Generation Renew

You probably have noticed how Google Traffic maps uses different shades of red to let drivers know how bad traffic is. There is light red, medium red, and what some call bloody hell red. The traffic jam below surely qualifies as bloody hell red! This shade of red is probably what power generators have been seeing over the last decade. The current wait time in the interconnection queue for new power generation or storage is over five years, up from less than two years in 2008.

“Fracking”. The dirty word that spurred consternation, protests, and innumerable documentaries. In an odd twist “fracking” and renewables, specifically geothermal energy, are in the early stages of forming an unlikely pair. The controversial technique may just be the missing piece toward broadly commercializing geothermal energy, which is both reliable and has energy storage potential.

If the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) hadn’t made it abundantly clear, recently proposed limits by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are yet another signal the government really wants you to drive an electric vehicle (EV). Outside of retrofitting Tesla’s with shark teeth to eat chunks out of gas cars it couldn’t be more obvious that by 2030 the roads in the United States are going to look very different.

The “green arms race” appears to be going global. [...]