2014 was hotter than 1998. 2015 data in yet?

Curiously I don't see how it is a lie or a selling gimmick. It is real, it is happening. Kenya is a developing country with very little infrastructure for electrical transmission. It makes sense to use solar because (a) there is plenty of it and (b) it is cheaper to install near where it is used than to build big plants and transmission lines. They are freed from that fossil fuel paradigm and can develop a solar based energy economy from the start. And again, that power is not getting to the remote and rural areas and solar provides electricity at those locations. India is also a developing country, and the cities are overcrowded. Using solar in the rural and remote areas allows for future development in those locations without having to go to the cities to use electricity. With solar energy developing nations do not need to copy and paste the paradigm of western "civilization" production and distribution to energize new economic growth, but can develop one based on localized production and use, scaling up as needed.Enjoy

All irrelevant: the power generated isn't enough to lift them from poverty. What paradigm is that? The paradigm by which every advanced country on earth has grown rich and powerful burning shit loads of dead plants? So? Who wants that economy if it means being like Kenya? Enough about India, really. It's already been pointed out to you that India gets a larger share of its power from coal than even the U.S. Using India as an example of the 'wonders of solar power' is plain dishonest. That is not only a horrible economic model (it's never worked in the millions of years humans have been on this planet), but an environmentally devastating one as well.Your ideas of what would make good economic and environmental policy/practice are only based on wishy-washy, hippy-dippy, touchy-feely nonsense, not on any actual facts or evidence.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

I guess fission power can be considered a form of stellar power, i.e. energy formed from stars other than Sol. But fusion is not a form of solar or star energy at all. Hydrogen is a primordial energy source formed in the big bang.But there is no real reason to care about such a lumping as 'it's all solar'. Each method of deriving energy from a solar source has its own characteristics regarding how it affects the environment, the carbon in the atmosphere (climate), and what other resources must be consumed to produce it. Even burning carbon has different implications depending on the source of the carbon. If we are burning renewable carbon sources, we are not adding to the atmosphere as we do when we burn fossil fuels.Substantial reductions in AGW can be gotten by exploiting renewable and non-carbon burning energy sources and using them to replace the burning of fossil fuels to the extent possible. While that won't eliminate all effects of planet warming, it is the current goal.The proposition that we cannot accomplish anything meaningful without becoming a Kenyan-like economy is not self evident. In fact it is counter intuitive. So far that case seems to be that if we use solar energy in the same proportions as Kenya then we'd have a Kenyan economy. In short, not an argument worth discussion. I'd like to see a case made for such a proposition at least equal to the facts already presented for the opposite proposition which suggests that the capacity for wind and solar is sufficient to keep us well below acceptable AGW. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

And then we have to ask the question: which is better for people, low density suburbia (with distributed systems) or high-density urbia (with concentrated systems)?One of the reasons high density urban systems exist is because of the concentration of energy distribution. Energy is concentrated and people cluster around it to take advantage of it. This is why energy costs are less when concentrated: it is the distribution, not the generation -- more concentration means less transmission lines.With a more open system and energy disbursed across the area there is less need to clump people.Enjoy

NYC electricity prices are higher than the U.S. average. Yet if our goal is reducing our environmental footprint, we want to clump people.

It doesn't quite work that way. It won't be an even point for point distribution across the state because NYC, being a very dense city with high energy efficiency, doesn't use as much energy in proportion to its percentage of the state's population. Instead of conjecturing, we can just use numbers already collected Hopefully I don't make a mess of this trying to convert it to metric.Based on the analysis I did with Topaz, you can get about 33,500 Mwh/year of power per km² of solar panels in New York. That's 33.5 Gwh/year/km².According to this wind power propaganda, NYC used 60,000 Gwh in 2009.The math is easy: 60,000/33.5 = 1,791 km².That's almost twice your estimate.Now these aren't 'impossible' numbers. But I think they are much larger than promoters of solar power want us to believe is actually required.And again, just solving the space issue for the panels doesn't solve the space issue for the storage or the technical problems of the storage.How do we overcome those hurdles?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

42% of the 143,401 Gwh that NY state used is 60,228 Gwh. Ok but according to the National Renewable Energy Labratory you only need about 4 acres of panels to collect a Gwh. Its on page 6 of this report. If NYC used 60,000 Gwh that is 971,040,000 m2. That is 971.04 km2. We overcome those hurdles by deciding that we have to. The same way that we overcome the hurdles of building a Hoover Dam or mapping out the human genome or landing a probe on a comet. The most difficult hurdle is getting the right people to agree that we have to change how we do things.Essentially all that we have to do is change the energy from kinetic to potential. So batteries, capacitors, thermal mass, wind up a spring, pump water up a hill, compress a gas, liberate hydrogen from water. I am sure that the list goes on.

