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Sorry if I am redundant. Some people offer 25 years warranties on these things. They degrade very slowly.

Sorry, I meant silicon vs. thin film. Here's a thing (caution, pdf). The panels, even the newest ones, last a very long time.

On average, buses are far worse than cars for energy efficiency because of the low average load factor.

On what data is this assertion based? I spent a few minutes seeing if such data exist. I could not find data to support your claim that buses are far worse.

I found the following. A bus fuel efficiency is about 5 mpg [1]. That is with fifty-five passengers, which is the maximum capacity and therefore our lower bound. In my county, the average load-factor over all of 2012 was 479 million passenger miles divided by 44 million vehicle miles, or 10 passengers per mile.

Our average fuel consumption over number of passengers then is 50 mpg, which is not far worse than cars for energy efficiency. In 2006, the average mpg of a private vehicle on the road was about 20 mpg. Even with two people in such a vehicle, the average-loaded bus is better.

I did not dig very deeply; I was more trying to find your data and stumbled into data that seems to paint a different picture. It's quite possible that my data paints the wrong picture and you were using much more sound data, but because you did not provide it, I must ask for a citation now.

Which data had you used?

[1] http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy00o...
[2] http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am...
[3] http://www.project.org/info.ph...

Here is an interesting quote from the first report;

Distributed PV contributes less variability to the grid, but it presents a challenge in high-penetration scenarios (in the absence of a smart grid) because of the inability of the utility to curtail its power production, which results in less flexibility for grid operators.

The study even admits it is incomplete

Although reliability challenges increase with increasing levels of variable
renewable generation, this study found those challenges are manageable from the standpoint of the bulk power system for the scenarios studied with the mitigation approaches recommended. Note that this study did not look at the capital costs for the higher renewable energy scenarios or the mitigation strategies. It also did not assess the integration issues at the distribution level of the power systems.

If you read that paper you will see that there are ways to integrate solar into the grid. The issue is that those methods require modifications and equipment to implement. How much will those changes cost? Who should pay for those changes?

The study even points toward the need for more studies;

The insights from the Hawaii Solar Integration Study form a large body of knowledge for future grid integration studies, and the results can be used to further our understanding of grid integration in other island systems as well as in mainland U.S. systems with high regional solar and wind penetrations.

The second article is about connecting three grids and little if anything about the impact of solar on the grid

The last article is a complaint and does not prove anything.
Here is the entire article;

Maui homeowners and photovoltaic system installers are expressing frustration at requirements that they pay for expensive "interconnection studies" before installing solar panels, with no guarantee that their project will be approved after the study is complete.

There is no reference to how much an interconnection study costs. Here is a better explanation about what an interconnection requirements study (IRS) is and what it is necessary in certain instances. An IRS looks into the local grid capacity to handle the input of electricity from the new installation and whether or not local upgrades would be required to accommodate it. Note that an IRS is only required when there is a lot of solar already on the local grid.

Note that the first two articles deal with much higher level grid issues and not local grids.

Look at the current policy from Hawaiian Electric. Notice that IRS's are only required if DML is >250%. They may be required at lower levels depending on the age and capability of the local grid.

I fail to see how any of this supports the statement that interconnect study requirement is unnecessary,

Sorry but posting a few links to article with the words "Hawaii", "grid" and "integration" is not research.

Solar can supply the worlds energy needs several times over, including transport:
Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar

Note: continuing solar pv efficiency gains since 2009 mean that a far smaller area is actually required.

Solar PV Efficiency chart (JPEG Image, 4190 x 2456 pixels)

The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population.

Hello, the 1980s are calling with some information for you. There is more than enough appropriate land for biofuel-from-algae production in the USA to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption, assuming it could all be done with diesels. And since the average age of a vehicle in the fleet is under 20 years even now when it is at literally its all-time highest level, you could feasibly phase in the diesels on a useful time scale without inconveniencing a single driver.

The short form is that you grow algae in inexpensive raceway ponds and use centrifugal separation to get oil out as a diesel feedstock. This can then be fed to a basically traditional fractionation column distiller and made into green diesel, eliminating the gel-point disadvantages normally experienced with biodiesel.

