Large hydro is not considered "renewable" due to the large impacts on the river - you'll see that it's broken out on the CAISO web site which shows current state of the grid and where energy is currently coming from:

California ISO - Today's Outlook

They also have a Renewables Watch page for historical data.

There's quite a bit of wind and solar plants being built right now to accomate the renewable energy mandate in California.

The utilities in the state have until 2020 to increase renewable energy production to 33% of total energy production and they aren't half-way there yet.

Utility companies never do anything except for reasons of profit. They simply felt that it would be more cost effective to mothball the plant rather than to try to fix it. The shareholders agreed - their stock price jumped upon the news hitting the wire.

While SONGS provided an important chunk of power while running (about 1GW) it's only a small fraction of generation capacity in the state. It certainly won't double rates and if the utilties try to pass on any of the cost of mothballing the plant to the rate-payers, you can be sure that the customers will be in an uproar then.

Yep, these are the only drives I'd recommend for enterprise use - or any other use where you want to be sure that losing power will not corrupt the data on the disk thanks to actual power-loss protection.

Intel's pricing with the S3500 places it very competitively in the market - even for desktop/laptop use I would have a hard time not recommending it over other drives unless you don't care about reliability and really need maximum random write performance or really need the lowest cost.

Where are you pulling those numbers from? At least here in the USA, in real life, on the highway at speeds of 60-80 mph, the Prius and Jetta diesel are very similar in fuel economy, despite diesel having a ~20% advantage in energy density per gallon.

While diesels are good for constant speed long-distance travel, they still blow for city use where fuel economy plummets and tailpipe emissions are high.

A hybrid with an atkinson cycle engine will match a diesel in long-distance travel efficiency while providing far superior city fuel economy and emissions. Not to mention that hybrids can easily be converted to a plug-in hybrid either drastically reducing or eliminating gasoline usage for most of your local driving while still being very fuel efficient for long trips.

Exactly. For 800 km/day (500 miles), your typical gas car will need to be fueled anywhere from 1-2 times depending on the car (typical gas cars might go 200-450 miles between fillups). Typical fuel stop might take 15 minutes at best assuming you also need to stop, use the restroom, grab a drink/snack, etc. A Model S with 200 miles range between SuperChargers will also need to be filled 2 times - but you'll need about 90 minutes of charging, or about 60-75 minutes longer than a gas car.

A 500 mile trip, you may travel 70 mph while on the road, so lets say 7 hours of driving. The gas car might take about 7.5 hours including stops at best, a Tesla might take up to 8.5 hours.

Is that extra hour hour or so going to kill that occasional trip? Highly doubtful, but if it is, I suggest that a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt might be a much better fit for that type of use.

Exactly. The dealer model hasn't exactly helped Fisker any - while all the dealers remain, they all want exorbitant amounts of money to do any work on the vehicle. And an independent group has surfaced offering support for the vehicles regardless - but of course, you still have to pay.

Now you have the result of owners having paid thousands more because of the extra middle man - and certainly the extra middle man didn't help Fisker's profitability any, either.

I found in the last two Home Depots I visited the CREE bulbs were not with the rest of the bulbs. They were in their own display in front of one of the rows not far from the rest of the bulbs.

It's crazy - they ought to keep at least a few with the rest of the bulbs because people looking specifically for bulbs expect to find them there, not in a special display designed to catch the eye of people not looking for bulbs.

I just checked Home Depot online and the site says that the Ukiah has 155 of the 9.5W / 60W equivalent Cree LED bulbs, 90 of the 40W equivalent bulbs... So you can just go in and buy one. You can even pay for it online and they'll pick it off the shelf for you and have it ready for you when you get there.

Are we talking about the same CREE LED bulbs?

I bought two of the new CREE bulbs, a 40W and 60W equivalent and the light distribution is very even, though if you look at the bulb it is slightly dim at the top. While I haven't tried the 10.5W Philips bulb you linked to, it looks like it would be darker than normal at the bottom of the bulb.

Now the Philips L-Prize bulb is awesome in performance - even more efficient than the other bulbs mentioned above industry leading CRI and light distribution - but it's even funnier looking at the funny looking Philips bulb you linked to above. The L-Prize bulb initially sold for $35-45 each. The price has been cut to $15 now at Home Depot, but they generally have very low quantities of these now, it's very apparent that the normal looking Cree at a lower price is killing it in sales.

GreenDot MoneyPaks cost $4.99 to purchase. You're much better off funding your PayPal account with an ACH transfer.

The main reason Nukes run as baseload is that the incremental cost of running the plant is very low - fuel costs are negligible in comparison to the value of electricity they generate.

But you are correct in that they aren't generally designed to be able to ramp up/down with load. Natural gas plants are really the only fuel-powered plants that are good at this. Part of that is the design, but also the incremental cost to generate is directly relative to the cost of natural gas which historically has been expensive so one generally does not want to run a gas plant any more than necessary.

I am really horribly surprised that this isn't mentioned more.

Just 4 months ago Wanxiang offered $450M for 80% of A123. Now Wanxiang got it for $260M. A123 lost it's creditors quite a large chunk of money and now Wanxiang gets control of A123 debt free.

http://insideevs.com/wanxiang-takes-control-of-a123-again-as-it-wins-bankruptcy-auction/

A123 has been horribly mismanaged from the start. People have been clamoring for their cells for years - but they wouldn't sell to anyone but OEMs - so many people took to disassembling packs from drills or more recently buying them off the grey market (eBay).

Their batteries are very good, but they have been plagued by bad business decisions and some bad luck (like the big batch of defective cells they sold to Fiskar costing $55M to replace).

I would have rather seen A123 tech been bought by JCI rather than Wanxiang - I can only hope that they are able to sort out A123s problems and finally get their product to market successfully.

I guess you hadn't heard - Better Place is basically done. It may have limited success for fleet applications (like taxis) where a 2 minute battery swap is critical, but for the mass market where no two cars are alike and neither are the battery packs, storing enough packs and the additional complexity of building and running a battery swap stations kill any chance of cost effectiveness.

For the price of one battery swap station, you could install a hundred quick charge stations.