The first time I started thinking about regenerative energy systems was reading the following passage about the Milwaukee Road, the electric railway system of the late 19th and early 20th century in the book _Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives_ by Edwin Black (NY: St Martin's Press, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35907-2 https://internalcombustionbook.com/ Video of Black on his book at https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/internal-combustion/167929):
"Sometimes electrified railways seemed to defy the laws of perpetual motion. For example, when the brakes were applied or the train traveled down a slope, the engine actually returned electricity to the grid. Regenerative braking and similar power returns helped the engines pay for themselves. In some mountain ranges, if timed correctly, a heavy downhill train could actually regenerate enough electricity to the grid to power another train passing it uphill. Thus both trains would travel in a minuet of seemingly energy-free motion. That might have seemed to violate the laws of physics, but not the rules of General Electric's wondrous workhorses, which were designed to observe this maxim: It is better to give than receive when it comes to electrical power. Those engines lasted not for years but for decades. Their endurance was measured in millions of miles. They were monumental vehicles that created economic prosperity and environmental balance everywhere they rolled."
I imagined a transportation system based upon regenerative braking with load balancing so that energy expenditure going uphill was matched with the energy gain going downhill. That was nearly 20 years ago. Now it is happening. There are trains, trucks, automobiles which are using regenerative braking, batteries, and two-way or bidirectional charging, operating as grids and grid back-ups.
One of the largest electric vehicles on Earth, weighing in at 123 tons with a 65 ton payload capacity, is the fully electric eDumper, developed by eMining AG, using regenerative braking to charge the batteries, and in active use since 2018. Roger Miauton, the chief executive of eMining AG, says, “When you have a descent of 10 percent, from top to bottom, you never need to recharge. You generate enough energy going downhill as you need to get back up again.”
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/21/revenge-of-the-electric-truck-hydropower-scheme-infinity-train-edition/
Fortescue Williams, a hard rock mining company, operates an "Infinity Train” in Australia that never needs charging using this idea. Unfortunately, although saving them 10% of their fuel costs, they started shutting down the program in September 2025.
https://www.boilingcold.com.au/fortescue-slashes-electric-train-program-but-insists-zero-emissions-on-track/
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/31/an-electric-train-that-never-needs-charging-its-real/
https://inhabitat.com/mining-company-adopts-electric-trains-that-never-need-recharging/
Barcelona's main transit operator, Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona, or TMB, built four electrolineras - Spanish for “electric gas stations” - in which regenerative braking supplies power to the station and the fast EV chargers outside. They plan to add three more as they expand the MetroCHARGE project. “We’re trying to take advantage of the power that’s already in the metro system and use that spare energy to feed EV chargers on the street,” said Marc Iglesias, head of sustainable mobility at Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona, a regional agency working with TMB on the project.
https://grist.org/transportation/barcelona-is-turning-subway-trains-into-power-stations/
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/09/30/barcelona-is-using-regenerative-braking-to-power-subways-ev-chargers/
There are also many vehicle to grid projects ongoing using business fleet vehicles or even school buses
https://rmi.org/electrification-101-how-fleets-and-utilities-can-work-together-to-unlock-electrified-transportation/
and China is building two-way charging stations that allow parked EVs to send power back to the grid during peak demand periods
https://restofworld.org/2025/china-electric-vehicle-bidirectional-charging/
https://english.news.cn/20240816/47b3faa6206247b8b9c79772563a213d/c.html
I asked two Large Language Models [LLMs], ChatGPT and Claude, to produce one page outlines and elevator pitches for such a system using the resources above.
ChatGPT said:
One Pager
Regenerative Load-Balanced Transportation System
Concept Summary
A multi-modal transportation ecosystem in which downhill vehicles generate energy and uphill vehicles consume it, coordinated through local microgrids, fast storage, and real-time control. Inspired by heavy-haul regenerative systems (eDumper, Infinity Train, Barcelona Metro), the architecture extends these ideas to city transit and micro-mobility.
System Architecture
1. Energy Capture
Onboard regenerative braking collects gravitational and kinetic energy.
Wayside DC microgrids at stations/grade transitions absorb high-power regenerative pulses.
Braking energy instantly powers nearby chargers, station loads, or is stored.
2. Local Energy Buffering
Fast-response stationary batteries / supercaps store short bursts of regen energy.
Strategic placement: downhill termini, stations in hilly zones, transit hubs.
Heavy-rail systems can fully recharge from downhill runs; micro-mobility uses aggregated charging at hubs.
3. Bidirectional Charging + Grid Coordination
V2G/V2X allows vehicles and stationary storages to trade energy with the grid.
Enables selling surplus regenerative energy or absorbing grid overflow.
Micro-mobility docks use bidirectional charging or standardized battery swaps.
4. Real-Time Energy Management
Model Predictive Control (MPC) forecasts downhill energy pulses and uphill demand.
Optimizes when to route energy directly, store it, or export it.
Includes constraints for battery health, thermal limits, power flows, and safety.
Micro-Mobility Integration
E-bikes/scooters recover small per-trip energy, but fleet aggregation + smart docking makes it impactful.
Docking stations act as edge batteries, passively absorbing regenerative surges from nearby rail/tram systems.
Standardized high-C battery modules enable rapid, safe bidirectional energy exchange.
Value Proposition
Environmental
Cuts grid draw for uphill operations; in heavy rail, can approach net-zero propulsion.
Reduces peak loads, enabling more renewable penetration.
Economic
Downhill energy becomes an asset, lowering operational costs.
Utilities benefit from predictable load behavior and distributed storage.
Reduces battery cycling costs via optimized dispatch.
Urban Benefits
Turns transit hubs into clean energy nodes.
Micro-mobility fleets become distributed flexible storage, improving urban electrification resilience.
Deployment Pathway
Identify corridor with predictable downhill → uphill flow.
Install DC wayside buffer and bidirectional chargers at nodes.
Deploy MPC controller for energy forecasting and routing.
Add micro-mobility docking/storage hubs to share captured energy.
Pilot → measure → refine → scale.
ELEVATOR PITCH (45 seconds)
Imagine a transportation system where going downhill powers going uphill. Heavy trains, trams, and even micro-mobility devices feed their regenerative braking energy into local batteries at stations. Instead of wasting that energy as heat, we store it and route it—instantly—into the next uphill climb, EV charger, or grid service. This creates a self-balancing transportation microgrid: heavy rail systems like the Infinity Train can recharge entirely from gravity, while city transit turns stations into clean-energy hubs that also power e-bikes and scooters. The result is lower operating costs, reduced grid stress, and near-net-zero mobility, all achieved by capturing energy we already have and using smart control to share it across an ecosystem of vehicles.
