Enlarge / A field of solar panels and windmills in the desert. (credit: Getty )

On Monday, the Energy Information Agency released its annual figures for how the US generated electrical power during 2021. The year saw lots of changes as the country moved out of the pandemic, with coal, wind, and solar power all seeing large jumps compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, widespread drought conditions in the west caused a significant drop in hydroelectric production.

Longer term, the big stories are the two renewables, wind and solar. Wind only started outproducing hydro three years ago but has now developed a commanding lead. And solar has gone from a rounding error to 4 percent of annual production over the last decade and is poised for explosive growth.

Living fossils

2021 marks the first increase in annual coal use since the Obama administration. Megawatts generated via coal were up by 16 percent compared to the year prior and accounted for a bit under 22 percent of the total electricity produced. But this is likely to be a temporary change. No new coal plants are planned in the US, and the past decade has seen both the number of operating coal plants drop by half, and coal go from powering 44 percent of US electricity production to only 22 percent.

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Lights went out as Hurricane Fiona devastated areas from the Caribbean to Canada, and Hurricane Ian has done the same . Hurricanes, along with other natural disasters like wildfires and winter storms, can leave people without access to electricity.

However, new research out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that added solar capacity, paired with batteries, can help address this problem. The study makes use of historic long-term power outages (caused by disasters) and models the performance of behind-the-meter solar and energy storage systems functioning as a kind of backup source of power during long-term power interruptions.

Behind-the-meter refers to solar systems that are installed on a customer’s residence—on the customer side of the electricity meter. The more common term for this is “roof-top solar,” according to Galen Barbose, research scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the paper’s authors. “It’s more customer-sided solar,” he told Ars.

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As solar and wind energy ramps up in the United States, the industries have gotten better at installing and operating their facilities. This experience can be seen in how the facilities are financed. According to new research , people working in the fields—and adjacent ones—have learned to be more efficient, reducing the overall cost of power. Further, according to Mark Bolinger, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the authors of the paper, this so-called learning rate can be extrapolated into the future, and it spells good news for the two renewable sources of energy.

“The people who operate these turbines naturally get better over time as they do more of it. They get more efficient, and it allows them to lower their costs a bit,” Bolinger told Ars, adding that the same holds true for the workers manufacturing the facilities. “Some of them have been doing it for a really long time… All things being equal, that should lead to a reduction in manufacturing costs.”

There’s a large amount of literature on learning rate and learning curve theory, he said. Moore’s Law, which pertains to the power of silicon computer chips, says that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles each year. Bolinger said that the learning rate in these renewable energy operations is similar to that. Learning rate is a measure of how much cost declines for each doubling of cumulative output, he said.

Enlarge / The Electrify America Solar Glow 1 farm will generate enough solar power to offset the entire EA charging network.

One of the best things about electric cars, other than their power trains, immediate torque, and relaxing quiet, is the fact that as the electrical grid becomes cleaner, so too does every EV that uses that grid to charge. That process took a step forward this week with the news that by next year, the Electrify America (EA) charging network will be entirely offset by solar energy.

On Wednesday, EA signed a 15-year agreement with Terra-Gen to purchase electricity from a 75 MW solar farm being built by the latter in San Bernardino County, California. In the past, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made various promises about making Tesla’s Supercharger network entirely solar-powered , and the automaker has installed solar arrays at some of its charging locations. It does not appear that the network is fully solar-powered yet, though.

The Electrify America Solar Glow 1 project will break ground later this year, and when it's fully operational in 2023, it should have an annual energy production of 225,000 MWh. That’s more than enough to account for the annual energy use of the EA charging network.

This one is for those in the USA. Date: 21 August 2017

Check out this page to know where to be on the day. ttps://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2017-august-21

Unfortunately it is not visible from my location...

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