The longer form is that Gevo, a corporation held by GE Energy Ventures and others, would also like to sell us Butanol — a 1:1 replacement for gasoline made by bacteria which reduces emissions and which is made from any organic material — including the left-over algae from the biodiesel process. But Butamax, a company owned by BP and DuPont, holds the rather obvious patent on taking the gene which has been doing this for us for decades and putting it into basically anything else which might hold it, which is the piece needed to make it commercially viable. Yet, they seem to have no interest in actually selling the fuel.

We have the ability to shift to biofuels using technology which is decades old. This report is a dirty and stupid lie, because it completely ignores decades-old technology.

Oh yeah, as an aside, if you put your algae production facilities near coal or oil plants, you can capture up to 80% of their CO2 output in the algae, increasing growth rates and letting you basically use that carbon all over again when you burn the fuel. It's not a solution to the problem of carbon release, but it does mitigate it significantly. Then we can save our oil for making plastics. It's too valuable to burn.

No we could not do that in the very near future.

Yes, yes we could. It's cheap and easy.

Your own old citation proves otherwise. Your citation mentions various open questions moving from lab conditions to field conditions. Swings in desert temperatures were very disruptive, hostile to many species. At best your citation claims they have shown large scale plausibilty. As I said, much work remains.

Wiki shows that more recent government cost estimates approach US$200 a barrel pricing.

No. The fact that the technology is proven does not mean that it is ready to scale up to necessary levels any time soon.

Yes. The test was applicable to large-scale production. If you had read the report then you would know this. I've read the whole thing, how much have you read?

You need to re-read. They claim nothing more than plausibility of large scale production from the olympic sized pool testing. The US military is only now attempting large scale production and anticipates **decades** of work ahead. And the needs of the military are dwarfed by commercial trucking. After basic science comes engineering and engineering takes time.

Maybe someday, but not today.

A perfect summary of the situation regarding algae based biofuels. I'd love to see it happen but for the near future we could move to natural gas or continue to use petroleum.

No we could not do that in the very near future.

Yes, yes we could. It's cheap and easy.

No. The fact that the technology is proven does not mean that it is ready to scale up to necessary levels any time soon.

Yes. The test was applicable to large-scale production. If you had read the report then you would know this. I've read the whole thing, how much have you read?

No, the fracking techniques could be cleaned up.

[citation needed]

Regulations are need to ensure proper shaft creation

There's no such thing.

non-toxic fluids being pumped

So, only water then?

fracking is at proper depths and below proper impermeable layers, etc

There's no such thing, and no such thing.

There is nothing wrong with the fracking concept, its the current implementation that is screwed up.

No, implementation of the idea is screwed up.

An implementation based on low costs not safety.

It's never safe, because the repercussions are never clear, because our remote sensing technology will not tell us everything we need to know to frack intelligently. Maybe someday, but not today.

Citations about what?

Repay time of solar panels can easy be googled.

A random link from it: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04o...

Regarding storage: base load of a typical country is between 40% and 50% of peak load.

You have like 5h every day where you only need base load, the rest is a curve with a plateau from roughly 11:00 to perhaps 19:00 with the "peak".

If the percentage of renewables in your power production is low, the amount you produce at night, is not really worth it to be stored and used at day time.

If you overproduce at daytime, storing it does not help much at night as the base load is so low.

So storing makes only sense if you produce so much, and can store so much, that the overproduction TODAY at daytime can be stored and used TOMORROW at daytime.

Storing starts making sense if you produce more than your night base load (which is, as I mentioned above, ~40% and depending on your country, more! Up to 60% in France e.g.) So e.g. if your base load is 40% but the average production of renewables is already over that, storing the excess makes sense. As you can now use it during daytime. If your production is below base load, what would you store? Only the "random" overproduction by wind.

So bottom line, you need minimum base load% in wind production (which easy over produces) to have something to store at night. And for daytime it is similar but more complicated but in that case you likely want to shift summer solar over production to winter ... which is futile as you never can store so much power. And makes no sense as in winter you get more wind which by far compensates the lack of sun.

NREL disagrees with you on solar. The payback period is anywhere from 1-4 years with current technology.

As for wind turbines, often the payback period is even shorter.

Birds haven't been a huge problem except for Altamont Pass which is a major bird migratory area. The new larger turbines are also much less of a hazard for birds.

Do you know how many solar panels it takes to charge an electric car? You're basically looking at a football field's worth, each.

Ah, to be young and full of made up numbers. Let's do the math.

The large Tesla battery is 85kWh. A solar cell typically has an efficiency of 10-20%, so with about 5kWh/m^2/day of typical solar radiation (check PVWatts for specifics in your town you can produce about 0.5-1kWh/m^2 per day.

