Saturday, September 17, 2011

Solar is the “Fastest Growing Industry in America”

Stephen Lacey: The U.S. solar industry grew 102% last year and is on track to grow another 100% this year. What other industry doubled its growth during one of the worst economic periods in our history?....

...A recent report found that America actually had a $1.9 billion trade surplus of solar products to the rest of the world in 2010. And that same report, put together by GTM Research, found that
73% of the economic value of a solar installation stays in the U.S....


2 comments:

jeg3 said...

Easy to double when at a very small number, even for years.

From the report intro:
"Despite the significant year-on-year growth, however, the share of global and U.S. electricity supply met with PV remains small."
http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/reports/lbnl-5047e.pdf
And that is just for current electric use, what about using electric for transportation and heating/cooling (geothermal/solar thermal can work here)?
You need batteries:
http://www.physorg.com/search/?search=batteries
And to speed up development of Gen IV nuclear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
(my favorite so far is LFTR)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR

Anonymous said...

Solar is coming online now whereas the new reactor designs will require decades. A lot can happen in the energy sector between now and then.

Diversified energy production is a good thing and should be encouraged.