I recently stumbled across some interesting pieces of information between Monticello and telephone-incumbent TDS when the Minnesota City decided to build a city-owned next-generation FTTH netwo… Continue reading
Over the last decade, Walmart has emerged as one of the country’s largest funders of political campaigns. Its dollars skew heavily in favor of candidates who routinely vote against the environment. Continue reading
One of our kindred spirits across the pond reached out to me after I wrote about Vermont’s self-funded community network. The B4RN initiative, Broadband for the Rural North, has launched using… Continue reading
This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December. Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide… Continue reading
In this Nov. 20 interview with Baruch on his WKBM Paradigms program, we talked about: The coming decentralization of the electricity system The folly of a building inherently decentralized technology (wind and solar) in a centralized fashion The benefits for local ownership of a decentralized system How limited economies of scale for solar and wind… Continue reading
In this short interview on KGNU’s science show – How on Earth– with Tom McKinnon, we talk about: the problems presented for local ownership of energy resources when federal incentives use the tax code, the trouble for clean energy when it’s reliant on Wall Street, how Boulder, CO, may accomplish something remarkable with its vote… Continue reading
Where does solar grid parity strike first? How fast does it spread? Click “animate” on the map below to see which major metropolitan areas can beat grid prices with local solar first, and how quickly unsubsidized solar could take over America’s major metropolitan areas.
In January, I plotted the size of state solar markets against their average installed cost and found surprisingly little correlation. When Lawrence Berkeley Labs put out their 2011 version of Tracking the Sun (IV), it was possible to update the chart, which I did in two stages. The first chart simply overlays the 2010 average… Continue reading
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging. “You can… Continue reading
One doesn’t need 540 MW of reserve to back up 540 MW of small-scale distributed generation, but one does need it to back up a single critical 540 MW unit.