Claude:
The Regenerative Transportation Ecosystem: Energy-Neutral Transportation Through Intelligent Load Balancing
The Elevator Pitch
What if transportation systems could power themselves? Mining trucks already generate more energy going downhill loaded than they use going uphill empty. Barcelona's subway trains capture braking energy to power stations and EV chargers. China's building a network where 100 million electric vehicles become the grid's battery. We're creating an interconnected transportation ecosystem where gravity-fed heavy vehicles subsidize urban transit, which powers neighborhood EV charging, which supports micro-mobility - turning every vehicle into part of the energy solution.
One Page:
The Problem
Transportation consumes massive energy while grid infrastructure struggles with peak demand. Meanwhile, energy is wasted daily: heavy vehicles braking downhill, trains stopping at stations, vehicles sitting idle. Each transportation segment operates in isolation, missing opportunities to share and balance energy loads.
The Solution: Four-Tier Energy Network
TIER 1: Heavy Industrial (Net Producers)
Mining trucks and trains on downhill routes generate surplus energy through regenerative braking
Example: eDumper (123-ton electric truck) generates more energy than it consumes, feeding excess to grid
Fortescue's Infinity Train eliminates 82M liters diesel annually while producing net energy
TIER 2: Urban Transit (Distribution Hubs)
Every subway/light rail station becomes an energy hub capturing braking energy
Barcelona: 41% of train power from regenerative braking, powering 25 stations + EV chargers
440M annual passenger trips = continuous energy generation and distribution
TIER 3: Personal EVs (Mobile Storage)
Bidirectional charging turns vehicle fleets into distributed batteries
China deploying 5,000 V2G stations by 2027; 100M EVs = 1 billion kW capacity by 2030
Owners earn revenue through energy arbitrage while stabilizing grid
TIER 4: Micro-Mobility (Efficient Last Mile)
E-bikes, scooters, monowheels charge from neighborhood hubs
Minimal energy needs filled by transit regeneration overflow
Complete the zero-emission journey from heavy industry to doorstep
How Energy Flows
Morning: Industrial vehicles descend loaded → generate surplus → charge urban transit + neighborhood stations → power morning commute EVs and micro-mobility
Midday: Transit braking during rush hour → feeds station amenities + street-level chargers → charges parked EVs + micro-mobility fleets
Evening: EVs discharge to grid during peak demand → stabilize grid → earn owners revenue → recharge overnight during off-peak
Continuous: Smart systems balance loads in real-time, routing energy where needed most
The Business Case
Proven Results:
eDumper: 50,000+ liters diesel saved annually, generates net energy
Fortescue: $80M annual cost savings projected
Barcelona: $8.6M investment, 4-5 year payback through energy savings
China V2G: Early adopters earning $200+ in days
Market Opportunity:
350M EVs expected by 2050 = 24 billion kWh annual storage capacity
Every city with transit + topography can implement
Existing infrastructure (subway systems, industrial routes) already has electric backbone
Why Now?
Technology proven at every tier (eDumper since 2019, Barcelona since 1980s, V2G scaling now)
EV adoption accelerating globally
Energy storage costs dropping
Grid modernization creating bidirectional infrastructure
Climate urgency demanding transportation solutions
The Vision
Transform transportation from energy consumer to energy producer. Every vehicle, from 123-ton mining trucks to e-scooters, participates in an intelligent energy network. Heavy vehicles on favorable terrain subsidize light urban transportation. Transit systems power neighborhoods. EVs stabilize the grid. Micro-mobility completes emission-free journeys.
The result: Self-powering transportation that reduces emissions, generates revenue, and turns physics—gravity, mass, momentum—into our advantage.
Next Steps
Phase 1 (2025-2027): Deploy industrial regenerative systems + expand urban transit programs + V2G pilots
Phase 2 (2027-2030): Scale V2G nationally + integrate micro-mobility + unified standards
Phase 3 (2030+): Full ecosystem integration + smart grid management + global adoption
Target Cities: Hilly metros with transit systems (San Francisco, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh, Lisbon, Seattle) + mining regions with elevation-based operations
-30-
All my adult life I’ve had three sayings which inform the way I think:
We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all. - Lew Welch
Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction. - R. Buckminster Fuller
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it. - Diane di Prima
I imagine we can educate ourselves swiftly enough to transition our existing fossil fuel transportation system to a regenerative electric system more swiftly than most would believe and that the whole huge machinery that rolls by will be powered by a much more efficient, maybe even close to net zero energy system.
Another saying I’ve picked up along the way from Walt Kelly’s Pogo: We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.
Happy Merry New
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Wednesday, November 05, 2025
100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything
On October 29, 2025, Mark Z Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, gave a succinct one hour lecture to Elders Climate Action (https://www.eldersclimateaction.org) on 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOXwMb3kPBk
Dr Jacobson has been designing 100% renewable energy systems using wind, water, and solar [WWS] for countries and states most of this century and reality is quickly catching up with his calculations. The speed of change is accelerating as battery costs and new/old energy storage techniques come into use to provide 24/7 power, for all intents and purposes.
Here are my notes:
electrifying everything brings demand for total energy down 54.2%
19.8% through higher efficiency in Building Energy [BE] & Internal Combusion Engines [ICE]
4.1% in electric industry
13.1% heat pumps
10.6% eliminating mining for fuel, processing, transporting fossil fuel and uranium
6.6% efficiency beyond BAU
10% of the energy we produce goes into mining, processing, & transporting fossil fuel and uranium. Bill McKibben wrote in Here Comes the Sun (my notes at https://solarray.blogspot.com/2025/09/notes-on-here-comes-sun.html): "Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean..."
electric and fuel cell vehicles reduce energy requirements by 75%
which is almost a 20% reduction in total demand
Leveled cost of electricity 2023 (IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] 2024)
fossil fuels $100/MWh
utility PV $44/MWh
onshore wind $33/MWh
onshore wind $75/MWh
hydro $57/MWh
Onshore wind is a third of the cost of fossil fuels and utility PV is less than half. They have also been the fastest growing source of new generation and jobs, growing year by year.
14 countries with electric generation 95-100% WWS 2023
12 USAmerican states with consumption 49-100% WWS Q324 -Q225
Transition world to 100% WWS
creates 28 million more jobs than lost
requires only 0.18% of land
avoids about 7 million air pollution deaths per year
slows then reverses global warming
stabilizes the global grids
The economics of renewables are now so overwhelming that the energy transition we need to deal with much of our greenhouse gas pollution problems is happening, accelerating, and, seemingly, inexorable.