If we assume 15% charging losses it will take 100kWh to charge a Tesla battery, which will require 100 to 200 square meters to produce in one day. A football field has about 5300 square meters, so we could expect one football field of tightly packed solar panels to charge around 26 to 53 Tesla's per day.

http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

It's U.S.-centric, but it also includes data for a lot of major non-U.S. cities. Instead of having to guess how much power your solar panels will generate, the site uses latitude and historical weather data to estimate how much your panels will generate. Northern parts of central Europe (like Germany) tends to have pathetic ROI on solar (capacity factor around 0.10). But for lower latitudes in Central Europe you should be able to hit close to 0.15 - about the average for the continental U.S.

A total conversion to biodiesel would require every square foot of land area on the planet given over for oilseed production.

A total conversion to biodiesel would require only a small percentage of our available desert land given over for algae production. We can use seawater pumped inland with thermal solar. The land in which we are interested is low-lying and predominantly unused. The process produces not only biofuel feedstock with high oil content, but also fertilizer and salt. It requires only minimal initial outlay and utilizes technolgies proven by the USDoE (i.e. "with our tax dollars) in the 1980s.

In other words, everything you said which was not a lie was irrelevant.

You can't calculate the numbers taking horus of sunlight between two days and averaging, because cloud cover is a key element as well as latitude. So, once again, you are demonstrating you really don't know what forms the basis for the points you are arguing. Here is a nice picture that clearly shows the relative solar insolance between Germany and the USA. It is based on actual real world data, and is indisputable. These are the data used for solar energy calculations. You don't use 'hours of sunlight" alone because the sun intensity curve differs from region to region based on latitude and cloud cover. The fact that you did not realize that well known critical basis should be enough, but I bet you'll keep spouting stuff based on your anecdotal assumptions rather than proven methods and knowledge. Even the solar fanboys would shake their heads at your argument.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images...

And, even if you could show the average is as high as 3.5 full sun hours/day in Germany, my original point still stands solidly.

Yes, it's a very crude estimate, and more of a summertime number too here in the US.

In the US I would refer them to PV Watts which will take examine a database of historical solar data and tell you how much daily energy to expect through the year for different types of setups, even including solar panel fixed angle or angle tracking systems. But it will not take into account your point on the effect of diffuse light on concentrated systems.

has anything really changed re: tesla on the actual net pollution front?

If nothing has changed, then EVs are still cleaner than gasoline cars by some 40%, so that's still a win.

If we used technology proven by the USDoE at Sandia NREL in the 1980s, we could be capturing CO2 emissions from those plants and using them to grow algae as a biodiesel feedstock — improving yields by as much as 80%. So while EVs are only part of a comprehensive attempt to improve transportation efficiency, they're a completely valid part, provided that we do the other things that we need to do — which we know how to do already. We're simply not doing them, because money.

"probably required as much energy to create"......not even close. The energy payback is about 3 yrs and the PV panels should still be producing at 75% of rated output when they're 20+ years old.

Note that the numbers used in the following doc are from pre-2004. The efficiency of making panels has increased considerably since then.

From http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04o...

Producingelectricity with photovoltaics (PV) emits no pollution, produces no greenhouse gases, and uses no finite fossilfuel resources. The environmental benefits of PV are great.But just as we say that it takes money to make money, it also takes energy to save energy. The term “energy payback”
captures this idea.
How long does a PV system have to operate to recover the energy—and associated generation of pollution and CO2 —that went into making the system,
in the first place?
Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1).
With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that
PV systems generate won’t be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources.

Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth. Indeed, researchers Dones and Frischknecht found that PV-systems fabrication and fossil fuel energy production have similar energy payback periods (including costs for mining, transportation, refining, and
construction).

And yet it works. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... Perhaps this a forest and trees issue for you.

Perhaps you did not notice that it was an NREL study he was citing. Your problem is with the gvnmnt, not him. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r...

The central challenge considered here is do we need a lot of storage for renewable energy and the answer turns out to be no, not much:

"Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.

Increased electric system flexibility, needed to enable electricity supply and demand balance with high levels of renewable generation, can come from a portfolio of supply- and demand-side options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations." http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r...

