“The owner [of the Lake Pulaski solar project], multinational conglomerate Enel Green Power, recently clear-cut hundreds of mature hardwood trees to make way for tens of thousands of solar panels later this summer. Angry residents posted dozens of photos of the carnage on the township’s Facebook page, too late to save 11 acres of maple, ash and oak from the chainsaw.”
It’s a given that solar power is unreliable as a source of base load power to meet our daily energy requirements. After all, the sun—at best—shines some of the time. Great River Energy’s experimental solar array in the Twin Cities, for example, operated at 13.6 percent of capacity in 2014. The utility recorded overcast skies a full 70 percent of days, observing clear and sunny conditions just 10 percent of the year.…