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San Diego County has farmers who have worked in the region's rural residential and commercial agricultural zones for generations. Many of these residents would like to continue this tradition - not by growing avocados or tomatoes - but by lawfully growing cannabis and hemp on their existing properties.

This may prove difficult given that upcoming actions by the county Board of Supervisors may ban local cultivation altogether or relegate it solely to medical dispensaries. Either of these actions would leave independent farm-to-market businesses literally out in the weeds.

Recently, California enacted two laws that chart a legal path forward for outdoor commercial cannabis farming - with the state slated to begin issuing licenses in January 2018.

Under these laws - the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act, enacted in 2015 and the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, approved by voters in November - farms that receive zoning approval from local jurisdictions can then apply for a state license.

Those without local permits will have to leave their land untilled.

The problem is that navigating this politically charged process is far from clear - and, as of today, no local communities have allowed outdoor cannabis farms to take root.

Meanwhile, other cities and counties across California are scrambling to integrate farming as part of the state's $2 billion-a-year cannabis industry.

It makes sense; farms tend to be discreet, cleanly run operations that have a business-to-business sales model - meaning no sales to the general public. In addition, this low-impact industry stands to generate tens of millions of dollars for local communities in the form of new state and local taxes.

Speaking for many farmers in San Diego County, we would like to see our region move in this direction as well. To be sure, farmers are in business to earn a profit, but we also see benefits for all San Diego County residents.

Today, a strong economic engine is coming online in California - one that will fuel new job growth and bolster existing business services and products that cater to the agricultural sector.

According to New Frontier - a cannabis research firm based in Washington, D.C. - the state's cannabis sales are expected to grow to $6.4 billion by the year 2020. This means California will potentially collect more than $1 billion in annual tax and licensing revenues, much of which is to be distributed to local jurisdictions.

Communities that tap into this engine will reap huge benefits in terms of these tax dollars - for local general funds and additional dollars earmarked for public safety services such as police and fire departments.

However, under the law, jurisdictions that bar cannabis cultivation will receive far less in tax revenue from the state - and they will have no cannabis farms in their jurisdictions to tax at all.

So there is a lot at stake - too much for local farmers to remain silent.

That's why many of us recently formed the Southern California Responsible Growers Council, or SCRGC. We are a member-based association created to advocate for common-sense public and land-use policies in San Diego County and across the region.

Our goals are to protect small farms, reducing black-market activity and ending trespass-grows on public lands. We also intend to work with local public health and safety experts to safeguard communities and the environment.

To accomplish this, we are eager to work with local communities to develop a practical framework that regulates outdoor cannabis farms in a way that's sustainable in the long run.

Sustainably means ensuring cannabis is grown where it makes sense and in a manner that doesn't impact surrounding neighbors. It means running clean and secure farms, employing local experts to address public health and safety concerns.

Currently, some jurisdictions have relegated cannabis farming to industrial zones, in artificially lit warehouses. While this model works for some growers, many more are hoping to capitalize on the region's bountiful sunlight and open agricultural space.

We're not naïve. Obviously, the issue of legalized cannabis is a contentious one.

It doesn't have to be.

There's no reason why communities can't develop procedures and land-use policies that give communities the peace of mind they deserve, while reaping the benefits of this fledgling economic engine. Our goal is to do just that.

We just need freedom to grow.
Wagner is a land-use policy expert who serves as executive director of the Southern California Responsible Growers Council. Anderson serves as president of the SCRGC and is recognized statewide as an industry expert.

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San Diego County has farmers who have worked in the region's rural residential and commercial agricultural zones for generations. Many of these residents would like to continue this tradition - not by growing avocados or tomatoes - but by lawfully growing cannabis and hemp on their existing properties.

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Partner with Kaozear

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Cocaine (photo via Flickr user Valerie Everett)

In her teens and 20s, Jennifer was making up to $3,700 USD a week stripping in Ottawa, Canada. Almost all of it went to cocaine.

"The effort I put into spending money on drugs, it's not even calculable," Jennifer, now 47, told VICE. "It's an extraordinary amount. I would be a millionaire."

These days, she's living on social assistance.

"I don't have two cents to rub together."

According to a 2002 study by the Canadian Center for Substance Abuse, the "societal cost" of substance abuse, in terms of health care and the criminal justice system, is about $30 billion USD.

For an individual, the price of maintaining an addiction can be devastating, with some relying on crime and prostitution to pay for their drugs of choice, and losing their health, homes, freedom, and families along the way.

VICE reached out to several current and former addicts to ask what their addictions have cost them. (All the costs below have been converted to USD.)

Cocaine

Jennifer started stripping illegally at the age of 14 in Calgary before moving back to Ottawa to continue her career. By 16, she was addicted to coke.

"All the other girls were doing it. It got you through the night, you could just do line after line."

Her addiction grew in her early 20s, when she said all of her money-$1,500 to $3,700 per week-went to supporting her habit. Depending on how much money she was making, she'd spend between $450 to $1,200 a day.

"I would probably sleep from 3 or 4 AM until around 1 PM, and the rest of the time I was doing cocaine."

That routine continued until she was about 29.

"At that point, I guess I was too old just to keep stripping, and my drug addiction was too far gone," she said. "I started in prostitution."

Picking johns up off the street, Jennifer said she was pocketing about a grand a night. She started injecting cocaine because the high was "more intense" and continued to snort it as well as smoke crack.

She also began trafficking crack cocaine to pay for drugs, which, along with prostitution and fraud convictions, has landed her seven years in jail. About four years ago, she started shoplifting groceries.

"It was mostly meats and cheeses," she said, adding there is "a lot" of money in black market meat.

"Say a roast is $25, you're getting about $12... You're stealing about 16 a day."

For the last two years, Jennifer has tried to stop doing cocaine, although she told VICE she still has relapses. She also does harm reduction outreach and works with women who've been victims of violence; she recently testified in court against a man she said raped her.

These days, Jennifer is living on social assistance and trying not to commit any crimes, though the temptation is still there.

"I was thinking about it this just morning," she told VICE. "I ran into a friend of mine, and she was saying how much stuff she has and how good she's gotten at shoplifting... and I just turned around and walked away."

Hydromorphone. Photo via Flickr user The.Comedian

Prescription Opioids (Hydromorphone)

At 43, Sean LeBlanc lives in a small apartment in Ottawa with his girlfriend. Though he has a great job and a steady relationship, "it still hurts to think" that he could be living in a house right now, were it not for his crippling opioid addiction, he said.

LeBlanc told VICE he started using hydromorphone (brand name Dilaudid), a fast-acting and potent painkiller, after his pregnant girlfriend overdosed and drowned in a bathtub nine years ago. At the time, he was a mature student at St. Thomas University and a DJ in Fredericton.

A week after she died, "a guy give me this Dilaudid all loaded up in a rig, and it was exactly what I wanted," he said. "It made me feel nothing."

But the effects of Dilaudid wear off after five or six hours. Within a couple of weeks, LeBlanc said he was physically hooked on the drug and dope sickness had kicked in. He needed more to get high-instead of putting one pill "in a spoon," it took five to get the same feeling. At the peak of his addiction, he said he was doing 160 mg a day, which sometimes meant injecting himself up to 40 times.

"If I didn't spend $100 a day, it was a good day," he said.

He said he stopped attending classes, got kicked out of school, and lost his jobs, eventually resorting to stealing from large chain stores.

LeBlanc said aside from weed and a very occasional dose of methadone, he no longer uses harmful drugs. He does outreach work for fellow addicts.

He told VICE a "conservative estimate" of how much he's spent on opioids is $200,000, and that's not including the cocaine, alcohol, and LSD he was also consuming.

"It breaks my heart, even just thinking about it."

Alcohol

Cost: $50/day

Heroin

Cost: $220/gram

Rick Sproule, 58, started drinking when he was 12; by 16, he was a full-blown alcoholic.

During the most severe part of his addiction, he says he drank a bottle of rum (20-30 ounces) a day, plus around 20 beers.

"I used to make my own beer as well, so the party didn't stop," he told VICE. "I went downhill faster that way."

It being the 80s, he was making around $5/hr working as a cook and spending half of it on booze. He said the food industry "really lends itself to alcoholism and drug addiction."

While living in Vancouver, Sproule said he also became addicted to heroin. The cost was about $225/gram, and he began using up to $375 worth of it a day.

"It's very expensive," he told VICE. "It gets to the point where you have to do armed robberies and things just to keep using." (He said he's never done that.)

"I'm kind of a middle class guy. I had a family, I had a career, I had a [Registered Retirement Savings Plan]." That's all gone now.

"I spent $10,000 in four months."

Crack

Steven's first hit of crack, at age 16, was "incredible."

"It was serious right from the start," he told VICE.

As a teen, he said he'd spend about $60 for a gram of powdered cocaine and cook it with his friends. They would steal electronics and jewelry, and panhandle to pay for it.

As he got older, he took on labor jobs to support the habit, spending around $225 a day for three grams of pre-cooked crack.

He started shooting up hydromorphone to bring him down off crack highs and avoid "cocaine psychosis."

"When you smoke a lot of rock, you gotta find a way to chill yourself out, which is by shooting opioids, so you can sleep," he told VICE. Around seven years ago, he was diagnosed with HIV, which he contracted from using dirty needles; he said his brother is in the exact same situation. For a time, he was living on the streets, but he said he now receives a disability check of about $820 a month. He spends a couple hundred of that on crack, but he said he's slowed down his usage because he's "too tired."

"A lot of people blow their disability... check and get an 8-ball."

On crack alone, Steven said he's spent at least $150,000.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

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We Asked Drug Addicts How Much Their Habit Costs Them

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Cocaine (photo via Flickr user Valerie Everett) In her teens and 20s, Jennifer was making up to $3,700 USD a week stripping in Ottawa, Canada. Almost all of it went to cocaine. "The effort I put into spending money on drugs, it's not even calculable," Jennifer, now 47, told VICE.

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Every other day it seems we're bombarded with another news headline lambasting the fact that illegal and contraband drugs like heroin, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, and tobacco are being smuggled into prisons nationwide. From inmates bribing prison workers to bring in drugs to ministers smuggling in contraband items to friends and relatives passing off drugs during visits to drones dropping off illicit packages. Drugs are so prevalent in prison that Death Row inmates in California can obtain them.

With all the hoopla The Daily Beast reached out to some ex-cons to find out how prisoners set up shop, get the drugs in, sell to other prisoners, and convert prison money to real world funds. Although schemes differ from prison to prison, they usually follow the same pattern and principles. Doing life in the penitentiary isn't pretty and with nothing but time on their hands convicts have perfected the art of the ruse. Here are eight steps that every prison drug smuggling venture operates by.
Determine the Market
The first thing I noticed about drugs in prison was price inflation. A gram of heroin in Los Angeles is currently running at about $80 and the price of a gram of heroin in prison is $400. Heroin makes its way within the prison walls in three ways: contact visits, mail scams, and guards smuggling it in. I knew a dealer that was bringing 9 grams of heroin in a week. His girlfriend brought the dope in by stuffing a tampon and taping it under the visitation room seat. Then an inmate assigned to cleaning the visit room would recover the stuffed tampon and take a spilt for helping to smuggle it in.

- RL, a California white boy from LA who did time in federal prison for distributing heroin.
Find a Mule
Once I get a woman interested enough to come visit, I start slipping a piece of candy in her mouth when I kiss her. After a couple of visits this becomes routine. Then one day at visiting I'll concoct a story, I owe a debt. I need you to bring some weed in that my brother has for me. When she asks how I just remind her how I've been slipping the candy into her mouth when we kiss. She nods in understanding and I tell her that my brother is going to wrap up the weed in little balloons and when we kiss she can slip the balloons into my mouth and then I'll swallow the balloons. Once I get her to agree I'll convince her to start bringing in more profitable drugs like heroin.
-Stone, a Black Guerrilla Family member who's done time in the California state system for robbery and assault. Establish a More Sophisticated Operation
Every prison has a weakness; it's just a matter of finding it and exposing it. I knew a Mafia guy that used to bribe the guards at Rikers Island. It would involve a simple payoff on the outside by the Mafia guy's associates and the hack would bring in heroin, weed, Vodka, razors, cigarettes, and even Chinese food, whatever he wanted. One of my friends filled tennis balls up with black tar heroin and threw them over the walls of the prison to me in the exercise yard. Prisoners also smuggle packages in through Food Service in frozen food or other boxed items that come in through the warehouse. I've even seen dudes get stuff in through religious services from Chaplains. But the big thing nowadays is drones. A drone will drop a package on the recreation yard; an inmate wearing a hoodie grabs it and blends into a group of convicts right before a recall for count when everyone is going back to their cells.
- Andrie, a Russian gangster who's been in and out of the New York state system since the 1980s for drug-related crimes. Build a Clientele for Retail Sales
In federal prison, I was making as much as $5k per month. I dealt off and on for years. It's pure profit in there. I used to get a gram of good Mexican tar for $50-60 bucks. I would get 12 to 15 papers out of that and each paper would sell for $50 a pop. I had a lot of customers at every prison I was at. A prison without drugs is a deserted and dry place. I turned every prison I was at into a big party and fun place. Later in my bid tobacco became a big money-generating business too. In non-smoking jails I had tons of customers, everybody smokes, and I could sell one Newport cigarette for $25.

- Bumperhead, a Mexican Mafia associate who served time in federal prison for guns and drugs.
Make Sure you Get Paid
Drug debts get paid by Paypal, Moneygram, Wal-mart or similar schemes. If you're paying cash then you use stamps or commissary. I knew a guy who owed money to a Border Brother for some K2. While waiting for the money to come in, he had to clean the Border Brother's cell every day. He was totally this guy's bitch. If you ask me, some guys got preyed upon due to their stupidity. Imagine every day having to be somebody's gopher. His slave. His bitch. Fuck that. Kick the habit already. Do something to make your time go faster. Don't get owned. The dude got no respect. The Border Brother eventually sold him to one of his homeboys. All for a high? No thanks.
- Q, a hardcore white boy from Nebraska who did time in federal prison for a bank robbery. Turn Prison Money into Free World Money
The currency used to buy pretty much anything in prison is a book of stamps, which equals six dollars. But convicts would also send the money out from their commissary account or get their girl to do a street to street transaction. Money was also passed in the visiting room. Guys would keister the bills. To do this they had to make a plug. A plug, for those who've never heard the jail slang, is normally wrapped in Saran wrap and inserted into a condom and then lubed up, and you guessed it, up the back door until you are in the visiting room where you can remove it and pass it off to your visitor.
- Danny, a dead head who did time in both U.S. and Canadian prisons for LSD. Keep your Business off Front Street
In L.A. County this Asian gangster had the place sowed up with weed. No one knew how they were getting the buds in. Everyone thought they had a deputy in their pocket. They'd constantly get their lockers searched and still the deputies couldn't find the stash. In the county your family can bring you a pair of tennis shoes every month. The Asian gangster's mother was a seamstress who owned a shoe store at the local swap meet. Turns out she'd been taking out the sole of the shoes, filling them up with weed, and then sewing them back up. When officers would inspect the shoes, they'd never see a thing. But one day two deputy sheriffs walked in the visiting room and arrested the gangster's mother. A different officer was working that day, a real yankee doodle, by the book type of C/O. He must have searched and found some tear in the seam, which resulted in taking the sole apart and finding the drugs. The Asian gangster didn't have much to lose, he was facing life, but unfortunately, now his mother would be joining him.

- Goose, Mexican gangbanger who's served numerous bids in California and federal prison for drug conspiracies.
Don't Get High on Your own Supply
I was a junkie before I ever landed on a prison yard, so it was only natural that I'd be indoctrinated into the heroin culture once I was confined within the walls of a federal prison. Drugs are incredibly ubiquitous in prison-marijuana, alcohol, and heroin seem to be the drugs of choice amongst the prisoners-surely because of their escapism properties. But you can't get high on your own supply. Anyone that has ever served a significant amount of time knows that getting out of your head is an indispensable part of keeping your sanity. But if you're selling you have to be careful and have some willpower or you'll use up all the drugs you're supposed to sell getting high with your celly. This could be the downfall of your whole operation.

- Biggie, an Aryan Nations member who served time in federal prison for cocaine conspiracy.

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Prisoners on the Eight Rules of Dealing Drugs Behind Bars

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Every other day it seems we're bombarded with another news headline lambasting the fact that illegal and contraband drugs like heroin, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, and tobacco are being smuggled into prisons nationwide. From inmates bribing prison workers to bring in drugs to ministers smuggling in contraband items to friends and relatives passing off drugs during visits to drones dropping off illicit packages.

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How the war on drugs affects incarceration rates

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How the war on drugs affects incarceration rates

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The war on drugs led to "a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities."

By Lauren Carroll on Sunday, July 10th, 2016 at 6:27 p.m.

To address racial tensions in the United States, the federal government should invest in law enforcement, said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., on NBC's Meet the Press July 10. But it has to be the right kind of investment.

"There is a challenge with America where we have invested, unfortunately, in a war on drugs, which has been profoundly painful to our nation, with a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities," Booker said.

President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs in the early 1970s, and about 10 years later President Ronald Reagan strengthened the effort. We decided to look into Booker's claim that these stricter drug policies led to a 500 percent increase in incarceration.
Rising incarcerated populations
We found that the number of people incarcerated for drug-related offenses has increased dramatically in the past 40 years, as has the overall incarcerated population. But it's hard to prove a causal relationship.

A spokesman said Booker's statistic comes from the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy organization. It says the current incarcerated population is 2.2 million - including federal prisons, state prisons and local jails - which is a 500 percent growth over the past 40 years.

Experts told us that the Sentencing Project's statistics are credible.

The state and federal prison population grew from 218,466 in 1974 to 1,508,636 in 2014, which is a nearly 600 percent increase. For comparison, the overall United States population has increased just 51 percent since 1974.

The state and federal prison population remained fairly stable through the early 1970s, until the war on drugs began. Since then, it has increased sharply every year, particularly when Reagan expanded the policy effort in the 1980s, until about 2010.

So it seems Booker has his numbers right, but how much of this increase is a direct result of the tougher drug laws? The effort resulted in the Drug Enforcement Administration's establishment, as well as policies such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and new asset forfeiture rules.

It's hard to say exactly how much of the increase can be attributed to these policies because it's difficult to isolate the impact to any one cause, experts told us.

That being said, "a lot of people attribute the increase in incarceration to the war on drugs," said Nancy La Vigne, director of the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. "While it's much more complicated than that, I suppose most would agree that it was the single biggest driver."

