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Well, the critical path is acquiring and installing solar technology. Until THAT becomes affordable, or at least can amortize over a handful of years, then it's kind of a pipe dream.
I'm totally pro-solar. When Winter Storm Nemo struck the east coast, and once again hundreds of thousands were without power and probably heat, my mental reaction was "this is all due to centralized power generation". We have this Soviet-Style power model of big power plants and lots and lots of aboveground wires. As weather becomes more extreme, people better get the lead out and install some independent residential power. Because the power companies are living on borrowed time. They cannot supply continuity of service. Its been a clearly demonstrated fact through one cataclysm after another. Some commentators like to pretend its due to degradation of infrastructure. No it is not. It is due to time passing by a model that just grew and grew to meet ever escalating demands. And now that so much in the economy is totally dependent, the system can only deliver under fairly ideal circumstances. Continuing to build more redundancy into this outmoded system is just doubling down. There needs to be a sustained effort to get as much off the grid as possible. That will address the environmental harm of this model, but it also will reduce the work emergency crews have to do. They are failing time after time, and that's due to the fact that power corporations built something beyond what they can support.
I'm totally pro-solar. When Winter Storm Nemo struck the east coast, and once again hundreds of thousands were without power and probably heat, my mental reaction was "this is all due to centralized power generation". We have this Soviet-Style power model of big power plants and lots and lots of aboveground wires. As weather becomes more extreme, people better get the lead out and install some independent residential power. Because the power companies are living on borrowed time. They cannot supply continuity of service. Its been a clearly demonstrated fact through one cataclysm after another. Some commentators like to pretend its due to degradation of infrastructure. No it is not. It is due to time passing by a model that just grew and grew to meet ever escalating demands. And now that so much in the economy is totally dependent, the system can only deliver under fairly ideal circumstances. Continuing to build more redundancy into this outmoded system is just doubling down. There needs to be a sustained effort to get as much off the grid as possible. That will address the environmental harm of this model, but it also will reduce the work emergency crews have to do. They are failing time after time, and that's due to the fact that power corporations built something beyond what they can support.
Solar panels are susceptible to storm damage too and worse case is they become non functional and non repairable which is worse than some downed power lines. I'm not so sure a distributed system is ideal becsue now you have so many points of failure. That will help prevent sytem wide issues but now you have created multiple local issues.
As far as heat goes if you want guaranteed heat consider a coal if you live in the Northeast or wood burning stove. I have two fireplaces in my house that I rarely use but they are there if I need them. A coal fired cookstove with hot water jacket is in the the future as it's both very functional and looks cool, plus I already have a least winters worth of fuel to fire it from my boiler which becomes useless once I run out gas for the generator as it requires electric.
Subsidies for solar and wind are at the taxpayers’ expense. Once a developer gets them they hook some poor saps with a high dollar PPA meaning utilities agree to purchase clean energy at a significantly higher rate for a set number of years. The clean energy initially costs two to four times as much as conventional electricity, at least in the beginning.
This practice of utilizing federal subsidies and then passing on costs to ratepayers is nothing short of a ripoff. ON top of that no one wants to the dirty side of clean solar.
Yeh, that's right, don't encourage people to get off grid. Leave them on grid where disasters can create millions of dollars of loss, then declare a disaster and pay the millions/billions for each one. By the way, the mineral rights law hand over huge amounts of American assets to companies for pennies. That's such a great deal for the owners which are the citizens of the United States.
Subsidies for solar and wind are at the taxpayers’ expense. Once a developer gets them they hook some poor saps with a high dollar PPA meaning utilities agree to purchase clean energy at a significantly higher rate for a set number of years. The clean energy initially costs two to four times as much as conventional electricity, at least in the beginning.
This practice of utilizing federal subsidies and then passing on costs to ratepayers is nothing short of a ripoff. ON top of that no one wants to the dirty side of clean solar.
A lot of solar is sold on a net metering basis, where the producer gets credit for the retail price of electricity. That may seem high, but in many cases is well less than the cost of replacement power delivered to the load. Keep in mind that solar is produced during the day, often within city load pockets, and doesn't use scarce transmission or distribution resources. If you consider peak power prices, congestion charges and debottlenecking, the price of solar is often way lower than its value. The retail price of electricity for residential customers is a rolled in overall system average that doesn't properly price the commodity.
The sun is the source of every other kind of power. Using its radiant energy is cutting out the middleman. The building of the national highway system is what created the massive industry that now provides most energy. It was supposed to be for "national defense" and has not fulfilled that alleged mission once. But it did create rich families like the Bushes. And dragged us into endless war in the Middle East (making Pentagon budgets another form of subsidy). So all the polemic against the native energy of the sun is one more case of hatred of the future. We can't go back, but a lot of people think somehow we can't go forward, either. They doom all the more reasonable people into being dragged into the future unprepared.
No hydrogen to helium fusion is the least expensive, cleanest, most reliable, most sustainable, least polluting, safest, and simply all around best energy source IF and only IF it is possible to do it and we figure it out.
What for... the fusion generator is safely banked 150 million kM from earth and transmits it's power to us continuously. Problem solved, well except for a storage solution.
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