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The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change
- josefresco 11y agoRelated: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-coal-000002 http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-c...
- inetsee 11y agoThe article was so optimistic, right up until the sixth section: "The Climate Is Still Screwed".
- disposition2 11y agoLike driving down an endless highway where you can see a huge crash well down the road but you fail to lift your foot off the accelerator.
- frandroid 11y agoThe part that shocked me (and prefaced section 6) is the chart in section 2: these are all _additions_ to the current energy grid. We're still adding so much coal when we should stop building these plants right now. Not to mention the continued development of Canadian tar sands, which falls outside the electricity generation equation but is still part of the global emissions picture.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoThe next few decades are gonna be a great time to say "I told you so." :-/
- merpnderp 11y ago19 years and 6 months with a statistically insignificant temperature trend. UAH 6.0 brings the UAH data inline with the RSS data. As the years go on, catastrophic warming seems less and less likely - or at least so the hard satellite data says. http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
- sitkack 11y agoI have a coral reef to sell you.
- merpnderp 11y agoYou mistake my argument. I don't doubt ocean acidification, rise in ocean levels, or global warming. My point is that the best data we have conflicts with the IPCC consensus of 4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. And there wasn't a single model that showed 2 decades of flat temperatures until the latest IPCC assessment, when it became obvious there were definitely 2 decades of flat temperatures.
- mturmon 11y agoAny few decades would be a great time to say that. You just have to pick the right predictions of yours to say "I told you so" about, and be silent about the incorrect ones.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 11y agoEnergy is fungible at an efficiency loss. If solar gets cheap enough we'll use it, water, and atmospheric CO2 to synthesize hydrocarbons. At that point your boats and planes are net carbon neutral. It's getting carbon-free energy that cheap that's the challenge. EDIT: I hope the OP wasn't getting downvotes. It was a reasonable thing to worry about.
- cmsmith 11y ago1. 3/4 of energy usage is outside the transportation sector. 2. If we switch 3/4 of energy production away from fossil fuels, that will make a huge dent and make renewables even cheaper. 3. Once renewables get cheap enough, it may be cheaper to use a few kWh of solar to produce one kWh of ethanol than it will be to dig 1 kWh of oil out of the ground.
- frandroid 11y ago3. Ethanol or hydrogen?
- Symmetry 11y agoProbably methanol. It's relatively energy efficient and it doesn't boil at room temperature like methane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Production
- oldpond 11y agoHydrogen goes boom, and ethanol is already straining the corn market to the limits. I can't see us turning every square section of arable land into ethanol production.
- seanalltogether 11y agoWell nothing beats the stability and storage density of hydrocarbons, so they will never go away.
- txu 11y ago"The lifetime cost of a photovoltaic solar-power plant will drop by almost half over the next 25 years". Can someone explain how big of an impact this is?
- pjc50 11y agoI'm confused as to whether that means "if you build a plant today, your de-amortized annual running costs will fall" or "in 25 years time, the projected lifetime cost of a solar plant will be half of what it is today". The latter is .. not useful today.
- hyperion2010 11y agoDecentralized solar might work in some places, but we have a long, long way to go before our existing grid can start to make use of it. We still need old school generating capacity (read: nuclear) to serve peak demand. The other reason solar has become so attractive is because the spinup time is so much lower than for other traditional sources.
- durkie 11y agoBatteries (like Tesla's PowerWall) are an increasingly-relevant option for peak loads. I was also under the impression that most peaker plants are likely to be natural gas fired and not nuclear -- as in, easier to build, and less of an investment to recoup if something better/cheaper comes along for peak loads.
- mikro2nd 11y agoExcept that nuclear plants do not serve peak demand in any way, unless by "peak" you mean something other than the electrical supply industry means by that term; nukes are by nature very much baseload generation, taking days and weeks to spin up and synchronise. Pumped storage, gas turbine, large-scale hydro,... those are peak supply generation that can be brought onstream in minutes to hours to meet peak demand.
- hyperion2010 11y agoAnd don't forget the good old diesel generators that are the last line of defence when all other capacity is maxed out.
- mikro2nd 11y agoAs we currently experience to great cost here in South Africa currently, where, due to a decade of neglected maintenance and capacity building brought about by a short-sighted government, rolling blackouts (euphemistically called "load shedding") are the norm, and diesel generation is brought to bear as a poor substitute for baseload capacity, at - as you may imagine - ruinous financial cost. Something in the region of USD400million a month for diesel fuel. Boy, are we in for some price hikes coming up!
