Green Energy

BRAINERD — The nonprofit group Solar United Neighbors announced the launch of the Fields and Forest Solar Co-op to help northcentral Minnesota residents go solar together.

The co-op is an opportunity for homeowners and small businesses in Cass, Crow Wing, Morrison, Todd and Wadena counties to learn about solar energy and if it is right for them.

“If you’ve ever thought about going solar, now’s your chance,” said John Anderson, Minnesota program director for Solar United Neighbors, in a news release. “As energy costs continue to climb, going solar is a way to get a handle on your electric bill by taking control of where your energy comes from.”

The solar co-op is free to join and open to homeowners and business owners in the five-county region. Together, solar co-op members will learn about solar energy and leverage their numbers to purchase individual solar systems at a competitive price and top quality.

Jigar Shah, the former director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs office, maintains that scaling virtual power plants is the quickest way for state leaders to stabilize electric rates, in a report he co-authored with Deploy Action Executive Director Arnab Pal, published by Deploy Action.

The report, which describes virtual power plants as aggregations of distributed energy resources such as electric vehicles, distributed batteries and smart thermostats, says they can be deployed “within months, not years.” VPPs can shift some electricity consumption to non-peak hours, and a VPP’s batteries can help serve remaining peak demand. As a result, there is less need for costly new generating capacity.

The report cites a virtual power plant “liftoff” study, published by the U.S. Department of Energy, which found that scaling VPPs three to five times by 2030 to reach 80 to 100 GW of enrolled capacity could serve 10% to 20% of peak load and save power systems $10 billion per year. Shah presented those findings at the 2023 RE+ conference.

More solar energy was added to U.S. grids than any other technology, but the amount installed fell by 14 percent, according to a new report.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60506927

Past oil crises forced countries to cut fuel use and pay high prices, but now falling prices of clean tech offer another solution.

For context, China just stopped exporting gasoline and diesel

More than a quarter of US electricity came from renewable sources in 2025, up from 10% the prior year, the EIA found. Solar and wind, both of which lost their federal tax credits last year and have been frequent targets of US President Donald Trump’s broadsides, remained the fastest-growing electricity source in the country. Although a surge in energy demand has driven up power generated from fossil fuels, renewables are accelerating beyond those gains, mostly for economic reasons. The cost of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and grid-scale batteries has fallen low enough that building new renewable capacity remains cheaper than most alternatives, with or without government subsidies. Investors have evidently caught on: Nearly 80% of the power plant capacity planned over the next decade is tied to renewable sources.

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As utility bills climb and contribute to broader cost-of-living challenges across the United States, legislators see the portable tech as an affordability tool. It literally empowers people, said New York Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, a Democrat who in September introduced a bill to pave the way for small-scale solar.

“People are extremely enthusiastic about it,” noted Gallagher, a renter who longs for a plug-in system of her own.

An 800-watt unit that costs $1,099 is capable of powering a fridge or a few small appliances for a sunny fraction of the day. That’s enough power to reduce bills for a New York household by $279 per year on average, Gallagher said. Assuming utility costs continue to rise, those savings could increase to $327 per year by 2035.

Plug-in solar is already booming in Europe. As many as 4 million households in Germany have installed the systems, which people can order through Ikea.

But in the U.S., outside of Utah, the tech is stuck in regulatory limbo. While the systems aren’t illegal, utilities often require users to sign an interconnection agreement before plugging in solar — just as they would for a large rooftop array. And those agreements can require fees and take weeks to months to get.

Utah did away with that interconnection requirement, so long as a nationally recognized testing laboratory certifies the solar device is safe to use. All the other legislation introduced since would do the same.

“The technology has evolved, and the law hasn’t caught up yet,” Phillips said. Putting up her own system might be ​“an act of solar civil disobedience,” she mused.

A new copolymer-based battery developed by researchers at Ulm and Jena universities in Germany stores energy from sunlight for days and can release it when required as green hydrogen. The battery is rechargeable, and the charge and discharge process can be activated by flipping a pH switch, a press release said.

With the focus on switching away from fossil fuels, countries are adopting large-scale solar and wind power plants. However, for applications requiring higher energy density, hydrogen is a more viable alternative. It can be burnt, much like a fossil fuel, but produces only water as a byproduct, offering a carbon-free solution for energy-intensive applications.

Power accrues not only to those who produce energy but to those who build, finance, integrate, and expand energy systems. By that definition, China, not the United States, is most successfully practicing a policy of energy dominance.

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The IEA releases a .csv file of global electricity data every month. It lags a bit due to its comprehensive nature, the latest data runs to November 2025. I maintain a dashboard on my website that updates the data every couple of months and looks at the trends.

The database doesn’t capture every country, Russia and North Korea are missing, but it is pretty comprehensive.

The first four plots show:

– Renewables dominate the growth in electricity consumption since 2016 and in the past 12 months;

– That’s not just because big countries are growing their renewables share, although they are. Perhaps the most important feature of the data is that every country is doing the same thing.