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hunter

(38,328 posts)
9. There's no such thing yet.
Fri Apr 21, 2017, 10:56 AM
Apr 2017

We have solar supplemental to nimble natural gas plants and hydro for the simple reason the sun doesn't shine twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Solar merely delays the fossil fuel reckonings, and not by much.

Anyone who has lived in an off-grid solar home with a battery bank and a small fossil fuel generator will find themselves running the generator more than they expected, and they will very soon learn to loathe batteries. (Batteries are evil and capricious... ) These problems don't go away at scale. Solar must have 100% backup, and in today's economy that's nimble natural gas power plants even before any significant storage is considered. The same is true of wind. Solar and wind won't make any natural gas plants go away, and gas will replace coal with or without solar.

I live in a place where solar is growing rapidly. Schools and businesses are installing solar panels over their parking lots, there are electric cars parked in those lots being charged by the sun, and many of my neighbors already have solar on their roofs, most of them installed with various leasing schemes that may or may not prove beneficial to the homeowner... time will tell.

If we could tag individual electrons at the power plant, most of the electrons flowing through my home would be motivated by natural gas power plants, except for a few state-wide mild weather spring days in California when hydro and nuclear might dominate. For a few hours on sunny days I'm probably getting some power from my neighbor's solar panels, but I doubt our neighborhood is exporting power yet at any time, all that mid-day solar energy going to power refrigerators, freezers, and always-on electronic devices.

I won't begrudge my neighbors their solar panels, I simply believe social innovations are far more important than technology. How do we convince people that relaxed low energy lifestyles and small families are a good thing?

5-10TW within 13 years? kristopher Apr 2017 #1
You're welcome OKIsItJustMe Apr 2017 #3
Peak watts are not energy, never have been, never will be. The operative point is 1% of... NNadir Apr 2017 #2
rate of growth in solar is indisputable ccarrick Apr 2017 #4
Bullshit. First of all, the solar industry doesn't count the cost of redundancies, in... NNadir Apr 2017 #5
You, sir, are full of crap ccarrick Apr 2017 #12
Well, sir, I'm going to go with the measured chemistry of the planetary atmosphere and thousands... NNadir Apr 2017 #13
Talk about projection ccarrick Apr 2017 #14
Nuclear energy for more than 30 years has been the world's largest, by far, source of climate... NNadir Apr 2017 #15
waste ccarrick Apr 2017 #16
zone of death ccarrick Apr 2017 #19
Thought experiment: Let's pretend solar panels are FREE. hunter Apr 2017 #6
Is there a harm in putting solar in place? OKIsItJustMe Apr 2017 #7
Probably. It will be electronic waste in 20 or 30 years, and there will be no infrastructure... NNadir Apr 2017 #8
There's no such thing yet. hunter Apr 2017 #9
Individuals, putting panels on their roofs is not "the answer" OKIsItJustMe Apr 2017 #10
You, for one, don't see anything wrong with throwing trillions of dollars that could be spent... NNadir Apr 2017 #11
yes, but how? ccarrick Apr 2017 #17
Here in the U.S.A. we've already got a robust high capacity distributed energy system. hunter Apr 2017 #18
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