Anthropocene

The Anthropocene defines Earth's most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans. The word combines the root "anthropo", meaning "human" with the root "-cene", the standard suffix for "epoch" in geologic time. The Anthropocene is distinguished as a new period either after or within the Holocene, the current epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago (about 8000 BC) with the end of the last glacial period.

Solar Power To Become 4th Largest Electric Power Capacity In The World (Passing Up Wind) | CleanTechnica

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis Global Power Industry Outlook, 2018, which posits that solar will surpass wind in global energy capacity starting in 2020, making it the fourth largest source of energy generation behind coal, gas and hydro. Less than a year ago, solar surpassed nuclear energy to reach 5th place.

California is throttling back record levels of solar—and that’s bad news for climate goals | MIT Technology Review

Californians are enjoying a sunny spring, which means the state’s solar farms and rooftop panels are flooding the grid with electricity. The problem is, they’re producing so much that plummeting prices and mandates by the state’s grid operator are forcing renewable power plants to throttle back production. In April, California solar and wind farms shut down or dialed back nearly 95,000 megawatt-hours of electricity, a new record, according to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the vast majority of the state’s electricity. That’s enough to power more than 30 million homes for an hour.