Aptera Motors has shared another exciting progress update video, giving us our best look yet at its production-intent solar EV out in the real world. The SEV startup recently completed the PI build’s first-ever road trip, traveling over 300 miles using an all-electric battery and free energy from the Sun.

German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.

Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."

Fascinating new EIA data

South Dakota produced 110% of its electricity demand with just Wind-Water-Solar for the full year Oct 1 '23-Sep 30 '24

77.5% Wind 30.1% Water 2.2% Solar

Also produced 16.8% gas, 11.7% coal

So SD produced 138% of demand, exporting 38%

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countries100Pct.pdf

Attacks on two DTEK solar farms last spring is a good example. They destroyed many solar panels and some of the transformers, which step up voltage for long distances or step it down for use in homes. Replacing the transformers and swapping out destroyed panels allowed the farms, which generate 400 megawatts, to be back up in seven days.

Timchenko said an attack on a thermal generating station, which experienced a similar amount of damage, took three to four months to rebuild.

Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University, citing his 2019 analysis he still stands by, serves as an expert witness for the environmental coalition opposing Palisades’ restart. Jacobson has testified that “a fixed amount of money spent on a new nuclear plant means much less power generation, a much longer wait for power, and a much greater emission rate than the same money spent on WWS [wind, water, and sunlight] technologies.”

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, authored “Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy” in 2007. It was the first technical study on the feasibility of generating all U.S. energy from fossil fuel- and nuclear-free sources, including renewables such as wind and solar, combined with efficiency and storage.

Dr. Makhijani concluded then that, by the year 2030 (that is, within a quarter-century), fossil fuels and nuclear power could be phased out of the U.S. economy, and replaced with carbon-free and nuclear-free alternatives, for the same percentage of our gross domestic product currently devoted to those dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy sources. This could be accomplished with no more carbon-free, nucledar-free technological breakthroughs required.