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You negative posters apparently do not know that the goal is not to totally end the use of coal, gas and oil...The goal is to reduce global carbon emissions enough so that the natural carbon cycle in not overwhelmed....Since the beginning of human civilization, our atmosphere has contained about 275 ppm of carbon dioxide, and now it's over 400 ppm.
I see fuel supply as the bigger issue. Look at the damage of strip mining coal, fracking... Energy supplies are all about only hundreds of years out, not indefinite.
5 years ago, this would have completely wiped out the solar industry for good, but nowadays, with the price per watt in several areas having gone down to below $3.00 a watt, solar power will still continue to grow, especially in places like Hawaii and California where solar power has basically reached grid parity.
This will put an end to residential solar leasing schemes, so I bet SolarCity et al are lobbying the hell out of people in Congress right now to keep their business model viable.
Yeah, but huge chunks of Appalachia are forever ruined and polluted beyond belief. Harvard did a study which showed that when you account for all the associated costs of coal, it has always been one of the most expensive sources of power. The coal companies used their workers up, spit them out and then left them and their many health concerns winding up on the public dole. Privatizing the profits, socializing the risks.
The tax credit for business's will drop from 30% to 10% and residential installations will drop from 30% to 0%. Without those subsidies the industry is toast.
Even if the tax credit were to drop, the solar industry is not the same thing as the rooftop solar panel industry.
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Originally Posted by RegalSin
It was inevitable. most citizens are too broke and too stupid to invest in Solar products. I want some Solar stuff right now but I am too broke for it. Everybody should have solar panels on there roofs.
A roof needs to be large enough for solar to be economically beneficial. Small roofs, with current technology, don't generate enough power to justify the costs.
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Originally Posted by shooting4life
If you really wanted clean power you would promote nuclear. it is clean, cheap and safe.
Investing in solar only made sense because the government was voting so much of the bill. The savings just don't pan out for the majority of homes, especially when the government subsidies stop.
Nuclear has two big problems: 1) the consequences of catastrophic failure, and 2) long-term storage of the waste.
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Originally Posted by arleigh
Glad I got into solar and wind long before it became fashionable.
My solar is a battery system so I don't need the grid ,but i'm still connected. I got into a battery system long before I got into solar, simply because the Grid was unreliable . a lightening strike during a summer storm and the grid was down ,a wet snow fall during the winter and the grid was down.
When the power came back up, there were spikes and brown outs, and the power company was not responsible for damage .
To protect our computer and other sensitive electronics I bought gel cell batteries and an inverter, and used my battery charger for the car to maintain the system.
As I could afford solar cells ,they supplemented the battery charger as well as the wind mill .
I do not depend on one source alone but employ all of them as required and it keeps my electric bills reasonable, seeing there are things my system cannot run.
You do need the grid if there are things your energy system can't run.
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Originally Posted by lvoc
Yes and no. Still have the problem of trapped capital that has to be paid for and the need to have power at night. But actually the die is cast and we will probably end up with all daytime power from solar in 15 years or less. Then we have the storage problem which probably gets solved in less than 50 years... Hydrogen? A workable utility battery? Maybe they will get fusion to work in the end.
Managing the changeover will be most interesting as the utilities try to recover their capital. Get particularly interesting if the storage problem yields.
I would think nuclear is dead short of some new and revolutionary breakthrough. Capital cost is just to high. Even thermal solar is cheaper.
I think the risk (and resulting politics) are what put solar in a tough spot.
As the article mentions, there are two problems: first you risk generating too much daytime energy (which is a problem because that energy needs somewhere to go on the grid--it doesn't just disappear), and second you risk the lack of evening/nighttime generation. 50 years is too slow for a solution.
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Originally Posted by sanspeur
It's already been solved.... Powerwall offers independence from the utility grid and the security of an emergency backup. Tesla Powerwall
An average household uses about 30 kwh a day. They would need to 1) generate, and 2) store that energy, all while dealing with reliability, interruption, and resilience issues in order to go off the grid. So say you buy generating assets (solar panels, wind turbines, and a diesel backup generator, maybe?), 4 Powerwalls (because your solar panels are only producing up to maybe 5 hours a day, and there will be cloudy days where their generation does not approach your daily power usage--actually, 4 is probably an underestimate of what you would need for reliable power), a power inverter, and installation/maintenance costs. Let's call the total cost something in the neighborhood of $40k ($15k on powerwalls, another $15k for solar, $10k for installation, inverter, backup, maintenance). YMMV, but that would cover around 50 years of my grid bills. I'm guessing those Powerwalls aren't going to last 50 years. Your emergency backup is going to be much less resilient, secure, and reliable than the electric company's.
Some people will still want to do it, sure, but for most people, this is not an off-the-grid product, but rather a way to reduce electricity bills if you have high usage and (especially) time of use pricing from your utility.
If you really wanted clean power you would promote nuclear. it is clean, cheap and safe.
Investing in solar only made sense because the government was voting so much of the bill. The savings just don't pan out for the majority of homes, especially when the government subsidies stop.
Ahem to that, Solar has no base load, when there no sun there no power. Nuclear is a nice stable safe reliable power source. Unfortunately Gas is kicking Nuclear butt right now, cheap natural gas is making nuclear power pretty unattractive right now. Eventually gas will run out and Nuclear will come back in fashion again, but it takes a long time to build nuclear power plants, so there may be a couple of years where electric rates are sky high.
Eventually gas will run out and Nuclear will come back in fashion again,
The estimated amount gas is enormous, they are giving figures for a century and that is assuming no technological improvements.
The fossil fuel resources in this country are enormous, so enormous that the supply will never run out before some other tech can viably replace them. Greenpeace will have to build a space ship to protest mining on the moon.
Resch laid out an eye-opening scenario if the solar ITC expires: “The reality is that we will lose 100,000 jobs if we lose the ITC — and these are conservative numbers. Ninety percent of solar companies will go out of business.”
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
Why on earth would the Dutch need to build a 1.4 gig coal power plant with all those wind mills there?
Here is why:
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Both German and Dutch governments are in support of the thermal power project, since Germany intends to end nuclear power production by 2020, and the Netherlands will struggle owing to a decline in natural gas resources.
According to RWE's Dutch subsidiary Essent, coal is a relatively cheaper fuel for power generation and can be derived in large quantities from politically stable countries.
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