Alternative Energy Continues to Make Inroads

It appears that the United States took the lead in total wind-generated power production last year, although as several bloggers noted, on a per capita basis we're still far behind Germany, Denmark, Spain and other countries. This follows hard on the heels of a post from earlier this month, where I noted that in 2007 total newly-installed wind-generated power had exceeded new coal-generated power for the first time. They still haven't solved the level load, storage problem, but that may change. In the meantime, we'll have to keep producing coal and oil and gas. There is no alternative.



Also needing a power storage solution, but exciting nonetheless, is the development of what is billed as the largest solar power plant in the world, in southern California. I was interested to see that it is a solar thermal plant - that is, it generates power by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight and produce high temperatures, heating steam to drive a turbine, just like a coal plant, rather than relying on photovoltaics. Solar thermal is much cheaper to develop than photovoltaics, and while PV remains the holy grail, as a practical matter solar thermal probably will be the way to go for quite a while.