Clearly, the possibilities considered in your second reference are part of the conclusion that supersedes the claims of your first link regarding storage. Other management strategies can fill in for storage including flexible conventional generation, new transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations. So, storage is not so crucial as some have claimed. It would be nice, and given trends in transportation, likely cheap and abundant, but it is not crucial.

The NREL simulation is for 80% renewables in 2050 so the gas plants should still be around in that. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... There was mention of some ice storage for cooling as new storage as well in the video. The main thing was that not a lot of new storage was needed though.

Perhaps you should look over this NREL study. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... The things you worry about seem pretty well worked out there.

More:
http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r...

http://www.elp.com/articles/20...

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

http://phys.org/news/2011-01-p...

http://theenergycollective.com...

(Lucky me, it is 7.54 here in Albuquerque. Now excuse me while I put on another layer of sunscreen.)

Ever thought about wind turbines are easy to take offline and thermal is not?

I assume you mean taking offline excess capacity when its not needed. Sure taking a wind turbine offline when it's not needed is easy enough, but this significantly lowers the capacity factor of these devices, increases LCOE and prolongs ROI.

You are still not answering about that 60GW

I honestly can't explain it any more simply than that. Look, it really boils down to these questions: if you build enough wind to cover 80% of peak demand, what happens during the days when REs produce 1/10 of their nominal capacity (as does happen - if you don't believe the tons of sources I've provided for this, then you're just a fact denier). Do you build so much capacity that your minimum values are above peak demand (and waste tons of it by not using it when its available)? Or do you build transmission infrastructure capable of carrying 80% of peak demand in from elsewhere (which does not currently exist)? Or do you build shitloads of energy storage (which is expensive as heck)? Or do you build additional traditional backup peaker capacity, which effectively doubles your system cost (before we get to transmission and switching issues)? You have to do one of those. Answering "none of the above" without providing an alternative is not an answer.

instead of lies from "no wind" little shits like you

Keep the hate coming, I love confirmation that you don't have any arguments to respond with.

Modded you up as everything you say is true. Here's some further facts illustrating that without tax breaks/subsidies, Solar is at most a "wash" at best for consumers:

SOLAR FACTS:
- Most Efficient Solar Panel - 44.7% efficient Fraunhofer Q-Cell (1), AVERAGE efficiency between American's top 5 retailers: 17% (Kyocera KD+SunPower+SunPower+SolarWorld+Canadian Solar), which is crap compared to corporate use panels that average 21%.
- Photovoltaic (PV) Degradation Rate - Every Solar panel loses between 0.5% and 4% of its efficiency per year (depending on a-Si, CdTe and CIGS films) further resulting in a constant decline in ones ROI (2)
- Solar pricing is a monopoly: Green Building Programs that offer incentives (http://www.dsireusa.org/) are in decline year-over-year due to reduced cost of panels. (3)

REFERENCES:
1) http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...
2) http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12o...
2) http://energyinformative.org/l...
3) http://www.energymanagertoday....

Diesels cannot, in anyway, be scalably filled with carbon neutral fuel. Biodiesel and it's ilk have all the same problems as ethanol.

False, and also false.

Every licensed installer in my state charges 6-10x the wholesale panel price and will only do a fixed bid install that is about 4x the T+M labor cost.

Citation? Which state? My Anecdote: I walked into the solar place in my town and the first thing they proposed when I laid out my situation was that I do the install myself. About the only labor I couldn't do myself would be the final hookup. They'd provide the plans and instructions.

I'm not seeing any requirements to use a licensed installer here. It might be a state/city requirement.

In effect I can put up the 100 or so pannels to meet my current needs for 30k including skilled labor yet the cheapest installer it looking for 100+ with the government programs taking it back down to 80 meaning they are making 70+k on whats quoted as a 2 day job with a 5 man crew.

100 panels? How much electricity do you use? 25 would cover the average household in the USA(10,837 kWh/year, each panel producing 437 kWh/year, even in the middle of the country). Standard panels today are 250-300 watts each. Even the cheapest pallet of 20 300 watt modules will run you $5,270, or $26,350 in panels alone, without racking or inverters(~$4.5k). Checking other online sites shows similar pricing.

As such, wanting it done for $30k means the workers would be doing it for free. The $70k worth of 'labor' does seem inappropriate.

What does 22GW look like? If all of the collectors and ancillary equipment were in the same place, how many acres would the facility be?