In 1980, about 41,000 people were incarcerated for drug crimes, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2014, that number was about 488,400 - a 1,000 percent increase.

More people are admitted to prisons for drug crimes each year than either violent or property crimes, found Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup. So drug prosecution is a big part of the mass incarceration story, he said.

Rothwell told PolitiFact he thinks some of the increase would have happened regardless, but Booker is right to focus on the drug war.

Others see it differently. John F. Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, has argued that the impact of the war on drugs is greatly exaggerated, finding that drug crime only accounts for about 20 percent of prison growth since 1980.

"In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders, and a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge, at least not as their primary charge," he wrote last year.
Effect on minorities and poor people
But violent crime and seemingly unrelated factors that contributed to the rapid increase in prison population growth can actually be connected to the war on drugs, said Steven Duke, a professor at the Yale Law School. For example, if policies cause the cost of drugs to go up, users might be more prone to steal in order to afford drugs. And black markets can lead to more violent crime, like if a drug deal goes sour and results in a murder.

It is a well-established fact that minorities are overrepresented in the prison population. About 58 percent of all sentenced inmates in 2013 were black or hispanic, yet the two groups make up just about 30 percent of the total population.

Research also suggests that when black and white people engage in the same illegal activity and have the same criminal history, black people are more likely to be arrested, more likely to face tougher charges and more likely to receive longer sentences than whites.

In a 2014 article, Rothwell found that the war on drugs has significantly impacted black people. He found that white people are more likely than black people to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them. Even so, black people are 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for selling drugs and 2.5 times more for drug possession.

The question of how poor people are represented in the prison population, particularly among those incarcerated for drug-related offenses, is a little more elusive. The best data about prisoners' income before their arrest comes from a 2004 government survey.

The Prison Policy Initiative analyzed the survey and "found that incarcerated people had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to incarceration, which is 41 percent less than non-incarcerated people of similar ages."
Our ruling
This would indicate that the incarcerated population is disproportionately poor, but it does not shed light directly on the question of the war on drugs' impact on poorer populations.

Booker said the 40-year war on drugs led to "a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities."

Booker has his numbers right, looking at incarcerated population growth over the past 40 years. It's hard to conclusively attribute the rapid rise to the war on drugs, but many experts believe that it is a major factor, if not the primary factor.

Minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and some slightly dated research indicates poor people are, as well. Evidence seems to show that black people are more likely to be arrested for drug crime than white people, despite being equally likely to use and less likely to sell drugs.

Even though it's hard to prove a direct causal effect, the evidence seems to back up Booker's claim. Because of that additional context, we rate his claim Mostly True.

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The war on drugs and incarceration rates

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To address racial tensions in the United States, the federal government should invest in law enforcement, said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., on NBC’s Meet the Press July 10. But it has to be the right kind of investment.

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Partner with Amber

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Many people don't understand why or how other people become addicted to drugs. They may mistakenly think that those who use drugs lack moral principles or willpower and that they could stop their drug use simply by choosing to. In reality, drug addiction is a complex disease, and quitting usually takes more than good intentions or a strong will. Drugs change the brain in ways that make quitting hard, even for those who want to. Fortunately, researchers know more than ever about how drugs affect the brain and have found treatments that can help people recover from drug addiction and lead productive lives.

What Is drug addiction?

Addiction is a chronic disease characterized by drug seeking and use that is compulsive, or difficult to control, despite harmful consequences. The initial decision to take drugs is voluntary for most people, but repeated drug use can lead to brain changes that challenge an addicted person's self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. These brain changes can be persistent, which is why drug addiction is considered a "relapsing" disease-people in recovery from drug use disorders are at increased risk for returning to drug use even after years of not taking the drug.

It's common for a person to relapse, but relapse doesn't mean that treatment doesn't work. As with other chronic health conditions, treatment should be ongoing and should be adjusted based on how the patient responds. Treatment plans need to be reviewed often and modified to fit the patient's changing needs.

Video: Why are Drugs So Hard to Quit?

What happens to the brain when a person takes drugs?

Most drugs affect the brain's "reward circuit," causing euphoria as well as flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. A properly functioning reward system motivates a person to repeat behaviors needed to thrive, such as eating and spending time with loved ones. Surges of dopamine in the reward circuit cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy behaviors like taking drugs, leading people to repeat the behavior again and again.

As a person continues to use drugs, the brain adapts by reducing the ability of cells in the reward circuit to respond to it. This reduces the high that the person feels compared to the high they felt when first taking the drug-an effect known as tolerance. They might take more of the drug to try and achieve the same high. These brain adaptations often lead to the person becoming less and less able to derive pleasure from other things they once enjoyed, like food, sex, or social activities.

Long-term use also causes changes in other brain chemical systems and circuits as well, affecting functions that include:

Despite being aware of these harmful outcomes, many people who use drugs continue to take them, which is the nature of addiction.

Why do some people become addicted to drugs while others don't?

No one factor can predict if a person will become addicted to drugs. A combination of factors influences risk for addiction. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that taking drugs can lead to addiction. For example:

Biology. The genes that people are born with account for about half of a person's risk for addiction. Gender, ethnicity, and the presence of other mental disorders may also influence risk for drug use and addiction.

Environment. A person's environment includes many different influences, from family and friends to economic status and general quality of life. Factors such as peer pressure, physical and sexual abuse, early exposure to drugs, stress, and parental guidance can greatly affect a person's likelihood of drug use and addiction.

Development. Genetic and environmental factors interact with critical developmental stages in a person's life to affect addiction risk. Although taking drugs at any age can lead to addiction, the earlier that drug use begins, the more likely it will progress to addiction. This is particularly problematic for teens. Because areas in their brains that control decision-making, judgment, and self-control are still developing, teens may be especially prone to risky behaviors, including trying drugs.

Can drug addiction be cured or prevented?

As with most other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, or heart disease, treatment for drug addiction generally isn't a cure. However, addiction is treatable and can be successfully managed. People who are recovering from an addiction will be at risk for relapse for years and possibly for their whole lives. Research shows that combining addiction treatment medicines with behavioral therapy ensures the best chance of success for most patients. Treatment approaches tailored to each patient's drug use patterns and any co-occurring medical, mental, and social problems can lead to continued recovery.

More good news is that drug use and addiction are preventable. Results from NIDA-funded research have shown that prevention programs involving families, schools, communities, and the media are effective for preventing or reducing drug use and addiction. Although personal events and cultural factors affect drug use trends, when young people view drug use as harmful, they tend to decrease their drug taking. Therefore, education and outreach are key in helping people understand the possible risks of drug use. Teachers, parents, and health care providers have crucial roles in educating young people and preventing drug use and addiction.

Points to Remember

Drug addiction is a chronic disease characterized by drug seeking and use that is compulsive, or difficult to control, despite harmful consequences.

Brain changes that occur over time with drug use challenge an addicted person's self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. This is why drug addiction is also a relapsing disease.

Relapse is the return to drug use after an attempt to stop. Relapse indicates the need for more or different treatment.

Most drugs affect the brain's reward circuit by flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. Surges of dopamine in the reward circuit cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy activities, leading people to repeat the behavior again and again.

Over time, the brain adjusts to the excess dopamine, which reduces the high that the person feels compared to the high they felt when first taking the drug-an effect known as tolerance. They might take more of the drug, trying to achieve the same dopamine high.

No single factor can predict whether a person will become addicted to drugs. A combination of genetic, environmental, and developmental factors influences risk for addiction. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that taking drugs can lead to addiction.

Drug addiction is treatable and can be successfully managed.

More good news is that drug use and addiction are preventable. Teachers, parents, and health care providers have crucial roles in educating young people and preventing drug use and addiction.

Learn more

For information about understanding drug use and addiction, visit:

For more information about the costs of drug abuse to the United States, visit:

For more information about prevention, visit:

For more information about treatment, visit:

To find a publicly funded treatment center in your state, call 1-800-662-HELP or visit:

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Understanding Drug Use and Addiction DrugFacts | National Institute on Drug Abuse

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Provides an overview of drug use and addiction, including what happens in the brain during drug use, why some people become addicted while others don't, and the importance of prevention.

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/crack-cocaine-9-things-to-know-1.2415886http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/crack-cocaine-9-things-to-know-1.2415886

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Authorities say a drug bust in Brooklyn Center has netted 140 pounds of methamphetamine, the largest seizure of the drug in state history.

Forty-year-old Dolores Castillo and 27-year-old Francisco Silvestre-Martinez are both charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

The federal Drug Enforcement Agency and the Anoka Hennepin Drug Task Force seized the meth from a home in Brooklyn Center on Monday.

Castillo and Silvestre-Martinez were arrested at their home in Maplewood. Authorities say the two had two pounds of meth and $130,000 in cash on hand.

Authorities made several undercover purchases from a dealer in March and April and later learned that a home in Brooklyn Center was being used as a storage facility.

It's unclear whether the two have attorneys.

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In Brooklyn Center, 140-pound meth bust is largest in Minnesota history

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Authorities say a drug bust in Brooklyn Center has netted 140 pounds of methamphetamine, the largest seizure of the drug in state history. Forty-year-old Dolores Castillo and 27-year-old Francisco Silvestre-Martinez are both charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

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A traffic stop in South Dakota last week interrupted the cross-country shipment of more than 90 pounds of methamphetamine headed for Eagan, a discovery that led to federal charges this week against three men after the driver agreed to cooperate with authorities.

And in a separate case made public this week, federal authorities said the former owner of a Lake Street soccer store was running the Minnesota operation of a Mexican cartel and distributing large quantities of meth and cocaine. A multiyear probe into drug trafficking by "multifaceted and interrelated organizations" led to criminal drug conspiracy charges against Edgar Martinez-Sanchez, aka Compa or Compita, and at least two of his couriers.

Taken together, the cases underscore the persistent reach of Mexican cartels into Minnesota, where they continue to dispatch alleged associates to distribute large volumes of meth and cocaine around the state.

The charges stem from separate investigations by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and involve seizures of hundreds of pounds of drugs and bundles of cash wrapped and coated at times with "mustard and other unknown substances," according to documents filed in federal court.

"Minnesota is unique in that we're both a destination market and a transit market to other regions," said Paul Kunze, assistant special agent in charge for HSI in St. Paul. In addition to selling drugs for consumption here, he said, cartels "are also using the region as a transportation point for drugs moving up into Canada and further east in the United States."

Martinez was arrested Tuesday after being indicted alongside Roberto Galicia-Maceda, allegedly a Richfield courier for his organization, according to charges. Both men are Mexican citizens living illegally in the United States, according to an HSI agent's sworn affidavit.

Martinez' attorney, Arthur Martinez (no relation), said his client would plead not guilty at his scheduled arraignment Friday in federal court in Minneapolis. He said Edgar Martinez has since closed his soccer store and was working as a delivery driver and for an office-cleaning business when arrested.

"He had two legitimate jobs - nothing like he's accused of," the attorney said.

Soon after their arrests, another associate, Eliel Garcia, was charged federally with conspiring to distribute meth and cocaine since 2014, when he was first found with 14 kilograms of cocaine hidden in his car as he drove from Phoenix to Chicago.

HSI agents had tracked Martinez since April 2016 as he allegedly directed an unnamed cartel's Minnesota branch, which included family members and other still-unidentified associates.

After conducting hundreds of hours of surveillance and controlled drug purchases from Martinez' organization, agents seized roughly 35 pounds of meth, two pounds of cocaine, a handgun and currency. Agents seized the meth from a co-defendant they later flipped to informant after a meetup in a St. Paul restaurant parking lot late last year.

A day after a federal grand jury returned a sealed nine-count indictment against Martinez and Galicia, Iowa State Patrol troopers retrieved from Galicia's car $391,050 in bundles that were wrapped in plastic and dryer sheets and greased before being completely encased again in black electrical tape. Searches of the men's homes around the Twin Cities this week turned up another $127,000, 10 pounds of meth and five kilograms of cocaine stored in a Honda Civic that Galicia stopped using because, agents believe, he suspected he had been followed.

Family is threatened

Three other men were charged Wednesday with conspiring to distribute meth after the South Dakota State Patrol found 92 pounds of it in a car being driven by Abraham Suazo from California to Eagan, where he said he was to deliver it to co-defendant Arturo Juarez-Madrigal.

According to charges, Suazo agreed to wear a recording device and deliver a "substituted sham substance" passed off as meth to his intended destination in Eagan. There, on Feb. 9, agents arrested Suazo, Juarez-Madrigal and Luis Manual Sanchez-Lopez as the three began to unload the fake meth from a hidden compartment in Suazo's car.

Agents searching the Eagan home found nearly 10 more pounds of meth and $118,500 in wrapped bundles "which were coated with mustard and other unknown substances," the complaint said.

The large meth seizures represent an upward trend in the amounts of drugs federal agents say they are seizing, including a state record 140 pounds retrieved last May in Brooklyn Center.

Minnesota has long been both a market for meth and a transshipment point as the drug makes its way to Canada, Chicago or Milwaukee. Federal sentencing data show that nearly 70 percent of federal drug offenders sentenced in Minnesota in 2015 were charged in meth cases - more than twice the national average.

Federal investigators have established links from Mexico's Sinaloa and Beltran-Leyva cartels to Minnesota drug traffickers, maintaining cells believed to report directly to leaders in Mexico or through intermediaries. And the DEA's latest National Drug Threat Assessment says that Mexican cartels are expected to be a "dominant influence" in the U.S. drug market for the near term.

Minnesota's cases also reveal the extreme measures that Mexican cartels can use to intimidate and control their northern employees.

Last month, Dolores Ludmilla Castillo, 40, became the last of three defendants to plead guilty after the May 2016 Brooklyn Park bust. Speaking softly, and through an interpreter, Castillo was asked by a federal prosecutor if anyone had forced her to help spread meth from Mexico into the U.S.

"Well there is a person who forced us, so he wouldn't bother my siblings or parents in Mexico," she said.

Twitter: @smontemayor

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Big federal meth busts paint picture of Mexican cartel reach into Minnesota

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A traffic stop in South Dakota last week interrupted the cross-country shipment of more than 90 pounds of methamphetamine headed for Eagan, a discovery that led to federal charges this week against three men after the driver agreed to cooperate with authorities.

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BRUNSWICK, GA. | Ronnie Music Jr., a Waycross man who sank part of $3 million in lottery winnings into methamphetamine trafficking, will spend the next 21 years in prison on drug conspiracy and firearms charges.

The 46-year-old Music admitted his involvement in multi-state drug trafficking, including a ring being run from a Georgia prison that he fronted with lottery winnings. He also pleaded guilty to being a convicted felon in possession of firearms.

Music won $3 million in 2015 on a scratch-off ticket in the Georgia Lottery.

"You got a windfall that few in this world ever get," Chief U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood said before sentencing Music. "Nobody has ever blown lottery winnings in a more dangerous and destructive way than you did."

The government agreed to ask Wood to impose a sentence lighter than that called for under federal advisory guidelines. The guidelines called for a sentence of 27 years to 33 years and nine months.

Music provided information agents used against Daniel Alo, 46, who was running a methamphetamine ring from Calhoun State Prison where he was serving a life sentence for murder.

During a hearing in federal court in Waycross, the government said conspirators on the outside used drones to drop cellphones into the prison yard and that those inside used them to direct drug trafficking. They used GreenDot financial cards to transfer money and pay suppliers and dealers.

Alo pleaded guilty before Wood Jan. 22 and is awaiting sentencing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Gilluly Jr. said a corruption investigation at Calhoun State Prison was already under way before Music made his first statement to federal agents.

"Alo was done," Gilluly said. "[Music] corroborated what we already knew."

Alo was one of 15 people arrested, some in the Waycross area, for distributing methamphetamine. All have since pleaded guilty and Music's cooperation likely figured into those pleas and a quick wrap-up of the case, Gilluly said.

"His willingness to testify may have resulted in others jumping on board and being willing to testify," he told Wood.

Music's lawyer, Ronald Harrison of Brunswick, tried to downplay Music's participation.

"I think at worst, he's a wholesaler," Harrison told Wood in asking her to trim years off his sentence.

"He came in early. He was thorough. He was truthful," Harrison said. "It was a risk to him. It was a risk to his family."

Harrison said he was also amazed Music and his associates, whom he called "The Apple Dumpling Gang," ever reached the level they did.

"You wouldn't take them to be methamphetamine dealers and users," he said. "They're just regular guys."

He also said Music used alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and, eventually, methamphetamine to deal with tragedy in his life.

Gilluly countered that Music was very much a large-scale dealer "who brought pounds and pounds" of meth into the community.

"It's addictive. It destroys families. It destroys communities," he said.

He also said Music had ties to drug cartels, the Bloods gang and white supremacists.

"That is not a rag-tag gang of misfits," Gilluly said. "He's not just a drug dealer. He's dangerous."

Although Harrison said Music came in early, court documents show it wasn't at the first opportunity.

Records show Music seemed oblivious to any chances he would be arrested even as he watched agents take down two of his co-conspirators.

Music was arrested in October 2014 with 4 pounds of meth, $22,000 in cash, $5,000 of which an informer handed over earlier for a pound of meth, records show.

That arrest came a month after some of his co-conspirators were caught trying to sell 11 pounds of methamphetamine that Music supplied, the government has said.

On parole from a previous conviction, Music supplied more than 10 pounds of crystallized meth to Jessie Case for redistribution, the government said.

On Sept. 1, 2015, local and federal agents arrested Case for attempting to sell that meth in Brunswick, but the arrest didn't stop Music.

"Mr. Music observed the transaction and the bust, but did not stop his involvement in the drug business," the government said in a court document.

While free on bond, he was a fugitive from cases in Georgia and Tennessee, the government said. He was tracked to a Red Roof Inn in Tennessee and arrested with 14.4 grams of meth and some marijuana.

Brought back to Brunswick, Music confessed and talked to agents for hours.

Gilluly acknowledged that Music, while talking with an agent on the phone, agreed to have his house searched then directed the searchers to hidden money and 11 guns, including an illegal shotgun and an assault rifle and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Gilluly also noted Music has a 25-year criminal history, some of it extremely violent, and that he pleaded guilty only to the 10 to 11 pounds of meth "seized in our neighborhood," and not all his trips to other states.

For his part, Music took responsibility for his actions and apologized to the court and his family.

Wood ordered Music to pay a $25,000 fine and to serve five years on probation in addition to the vehicles and other cash he already forfeited to the government.

Wood also showed she knows something about children's movies.

" 'The Apple Dumpling Gang' was children digging for gold," she said of the Disney film.

