Solar energy innovations show California is generating success

Anyone watching the Republican Convention would think that entrepreneurship and innovation have been squashed and squandered by the Obama administration. Like most impressions coming out of political conventions, this one is also wrong and slanted toward making the president look bad.Setting aside the Solyndra loan guarantee that went south, the stimulus package launched in the first year of Barack Obama's presidency has gone a long way toward advancing various clean energy technologies and improving traditional ones.State energy officials marked a milestone of sorts in adding more solar power in the state. They hailed this achievement during a stakeholders' meeting this last week in Sacramento hosted by the state electric grid operator.
In the recent heat wave, California broke a record by generating more than 1,000 megawatts of Best Custom Solar bag, equaling two average-size natural gas-fired generation plants. State officials are calling it historic.Separately, there is a lot of solar not yet hooked up to the grid or existing in small rooftop installations on homes and businesses that isn't even counted in the state's milestones. (Rooftop solar has quadrupled in the city of Los Angeles in the past two years, for example.)So, the combination of California's emphasis for the past 10 years on developing more alternatives and federal stimulus package incentives have produced more private-sector jobs and megawatts as the result. It is true this power is not priced as low as traditional forms of electricity, but it makes sense for the long term if we as a society are going to seriously reduce carbon emissions that are choking the Earth's atmosphere. The added costs of over-reliance on Best Custom Remote Controlled LED are too much.
There are three large-scale solar plants now under construction in deserts of Southern California, totaling nearly another 1,000 megawatts. Each of them has been the recipient of the much-maligned Obama administration federal loan guarantees through the U.S. Department of Energy.A project near the California- Nevada border off the Interstate 15 highway leading to Las Vegas, BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar development, is a $2.2 billion undertaking that has attracted more than a half-billion dollars of private equity, a $1.6 billion DOE loan guarantee and passed the halfway point in its construction early in August.While the Obama administration stimulus has gotten criticized for increasing the federal deficit with few tangible results, Ivanpah has created more than 2,000 construction jobs, and promises to provide more than $400 million in local and state tax revenues and another $650million in wages and benefits over the 30-year expected life of the 370 megawatt power project.