the electricity industry and drive prices down?
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4240286.htm
Transcript
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Imagine life without that dreaded quarterly power bill. That could be around the corner for people with solar panels. Until now, solar energy couldn't be stored efficiently and people who had it relied on the electricity grid for backup. Now, new battery technology means that could change. Matt Peacock reports.

MATT PEACOCK, REPORTER: It's the power revolution coming to your house soon.

ELON MUSK, CEO, TESLA: We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the Sun. You don't have to do anything; it just works. Shows up every day and produces ridiculous amounts of power.

MATT PEACOCK: Power that's plentiful but could never be effectively stored. A breakthrough in battery technology is about to change that.

KOBAD BHAVNAGRI, BLOOMBERG NEW ENERGY FINANCE: Batteries really signify a complete game-changer. They come in couple with solar PV that really enable consumers now to become their own mini-power stations.

GILES PARKINSON, EDITOR, RENEW ENERGY: It's going to be about as big a change as we've seen in the telecommunications industry with mobile phones.

ELON MUSK: You can actually go, if you want, completely off grid. You can take your solar panels, charge the battery packs and that's all you use.

MATT PEACOCK: This month, PayPal billionaire Elon Musk unveiled Powerwall, a cheap lithium ion battery, soon to be churned out on a massive scale in a giant factory being built in Nevada.

The solar batteries have been developed from the technology that powers this groundbreaking electric car, the Tesla.

HEATH WALKER, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER, TESLA AUSTRALIA: We have been able to take solar to battery, battery to car. And as you can see from the release of the power in the car, accelerating from zero to a hundred in just 3.3 seconds, shows that we've got great release from the lithium ion batteries to power. So, we've now got two batteries on the market, the seven kilowatt-hour and the 10 kilowatt-hour. Seven kilowatt-hour for daily use and 10 kilowatt-hour as a backup.

MATT PEACOCK: Next year, Australia will become Powerwall's prime overseas market, where it's estimated with add-ons it'll retail at about $5,500.

HEATH WALKER: The interest in Australia is mainly due to the high uptake of solar in this country and the opportunity - it makes economic sense to have a home battery.

GILES PARKINSON: It'll happen quicker in Australia than it will happen anywhere else in the world because of the high retail prices. We pay so much just to boil a kettle in the city and now we've got a cheaper way of doing it.

MATT PEACOCK: Imagine low or even no power bills. The new solar battery technology gives consumers control. And that's forcing energy companies to rethink the way they do business.

Up in Northern Australia in the tropics, solar power's a bit of a no-brainer. But it's here in a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Townsville that the local electricity supplier's been running tests in 10 houses of solar, plus the new revolution, batteries.

For Ergon Energy, it's a case of: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

DEAN CONDEN, INNOVATION ENGINEER, ERGON ENERGY: So at the moment our solar panels are generating power and coming onto the grid. We've also got excess. There's not much load, so the rest of it's going back out to the electricity network on the street.

MATT PEACOCK: That means Barry and Glenys Lowe are now using battery power and selling their surplus back to the grid.

BARRY LOWE: Well since Dean's put the five-kilowatt system in, we haven't paid a power bill.

MATT PEACOCK: Has that surprised you?

BARRY LOWE: It did, it did. And there's been some surplus money out of it.

MATT PEACOCK: In some of Queensland's far-flung rural communities, Ergon is installing localised grids with battery storage to save running transmission lines over vast distances. Similar micro grids are possible in cities.

DEAN CONDEN: Up here in North Queensland, we're subject to things like cyclones, where we can come in and have widespread devastation. The opportunity here we have in this street is that we could potentially test the availability of a micro grid where the mains power went down into the street, then the houses in the street could supply energy and trade energy amongst each other and still stay connected and share their energy.

MATT PEACOCK: The Tesla battery has Australia's top power companies like AGL scrambling to catch up. Three years ago, it bought out Victoria's biggest brown coal generator, Loy Yang, the nation's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it also operates the country's largest solar farm at Nyngan. Now, it's begun offering customers solar panels without upfront fees and in a few weeks begins to market its own battery.

MARC ENGLAND, NEW ENERGY, AGL: The typical Australian home runs on a circuit that requires about three kilowatts of power. So our battery will allow Australian consumers to have this battery to run their appliances and their air-conditioning late in the afternoon off the battery power.

GILES PARKINSON: They are recognising that this is going to be the biggest change in their industry in more than a century, so they're trying to engage with the consumer and protect their business.

MATT PEACOCK: Very soon, households, even apartments and rental homes, will be offered bundled plans for their electricity, a mixture of solar, grid and batteries, all tailored for affordable cost and household demand.

GLEN WALDON, ERGON ENERGY: So instead of just buying kilowatt hours, you'll be getting different product wraps and product mixes. So capped price options, somewhat like telco offerings for mobile phone plans'd be the sort of - typical sort of thing you'll start to see.

MATT PEACOCK: With the price of lithium batteries predicted to fall still further, faster, the switch to solar is likely to accelerate.

KOBAD BHAVNAGRI: Solar on people's roofs is an unstoppable force. You have to embrace the new technology, otherwise you will be swept away by it.

LEIGH SALES: Matt Peacock with that report.

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Report: Triple investment in clean energy to $1.2 trillion
05/21/2015
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - A new report calls for investment in clean energy to be tripled to $1.2 trillion annually through 2030 to give more than one billion people worldwide access to electricity and help prevent global warming.

Adnan Amin, director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency said Wednesday "it's absolutely feasible" that the goal can be achieved, pointing to major advances in using solar power and other renewables to power national grids, villages and homes especially in the developing world.

The report produced by the World Bank and some 20 other organizations and agencies tracks progress on the Sustainable Energy for All initiative. The campaign calls for achieving three targets by 2030: universal access to modern energy services, doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, and doubling the share of renewables in the global energy mix.

According to the report, which was released Monday, annual global investments in energy will need to scale up from roughly $400 billion to meet the three targets. Of the $1.2 billion required, it said, between $40 billion and $100 billion annually is needed to achieve universal access to electricity.

By contrast, the report said, universal access to modern cooking fuels to replace wood, charcoal and dung which cause serious pollution and respiratory problems requires just $4.3 billion a year.

"This is not about charity," Kandeh Yumkella, the U.N. special representative for Sustainable Energy for All and CEO of the initiative, said Wednesday. "This is about markets and investments. We see this as a trillion-dollar opportunity, not a trillion-dollar challenge."

The initiative is rallying governments, international institutions, businesses, banks and civil society groups to help meet the 2030 targets.

"Governments do not have that kind of resource," Yumkella said. "Only public-private partnerships will generate this kind of resource flow."

Amin cited the case of Bangladesh where today about six million homes are receiving light and electricity through solar power. "They're installing close to 60,000 home units every month - this is massive growth," he said.

At a three-day forum that runs through Thursday attended by some 40 ministers and leading figures from business and international organizations, a number of commitments were made including by the European Union which said it will provide grants of over $3.5 billion for sustainable energy investments from 2014-2020.

China said it would meet its target of providing all people with electricity by 2015 and said the country will increase the non-fossil fuel share of its energy consumption from about 11 percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2020 and 20 percent by 2030.

Grammy-nominated singer Akon, who started an initiative called "Akon Lighting Africa" two years ago, told a press conference Wednesday that he sees energy as "a key of Africa's development."

The singer, who was born in the U.S. of Senegalese parents and was reared in both countries, said he set a goal of bringing solar-powered electricity to 1 million homes in Africa by the end of 2014 and not only achieved that but is now operating in 14 countries.

Is Rooftop Solar Finally Good Enough to Disrupt the Grid?
Nathan Richter
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

https://hbr.org/2015/05/is-rooftop-solar-finally-good-enough-to-disrupt-the-grid
Over the past two decades, there have been many attempts to reform the electric utility market. The costly and complex operations of transporting energy have made utilities natural monopolies, while regulatory barriers and the high fixed costs of building and maintaining regional electrical grid infrastructure have also kept much competition at bay. But recent technological advances and new business models are now allowing nimble players to compete and provide consumers with cost-saving alternatives. With the rise of distributed forms of energy, such as rooftop solar power, and batteries, it’s become much more feasible to match individual demand for electricity with on-site production.

