Spencer Hunt of the Columbus Dispatch has a story on the overwhelming demand for state tax credits to homeowners and businesses that install solar panels on their homes and buildings. The two takeaways from the reader would get from this story is that demand to install solar panels is incredibly high and the cost of solar technology is coming down. The real takeaways of the story should be that if you subsidize something enough, people will buy it, and that the cost of generating electricity from solar panels is still prohibitively high to compete in the … Continue Reading

As tragic as the oil spill is, reports are conflating energy sources that are used much differently. Reuters is one of many papers that fails to distinguish petroleum production for the transportation sector and renewable generation for the electricity sector. Reuters’ Richard Cowen reported on May 4th that Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) “told reporters the oil spill should expedite alternative energy legislation, which would encourage the use of cleaner power sources, such as wind and solar.”

What Reuters and others fail to point out is how little petroleum fuels our electricity sector. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, … Continue Reading