- matdrewin 11y agoIt'll be a while before it is cheaper than the hydro-electricity we generate here in Quebec. But yeah, anywhere else it makes sense. Also wonder how cost effective it is in harsh climates where there is less sun.
- fweespeech 11y agoBut it never has to be cheaper than hydro-electric. ;) It just has to be cheaper than pure coal/natural gas/etc. plants.
- matdrewin 11y agoWell I'm not sure about never. I'm sure it's going to happen someday, it's just going to take longer. As for your 2nd comment, I thought I had covered that with: "But yeah, anywhere else it makes sense."
- yxhuvud 11y agoWell, it is never going to be cheaper than existing hydro-electric. It could well be cheaper than installing new capacity.
- cmsmith 11y agoThis article does a pretty good job of synthesizing why I'm fairly optimistic about climate change despite believing the scientific models. I think that there is an austerity/flagellant meme within environmental circles that states that we have sinned against the environment, and unless the solution involves a heroic self-sacrifice (a la Kyoto protocol) then we cannot be saved. In reality, all power is solar power, and innovation and market forces will eventually make it more efficient to skip the fossil-fuel middleman. The process could be accelerated by a carbon tax, but it will happen either way. Responding to the 'Climate is still screwed' point, once we're on track to stabilizing emissions, geo-engineering methods that were dismissed as stopgaps can always be used to hold the climate over for the next century.
- henrikschroder 11y agoAgreed, appealing to people's conscience to buy the more expensive, but more environmentally friendly option doesn't work at scale, because only the upper-middle class can make that choice consistently. Most people cannot afford it, and won't make the choice. But once the most environmentally friendly choice is the cheapest choice, then, as if by magic, everyone will switch. Car pollution too high? Make electric cars cheaper to buy and own,and everyone will switch. Coal power plant pollution too high? Make solar power plants cheaper, and everyone will switch. Meat industry pollutes too much/uses too much water/is unethical? Make synthetic meat cheaper, and everyone will switch.
- VLM 11y agoI would agree with and extend your remarks that humans tend to be slightly more adaptable than they are usually given credit. A century ago it was utterly unthinkable that people would drink milk in any format other than quart glass jars delivered daily to a little airlock on the side of the house. My neighbors ancient brick house still has their milk delivery door! Now a days people get their gallon of antibiotics and growth hormones in plastic gallon jugs that last a week or so. Turned out to not be a big deal. Humans adapt, its just what we do. Can't run a grid at night? Well, then don't. Or more likely a KWh at noon will be a 100th the cost of a KWh at midnight, maybe less. Not being able to run my clothes dryer at 3am sounds a lot like the astroturfers who claim the universe will end if they can't drive their SUV 800 miles daily so no one should be permitted to buy electric cars.
- arca_vorago 11y agoMy main issue is that electricity prices are not going to reflect the reduction in costs to the consumer, and instead, between stagnant companies fighting decentralization via corruption of local politics and big monopolies taking over, electricity will be high as ever. A good example is my local town, where the city council are all bought out, don't even rely on the single electricity provider because they live in a different part of the city, but still keep voting on jacking up prices more and more all while the electrical company that was originally a publicly owned company, (pushed private by our congresscritter), is probably the most hated entity in town for it's shady business practices and constant rate hikes. (For example, last summer they said they underbilled in May, but didn't catch it till June, and then added the new "back-owed" charges at the new rates in July, one of the hottest times of the year, handily raking in tons more money than they would have. No one did a thing because all our politicians are corrupt. Of course this is in one of the most conservative towns in America, where everyone pays jingoistic lip-service to "family values" like "honesty", but when it really comes down to it we're just as bad as the beltway.)
- pakled_engineer 11y agoPublic isn't much better, here in Canada the corrupt kleptocrats running my province clean out the profits of the public hydro corp which disappear into general revenue, so the corp has to increase rates every year as they have no way to save any income, and are increasing filled with more crony management positions with sky high salaries.
- cfsc 11y agoThis article doesn't mention some serious problems that affect power grids reliant on renewable energies: 1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid. In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available. 2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy. 3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels. Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.