Terry Dickson: (912) 264-0405

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$3 million lottery winner gets 21 years in prison for financing meth trafficking

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BRUNSWICK, GA. | Ronnie Music Jr., a Waycross man who sank part of $3 million in lottery winnings into methamphetamine trafficking, will spend the next 21 years in prison on drug conspiracy and firearms charges.The 46-year-old Music admitted his involvement in multi-state drug trafficking, including a ring being run from a Georgia prison that he fronted with lottery winnings.

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Future after oil and gas? Norways fossil-free energy startup

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Future after oil and gas? Norways fossil-free energy startup

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https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/mar/28/oil-and-gas-norways-fossil-free-energy-renewables-oslohttps://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/mar/28/oil-and-gas-norways-fossil-free-energy-renewables-oslo

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http://www.mnseia.org/http://www.mnseia.org

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https://www.greenmountainenergy.com/why-green/benefits-of-clean-electricity/https://www.greenmountainenergy.com/why-green/benefits-of-clean-electricity/

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https://www.marketplace.org/2017/03/27/sustainability/portable-solar-units-fill-electric-charging-void

Portable solar units fill the electric charging void

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http://www.energyharvestingjournal.com/articles/10795/airborne-wind-energy-sophisticated-technology-primitive-marketing

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http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/03/the-uks-solar-panel-covering-set-new-production-records-this-weekend/

The UK's Solar Panel Covering Set New Production Records This Weekend

Gizmodo UK - 5h ago

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Trump Signs Executive Order Unwinding Obama Climate Policies

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Trump Signs Executive Order Unwinding Obama Climate Policies

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There's no doubt that Elon Musk's announcement that Tesla Motors will enter the energy-storage market last week excited Tesla fanboys and a good bit of the stock market. But are the economics compelling enough that consumers should get excited, too?

That's a less compelling proposition. In the same way that payback periods for hybrid cars and rooftop solar slowed early adoption, Tesla's bold utility-market move will take some time to prove its worth when it comes to your electricity bill.

Already enthusiasm for the product has been keen. Yesterday Musk announced that there had been 38,000 reservations for the power unit in California, a sellout into next year, but he also conceded that the system currently makes little economic sense for most utility customers in the U.S.

Patrick T. Fallon | Reuters

Tesla's $3,000 to $3,500 Powerwall system for homeowners (the price depends on the size of the system, either the 7-kWh or 10-kWh version) may actually cost as much as $9,000-including installation and ancillary electronics-for the consumer, said Dean Frankel, an analyst at Lux Research in New York.

"You'll likely see a price to the consumer of $7,000 to $9,000," Frankel said. "It depends on how cheaply Tesla's [installation] partners can get the power electronics."

Read More Tesla shares climb as results beat the Street

In places like California, where there are generous incentives for installing renewable power, a homeowner could save about $2 a day, meaning the system pays for itself in four to six years, said Mark Duvall, director of energy utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute, who's based in the northern California town of Half Moon Bay. In most of the rest of the country, the payoff would be longer because government incentives to go solar are smaller.

Read More Why Carl Icahn keeps buying Chesapeake Energy

Tesla's system, which will become available this summer, is still about 50 percent cheaper than power-storage systems that have been on the market before, Duvall said. And for people who want the storage system as a way to provide emergency backup power-which is expected to be a small part of the demand-Tesla's units are cost-competitive, with backup generators that run on gasoline or natural gas.

But for most people, energy storage will have to get still cheaper, and there will need to be new mechanisms and business models to help spread out the cost before it makes both short-term and long-term financial sense.

Here's how to think about it.

Musk's virtuous energy circle

Currently, the business model works great for Musk and his holdings.

Musk is also the founder of SolarCity, so a home energy-storage system can be linked to a rootfop solar array. It also plays a part in Musk's bold plan to create a battery manufacturing gigafactory in the U.S.-the Powerwall is based on Tesla's existing battery production method. At the same time, SolarCity is planning to build a solar panel manufacturing plant, a break from its roots in solar installation and financing alone. In all, it's a virtuous renewable-energy capitalism circle for Musk companies. (Powerwall is separate from Tesla's existing home-charging options for its cars, which can also be linked to SolarCity home solar installations.)

Meanwhile, the system makes little sense on straight economics for most consumers right now, though changing utility rates will make the economics work better.

The rising trend in utility rates is to charge more for electricity use at peak hours, or based on an individual's own peak consumption, Duvall said. At-home electricity storage makes the most sense for consumers who live in states that have high peak-use rates, the experts say.

Karl Rábago, an energy consultant who has worked in the past for both municipal utilities and utility corporations said that there are increasing arbitrage opportunities being offered by almost every utility in the country-some form of a dynamic pricing model. "It's swept across the country," he said. He said consumers interested in the Tesla Powerwall and researching the potential benefits need to first explore a local utility's dynamic pricing model.

Read More Why Apple's alleged plan to create a car may not be crazy

The idea is simple: Use solar panels to create power and store it when it is in less demand, then sell it to the local utility or use it to offset your own consumption when demand and prices are both at their highest, Frankel said.

Duvall said more utilities are offering optional rates, where the customer can elect to pay more for electricity use at peak hours-typically mid-afternoon to mid-evening-or based on an individual's own peak consumption, in exchange for less-expensive electricity at night and on weekends.

"If you can shift 7 kWh of electricity use from peak to nonpeak, you can save $2 a day," Duvall said. "If you don't have a time-of-day rate, you value [Tesla's system] based on its use as backup power, and there's not a lot of demand for that.''

The average home uses between 1,000 and 1,200 kWh of juice per month, he said.

"People who will want to do it first are those who desire energy self-sufficiency and autonomy. They will think it's worth it. And the more of them we get, the cheaper the next version will be for the rest of us." -Karl Rábago, energy consultant

The systems will get cheaper-not a lot-but cheaper.

Duvall said a system like Tesla's will probably get as much as 50 percent cheaper in the next 10 years. Part of that is the difference new technical innovations will make, but more of the price reduction will come simply from economies of scale as more people adopt at-home storage, using it in place of power from the utility grid or, more often, working in tandem with the grid. Another key factor will be how rapidly contractors learn how to install systems more efficiently, which has already helped drive down prices of residential solar-power systems.

"It's a lot more expensive now because of how small the market is," Lux's Frankel said. That's especially true of the electronics, which are less advanced commercially than the batteries themselves, he added.

Finally, emerging business models will help consumers manage the cost more easily.

For years solar power stagnated, because it cost too much upfront to install, until SolarCity and others came along with plans to finance and install the panels, letting consumers recoup the investment by electricity savings each month that typically exceed the payments. That model has helped SolarCity, where Tesla CEO Elon Musk is chairman and his cousin chief executive Lyndon Rive, become a huge hit, with shares rising sevenfold since a late-2012 initial public offering.

SolarCity, or someone like it, will soon offer plans to finance the battery-storage systems, Frank and Duvall said. After 195,000 installations in 2014, nearly 645,000 U.S. homes and businesses now have solar arrays, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Utilities may also offer some assistance, because having more power available from battery owners may let them avoid the capital cost to build as many new plants, usually burning natural gas, to generate peak-load power. One of the earliest plans is a Sacramento Municipal Utility District pilot study on how to integrate at-home solar and storage systems into a smart grid.

"There's a lot of room for incentives, and there are certain to be a lot of options,'' Duvall said.

Read More Buying a used Tesla just got easier

"Powerwall looks like it will do OK in high-cost places with high-cost photovoltaic solar systems-Hawaii especially, and California," said Richard Sedano, of the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit focused on the power sector. He said reforms in New York will help, too, but broad success is uncertain and will depend largely on how pricing evolves.

Rábago said the Powerwall system isn't, strictly speaking, necessary to keep the electric grid from breaking down. But, the energy consultant added, "I think there is an opportunity for it to be successful." For one, he said it hits the antisolar argument from some utilities-that you can only use solar when the sun shines-on the head. The Tesla bet is that there is a reasonable, affordable way to solve the utility problem with at-home energy storage.

Rábago also said that early adopters wouldn't necessarily be motivated, or discouraged, by cost savings. He recalled an interview he was present at a decade ago in Colorado with a guy who had a 9-kWh solar system and was asked if it was cost-effective. "He said, 'You're sitting on a $9,000 couch. Do I look like a price-sensitive consumer?'"

"People who will want to do it first are those who desire energy self-sufficiency and autonomy. They will think it's worth it," Rábago said. "And the more of them we get, the cheaper the next version will be for the rest of us."

-By Tim Mullaney, special to CNBC.com

Musk's earnings call commentary on Powerwall

The following is the full text of Elon Musk's answers to questions from analysts about viability of Powerwall as part of current U.S. grid economics-analysts specifically referenced reports that sister company SolarCity did not plan to use the 7kWh system:

Let me just talk more broadly about the response to the Powerwall and Powerpack because I think that's really the questions you should be asking. The response has been overwhelming, like, crazy.

In the course of less than a week, we've had 38,000 reservations for the Powerwall, 2500 reservations for the Powerpack. The Powerpack, it should be noted, typically this is brought by utilities or large industrial companies, for heavy industrial work.

Typically, Powerpack, it's at least 10 Powerpacks per installation. So if there's 2500 reservations, actually 25,000 Powerpacks.

Powerwall also is, we suspect, is probably an average of the number of Powerpacks is probably 1.5 to 2 per installation. 38.000 reservation is more like 50,000 or 60,000 actual Powerwalls.

So there is no way that we could possibly satisfy this demand this year. We are basically sold out through the middle of next year in the first week. It was just crazy.

We had 2500 requests from companies that want to distribute and install Powerwall and Powerpack. We can't even respond to them. We have to, like, triage our response to those who want to be a distributor.

It's crazy off the hook. It seems to have gone super-viral.

For the specific case of Solar City, what they are referring to is that there is two versions of the Powerwall. There's the daily cycling version and there is the power back-up version.

One is energy optimized in one is daily cycling optimized. For the daily cycling optimized one, the economics, it is true in the US, with rare exceptions, are more expensive then utility.

If somebody wants to do a daily cycling, basics, they go off-grid. It's going to be more expensive than being on-grid.

This doesn't mean that people won't buy it, because There are people who want to go off grid on principle or they just want to be independent. That's what the Solar City comment is about.

Solar City's only operating in the US. The Powerwall -- it will be available from Solar City and from other installers in both configurations. But if someone is doing a daily cycling application, they are doing it because they specifically want grid independence. There's some number of people who will want to do that, and that's good.

It's also important to appreciate for, even to say the power backup systems so that you always have power in the event of power outage. Let's say that appeals to 2% of households in the US, or 1%. That is 1 million households. Like, is there 1 person in 100 care about having battery backup in the event of utility outage? Probably.

We couldn't even support a small fraction of that Right now. So its kind of a moot point.

(Source: TheStreet)

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Can Tesla's home battery lower your electric bill?

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There's no doubt that Elon Musk's announcement that Tesla Motors will enter the energy-storage market last week excited Tesla fanboys and a good bit of the stock market. But are the economics compelling enough that consumers should get excited, too? That's a less compelling proposition.

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AN INVISIBLE ENERGY REVOLUTION.

Our Builders.
Bold. Creative. Integrity.

SolarWindow™ Technologies, Inc. (OTCQB: WNDW) is developing first-of-their-kind electricity-generating see-through windows and products for America's 85 million detached homes and commercial buildings.

Our mission has been to create SolarWindow™ products which produce extraordinary amounts of clean electricity, financially reward our customers, and benefit the environment. A bold undertaking.

Along the way, we've attracted talented experts who have sound scientific and engineering skills, proven expertise with commercializing new technologies, and the many important industry connections and business skills needed to turn great ideas into spectacular products.

Here's a glimpse into the contributions of our team:

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AN INVISIBLE ENERGY REVOLUTION. Our Builders. Bold. Creative. Integrity. SolarWindow™ Technologies, Inc. (OTCQB: WNDW) is developing first-of-their-kind electricity-generating see-through windows and products for America's 85 million detached homes and commercial buildings. Our mission has been to create SolarWindow™ products which produce extraordinary amounts of clean electricity, financially reward our customers, and benefit the environment.

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SARASOTA - Like a good consumer, local solar contractor Bill Johnson of Brilliant Harvest did his homework before his company became one of only a few certified Tesla Powerwall installers in the state.

Although the 2015 announcement of Tesla's then-newest product, a battery that stores solar energy, was accompanied by what Johnson called "a tremendous amount of buzz," he was hesitant to trust the hype and wanted to crunch the numbers himself. Tesla is a manufacturer better known for its specialty electric sports cars and its co-founder Elon Musk's attempts to make space travel more common through his company, SpaceX. So the company's foray into the solar world was met with some hesitation on Johnson's part.

Out came the notebooks. Drawing board sessions came up with a list of pros and cons and checked boxes in an attempt to pick the best battery storage for solar applications. When it came down to it, Tesla's product was the clear winner.

"It was the best, least expensive, most durable, most flexible option on the market," Johnson said.

After a grueling certification process that included sending field technicians to check Brilliant Harvest's work, Tesla certified the company last September to begin installing the systems.

"It was not a trivial undertaking," Johnson said with a laugh.

His office is a testament to that. At the top of a bookcase is a prominently displayed photo of a home where Johnson installed multiple Powerwalls - the homeowner wanted extra storage, he says. On the company's website, Brilliant Harvest's status as a "Tesla Energy certified installer" is shown prominently.

With a glossy white surface and a sleek, rectangular shape, Powerwalls are objectively beautiful devices. In an otherwise dusty and cluttered garage, they hang on a wall like something from the future. Compared with the sometimes obtrusive appearance of boxy solar panels on a roof, the Powerwall's sophisticated look is a welcome change for many consumers. But people don't buy them for their looks or their maker's fame.

'A game changer in many ways'

The Powerwall is a backup power supply for solar-powered buildings at night or in the event of a grid outage when solar power is blocked from coming into the house so technicians working on power lines won't be injured. Unlike a generator, it doesn't need fuel.

"The Powerwall is there and it's ready to go," Johnson said. "It's a different way of thinking about it in terms of that energy security that you can be renewable and be energy secure at the same time. That's a game-changer in many ways."

Powerwalls are, however, expensive. The average cost of a Powerwall 1, the first version, is $8,500, including installation, according to Johnson, while the latest version, the 2, runs about $11,500.

Johnson has installed five of the systems since October. One local homeowner, who lives near Osprey, 81-year-old Rotraut Bockstahler, said she settled on the idea of the battery after talking with her nephew, an engineer, in Germany, where solar use is far more widespread.

"When I was talking this through to my nephew, he encouraged me to go with a battery," Bockstahler said. "He said, 'You have your own little electric company if you have a battery.' That was the spark."

Bockstahler admitted that the whole system is "pretty expensive." In total, she paid more than $36,000 for her solar panels, one Powerwall and installation of both. That includes about $8,400 for the Powerwall and $28,000 for the solar panels and installation.

When calculating the total cost for solar, both Johnson and Bockstahler take into account the federal tax credit that comes with installing a solar system. Under federal law, consumers can deduct 30 percent of the cost of a solar energy system installation from their taxes. A deduction on a $40,000 system would put the consumer at about $29,000 net system cost, according to Johnson's calculations.

The return on investment

In addition to a backup power supply, one of the other major advertised perks of solar is savings on electric bills.

"People make the mistake of assuming that there's no cost to not adopting solar," Johnson said. "That's not the case, because they're going to continue to pay that electric bill. The money is still going out, it's just going out and you have nothing to show for it."

And while the solar energy system without a battery takes four to six years to break even on the initial investment, Johnson said, buying a Powerwall lengthens that time to seven to nine years. Although the battery provides energy insurance and security for a solar-powered home, it does not actually reduce electric bills and, as Bockstahler noted, it is costly.

And it takes longer to install. Because of the complicated nature of putting together the Powerwall, which includes wiring and updated software, it can take about two weeks to install the battery and solar panels, versus about five days to install the panels alone.

"There's a lot to it," Johnson said.

The Powerwall, because it minimizes Bockstahler's need for power from the grid at night and other times when her panels create less electricity, allows her to avoid a problem created by utilities in Florida and some other states: The utility credits people with solar power contributed to the grid at a lower rate than what the utilities charge people for drawing power from the grid.

The difference between what utilities pay customers to reimburse them for extra solar power they generate and what the utilities charge for electricity is 6 to 9.5 cents per kilowatt hour, according to Patrick Altier, president of the Florida Solar Energy Industries Association and the head of Ocala-based solar installer SolarTrek.

A home could run for about eight hours on the Powerwall alone, according to Popular Mechanics. Bockstahler still tries to run the majority of her appliances when the sun is out so she saves the reserve power in her Powerwall.

"In her situation, she feels it's the right thing to do - proactively trying to minimize the grid back-and-forth," Johnson said.

Now, when Bockstahler's electric bills arrive from Florida Power & Light, she pays an average of $35 a month - less than half of what her bills were before.

Why solar?

Since starting his business in 2009, the biggest question Johnson continues to hear about solar energy has to do with cost.

Customers considering a solar installation often hesitate about the large initial investment, Johnson said.

"Once they pull the trigger and say, 'We're going to do this,' and once they get that first power bill, the whole money thing is gone," Johnson said. "They'll say, 'This is the best decision we've ever made.' That's very rewarding - everybody loves us."

In the seven years he's been in the solar industry, Johnson said prices have dropped dramatically - by more than half. Yet Florida is a notoriously difficult state for solar to thrive in, because of its many regulations that prohibit things such as third-party leasing of solar panels, a method that avoids the large sticker price for solar. Even so, Johnson averages about a project every two weeks and 30 to 35 a year.

"We kind of jokingly say, as long as the sun keeps shining, the system's going to make that return for you," Johnson said. "As long as you keep using power, it really is a risk-free investment."

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Local solar installer is one of the first to bring Tesla's battery product to Florida homes

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SARASOTA - Like a good consumer, local solar contractor Bill Johnson of Brilliant Harvest did his homework before his company became one of only a few certified Tesla Powerwall installers in the state.

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http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-solar-city-roofs-october-28http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-solar-city-roofs-october-28

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http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/usa-nuclear-power-policy.aspxhttp://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/usa-nuclear-power-policy.aspx

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170327172829.htmhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170327172829.htm

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A Tesla expert will reach out to you to confirm your home is right for solar panels. We will then gather additional information about your home to create a custom design and detailed quote. After you confirm the design, our team will come to your home and install your solar power system.

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https://electrek.co/2017/03/28/tesla-model-y-elon-musk-next-week/https://electrek.co/2017/03/28/tesla-model-y-elon-musk-next-week/

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Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company's all-electric compact SUV, called Model Y, is still "a few years" away from production.

