Quote:
Originally Posted by nak
Not cheaper than coal (at least not today) is granted. Reliably is another matter. Small scale (a few kW) home solar has no moving parts and all solid state components (aside from the big disconnect switch out by the meter). Failures are most probably caused by bad installs, which means comparable to electrical house fires, which is not a huge issue (though it is non-zero). And your failures take down one house, not all of them. If someobdy has numbers on reliability for this stuff, please post the URL.
They won't. Not at today's prices. The cars are clearly too expensive, even if the fuel is cheaper. Those of us with a few extra dollars and/or a serious view at cutting pollution are the early adopters fueling demand which is needed before any economy of scale will kick in. This changes if fuel prices or coal prices climb.
We all pay for catalytic converters, airbags, and ABS even though all the car companies said they would price cars out of everyone's reach. Solar isn't *that* cheap, yet.
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I agree with your points. The issue in contention is really how do we as a society decide to get our energy going forward... The big thinking right now is the hippie/green/environmentalist 'reduce your energy footprint' concept which personally I do not argee with at all. The truth of the matter is that we should be able to use whatever energy we want or need to, but only do ot in a renewable manner. There is (just in our solar system) a *huge* amount of energy available both from the sun and from the earth's internal radiological processes but we have ignored those options because of the econonomic benefit that fossil fuels have provided for the past 100 years.
So now the issue is how do we really start using our renewable options and the answer in 'in the biggest way possible'. So there is nothing wrong with everyone putting thin film solar on their houses or indeed wherever you can put the stuff but the truth of the matter is that we need to go *big* with these ideas so that we can benefit from economies of scale. One good way to do this is to build large scale solar thermal plants and colocate them next to conventional generating plants wherever possible. The idea is that since conventional plants like coal all use steam turbines its really just a matter of adding an additional steam loop and then using the solar during the day to run the existing turbines and switching to coal at night. honestly the biggest issue and the one we really havent come up with a good answer is how to store up enough solar energy during the day to then use it for our nighttime generation needs. We need to put alot of effort into figuring out what to do about that issue (e.g. ideas like pumping water to a high resevior during the day and then using it to run hydroelectric at night)
Thats the energy part of the problem. then we still have to figure out what to do about our transportation issues (e.g. how to leverage all the extra solar generated power we will one day have and use it to power that 33 mile/day average trip we all make). I just dont see billions of little li-on batteries as being a practical answer.