We just have to recognize what is happening before our eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOXwMb3kPBk
Dr Jacobson has been designing 100% renewable energy systems using wind, water, and solar [WWS] for countries and states most of this century and reality is quickly catching up with his calculations. The speed of change is accelerating as battery costs and new/old energy storage techniques come into use to provide 24/7 power, for all intents and purposes.
Here are my notes:
electrifying everything brings demand for total energy down 54.2%
19.8% through higher efficiency in Building Energy [BE] & Internal Combusion Engines [ICE]
4.1% in electric industry
13.1% heat pumps
10.6% eliminating mining for fuel, processing, transporting fossil fuel and uranium
6.6% efficiency beyond BAU
10% of the energy we produce goes into mining, processing, & transporting fossil fuel and uranium. Bill McKibben wrote in Here Comes the Sun (my notes at https://solarray.blogspot.com/2025/09/notes-on-here-comes-sun.html): "Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean..."
electric and fuel cell vehicles reduce energy requirements by 75%
which is almost a 20% reduction in total demand
Leveled cost of electricity 2023 (IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] 2024)
fossil fuels $100/MWh
utility PV $44/MWh
onshore wind $33/MWh
onshore wind $75/MWh
hydro $57/MWh
Onshore wind is a third of the cost of fossil fuels and utility PV is less than half. They have also been the fastest growing source of new generation and jobs, growing year by year.
14 countries with electric generation 95-100% WWS 2023
12 USAmerican states with consumption 49-100% WWS Q324 -Q225
Transition world to 100% WWS
creates 28 million more jobs than lost
requires only 0.18% of land
avoids about 7 million air pollution deaths per year
slows then reverses global warming
stabilizes the global grids
The economics of renewables are now so overwhelming that the energy transition we need to deal with much of our greenhouse gas pollution problems is happening, accelerating, and, seemingly, inexorable.
We just have to recognize what is happening before our eyes.
Saturday, September 06, 2025
Notes on Here Comes the Sun
I found an advance copy of Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun in a Little Free Library (ah, Cambridge, where the streets are paved with books) and read it over the next two days. He has the facts and figures which show that, in all likelihood, the renewable transition is past the tipping point and picking up speed.
The book and the September 21, 2025 Sun Day event (http://sunday.earth) are more of Bill's creative responses to accelerate that process.
As such, it is the perfect counter to the fossil foolishness coming out of the Trmp administration and as Bill writes, "If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance."
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben
NY: WW Norton, 2025
ISBN 978-1324106234
(2) Sometime in the early part of the 2020s we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel.
(3) There’s no longer a technical or financial obstacle in the way; we already have the factory capacity, mostly in China, to produce as many solar panels as the climate scientists say we need.
(4) On the other side of the world, in Pakistan, a flood of cheap solar panels from China let homeowners and storekeepers and factory managers build the equivalent of a third of the country electric grid inside a year. Peasant farmers, often just laying the panels on the ground, started pumping their irrigation water with electricity instead of generators powered with fossil fuels; diesel sales dropped 30 percent in the course of a year.
(5) In February 2025 the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North.
… If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance.
(7-8) … on the last day of February 2025 the Federal Energy Information Administration predicted that 93 percent of American electric generation built in Trump’s first year would be carbon-free, mostly from solar. In the first month of 2025, as Trump was taking office, sun and wind combined made up 98 percent of new generating capacity in the States.
(26) The world’s largest EV is a Swiss dump truck used to haul stone and lime to a cement factory. The empty truck climbs a 13 percent grade, is loaded with 65 tons of rock, and then drives back down, braking all the way. Each trip up the hill brings the battery down to 80 percent of capacity, and each trip back back down refills it to 88 percent. It’s about as close to perpetual motion as we’re likely to get.
Editorial Comment: There are also trains which use regenerative braking and batteries for energy: https://solarray.blogspot.com/2022/07/playing-with-electric-trains-as-climate.html
I can imagine a near-net zero transportation system that takes advantage of these ideas.
(28) … there are roughly 150 million dwellings in American alone…
Editorial Comment: Average lifetime of our buildings is 50-60 years, up to 100 for single family homes with a replacement rate below 2% per year.
(29)… just mining, refining, and transporting fossil fuels requires 11 percent of all the energy humans currently use.
(38) In April 2025, for instance, Spain announced it would slowly shut down its fleet of reactors because sun and wind generate “three to four times more power with the same amount of investment.”
(47) Those may sound like small revisions, but research indicates that each tenth of a degree increase will move about a hundred million more people out of a useful climate niche and into “unprecedented heat exposure.” By century’s end, “roughly one-third of people worldwide could be outside the human climate niche” - if you think a few million immigrants and refugees have discombobulated the world’s politics, prepare yourself for numbers a thousand times as large.
(48) Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to be burned, a delivery job the sun accomplishes each morning as it moves across the heavens.
(55) … Tongwei, CGL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi Green Energy Technology, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar - were by 2024 producing more energy than the Seven Sisters of the oil industry.
… China, in 2020, set a goal of producing 1,200 gigawatts of clean power by 2030; in fact it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule.
(60) In the US, 80 percent of new generating capacity in 2024 came from solar panels and batteries, and most of the rest from wind.
(62) Across Europe people are using solar panels for fencing, because they’re now the same price as traditional wooden pickets.
Editorial Comment: A solar light and charger costs about $7 in Nigeria. Access to electricity for all those without (about 800,000) would cost about less than $1 billion at RETAIL prices using off the shelf products. See Basic Electricity for the Bottom Billion https://solarray.blogspot.com/2024/11/basic-electricity-for-bottom-billon.html
This is also a solar civil defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0mjqjgZ64E
(67-68) So far they’ve [Mark Z Jacobson’s Stanford group] produced plans to take 149 countries to 100% wind, water, and solar power by 2035. The latest countries added to his database, in the spring of 2024, were Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, and Eswatini, (the former Swaziland). For each of them, Jacobson has a model that can forecast the weather every 30 seconds, for decades ahead, taking into account the predictions of a warming climate. If, on some June day in 2050, it's going to be 80 degrees in the mountains of Madagascar, and you want it to be 70 degrees inside a home, he can calculate the insulation value of the wall of an average residential building there and show how much energy it will take to cool things down. Then he can show several combinations of wind, water, and solar that will provide it. Very occasionally, you'll find a place with so little land that it can't produce the energy it needs on its own soil. (He limits the acreage to be used for solar and wind production to about 2% of the nation's territory.) "Singapore, Gibraltar, places like that," he says. “And then we go offshore.” And, in interest of grid stability, he tries to couple wind and solar in relatively equal amounts. “That's because in a heat wave, you have high pressure, and lots and lots of sun, but the wind tends to die," he says. "And then the low pressure comes in, and with it storms, which cuts the solar energy, but the pressure gradient means strong winds." Hydro is a reliable source – essentially the biggest battery on the grid, because its power can be so easily stored for dispatch when needed – but when drought causes its availability to drop, that almost certainly means that there's been a lot of sun. "Everywhere in the world, we can find ways to match demand for energy by supply and storage," he says.
