Free Republic

I’m away, so this is a good time for Guest posts. Here Tony explains that we need lots of electricity even while we sleep. I didn’t realize our electricity needs were so high at night. The lowest power use each day is still as much as 60% of the peak. That’s the base load at 3am, and solar panels and wind farms just can’t provide it. We can burn the odd $500 billion building hundreds of solar plants, but even then, we would have to go “medieval” for about 8 hours each night. Candles anyone? — Jo Guest post by...

Superflares (white area) arise from starspots (dark areas) much larger than those seen on our Sun.Hiroyuki Maehara (Kwasan and Hida Observatories, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University) Some middle-aged stars burn and rave like newborns, producing flares thousands of times as energetic as those we see on the Sun, according to the first large survey of these events.Solar flares occur when magnetic-field loops threading through sunspots get twisted and break, releasing massive amounts of radiation and accelerating charged particles into space. The largest ever measured on the Sun took place on 1 September 1859, and was observed as a...

The U.S. Commerce Department announced stiff tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels Thursday, a move critics said could raise costs for consumers and further inflame trade tensions with Beijing. The preliminary ruling came as a result of a finding that Chinese solar cell manufacturers are "dumping" their products on the American market below production costs. U.S. manufacturer Solyndra became the highest-profile victim of plunging panel prices last year, forced to file for bankruptcy despite receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. The tariffs are two-tiered. The first includes a group of 61 exporters, with Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar among...

Enterprise Community Investment, Inc. today announced the closing of the first loan under the Green Refinance Plus program, a partnership between Fannie Mae and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) introduced last year to incentivize energy and resource efficiency improvements in affordable housing.

This is my 45 watt solar panel setup. I purchased this kit from Harbor freight for about 0. I use it for lighting in my home, as well different power tools around the house. This is a great source of power in the event of power failures (which happens often).

The three top U.S. tycoons on Forbes’s “Green” billionaires list have received billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for their clean technology companies, after they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for political campaigns and lobbying. Two of the moguls, Elon Musk and Vinod Khosla (in photo), are technology pioneers based in California with net worths of $2 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively. The third, Christy Walton, is the widow of the late John Walton who was an heir to the Walmart fortune. Forbes says she is “the world’s richest woman” is worth $24.8 billion. Significant percentages of Musk’s...

Odd orbits of remote objects hint at unseen world, new calculations suggest. An as yet undiscovered planet might be orbiting at the dark fringes of the solar system, according to new research.Too far out to be easily spotted by telescopes, the potential unseen planet appears to be making its presence felt by disturbing the orbits of so-called Kuiper belt objects, said Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Kuiper belt objects are small icy bodies—including some dwarf planets—that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. Once considered the ninth planet in our system, the...

Explanation: The Super Moon wins, by just a little, when its apparent size is compared to the Sun in this ingenious composite picture. To make it, the Full Moon on May 6 was photographed with the same camera and telescope used to image the Sun (with a dense solar filter!) on the following day. Of course, on May 6 the Moon was at perigee, the closest point to Earth in its eliptical orbit, making it the largest Full Moon of 2012. Two weeks later, on May 20, the Moon will be near apogee, the most distant point in its orbit,...

NEW YORK (AP) — A shakeout that is rattling the solar panel industry has sent First Solar, once among the industry's biggest and strongest companies, to a big quarterly loss. First Solar Inc. said Thursday that it lost $449 million in the first quarter, The company also announced that its Chief Commercial Officer, James Hughes, would become CEO, replacing interim chief and company founder Mike Ahearn. First Solar said the loss amounted to $5.20 per share..... In the year-ago quarter, the company earned $115 million, or $1.33 per share, on revenue of $567 million. First Solar, along with other makers...

Solar panel installations have fallen by almost 90% in the weeks since the government halved cut the subsidy available, according to Department of Energy and Climate Change figures. The new data lends support to the charge of some in the solar industry that the government cut the subsidy too far and too fast, endangering thousands of jobs. Ministers have defended their actions, saying the scheme they inherited from the previous government was poorly set up and was too costly for the energy customers who ultimately foot the bill.

