Research that Informs Business and Public Policy
Last month, I went to a talk by someone I surprisingly hadn’t heard of before. Yosef Abramowitz is an entrepreneur whose company, Gigawatt Global, just constructed and commissioned the largest … Continue Reading Why Does the Media Ignore Grid-Scale Solar?
I am currently sitting in my yard enjoying the post El Nino 75 degree weather, while typing away on my locally made (…well invented at least) MacBook which was charged … Continue Reading No More Berning of Fossil Fuels
If you’re thinking of putting solar panels on your roof to save money on your electricity bills, you should recognize that there is risk involved. In some ways, this is … Continue Reading The Risks of Going Solar
A recent article in the New York Times describes how a solar home provider will, “help some of the 1.2 billion people in the world who don’t have electricity to … Continue Reading “Real” Electricity Still Comes from the Grid
If you’ve installed solar at your home and are now basking in the I’m-saving-the-planet warm glow, you may be in for a splash of ice water. There’s a good chance … Continue Reading Double Counting Virtue
Just before Christmas, an administrative law judge at the California Public Utilities Commission put a shiny package with a big bow under the tree for distributed solar PV companies, and … Continue Reading Billing Tweaks Don’t Make Net Metering Good Policy
Steeply tiered rates likely provided more incentive than the California Solar Initiative. California leads the nation in residential solar photovoltaic installations. In fact, nearly half of all systems installed have been in the Golden … Continue Reading What Put California at the Top of Residential Solar?
Renewable energy technologies have made outstanding progress in the last decade. The cost of solar panels has plummeted. Wind turbines have become massively more efficient. In many places some forms … Continue Reading Is the Future of Electricity Generation Really Distributed?
I found yesterday’s NY Times article on the shifting politics of renewable energy morbidly fascinating on both a political and economic level. Basically the article pieces together anecdotes of odd-couple … Continue Reading The Politics of Renewable Energy
An aptly named picture – the “duck graph” – is captivating the California energy policy world. It depicts electricity demand net of projected renewable generation (“net load”) on a representative … Continue Reading What’s the Point of an Electricity Storage Mandate?