- bane 11y agoI think we'll see a companion industry for base-load energy storage following pretty fast. Musk's companies are already in on some of this, but I think it will take more forms than just electro-chemical batteries: for example, kinetic or thermal systems can be scaled up quite large and can provide fairly steady base-load ready power. If this fails, we'll probably still see energy storage taking off in the consumer space as devices are built to simply assume intermittent power...everything will basically have an UPS that will just carry it through to the next time the power is on. We see this already in many places with low development, mobile phones are the preferred access to the internet, personal home generators are common, people keep banks of car batteries around and charged so they can watch the TV or keep the fridge up and running. If we knew our current base-load systems were going away in 50 years, humanity could engineer solution to keep modernity around.
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- badloginagain 11y agoHow do we get power at night? Batteries?
- sp332 11y agoYes. Also we probably use less power at night.
- lspears 11y agoI work at ShaleApps http://shaleapps.com/ http://shaleapps.com/ a Oil and Gas focused start up in West Virginia. Investment in the industry is plummeting because of low oil prices. The price of oil is around $60 a barrel right now, but the oil sands in North Dakota and Canada are only profitable at >$100. Coal is getting killed in the US for regulator reasons, but I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch to natural gas. I think coal will like be seen as the "bridge fuel" by later generations.
- jacquesm 11y ago> I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch to natural gas. Quite a few countries have substantial natural gas reserves.
- lspears 11y agoTrue but with a lack of certainty in demand few companies will invest to extract those reserves.
- baakss 11y agoRight now the efficiency over oil is enormous. At current market price youre getting over 3x the energy per dollar for natural gas, IIRC. Methane is also by definition the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, with the fewest CO2 molecules per energy provided. In the US alone, it's estimated that nat gas has the average household pocketing $800 yearly since the fracking boom. In addition, a geoscientist recently told me it's estimated that we're only extracting about 10% of the natural gas available per well, meaning there's tons more down there. It has serious potential, and at least the US's electric infrastructure is rapidly changing to accommodate it. Anyway, what I'm getting at is maybe we shouldn't count out natural gas.
- tdees40 11y agoMy problem with all of this is that, as renewables get cheaper, people use less fossil fuels. But this drives the price of fossil fuels down. Eventually all you're extracting is the low-hanging fruit that can be pulled out of the ground very cheaply and running tight margins on it. So you have kind of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile most people just assume that fossil fuel prices will increase inexorably. I doubt it. In other words, absent regulation keeping fossil fuel costs high (carbon tax!), I think the shift to renewables will take longer than the optimists think.
- throwaway342526 11y agoOnly for some types of fossil fuels. Saudi light crude costs very little to extract -- a few dollars a barrel -- whereas shale oil has an extraction cost of around $70-$90. You're right in that the Saudis will likely never stop extracting. But there are much larger deposits in the Americas that we quite likely will never develop if solar brings down the price of energy.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoThis is a good thing, in fact lower prices/profits for oil is the only way to keep most of it in the ground. Of course a carbon tax does the same thing, as does removing the tax breaks were still paying to corporations to prospect for yet more oil. One nice feedback loop is that as countries shift to renewables they have more selfish reasons to introduce carbon taxes to try to stick it to other countries while looking progressive.
- netcan 11y agoOil is constantly underestimated. Underestimated hopefully in most cases but underestimated nonetheless. A - Demand for oil is notoriously inelastic. If demand drops a little, a big shift in price will "compensate." If solar starts genuinely digging into oil's market share the oil prices will drop by a lot, fast until almost the same amount of oil gets bought as before. Whatever you are assuming is the "cheaper than oil" flip point, is very likely to be too optimistic. It is likely to just be cheaper than the most expensive marginal 5%. This is inherently speculative because economics and because real marginal costs of oil production are closely guarded secrets, but over the last 50+ years this has usually been correct. This isn't disruptive tech land where the cheaper-worser becomes the cheaper-better and wins total victory. This is substitutable commodity land where prices drop like rocks but total volume produced barely moves. ^Much cheaper power for slightly less carbon is still a good thing, but more on the prosperity front than the climate change front. B - There is a lot of oil down there. Even "dry" wells are usually only slightly drier than they were when we started drilling them. We just got the easy oil out and then stopped. FInding oil really means finding "accessible" oil. Our methods of finding and our methods of accessing are technology too. It's advancing, like solar tech is. This is what "fraking" is. It's a new way of accessing. C - Speaking of fraking… It's only just begun, probably. It's happening in the states because that's where it happens to have been invented. There is no reason to think that it is not equally applicable in Russia, S. America, the Persian Gulf or anywhere else with oil. I like the elegance of solar though, and I hope it succeeds. Decentralization seems like it can take a big part of the residential market. In rich countries, a lot of people can afford it and with between incentives, people's general interest and the real estate value (people like investing in their home), it seems like it will have a good run. In poor and/or dysfunctional places, going off grid is always a favored option. Solar power can do what mobile phone did. Anything that relies on less infrastructure is more suitable for these places. This is an especially attractive idea. Mobile phones/modems mean that phone infrastructure is much easier to come by. Solar + battery could mean the same for electricity. Add in rainwater + home purification systems (progress here too) and all we'll need is hover cars to deal with potholes.
