The number of solar industry jobs, now said to be 209 thousand, is widely reported and cited. President Obama included, as during his speech last April, announcing a program to train retiring military and veterans to work in solar.

The source for the number of solar jobs is an annual survey conducted by The Solar Foundation. The findings of the latest survey were published a couple of weeks ago in the "National Solar Jobs Census 2015." 

The Labor Department reported last week the Consumer Price Index, the CPI, for December 2015. 

The CPI for all goods and services increased 0.7 percent during the twelve months through December. That's a low rate of inflation. The CPI for electricity specifically decreased 1.2 percent during the same twelve months. That's a medium rate of deflation.

The public naturally believes that most electric utility costs are variable, if only because utility bills are mainly based on per kilowatt-hour rates. Utilities' fixed costs, for generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, are largely invisible to the average person.

November 2015 new house sales were 4 percent greater than the prior month and 9 percent greater than November 2014. More importantly, from the perspective of the electric utility industry, as well as the natural gas utility industry, new house sales in the South were 5 percent greater than the prior month and 19 percent greater than November 2014.

What happens in the South is crucial to the national numbers on electricity. To show why, look at the regional breakdown of electricity sales.

Coal has always produced the most electricity for the grid, compared to other sources, until a few recent months when coal was temporarily surpassed by natural gas. That's what the panelist said, in a seminar last week about electric utilities.

It's true that coal has led. But hydro ran neck and neck with coal well into the 1930's. And up until 1947, hydro produced over a third of the grid's electricity.

The IEEE Spectrum article posted by Markus Krajewski of the University of Basel, Switzerland, opens like a mystery thriller (posted September 24, 2014). The secret meeting in Geneva 92 years ago still haunts how we light our world today.  

All the major manufacturers of lightbulbs met to split up the world market among them. Soon enough they found a way to accelerate the market's expansion as well:

"In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence."

The epic battle was played out in US District Court, Eastern District South Carolina, Judge Harry Watkins presiding. In this grudge match of 60 years ago, nothing less than the icons of the investor-owned and rural cooperative utilities were at stake.