"The idea that solar power could interfere with the UK’s food security is utterly detached from reality. Solar power generated over 8% of all our electricity this spring, but takes up less land than golf courses."
Better idea than banning solar panels on potential farmland - turn all the golf courses into community gardens and allotment sites.
A #solarpower spinout from Oxford University has concluded that due to a lack of incentives, the UK is the 'least attractive' of the countries it is considering for a plant to manufacture its highly efficient perovskite-silicon cells for #solar panels. The plant is likely to be located in either the US or Germany.
Its an old story of UK advances in #technology being capitalised on elsewhere, now compounded by a #Tory Govt. with no #industrial strategy & a weak commitment to #greenenergy!
Scientists Beam #Space-Based #Solar Power to Earth for First Time
"#MAPLE’s array of transmitters successfully beamed #SolarPower collected in space using #microwaves to a receiver on the rooftop of Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on #Caltech’s campus in #Pasadena."
For the past 15 years, when we turned on the lights at Firestorm we were using electricity generated by a Duke Energy plant on Lake Julian, south of Asheville. Prior to its retirement in 2020, that plant burned 400K tons of Appalachian coal per year, mined through a process known as mountaintop removal, making it a frequent target of environmental activists. When Duke moved to replace it with a new facility that burns fracked gas, that plan was opposed by Appalachian Voices, NC WARN, and others who argued that the environmental impact could be just as bad, or worse. (Mountaintop removal and fracking are both nightmarish, go read about them, if you haven't already!) Today less than 10% of Duke's electricity is renewable, and the company's future plans for industrial scale wind, solar, and hydro are sure to replicate the environmental racism and extractive practices on which the company built its fortunes.
It shouldn't be surprising to learn that, as anarchists, our vision for energy justice is decentralized and radically democratic! We're excited to share that our co-op is now meeting most of its electric needs through a 7.5 kW rooftop solar system installed by the good folks at Asheville Solar Company. Like other energy sources, solar has significant environmental impacts—from materials mining to end-of-life waste—but the shift to neighborhood-scale energy production, alongside a reduction in energy use through degrowth, is essential to the solarpunk future we dream of.
Me: Solar panel day! How many are going on?
Solar tech: Thirty-five.
Me: Wow! What is all that going to weigh?
Solar tech: About 1,000 pounds.
Me : And after they fill with sunshine?
Solar tech: That will make them lighter, m’am.
Thanks to #HomeAssistant, this old smartphone has a second life as weather station in our kitchen. It also displays our current #solarpower, battery level and energy consumption. Helps deciding when to start the dishwasher or other devices using a lot of electricity. #solarpunk
In 2008, the sadly missed David McKay published a brilliant book about the numbers behind the #GreenTransition - the analysis is now updated to 2023 and the wonderful @_hannahritchie
has done a deep dive on her substack - can #WindEnergy + #solarPower meet Britain's #energy demands?
A home #solarpower x bungalow living failure mode I probably should have expected but somehow did not: woke up at 7am today to the sound of chunks of snow sliding off the solar panels and landing with a thud next to our bedroom 😅🌞🤣
A solar PV production peak of 3 GW on 29 December in the Netherlands...
This spring, we'll probably see our first 20 GW peak (from over 25 GW installed capacity). If the power system allows it; it's more than the country's peak demand. #solarenergy#solarpower#SolarPV
Don’t ever let anyone tell you TX is an “oil” state given their massive wind power generation and now news like this re: grid solar (this doesn’t even include rooftop solar generation!):
Fantastic news that, despite the best efforts of Australia’s cowardly politicians, the market is driving dirty energy out of the system #CleanEnergy#Renewables#SolarPower
When this documentary was made the car in it was already vintage. Today we are discussion if it is possible to build such a thing and call it revolutionary.
I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world who has solar panels on their roofs who has wasted quite some time in the mornings watching the magic of the power coming on.
This smugness is matched by looking back at a bell curve graph of production for the day where you've used up almost everything that the panels have produced and yet drawn almost nothing from the grid.
As of March 2024, the Golmud Solar Park in China is the world's largest solar farm, with 2.8 gigawatts of installed capacity. The park has more than 7.2 million solar panels that use photovoltaic (PV) technology to generate electricity.
#SolarPower is Earth's most abundant #Energy source. The Earth receives 174 petawatts (PW) of incoming solar radiation (insolation) at the upper atmosphere.
On April 25, 1954, Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, publicly demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell. The cell was invented by Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson.