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Showing posts from April, 2017

Future of Energy Production

For many years now, the future of energy production has been quite steadily moving toward distributed generation.  Solar power, with increasingly more efficient panels for decreasing cost per watt, is at the forefront of this revolution.  Traditionally, most states have adopted what is called net metering, which simply means that your electric meter runs backwards when a customer generates more power than they are using.  In effect, they are providing power back into the electric grid and powering nearby homes.  This saves the utilities from spending millions to build expensive 'peak load' natural gas power plants that are spun up only when the demand is at it's highest and beyond the capacity of it's more traditional plants such as coal or nuclear, which often corresponds to the sunniest times when cooling demand is at it's peak.  It also saves utilities in that they don't have to spend millions more to upgrade the expensive distribution system to get that peak