Cemeteries and solar panels are two things that aren’t usually mentioned in the same sentence. But one New Jersey cemetery finds it necessary to make that connection. Nearly 100,000 people are buried at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Hanover, New Jersey. But each year more and more people are choosing this bright, airy mausoleum as their final resting place. “The lighting and the music is beautiful,” Jeannie Harper of Towaco told CBS 2′s Elise Finch. “It’s a change from outside” “I feel hopefulness and the sense of eternal life when I come in here,” Susan Allender of West...

The U.S. Department of Labor has determined that all manufacturing employees laid off from SolarWorld Industries America Inc. as a result of the company's shutdown of its solar module production plant in Camarillo, Calif., in September are eligible for federal trade-adjustment assistance, including grants for education to retrain them for new work.

After being fired in 2009 as the top executive of Willard & Kelsey Solar Group, a Perrysburg start-up that has received millions in state loans, William Mitchell made a decision that he wasn't going to go away quietly. Before the company's chief executive officer left his job, he copied company records onto his computer's external hard drive -- months of financial transactions, banking records, and detailed expense reports showing the firm spent thousands on travel and entertainment, including trips to Detroit Tigers games and Pittsburgh Steelers events. Emails from Mr. Mitchell also show that he took a keen interest in...

Hanover, Germany — Shiny black solar panels are as common a sight as baroque church spires in this industrial hub, thanks to government subsidies that have helped make Germany a world leader in solar technology. Now, sudden subsidy cuts here and elsewhere in Europe have thrown the industry into crisis just short of its ultimate goal: a price to generate solar energy that is no higher than fossil-fuel counterparts. Across Europe, governments are slashing public spending to cut their deficits, and green-energy subsidies are a target, too, even as solar power accelerates in the United States, helped by sympathetic federal...

(Reuters) - BYD Co Ltd , a Chinese carmaker backed by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, posted a 90 percent slide in quarterly profit as it was hit by a slowdown in the world's largest car market and losses in its solar business. China's once-sizzling auto industry has succumbed to softening economic growth, further exasperated by new vehicle offerings in the fiercely competitive market. BYD, which attracted investment from Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway because of its battery technology, has started selling pure electric cars and buses in China. BYD, which debuted its new generation of plug-in sedans at the Beijing auto show...

The Solar thing just got a little more interesting.......REALLY! The Tonopah Solar company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million loan from Obama's DOE. The project will produce a 110 megawatt power system and employ 45 permanent workers. That's costing us just $16 million per job. One of the investment partners in this endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG). The PCG executive director is Ron Pelosi who is the brother to Nancy's husband. Just move along folks.....nuthin goin on here. EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW HOW THEIR MONEY IS BEING STOLEN SO FORWARD THIS TO EVERYBODY.

The 411,618 square foot Solyndra building in Fremont, California has been put on the market: The office area of the grand compound are "LEED Gold Standards," according to a website set up to sell the building. It's "Expandable to 739,232 square feet." Solyndra, the green energy firm that received $528 million in a Department of Energy loan, filed for bankruptcy in September. As Bloomberg reported, "Solyndra, heralded by President Barack Obama as proof that 'the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,' filed for bankruptcy in September, days before the FBI raided its headquarters in Fremont, California....

First Solar , the beneficiary of at least $3 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees, paid its former CEO $32 million over two years as he stewarded its stock price from $143 to below $100. Today it sells for less than $21-per-share, hitting a 52-week low last week, and yesterday the company announced it would slash global payroll by 2,000 workers in Malaysia, Europe and the U.S. The Arizona Republic reported Thursday that Rob Gillette, who was terminated as CEO in October, received $16.55 million during the first three months of employment in 2009 (October to December), and...

First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced today that it will layoff 2,000 workers in the United States and world-wide. The company will "indefinitely idle" four production lines in Malaysia and shutter a plant in Germany. "These actions, combined with other personnel reductions in Europe and the U.S., will reduce First Solar's global workforce by approximately 2,000 positions, about 30 percent of the total," First Solar announced today. "After a thorough analysis, it is clear the European market has deteriorated to the extent that our operations there are...

Planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle.Argiris Diamantis writes in with this tip: Professor Cornelis de Jager from the Netherlands has put a new publication on his website. It is a study of Dirk K. Callebaut, Cornelis de Jager and Silvia Duhau. They conclude that planetary effects are too small by several orders of magnitude to be a main cause of the solar cycle. A planetary explanation of the solar cycle is hardly possible.The paper is titled:The influence of planetary attractions on the solar tachocline Dirk K. Callebaut...

With the price of solar panels dropping I have to wonder if I should investigate since I live in sunny eastern North Carolina.

This is the year that the fake energy provided by our fake president finally collide and go boom. So, get ready for a new round of green bankruptcies, as Europe trims back subsidies for solar companies and taxpayers lose their appetite for subsidizing green power. “The mini-bubble resulting from the rush to cash in on solar subsidies in European and U.S. markets is ending, as feed-in tariffs drop in Europe while loan guarantee and tax credit programs tighten up in the U.S.,” says a new report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch according to CNBC.com.Germany is dialing back subsidies for...

The Maryland Legislature has passed a new bill that opens the way for the rapid growth of solar energy in the state. The bill was passed by a vote of 37-9 and will accelerate the state’s alternative energy goals by increasing the percentage of electricity the state must obtain through the use of solar power. The bill requires that Maryland produce more electricity through the use of solar power. Legislators believe that this will create a higher demand for solar energy projects and encourage state residents to install solar panels on their homes and other properties. Solar energy has been...

In 2006 California’s Senate Bill 107 codified a requirement that by 2010 all electricity retailers in the state were to procure 20% of their electricity from “renewables.” That same year L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich established Nuisance Abatement Teams that started combing the Mojave desert hitting isolated residents with ever-expanding lists of code violations, imposing whatever it took to drive residents out, and they made their intentions perfectly clear . . . . . . Apparently it is not enough that our green crony capitalists are getting billions in taxpayer subsidies, or that that rate-payers are forced to buy their...

President Obama describes his energy policies as ones that "invest in stuff that's new" and "stop subsidizing stuff that's old." But several of Obama's energy priorities are very "old stuff" -- wind, electric cars, batteries, trains -- much of it predating the gasoline engine, and little finding much commercial success despite massive public investments.

For those of you looking for a job or a different career, there’s some good news: Green jobs — that is, those with an eco-friendly focus — are expected to grow in the coming years. What’s more you needn’t worry about having to have a green résumé. If you have technical skills in engineering, architecture, accounting, marketing or project management, you’ll find job openings at solar energy firms, renewable energy outfits and others. Interested? Here are five jobs to consider, depending on your skills and interests. Pay varies based on factors such as experience and where you live. Salary figures...

Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and the Commerce Secretary have extensive ties to fast-tracked green energy programs under investigation by the Senate Budget Committee. Seven solar power companies have received quick approval and little scrutiny from the Department of Interior to lease federal lands in California and Nevada in no-bid processes. Critics have raised questions about the environmental impact of these companies on endangered species.

A California solar energy company that was unable to meet a deadline for an Energy Department loan guarantee last year has sought bankruptcy protection in Delaware. “Solar Trust of America LLC…holds the development rights for the world’s largest solar power project,” Reuters reports, “which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project [emphasis added].” Solar Trust of America’s Chapter 11 filing on Monday listed assets between $1 million and $10 million, and liabilities between $10 million and $50 million. “We have been working...

BERLIN — Struggling German solar cell manufacturer Q-Cells SE says it will file for bankruptcy after abandoning a debt restructuring plan. The company said it will make its filing Tuesday at a court in Dessau. It said Monday that it had concluded it had no alternative after examining alternative restructuring plans. Q-Cells was once the world’s biggest solar cell manufacturer but has been hit by problems including falling prices. It lost €845.8 million ($1.1 billion) last year and reported revenue of €1.02 billion.

Two years ago, President Barack Obama hailed Loveland-based Abound Solar Inc. for its state-of-the-art technology and its potential to create thousands of jobs. ... Abound received a $400 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, drew down $70 million and, by the end of last year, ramped up production at its 400-employee Longmont-area plant. This year, however, the attention directed toward Abound has spun swiftly from praise to skepticism. At the end of February, Abound laid off 280 workers -- about 90 were temporary employees -- at its Longmont plant and halted production ...

