During COP16, Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson described attributes of his team’s most recently produced paper. The abstract leads with the following claim about the paper’s content. This study addresses the greatest concern facing the large-scale integration of wind, water, and solar (WWS) into a power grid: the high cost of avoiding load loss caused by…
Jigar Shah is the founder of SunEdison, a former CEO of the Carbon War Room, and is currently the President of Generate Capital. He is also a member of The Energy Gang on Greentech Media. Jigar and I have been engaged in some lively discussions on Twitter about the future of solar and nuclear energy…
By Paul Lorenzini Part I. Must we destroy the environment to save it? When Jonathan Franzen wrote a provocative piece in The New Yorker earlier this year, “Climate Capture”, Chris Clarke, an influential environmental blogger in California, described it as having “walked up to a hornet’s nest and hit it with a baseball bat.”[1] Franzen…
A May 30, 2015 story in the Los Angeles Times titled Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies provides an enlightening look at the basis for Musk’s recent business success. His visionary — and generously subsidized — enterprises including Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX have resulted in his elevation to…
Perhaps the largest single engineering project of the 20th century was the Three Gorges Dam in China. Standing nearly 600 feet tall, and 2.3 kilometers in length, the Three Gorges Dam is the single largest dam ever constructed, holding a reservoir that stretches for 660 kilometers. Standing at the base of the dam, it feels…
On November 18, 2014, I participated in a round table discussion hosted by the Global American Business Institute (GABI) and the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER). The guest speaker for the round table was Georg Maue, First Secretary for Climate and Energy, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, DC. The topic…
Some Atomic Insights readers don’t like it when I use the term “unreliables” to describe weather dependent power sources like wind and solar energy. They believe that word is demeaning and not entirely accurate, especially in certain system designs where wind turbines are partnered with hydro or pumped storage. Even in that situation, however, the…
After posting a couple of videos with Amory Lovins providing his energy mirage, several commenters indicated they would like to hear and see a different point of view. Unlike Amory, David MacKay is a physicist who likes to use real numbers and simple arithmetic to illustrate the scale of the challenge of replacing the power…
The above panel discussion — moderated by Coral Davenport, who is an Energy and Environment Policy Reporter for The New York Times — features three energy and policy experts. Meghan O’Sullivan is a professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. From 2004-2007 she was the deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. Michael…
A few hours ago, I posted a blog titled Amory Lovins-speak: Three misleading statements in a 15 second sound bite. That post included a video embed of Lovins presentation during a March 28, 2014 symposium sponsored by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth titled Three Mile Island 35th Anniversary Symposium: The Past, Present, and…
I had the opportunity to be in the audience during the above talk. You might notice my impolite interjections; I have often been accused of being very poor at hiding my real reactions and feelings. There is a reason why I stopped playing poker during game nights on the USS Stonewall Jackson. I was losing…
A friend just passed me a link to an article on Clean Technica by Zachary Shahan titled Why Are So Many Redditors Obsessed With Uncompetitive Nuclear Energy?. Shahan bemoans the fact that nuclear supporters on Reddit seem to outnumber solar and wind supporter and believes that contrasts with the real world as demonstrated by the…