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posted by mrpg on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the forecast-cloudy dept.

Solar power grew faster than any other source of fuel for the first time in 2016, the International Energy Agency said in a report suggesting the technology will dominate renewables in the years ahead.

The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar powered by photovoltaics, or PVs, grew by 50 percent, with almost half of new plants built in China.

"What we are witnessing is the birth of a new era in solar PV," Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said in a statement accompanying the report published on Wednesday in Paris. "We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be higher than any other renewable technology through 2022."

Solar Grew Faster Than All Other Forms of Power for the First Time
International Energy Agency

Solar power will only work until the sun burns out, but dinosaurs are forever.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:25PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:25PM (#577589) Journal

    Solar may be great, someday, but only when the storage problem is solved. Meanwhile, it mostly lives on government subsidies, directly or indirectly.

    Solar is great, now. If you go by the numbers of installed cost, grid parity has been reached in 36 states (last I checked 8 months ago). The price of panels themselves has been sinking very quickly the last 10 years. Installation costs are still much higher than they have any right to be. It will come down (market forces are good for situations like that).

    As far as subsidies go, well, the same thing can be said for fossil fuels. They get hidden in a number of other ways to hide their true extent, but the prices we see are not what the true cost is. That's even without dipping into the increasingly real cost of their negative externalities.

    I like renewables and welcome their spread because they represent freedom. Freedom from the fucking utilities that jack up their rates double digits every year. Freedom from oil sheiks who decide they want to teach the arrogant West a lesson. Freedom from corporations that feel like they have a right to dictate every iota of minutiae of our existence. Sure, it's nice to save the Earth and butterflies and rainbows and all that, but at last a real shot to shed the yoke of slavery that fossil fuels are.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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