An actual answer:

if you converted all of Central Park in Manhattan to solar it would generate about a GW at Peak. So Germany's 22GW record is roughly equivalent to 22 central parks. Or, approxmiately the size of Manhattan. Or, about 29 sq mi, and you can search google for "what is the size of X" to find your favorite metric.

source, an earlier poster linked to this NREL paper saying that an average solar footprint was 8/MW peak.

According to NREL, it varies but is roughly 8 acres per megawatt for large stations. 22 gigawatts is 22,000 megawatts, so that's about 176,000 acres of land.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13o...

I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term.

I imagine you meant the long term? Or for the short term?

it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor.

We all breathe. Reducing pollution actually means more jobs. Doing things right is harder.

just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks.

Driving on petrofuel is unsustainable. You haven't done anything to change your habits on your own, so now you're being forced.

but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does

Yes there is, and the excuse is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's a good idea to be burning oil as fuel. It's too valuable to burn, and the secondary effects are harmful to our very existence. We have no need to burn it. For example have the technology (and have at least since the 1980s) to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption with biofuels in a way which is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. As ever, I refer you to this DoE report and information on AIWPS, as well as on Butanol.

I'm tired of your the dichotomy between economic development and ending the wasteful, harmful, and completely unnecessary refining and subsequent combustion of oil. By all means, make plastic out of it. It saves an enormous amount of energy as compared to making plastics from other sources, and the plastics can be recycled. You're repeating this logical fallacy solely to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions, and you're only impressing others suffering from the same brand of cognitive dissonance. In fact, it is wholly possible to reduce and perhaps even eliminate harmful emissions, or at least account for them (e.g. by carbon-fixing schemes) such that there is effectively zero negative impact to human health and biosphere persistence, the latter currently being an absolutely irreplaceable requirement for the former. We have numerous (one might even be tempted to say innumerable) solutions which we are not putting into place for political-economic reasons which boil down to protection of profit for a privileged class of self-entitled robber barons.

You mean the same spinning reserve for large changes in demand such as the ad breaks in popular shows as people make a cup of coffee or in case a large power station has a problem and shuts down?

Integration impacts are not exclusive to wind and solar. Nearly all generators can impose costs on the power system or other generators when they are added to the power system.
These impacts are seldom calculated as integration costs and never applied to conventional generators as integration costs.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11o... (page 11)

Currently, most solar cells STILL don't make back their manufacturing costs within the lifetime of the product.

Whoever told you this desperately needs their pants extinguished. If the above statement were ever true, it at least hasn't been so for over two decades, which is as far back as I could find data.

Here's another link from the DOE that shows the worst current-gen rooftop PV estimated payback time at no more than 4 years in the US, with some as low as 1 year. Average estimated life span is 30 years, an order of magnitude greater.

A research paper, this time for Hong Kong, shows an EPBT of 7.1 years with optimum orientation and 20 years with worst possible orientation. Even installed incompetently, they still break even before they break down.

22kWh/day really is your best case scenario.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images...
6.8kWh/(m.day) in Arizona on a tilted plane gives you about 2500kWh/(m.y)
With a performance ratio of 90% for your PV installation, you can get 2250kWh/(kWp.y) of electricity.
With 3.6kWp (see http://www.solarwatt.de/en/pro...), you get 8100kWh/y, which is about 22kWh/day.

But this is only in the sunniest place in the US, with a tilted roof and a very good performance ratio.
You'll get close to 10kWh in Europe and many other places in the US.

I guess the initial costs might be quite a big higher than just getting a pump and a semi-permeable membrane.

It takes an average of 3kwh to desalinate 1 m^3 of water via reverse osmosis. Per this report it's 4-12 kwh of thermal energy to distill 1 m^3, plus 1.5-3.5 kwh of electricity.

If we figure on 10 kwh of thermal and we're setting stuff up so that we're down near 1.5 kwh of electric*, then consult a solar map, we're looking at needing 2-3 m^2 of collector per m^3 of production a day(at 90% or so efficiency), and it only cuts electric costs in half.

That's 264 gallons of water/day, roughly enough for 2.5 people. Household useage, not commercial or industrial.

Please note that these are using near optimal assumptions, I wouldn't be surprised if you need 2-10 times as much collector as what I've estimated.

*Pumping and such.