Today, the CEO reportedly teased that an announcement about the vehicle is coming "next week".

He reportedly told Ars Technica in a private direct message on Twitter. The publication then weirdly buried the lead in an article about Tencent investing in Tesla, as we reported earlier today.

They wrote:

"Finally, we've had the closest thing to official confirmation that a cheaper electric SUV-the so-called Model Y-is happening. We asked Musk (via Twitter direct message) whether there was any truth to recent rumors of the fourth model. The reply? An enigmatic "Next week."

It doesn't look like there's any unveiling planned for next week - so if the information is true, it's more likely to be some details (or hopefully a picture) that Musk would share on Twitter.

Though as we previously noted, we expected to see a prototype relatively soon since Musk said that Tesla planned to unveil the prototypes for its electric pickup truck and semi truck this year and that the Model Y is expected before those two vehicles.

Tesla hasn't released a ton of information about the Model Y, but Musk said that the vehicle will feature 'Falcon Wing' doors like the Model X.

Aside from the doors, the vehicle is expected to be very similar to the Model 3 in term of design and feature similar options as the Model 3, like the Model S is similar to the Model X. They are both expected to be built on the same vehicle platform.
Featured Image: Tesla Model Y unofficial render via Autocar.

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Elon Musk to reportedly share more info about the Tesla Model Y 'next week'

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Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company's all-electric compact SUV, called Model Y, is still "a few years" away from production. Today, the CEO reportedly teased that an announcement about the vehicle is coming "next week". He reportedly told Ars Technica in a private direct message on Twitter.

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Story Highlights

59% say protecting environment is more important than traditional energy

Over seven in 10 favor development of alternative energy vs. oil, gas, coal

Majority favor higher emissions standards, enforcement of regulations

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Given a choice, the majority of Americans think protecting the environment should take precedence over developing more energy supplies, even at the risk of limiting the amount of traditional supplies the U.S. produces. An even larger majority would prioritize developing alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power over the production of oil, gas and coal. Although these have been Americans' preferences for some time, support in the past two years has been at record highs.

Gallup has asked Americans about the trade-off between protecting the environment and developing oil, gas and coal supplies every March since 2001, including the latest update in this year's March 1-5 Environment survey. The public's attitudes on these issues are particularly relevant as President Donald Trump has proposed rolling back environmental regulations affecting the energy industry, removing a moratorium on federal coal leasing and lowering emissions restrictions on the automobile industry.

Americans have usually, but not always, favored the environment when given this choice. The exceptions came in early 2010 and from 2011 through 2013 as the nation recovered from the Great Recession. Americans' preferences temporarily shifted back toward environmental protection in May 2010, after the massive leak from a damaged BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The gap has widened in favor of the environment in the past four years. In both 2016 and this year, 59% of Americans have favored the environment versus 34% who have favored the production of oil, gas and coal -- the 25-percentage-point difference is the highest such margin in Gallup's history of asking the question.

Gallup has asked Americans about the trade-off between traditional and alternative energy sources in every year but one since 2011, and the public has consistently favored the latter, albeit by varying margins. The last two years have seen the largest gaps in favor of alternative energy over the six-year history of this trend.

The public's support for emphasizing alternative energy is underscored by the results of a separate question that asks Americans if they favor or oppose a number of energy-related proposals:

Americans' support for spending more government money on solar and wind power (72% favor) is the highest of any on the list.

About two-thirds of Americans favor more strongly enforcing federal environmental regulations and setting higher emissions standards for business and energy -- further reinforcing the public's tilt toward the environment versus energy production.

Slightly less than half favor opening up more federal land for oil exploration.

Broad public support for solar and wind power, stronger environmental regulation enforcement and setting higher emissions standards has been evident each time these questions have been asked since 2001. However, the current support levels remain slightly lower than pre-recession readings. Support for opening up federal lands for oil exploration has dropped from 65% who favored it in 2014 to 46% today.

In addition to these findings, a separate question finds that over half of Americans (53%) are opposed to hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" as a means of increasing the production of natural gas and oil in the U.S.; 35% favor it.
Implications
Production and distribution of the fossil fuels that the nation's economy and people's lives depend on inevitably take a toll on the environment -- leaving the question of how much of this type of a toll society is willing to accept. Gallup trends show public tolerance for hurting the environment to maintain energy supplies is at a low point. One likely reason for this is the perception that the nation has plenty of energy, available at a relatively low cost.

Fewer Americans are worried about the availability and affordability of energy than any of 12 other problems measured in the March Environment survey, and worry about energy is the lowest it has been in 14 years. The percentage of Americans rating energy as a serious problem is at a 15-year low, and almost no one mentions energy as the most important problem facing the nation.

Underlying views of an abundant and affordable energy supply may free Americans to prioritize the environment and to stress the development of alternative energy. Statistical analysis shows a significant year-by-year relationship between views of the seriousness of the energy situation and views of the trade-offs between traditional energy and the environment, as well as between traditional energy and alternative energy sources.

Americans are also now more positive about the economy overall. This increased confidence in the nation's economic situation may suggest to Americans that the nation can bear the economic consequences of an increased focus on the environment or on alternative fuels.

Trump is, on the other hand, emphasizing more fossil fuel extraction, opening up federal lands and relaxing environmental restrictions. This presents a potential challenge for the president at a time when large portions of the public appear more interested in protecting the environment and developing alternative energy sources than focusing on oil, gas and coal.

Americans could be favorably disposed toward some of Trump's specific proposals if they are linked to jobs or more broadly justified for other reasons. Additionally, the changes in attitudes about the trade-off between the environment and energy over the years show the public could easily swing back to favoring energy production at some point in the future.

Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted March 1-5, 2017, with a random sample of 1,018 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

View survey methodology, complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

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Americans Tilt Toward Protecting Environment, Alternative Fuels

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Story Highlights 59% say protecting environment is more important than traditional energy Over seven in 10 favor development of alternative energy vs. oil, gas, coal Majority favor higher emissions standards, enforcement of regulations WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Rob Callahan

Rob Callahan lives in Minneapolis, where he covers style, culture and the arts for Vita.MN and "l'étoile Magazine." His work has earned awards in the fields of journalism, social media and the arts. Callahan graduated from Saint Cloud State University in 2001 with a Bachelor's degree in philosophy.

Photovoltaic and solar-thermal panels generate free electricity by converting sunlight into electricity or transferring the sun's heat to heating and ventilation systems. The use of solar panels to generate energy provides many benefits, which include reductions in the costs associated with generating electricity. Solar panels also provide pollution-free power sources and afford new levels of independence to energy consumers.

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While coal power plants filter their emissions, trace amounts of toxic particulates penetrate air filtering systems and enter the atmosphere. Mercury is among the pollutants that enter the air from coal power plant emissions, and it can contaminate local ecological systems and harm plants, wildlife and human inhabitants. Because solar power is emissions-free, it is more safe for the environments and communities that neighbor solar panel arrays than are coal power plants.

Because solar panels convert light from the sun into heat and electricity, they require no other source of fuel. Coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear power systems rely on nonrenewable resources to generate power.

Coal and uranium mining are often devastating to their local environments. Heavy equipment, waste products and large-scale disruption of local habitats can render the land surrounding a mine barren and unusable after the mine is no longer in use. Coal mining is also dangerous to the workers who operate the mines. The use of solar panels eliminates these dangers to both miners and the environment.

Nuclear power is sometimes classed as a clean or "green" energy source because of the lack of air pollution associated with it, but it generates harmful waste. Nuclear fission reactors are controversial because of the long-lasting nuclear waste they produce and the possibility of catastrophic events, such as the Chernobyl meltdown.

Because sunlight is available at no cost, solar panels do not require expensive mining and fuel processing. Once a solar panel is built, it operates for free. In some applications, solar panels can be used to supplement existing power sources to reduce the total cost of energy. In power systems where all of the needed electricity is supplied by solar and other renewable energy sources, such as wind or hydroelectric, electricity is generated completely free of cost.

Nations that need to obtain oil and other fuel sources from other nations are beholden to their suppliers. Such countries may find it necessary to compromise their national safety or principles in order to maintain trade with their suppliers. Communities and nations who adopt solar energy systems reduce or eliminate their dependence on foreign fuel sources.

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Why Are Solar Panels Important in Our Society?

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Photovoltaic and solar-thermal panels generate free electricity by converting sunlight into electricity or transferring the sun's heat to heating and ventilation systems. The use of solar panels to generate energy provides many benefits, which include reductions in the costs associated with generating electricity. Solar panels also provide...

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Fusion power offers the prospect of an almost inexhaustible source of energy for future generations, but it also presents so far insurmountable engineering challenges.

The fundamental challenge is to achieve a rate of heat emitted by a fusion plasma that exceeds the rate of energy injected into the plasma.

The main hope is centred on tokamak reactors and stellarators which confine a deuterium-tritium plasma magnetically.

Today, many countries take part in fusion research to some extent, led by the European Union, the USA, Russia and Japan, with vigorous programs also underway in China, Brazil, Canada, and Korea. Initially, fusion research in the USA and USSR was linked to atomic weapons development, and it remained classified until the 1958 Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva. Following a breakthrough at the Soviet tokamak, fusion research became 'big science' in the 1970s. But the cost and complexity of the devices involved increased to the point where international co-operation was the only way forward.

Fusion powers the Sun and stars as hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and matter is converted into energy. Hydrogen, heated to very high temperatures changes from a gas to a plasma in which the negatively-charged electrons are separated from the positively-charged atomic nuclei (ions). Normally, fusion is not possible because the strongly repulsive electrostatic forces between the positively charged nuclei prevent them from getting close enough together to collide and for fusion to occur. However, if the conditions are such that the nuclei can overcome the electrostatic forces to the extent that they can come within a very close range of each other, then the attractive nuclear force (which binds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei) between the nuclei will outweigh the repulsive (electrostatic) force, allowing the nuclei to fuse together. Such conditions can occur when the temperature increases, causing the ions to move faster and eventually reach speeds high enough to bring the ions close enough together. The nuclei can then fuse, causing a release of energy.

Fusion technology

In the Sun, massive gravitational forces create the right conditions for fusion, but on Earth they are much harder to achieve. Fusion fuel - different isotopes of hydrogen - must be heated to extreme temperatures of the order of 50 million degrees Celsius, and must be kept stable under intense pressure, hence dense enough and confined for long enough to allow the nuclei to fuse. The aim of the controlled fusion research program is to achieve 'ignition', which occurs when enough fusion reactions take place for the process to become self-sustaining, with fresh fuel then being added to continue it. Once ignition is achieved, there is net energy yield - about four times as much as with nuclear fission. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the amount of power produced increases with the square of the pressure, so doubling the pressure leads to a fourfold increase in energy production.

With current technology, the reaction most readily feasible is between the nuclei of the two heavy forms (isotopes) of hydrogen - deuterium (D) and tritium (T). Each D-T fusion event releases 17.6 MeV (2.8 x 10⁻¹² joule, compared with 200 MeV for a U-235 fission and 3-4 MeV for D-D fusion). On a mass basis, the D-T fusion reaction releases over four times as much energy as uranium fission. Deuterium occurs naturally in seawater (30 grams per cubic metre), which makes it very abundant relative to other energy resources. Tritium occurs naturally only in trace quantities (produced by cosmic rays) and is radioactive, with a half-life of around 12 years. Usable quantities can be made in a conventional nuclear reactor, or in the present context, bred in a fusion system from lithium. Lithium is found in large quantities (30 parts per million) in the Earth's crust and in weaker concentrations in the sea.

In a fusion reactor, the concept is that neutrons generated from the D-T fusion reaction will be absorbed in a blanket containing lithium which surrounds the core. The lithium is then transformed into tritium (which is used to fuel the reactor) and helium. The blanket must be thick enough (about 1 metre) to slow down the high-energy (14 MeV) neutrons. The kinetic energy of the neutrons is absorbed by the blanket, causing it to heat up. The heat energy is collected by the coolant (water, helium or Li-Pb eutectic) flowing through the blanket and, in a fusion power plant, this energy will be used to generate electricity by conventional methods. If insufficient tritium is produced, some supplementary source must be employed such as using a fission reactor to irradiate heavy water or lithium with neutrons, and extraneous tritium creates difficulties with handling, storage and transport.

The difficulty has been to develop a device that can heat the D-T fuel to a high enough temperature and confine it long enough so that more energy is released through fusion reactions than is used to get the reaction going. While the D-T reaction is the main focus of attention, long-term hopes are for a D-D reaction, but this requires much higher temperatures.

In any case, the challenge is to apply the heat to human needs, primarily generating electricity. The energy density of fusion reactions in gas is very much less than for fission reactions in solid fuel, and as noted the heat yield per reaction is 70 times less. Hence thermonuclear fusion will always have a much lower power density than nuclear fission, which means that any fusion reactor needs to be larger and therefore more costly, than a fission reactor of the same power output. In addition, nuclear fission reactors use solid fuel which is denser than a thermonuclear plasma, so the energy released is more concentrated.

At present, two main experimental approaches are being studied: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. The first method uses strong magnetic fields to contain the hot plasma. The second involves compressing a small pellet containing fusion fuel to extremely high densities using strong lasers or particle beams.

Magnetic confinement

In magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), hundreds of cubic metres of D-T plasma at a density of less than a milligram per cubic metre are confined by a magnetic field at a few atmospheres pressure and heated to fusion temperature.

Magnetic fields are ideal for confining a plasma because the electrical charges on the separated ions and electrons mean that they follow the magnetic field lines. The aim is to prevent the particles from coming into contact with the reactor walls as this will dissipate their heat and slow them down. The most effective magnetic configuration is toroidal, shaped like a doughnut, in which the magnetic field is curved around to form a closed loop. For proper confinement, this toroidal field must have superimposed upon it a perpendicular field component (a poloidal field). The result is a magnetic field with force lines following spiral (helical) paths that confine and control the plasma.

There are several types of toroidal confinement system, the most important being tokamaks, stellarators and reversed field pinch (RFP) devices.

In a tokamak, the toroidal field is created by a series of coils evenly spaced around the torus-shaped reactor, and the poloidal field is created by a system of horizontal coils outside the toroidal magnet structure. A strong electric current is induced in the plasma using a central solenoid, and this induced current also contributes to the poloidal field. In a stellarator, the helical lines of force are produced by a series of coils which may themselves be helical in shape. Unlike tokamaks, stellarators do not require a toroidal current to be induced in the plasma. RFP devices have the same toroidal and poloidal components as a tokamak, but the current flowing through the plasma is much stronger and the direction of the toroidal field within the plasma is reversed.

In tokamaks and RFP devices, the current flowing through the plasma also serves to heat it to a temperature of about 10 million degrees Celsius. Beyond that, additional heating systems are needed to achieve the temperatures necessary for fusion. In stellarators, these heating systems have to supply all the energy needed.

The tokamak ( toroidalnya kamera ee magnetnaya katushka - torus-shaped magnetic chamber) was designed in 1951 by Soviet physicists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm. Tokamaks operate within limited parameters outside which sudden losses of energy confinement (disruptions) can occur, causing major thermal and mechanical stresses to the structure and walls. Nevertheless, it is considered the most promising design, and research is continuing on various tokamaks around the world.

Research is also being carried out on several types of stellarator. Lyman Spitzer devised and began work on the first fusion device - a stellarator - at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1951. Due to the difficulty in confining plasmas, stellarators fell out of favour until computer modelling techniques allowed accurate geometries to be calculated. Because stellarators have no toroidal plasma current, plasma stability is increased compared with tokamaks. Since the burning plasma can be more easily controlled and monitored, stellerators have an intrinsic potential for steady-state, continuous operation. The disadvantage is that, due to their more complex shape, stellarators are much more complex than tokamaks to design and build.

RFP devices differ from tokamaks mainly in the spatial distribution of the toroidal magnetic field, which changes sign at the edge of the plasma. The RFX machine in Padua, Italy is used to study the physical problems arising from the spontaneous reorganisation of the magnetic field, which is an intrinsic feature of this configuration.

Inertial confinement

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is a newer line of research, laser or ion beams are focused very precisely onto the surface of a target, which is a pellet of D-T fuel, a few millimetres in diameter. This heats the outer layer of the material, which explodes outwards generating an inward-moving compression front or implosion that compresses and heats the inner layers of material. The core of the fuel may be compressed to one thousand times its liquid density, resulting in conditions where fusion can occur. The energy released then would heat the surrounding fuel, which may also undergo fusion leading to a chain reaction (known as ignition) as the reaction spreads outwards through the fuel. The time required for these reactions to occur is limited by the inertia of the fuel (hence the name), but is less than a microsecond. So far, most inertial confinement work has involved lasers.

Recent work at Osaka University's Institue of Laser Engineering in Japan suggests that ignition may be achieved at lower temperature with a second very intense laser pulse guided through a millimetre-high gold cone into the compressed fuel, and timed to coincide with the peak compression. This technique, known as 'fast ignition', means that fuel compression is separated from hot spot generation with ignition, making the process more practical.

A completely different concept, the 'Z-pinch' (or 'zeta pinch'), uses a strong electrical current in a plasma to generate X-rays, which compress a tiny D-T fuel cylinder.

Magnetized target fusion

Magnetized target fusion (MTF), also referred to as magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), is a pulsed approach to fusion that combines the compressional heating of inertial confinement fusion with the magnetically reduced thermal transport and magnetically enhanced alpha heating of magnetic confinement fusion.

A range of MTF systems are currently being experimented with, and commonly use a magnetic field to confine a plasma with compressional heating provided by laser, electromagnetic or mechanical liner implosion. As a result of this combined approach, shorter plasma confinement times are required than for magnetic confinement (from 100 ns to 1 ms, depending on the MIF approach), reducing the requirement to stabilize the plasma for long periods. Conversely, compression can be achieved over timescales longer than those typical for inertial confinement, making it possible to achieve compression through mechanical, magnetic, chemical, or relatively low-powered laser drivers.

Several approaches are underway to examine MTF, including experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, the University of Rochester, and private companies General Fusion and Helion Energy.

R&D challenges for MTF include whether a suitable target plasma can be formed and heated to fusion conditions while avoiding contamination from the liner, as with magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Due to the reduced demands on confinement time and compression velocities, MTF has been pursued as a lower-cost and simpler approach to investigating these challenges than conventional fusion projects.

Hybrid fusion

Fusion can also be combined with fission in what is referred to as hybrid nuclear fusion where the blanket surrounding the core is a subcritical fission reactor. The fusion reaction acts as a source of neutrons for the surrounding blanket, where these neutrons are captured, resulting in fission reactions taking place. These fission reactions would also produce more neutrons, thereby assisting further fission reactions in the blanket.