Seven solar companies received fast-tracked approval by DOI to lease federal lands in a no-bid process: Abengoa Solar, BrightSource Energy, First Solar, Nevada Geothermal Power, NextEra Energy Resources, Ormat Nevada, and SolarReserve. Those seven companies all received loan guarantees worth billions from the Department of Energy under its renewable energy loan program, as well as renewable energy grants from the Treasury Department.

<p>"Instead of taxpayer giveaways to an industry that's never been more profitable, we should be using that money to double down on investments in clean energy technologies that have never been more promising.</p>

<p>Could even higher energy prices be on the way for Americans?</p> <p>During his two-day, four-state energy tour last week, President Obama reiterated his strong support for tax-subsidized solar energy. The president has repeatedly vowed the U.S. would not cede the solar industry to "China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here." But with Germany's recent cuts to solar subsidies and the U.S. Commerce Department's decision to impose tariffs on Chinese solar imports, the U.S. could be headed towards higher energy prices and wasted tax dollars thanks to the very policies created to compete with these nations.</p>

Calico Developers Reject Relocation, Choosing Pristine Wild Lands Over Degraded Sites Sacramento, CA - The proposed California-based Calico solar project fails to meet basic environmental protection requirements and threatens imperiled wildlife, according to Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. The groups are filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior after failing to reach agreement with the developers and the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to move the project to a location without major environmental conflicts. Over the course of three years, the environmental groups met...

It took President Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney to shock me to my senses. As someone who favors cutting government spending on clean energy and eliminating government subsidies in general, I was particularly distressed to learn (in Carney’s words) that “I am “aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century.” Even worse, I learn that “I have a severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.” And I had thought that if clean...

Solar thermal technology startup BrightSource Energy hopes to raise $182.5 million in a long-awaited initial public stock offering, according to an amended S-1 filed with the SEC Wednesday. The Oakland-based company plans to issue 6.9 million shares, .. at a price between $21 to $23 per share. .. BrightSource uses mirrors to concentrate the sun and turn turbines that generate electricity. It's most advanced project is the massive Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System currently under construction on federal land in California's Mojave Desert. When completed next year, Ivanpah will be the largest solar thermal power plant in the world, generating...

President Obama will tout investments in “renewable” energy Wednesday at the local Copper Mountain Solar 1 plant, although the plant has only five full-time employees. The plant, owned by San Diego-based energy company Sempra, was built in late 2010 at a cost of $141 million. Funding included $42 million in federal-government tax credits and $12 million in tax-rebate commitments from the state of Nevada. Construction of the plant involved over 300 part-time jobs, but currently only five full-time employees operate the plant, a Sempra spokeswoman confirmed. That comes out to $10.8 million in tax-dollar subsidies per employee…. In addition to...

The Bloomberg administration asks private companies to design, build and operate a renewable energy plant on 75 acres of the former Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. --- Earlier this month, the city proposed turning garbage into energy. Now it wants to turn a former garbage heap on Staten Island into an energy farm. The city is asking private companies to design, build and operate a wind and solar farm on 75 acres of the former Fresh Kills Landfill, Deputy Mayor for Operations Caswell Holloway announced at a Crain's forum Tuesday morning. It would be the first commercial-grade operation of...

The US has imposed duties on Chinese solar panel manufacturers after it said that they received unfair subsidies. Chinese exporters into the US - including Suntech - will now face customs tariffs of between 2.9% and 4.73%, the Commerce Department said. In 2011, imports of solar cells from China into the US were valued at $3.1bn (£1.96bn), it added. The price of solar panels dropped more than 30% last year, mainly linked to cheaper panels made in China. "Countervailable subsidies are financial assistance from foreign governments that benefit the production of goods from foreign companies," the Commerce Department said. China's...

The United States Commerce Department said Tuesday it would impose tariffs on solar panels imported from China after concluding that the Chinese government provided illegal export subsidies to manufacturers there. The tariffs were smaller than some American industry executives had hoped for — 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent — which could blunt their effect on the market. But whatever the size of the penalties, Tuesday’s ruling is likely to further heighten trade tensions with China, while holding implications for renewable energy policy in this country.

