Rob DeLine's blog

Ever since the first conference to discuss what solar could do for meeting electricity supply held in 1973, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the solar industry has talked about the holy grail of "grid parity".More

That refrain from Paul Simon’s song by the same title inserted itself into my brain recently as I read that Samsung had signed a $6.6 billion solar and wind power deal with Ontario, Canada.

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California will miss its 20% RPS target in 2010, and the very issues that caused the state to miss its 2010 goal will persist as we slog toward a 33% RPS goal by 2020. So say some folks that ought to know.

Last night, Climate One and the Commonweatlh Club of California hosted a roundtable with four highly successful professionals, each dedicated to achieving California’s aggressive RPS goals while also establishing a robust clean tech industry that creates and keeps jobs in the state of California. On stage was (L to R) a pro-renewable chairman of the California Public Utility Commission, Mike Peevey, an executive from a progressive utility, Nancy McFadden of PG&E, a CEO from the #1 solar capital equipment company, Mike Splinter of Applied Materials, a practical environmentalist, Bob Epstein of Environmental Entrepreneurs, and, no, that’s not an oxymoron, as well as moderator, Greg Dalton founder of Climate One.More

"I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest." That maxim is attributed to Alan Cox, a Welshman of Linux Kernel and wild hair fame.

I know the end of the year is approaching when I see the annual predictions hitting the newsstands. Most of the prediction game is weak sauce - not very insightful with the very good chance of being spectacularly wrong. "DOW 36,000" anyone? So imagine my surprise when asked to blog my utility scale solar predictions for 2010.More

In conversations about utility scale renewable energy, I'm consistently running into the same three misperceptions.

#1: Renewable energy requires new transmission. When utilities and policy makers think large scale renewable energy, they think first about wind and concentrating solar thermal. For utility scale generation, both technologies have had a head start versus solar PV (and, therefore, are more top-of-mind). But More