The concept of hybrid fusion can be compared with an accelerator-driven system (ADS), where an accelerator is the source of neutrons for the blanket assembly, rather than nuclear fusion reactions (see page on Accelerator-driven Nuclear Energy). The blanket of a hybrid fusion system can therefore contain the same fuel as an ADS - for example, the abundant element thorium or the long-lived heavy isotopes present in used nuclear fuel (from a conventional reactor) could be used as fuel.

The blanket containing fission fuel in a hybrid fusion system would not require the development of new materials capable of withstanding constant neutron bombardment, whereas such materials would be needed in the blanket of a 'conventional' fusion system. A further advantage of a hybrid system is that the fusion part would not need to produce as many neutrons as a (non-hybrid) fusion reactor would in order to generate more power than is consumed - so a commercial-scale fusion reactor in a hybrid system does not need to be as large as a fusion-only reactor.

Fusion research

A long-standing quip about fusion points out that, since the 1970s, commercial deployment of fusion power has always been about 40 years away. While there is some truth in this, many breakthroughs have been made, particularly in recent years, and there are a number of major projects under development that may bring research to the point where fusion power can be commercialised.

Several tokamaks have been built, including the Joint European Torus (JET) and the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) in the UK and the tokamak fusion test reactor (TFTR) at Princeton in the USA. The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project currently under construction in Cadarache, France will be the largest tokamak when it operates in the 2020s. The Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a tokamak which is reported to be larger than ITER, and due for completion in 2030. Meanwhile it is running its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).

Much research has also been carried out on stellarators. A large one of these, the Large Helical Device at Japan's National Institute of Fusion Research, began operating in 1998. It is being used to study the best magnetic configuration for plasma confinement. At the Garching site of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, research carried out at the Wendelstein 7-AS between 1988 and 2002 is being progressed at the Wendelstein 7-X, which was built over 19 years at Max Planck Institute's Greifswald site and started up at the end of 2015. Another stellarator, TJII, is in operation in Madrid, Spain. In the USA, at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where the first stellarators were built in 1951, construction on the NCSX stellerator was abandoned in 2008 due to cost overruns and lack of funding .

There have also been significant developments in research into inertial confinement fusion. Construction of the$7 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration, was completed in March 2009. The Laser Mégajoule (LMJ) in France's Bordeaux region started operation in October 2014. Both are designed to deliver, in a few billionths of a second, nearly two million joules of light energy to targets measuring a few millimeters in size. The main purpose of both NIF and LMJ is for research to support both countries' respective nuclear weapons programs.

ITER

In 1985, the Soviet Union suggested building a next generation tokamak with Europe, Japan and the USA. Collaboration was established under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Between 1988 and 1990, the initial designs were drawn up for an International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER, which also means 'a path' or 'journey' in Latin) with the aim of proving that fusion could produce useful energy. The four parties agreed in 1992 to collaborate further on engineering design activities for ITER. Canada and Kazakhstan are also involved through Euratom and Russia, respectively.

Six years later, the ITER Council approved the first comprehensive design of a fusion reactor based on well-established physics and technology with a price tag of $6 billion. Then the USA decided pull out of the project, forcing a 50% reduction in costs and a redesign. The result was the ITER Fusion Energy Advanced Tokomak (ITER-FEAT) - initially expected to cost $3 billion but still achieve the targets of a self-sustaining reaction and a net energy gain. The envisaged energy gain is unlikely to be enough for a power plant, but it should demonstrate feasibility.

In 2003, the USA rejoined the project and China also announced it would join. After deadlocked discussion, the six partners agreed in mid-2005 to site ITER at Cadarache, in southern France. The deal involved major concessions to Japan, which had put forward Rokkasho as a preferred site. The European Union (EU) and France would contribute half of the then estimated €12.8 billion total cost, with the other partners - Japan, China, South Korea, USA and Russia - putting in 10% each. Japan will provide a lot of the high-tech components, will host a €1 billion materials testing facility - the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) - and will have the right to host a subsequent demonstration fusion reactor. India became the seventh member of the ITER consortium at the end of 2005. In November 2006, the seven members - China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the USA and the European Union - signed the ITER implementing agreement. The total cost of the 500 MW ITER comprises about half for the ten-year construction and half for 20 years of operation.

Site preparation works at Cadarache commenced in January 2007. First concrete for the buildings was poured in December 2013. Experiments were due to begin in 2018, when hydrogen will be used to avoid activating the magnets, but this is now expected in 2025. The first D-T plasma is not expected until 2035. ITER is large because confinement time increases with the cube of machine size. The vacuum vessel will be 19 m across and 11 m high, and weigh more than 5000 tonnes.

The goal of ITER is to operate with a plasma thermal output of 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with less than 50 MW of plasma heating power input. No electricity will be generated at ITER.

An associated CEA facility at Cadarache is WEST, formerly Tore Supra, which is designed to test prototype components and accelerate their development for ITER. It is focused on the divertor structure to remove helium, testing the durability of tungsten materials used.

A 2 GW Demonstration Power Plant, known as Demo, is expected to demonstrate large-scale production of electrical power on a continual basis. The conceptual design of Demo is expected to be completed by 2017, with construction beginning in around 2024 and the first phase of operation commencing from 2033.

JET

In 1978, the European Community (Euratom, along with Sweden and Switzerland) launched the Joint European Torus (JET) project in the UK. JET is the largest tokamak operating in the world today. A similar tokamak, JT-60, operates at the Naka Fusion Institute of Japan Atomic Energy Agency in Japan, but only JET has the facilities to use D-T fuel.

Following a legal dispute with Euratom, in December 1999 JET's international contract ended and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) took over the management of JET on behalf of its European partners. From that time JET's experimental programme has been co-ordinated by the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) parties.

JET produced its first plasma in 1983, and became the first experiment to produce controlled fusion power in November 1991, albeit with high input of electricity. Up to 16 MW of fusion power for one second and 5 MW sustained has been achieved in D-T plasmas using the device, from 24 MW of power injected into its heating system, and many experiments are conducted to study different heating schemes and other techniques. JET has been very successful in operating remote handling techniques in a radioactive environment to modify the interior of the device and has shown that the remote handling maintenance of fusion devices is realistic.

JET is a key device in preparations for ITER. It has been significantly upgraded in recent years to test ITER plasma physics and engineering systems. Further enhancements are planned at JET with a view to exceeding its fusion power record in future D-T experiments. A compact device - Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) - is also being developed alongside JET, partly to serve the ITER project.

KSTAR

The KSTAR (Korean Superconducting Tokamak Reactor) at the National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) in Daejeon produced its first plasma in mid-2008. It is a pilot device for ITER, and involves much international collaboration. It will be a satellite of ITER during ITER's operational phase from the early 2020s. The tokamak with 1.8 metre major radius is the first to use Nb3Sn superconducting magnets, the same material to be used in the ITER project. Its first stage of development to 2012 was to prove baseline operation technologies and achieved plasma pulses of up to 20 seconds. For the second phase of development (2013-2017), KSTAR was upgraded to study long pulses of up to 300 seconds in H mode - the 100s target was in 2015 - and embark upon high-performance AT mode. It achieved 70 seconds in high-performance plasma operation in late 2016, a world record. In addition, KSTAR researchers also succeeded in achieving an alternative advanced plasma operation mode with the internal transport barrier (ITB). This is a steep pressure gradient in the core of the plasmas due to the enhanced core plasma confinement. NFRI said this is the first ITB operation achieved in the superconducting device at the lowest heating power. KSTAR Phase 3 (2018-2023) is to develop high performance, high efficiency AT mode technologies with long-pulse operation. Phase 4 (2023-2025) will test DEMO-related prior arts. The device does not have tritium handling capabilities, so will not use D-T fuel.

K-DEMO tokamak

In collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey and South Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) K-DEMO is intended to be the next step toward commercial reactors from ITER, and would be the first plant to actually contribute power to an electric grid. According to the PPPL, it would generate "some 1 billion watts of power for several weeks on end", a much greater output than ITER's goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020s. K-DEMO is expected to have a 6.65m diameter major radius tokamak, and a test blanket module as part of the DEMO breeding blanket R&D. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology plans to invest about KRW 1 trillion (US$ 941 million) in the project. About KRW 300 billion of that spending has already been funded. The government expects the project to employ nearly 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last throughout 2016. K-DEMO is expected to have an initial operational phase from about 2037 to 2050 to develop components for the second stage, which would produce electricity.

EAST

In China the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) at China's Institute of Physical Science in Hefei is reported to have produced hydrogen plasma at 50 million degrees centigrade and held it for 102 seconds.

TFTR

In the USA, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) operated at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) from 1982 to 1997. In December 1993, TFTR became the first magnetic fusion device to perform extensive experiments with plasmas composed of D-T. The following year TFTR produced 10.7 MW of controlled fusion power - a record at that time. TFTR set other records, including the achievement of a plasma temperature of 510 million degrees centigrade in 1995. However, it did not achieve its goal of break-even fusion energy (where the energy input required is no greater than the amount of fusion energy produced), but achieved all of its hardware design goals, thus making substantial contributions to the development of ITER.

ALCATOR

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since the 1970s a succession of small ALCATOR (Alto Campus Torus) high magnetic field torus reactors have operated on the principle of achieving high plasma pressure as the route to long plasma confinement. Alcator C-Mod is claimed to have the highest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any fusion reactor, and is the largest university-based fusion reactor in the world. It operated 1993-2016. In September 2016 it achieved a plasma pressure of 2.05 atmospheres at a temperature of 35 million degrees Celsius. The plasma produced 300 trillion fusion reactions per second and had a central magnetic field strength of 5.7 tesla. It carried 1.4 million amps of electrical current and was heated with over 4 MW of power. The reaction occurred in a volume of approximately 1 cubic metre and the plasma lasted for two seconds. Having achieved this record performance for a fusion reactor, government funding ceased.

A scaled-up version planned to be built at Triotsk near Moscow in collaboration with the Kurchatov Institute is Ignitor, with 1.3 m diameter torus.

Large Helical Device - stellarator

The Large Helical Device (LHD) at Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science in Toki, in the Gifu Prefecture, was the world's largest stellarator. LHD produced its first plasma in 1998 and has demonstrated plasma confinement properties comparable to other large fusion devices. It has achieved an ion temperature of 13.5 keV (about 160 million degrees) and plasma stored energy of 1.44 million joules (MJ).

Wendelstein 7-X stellarator

Following a year of tests, this started up at the end of 2015, and helium plasma briefly reached about one million degrees centigrade. In 2016 it progressed to using hydrogen, and using 2 MW it achieved plasma of 80 million degrees centigrade for a quarter of a second. W7-X is the world's largest stellarator and it is planned to operate continuously for up to 30 minutes. It cost €1 billion ($1.1 billion).
Some good diagrams are in a Business Insider Australia article on the Wendelstein 7-X.

Heliac-1 stellarator

At the Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility at the Australian National University the H-1 stellarator has run for some years and in 2014 was upgraded significantly. H-1 is capable of accessing a wide range of plasma configurations and allows exploration of ideas for improved magnetic design of the fusion power stations that will follow ITER.

National Ignition Facility - laser

The world's most powerful laser fusion facility, the $4 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), was completed in March 2009. Using its 192 laser beams, NIF is able to deliver more than 60 times the energy of any previous laser system to its target. LLNL announced in July 2012 that in "an historic record-breaking laser shot, the NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 TW of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its (2mm diameter) target" for a few trillionths of a second. It was reported that in September 2013 at NIF for the first time the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel, but not the amount supplied by the giant lasers. Publication of this in 2014 said 17 kJ was released.

An earlier high-power laser at LLNL, Nova, was built in 1984 for the purpose of achieving ignition. Nova failed to do this and was closed in 1999, but provided essential data that led to the design of NIF. Nova also generated considerable amounts of data on high-density matter physics, which is useful both in fusion power and nuclear weapons research.

In connection with NIF, LLNL is developing the Laser Inertial Fusion Engine (LIFE), a hybrid fusion system where neutrons resulting from laser fusion would drive a subcritical nuclear fission blanket to generate electricity. The blanket would contain either depleted uranium; used nuclear fuel; natural uranium or thorium; or plutonium-239, minor actinides and fission products from reprocessed used nuclear fuel.

Laser Mégajoule

Meanwhile, the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, CEA) has operated a similar size laser - the Laser Mégajoule (LMJ) - near Bordeaux since 2014. Its 240 laser beams are able to generate 1.8 MJ pulses for a few billionths of a second, concentrated on a small deuterium and tritium target. A prototype laser, the Ligne d'Integration Laser (LIL), commenced operation in 2003.

SG-II

China's National Laboratory of High-Power Laser and Physics, associated with the China Academy of Science, has a laser inertial confinement experiment in Shanghai - the Shenguang-II eight-beam laser facility (SG-II), similar to the National Ignition Facility in the USA and Laser Mégajoule in France. It is the only high power neodymium-glass solid laser facility with an active probe light in China. In 2005 a ninth beam was added, advancing the capacity for fusion research. The SG-II facility is China's high-power laser technology international demonstration base.

PETAL and HiPER lasers

The Petawatt Aquitaine Laser (PETAL) laser facility is a high energy multi-petawatt laser (3.5 kJ energy with a duration of 0.5 to 5 ps) under construction near Bordeaux, on the same site as LIL. PETAL will be coupled with LIL to demonstrate the physics and laser technology of fast ignition. First experiments are expected in 2012.

The High Power Laser Energy Research Facility (HiPER) is being designed to build on the research planned at the PETAL project. HiPER will use a long pulse laser (currently estimated at 200kJ) combined with a 70kJ short pulse laser. A three-year preparatory phase that commenced in 2008 has direct funding or in-kind commitments amounting to around €70 million from several countries. The detailed engineering phase is projected to begin in 2011, with a six-year construction phase possibly commencing by 2014.

Z machine

Operated by Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world. As with NIF, the facility was built as part of the country's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which aims to maintain the stockpile of nuclear weapons without the need for full-scale testing.

Conditions for fusion are achieved by passing a powerful electrical pulse (lasting less than 100 nanoseconds) through a set of fine tungsten wires inside a metal hohlraum. The wires turn into a plasma and experience a compression ('Z-pinch'), forcing the vapourized particles to collide with each other, thereby producing intense X-ray radiation. A tiny cylinder containing fusion fuel placed inside the hohlraum would therefore be compressed by the X-rays, allowing fusion to occur.

In 2006, Z machine had achieved temperatures of over 2 billion degrees, considerably higher than what is needed for fusion, and in theory high enough to allow nuclear fusion of hydrogen with heavier elements such as lithium or boron.

Other fusion projects

There is a considerable amount of research into many other fusion projects at various stages of development.

Lockheed CFR. Lockheed Martin at its so-called 'skunk works' is developing a Compact Fusion Reactor (CFR) which uses conventional D-T plasma in evacuated containment but confines it differently. Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. The energy is supplied by radiofrequency heating. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. The aim is to go to plasma pressure being as great as confining pressure at high enough temperature for ignition and net energy yield. Heat exchangers in the reactor wall would convey energy to a gas turbine. It has progressed to a magentised ion confinement experiment, but has some way to go before any prototype, which they claim will be very much smaller than conventional designs such as the ITER tokamak.

Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) is developing a small tokamak reactor by the name of Ignitor. Under an Italian-Russian agreement signed in May 2010, a reactor will be assembled in Italy and installed at the Kurchatov Institute's Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fusion Research (TRINITI) near Moscow.

An alternative to using powerful lasers for inertial fusion is ' heavy ion fusion', where high-energy particles from an accelerator are focused using magnetic fields onto the fusion target. Heavy ion fusion experiments are planned for the NDCX-II (Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment II) accelerator, which is under construction (due to be completed in early 2012) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Polywell ('polyhedron' combined with 'potential well') device consists of magnetic coils arranged in a polyhedral configuration. The magnetic fields confine a cloud of electrons in the middle of the device so as to be able to accelerate and confine the positive ions to be fused. This concept differs from traditional magnetic confinement because the fields do not need to confine ions - only electrons. As with other fusion methods, sufficient funding is difficult to obtain due to the bulk of fusion research being focused on a few large-scale projects, most notably ITER.

Another line of fusion research using lasers involves fusing hydrogen and boron-11 ( HB11) to produce helium nuclei, which continue the chain reaction from boron. One laser generates a powerful magnetic confinement field in a coil to trap the fusion reaction in a small area for a nanosecond, while a second more powerful laser triggers the nuclear fusion process. Early HB11 fusion trials at the Prague Asterix Laser System, using high-energy iodine lasers, have generated more energy than needed to trigger the fusion process.

General Fusion is one of a number of private efforts to develop a commercial fusion power plant. The company's magnetized target fusion (MTF) approach generates a compact toroid plasma in an injector, containing and compressing it using a magnetic field before injecting it into a spherical compression chamber. The chamber holds a liquid lead-lithium liner which is pumped to create a vortex, into which the plasma target is injected. A synchronized array of pistons firing simultaneously creates a spherical compression wave in the liquid metal, compressing the plasma target and heating it to fusion conditions. General Fusion, founded in Canada in 2002, is funded by a syndicate of private investors, energy venture capital companies, sovereign wealth funds and the Canadian government's Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) fund. The company has demonstrated milestones including successfully creating 200-300 eV magnetized spheromak plasmas and confining them for over 500 µs.

Much of current work underway on MTF is derived from programs at the Soviet Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, under E. P. Velikhov, circa 1970. This inspired the LINUS project at the Naval Research Laboratory in the USA, and later the fast-liner project at Los Alamos.

Tokamak Energy in the UK is a private company developing a spherical tokamak, and hopes to commercialize this by 2030. The company grew out of Culham laboratory, home to JET, and its technology revolves around high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, which allow for relatively low-power and small-size devices, but high performance and potentially widespread commercial deployment. Its first tokamak with exclusively HTS magnets - the ST25 HTS, Tokamak Energy's second reactor - demonstrated 29 hours' continuous plasma during the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London in 2015, a world record. The next reactor is the ST40 at Milton Park in Oxfordshire, which achieved first plasma in April 2017. It is expected to produce plasma temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the centre of the Sun in 2017 after the commissioning of further magnetic coils. "The ST40 is designed to achieve 100 million degrees C and get within a factor of ten of energy break-even conditions. To get even closer to break-even point, the plasma density, temperature and confinement time then need to be fine-tuned." The company is working with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on spherical tokamaks, and with the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre at MIT on HTS magnets. It aims to achieve commercial scale fusion power by 2030.

