RE Power’s “5M” offshore wind turbine is definitely the King of wind turbines - a single unit that generates 5.0 megawatts of electricity at full output.  With a rotor diameter of 126 meters (412 feet) and a hub height between 90 and 120 meters, RE Power’s 5M unit is the biggest wind turbine available in [...]

If you want to imagine the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent to China’s Three Gorges Dam, look no further than the proposed Severn Barrage, which at peak output will deliver over 8 gigawatts of electricity, or about 50% of what the Three Gorges delivers. Even though the Three Gorges output decisively exceeds that of the Severn Barrage, [...]

The opponents of California’s ballot Proposition 7 (read full text of Prop 7) claim it will “cost consumers and taxpayers hundreds of millions per year in higher electric rates - a $300 increase per household per year.”  It is hard to get access to the calculations behind these estimates, so we have attempted to come up [...]

In our interactive spreadsheet “How Much Electricity for all Commuters? ” you can calculate what it would take to replace our combustion-driven automotive fleet with electric vehicles.  The assumptions that the spreadsheet default to (which you can change to anything you wish) indicate that based on 4.0 kilowatt-hours per mile, and 40 miles per day [...]

From the DOE online reference, CO2 Emissions Report, Table 1, you will see that in 1999 in the USA there were nearly 1.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from the burning of coal to create electricity, which yielded nearly 1.9 million kilowatt-hours of power.  This means in that year in the USA, for each megawatt-hour of coal-fired [...]

Even if California “only” ends up with 25% renewable electricity within the next decade or two, there is going to be a staggering amount of investment pouring into wind and solar power, and with intermittant sources of energy, massive storage infrastructure is just as necessary as the generating infrastructure. In our analysis of Prop. 7, [...]

There is nothing wrong with encouraging clean, renewable, domestically produced energy.  But California’s proposition 7 “would, if approved, require California utilities to procure half of their power from renewable resources by 2025″ (ref. Ballotpedia).  Currently California’s public utilities are mandated to generate 25% of their electricity by 2025, and this is an ambitious goal.  Just [...]