(70) As one analyst explained, batteries follow sun and wind as - well, as night follows day. “It’s a sequential reality of development right now,” he said. “We expect in every market that deploys a lot of wind and solar, storage comes right behind it. You need shock absorbers, and storage is a shock absorber.”
(71) Texas is further from perfect than Californa; among other things, per capita energy consumption in Texas is more than twice as high.
(71-72) Over the course of 2024, he [Jacobson] reported on New Year’s Day, _the state [CA] had used 25 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it had the year before._ That’s the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in 40 years of writing about our predicament. That’s a number big enough to actually matter.
(73) “We already have 95 percent of what we need,” Jacobson told me. “Really, we can do everything except long-range aircraft right now,” and that’s barely more than 1 percent of emissions.
(74) The Chinese already have the factory capacity to build 1.1 terawatts of solar panels every year, which is actually slightly more than we need to hit the curve climate scientists are demanding, though in December 2024 the Chinese companies that own those factories announced an OPEC-like to rein in production in order to keep prices from plummeting further.
(75) Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process. In the US alone, as The Economist pointed out, we have a terawatt of new solar capactiy just waiting to be connected to the grid if regulators can get out of the way.
(76) Before our decade is out, we have to break the back of the fossil fuel system. We have to land the sun on the earth.
(80) Yes, the economy will have grown larger by century’s end, but a January 2025 report with the ominous title “Planetary Solvency,” from the London-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that by 2070 the world could face a 50 percent loss in its GDP from climate shocks. On the current path, it said, the earth’s systems could become so degraded that “humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services relied on” to support our civilization. “You can’t have an economy without a society,” the report’s lead author expalined to The Guardian.
(82) Forget the price of eggs for a minute - insurance premiums are going up to 40 percent faster than inflation.
(83) The latest global estimate is that by 2050 climate change could wipe out almost 10 percent of the value of the planet’s housing stock, or $25 trillion.
(94) Mark Jacobson’s calculations, from 145 countries, predict 55 million new jobs in sun and wind, far outdistancing the 27 million lost in coal and oil and gas.
(86) In 2014 The Economist held that “solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions”; but a decade later, in 2024, The Economist put out a special issue devoted to solar energy that said, “An energy sources that gets cheaper the more you use it marks a turning point in industrial history.”
… That dive continues; indeed, the enraptured editors of The Economist now call it “the steepest drop in the price of one of the basic factors of production that the world has ever seen.” It’s a drop, they continued, that essentially faces no limit.
(87) [Doyne] Farmer’s team at Oxford released a report showing that the rapid transition to renewable energy would, net, save the world 26 trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. Because you don’t have to pay for fuel.
(92) But, in return, [Kingsmill] Bond [of Ember] said, we get an almost incomprehensible economic gift: “We save about two trillion dollars a year on fossil fuel rents. Forever.” Fossil fuel rent is what economists call the money that goes from consumers to those who control the hydrocarbon supply.
Editorial Comment: No mention of ancillary health benefits from reducing fossil fuel combustion nor efficiency gains from electrification and expanded usage of heat pumps. (93) But now, “a dollar, yuan, or euro spent on fossil fuels delivers substantially less useful energy to the end user than the same amount spent on renewable energy."
(104) As a Pakistani solar entrepreneur told American journalist David Roberts in February 2025, “A 3-kilowatt inverter with, you know, maybe four or five panels” is now routinely included in a bride’s dowry.
(110) As Tom Athanasiou, the director of the activist think tank EcoEquity and perhaps the earth’s most diligent environmental accountant, recently estimated, the US would have to cut its emissions 175 percent to make up for the climate damage it’s already caused - since that’s impossible, the only way to make up the shortfall is with money.
(111) Mark Jacobson, using data from island countries in the Caribbean, estimated that the average consumer would see their energy cost fall to a fifth of what they pay currently if they could rely on their wind and sun, not on a tanker pulling up in the harbor.
(113) Depending on how you calculate it, 10 solar panels per person is enough to give everyone American levels of energy. The Global South has 60 percent of the world’s population but 70 percent of the world’s renewable potential - remember, the solar power works better nearer the equator.
Editorial Comment: 2/3rds of USAmerican energy does no useful work, is lost mostly is fossil fuel combustion as waste heat, friction, in distribution and transmission...
(115) China, as of summer 2024, was building nearly two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects, but it was also figuring out how to sell that tech around the world. Not in the US, where tariffs keep Chinese panels, not to mention Chinese EVS, safely at bay, but in most of the rest of the planet.
… Meanwhile, strategic investments - China spent $329 on the clean energy technology supply chain between 2019 and 2023, according to Bloomberg, while the US and Europe spent $29 billion - have had strategic results.
(122) In other words, we’re not going to run out of lithium, or graphite, or any of the other minerals that are useful for this transition; a 2023 paper in the journal Joule looked at 75 different scenarios for a green energy transition and ran the numbers for 15 different minerals. For most, demand through 2050 amounts to less than 15 percent of global reserves. The earth, the eight-person team concluded, “should suffice to meet anticipated demands.” We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it.
(123) Here’s how Bloomberg did the math in 2023: “Annual demand for transition metals will grow fivefold by mid-century,” they calculated. Yet that doesn’t mean we need to extract more stuff. In fact we need less. While EVs and clean energy infrastructure will mainly consume electricity and require lots of metal, the total amount of materials the world mines will fall.”
How much? According to a large-scale report from the Energy Transitions Commission, “All the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone."
(128) A 2024 report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we’d have done _all the mining we’d ever need to do_ for battery minerals; we’d just take them out of service and recycle them, over and over again.
(133) Remember, nine million people a year die - one death in five - from breathing the particulates spewed out by fossil fuel combustion.
(137) The leading cause of whale deaths, it’s worth noting, is being hit by ships, and 40 percent of all maritime cargo on this planet is coal, oil, and gas; one container ship full of EVs will avoid the need for 84 tankers full of oil.