Cold fusion

In March 1989, spectacular claims were made for another approach, when two researchers, in the USA (Stanley Pons) and the UK (Martin Fleischmann), claimed to have achieved fusion in a simple tabletop apparatus working at room temperature. 'N-Fusion', or 'cold fusion', involves the electrolysis of heavy water using palladium electrodes on which deuterium nuclei are said to concentrate at very high densities. The researchers claimed that heat - which could only be explained in terms of nuclear processes - was produced, as well as fusion byproducts, including helium, tritium and neutrons. Other experimenters failed to replicate this, however, and most of the scientific community no longer considers it a real phenomenon.

Low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR)

Initiated by claims for 'cold fusion', research at the nanotechnology level is continuing on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) which apparently use weak nuclear interactions (rather than strong force as in nuclear fission or fusion) to create low-energy neutrons, followed by neutron capture processes resulting in isotopic change or transmutation, without the emission of strong prompt radiation. LENR experiments involve hydrogen or deuterium permeation through a catalytic layer and reaction with a metal. Researchers report that energy is released. The main practical example is hydrogen plus nickel powder evidently giving more heat than can be explained on any chemical basis.

The Japanese government is sponsoring LENR research - notably a nano-metal hydrogen energy project (MHE) - through its New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), and Mitsubishi is also active in research.

Assessing fusion power

The use of fusion power plants could substantially reduce the environmental impacts of increasing world electricity demands since, like nuclear fission power, they would not contribute to acid rain or the greenhouse effect. Fusion power could easily satisfy the energy needs associated with continued economic growth, given the ready availability of fuels. There would be no danger of a runaway fusion reaction as this is intrinsically impossible and any malfunction would result in a rapid shutdown of the plant.

However, although fusion does not generate long-lived radioactive products and the unburned gases can be treated on site, there would a short- to medium-term radioactive waste problem due to activation of the structural materials. Some component materials will become radioactive during the lifetime of a reactor, due to bombardment with high-energy neutrons, and will eventually become radioactive waste. The volume of such waste would be similar to the corresponding volumes from fission reactors. However, the long-term radiotoxicity of the fusion wastes would be considerably lower than that from actinides in used fission fuel, and the activation product wastes would be handled in much the same way as those from fission reactors with some years of operation..

There are also other concerns, principally regarding the possible release of tritium into the environment. It is radioactive and very difficult to contain since it can penetrate concrete, rubber and some grades of steel. As an isotope of hydrogen, it is easily incorporated into water, making the water itself weakly radioactive. With a half-life of about 12.3 years, the presence of tritium remains a threat to health for about 125 years after it is created, as a gas or in water, if at high levels. It can be inhaled, absorbed through the skin or ingested. Inhaled tritium spreads throughout the soft tissues and tritiated water mixes quickly with all the water in the body. Although there is only a small inventory of tritium in a fusion reactor - a few grams - each could conceivably release significant quantities of tritium during operation through routine leaks, assuming the best containment systems. An accident could release even more. This is one reason why long-term hopes are for the deuterium-deuterium fusion process, dispensing with tritium.

While fusion power clearly has much to offer when the technology is eventually developed, the problems associated with it also need to be addressed if it is to become a widely used future energy source.

Notes & References

Notes

a. The nucleus of deuterium (D) consists of one proton and one neutron, whereas hydrogen only has one proton. Tritium (T) has one proton and two neutrons. When the nuclei of D and T fuse, helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons) is formed, along with a free neutron. The 17.6 MeV of energy released in the fusion reaction takes the form of kinetic energy, the helium having 3.5 MeV and the neutron 14.1 MeV. The products of the fusion reaction have a total mass that is slightly lower than the starting materials (D and T), this decrease in mass having been converted to energy according to E=mc ². [ Back]

b. Tritium can be produced by bombardment of lithium-6 with neutrons of any energy. When lithium-6 (three protons, three neutrons) absorbs a neutron it splits into helium (two protons, two neutrons) and tritium (one proton, two neutrons), along with the release of 4.8 MeV of energy. Tritium can also be produced from the more-abundant lithium-7 from high-energy neutrons. Hence, natural lithium can be used for tritium generation in a fusion reactor. According to the European Commission: "A 1 GW (electric) fusion plant will need about 100 kg deuterium and 3 tons of natural lithium to operate for a whole year, generating about 7 billion kWh." [ Back]

c. The European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA, see www.jet.efda.org) was established to provide a framework for magnetic confinement fusion research within the European Union and Switzerland. [ Back]

d. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has a webpage on TFTR at www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/tftr.html [ Back]

e. The first inertial confinement fusion experiments at NIF (see https://lasers.llnl.gov) will use the 'indirect drive' method, which differs from the 'direct drive' method described in the main text. In the indirect drive method, the lasers are focused on a gold cavity (known as a hohlraum) containing the fuel pellet. The lasers rapidly heat the inside surface of the hohlraum, generating X-rays that cause a blowoff of the capsule surface, in turn causing the fuel capsule to implode in the same way as if it had been hit with the lasers directly. It is hoped that NIF will be the first laser in which the energy released from the fusion fuel will exceed the laser energy used to produce the fusion reaction. [ Back]

f. Z machine was designed to supply X-ray pulses of 50 terawatts, but improvements allowed pulses of 290 terawatts. Following a major refurbishment in 2007, Z machine's electrical pulse was increased from 18 million amps to 26 million amps delivered over a few nanoseconds. [ Back]

g. A hohlraum is a metal cavity used in 'indirect drive' methods for inertial confinement fusion - see Note e above. [ Back]

h. See Tutorial on Heavy-Ion Fusion Energy on the website of the Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion ( http://hif.lbl.gov) for more information on heavy ion fusion. [ Back]

References

1. Fusion Research: An Energy Option for Europe's Future, Directorate-General for Research, European Commission, 2007 (ISBN: 9279005138) [ Back]
2. Statement by Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Under Secretary for Science and Director, Office of Science, US Department of Energy (22 May 2008) [ Back]
3. National Ignition Facility achieves unprecedented 1 megajoule laser shot, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory news release (27 January 2010)
4. LIFE: Clean Energy from Nuclear Waste page on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory website (www.llnl.gov) [ Back]
5. Z produces fusion neutrons, Sandia scientists confirm, Sandia National Laboratories news release (7 April 2003)
6. Sandia's Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin, Sandia National Laboratories news release (8 March 2006) [ Back]
7. New project aims for fusion ignition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology news (10 May 2010) [ Back]
New record for fusion, MIT News (14 October 2016)
8. On the Road to Fusion Energy, an Accelerator to Study Warm Dense Matter: The evolution of NDCX-II, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (14 October 2009) [ Back]
9. Safety and Environmental Impact of Fusion, I. Cook, G. Marbach, L. Di Pace, C. Girard, N. P. Taylor, EUR (01) CCE-FU / FTC 8/5 (April 2001) [ Back]

General sources

Iter website ( www.iter.org)
JET website ( www.jet.efda.org)
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (formerly UKAEA Culham) website ( www.ccfe.ac.uk)
National Ignition Facility website ( https://lasers.llnl.gov)
PETAL website ( www.petal.aquitaine.fr)
HiPER website ( www.hiper-laser.org)
European Fusion Network Information website ( www.fusion-eur.org)
Website of the Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program of the US Department of Energy's Office of Science ( www.er.doe.gov/Program_Offices/fes.htm)
Large Helical Device Research website ( www.lhd.nifs.ac.jp)
HiPER activity, Nuclear Engineering International (November 2008)
Fast track to fusion energy, Michael H. Key, Nature 412, 775-776 (23 August 2001)
Lockheed CFR article, Aviation Week (October 2014)
Magneto-Inertial Fusion, G. A. Wurden et al, Journal of Fusion Energy, Volume 35, Issue 1, 69-77 (February 2016)
Why Magnetized Target Fusion Offers A Low-Cost Development Path for Fusion Energy, Richard E. Siemon, Irvin R. Lindemuth and Kurt F. Schoenberg, Los Alamos National Laboratory (submitted to Comments on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 12 November 1997)
An Acoustically Driven Magnetized Target Fusion Reactor, Michel Laberge, General Fusion Inc., Journal of Fusion Energy, Volume 27, 65-68 (June 2008)
Stabilized Liquid Liner Implosions for Repetitive Compression of Plasma Targets, Peter J. Turchi, presented at the ARPA-E Workshop on Drivers for Low-Cost Development Towards Economical Fusion (29-30 October 2013)
Power Generation Via LENRs, Steven Krivit (February 2017)

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Nuclear Fusion : WNA - World Nuclear Association

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Fusion power offers the prospect of an almost inexhaustible source of energy for future generations, but it also presents so far insurmountable engineering challenges. The fundamental challenge is to achieve a rate of heat emitted by a fusion plasma that exceeds the rate of energy injected into the plasma.

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Power plant gases contaminating the earth

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Power plant gases contaminating the earth

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On March 28, President Donald Trump signed the Executive Order on Energy Independence (E.O. 13783), which calls for a review of the Clean Power Plan. The event signaled a commitment to the rule of law, cooperative federalism, and sound scientific rulemaking at EPA. We will continue to post updates as available as we implement this executive order. Read more:

In order to comply with the president's action, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued the following notices and reports:

On October 25, 2017, EPA issued an Energy Independence Report (full title: Final Report on Review of Agency Actions that Potentially Burden the Safe, Efficient Development of Domestic Energy Resources Under Executive Order 13783) to implement Executive Order 13783.

On March 30, 2017, Administrator Pruitt also sent a letter informing governors that EPA does not expect the states to dedicate resources to complying with a rule that has been stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States. Read more:

Environment: Protecting the Environment

Economy: Sensible regulations that allow Economic growth

Engagement: Engaging with state and local partners.

This website and other areas of epa.gov will continue to be updated as progress is made to comply with President Trump's executive order.

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On March 28, President Donald Trump signed the Executive Order on Energy Independence (E.O. 13783), which calls for a review of the Clean Power Plan. The event signaled a commitment to the rule of law, cooperative federalism, and sound scientific rulemaking at EPA. We will continue to post updates as available as we implement this executive order.

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A Tesla expert will reach out to you to confirm your home is right for solar panels. We will then gather additional information about your home to create a custom design and detailed quote. After you confirm the design, our team will come to your home and install your solar power system.

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Researchers in Japan have set a new record for the efficiency of mass-produced solar panels, meaning even more of the Sun's energy can now be converted into electricity.

The efficiency record for solar panels now stands at 26.6 percent - breaking the previous record established in 2015.

"Improving the photoconversion efficiency of silicon solar cells is crucial to further the deployment of renewable electricity," the team from Japan's Kaneko company explains. "This result confirms the strong potential of silicon photovoltaics."

To reach their record-breaking efficiency level, the team layered silicon inside individual cells to minimise band gaps where electrons can't exist and sunlight is wasted.

This approach is called thin-film heterojunction (HJ) optimisation, and while other scientists have attempted the procedure before, the Kaneko researchers improved the technique and were able to achieve that 26.6 percent milestone.

The team optimised their setup by placing low-resistance electrodes toward the rear of the cell, away from the exposed side, maximising the number of photons that could be collected from the front.

That photon collection was then made even more efficient with amorphous silicon and anti-reflective layers on top, to protect the cell components and reduce the amount of sunlight being lost.

While research-oriented panels have reached higher efficiencies - over 40 percent in some cases - this is a new record for panels viable for home use, although it's not always easy to say which technologies are feasible for consumer panels.

The definition of what's consumer-friendly is always changing, as production processes improve and costs come down, so keeping track can be tricky. But the bottom line is we're making progress.

In this specific case, we're talking about crystalline silicon-based solar panel cells, which have a theoretical efficiency of around 29 percent based on scientists' best estimates.

These cells have become the industry standard thanks to their reliability and relatively low cost.

As always, the Efficiency Chart (above) produced by the US National Renewable Energy Lab is a useful guide to where the various solar panel technologies are up to.

You can see the new Kaneko record marked on the right-hand side ( click here for a bigger version).

The team is now exploring the practical steps needed to make the technique they've achieved in the lab ready for mass production, but it sounds like it won't be long before we're tapping into even more power from the Sun - and that can only be a good thing.

The research has been published in Nature Energy.

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Scientists Have Broken The Efficiency Record For Mass-Produced Solar Panels

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Researchers in Japan have set a new record for the efficiency of mass-produced solar panels, meaning even more of the Sun's energy can now be converted into electricity. The efficiency record for solar panels now stands at 26.6 percent - breaking the previous record established in 2015.

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Whisper it to the home crowd whooping and hollering every time Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said "sustainability" and "CO2 reduction" at the reveal of the Model 3 prototype, but lifetime carbon dioxide from electric cars may actually not be much different from conventional internal combustion engines in some markets.

Until most electricity is generated by clean, renewable sources, claims electric cars are saving the planet are hollow.

That's the view of Bernstein Research, which studied the car market in Hong Kong where it is based. Bernstein Research said because Hong Kong, and China's, production of electricity is carbon intensive, mainly from coal in other words, electric cars are increasing rather than reducing pollution. And worse, the government subsidizes the rich to do this.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it, said over a 150,000 kilometer (93,000 mile) lifetime, a Tesla Model S will effectively emit about 13 tonnes of CO2 from electricity generation. The battery production will add another 14 tonnes, with 7 more from the rest of its production and decommissioning. This total of 34 tonnes compares with what he called a similarly performing diesel-powered A7 Sportback, which emits 35 tonnes, Lomborg said in an article in the London-based Daily Telegraph.

Bernstein Research analyst Neil Beveridge said because of the high carbon intensity of electricity generation in Hong Kong, electric cars will likely emit 4.4 tonnes or 20 per cent more CO2 over their 93,000 mile lives than equivalent gasoline cars. Beveridge used a BMW 320i for his comparison. This has a two liter engine, so isn't really comparable with the Tesla Model S, but would be a direct competitor to the Tesla Model 3.

"While EVs may be part of the long term solution, they are currently more of a problem," Beveridge said of China. "The reality is that EVs in places like Hong Kong will emit 20% more CO2 over their lifetime than conventional gasoline cars, given the high carbon intensity of electricity production and battery production. Taxpayers are being asked to pay for this, which is ironic given that EVs tend to be driven by those on higher income levels."

In Hong Kong, described by Musk in January as a 'probably the leading city in the world for electric cars' this is a big deal because conventional cars are taxed at 36% of the sales price, while electric cars go free.

Lomborg agrees that because China's electricity production is so dirty, electric cars make local air pollution much worse. Subsidizing them makes no sense.

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Does Tesla's Claim For Environmental Friendliness Stand Up?

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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk talked "sustainability" and "CO2 reduction" at the reveal of the Model 3 prototype, but it seems lifetime carbon dioxide from electric cars is actually not much different from conventional internal combustion engines. Until most electricity is generated by clean, renewable sources, claims electric cars are saving the planet are hollow.

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Fake Sun could be the future of alternative energy

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Fake Sun could be the future of alternative energy

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BERLIN - Scientists in Germany are flipping the switch on what's being described as "the world's largest artificial sun," hoping it will help shed light on new ways of making climate-friendly fuel.

The "Synlight" experiment in Juelich, about 19 miles west of Cologne, consists of 149 giant spotlights normally used for film projectors.

Starting Thursday, scientists from the German Aerospace Center will start experimenting with this dazzling array to try to find ways of tapping the enormous amount of energy that reaches Earth in the form of light from the sun.

One area of research will focus on how to efficiently produce hydrogen, a first step toward making artificial fuel for airplanes.

The experiment uses as much electricity in four hours as a four-person household would in a year.

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This fake sun could be the future of alternative energy

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BERLIN - Scientists in Germany are flipping the switch on what's being described as "the world's largest artificial sun," hoping it will help shed light on new ways of making climate-friendly fuel. The "Synlight" experiment in Juelich, about 19 miles west of Cologne, consists of 149 giant spotlights normally used for film projectors.

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Why we aren't switching to cleaner energy fast enough

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Why we aren't switching to cleaner energy fast enough

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In the last couple years, it has become abundantly clear that we as a human race must start to shift towards alternate forms of energy. With oil and coal usage for energy being major causes of pollution and climate change. Public opinion has started to shift towards renewable forms of energy such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy. The problem, however, lies in how feasible it is to switch our energy to these alternate forms.

One major question that always arises with these types of discussion is how much it will cost to change our energy to these alternate forms. Currently production of energy using coal and natural gas is cheaper than production of energy using solar power or wind power. Furthermore, a lot of money still is needed for research on solar and wind power in order to make them more cost effective and stronger sources of energy. Furthermore, since wind and sun are not abundant everywhere in the United States, it would be an extra cost to build infrastructure to transport the energy in these resource rich areas to areas that need energy. However, once the technology is improved, solar and wind energy will be far more cost effective than coal and oil, while also having the potential to last longer and providing immense returns later on in their life cycle.

Another problem that has been brought up regarding alternate forms of energy is that in order to make these solar panels and wind turbines, coal and oil are being used o they are not as "clean" sources of energy that they are made out to be. While this is certainly true, the long term environmental effects of these renewable forms of energy vs. non renewable energy sources would be much better.

The benefits of alternate forms of energy are certainly notable. Clean energy sources such as wind and solar have almost no environmental effects once they are installed and therefore would significantly reduce our emissions for years to come. Also, solar and wind energy are not intrusive and most solar and wind farms are simply in open space that was not being used in the first place.

Alternate energy could also lead to major production of jobs in the United States. A lot of the new technologies would lead to major job creation in order to create the wind and solar farms as well as any other renewable resources. Furthermore, these energy resources would require upkeep and other maintenance which would keep jobs for longer than just the creation.

Some may wonder why we can't just stop using nonrenewable resources such as coal and oil to reduce pollution and curb climate change. Part of the problem with this idea is the sheer amount of our society that is entirely dependent on oil and coal. If we stopped using oil and coal right now. We would not be able to transport food, drive cars, or even make plastics. This is why the transition must be slow, but we should certainly start moving forward with the transition.

Although initial reports cast doubt on the progress of renewables in the Trump administration, there have been some recent reports that suggest the Trump administration will seek to expand the United States' renewable energy infrastructure. A leaked document detailing Trump's infrastructure plans actually refer many times to new renewable projects. These projects would create 9 gigawatts of clean power for the United States and it also would create 26,000 long-lasting American jobs. Although some people may be looking for more advancements in renewable energy, this is a great start and any advancement towards renewable energy is a good one.

