Situation Report

East Avenue Church Shelter in Chico, California, where norovirus has spread and makeshift quarantine barriers have been erected.  Photo: Cayce Clifford

Even people nearly 200 miles from the flames are suffering the consequences of the massive Camp fire.

huffingtonpost.com - by Antonia Blumberg and Lydia O’Connor - November 16, 2018

Skies so hazy that the Golden Gate Bridge looks like a shadow of itself. A fire so devastating that hundreds of people remain unaccounted for. Air so polluted that people without safety masks are trapped inside. A quarantine set up by the National Guard to limit the spread of a dangerous virus.

This is not the climactic scene of an apocalyptic horror movie, set far in the future. This is California in 2018.

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Entire Town Destroyed by Wildfire, People Literally Ran from Flames In Paradise, CA, thousands of structures are destroyed and an entire town is devastated after a the Camp Fire exploded in size on Thursday.

weather.com - by Pam Wright - November 9, 2018

Fast-moving wildfires prompted tens of thousands of evacuations in both Northern and Southern California, including 75,000 in and around Los Angeles, sending residents fleeing for their lives on short notice.

The largest inferno, sparked Thursday morning in Northern California, prompted numerous evacuations, including several entire towns. The Butte County Sheriff's Office told the Associated Press that a mandatory evacuation order was issued for the entire town of Paradise, which is home to about 27,000 people and is north of Sacramento.

"Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed, it's that kind of devastation," said Cal Fire Capt. Scott McLean late Thursday. "The wind that was predicted came and just wiped it out."

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New solar flow battery with a 14.1 percent efficiency. Photo: David Tenenbaum, UW-Madison

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Chem - 14.1% Efficient Monolithically Integrated Solar Flow Battery

theverge.com - by Angela Chen - September 27, 2018

Solar energy is becoming more and more popular as prices drop, yet a home powered by the Sun isn’t free from the grid because solar panels don’t store energy for later. Now, researchers have refined a device that can both harvest and store solar energy, and they hope it will one day bring electricity to rural and underdeveloped areas.

The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways.

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Solar installers could make a better business case for panels bundled with heat pumps and other electric devices that offset natural-gas use, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Here, Luminalt solar installer Pam Quan moves a solar panel during an installation on the roof of a home on May 9, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

CLICK HERE - REPORT - Rocky Mountain Institute - The Economics of Electrifying Buildings

forbes.com - by Jeff McMahon - September 2, 2018

Solar installers could offer rooftop customers even more savings by bundling solar panels with heat pumps and other electric appliances, according to a recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute.

RMI studied the carbon benefits and financial costs  of electrification of home heating in four U.S. cities. The carbon reductions were pronounced in three of the four. The financial costs were harder to overcome—unless the electricity comes not from the grid, but from the rooftop.