Renewable energy plan creates rift
Sen. Dianne Feinstein wants to establish a national monument that would bar energy development on hundreds of thousands of acres of desert between the Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.
The area includes former railroad land the Wild-lands Conservancy donated to the government a decade ago, according to the Associated Press.
President Obama wants a "clean-energy economy" that relies on renewable sources such as solar and wind power instead of coal and oil.
He wants to put these new utilities on federally owned lands like this stretch of the Mojave Desert, one of the sunniest places on Earth.
The administration wants to lead the way by taking advantage of its vast holdings, which account for 20% of all land in the USA, mostly in the West.
That idea is creating a rift among environmentalists, who favor renewable energy but are at odds over where to produce it. Some are willing to compromise with utility companies to build large power plants on remote federal lands to accelerate the transition to clean energy.
Purists are dead set against disturbing pristine landscapes.
I don't get it. You still have to take the 240v that comes out of the microinverter and transform/rectify it to charging voltage for the batteries. So the microinverter just adds another 8% loss to the system, compared to a DC-out MPTT controller like FlexMax 80. Also, much of Andalay's propaganda is bogus -- nobody in their right mind has 600 VDC wiring, shadows on one panel don't affect the output of other panels, etc. Yeah, this system makes sense if all you want to do is pretend to sell electricity back to the grid (note: they might buy it, but it doesn't really go anywhere except into heat at the first transformer), but if you actually want to USE the generated electricity, a conventional system is much more efficient.
I truly love all of the grueling labor that you have done keeping this site available for all of us. I absolutely hope this is here for a really long time.