Michael Neary, president of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, a non-profit trade association, said McCain frequently says he supports renewable energy development, but his deeds do not match his words.
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In 2004, McCain introduced an amendment that would have eliminated the alternative energy tax credits. In March 2006, he voted against extension of the incentives. In 2007, the senator missed three votes to extend the tax credits set to expire this year.
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Rather than supporting renewable energy, McCain has made expansion of nuclear energy the centerpiece of his energy policy. During the Sept. 26 debate, he said construction of 45 nuclear power plants would create 700,000 jobs and help the U.S. reduce reliance on foreign energy.
If you’ve ever been interested in going solar this article offers one of the clearest explanations I have seen.
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A Bush administration plan to let U.S. agencies decide for themselves whether their actions put wildlife at risk is drawing fire from environmental groups, which say this is like letting a fox guard a henhouse.
BCC Research, which charts technology markets, expects the global solar market to grow from $13 billion to $32 billion by 2012, with thin film expanding 45% a year.
“start-up Nanosolar, which shocked its competitors in December when it announced it would begin profitably selling thin-film panels at $1 a watt. That figure is solar’s holy grail, the point at which power from the sun becomes generally cheaper than coal, without the help of subsidies.” Video below.
Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity. Even acre for acre, I’ll take Solar One’s pleasant campus over a coal mine.
But the best is in the comments:
If you look at this from a practical point of view, one shouldn’t underestimate the problem of solar’s lack of base- and peak-load capacity.
Molten sands are certainly interesting for energy storage but haven’t been proven on a commercial scale.
So unless a viable energy storage technology becomes available, such large solar plants remain dependent on fossil fuels for their baseloads and peakloads (or biomass).
That’s why its often difficult to compare these technologies from a practical point of view.
One should look at how big a solar plant’s minimal baseload/peakload requirement is (that is, its minimal reliance on coal, gas or biomass), add this to the equation, and then compare with pure coal, which does always deliver base and peakloads.
Leaving this crucial context out of the equation, it does seem like solar-thermal plants like the one mentioned are quite efficient when it comes to the amount of space they take up. But is this really even an argument?
It seems to me that stored energy sources (coal, oil, gas, biomass) have many other advantages that make them so attractive: they can be physically moved and traded. Solar power cannot. Can’t ship concentrated solar power from one continent to another. You’re stuck in a rather inflexible local context. But then that’s probably the context many of us want to move to: one of more locally rooted energy self-reliance, instead of energy interdependence.
Joseph Romm on solar thermal/concentrated solar power (CSP) in Salon. Mr. Romm thinks that CSP is “the technology that will save humanity.” Actually, I’m not sure if he wrote that or if that is just the copy that Salon stuck in. Either way I hate it when such hyperbole is attached to the environmental movement. People can only hear so many Paul Ehrlich-esque The Sky Is Falling statements before they tune out and stop listening.
That point aside the rest of the article is, as usual, excellent. Here are some tidbits:
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States.
…That means Congress and the president must renew the 30 percent solar energy investment tax credit through 2016. After all, it’s the least they can do. From 2002 to 2007, fossil fuels received almost $14 billion in electricity-related tax subsides, whereas renewables received under $3 billion. From 1948 to today, nuclear energy R&D exceeded $70 billion, whereas R&D for renewables was about $10 billion.
This is a technology that is available now. Why aren’t we pouring money into it?