It will be interesting to watch these next few months to see the direction that the US and the world go as far as researching and creating renewable energy sources. The adaptation of these resources could certainly help lower pollution and climate change across the world and it will be important for nations such as America to be a role model for other nations in responsibly creating energy and lowering pollution.

One country to watch in regards to clean energy is India. India stated recently that they plan to have over 60% of their energy produced by renewables by 2027. It will be interesting to see if these changes end up helping reduce pollution while also being economically viable.

In conclusion, renewable energy certainly comes with some great benefits for the environment, but is held back by some logistical and financial drawbacks. However, a slow transition towards renewables could certainly be helpful not only for the economy, but also the environment.

Thank you for reading my first blog post. My posts in the coming weeks will all be focused on the environment, with each post touching on a different issue and the current events surrounding that issue.

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Renewable Energy: Why Aren't We 100% Renewable?

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In the last couple years, it has become abundantly clear that we as a human race must start to shift towards alternate forms of energy. With oil and coal usage for energy being major causes of pollution and climate change. Public opinion has started to shift towards renewable forms of energy such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy.

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The U.S. Climate Change Conference meeting in Paris 

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The U.S. Climate Change Conference meeting in Paris 

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The text of the climate pact establishes a commitment by 195 countries to take concrete measures to reel in planet-warming carbon emissions. Related Article

Christophe Petit Tesson/European Pressphoto Agency

Produced by K.K. Rebecca Lai

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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The text of the climate pact establishes a commitment by 195 countries to take concrete measures to reel in planet-warming carbon emissions. Related Article Christophe Petit Tesson/European Pressphoto Agency Produced by K.K. Rebecca Lai

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Last year, Germany completed and turned on the Wendelstein 7-X nuclear fusion reactor. This amazing piece of technology uses a complicated design called a stellerator, and scientists have finally managed to verify that the design works like it's supposed to.

Nuclear fusion is a reaction like the type that powers the Sun and other stars. Unlike the nuclear fission underway at our current nuclear plants, fusion generates far more energy without any harmful waste products. Theoretically, fusion reactors are capable of producing nearly limitless energy using nothing but seawater as fuel.

Theoretically. Fusion requires the kinds of temperatures and pressures found inside the cores of stars, and generating those conditions on Earth is extremely difficult, which is why the tech seems perpetually five or ten or twenty years away. Most designs involve giant magnets and lasers and can get complicated, to say the least.

The standard design of fusion reactor is called the tokamak reactor, and it involves a ring of magnets that force the nuclear material to travel in a large circle. The stellerator design used by the W7-X reactor adds several twists to the ring to increase stability.

However, the stellerator design is still relatively untested, so a group of researchers spent the past year studying the W7-X reactor to ensure that it was working the way it was supposed to. They found an incredibly small error rate, less than 1 in 100,000, which the researchers characterized as "unprecedented accuracy."

This is good news for the W7-X reactor, which was intended as a proof-of-concept for the stellerator design. Now that the researchers know the accuracy of the reactor's magnetic fields, they can begin building new reactors that focus on efficiency.

Unfortunately, current fusion reactors, including the W7-X, are still not efficient enough to produce more energy than they use. However, the success of W7-X gives the researchers hope that the next generation of fusion reactors will be able to reach that limit.

Source: ScienceAlert

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Germany's Wildly Complex Fusion Reactor Is Actually Working

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Last year, Germany completed and turned on the Wendelstein 7-X nuclear fusion reactor. This amazing piece of technology uses a complicated design called a stellerator, and scientists have finally managed to verify that the design works like it's supposed to. Nuclear fusion is a reaction like the type that powers the Sun and other stars.

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Last week, Xcel Energy announced a multi-state wind capacity project, anticipated to be the largest in the United States. Spanning seven states, the project covers eleven new wind farms and would generate 3280 MWs at a cost of $3.5-4.4 billion. In its announcement, Xcel emphasized the cost-savings attached to wind power, arguing that it would save Xcel customers in the Midwest $7.9 billion over thirty years. This, rather than the environmental benefits of renewable energy, drove the company's mission statement: wind was cheap, not just clean.

Increasingly, this is a line of argument companies involved in renewable energy are deploying, finding that it gets better traction from skeptical consumers and fidgety investors. Existing tax credits, most notably the production tax credit (PTC) that keeps costs low, as well as a tax rebate per kilowatt hour. These help wind compete with natural gas as a cheap source of electricity and has driven the surge of utility interest in harnessing wind power, despite the much-touted promises of President Donald Trump to bring back American coal.

Moody's Investor Services now estimates that the falling costs of wind power directly threatens 56 GW of coal power, out of 87 GW surveyed. Moody's report estimates the MW-hour cost of wind in the Great Plains region at around $20, while coal comes in at $30.

Total U.S. wind energy capacity grew 19 percent in 2016 and reached 5.5 percent of total generating capacity, outstripping hydroelectric as the nation's largest source of renewable energy. Much of the surge in added capacity came from power companies and utilities eager to take advantage of the PTC before it is cut from 80 percent to 60 percent.

The author of the report noted that it was economic, not environmental logic that is driving utilities to adopt wind power, as Xcel plans to do. "Yes, it's good for the environment and the consumers benefit from having cleaner power at a cheaper price, but at the end of the day, it is pursued by the utility because it is much more cost-effective." Related: Self-Driving Cars May Just Be the Start

The PTC is already set to decline to 20 percent by 2019, and will be phased out after that. The decision to renew the credit in 2015 largely drove the current rush of investment. Those economic arguments tend to emphasize short-term gains, as the federal government has recently indicated it plans on eliminating many of the previous administration's clean power regulations. That would threaten wind power's cheap appeal and cause it to lose its competitive edge over natural gas.

But the surge of investment in wind power may spur on additional growth, especially if the price of natural gas increases (as the EIA predicts it will, by 2018). Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, an energy developer owned by Warren Buffett, purchased a 400 MW project in Nebraska, while another Buffett company, MidAmerican Energy, bought 551 MW of wind online in Iowa, a state with the second-largest total wind capacity, 6,917 MW according to the American Wind Energy Association.

With these investments, Iowa expects $3.6 billion pumped into nearly 2000 MW of wind power capacity between 2017 and 2019. The interest of investor-owned utilities is matched by public utility companies in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and elsewhere. Improving turbine technology is expected to further drive down costs, while innovation (such as new offshore projects in North Carolina and New York) will display wind power's versatility.

It's enough to make proponents of wind power optimistic, at least for now. There are reasons to believe that wind, even without the advantages of the PTC, can out-compete coal and even natural gas. Moody's estimates that without the tax credit, wind costs increase to about $40 per MW hour. But further improvements in technology could drive that cost down.

Utilities like it because it protects customers from volatility in the fossil fuels markets. These arguments and the chance to add capacity at little cost in the short term, rather than the environmental advantages, are the main justifications for putting up new turbines nationwide. Related: Mexico Sees Its First International Offshore Drilling Success

For now, those justifications are enough to attract investors like Xcel and Buffett. But long-term, competition with natural gas for the utilities market will be fierce, particularly if gas prices remain low. The effects of federal regulation and legislation from Congress could shift advantages from renewable energy to coal. The EIA estimates that without tax credits, the costs of constructing and maintaining equal capacity wind power and natural gas power plants are nearly the same: $58.50 per MW-hour versus $56.40.

Right now, investing in wind power makes sense for utilities, allowing them to downplay the environmental arguments. But if the economic rationale for clean energy begins to wane, it's possible that rhetoric around wind, as well as solar power, could shift once more.

By Gregory Brew for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

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Wind Energy Now Directly Competing With Coal On Cost | OilPrice.com

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Last week, Xcel Energy announced a multi-state wind capacity project, anticipated to be the largest in the United States. Spanning seven states, the project covers eleven new wind farms and would generate 3280 MWs at a cost of $3.5-4.4 billion.

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Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future

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Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future

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This story appears in the November 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Hamburg knew the bombs were coming, and so the prisoners of war and forced laborers had just half a year to build the giant flak bunker. By July 1943 it was finished. A windowless cube of reinforced concrete, with seven-foot-thick walls and an even thicker roof, it towered like a medieval castle above a park near the Elbe River. The guns protruding from its four turrets would sweep Allied bombers from the sky, the Nazis promised, while tens of thousands of citizens sheltered safely behind its impenetrable walls.

Coming in at night from the North Sea just weeks after the bunker was finished, British bombers steered for the spire of St. Nikolai in the center of the city. They dropped clouds of metallic foil strips to throw off German radar and flak gunners. Targeting crowded residential neighborhoods, the bombers ignited an unquenchable firestorm that destroyed half of Hamburg and killed more than 34,000 people. Towering walls of fire created winds so strong that people were blown into the flames. Church bells clanged furiously.

The spire of St. Nikolai, which somehow survived, stands today as a mahnmal- a memorial reminding Germany of the hell brought by the Nazis. The flak bunker is another mahnmal. But now it has a new meaning: An urban development agency (IBA Hamburg) and the municipal utility (Hamburg Energie) have transformed it from a powerful reminder of Germany's shameful past into a hopeful vision for the future.

In the central space of the bunker, where people once cowered through the firestorm, a six-story, 528,000-gallon hot water tank delivers heat and hot water to some 800 homes in the neighborhood. The water is warmed by burning gas from sewage treatment, by waste heat from a nearby factory, and by solar panels that now cover the roof of the bunker, supported by struts angling from the old gun turrets. The bunker also converts sunlight into electricity; a scaffolding of photovoltaic (PV) panels on its south facade feeds enough juice into the grid to supply a thousand homes. On the north parapet, from which the flak gunners once watched flames rising from the city center, an outdoor café offers a view of the changed skyline. It's dotted with 17 wind turbines now.

What makes Germany so important, however, is the question of whether it can lead the retreat from fossil fuels.

Germany is pioneering an epochal transformation it calls the energiewende- an energy revolution that scientists say all nations must one day complete if a climate disaster is to be averted. Among large industrial nations, Germany is a leader. Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today. The change accelerated after the 2011 meltdown at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, which led Chancellor Angela Merkel to declare that Germany would shut all 17 of its own reactors by 2022. Nine have been switched off so far, and renewables have more than picked up the slack.

What makes Germany so important to the world, however, is the question of whether it can lead the retreat from fossil fuels. By later this century, scientists say, planet-warming carbon emissions must fall to virtually zero. Germany, the world's fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts-by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.

The fate of those promises hangs in the balance right now. The German revolution has come from the grass roots: Individual citizens and energy genossenschaften- local citizens associations-have made half the investment in renewables. But conventional utilities, which didn't see the revolution coming, are pressuring Merkel's government to slow things down. The country still gets far more electricity from coal than from renewables. And the energiewende has an even longer way to go in the transportation and heating sectors, which together emit more carbon dioxide (CO₂) than power plants.

German politicians sometimes compare the energiewende to the Apollo moon landing. But that feat took less than a decade, and most Americans just watched it on TV. The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German-more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now. "It's a project for a generation; it's going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it's hard," said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who's now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. "It's making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes."

Why? I wondered as I traveled in Germany last spring. Why is the energy future happening here, in a country that was a bombed-out wasteland 70 years ago? And could it happen everywhere?

The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest. It dates back to the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote about the Teutonic hordes who massacred Roman legions, and it was embellished by German Romantics in the 19th century. Through the upheavals of the 20th century, according to ethnographer Albrecht Lehmann, the myth remained a stable source of German identity. The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls-a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.

So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat of waldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.

Government and utilities were pushing nuclear power-but many Germans were pushing back. This was new for them. In the decades after World War II, with a ruined country to rebuild, there had been little appetite for questioning authority or the past. But by the 1970s, the rebuilding was complete, and a new generation was beginning to question the one that had started and lost the war. "There's a certain rebelliousness that's a result of the Second World War," a 50-something man named Josef Pesch told me. "You don't blindly accept authority."

Pesch was sitting in a mountaintop restaurant in the Black Forest outside Freiburg. In a snowy clearing just uphill stood two 320-foot-tall wind turbines funded by 521 citizen investors recruited by Pesch-but we weren't talking about the turbines yet. With an engineer named Dieter Seifried, we were talking about the nuclear reactor that never got built, near the village of Wyhl, 20 miles away on the Rhine River.

The state government had insisted that the reactor had to be built or the lights would go out in Freiburg. But beginning in 1975, local farmers and students occupied the site. In protests that lasted nearly a decade, they forced the government to abandon its plans. It was the first time a nuclear reactor had been stopped in Germany.

The lights didn't go out, and Freiburg became a solar city. Its branch of the Fraunhofer Institute is a world leader in solar research. Its Solar Settlement, designed by local architect Rolf Disch, who'd been active in the Wyhl protests, includes 50 houses that all produce more energy than they consume. "Wyhl was the starting point," Seifried said. In 1980 an institute that Seifried co-founded published a study called Energiewende- giving a name to a movement that hadn't even been born yet.

It wasn't born of a single fight. But opposition to nuclear power, at a time when few people were talking about climate change, was clearly a decisive factor. I had come to Germany thinking the Germans were foolish to abandon a carbon-free energy source that, until Fukushima, produced a quarter of their electricity. I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment-the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.

All over Germany I heard the same story. From Disch, sitting in his own cylindrical house, which rotates to follow the sun like a sunflower. From Rosenkranz in Berlin, who back in 1980 left physics graduate school for months to occupy the site of a proposed nuclear waste repository. From Luise Neumann-Cosel, who occupied the same site two decades later-and who is now leading a citizens' initiative to buy the Berlin electric grid. And from Wendelin Einsiedler, a Bavarian dairy farmer who has helped transform his village into a green dynamo.

All of them said Germany had to get off nuclear power and fossil fuels at the same time. "You can't drive out the devil with Beelzebub," explained Hans-Josef Fell, a prominent Green Party politician. "Both have to go." At the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: "Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That's the difference."

If you ask why antinuclear sentiment has been so much more consequential in Germany than, say, across the Rhine in France, which still gets 75 percent of its electricity from nukes, you end up back at the war. It left Germany a divided country, the front along which two nuclear superpowers faced off. Demonstrators in the 1970s and '80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn't seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.

In 1983 the first Green representatives made it into the Bundestag, the national parliament, and started injecting green ideas into the political mainstream. When the Soviet reactor at Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), one of Germany's two major parties, was converted to the antinuclear cause. Even though Chernobyl was hundreds of miles away, its radioactive cloud passed over Germany, and parents were urged to keep their children inside. It's still not always safe to eat mushrooms or wild boar from the Black Forest, Pesch said. Chernobyl was a watershed.

But it took Fukushima, 25 years later, to convince Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that all nuclear reactors should be switched off by 2022. By then the boom of renewable energy was in full swing. And a law that Hans-Josef Fell had helped create back in 2000 was the main reason.

Fell's house in Hammelburg, the town in northern Bavaria where he was born and raised, is easy to spot among all the pale postwar stucco: It's the one built of dark larch wood, with a grass roof. On the south side, facing the backyard, the grass is partially covered by photovoltaic and solar hot water panels. When there's not enough sun to produce electricity or heat, a cogenerator in the basement burns sunflower or rapeseed oil to produce both. On the March morning when I visited, the wood interior of the house was bathed in sunlight and warmth from the conservatory. In a few weeks, Fell said, wildflowers would be blooming on the roof.

A tall man in jeans and Birkenstocks, with a bald, egg-shaped head and a fringe of gray beard, Fell has moments of sounding like a preacher-but he's no green ascetic. A shed in his backyard, next to the swimming pond, houses a sauna, powered by the same green electricity that powers his house and his car. "The environmental movement's biggest mistake has been to say, 'Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,' " Fell said. "People associate that with a lower quality of life. 'Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity'-that's the message."

From Fell's garden, on a clear day, you used to be able to see the white steam plumes of the nuclear reactor at Grafenrheinfeld. His father, the conservative mayor of Hammelburg, supported nuclear power and the local military base. Young Fell demonstrated at Grafenrheinfeld and went to court to refuse military service. Years later, after his father had retired, Fell was elected to the Hammelburg city council.

It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified-and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a "feed-in tariff." Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.

But Fell, who was installing PV panels on his roof in Hammelburg, realized that the new law would never lead to a countrywide boom: It paid people to produce energy, but not enough. In 1993 he got the city council to pass an ordinance obliging the municipal utility to guarantee any renewable energy producer a price that more than covered costs. Fell promptly organized an association of local investors to build a 15-kilowatt solar power plant-tiny by today's standards, but the association was one of the first of its kind. Now there are hundreds in Germany.

In 1998 Fell rode a Green wave and his success in Hammelburg into the Bundestag. The Greens formed a governing coalition with the SPD. Fell teamed up with Hermann Scheer, a prominent SPD advocate of solar energy, to craft a law that in 2000 took the Hammelburg experiment nationwide and has since been imitated around the world. Its feed-in tariffs were guaranteed for 20 years, and they paid well.

"My basic principle," Fell said, "was the payment had to be so high that investors could make a profit. We live in a market economy, after all. It's logical."

Fell was about the only German I met who claimed not to have been surprised at the boom his logic unleashed. "That it would be possible to this extent-I didn't believe that then," said dairy farmer Wendelin Einsiedler. Outside his sunroom, which overlooks the Alps, nine wind turbines turned lazily on the ridge behind the cow pen. The smell of manure drifted in. Einsiedler had started his personal energiewende in the 1990s with a single turbine and a methane-producing manure fermenter. He and his brother Ignaz, also a dairy farmer, burned the methane in a 28-kilowatt cogenerator, generating heat and electricity for their farms. "There was no question of making money," Einsiedler said. "It was idealism."

But after the renewable energy law took effect in 2000, the Einsiedlers expanded. Today they have five fermenters, which process corn silage as well as manure from eight dairy farms, and they pipe the resulting biogas three miles to the village of Wildpoldsried. There it's burned in cogenerators to heat all the public buildings, an industrial park, and 130 homes. "It's a wonderful principle, and it saves an unbelievable amount of CO₂," said Mayor Arno Zengerle.

The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes. Einsiedler manages the turbines, and he's had little trouble recruiting investors. Thirty people invested in the first one; 94 jumped on the next. "These are their wind turbines," Einsiedler said. Wind turbines are a dramatic and sometimes controversial addition to the German landscape-"asparagification," opponents call it-but when people have a financial stake in the asparagus, Einsiedler said, their attitude changes.

It wasn't hard to persuade farmers and homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs; the feed-in tariff, which paid them 50 cents a kilowatt-hour when it started in 2000, was a good deal. At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year-the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China-which took the boom worldwide.

Fell's law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany's tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. "We've created a completely new situation in 15 years-that's the huge success of the renewable energy law," Fell said.

Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month-a hardship for some, Rosenkranz told me, but not for the average German worker. The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.

In the 2013 elections Fell lost his seat in the Bundestag, a victim of internal Green Party politics. He's back in Hammelburg now, but he doesn't have to look at the steam plumes from Grafenrheinfeld: Last June the reactor became the latest to be switched off. No one, not even the industry, thinks nuclear is coming back in Germany. Coal is another story.

Germany got 44 percent of its electricity from coal last year-18 percent from hard coal, which is mostly imported, and about 26 percent from lignite, or brown coal. The use of hard coal has declined substantially over the past two decades, but not the use of lignite. That's a major reason Germany isn't on track to meet its own greenhouse gas emissions target for 2020.

Germany is the world's leading producer of lignite. It emits even more CO₂ than hard coal, but it's the cheapest fossil fuel-cheaper than hard coal, which is cheaper than natural gas. Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market. Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

"Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal-it's very obvious," said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. "But it's quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite."

Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany's big utilities have been losing money lately-because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.

"The utilities in Germany had one strategy," Flasbarth said, "and that was to defend their track-nuclear plus fossil. They didn't have a strategy B." Having missed the energiewende train as it left the station, they're now chasing it. E.ON is splitting into two companies, one devoted to coal, gas, and nuclear, the other to renewables. The CEO, once a critic of the energiewende, is going with the renewables.

Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned company that's another one of Germany's four big utilities, is attempting a similar evolution. "We're a role model for the energiewende," spokesperson Lutz Wiese said cheerfully as he greeted me at Welzow-Süd-an open-pit mine on the Polish border that produces 22 million tons of lignite a year. In a trench that covers 11 square miles and is more than 300 feet deep, 13 gargantuan digging machines work in synchrony-moving the trench through the landscape, exposing and removing the lignite seam, and dumping the overburden behind them so the land can be replanted. In one recultivated area there's a small experimental vineyard. On the same rebuilt hill stands a memorial to Wolkenberg, a village consumed by the mine in the 1990s. Boulders mark the spots where the church and other buildings once stood.

It was a gorgeous spring day; from Wolkenberg, the only cloud we could see was the lazily billowing steam plume from the 1.6-gigawatt power plant at Schwarze Pumpe, which burns most of the lignite mined at Welzow-Süd. In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall's lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.

"We have to face some kind of a market cleaning," Adermann said. But lignite shouldn't be the one to go, he insisted: It's the "reliable and flexible partner" when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Adermann, who's from the region and worked for its lignite mines before they belonged to Vattenfall, sees them continuing to 2050-and maybe beyond.

Vattenfall, however, plans to sell its lignite business, if it can find a buyer, so it can focus on renewables. It's investing billions of euros in two new offshore wind parks in the North Sea-because there's more wind offshore than on and because a large corporation needs a large project to pay its overhead. "We can't do onshore in Germany," Wiese said. "It's too small."

Vattenfall isn't alone: The renewables boom has moved into the North and Baltic Seas and, increasingly, into the hands of the utilities. Merkel's government has encouraged the shift, capping construction of solar and onshore wind and changing the rules in ways that shut out citizens associations. Last year the amount of new solar fell to around 1.9 gigawatts, a quarter of the 2012 peak. Critics say the government is helping big utilities at the expense of the citizens' movement that launched the energiewende.

At the end of April, Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

In part because it has retained a lot of heavy industry, Germany has some of the highest per capita carbon emissions in western Europe. (They're a bit more than half of U.S. emissions.) Its goal for 2020 is to cut them by 40 percent from 1990 levels. As of last year, it had achieved 27 percent. The European carbon-trading system, in which governments issue tradable emissions permits to polluters, hasn't been much help so far. There are too many permits in circulation, and they're so cheap that industry has little incentive to cut emissions.

Though Germany isn't on track to meet its own goal for 2020, it's ahead of the European Union's schedule. It could have left things there-and many in Merkel's CDU wanted her to do just that. Instead, she and Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel, head of the SPD, reaffirmed their 40 percent commitment last fall.

They haven't proved they can meet it, however. Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants-achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.

It will have to get off gasoline and diesel too. The transportation sector produces about 17 percent of Germany's emissions. Like the utilities, its famous carmakers-Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Audi-were late to the energiewende. But today they're offering more than two dozen models of electric cars. The government's goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn't offered serious incentives to buy them-it hasn't done for transportation what Fell's law did for electricity.

Much the same is true of buildings, whose heating systems emit 30 percent of Germany's greenhouse gases. Rolf Disch in Freiburg is one of many architects who have built houses and buildings that consume almost no net energy or produce a surplus. But Germany is not putting up many new buildings. "The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables," said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. "That's the strategy, but it's not working. A lot is being done, but not enough."

All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though. For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050-the official goal-the rate would need to double at least. Once, Sandrock said, the government floated the idea of requiring homeowners to renovate. The public outcry shot that trial balloon down.

They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them?

"After Fukushima, for a short time there was aufbruchstimmung- for about half a year there was a real euphoria," said Gerd Rosenkranz. Aufbruchstimmung means something like "the joy of departure"; it's what a German feels when he's setting out on a long hike, say, in the company of friends. With all the parties in Germany in agreement, Rosenkranz said, the energiewende felt like that. But the feeling hasn't lasted. Economic interests are clashing now. Some Germans say it might take another catastrophe like Fukushima to catalyze a fresh burst of progress. "The mood is bad," Rosenkranz said.

But here's the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can't transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can't appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects-rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.

In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it's a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.

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Germany Has Some Revolutionary Ideas, and They're Working

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This story appears in the November 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. Hamburg knew the bombs were coming, and so the prisoners of war and forced laborers had just half a year to build the giant flak bunker. By July 1943 it was finished.

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The U.S. solar market grew 76% in 2012.[6] Never before has solar power been this available to American households. What are the reasons why so many homeowners choose to go solar these days? Without further ado, here`s Energy Informative`s top 10 benefits of going solar:

1. Save Thousands of Dollars

According to One Block Off the Grid, adding solar panels to your home can bring in monthly savings of well above $100 in many states. Extend this to two decades, less than the length of a typical solar panel warranty, and this translates to over $30,000. In Hawaii, residents save on average $64,000 the first 20 years!

Are you wondering how much you can save by going solar? Click here to find out.

2. Start Saving from Day 1
Solar purchase power agreements (PPAs) and solar leasing has made it possible for homeowners to go solar for little or no money down.
Many homeowners choose to finance their solar panels with one of the "pay-as-you-go" financing options. This means that a third-party company - the solar provider - owns the solar system and takes care of installation, maintenance, monitoring and repairs. You simply pay the solar provider for electricity - less than you would`ve paid the utility company.

As of June 2013, 75% of all American homes have access to pay-as-you-go solar.

Pay-as-you-go solar is an excellent option for many homeowners. However, we generally recommend that you should pay in cash (through a home equity loan or a second mortgage) if you can. This will bring in more long-term savings. More about this here: Benefits of Owning (vs. Leasing) Solar Panels.

3. Low Payback Period

If you choose to pay in cash, the payback period is in many cases less than ten years. In Hawaii, it takes homeowners on average 5 years before the monthly savings (in terms of lower electricity costs) meets the total costs of the solar system.

4. Increase Your Home Value

Buying a home with solar panels translates into lower electricity costs. Solar panels will increase a home`s attractiveness on the market, similarly to homes with low property taxes, homes in school districts and homes with good Home Energy Ratings (a measurement of a energy efficiency).
A study conducted by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) concluded that homes with solar panels sell 20% faster and for 17% more money.[1]
U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the sales price of the average home increased $17,000 with solar panels.[2]

5. Take Advantage of Incentives

As of 2009, the $2,000 cap on the Federal Solar Tax Credit is lifted. You will get 30% of total system costs back (equipment and installation). This means you would save $7,500 on a solar system worth $25,000. Combine this with state and local rebates, Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), and total costs can be cut in half. Take advantage of incentives while they last.

Data from One Block Off the Grid shows that the average solar home in New Jersey earns between $5,000 and $7,000 by selling their SREC credits every year.

To find out what state and local incentives apply to you (they can vary between ZIP codes), you should signup for free solar guidance.

6. Solar is a Secure Investment

The utility companies are notorious for their fluctuating and unreliable electricity prices. There is clearly an upward trend.

With solar panels and simple math, we can calculate how much electricity will be generated, and most importantly, at what price, for at least the next 20 years (fixed energy costs).

7. Guaranteed Performance

Solar panel manufacturers include a 20- to 25-year warranty (also known as a performance guarantee) with their solar panels. The industry standard guarantees 80% performance after 25 years.

The real lifespan of solar panels is much longer - your solar panels will likely generate a good amount of electricity 30-40 years down the line.

8. Save the Environment

We know that the majority of homeowners choose to go solar because it makes good sense from a financial point of view. That being said, the environmental benefits are also clearly worth mentioning.

The U.S. places second in the world in annual carbon dioxide emissions at 17.9%, right behind China.[3] You can go a long way in lowering your carbon footprint by replacing utility power with clean electricity from solar panels.

The average residential solar system offsets about 100,000 lbs. of carbon dioxide in 20 years - the equivalent of driving a car for 100,000 miles.

9. Create Energy Independence

The U.S. relied on net imports for about 40% of the petroleum (crude oil and petroleum products) that we consumed in 2012.[4]

You can help to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy. We will inevitably run out of oil, coal and natural gas. While we continue our consumption of these increasingly expensive and dangerous energy source, our national security and economy suffers.

Solar is one step in the right direction.

10. Solar is Easy

Shopping for solar used to be a long and complicated process. There are hundreds of solar companies in the U.S. alone.[5] It would take you weeks to find the best solar deal. Luckily things have changed.

To go solar has never before been easier. Our team of independent solar consultants will help you sort through your options. To see how much you can save, and for all other solar questions, request a free consultation. There's no obligation.

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Top 10 Benefits of Going Solar - Energy Informative

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The U.S. solar market grew 76% in 2012.[6] Never before has solar power been this available to American households. What are the reasons why so many homeowners choose to go solar these days? Without further ado, here`s Energy Informative`s top 10 benefits of going solar: 1.

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* Photo: James Day * Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the US-be it oil, gas, wind, or solar-is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.

But this keystone of our 21st-century economy has yet to advance much beyond its 19th-century roots. Considering how wasteful, unresponsive, and just plain dumb the grid is, it isn't surprising that outages-which have been increasing steadily over the past quarter century-cost us $150 billion a year. The real shock is that the damn thing works at all.

Now consider what we will ask the grid to handle in the near future: Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades-more than twice the population growth rate. To meet that need, we will have to generate an additional 214 gigawatts, a feat that would require the construction of more than 357 large coal plants. We also want to plug in dozens, if not hundreds, of gigawatts of wind and solar power harvested from the most remote corners of the country. And we will want to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, without fail.

That is why we must fix the grid-reinvent it to be reliable, efficient, responsive, and smart. Washington is already on the case: President Obama has called a new energy agenda "absolutely critical to our economic future," and his stimulus package directs more than $40 billion toward that goal-the largest single infusion of government capital to the energy sector in US history, more than half of which will go to grid-related projects. In the short term, this bonanza aims simply to create jobs. But in the long term, it lays the groundwork for the grid of the future. (About $400 million will go to fund ARPA-E, a sort of Darpa for energy research.) And this is just the beginning: Congress is considering additional legislation in the hope of remaking our energy infrastructure.

Private enterprise is on board as well. Just take a spin through General Electric's Smart Grid Lab in Niskayuna, New York, which will simulate an entire electric system-complete with the kind of state-of-the-art meters, software, and communication tech that will enable a smarter grid. Or check out Google's new PowerMeter, a Web app designed to give consumers instant information about their energy usage.

But technology alone won't solve this mess, because fixing the grid is not a technology problem-it's a system problem on the broadest scale. Political gridlock, broken markets, and shortsighted planning have created a slew of bottlenecks that can't be solved with a bunch of smart meters and fancy routers.

Here, we show how utilities and businesses have begun to tackle those obstacles-from installing new transmission lines to empowering consumers. If we're serious about remaking our energy infrastructure, we'll need to encourage these kinds of fixes and replace our current system of misplaced incentives. Right now, that system encourages everyone involved-customers, utilities, and private industry-to neglect the grid. We have to give those stakeholders new reasons to turn on, engage, and transform.

Go ahead, blame Edison. He's the guy who invented the business model that got us into this mess. Edison Electric Light, founded in 1880, was a vertically integrated monopoly that controlled everything from generation to distribution. (It even owned the bulbs in customers' homes.) As utilities sprouted across the country, they saw no reason to deviate from Edison's successful blueprint.

For its first century, then, the electricity industry was a simple affair. Most states anointed a single utility to provide all the power to its citizens. These utilities owned the plants that generated the electricity, the transmission lines that carried it to substations, and the wires that distributed it to customers. When more power was needed, they simply built another coal-fired plant and spliced it onto the grid. Rates had to be approved by a public-service commission, but otherwise the utilities were autonomous. (They linked their systems to neighboring grids, but mostly for backup.) Electricity was inexpensive and abundant, and the system's reliability was the envy of the world.

What it wasn't? Efficient. Since the utilities had a captive market and seemingly unlimited access to cheap fossil fuels, they had no incentive to upgrade their leaky old plants. No one complained as long as energy was seen as plentiful and harmless. Then came the fuel crisis of the 1970s, along with the rise of environmentalism. In 1978, Congress began chipping away at the utilities' dominance by forcing them to buy electricity from independent generation companies that met efficiency goals. Fourteen years later, the government went much further, ordering the utilities to open their transmission lines to all comers.

The result was utter chaos. Many utilities got out of the generation business and morphed into middlemen, shopping for the cheapest power-often from areas with low labor costs and lax environmental oversight-and transporting it hundreds, even thousands, of miles to their customers. This meant using the links between grids, which hadn't been designed to accommodate such heavy traffic. The grids of distant states thus became closely intertwined, so that an outage in one rural county could affect millions of far-flung customers.

Though power companies were demanding more from the grid, they had no incentive to upgrade it. Every penny a utility spent on grid improvement would potentially benefit plants owned by rivals. And states that exported cheap energy resisted plans for costly new transmission projects, fearing they would lead to higher in-state rates-and angry voters.

As a consequence, the grid has fallen into disrepair, with few major efforts to fix it. Today, utilities allocate just 2 percent of revenue to research. "For God's sake, we contribute less to R&D than the pet food industry does," says Jeffrey Byron of the California Energy Commission. So the grid remains hobbled by unreliable electromechanical switches and analog controllers. During the early minutes of the Northeast blackout of 2003, the Ohio utility whose damaged hardware started the cascade couldn't even monitor its own wires; employees had to phone a regional overseer and beg for updates. By that time, it was too late.

Regulators, meanwhile, have done a terrible job of mandating grid upgrades. Maybe that's because nobody is really in charge. The industry-run North American Electric Reliability Council appoints eight regional agencies to manage grid standards, but they clash with state agencies, which constantly angle for more authority. Adding to the muddle are the quasi-governmental independent system operators and the regional organizations responsible for ensuring open access to transmission lines. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, created in 1977 to supervise regional and national electricity sales, has proven inept at mediating interstate disputes. This thicket of regulation and competing interests strangles any ambitious initiative. As a result, despite ever-increasing electricity demand, fewer than 700 miles of interstate transmission lines have been built since 2000.

To fix the grid, then, we don't need another layer of oversight. We need to tweak the system so that companies are rewarded-not punished-for investing in the grid. Take the case of Duke Energy. Like most utilities, the North Carolina company is not known for its environmentalism. (It has been accused of flouting the Clean Air Act, for instance.) But in 2006, Duke announced its Utility of the Future initiative. This billion-dollar program is designed to smarten up Duke's portion of the grid by deploying customer meters and network-level gizmos that facilitate speedy, two-way communication. It's exactly the sort of upgrade that will help make the grid stable enough to handle wind turbines and plug-in hybrids.

How did the giant utility come around to embracing the smart grid? Probably not out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The costs of building new generation facilities-and the tumbling prices of plug-and-play gadgets-likely made raising the grid's IQ a more efficient way to improve Duke's long-term prospects. Look at the company's recent push toward IP-based open standards for all its grid hardware. Open standards will help operators communicate with one another regardless of utility-turning the grid into an Internet-like ecosystem rather than a scattered network of proprietary islands. But there may be another reason for Duke to become an evangelist of the approach: Open standards would make it easier for the large utility to gobble up and incorporate smaller rivals, since their systems could be integrated with minimal effort.

Duke isn't the only utility to grasp the financial upside of smart-grid projects. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy is building SmartGridCity, a $100 million effort in Boulder, Colorado, that will allow customers to monitor their electricity consumption via the Web, as well as pump wind and solar energy into the grid. If SmartGridCity is a success, Xcel hopes to persuade public utilities nationwide to invest in similar systems.

This type of investment benefits the grid tremendously and must be encouraged at every turn. According to Roger Anderson at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems, tweaking the grid's communications capabilities can increase transmission efficiency by 50 percent-no additional wires necessary.

Self-interest has a long, noble history of spurring some of America's greatest infrastructure projects. But it must often be nudged along by cleverly crafted government incentives. The transcontinental railroads, for instance, got a crucial boost from a federal land grant program. These grants, often located in barren quarters of the western US, weren't worth much at the time; the railroad companies laid track through the land in hopes of increasing property values. Energy regulators already have some experience creating similarly ingenious carrots. In the early 1980s, states began to realize that utilities wouldn't become more efficient until their revenue was no longer tied directly to the sheer amount of energy produced. So regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.

With similar policies, we can push energy companies to make the grid better for everyone. For example, utilities have not been eager to incorporate renewable power from customers' rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. They would be more likely to do so if they were allowed to hike rates or were given tax breaks for making the necessary accommodations.

The grid took more than a century to grow into the unwieldy beast it is now. Given the urgency of climate change, energy independence, and economic demands, we have only a fraction of that time to fix it. But the solution won't spring forth fully formed. This, the greatest engineering challenge of our era, must be solved the same way it was created-piece by piece, with utilities and consumers acting in their own interests. For too long, those interests have been misaligned. It's time for a reset.

Contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner (brendan_koerner@wired.com) writes Wired*'s Mr. Know-It-All column and blogs at microKhan.com.*

7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now: Generate Electricity Everywhere Deliver Clean Energy to Distant Cities Store Power in Super Batteries Monitor the Electrons in Real Time Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts Make Conservation Simple (and Easy) Taming the Electricity Beast
Could the Electric Grid Support Far More Wind and Solar? Girding Up For the Power Grid

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Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

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Photo: James Day Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid.