It’s easy enough to find information about energy—sometimes too much information to get a handle on. So, when thinking about energy in the United States, it’s not a bad idea to simplify things; there’ll be time for details later. For electricity, think of The Big Five. The five biggest power sources provided 95.5% of all the electricity generated in the United States in 2019. They were, from biggest to smallest: […]
You have power. Your access to energy would have cracked human credulity for most of our species’ time on earth. For millennia, we elbowed away the margins of night with the smoking glow of wood, grass or buffalo chips. Just 200 years ago, whale oil and candles lit the homes of a slowly industrializing world—for those who could afford them. For those who couldn’t, wood […]
To the casual observer, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) appear nestled comfortably on the upslope of a growth curve that would turn other industries green – with envy, in this case. From a global grand total of about 20,000 EVs of all makes on the road in 2010, by 2019, the total number of plug-in hybrid (PHEV) […]
Since January, there’s been a lot of discussion, analysis and 151-proof worry about the COVID virus – understandably. Viral impacts have produced (in less than six months) the biggest economic implosion since the 1930s, public health lockdowns spanning the planet, and a global death toll of (at this writing) 434,388, with nearly 116,000 of those […]
So, when we talk about someone employed in “clean energy”, what does that cover? Like “manufacturing”, many things. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines and tracks employment by sector, but it’s not the most user-friendly resource. So, while BLS notes that there were nearly 6,000 wind turbine service techs employed in May of 2020, […]
So where, as COVID redefines economies and politics, is the renewable energy sector? What happens over the next few years – to technologies, investments, deployments and incentives – will determine multiple trajectories. These include the jobs of millions of people, how quickly carbon accumulates in the atmosphere and oceans, and the possibility of stranded assets […]
Carnage in the conventional energy sector has drawn a lot of attention in the past few weeks. But the collapse of recent months was presaged by mediocre performance stretching back literally years. Total returns for the Standard & Poor Energy Sector for 2019, including dividends, were a paltry 6%. And for the entire decade of […]