Fair enough. I think we are just using different numbers for different years and with different definitions of NYC. I don't care about the propaganda of the NREL. I care about the actual numbers collected from actual usage.The conclusion we should draw from comparing the in-use figures to the NREL estimates is that the NREL is wrong and has overstated the potentials of solar power - likely to keep the funding rolling in. The essence of the solution has always been understood. It's the implementation where we fall short. I am not aware of any current technologies that would offer the kind of cheap and massive power storage required for our communities to run on renewable energy alone.Are you?

The thing is that we have decided that any new technologies have to be profitable before we introduce them. For the most part this makes good sense but with regard to AGW we are not inputting the real cost of continuing to burn oil and coal. It is a simple matter of accounting and most of the accountants work for the same people who are selling you gasoline.The fact that we don't have any municipal sized energy storage systems in place has nothing to say about the difficulty of building them. Take a 1000 tonnes of concrete and use your off peak power production to lift it off the ground using hydraulics. Then let it drive a generator while it falls slowly back down when you need the power.

World's largest solar plant goes live, will provide power for 1.1M people | Computerworld

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The world's largest solar power plant, now live in Morocco, will eventually provide 1.1 million people with power.

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...could eventually start exporting energy to the European market

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...the plant will be able to store energy in the form of heated molten salt, which allows for the production of energy even at night.

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Profitable is just another way of saying 'salable'. And that's just another way of saying 'affordable'.Energy has to be cheap to have the effects we want it to have - reduce poverty, improve lives, cure diseases, sanitize water, and so forth. Except that we are. As I pointed out to RAZD already, even though we do not itemize all the costs (and often even all the benefits) doesn't mean they aren't included in our final accounting. And the reality of it is that humans today are far better off burning huge amounts of fossil fuels than before we started burning them (the comparison holds even when looking at modern societies that do vs don't burn large amounts of fossil fuels).The evidence suggests this pattern will continue for decades if not centuries. And that's because the enormous benefits of cheap and reliable energy far outweigh the costs of using fossil fuels to generate that energy. Everything's easier from an armchair. How much concrete would you have to raise, how high, and how much energy could you get as it falls? Let's just say to take care of NYC.

We are better off because we have figured out beneficial ways of using energy. The dirty cheap fuel that we used only looks cheap. We are now beginning to see the real cost of 200 yrs worth of burning fossil fuels. Only when you defer and redirect the real costs of a global economy fueled by oil. Pollution related health care costs, environmental degradation, air quality, armed conflict for control of resources, sea level rise and population displacement. How do these things figure into your $2/gal gas? Ergo I remain thoroughly ensconced.

Yes that is true. But that is hardly the point. Burning fossil fuels did help get us where we are, but replacing those fuels with renewable sources to the extend possible does not move us backwards. You continue to argue as if the only alternative to doing what we currently do now is to go cold turkey off of burning ancient carbon. You haven't come anywhere close to establishing that premise.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Okay.So there's a real-world example of at least something.Let's do the math with it. I'll start:Assuming the plant produces at capacity, it stores 2230 Mwh of electricity - 2.23 Gwh/day (about 815 Gwh/year). It covers an area about 14 km². The plant operates at about 30% capacity (according to the Wikipedia article: Ouarzazate Power Station). So in sunny Morocco it produces 250 Gwh/year of stored electricity. That works out to 17 Gwh/year/km².Given the figures for NYC discussed earlier, and working from the premise that nighttime demand is half daytime demand (discussed here, though for California), NYC's needs at least 20,000 Gwh/year during times when the sun certainly doesn't shine.That works out to 1175 km². For generation and storage Remember, though: that's just to handle the power for nighttime use.If we want to also have the plant producing electricity for daytime use, we would have to triple the area used for the solar generation (though not the storage system).I haven't looked for those figures separately yet, but maybe I'll run the numbers later and post. Or someone else could...You up to it?

Of course not.And I am very eager to see working renewable power generation.But there are folks here making big claims; it's not unreasonable to ask for evidence for those claims and to examine them. Not at all.I am arguing that given the evidence presented so far regarding the potential of renewable energy it won't meet our energy needs and abandoning fossil fuels now - since those alternatives really don't exist - would leave us all in the dark. The last two hundred years seem to establish it well enough.