On 120% being a strawman:
Hawaii solar boom so successful, it's been halted, Dec 20, 2013:

On Oahu, 10 percent of utility customers will have rooftop solar by year-end, Rosegg said. That compares with California, where it is 2 to 3 percent, he said. And demand for new connections for PV has been heavy.
The new edict for Oahu mostly focuses on grid circuits where power available from rooftop solar reaches or exceeds 100 percent of the minimum daytime load, the low point of the total power that customers on a circuit are using.
About one-fourth of circuits on Oahu are at 100 percent, Rosegg said. At the current rate of adoption, Harris said, all electrical circuits controlled by the utility could be closed to small-scale solar within six months.
Changes could include adding grounding transformers or increasing the capacity of a substation, Rosegg said.

Combine the above statements with the power company allowing 120% Daytime Minimum Load(DML) that I found earlier, how long will it be before substations are seeing that 120%? Don't forget that commercial companies can install solar panels as well. I drive by that building fairly frequently, and it's not the only one with solar panels.
Another NREL study on Hawaii's issues, detailing technical information on WHY they're concerned.

Also known as rent seeking behaviour.

Maybe, maybe not. Electrical companies in the USA are generally highly regulated, and in a state like Hawaii said move is going to be both highly visible and unpopular. IE the state government IS going to get involved, so the power company needs to have a good explanation ready.

Let's say an incident kicks the local substation off the grid - what do you think happens?

Right now? Roughly 90% of the area goes dark, despite there being more than enough solar to power the area at the moment. Those that stay lit are the ones with backup generators or (slightly)more expensive inverter systems that aren't dependent upon the 'heartbeat' of the grid and will automatically isolate themselves so they aren't putting power on the grid(which presumably will shortly have line workers on it).

What will happen is that even at the extreme end of the solar ownership graph there are enough people, small businesses etc without their own generating capacity but plenty of fridges, pool pumps etc that the total consumed in that area is still much less than the total generated.

If you read the links, they're only refusing to allow new solar hookups when solar production EXCEEDS minimum local daytime demand, possibly resulting in backfeed past the substation. -
FTA: In neighborhoods where the daytime minimum load(DML) for PV has gone above 100 percent, HECO may require an interconnectivity study and circuit upgrades that could cost a homeowner several thousands of dollars.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory seems to agree that it's a legitimate concern for the power company.

Though it seems that HECO backed off some a couple months ago. They now allow small installations up to 120% of DML.

So, going fairly real-world and given that you're explicitly specifying a 'world-leading' solar install, they'd probably be somewhere around 200% DML, having paid the power company any monies necessary for the modifications(or gotten the company to pay).

At which point, given your scenario they'd be closer to the DML(not running AC is a big one) so theoretically there would be enough power for the area to operate normally if it wasn't for safety regulations.

it will be asking for less than anywhere else but will still be getting quite a bit off the grid and won't be sending anything back.

At 120%+ they will be sending power back at least occasionally.

Thus all locally generated power is used locally which means nearly zero line losses and no conversion up from 110/240V to 11kV or whatever so no losses there either.

True so long as < 20% of the community has solar panels. Thing is, when solar panels become cheaper than utility power there's a strong motivation to install them. Given an ideal area like Hawaii(lots of sunlight and expensive local power), and you can hit that point very quickly. ~450k households, 20% would be 90k. They were installing 3k systems a month for a while.

Household solar is still a tiny proportion of generating capacity and even if it reaches saturation the electricity consumption of local retail, light industry etc is going to take all excess and ask for many times more in just about every situation.

The problem with this is that the moment you assume that retail and light industry will 'take up the slack' because solar homes are generating excess power you're back to needing transformers, switches, and transmission lines designed for bidirectional power transfer.

Commercial power users also tend to pay less

It turns out that natural gas and renewable energy are making a lot of nuclear plants uneconomic. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R... This situation is bound to accelerate as renewable energy gets even cheaper as projected. (see appendix B) http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy10o... So, it is time to fully fund decommissioning before that happens over the next seven to twelve years.

And that point will be reached when all emissions are accounted for. There's no good reason why that can't be the case, heat aside. And even heat emissions should be managed.

Please inform me of how you intent to break several laws of physics. It is impossible to make a power station without having a heat sink and dumping the heat somewhere.

Please inform me if you intend to study English. Your intent is unclear.

I never said it must be eliminated, I said it must be managed. It is not generally a significant concern in any case, so far as we know. But there's no reason to simply ignore it.

Using solar power is a nifty way to have the heating go on elsewhere, yet still "somewhere". Ye olde solar power satellite concept rears its head again.