(139-140) One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area - this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape.
(140) His [Jacobson’s] numbers, across 145 countries: “the total new land area for footprint required …. is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land - both pasture and cropland - to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.
(141) About 40 percent of America’s crop is turned to ethanol - in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent.
… Or to do the math one more way, you could supply _all the energy_ the US currently uses by covering 30 million acres with solar panels. How much land do we currently devote to growing corn ethanol? About 30 million acres.
(146-147) A recent survey found 72 percent of German farmers considering the deployment of agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant TotalEnergies recently set up a Center for Expertise in the art of growing food next to PV panels - and no wonder since a 2024 study found that the presence of solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops some shade and some extra humidity are a blessing, especaily as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.
… As an Englishman putting an 100-acre array on his Cambridgeshire farm explained to reporters, “It’s not ‘produce ten units of energy’ or ‘produce ten units of food.’ It could be six units of both. And then, all of a sudden, your two halves are greater than the whole.” Indeed: Australian trials found that wool from merino sheep improved in both quality and quanitity on farms with solar panels - as the Independent newspaper explained, the panels provided “shelter for the sheep and the grass.”
Editorial Comment: Photosynthesis has a light saturation point after which more light will not produce more growth. That means most crops can be shaded up to about a third without significant loss of growth. See https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/09/agrophotovoltaics-agriphotovoltaics.html for more.
(148) Even when you're not growing food or grazing animals, though, there's increasing evidence that solar arrays can help the land where they're installed. In Phoenix, surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air – that's because the crust of the desert soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust" seems to be naturally regrowing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as "beach umbrellas." Indeed they're now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; "crustivoltaics," they're calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the north for decades, they are finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial by diversity than the surrounding desert. Indeed the arrays themselves were acting as windbreaks, keeping the dust out of the air.
Editorial Comment: 2 GW agrivoltaic project in China
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/19/massive-2-gw-agrivoltaic-project-aims-to-restore-desert-in-china/
Editorial Comment: I learned a new word: ecovoltaic - rebuilding soil health while restoring natural habitats and native plant species
(158) Carter’s proposed 1980 budget called for a billion-dollar Solar Bank to fund research and offer loans to homeowners who wanted to put solar panels on their roofs. The point of his plan, he said publicly, was that by the year 2000 a fifth of the country’s electricity should come from solar power. That was clearly the timeline he had in mind in 1979 when he climbed atop the White House to inaugurate its first solar panels. “A generation from now,” he said, these will either be “a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest adventures every undertaken by the American people."
(163) And by the way, every place that I know of solar developers have to put down a bond to pay for that eventual removal [of solar panels]. Editorial Comment: SEIA Solar Circular Economy http://www.seia.org/circulareconomy
(164) A unique organizing project called Greenlight America has spent the last few years teaching residents how to stand up at public meetings and tell the truth.
(169) A third of homes in Australia have solar panels on top, compared with about 7 percent in America.
… The difference is that it costs three times as much to put solar on the roof in America as it does in Europe or Australia, and that’s mostly down to what the industry calls soft costs, which is to say everything that isn’t a panel or a wire.
(171-172) A global poll in 2023 found 68 percent of us favoring solar energy, “five times more than public support for fossil fuels.” Even in the US, 2022 surveys found almost 70 percent of adults backing more sun and wind over more fossil fuel - that was down from 80 percent two years earlier, reflecting the endless Republican propaganda campaign.
Editorial Comment: Since the first Energy Crisis in 1972, public support of renewables has generally been around 70% except during the second Reagan term when it dropped into the 60s
(181-182) My dear colleague Svitlana Romanko, who used to work for the Catholic climate movement, spent the war years creating a remarkable nonprofit called Razom We Stand; it has a plan for rebuilding Ukraine with clean energy after the war, and indeed in the fall of 2024 it brought a dozen Ukrainian mayors to Washington and Wall Street in search of investors. Their goal, says Romanko, is that Ukraine becomes “the first post-war country in the world to have renewable energy as the basis of its reconstruction."
(198) It [the sun] provides us each year with about 720 times more energy than humans currently use.
The book and the September 21, 2025 Sun Day event (http://sunday.earth) are more of Bill's creative responses to accelerate that process.
As such, it is the perfect counter to the fossil foolishness coming out of the Trmp administration and as Bill writes, "If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance."
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben
NY: WW Norton, 2025
ISBN 978-1324106234
(2) Sometime in the early part of the 2020s we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel.
(3) There’s no longer a technical or financial obstacle in the way; we already have the factory capacity, mostly in China, to produce as many solar panels as the climate scientists say we need.
(4) On the other side of the world, in Pakistan, a flood of cheap solar panels from China let homeowners and storekeepers and factory managers build the equivalent of a third of the country electric grid inside a year. Peasant farmers, often just laying the panels on the ground, started pumping their irrigation water with electricity instead of generators powered with fossil fuels; diesel sales dropped 30 percent in the course of a year.
(5) In February 2025 the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North.
… If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance.
(7-8) … on the last day of February 2025 the Federal Energy Information Administration predicted that 93 percent of American electric generation built in Trump’s first year would be carbon-free, mostly from solar. In the first month of 2025, as Trump was taking office, sun and wind combined made up 98 percent of new generating capacity in the States.
(26) The world’s largest EV is a Swiss dump truck used to haul stone and lime to a cement factory. The empty truck climbs a 13 percent grade, is loaded with 65 tons of rock, and then drives back down, braking all the way. Each trip up the hill brings the battery down to 80 percent of capacity, and each trip back back down refills it to 88 percent. It’s about as close to perpetual motion as we’re likely to get.
Editorial Comment: There are also trains which use regenerative braking and batteries for energy: https://solarray.blogspot.com/2022/07/playing-with-electric-trains-as-climate.html
I can imagine a near-net zero transportation system that takes advantage of these ideas.
(28) … there are roughly 150 million dwellings in American alone…
Editorial Comment: Average lifetime of our buildings is 50-60 years, up to 100 for single family homes with a replacement rate below 2% per year.
(29)… just mining, refining, and transporting fossil fuels requires 11 percent of all the energy humans currently use.
(38) In April 2025, for instance, Spain announced it would slowly shut down its fleet of reactors because sun and wind generate “three to four times more power with the same amount of investment.”
(47) Those may sound like small revisions, but research indicates that each tenth of a degree increase will move about a hundred million more people out of a useful climate niche and into “unprecedented heat exposure.” By century’s end, “roughly one-third of people worldwide could be outside the human climate niche” - if you think a few million immigrants and refugees have discombobulated the world’s politics, prepare yourself for numbers a thousand times as large.