- lukasb 11y agoYou make an excellent argument for a carbon tax.
- netcan 11y agoA question for one of you build-it types. For large scale energy storage, what's wrong with pumping water up high and then making electricity on the way down. IE, make a dam. Make electricity at night. Refill the top part during the day.
- philip238 11y agoSome hydroelectric power plants do that, but storage is finite and it's not amazingly efficient.
- netcan 11y agoIf you already have a dam, why would a day or two's worth of water be troublesome?
- JorgeGT 11y agoLong but interesting read, with actual numbers and math: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
- rgbrenner 11y agoalready exists. It's called pumped storage hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... Here's one (built in 1977.. uses power from the grid), and can produce 3000MW (stores 24000MWH): http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro-pumped-storage-climate-change/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro-pu... Many of them were built to make nuclear plants more efficient.. nuclear plants turbines are most efficient at full power.. so they would store the water during the night (when demand is low) and then use it the next day to handle peak demand. So they were also made to start generating electricity quickly.. the one above takes 5-10minutes.. but there are others that respond within a minute. Much faster than starting a oil-fired generator. These account for the vast majority (90%+) of stored capacity worldwide. There's no reason they couldn't be used to store solar/wind energy.
- gameshot911 11y agoRe: the essentially unavoidable coming climate change - Perhaps it will be the impetus to learn how to control the climate, knowledge which in turn could be applied to making Mars more habitable? Just fanciful pondering, but cool to think about nonetheless (while also recognizing that for that impetus to exist, we're going to go through some rough times climate-wise for a while).
- traviswingo 11y agoWith a combination of solar and energy storage overall consumption and demand can drop dramatically. Intelligent storage systems can curb demand and drastically reduce carbon footprint. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned in the rift about cheap rooftop solar.
- ThePhysicist 11y agoAs others have already pointed out, the article contains a lot of handwaving arguments and seemingly inaccurate claims. So, for anyone interested in a more thorough and quantitative discussion of the problem I highly recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air", which is available for free online: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ It contains detailed discussions of many of the problems that we would face when shifting our energy production to renewable sources and decentralizing it, and he provides a lot of data and calculations to give you a feeling of how to overcome them.
- cossatot 11y agoThis is an excellent book, very well reason, quantitative, and clearheaded. I do wish it was a little less UK focused (I have the same problem with many books that are US focused; it's a world problem and leaving out the BRICs is missing a lot of the story).
- autokad 11y agodoes anyone else have HUGE issues with their chart? it makes it seem like solar provides something like 20% of the world electricity and hydro electric is not even a mention. meanwhile, as far as I know (wikipedia) solar is only 1% of the worlds total electricity and hydro around 16%
- upofadown 11y agoThe first chart is energy capacity additions ... which confused me too...
- autokad 11y agoah, thanks for the clarification. hmm, that seems like a stat cherry picked to suit its narrative
- OrwellianChild 11y agoAdditions are what's called a leading indicator. They are predictive about the direction of change in a system. If there is much more solar added than coal, then the overall make-up of the system will shift towards more solar, less coal overall... It is future-looking.
- StronglyTyped 11y agoThe governments of the world will allow decentralization only to the point where it starts to cut into the tax proceeds of centralized energy. In the U.S., solar isn't going to move to rooftops, it's going to move to panel arrays on large swaths of government-owned land out west where it can still be metered and taxed.
- oldmanjay 11y agoThis is reminiscent of the argument that marijuana could never be legalized because no one could figure out how to tax it. Different angle of attack, I suppose, but just as inapplicable to reality.
