Today’s Solar Power ‘Revolution’: Powerful Insights from Energy Experts
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
A powerful message on the ‘truly disruptive’ nature of solar energy technologies and the profound changes they portent for energy generation and individual customers … drawn from a range of respected energy experts.
Coming from a range of highly respected energy analysts, the new Yale Climate Connections “This Is Not Cool” video is powerful, the words and “sound bites” striking:
- Solar energy is “a truly disruptive technology.”
- …in the past 10 years, “the precipitous drop in the pricing for solar, especially utility grade solar.”
- “I’m extremely confident” that solar energy will produce a plurality of the energy, and most likely a majority,” used in the U.S. — more than any other single energy source — “in less than 20 years.”
- “That single relationship is going to change — the old model of a generator selling to a customer. The customer’s going to be able to produce their own energy.”
- For electric utilities, a future in which “the less electricity you sell, the more money you make.”
- “After all, people don’t really want to buy electricity; they want the services that electricity provides.”
- “For the first time, we’re going to buy solar for under five cents per kilowatt hour, and that puts solar competitive with wind, competitive with natural gas, competitive with coal, and competitive with nuclear. In fact, it beats them all, and that’s a revolution.”
- “…buildings getting their own power on site…meters running backward, generating more electricity than they’re using.”
- “…a giant distributed utility…instead of a utility monopoly.”
- “The old model’s going to not work anymore.”
- “This is what happened with file sharing of music, with Wikipedia, with YouTube, when millions of small players come together and they create the software and the connections, their power overwhelms…It isn’t even a competition .”
Independent videographer and regular Yale Climate Connections contributor Peter Sinclair’s new monthly video makes a powerful case for what many experts — across the political spectrum — are describing as a “revolution” in solar energy.
Posted by greenman3610 on Friday, 4 July, 2014