If you are thinking about carbon capture- don't.

If you are thinking about issuing me any more ignorant imperatives- blow them our your arse.

Nobody has proved it on a large scale. The largest projects I have heard of divert a tiny (~1-5) percentage of the exhaust gas from a test (small) power station.

Hello, the USDoE is calling you from the 1980s. You are woefully underinformed at best.

Likewise, capturing ALL the emissions would require more energy than the power station creates!

I'm happy if all the emissions are simply accounted for. For example, via carbon fixing schemes, like tree planting.

Carbon capture carries a huge parasitic loss, an inefficiency which if applied on a large scale would wastefully use up even more fossil fuels.

If you read the report I linked above, which has been around for quite some time now and cited all over teh interwebs and read by every person genuinely interested in this sort of thing and not just in it for the trollz, you will see that it actually helps produce fossil fuel substitutes. But I understand that you simply think you know what's best for me, and would like me to get on board.

In summary, get a dictionary and blow me.

study

It is quite difficult to figure out the true cost of energy, and subsidies are only part of the problem. Consider the cost of building a coal power-plant. It will be used for 50 years. So... what's the price of coal in 50 years? Not so easy.

Engineers, town planers, investors, and other technocrats follow levelized cost of energy, which attempts to find the fundemental cost of a particular energy source.

Wind is cheaper without subsidies -- and part of what makes it cheap is that you only need to price in spare parts and maintenance teams for 20-odd years.

... if there was ANY possible real benefit to a giant solar plant, the USA would be there first. When the usual suspects have no interest in this form of engineering, you can take it for granted that it is junk science.

The US is behind the world in a number of areas, high-speed internet being the first that comes to mind. That said, the US has multiple large solar power plants, including, but not limited to, Avenal, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada Solar One, Ivanpah, Solana, and multiple SEGS. There are multiple ones under construction, and many more planned. Most are thermal, not PV, and they are not as large as the proposed one, but solar plants make a great deal of sense in the right location (say, Arizona or Nevada or CA desert). It's also hard to get approval for exceptionally large projects in the US, it turns out to be easier (environmentally, financially, etc.) to make large projects. You can see a list of concentrating thermal plants here.

so, your argument that the US would be doing it if it was of any possible real benefit doesn't work.

Wishful thinking.

The only places that get 5 hours peek equivalent are the desert southwest. http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/ol...

More typical is 3. Which x .6 (the large factor you ignored) gets you back to 360Wh/day. Combine that with more realistic roof design and you are still overestimating.

Meanwhile, in reality, you ignored the following tiny caveats:
* the average price of a 16kW solar PV rig will be around $72480
* 1/10 of that will buy you around 1812 gallons of gas (at $4/gallon)
* a good, fuel-efficient gasoline car with around 50 mpg will drive approximately 90600 miles on that
* at the average of 15000 miles driven per year this will last you around 6 years
* 72 months is easily above the average amount of time that owners hold on to cars (somewhere around 60 months)
Oh and lest we forget, during the day, when your solar rig is producing the most power, is also when you're most like to be out with your car, i.e. not charging it. This effect will be least problematic during the summer (longest day, lowest energy consumption by car), and most problematic during the winter (highest energy consumption by car, and a day most probably too short to get any sunlight on the panels while the car's in the driveway).

The key here is the question specifically about *solar* power. When you look at the sum total amount of energy we consume, I think you'll find that you'd have to blanket a pretty significant portion of the usable surface of the earth with panels to provide all of it, if you went strictly solar.

Yes you would.

Fortunately, we already blanket a pretty significant portion of the earth with buildings, roads and parking lots. Put solar on all the buildings and cover the parking lots and you are well over half of the way there.

Here is the NREL report on this subject.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04o...

NREL states we would need 00.4% of all the land in the USA to go 100% solar electric. The report uses existing PV efficiencies. By the time we could possibly be near something like 100%, efficiencies will be higher and that land requirement will be down to something like 00.35% or lower.

and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.

That seems unlikely. The future is never as bleak as some would have you believe.
There have been a number of developments of late that suggest real progress is being made:

http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/cellulosic-ethanol-heads-for-cost-competitiveness-by-2016/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/04/same-moonshine-different-name-welcome-to-the-age-of-cellulosic-ethanol/

Somewhat dated:
http://www.nrel.gov/continuum/sustainable_transportation/cellulosic_ethanol.cfm

However, its still ethanol.
It may be wiser to take a look at other fuel stretchers as well.
Butanol is being looked at because it is less corrosive and also higher energy density than ethanol, almost approaching that of gasoline. (Exhaust smells like bananas).

Butanol trumps ethanol in several ways: Adding ethanol to gasoline reduces fuel mileage, but butanol packs almost as much energy as gas, meaning fewer fill-ups. Butanol also doesn't damage car engines like ethanol, so more of it can be blended into gas. And because butanol doesn't separate from gasoline in the presence of water, it can be blended right at the refinery, while ethanol has to be shipped separately from gas and blended closer to the filling station.

Even Zebra poop is helping, it yields a particular strain of Clostridium bacteria that can convert nearly any form of cellulose into butanol very efficiently.

Burned by itself, (B100) you might have a 10% mileage penalty. Mixed with gas it might not even impose any significant mileage penalty.
Its been found that the mileage penalty does not exactly vary in lock-step with energy density. (Theoretically ethanol should only see a 2 to 3% mileage penalty, but some claim 10%, especially on older vehicles). But to date, no one has done significant real world testing on Butanol + Gas blends.

Some links to Butanol stories:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/12/the-fuel-that-could-be-the-end-of-ethanol/
http://farmindustrynews.com/blog/bio-butanol-can-be-produced-about-same-cost-ethanol-optinol-reports
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2013/april/cost-saving-measure-to-upgrade-ethanol-to-butanol-a-better-alternative-to-gasoline.html

That means that to provide 100% of the power the US generates in a year (which was 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity in 2012), you'd need about 18,000 square miles of solar panels.

Per http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2013/2269.html there are ~691 000 square miles of cropland in the US. 18 000 square miles fit inside that 38 times over.

The short answer is that to provide all our power needs from solar, assuming we could actually get full use from the panels, which you can't, you'd use about 50% of the total land area on Earth that we currently use for crops, to hold all the panels. (I don't know about you, but I'd rather grow more food)

So basically, this is just not true. It's FUD. Get your facts straight before accusing others of being blind.

Try that link, it is embedded in the second link I provided above

In short, what it says is this:

A large fixed tilt photovoltaic (PV) plant that generates 1 gigawatt-hour per year requires, on average, 2.8 acres for the solar panels.

That means that to provide 100% of the power the US generates in a year (which was 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity in 2012), you'd need about 18,000 square miles of solar panels.

Except, of course, the power would not be produced evenly or when it was needed for demand, so either you figure out how to build some very, very large batteries, or you need another power source to backup the solar.

I am not against solar, but the blind faith that I see from "pro solar" people just amazes me. Give it a critical eye, it isn't bad, but it isn't as good as the proponents would have you believe.

We can install a dozen large new solar power plants every year for 10 years, it isn't going to make a dent in the overall power picture.

There are a lot of aging, crappy nuclear plants because politicians chicken out the minute people like you embrace FUD

How do you figure? The way I see it is that there are a lot of crappy nuclear plants out there because our ancestors were short-sighted enough to build them. And now the task of cleaning up the mess, which was never factored into the cost of the electricity they generated, is left to us. I'm happy France is exporting something besides their delicious wine and cheese and noxious sentimentality, but I expect their waste will end up somewhere that is not France.

And, well, there is the usual FUD which "people like me" embrace. It's a self-evident fact that nuclear power has associated risks and that history has shown that these risks occasionally result in catastrophe. I'm no actuary so I can't put odds to it, but there are certain similarities between SoCal and Fukushima: old coastal powerplant with creaky design, on a fault line, etc. I'd rather pay a little extra for my energy so I don't have to die of radiation sickness or see my property rendered worthless by a disaster that could have been easily averted.

But the math on this one isn't even close...The sun just ain't hot enough for long enough.

What math are you referring to (your article is TL;DR)? Do you mean the math that shows a rapid decline in the cost of PV systems and a dramatic increase in installations of 60% globally? Or the The math Steve Chu used to predict that renewable energy will be cost-competitive within 10 years? As for the second statement, the current insolation of the earth at the ground is about 7 times total power consumption -- to say nothing of wind or tidal power.

You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I certainly think you're a knee jerk partisan (and pessimist) relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I personally would support spending on research on thorium reactors. I'd much prefer fusion (not likely very soon and already pretty well funded) and would pref