- sravfeyn 11y agoThis might be one of the most trivial questions, but I always tried to find the answer, failing always. How is it that Solar energy is 'clean' and 'renewable', (or for that matter, any natural source of energy that plays a significant role on earth ecology), for if we make use of solar energy, will it not break the environmental equilibrium (temperatures, weather patterns etc) thereby making it 'unclean'? I see that using solar energy doesn't create any direct poisonous residue, but what about the unintended indirect effects? Did researchers already prove that there won'e be any effects or that the effects are far less significant than existing energy sources? (I would like to read actual research, apart from opinions/thoughts)
- pjc50 11y agoThe amount of energy extracted, even if we were to go to all-solar, is a small fraction of the incident solar energy.
- ctdonath 11y agoWe used to say the same about CO2 emissions.
- thedufer 11y agoAll renewable energy sources that I can think of are processes that used to be (Energy -> Heat) and we turn them into (Energy -> Electricity -> Heat), where Energy is gravitational potential, EM radiation, etc. The two changes are that the electricity is sometimes stored (so we have some small amount of energy cooped up in batteries instead of out in the world as heat) and that we often move the electricity before turning it into heat. The latter probably exacerbates the heat island effect, although I wouldn't expect it to be worse than pushing electricity from other sources into major cities. The former hardly seems like a problem given that global warming is a concern.
- bwanab 11y agoWhy would you think there's a possible break in environmental equilibrium due to solar energy. They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change. The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted, it will be used to generate electricity. Conservation of energy guarantees this. You asked for research, so here's a link from UCS. While they don't address that particular point, they do point out various potential problems. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-solar-power.html#.VYmIO_lVhHw http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa...
- fapjacks 11y agoHasn't it been on the verge of changing forever forever?
- hngiszmo 11y agoWho else thought the article might be about Skunk Works Fusion Reactor?
- brobdingnagian 11y agoHow can you make projections like "between now and 2040" with a straight face? It makes me instantly lose respect for an article attempting to be serious.
- titzer 11y agoHow to lie with graphs: use a log/log plot. In this article the GDP/capita vs the energy consumed/GDP. I know they did this to cram a lot of data onto one compact space, but it's very misleading. Overall the trend is to the lower right, which sounds great, and it's mostly straight lines. But on a log/log plot, all polynomials are straight lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log%E2%80%93log_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log%E2%80%93log_plot Second, the energy consumed per capita is not _going down_, it's actually still going up--it's just going up slower than GDP. The fact that GDP keeps going up would also seem to be a good thing, but it isn't always, e.g. if the economy is producing superfluous goods that don't actually improve the quality of life, and if life demands ever more services for basic necessities, this is also not a win. The simple fact remains that the total resource consumption per person is still rising. And the population is still rising, too.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y agoFrom the article: > So even as people rise from poverty to middle class faster than ever, BNEF predicts that global electricity consumption will remain relatively flat. In the next 25 years, global demand will grow about 1.8 percent a year, compared with 3 percent a year from 1990 to 2012. In wealthy OECD countries, power demand will actually decline. The doubling time at 1.8% per year is 39 years. This must be some alternate definition of the term 'flat' I was previously unaware of.
- graycat 11y agoOkay, let's consider some of that: First, sure, for the usual renewables, need either storage or transmission lines across continents and/or oceans. So, assume renewables need storage. === Home Batteries? For residential electric power, why have home batteries instead of grid batteries? Likely grid batteries will be cheaper due to economy of scale and also, due to parallelism and better engineering and maintenance, better reliability. === Wholesale Electric Prices We need to keep in mind, for someone in the US paying their local electric utility 12 cents per KWh, that the wholesale price on the grid is surprisingly low. E.g., at http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_markets.cfm http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mark... can see that the wholesale price is often, depending on geographic location and time, ballpark 1-2 cents per KWh. That's a current reference, but as I recall not so many years ago the wholesale price was commonly 0.5 cents per KWh. Lesson: In the US, electric power, the actual power itself, as generated, at the plant, and ready to put on the grid, is surprisingly cheap. So, talking about something cheaper has some challenges. So where does the rest of the 12 cents go? Sure, to running the grid. === Charging for a Grid Connection So, basically, assuming the wholesale price of 2 cents per KWh, for an electric bill of $100 