Published

2 years ago

April 18, 2024

Alice Rush

Nearly 200 solar and storage companies have sent a letter to congressional leaders calling for legislation to improve permitting, project siting, transmission and public lands access for solar and solar plus storage projects, says Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

“There are hundreds of billions of investment dollars that depend on our ability to get clean energy projects sited, permitted and efficiently connected to a modern transmission system,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA.

“Lawmakers in both parties understand the importance of getting new energy infrastructure built quickly and efficiently. Now is the time for policy action to strengthen America’s energy industry and support local economies with jobs and private investments.”

The companies have recommended reforms that include modernization of federal energy permitting, creating project siting partnerships across government and building out transmission capacity.

The post Clean Energy Companies Urge Congress to Pass Reform Before Election appeared first on Solar Industry.

Clean Energy Companies Urge Congress to Pass Reform Before Election

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

18 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.