Abstract
From 1990 to 2023, wind and solar energy went from less than 1% of the electricity generation mix in the United States to over 25%. By the time children born today are adults, they will likely know a world not powered by fossil fuels. The work being done to enable this clean energy transition is taking hundreds of thousands of dedicated individuals. Eight of their stories are featured here. They spell out the pathway to working 300 feet high on a wind turbine from intern to management. They recount the daily experience of working as a residential solar installer, climbing on roofs, and trying to manually create a new world. There’s policy, communication, sales, and cranes all required to make this transition work, and their stories and journeys are detailed here.
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Notes
- 1.
How much power is 500 MW? Five hundred megawatts of power is enough to power approximately 500,000 average homes in the United States, propel a large cruise ship or electric high-speed train, power a large data center, and generates around 2.2 billion BTUs (British thermal units) of thermal energy per hour. (Visit the U.S. Energy Information Administration for more info about electricity).
- 2.
Battery capacity is the total amount of energy a battery can store, measured in Ampere-hours (Ah). Kilowatt-hours (kWh) is a measure of energy consumption, equivalent to the energy consumed by a device using one kilowatt of power for one hour. For more, consider The Handbook of Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Design: Principles and Applications by Kang Xu and Zhiyong Fan (Springer, 2019).
- 3.
EV to home allows for electric vehicles to provide power to a home to be used as a source of energy to be used as a power source or a battery charger. EV to load refers to EVs as a mobile power source that can supply electricity to other devices.
- 4.
Renewable Energy Credits allow an entity to purchase or trade renewable energy without having to directly obtain the renewable energy.
- 5.
Popularly maligned on the internet as the “Worst Car in History” See here: https://gprivate.com/6312q
- 6.
Electricity tariffs are the rates or prices that electricity customers pay for the electricity that they consume. These tariffs can vary based on factors such as the amount of electricity used, the time of day or week the electricity is used, and the type of customer (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.). Some tariffs are fixed, meaning the price stays the same regardless of usage, while others are variable, meaning the price can change depending on usage. Tariffs can also be a barrier to the adoption of renewables, particularly for small-scale generators. For example, if tariffs are set too low, it may not be economically viable for small-scale renewable energy generators to sell their electricity to the grid. Tariffs can be designed in a way that favors fossil fuels over renewable energy, by providing subsidies or other financial incentives to fossil fuel generators, or by not accounting for the external costs of fossil fuel generation such as air pollution or carbon emissions.
References
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Kelly, A. (2023). Creating the New Energy Economy: Boots on the Ground in Wind and Solar. In: Climate Champions. Women in Engineering and Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32963-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32963-0_3
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