Credit: gtm
The problem with experiencing a year of explosive market growth is that it can make subsequent years look soft — which is part of what happened to the U.S. solar market in 2017.
A cumulative 10.6 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics were installed across the U.S. in 2017, according to the newly released U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2017 Year in Review from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). That’s way down from the 15 gigawatts installed in the record-breaking 2016, but it still represents 40 percent growth over the installation total in 2015.
The story doesn’t end there, though. 2017 wasn’t just a year of tempered growth for the U.S. solar industry — it also exposed weaknesses in certain market segments and specific locations, and marked successes in others. Most notably, the residential and utility-scale segments both saw installations fall on an annual basis for the first time since GTM Research and SEIA began publishing the Solar Market Insight report in 2010.
The performance of residential solar was most surprising. Despite a relatively […]
A brownstone in Brooklyn, where Airbnb growth has been particularly strong in recent years. Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
There are two kinds of horror stories about Airbnb. When the home-sharing platform first appeared, the initial cautionary tales tended to emphasize extreme guest (and occasionally host) misbehavior. But as the now decade-old service matured and the number of rental properties proliferated dramatically, a second genre emerged, one that focused on what the service was doing to the larger community: Airbnb was raising rents and taking housing off the rental market. It was supercharging gentrification while discriminating against guests and hosts of color. And as commercial operators took over, it was transforming from a way to help homeowners occasionally rent out an extra room into a purveyor of creepy, makeshift hotels.
Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort […]
‘A majority of Americans want their children taught accurate and comprehensive information about sex.’
Credit: Yui Mok/PA
There is something perfect about the irony of Donald Trump – a man who bragged about the size of his penis during a debate and who is currently being sued by a porn actress – advocating for abstinence-only education. But here we are, in the upside down.
Politico reports that Valerie Huber, a longtime abstinence-only activist turned Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) staffer, will be making decisions about federal family planning funds. Huber, who was suspended from her position at the Ohio Department of Health after a state ethics investigation in 2006, is founder of the National Abstinence Educators Association, which later became Ascend. (The name change was part of a broader move by the abstinence-only movement to seem more credible.)
Esplanade Park in Helsinki. Finland, is the happiest country in the world, according to the newest World Happiness Report. Credit Martti Kainulainen/Lehtikuva/Associated Press
Happy are the people of the Nordic nations — happier, in fact, than anyone else in the world. And the overall happiness of a country is almost identical to the happiness of its immigrants.
Those are the main conclusions of the World Happiness Report 2018, released Wednesday. Finland is the happiest country in the world, it found, followed by Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. Though in a different order, this is the same top 10 as last year, when Norway was No. 1 and Finland was fifth. (emphasis added)
Burundi and Central African Republic, both consumed by political violence, are the least happy countries for the second year in a row. This year, Central African Republic is slightly happier than Burundi; last year, their order was reversed.
As for […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