Distributed energy systems are basically comprised of small-scale energy-generating devices (the most common example being solar panels) that allow for electricity to be produced on-site and consumed immediately, without drawing from the local electrical grid. Recent developments, such as falling solar panel prices and increases in efficiency rates (the rate at which sunlight hitting panels is turned into usable energy), have made distributed energy increasingly economical, while new business models and financing methods have made it more accessible.

This story of disruption should feel familiar. Consider how Uber opened up the transportation market. Prior to Uber’s ascendance, entrenched taxi companies oversaw highly centralized, often unresponsive, operations, leaving consumers with few alternatives for private transportation. So the company mobilized existing, under-utilized assets and connected them to a sharable revenue stream. And it built a strong technology platform that optimizes various factors like market conditions, location, and availability to meet your needs and those of the 100 other people within your half-mile radius.

While Uber’s app can make one’s car a potential source of income, a solar panel can turn a home or a company facility into a productive asset by allowing it to produce its own electricity. In both cases, the two goods (car and real estate) are given value-creating potential through a process of market fragmentation and consumer empowerment. The result is a new value proposition: consumers get more personalized, flexible service, and new companies can charge competitive prices.

In the case of distributed energy, various financing options let consumers save in a number of ways. They are offered either solar leases (leasing the panel and its energy for a fixed periodic payment) from a solar company, power purchase agreements (they purchase each unit of electricity produced by the panel at an agreed upon rate), or solar loans (the consumer, rather than the service provider, owns the panel; effectively a solar panel mortgage). In each case, the cost per unit of electricity is not only cheaper but more stable when compared to rates charged by utilities.

With the introduction of batteries that can store electricity, such as Tesla’s, solar energy’s value proposition may well increase. Batteries can store excess solar energy produced in the middle of the day when the sun is strongest and then release the energy at peak price hours. While this isn’t quite as cost-effective for the residential sector yet, due to battery costs and regulatory issues, batteries are already being used in commercial and industrial sectors, where extra charges for using energy during high-demand periods can make up 30% of electric bills. Instead, batteries can pull electricity from the grid when prices are low, like in the middle of the night, and store it. That electricity can then be consumed later when energy is more expensive and demand charges come into play.

New energy management software can also help identify consumption inefficiency and automate electricity usage when necessary by collecting site-specific energy data. But before distributed energy can make a greater impact, more comprehensive energy management platforms must be developed. Ultimately, Internet of the Things software could optimize the interactions between a distributed energy system comprised of solar panels, batteries, and commercial or residential buildings’ energy management systems, based on real-time data from each component — much the way Uber’s platform oversees and coordinates a ride by transmitting and analyzing data from mobile devices.

To build this kind of fully integrated, smart system, different firms will have to collaborate — even Elon Musk noted that Tesla couldn’t change the energy market alone. Some solar companies, battery manufacturers, and software companies are starting to work together. Google’s Nest, a smart thermostat, now has an agreement with SolarCity, the largest U.S. residential solar installer, to eventually integrate Nest’s smart thermostats with SolarCity’s panels, and presumably Tesla’s batteries at some point in the future. And SunPower, the second largest U.S. solar manufacturer, is partnering with EnerNOC, which provides energy management software and was also announced as an early Tesla Energy partner.

Meanwhile, utilities are not standing idle. More are looking into real-time data and batteries to make the grid more efficient and reduce the variability in electricity prices throughout the day. But similar to the taxi industry, one weapon utility companies are relying on is their political muscle, which is considerable, but anti-market. This trend is becoming so well-established that the term “utility death spiral” has been coined. Utilities raise prices on customers in order to combat lost revenues from those that have turned to distributed energy forms. Of course, this response only ends up making distributed energy forms even more competitive.

The electricity market won’t see change quite as fast or garner the same headlines that Uber has, primarily due to the sheer size and complexity of the electricity market. But despite the challenges, the signs from the marketplace are auspicious. Residential use of distributed energy grew at a 50% annual rate in the U.S. from 2012 through 2014. And as distributed energy and smarter management software systems evolve, the changes could be much more profound.

Nathan Richter is a master’s degree candidate in management from Peking University’s HSBC Graduate Business School. He is a former assistant editor at The Globalist.