User:Picklenchips/Evaluate an Article

Article Evaluation for Solar power in California

I have chosen this article to evaluate because it is relevant to my current research topic, increasing the equity of renewable energy in California. Solar power in California is the leading effort in renewable energy, especially distributed among individuals and households, and has a lot of government and private backing behind it. California also leads the U.S. in distributed solar power and renewable energy implementations.

Evaluate the article

Lead Section

• Good first sentence introducing why solar energy is growing rapidly in California.

• Listing the direct capacity for solar isn't as relevant as the percentage of energy generated from solar - this might be too much information.
• how does household solar power compare to large-scale energy grid generation of solar?
• I wish there was more context provided of where California stands in solar adoption in comparison to other states.
• Also wonder what California's budget on solar is
• ADD:
  • California's energy budget per capita - ranked among other states
  • rate of new solar per year?

Content

• The article's content is about half relevant with data up-to-date with data from 2020, and in some cases energy data for 2021. However energy data for 2022 is fully available online and could be incorporated
  • some paragraphs have not been edited since 2012, such as at the bottom of Photovoltaics
  • The images are not up to date at all! There is one map showing all industrial California solar plants from 2012!! A lot has changed in the past decade
• The article does not deal with any equity issues or talk about social factors or even the distribution of solar energy in California. This could be its own header with its own information.
  • There is one random paragraph at the end of History concerning how housing affordability might increase, but this is it.
• I am confused by the purpose of the headers Photovoltaics, Solar Thermal, and Generation. The first two cover the implementation of their respective energy generation projects distinction.
  • Don't need monthly solar generation graphs from 2015 and 2017 in generation section, it looks clunky next to table of solar generation, which needs to be updated and filled in. A(n automatically generated??) graph of the generation table data would be really nice though
  • Photovoltaic and solar thermal should be combined into a heading of history of large solar projects table of new solar projects and generation by solar energy type. The bulleted lists present less information about the history of solar projects in California than a table would.
• The entire heading Government Support has last been updated in 2017. Huge bills have been passed since, such as Senate Bill 100, and many new government programs have been implemented in the past five-six years.
• I would like to see information on the percentage of distributed energy generation

Tone and Balance

The article is definitely neutral.

Sources and References

• much of the data comes from online databases released by government agencies
• many of the sources on innovation in solar power are news articles from reliable news sources, from which the information presented is purely factual, such as recording first-of-their-kind developments
• many policies are cited directly from state-released pdfs
• would love to see more policy papers being analyzed on solar policy and its effects on the energy economy

Organization and writing quality

• The writing is indeed clear and professional
• The article is well-organized to a fault, but I would definitely combine some headings, remove old/non-relevant paragraphs.
• Headings should be:
  • History (how solar energy has developed and proliferated across cali, important govt programs, top projects)
  • Notable Solar Projects (list photovoltaic and heated solar projects over time and historical capacity)
  • Generation (plot actual solar generation of photovoltaic and heated solar)
  • Government Incentives (history of govt subsidies for solar)

Images and Media

• Images are well captioned.
• Need more recent images! (map of solar energy generation projects is from 2012)
• Instead of California Solar PV Capacity by Year, why not a gif of california PV units on a map of california?

Talk page discussion

• The article is related to California, Energy, and Environment / Sustainability.
• There seem to be little discussions in the talk page relevant to the current state of the page.

Overall impressions

• The article is strong in its overview of the history of solar projects and government incentives in California before 2017.
• However, many paragraphs and ideas haven't been touched in a decade. Furthermore, the entire article is structured chronologically from least recent to most recent, which means it's hard to quickly gather the most important aspects of the current state of solar energy in California, which I think should be the first thing the reader should gather.
• This article can be improved in many ways. Restructuring headings for concision, the structure of informational paragraphs, and updating almost every section to most-recent information would all improve the quality of the article.