Work On Progress.

Brad Plumer: 

The main point here: Germany doesn’t get an enormous amount of sunlight, relatively speaking. Its annual solar resources are roughly comparable to Alaska’s. Just about every single region in the continental United States has greater solar potential, on average, than Germany.

Yet despite those limitations, Germany has still managed to be the world leader in solar power. At the end of 2012, the country had installed about 30 gigawatts of solar capacity, providing between 3 percent and 10 percent of its electricity. The United States, by contrast, has somewhere around 6.4 gigawatts of solar capacity.

Wonk Blog: 

The United States imported about 40 percent of its oil in 2012. So where are we getting it from?

For refineries on the East Coast, the majority of their imported oil comes from Africa, mainly Nigeria and Angola. By contrast, refineries in the Midwest get virtually all of their imported oil via pipeline from Canada.

Also note that relatively little of America’s imported crude comes from the Middle East, with the bulk of that (about 1.1 million barrels per day) getting shipped in through ports to refineries in the South, with much of the resulting gasoline and diesel getting shipped up to the Midwest.

Now what will happen in the years ahead, as the United States ramps up its domestic oil production, thanks to new drilling in places like North Dakota and Texas? Remember, the Energy Information Administration now expects U.S. oil imports to shrink from 8.3 million barrels per day down to 6 million barrels per day by the start of 2014.

That’s where things get tricky. The United States won’t simply be able to keep buying from the countries we like and shut off imports from countries we don’t like. As a recent investigation from Bloomberg’s Matthew Philips detailed, the changes will be a lot messier than that.

The Economist on “Pricing Sunshine”:

SOLAR energy currently provides only a quarter of a percent of the planet’s electricity supply, but the industry is growing at staggering speed. Underlying this growth is a phenomenon that solar’s supporters call Swanson’s law, in imitation of Moore’s law of transistor cost. Moore’s law suggests that the size of transistors (and also their cost) halves every 18 months or so. Swanson’s law, named after Richard Swanson, the founder of SunPower, a big American solar-cell manufacturer, suggests that the cost of the photovoltaic cells needed to generate solar power falls by 20% with each doubling of global manufacturing capacity. The upshot is that the modules used to make solar-power plants now cost less than a dollar per watt of capacity. This means that in sunny regions such as California, photovoltaic power could already compete without subsidy with the more expensive parts of the traditional power market. Moreover, technological developments that have been proved in the laboratory but have not yet moved into the factory mean Swanson’s law still has many years to run. See full article.

theweekmagazine:

America has an energy addiction. 

(Source: theweek.com)

barackobama:

Obama + clean energy = OTP.