A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself. First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama's insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare. Here's the road of subsidies these solar panels followed from Perrysburg, Ohio, to St. Clair, Ontario.

From the American Geophysical Union weekly highlights:Key Points Minimum 23-24 showed recurrence intervals of 9.0 and 6.7-dHistorical geomagnetic activity data show that minimum 23-24 was unusualThe heliosphere during minimum 23-24 had unusual sectorial structure Since the mid-1800s, scientists have been systematically measuring changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and the occurrence of geomagnetic activity. Such long- term investigation has uncovered a number of cyclical changes, including a signal associated with 27-day solar rotation. This is most clearly seen during the declining phase and minimum of each 11-year solar cycle, when the Sun’s magnetic dipole is sometimes tilted with respect to...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The largest solar flare in five years is racing toward Earth, threatening to unleash a torrent of charged particles that could disrupt power grids, GPS and airplane flights. The sun erupted Tuesday evening, and the effects should start smacking Earth around 7 a.m. EST Thursday, according to forecasters at the federal government's Space Weather Prediction Center.

So, how is that alternative, renewable wind energy coming along? No need to split hairs. Give us a general idea. “To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero,” says Matt Ridley at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Oops...

A Department of Energy-funded solar company that laid off 280 workers last week quietly imposed a mandatory, temporary cessation of its operations during the holidays, and warned employees to “not let the rumor mill create false purposes for this shut down.” And in another sign of potential financial troubles, a company document that is supposed to guide “the next great solar company” advises leadership to “stretch payables” to help attain its goals. The forced time off was discovered in an internal memorandum obtained by The Complete Colorado, a news digest Web site, which also revealed the planning document. Employees...

State-level conservative blogs and think tanks are doing the work the rest of the “mainstream media” won’t do on government big green boondoggles. Last week, Doug mentioned the Abound Solar debacle here in my home state of Colorado. It’s thanks to the intrepid investigative work of Colorado’s Todd Shepherd and Amy Oliver at Complete Colorado and the Independence Institute and Michael Sandoval at People’s Press Collective that this latest Department of Energy loan scandal has been exposed. Paul Chesser at the NLPC summarized: Yet another solar company that received loan guarantees from the Department of Energy has dismissed factory workers,...

Stubborn does not come close to describing the desert tortoise, a species that did its evolving more than 220 million years ago and has since remained resolutely prehistoric. At the $2.2-billion BrightSource Energy solar farm in the Ivanpah Valley, the tortoise brought construction to a standstill for three months when excavation work found far more animals than biologists expected. BrightSource has spent $56 million so far to protect and relocate the tortoises, but even at that price, the work has met with unforeseen calamity: Animals crushed under vehicle tires, army ants attacking hatchlings in a makeshift nursery and one small...

The solar shakeout continues as Abound Solar, a Colorado startup that aimed to take on industry leader First Solar with a $400 million federal loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories, halts production and lays off 180 workers. In addition to the $400 million loan guarantee, Abound, which was founded in 2007, has raised $260 million in venture funding from investors that include Invus Group, Bohemian Companies, DCM, GLG Partners, Technology Partners, BP Alternative Energy and West Hill Investors. Whether Abound can compete in an increasingly tough solar market remains in question.

Yet another solar company that received loan guarantees from the Department of Energy has dismissed factory workers, lopping off 70 percent of its U.S. employees. Loveland, Colo.-based Abound Solar announced Tuesday it would lay off 280 workers at its production plant near Longmont, leaving 120 still employed. The start-up (2009) company attributed the cutbacks to the need for upgrades at the plant to manufacture more efficient solar panels, with plans to restore production levels and rehire most employees within six to nine months. “Hopefully at the end of that time period we will bring people back,” said Steve Abely,...

Last week, steam shot out of my head as I read an e-mail press release that came here to the radio station. It was followed a day later by a glowing story in our local newspaper. It was the proud announcement of an award from the U.S. Green Building Council being given to a housing development in our Mississippi Gulf Coast city of Ocean Springs. Apparently this new housing development has met all the criteria to be praised as “green” and “sustainable,” and an example of so-called “smart growth.” What’s wrong with that? Well, just everything. And, what makes me...