(48) Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to be burned, a delivery job the sun accomplishes each morning as it moves across the heavens.
(55) … Tongwei, CGL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi Green Energy Technology, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar - were by 2024 producing more energy than the Seven Sisters of the oil industry.
… China, in 2020, set a goal of producing 1,200 gigawatts of clean power by 2030; in fact it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule.
(60) In the US, 80 percent of new generating capacity in 2024 came from solar panels and batteries, and most of the rest from wind.
(62) Across Europe people are using solar panels for fencing, because they’re now the same price as traditional wooden pickets.
Editorial Comment: A solar light and charger costs about $7 in Nigeria. Access to electricity for all those without (about 800,000) would cost about less than $1 billion at RETAIL prices using off the shelf products. See Basic Electricity for the Bottom Billion https://solarray.blogspot.com/2024/11/basic-electricity-for-bottom-billon.html
This is also a solar civil defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0mjqjgZ64E
(67-68) So far they’ve [Mark Z Jacobson’s Stanford group] produced plans to take 149 countries to 100% wind, water, and solar power by 2035. The latest countries added to his database, in the spring of 2024, were Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, and Eswatini, (the former Swaziland). For each of them, Jacobson has a model that can forecast the weather every 30 seconds, for decades ahead, taking into account the predictions of a warming climate. If, on some June day in 2050, it's going to be 80 degrees in the mountains of Madagascar, and you want it to be 70 degrees inside a home, he can calculate the insulation value of the wall of an average residential building there and show how much energy it will take to cool things down. Then he can show several combinations of wind, water, and solar that will provide it. Very occasionally, you'll find a place with so little land that it can't produce the energy it needs on its own soil. (He limits the acreage to be used for solar and wind production to about 2% of the nation's territory.) "Singapore, Gibraltar, places like that," he says. “And then we go offshore.” And, in interest of grid stability, he tries to couple wind and solar in relatively equal amounts. “That's because in a heat wave, you have high pressure, and lots and lots of sun, but the wind tends to die," he says. "And then the low pressure comes in, and with it storms, which cuts the solar energy, but the pressure gradient means strong winds." Hydro is a reliable source – essentially the biggest battery on the grid, because its power can be so easily stored for dispatch when needed – but when drought causes its availability to drop, that almost certainly means that there's been a lot of sun. "Everywhere in the world, we can find ways to match demand for energy by supply and storage," he says.
(70) As one analyst explained, batteries follow sun and wind as - well, as night follows day. “It’s a sequential reality of development right now,” he said. “We expect in every market that deploys a lot of wind and solar, storage comes right behind it. You need shock absorbers, and storage is a shock absorber.”
(71) Texas is further from perfect than Californa; among other things, per capita energy consumption in Texas is more than twice as high.
(71-72) Over the course of 2024, he [Jacobson] reported on New Year’s Day, _the state [CA] had used 25 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it had the year before._ That’s the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in 40 years of writing about our predicament. That’s a number big enough to actually matter.
(73) “We already have 95 percent of what we need,” Jacobson told me. “Really, we can do everything except long-range aircraft right now,” and that’s barely more than 1 percent of emissions.
(74) The Chinese already have the factory capacity to build 1.1 terawatts of solar panels every year, which is actually slightly more than we need to hit the curve climate scientists are demanding, though in December 2024 the Chinese companies that own those factories announced an OPEC-like to rein in production in order to keep prices from plummeting further.
(75) Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process. In the US alone, as The Economist pointed out, we have a terawatt of new solar capactiy just waiting to be connected to the grid if regulators can get out of the way.
(76) Before our decade is out, we have to break the back of the fossil fuel system. We have to land the sun on the earth.
(80) Yes, the economy will have grown larger by century’s end, but a January 2025 report with the ominous title “Planetary Solvency,” from the London-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that by 2070 the world could face a 50 percent loss in its GDP from climate shocks. On the current path, it said, the earth’s systems could become so degraded that “humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services relied on” to support our civilization. “You can’t have an economy without a society,” the report’s lead author expalined to The Guardian.
(82) Forget the price of eggs for a minute - insurance premiums are going up to 40 percent faster than inflation.
(83) The latest global estimate is that by 2050 climate change could wipe out almost 10 percent of the value of the planet’s housing stock, or $25 trillion.
(94) Mark Jacobson’s calculations, from 145 countries, predict 55 million new jobs in sun and wind, far outdistancing the 27 million lost in coal and oil and gas.
(86) In 2014 The Economist held that “solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions”; but a decade later, in 2024, The Economist put out a special issue devoted to solar energy that said, “An energy sources that gets cheaper the more you use it marks a turning point in industrial history.”
… That dive continues; indeed, the enraptured editors of The Economist now call it “the steepest drop in the price of one of the basic factors of production that the world has ever seen.” It’s a drop, they continued, that essentially faces no limit.
(87) [Doyne] Farmer’s team at Oxford released a report showing that the rapid transition to renewable energy would, net, save the world 26 trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. Because you don’t have to pay for fuel.
(92) But, in return, [Kingsmill] Bond [of Ember] said, we get an almost incomprehensible economic gift: “We save about two trillion dollars a year on fossil fuel rents. Forever.” Fossil fuel rent is what economists call the money that goes from consumers to those who control the hydrocarbon supply.
Editorial Comment: No mention of ancillary health benefits from reducing fossil fuel combustion nor efficiency gains from electrification and expanded usage of heat pumps. (93) But now, “a dollar, yuan, or euro spent on fossil fuels delivers substantially less useful energy to the end user than the same amount spent on renewable energy."
(104) As a Pakistani solar entrepreneur told American journalist David Roberts in February 2025, “A 3-kilowatt inverter with, you know, maybe four or five panels” is now routinely included in a bride’s dowry.
(110) As Tom Athanasiou, the director of the activist think tank EcoEquity and perhaps the earth’s most diligent environmental accountant, recently estimated, the US would have to cut its emissions 175 percent to make up for the climate damage it’s already caused - since that’s impossible, the only way to make up the shortfall is with money.
(111) Mark Jacobson, using data from island countries in the Caribbean, estimated that the average consumer would see their energy cost fall to a fifth of what they pay currently if they could rely on their wind and sun, not on a tanker pulling up in the harbor.
(113) Depending on how you calculate it, 10 solar panels per person is enough to give everyone American levels of energy. The Global South has 60 percent of the world’s population but 70 percent of the world’s renewable potential - remember, the solar power works better nearer the equator.