at 12 cents per KWh, (10/12) * 100 = 83.33 dollars are for basically just the grid connection alone. So, if you tell your electric company that you want to use their power only when there is two feet of snow on your roof, then they will have their public utility commission let them tell you that, fine, and now, the good news, your cost of electricity is reduced from 12 cents per KWh to 2 cents per KWh but, the bad news, there is now a flat fee of $83.33 per month for just the grid connection itself. Else, ballpark, the electric company loses money, and the public utility commission doesn't much like that. === Rugged Rooftop Solar Roof-top solar will need to be more reliable than asphalt shingles or will need to be replaced, say, each 10 years due just to wind and weather. Just the labor cost for the replacement will be significant even if the panels are just dirt cheap. If they are cheaper than asphalt shingles -- terrific! Somehow I doubt that rooftop solar panels will be cheaper per square foot than shingles; ask the shingle guys -- I doubt that they are worried! Gotta keep those solar panels in good shape. So, ballpark need a new roof each, maybe, 10 years. === Off the Grid! Suppose want to have no grid connection at all. Four issues: (1) If want electric cars, then need one heck of a slug of electric power and the grid again. Else get to drive for groceries maybe once a month. Look up the arithmetic -- e.g., for charging stations, we're talking megawatts. (2) I'm skeptical that rooftop solar can drive whole house A/C in warm climates. Then, what about the standard summer afternoon thunder storms -- the A/C will be pulling one heck of a load out of the batteries. Uh, a lot of the load on A/C is not to cool the air but just to condense the humidity as the air cools and keep the humidity nicely below 100%. So, even if the thunder storms cool the air, the A/C still has to remove humidity. Sure, a totally sealed up house, no air leaks at all, an air to air heat exchanger, special windows, fantastic insulation, etc. can work wonders (if you are not over a radon source), but only a tiny fraction of houses were built that way. (3) How to heat the house in the winter, say, the snow last winter in Boston? No sunlight to the solar panels for days. So, no electric power even to drive the pump for burning fuel oil. (4) If want electric heat in the winter (and I believe we should hope for that), then will need the grid again, at least when have two feet of snow on the solar panels. Then for the grid, will be back to that $83.33 a month fixed charge for the grid connection. === Cover the US SW So. sure, cover the US SW with solar panels. Also put wind turbines on the Rockies, all over Kansas, etc. Assume all this is for free, both capex and opex. Now, what will the batteries cost? And the conversions between DC and AC? Net, we need to hear about not just cheap solar panels but about a lot of really cheap batteries. Also we're talking paying for those batteries -- capex plus opex -- with ballpark 1 cent per KWh, maybe less, in wholesale electric prices. === Tests To me, the OP fails both the sniff test and the giggle test. === The Hidden Agenda So, what's really going on? I smell carbon taxes and, net, higher electric bills. No thanks. === High Speed Trains Japan has high speed trains. So do the Chinese. So does France. Just get on board and zip to your destination -- clean, modern, quiet, smooth, comfortable, fast, safe. Right? Wouldn't you really like to see lots of high speed trains, a nice grid, connecting all the important US cities? Pride of the US! Great for the US infrastructure! Benefits beyond ability to count! Changes everything! Why have we waited so long? If China can build high speed trains, then surely US engineering can also. Is there something wrong with US engineering; does it need to catch up with China? Do we need to wake up US engineering? Why does the US want to fall behind China? What to do with the carbon taxes? Sure, high speed trains, general revenues, etc. === Cost/Benefit Analysis Of course, there are problems with the US Federal Government building high speed trains: About 100 years ago a lot of people saw that could build big water resource projects and make the desert bloom. So, smart real estate entrepreneurs, buy up some cheap desert land, have the Feds build a big water resource project, make the desert bloom and that land valuable, sell the land, and retire rich, all from the generosity of the US taxpayers. Well, that situation, I didn't actually call it a scam, was the case a few times too often, and then a law was passed about "cost/benefit analysis". Before such a project, had to add up all the costs and all the benefits "to whomsoever they may accrue" and have the benefits bigger than the costs. Presto. Bingo. Right away that little ratio killed off nearly all the Fed funded water resource projects. For high speed trains? In the US, nearly all projects for public transportation of people lose buckets of money and would get a grade of flat F on any reasonable cost/benefit analysis. Indeed, in a course I took, the optimal decision for the Baltimore subway, already built and ready to roll, was just to brick up the entrances and f'get about it because, even counting the capex as $0.00, the project failed cost/benefit just from the opex. States and cities can fund high speed trains, but the Feds can't. === Summary The OP is not about solar panels. Instead it's about something it never mentions -- carbon taxes. Watch your wallet.
- breakyerself 11y agoNot fast enough!