Comments
By jauntywundrkind 2025-08-0517:263 reply The Interior Department is almost making it impossible to build renewables.
> The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/interior-department-wind-solar-l...
Yeah, like, there's zero chance a solar plant is going to be as power dense as a natural gas plant.
America has been taken over by traitors trying to destroy this nation.
By toomuchtodo 2025-08-0518:57 Not to worry, there is a whole lot of farm land that is going to free up soon for renewables as farmers go bankrupt from suboptimal agriculture trade policy.
https://www.uaex.uada.edu/media-resources/news/2025/july/07-...
https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/07/farm-bankruptcie...
(soybean exports to China from the US are already down 96% this year; also, while most federal lands are west of the midwest great plains, there should be sufficient non federal land to meet the energy needs of West Coast load centers: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-14-map-federal-land...)
By malfist 2025-08-0518:27 This is the same sort of nonsense they pulled on abortion providers. Just bury people in pointless regulation to keep them from operating, like requiring abortion clinics to have hallways at least 12ft wide
By exe34 2025-08-0517:59 > unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant
That's amazing! America is famously known for lacking land.
By idiotsecant 2025-08-0516:321 reply Solar is fine, but what we need grants for is storage and transmission. There are already areas of the country that we have way too much solar, i.e. southern California. If you have too much generation and not enough storage and transmission you get strange artifacts like the price of power rapidly going from negative to extremely high values. That's not a mark of a healthy, balanced system.
The problem is that getting political support for storage and transmission is much more difficult because everyone knows what a solar panel is. They don't always understand the intricacies of a net-zero electrical system.
By toomuchtodo 2025-08-0516:33 US battery storage tax incentives remain intact. Standalone energy storage projects are excluded from the provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill and will continue to qualify for the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC). We'll return to ramp on the low carbon generation after regime change.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
If it weren't for tariffs on foreign panels, I wonder how cheap solar would be. Solar's gotten cheap very quickly; we might be at the point that it's viable on its own.
By blacksmith_tb 2025-08-0517:08 There are good US producers, I have 9kW of Silfab[1] panels on my roof, made in Washington state.