Editorial Comment: 2/3rds of USAmerican energy does no useful work, is lost mostly is fossil fuel combustion as waste heat, friction, in distribution and transmission...
(115) China, as of summer 2024, was building nearly two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects, but it was also figuring out how to sell that tech around the world. Not in the US, where tariffs keep Chinese panels, not to mention Chinese EVS, safely at bay, but in most of the rest of the planet.
… Meanwhile, strategic investments - China spent $329 on the clean energy technology supply chain between 2019 and 2023, according to Bloomberg, while the US and Europe spent $29 billion - have had strategic results.
(122) In other words, we’re not going to run out of lithium, or graphite, or any of the other minerals that are useful for this transition; a 2023 paper in the journal Joule looked at 75 different scenarios for a green energy transition and ran the numbers for 15 different minerals. For most, demand through 2050 amounts to less than 15 percent of global reserves. The earth, the eight-person team concluded, “should suffice to meet anticipated demands.” We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it.
(123) Here’s how Bloomberg did the math in 2023: “Annual demand for transition metals will grow fivefold by mid-century,” they calculated. Yet that doesn’t mean we need to extract more stuff. In fact we need less. While EVs and clean energy infrastructure will mainly consume electricity and require lots of metal, the total amount of materials the world mines will fall.”
How much? According to a large-scale report from the Energy Transitions Commission, “All the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone."
(128) A 2024 report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we’d have done _all the mining we’d ever need to do_ for battery minerals; we’d just take them out of service and recycle them, over and over again.
(133) Remember, nine million people a year die - one death in five - from breathing the particulates spewed out by fossil fuel combustion.
(137) The leading cause of whale deaths, it’s worth noting, is being hit by ships, and 40 percent of all maritime cargo on this planet is coal, oil, and gas; one container ship full of EVs will avoid the need for 84 tankers full of oil.
(139-140) One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area - this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape.
(140) His [Jacobson’s] numbers, across 145 countries: “the total new land area for footprint required …. is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land - both pasture and cropland - to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.
(141) About 40 percent of America’s crop is turned to ethanol - in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent.
… Or to do the math one more way, you could supply _all the energy_ the US currently uses by covering 30 million acres with solar panels. How much land do we currently devote to growing corn ethanol? About 30 million acres.
(146-147) A recent survey found 72 percent of German farmers considering the deployment of agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant TotalEnergies recently set up a Center for Expertise in the art of growing food next to PV panels - and no wonder since a 2024 study found that the presence of solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops some shade and some extra humidity are a blessing, especaily as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.
… As an Englishman putting an 100-acre array on his Cambridgeshire farm explained to reporters, “It’s not ‘produce ten units of energy’ or ‘produce ten units of food.’ It could be six units of both. And then, all of a sudden, your two halves are greater than the whole.” Indeed: Australian trials found that wool from merino sheep improved in both quality and quanitity on farms with solar panels - as the Independent newspaper explained, the panels provided “shelter for the sheep and the grass.”
Editorial Comment: Photosynthesis has a light saturation point after which more light will not produce more growth. That means most crops can be shaded up to about a third without significant loss of growth. See https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/09/agrophotovoltaics-agriphotovoltaics.html for more.
(148) Even when you're not growing food or grazing animals, though, there's increasing evidence that solar arrays can help the land where they're installed. In Phoenix, surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air – that's because the crust of the desert soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust" seems to be naturally regrowing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as "beach umbrellas." Indeed they're now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; "crustivoltaics," they're calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the north for decades, they are finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial by diversity than the surrounding desert. Indeed the arrays themselves were acting as windbreaks, keeping the dust out of the air.
Editorial Comment: 2 GW agrivoltaic project in China
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/19/massive-2-gw-agrivoltaic-project-aims-to-restore-desert-in-china/
Editorial Comment: I learned a new word: ecovoltaic - rebuilding soil health while restoring natural habitats and native plant species
(158) Carter’s proposed 1980 budget called for a billion-dollar Solar Bank to fund research and offer loans to homeowners who wanted to put solar panels on their roofs. The point of his plan, he said publicly, was that by the year 2000 a fifth of the country’s electricity should come from solar power. That was clearly the timeline he had in mind in 1979 when he climbed atop the White House to inaugurate its first solar panels. “A generation from now,” he said, these will either be “a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest adventures every undertaken by the American people."
(163) And by the way, every place that I know of solar developers have to put down a bond to pay for that eventual removal [of solar panels]. Editorial Comment: SEIA Solar Circular Economy http://www.seia.org/circulareconomy
(164) A unique organizing project called Greenlight America has spent the last few years teaching residents how to stand up at public meetings and tell the truth.
(169) A third of homes in Australia have solar panels on top, compared with about 7 percent in America.
… The difference is that it costs three times as much to put solar on the roof in America as it does in Europe or Australia, and that’s mostly down to what the industry calls soft costs, which is to say everything that isn’t a panel or a wire.
(171-172) A global poll in 2023 found 68 percent of us favoring solar energy, “five times more than public support for fossil fuels.” Even in the US, 2022 surveys found almost 70 percent of adults backing more sun and wind over more fossil fuel - that was down from 80 percent two years earlier, reflecting the endless Republican propaganda campaign.
Editorial Comment: Since the first Energy Crisis in 1972, public support of renewables has generally been around 70% except during the second Reagan term when it dropped into the 60s
(181-182) My dear colleague Svitlana Romanko, who used to work for the Catholic climate movement, spent the war years creating a remarkable nonprofit called Razom We Stand; it has a plan for rebuilding Ukraine with clean energy after the war, and indeed in the fall of 2024 it brought a dozen Ukrainian mayors to Washington and Wall Street in search of investors. Their goal, says Romanko, is that Ukraine becomes “the first post-war country in the world to have renewable energy as the basis of its reconstruction."
(198) It [the sun] provides us each year with about 720 times more energy than humans currently use.
Thursday, July 03, 2025
Renewables Realities, at Least for Now
In USAmerica in 2023,
there are about 45,476 employees working in the coal mining industry
the solar industry employed 279,447
a 5.9% increase, or 15,564 new jobs, compared to 2022.
Solar has shown consistent job growth for years now.
About 90% of new installed electric capacity in 2024 was renewables
Coal was less than 1%
Since many old coal power plants were retired, coal-fired capacity actually declined in 2024 and coal had its lowest growth rate in 20 years globally.
