RSSU.S. becomes top wind producer, solar next... - Nice to be #1 at this, good start!
The United States overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.
Even before an expected "Obama bounce" from a new President who has vowed to boost clean energy, U.S. wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts (GW) -- enough to power more than five million homes.
Political and business leaders worldwide have urged "green growth" spending on clean energy to fight both recession and climate change.
German wind power capacity reached nearly 24 GW, placing it second ahead of Spain and fourth-placed China, which doubled its installed wind power for the forth year running, said the Brussels-based Global Wind Energy Council.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the US has been the top wind power producer since its invention.
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per capita numbers would probably show a somewhat different picture.
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US is 27 times larger and four times as populous as Germany :) And US probably consumes a lot more energy than Germany (couldn't find a number). So where does this put us on a relative scale?
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US is 27 times larger and four times as populous as Germany :) And US probably consumes a lot more energy than Germany (couldn't find a number). So where does this put us on a relative scale?
forget all of that, all that matters is that we are #1 in something, no matter how insignificant that may be.
USA! USA! USA!
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According to some figures on Wikipedia, this gives USA a solar rating of 0.08 GW per capita, and German 0.290 GW per capita. Not so much of a leader now.
And yes, America has the highest overall electrical energy consumption - but is 9th globally per capita.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
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This seemed to happen under the evil bush admin.
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Still, even though I agree with you guys I wouldn't seem fair to me to just ignore it; that still means that QUANTITY of electricity is produced by wind instead of something else. Then, if USA is x times bigger than other countries and needs more electricity, fair enough. AND I also guess the country could use less electricity but after all it's another issue, having shitloads of wind energy still sounds like good news for them (yuh I'm french, evil nuclear power user).
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Yeah it seems like a much fairer comparison would be to look at what percentage of the annual power consumption is supplied by wind generated power.
Also the article refers to "wind power capacity" - it doesn't state how much of this power is actually being used (e.g. they may have the capacity to generate 25GW, but they may only able to sell 1GW of that).
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