China's clean tech exports are crushing US filthy fossil fuels

The gap will likely only widen. Works for me.

Recent reports out of think tank Ember on China’s record-breaking $20 billion in August clean technology exports and the underlying data have stimulated discussion online. Electrek focused on the EV exports that are driving much of the growth. Meanwhile, Bloomberg put the numbers together with DOE and EIA data to show how China’s cleantech exports are outpacing US fossil fuels (reposted in Energy Connects). We also published a piece on it a few hours ago: “Renewables Drive A Stake Through The Cold, Dark Heart Of King Coal.”

…Of course, comparing fossil fuel exports to cleantech exports is like comparing apples to oranges. The two categories are significantly different. However, the differences indicate a substantial shift in how the world approaches energy and the global dynamics that drive trade. - CleanTechnica

Community solar is getting it done

Now if Big Energy would quit trying to hinder it.

Community solar allows customers to reap electric bill savings by subscribing to a share of a local solar project, rather than installing their own array. It’s an arrangement that ideally makes the benefits of solar more accessible to people who live in rental or multifamily housing and those who just can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop systems. Forty-two states have community solar projects in place — but the precise nature of who has benefited remained unclear. Until now.

A June study by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that analyzed data from 11 states found that people who adopt community solar are 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings, are 4.4 times more likely to rent, and earn 23 percent less annual income than rooftop solar adopters, who skew wealthy.

“Community solar is delivering on its promise,” said Eric O’Shaughnessy, the lead author of the peer-reviewed study, an affiliate at LBNL, and a renewable energy research analyst at Clean Kilowatts. - Canary Media

Natural gas price spikes are here to stay

The industry's trying to put blame elsewhere is based on some royal BS.

Already, the natural gas industry and its backers have begun casting blame on others for the gas market’s upheaval, suggesting that consumers hold the industry’s proposed villains responsible for the industry’s price issues.

In reality, a wide range of factors — starting with a blast of LNG exports that now consumes roughly 10 percent of the United States’s total gas production — have launched prices higher in the U.S. And shale drillers themselves have proved reluctant to drill more wells even as prices lurch up — a fact that stems far more from drillers’ own wild overspending during the shale rush (and the resulting wave of bankruptcies and cratered stocks) than from anything related to, say, proposed-but-not-implemented climate policies or a small but growing shift to renewable power...

Attempts to pin the blame for natural gas price swings on renewables drew immediate pushback from the International Energy Agency (IEA). “Recent increases in global natural gas prices are the result of multiple factors,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a September 21 statement, “and it is inaccurate and misleading to lay the responsibility at the door of the clean energy transition.”

The reality too is that natural gas has long suffered from wild price swings and volatility that — while tamped down in the recent past by the shale gas glut — just might be re-emerging into a pandemic-pressured world. - DeSmog

Trump finds another way to hurt renewables and foment climate change

I'm primarily looking to draw attention to the retroactive rent part. The whole article, though, is a well-documented summary of just how criminally awful the Trumpers are on all things environmental.

“Don’t waste a crisis.” This somewhat cynical political axiom has been attributed to many different people, but arguably none have exemplified it quite like President Trump and his allies. Taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve ramped up efforts to dismantle environmental rules, giving away natural resources and undercut the tools of government that ordinarily allow the public to have some say in what happens to the land, water and air around them...

The Department of the Interior is making it easier for oil and gas companies to avoid making royalty payments when they drill on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in particular, has moved to effectively give away publicly held oil by helping companies pause their leases and avoid royalty payments. 

Meanwhile, the BLM is charging retroactive rent to wind and solar energy producers, which have been decimated by the recent economic slump. Trump has a long record of antagonism toward renewable energy. - The Wilderness Society