Average cost of solar: $29/MWh to $92/MWh
Onshore wind projects: $27/MWh to $73/MWh
In 2024, the average cost of new coal-fired power generation rose to $46 per MWh, with prices increasing
there are about 45,476 employees working in the coal mining industry
the solar industry employed 279,447
a 5.9% increase, or 15,564 new jobs, compared to 2022.
Solar has shown consistent job growth for years now.
About 90% of new installed electric capacity in 2024 was renewables
Coal was less than 1%
Since many old coal power plants were retired, coal-fired capacity actually declined in 2024 and coal had its lowest growth rate in 20 years globally.
Average cost of solar: $29/MWh to $92/MWh
Onshore wind projects: $27/MWh to $73/MWh
In 2024, the average cost of new coal-fired power generation rose to $46 per MWh, with prices increasing
Thursday, June 05, 2025
Remembering Nancy Jack Todd
Nancy Jack Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute, which is still one of the best examples of a restorative way forward, has died.
I will miss my dear friend.
In the late 1960s, Nancy and her husband, John Todd, and their friend Bill McClarney began experimenting with ecological design, renewable energy, and organic agriculture. Over the years, they established a model farm and experiment station in Hatchville, MA on Cape Cod and began learning how to live not only lightly but with the Earth. John and Bill, both trained scientists, developed aquacultural techniques that could clean polluted water and enhance agricultural and aquacultural production. Nancy wrote and edited the annual journals and newsletters of New Alchemy and, later, produced Annals of the Earth which ranged widely from philosophy to practice over the years.
The farm itself attracted many interesting individuals who have branched out into all aspects of the sustainability world. McClarney went on to found a sister organization that has been doing sustainble development work in Costa Rica for decades (ANAI: 40 Years of Ecological Development in Costa Rica https://solarray.blogspot.com/2021/12/anai-40-years-of-ecological-development.html) while the original experimental farm on the Cape continued into the 1990s and now as a cohousing development.
Beside her magazine and journal work, Nancy wrote A Safe and Sustainable World (my notes are at Gaian Design of Ecological Alchemy https://solarray.blogspot.com/2005/05/gaian-design-of-ecological-alchemy.html), and co-authored with John Tomorrow Is Our Permanent Address, and Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming; Ecology as the Basis for Design, which I used extensively for a presentation I made for my local library this past January. The New Alchemy vision of the possible ecological present and flourishing future is still the vision I follow and believe to be eminently practical if only enough people understood how to dance with ecological systems, as the New Alchemists did and do, instead of force them into Procrustean boxes. As a trained dancer, I believe Nancy was instrumental in making that link between science, system, effectiveness, and beauty that, for me, is a hallmark of their work.
With Nancy’s death, John has rededicated himself to their work and his vision of healing the Earth through geotherapy. His most recent book is Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2019 ISBN 9781623172985) (my notes at https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/03/healing-earth-through-waters.html). On his Substack (https://oceanarks.substack.com/), he is reprising the book for those who wish to listen.
You can learn more about Nancy’s life at https://oceanarks.substack.com/p/nancy-jack-todd
Her work at New Alchemy is archived at https://newalchemists.net/
The last time I saw Nancy was before COVID and, coming away from our lunch together, I found a melody which became a tune, imagining her as a little girl dancing to the music in her mind for her own amusement and the pure joy of being alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP1_PkREau4
I like to think she might be dancing still.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Trmp and Energy Reality
Trmpists are destroying as much objective reality - accurate fundamental measures on essential conditions - as possible. It makes it easier for them to bullshit and lie.
They are doing it all across the board starting from the failure to update the the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in January 2025(https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/24/g-s1-44613/cdc-nih-hhs-health-data-mmwr)
and moving across all the other government departments and agencies they can reach.
At the US Energy Information Agency, which keeps track of energy accounting and projections, 100 out of 450 staffers have left since Trmp took office
(https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-employees-leaving-us-eia-putting-crucial-energy-data-risk-sources-say-2025-04-16/). Around the same time, March 2025, renewables [hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal...] generated more than half of USAmerica's electricity or as Reuters says Fossil Fuels Generate Less Than Half US Electricity First Month Ever, at least according to one energy think tank (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fossil-fuels-generate-less-than-half-us-electricity-first-month-ever-says-energy-2025-04-04/).
Trmp cannot change this reality of renewable energy growth on the ground. Yet. There’s too much installed capacity, more on the way, and the economics of renewables and battery technology are making them the lowest cost alternatives from household to grid scale almost everywhere. Trmp’s “forward into the past” fossil foolishness makes less and less economic sense every day.
The rest of the world knows this too. That will not change either. Most if not all nations are going to continue to increase their deployment of renewables, in the EU especially, because of the Russian carbon war in Ukraine. Energy efficiency, the rapid adoption of heat pumps [https://www.carel.com/blog/-/blogs/incentives-for-heat-pumps-in-europe-are-they-sufficient-], and increasing electrification of end use will also reduce the necessity for combustion fuels and tend to favor renewables.
While Trmp is stuck in a “Drill, baby, drill” fantasy of a misremembered 1950s, the Chinese are working on a 2 GW agrivoltaic [solar & agriculture] project which is also "ecovoltaic," because it rebuilds soil health while restoring natural habitats with native plant species below and around the solar installation (https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/19/massive-2-gw-agrivoltaic-project-aims-to-restore-desert-in-china/).
We’ll see how this project works out over time but it combines some of the concepts which I believe are core to dealing with the climate, the loss of biodiversity and natural systems: a swift transition to renewable energy which avoids combustion and the pollution and inefficiency it produces and geotherapy, using natural systems to repair the damage our species has done.
But it’s getting late and the longer we wait to act, the worse the damage will be.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
The Earth as a Being with Its Own Life
The earth was plainly a garden, a park, a being having its own life. There were minor lumps and blisters here and there about the surface, outcroppings of artificial rock and garbage that men are pleased to call cities, nations, empires. But even these weren’t really alien to or different from the rest of what there was, what appeared to the eye. The men and tin cans were a phase of a larger expression, a bigger composition that was working itself out regardless of the notions or wishes or theories of the men who thought of themselves as being in complete control of the entire show. Here it all was in the sun, or, as Ken was fond of thinking, temporarily bright, actually it all existed in endless darkness and silence, a being that was acting out its own curious desires.
Source: You Didn't Even Try by Philip Whalen
SF, CA: Coyote Books, 1967
Philip Whalen was a San Francisco Beat generation poet who later became a Buddhist monk. He has an original USAmerican voice. You Didn't Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, his two novels, are too little known but well worth reading as are Whalen's poems. He had his hand on the throttle and his foot upon the treadle of the clutch.
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