Michigan’s Energy Evolution: A Special Report

“Michigan is facing the transformation of our electric industry”, said Irene Dimitry, a DTE vice president. And the answer to the problem might be easier than we think. In response to proponents of renewable energy resources, the ONE campaign – a political activist network aimed at reducing extreme poverty internationally – has politicized the issue and has made dubious claims against renewable energy.

But because the state has so distorted the market for solar and other renewable energy sources by mandates imposed by SB350 (and other such laws before it), and because the Obama administration has similarly skewed the market by throwing extremely generous tax credits at developers that build solar plants, we don’t know how promising that future really is. It requires a coming-together of the energy and the IT sectors, to bring to life the exciting vision – where consumers start becoming producers and sellers of green energy. However, it predicted the percentage likely would surpass 30% again this year.

Yieldcos – public companies conceived by renewable energy firms as a way to raise cheaper capital for project development – have attracted billions in new investments.

With the lack of any real goals or accountability measures in the Electrify Africa Act other than raw power generation, one might look to Power Africa for guidance on how Congress’s aid to Africa will play out. Fortunately, recent experience demonstrates that large-scale solar power can be developed in a manner that minimizes damage to the environment. “We enlightened a population that was in the dark about renewable energy in an urban area”. The money for renewable investments is there, Bjerke said, but he also emphasized that the infrastructure is not. The decision to shut down the reactors was prompted by the Fukushima disaster in 2011, when nuclear power still totaled almost 23% of Germany’s electricity. “I don’t have to answer to anybody but my wife”. “Thanks in part to continuing progress on energy efficiency, the nation’s economy has tripled over this period, while energy use has increased by only one-third”.

“We need to adjust our tactics, at least in the short to intermediate term”, Ahmad R. Chatila, SunEdison’s chief executive, said in a conference call with financial analysts on Wednesday, The New York Times reports.

New England’s energy future is not entirely dependent on importing power from elsewhere. This group makes the same argument for the widespread deployment of wind turbines.

To meet this ambitious goal, diverse groups are debating the governor’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which would devote roughly 177,000 acres of farmland and open spaces to clean energy projects and related transmission. Twenty megawatts is huge – 10 times larger than the largest now in the state. End-to-end, the south-facing panels visible from M-14 could cover the University of Michigan’s football field and then a few. Now, just 4 gigawatts of power created in the country come from the Sunday.

Also part of the discussion was Maja Wessels of First Solar – one of the world’s largest solar development companies. Half of all energy use in Africa today involves traditional biomass consumption. Much of the growth has come from solar installations. “From every direction it appeared to be a good business to get in”.

In North Carolina, the boom in solar power has had a secondary effect of helping farm owners as companies lease farmland for solar-panel arrays.

“I believe there will be more solar”, Dimitry said. That means an end to the free solar panels.

“Going forward we hope that the process time frames are adhered to as smaller projects of this nature are sensitive to delays”. While solar won’t immediately power entire countries, she said, rapidly evolving technology – especially in storage – could see this change well before 2040.

“But onshore wind and solar PV are both now much more competitive against the established generation technologies than would have seemed possible only five or 10 years ago”.