Memo to Fox News: If you are concerned about your credibility going in the dumper, maybe you should review items like this.
Fox News claimed that the future of solar power in the U.S. is “dim” because we have less sunlight than countries like Germany, the current world leader in solar generation. But Fox completely reversed the facts: the U.S. receives far more direct sunlight, but has been outperformed due to Germany’s superior solar policies.
On Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson claimed that the U.S. solar “industry’s future looks dim.” The show brought on Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi, who said that Germany’s solar industry is doing “great” because “they’ve got a lot more sun than we do,” before adding, “In California, it’s a great solution, but here on the East Coast it’s just not going to work.”
The U.S. is lagging behind Germany in solar power generation, but it doesn’t have anything to do with our solar potential. In fact, the Southwest has “among the best photovoltaic resources in the world,” according to a report by GTM Research. And even the East Coast states have greater solar potential than Germany, as illustrated by this map from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
Just for reference, Germany is at approximately the same latitude as Newfoundland.
Thanks for the solar map – Germany is virtually the same as *Alaska*. Yikes.
Neil
I have a similar map of solar potential for Canada vs Germany (http://jpgreenword.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/germany-a-model-for-renewable-energy-policy/) and even we get much more sun than Germany. So, the idea that any of the “lower 48 states” doesn’t have great potential for solar is ridiculous.
What Germany has that most of Canada and the US don’t is intelligent policies that encourage investments into renewables. Most notably is a feed-in tariff that allows everyone to sell renewable energy to the grid at a favourable rate. That way, the payback on investment is much quicker and your solar panels or wind turbine becomes a source of revenue. That is why the majority of investments in renewables in Germany has been from citizens and farmers.
That’s how you get renewables going.
(In my opinion)
I guess many billions in subsidies had been invested in the nuclear industry before even a single kWh had been delivered to the grid. So according to Fox News solar now is doing infinitely better then nuclear 60 year ago.
And while we know that solar has a bright future without the need for subsidies, nuclear is going out with a fizzle while new plants needing increasingly large amounts of subsidies. But I guess that is something we will never hear from Fox News.
The Great Corporate American Propaganda whores mesmerizing the sheeple! You poor dumb-fucks! What else did she lie to you about?
And why does it matter that ‘Nat Gas’ (ooh, trendy sounding techie term) has far less CO2 output – I thought global warming was just something made up by the lefty greenies? Was your slip showing, Shabani? Ooops.
There’s just SO much wrong with this clip, but touting how much cleaner natural gas is than coal just goes to show how hard it is to keep the story straight when your lies begin to overlap.
Where do they find these “experts”?
http://www.solarfeedintariff.net/worldmap.html
It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re so cavalier about geography. Most of their audience has never been out of their own home state – GA, LA, TX, SC, etc. I’m sure that they couldn’t find Germany on a map, and even finding Canada might be a stretch for some of them.
When is our newly awakened “chief climatologist” going to come out of his drone strikes meeting and propose the kinds of tariffs that work so well for Germany?
Yet another Fox “analyst” whose brains are in her chest.
I’m sure that must be some place in the USA where insolation is less than Germany but it’s not in the lower 48.
I wish the inaccuracy were enough. But coupled with the cheery certainty that solar won’t work for America because of …. China (?) , or was it sunlight, you really have to worry about the people instructed, as a point of patriotism, to drink long and deep from this poisoned well.