Alternate Energy News

 Some items that I have run across, that might still be of interest when this is published.

Affordable, reliable and sustainable: report compares utility performance:

Compared to its peers, Indiana ranked near the bottom — at 43 out of 51 — for overall electric utility performance, with its lowest individual scores in the environmental responsibility sector. In terms of affordability and reliability, the Hoosier state was closer to the middle — at 36 and 27, respectively.

Lawmakers and energy advocates unite behind solar, wind disposal bill

Republican lawmakers — along with Democrats and clean energy advocates — want Indiana to figure out solar and wind energy equipment decommissioning and disposal before the hazardous waste involved becomes a large-scale problem.

Senate Bill 33, authored by Sen. Greg Walker, R-Columbus, would task the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Indiana Regulatory Commission with conducting a joint study of how to phase out old solar panels and wind turbines.

“We often react after the fact — [after] we have concerns about the environment, we have concerns about industrial waste — and we don’t attempt to deal with those concerns until we already have a significant problem handling the volume of material,” Walker told the Senate Utilities Committee Thursday.

This is an era of plentiful, cheap, renewable energy, but the fossil fuel dinosaurs can’t admit it

Last week, for two days straight, wind power hit a peak of supplying over half of all the UK’s electricity use. For five months last year, low-carbon electricity sources (solar, wind, hydrogen and nuclear) constituted more than 50% of the country’s energy use. And unbelievably, the National Grid spends hundreds of millions to billions a year constraining energy supplies, that is, paying renewable suppliers when they’re generating too much power for the grid to handle.

It’s one triumph after another in green energy, but you wouldn’t know it to look at our bills, nor to examine our short- and medium-term policy framework. UK energy unit prices are the highest in the world. Without the government price cap intervention, businesses would already be bankrupt, schools probably shut down and people freezing in their homes. Jeremy Hunt’s pledge to withdraw the price cap from next April looks fanciful: sure, the words coming out of his mouth make sense – prices can’t be held down forever because it wouldn’t be “responsible”. But there’s no imaginable reality in which the “unlimited volatility in international gas prices” he refers to can be weathered by the average household.

From Nuvo, Bills establish solar, wind disposal studies and statehouse energy audit advance in Senate.

 

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