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What you will also find there is that nuclear costs less in materials consumed

That must be why the EPR in UK will cost less than half as much as recent German solar... Oh, wait, it's the other way round? Never mind...

China has already installed over 165 GW (equiv to about 200 or NG plants), 40 of which was installed this year. The original target was 105GW, which they blew past and now are considering a 210-270 GW target by 2020. Also, due to gov. incentives, China has the largest EV market in the world, with over 1 million sold to date and they're just maturing. Shenzhen, with 13 million people, runs 100% electric buses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/20...

The narrative that China and India are polluting to gain economic advantage is just RW radio garbage. They realize that fossil fuels are a dead end and the country with the most advancements in growing renewable energy market will prosper. We should be leading, but instead we're falling further behind and ceding the lead to China.

Trump has no agenda - any fool can see. He only cares about his "ratings" and "brand" (his words). He just regurgitates whatever Fox News, Hannity, and Limbaugh say, which reinforces what that audience saw on TV or heard on the radio. Just as Pruitt set out to destroy the EPA and hand it over to the regulated, this administration has sold the government to the highest bidder. Many of those companies that lobbied for tax cuts used those profits to buy back stocks, pay executives bonuses, then they continued to lay off and outsource workers. https://www.theguardian.com/us... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

In fact, photovotaic solar, is the absolute highest priced option out there.

That "highest price" is getting pretty low these days.

Considering I originally cited economists on the issue explicitly backing the view up, you'd think you might recognize that the numbers have been run.

Quick googling....
Cost of rooftop solar according to a biased supporter of it: $3.36/watt
Cost of utility solar from an industry magazine: $1/watt

So yeah, utility solar is about 3.36 time as efficient as residential solar. These costs include land costs or lack of land costs for both situations. Also, CA has vast expanses of cheap open desert currently not used at all and suitable for utility solar (I was a teenager living in the CA desert, very familiar with the area). You can even put them in a neighboring state and pipe the energy into the State if you want.

http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...
http://www.aquionenergy.com/pr...
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...
http://www.treehugger.com/clea...

And those are just a handful of the top hits that came up when I did a search. Future technology development will certainly bring the cost down further, but we're completely capable of doing it even with current tech.

As long as it get launched into space, where the sunlight is 24/7. Otherwise, come up with a storage system for the 75% of the time ground-based solar won't work as a sole source, or piss off.

LOL. The clueless is telling the experts to piss off.

I'm telling an AC that, smart ass. I tell it to everyone who advocates Solar over nuclear. Solar Power Satellites would be a fantastic thing to build, and they would not have to remain geostationary, they could always be in sunlight, with only the downlink stations being geostationary, or relatively so.

Solar on the ground has two problems:

(1) Government subsidies which make it economical compared to grid power are being phased out; this leaves large thermal-electric solar generation stations like the one Apple is building (based on a "Solar One" style boiler design), and other large generation facilities as being economically viable long term

(2) There's a massive shortage, both politically, and in reality, for the solar-grade silicon (polysilicon) used to manufacture higher efficiency photovoltaic cells. If you don't believe that:

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM)announced duties of between 2.4% and 57% on solar grade polysilicon from the U.S. and South Korea, following on the heels of a similar set of duties imposed on the EU:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...

This is expected to lead to a 2007-style feedstock shortage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Warning from GCL Leads to Polysilicon Shortage
http://pv.energytrend.com/pric...
(While this one is not current, it's an indicator that financial markets make this an extremely volatile commodity)

DumpWatch: Silicon Tariffs Will Change the US Solar Industry in 2015
https://agmetalminer.com/2014/...

By contrast solar cells for use in space can use lower grade materials and still achieve higher efficiencies than in-atmosphere photovoltaic cells, even after we consider microwave transmission losses from orbit to rectilinear ground antenna arrays which are unnecessarily spread out in order to keep the Sierra Club from having kittens.

And yes, we should be building more nuclear plants, for desalination in California, if nothing else.

As long as it get launched into space, where the sunlight is 24/7. Otherwise, come up with a storage system for the 75% of the time ground-based solar won't work as a sole source, or piss off.

LOL. The clueless is telling the experts to piss off.

I'm telling an AC that, smart ass. I tell it to everyone who advocates Solar over nuclear. Solar Power Satellites would be a fantastic thing to build, and they would not have to remain geostationary, they could always be in sunlight, with only the downlink stations being geostationary, or relatively so.

Solar on the ground has two problems:

(1) Government subsidies which make it economical compared to grid power are being phased out; this leaves large thermal-electric solar generation stations like the one Apple is building (based on a "Solar One" style boiler design), and other large generation facilities as being economically viable long term

(2) There's a massive shortage, both politically, and in reality, for the solar-grade silicon (polysilicon) used to manufacture higher efficiency photovoltaic cells. If you don't believe that:

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM)announced duties of between 2.4% and 57% on solar grade polysilicon from the U.S. and South Korea, following on the heels of a similar set of duties imposed on the EU:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...

This is expected to lead to a 2007-style feedstock shortage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Warning from GCL Leads to Polysilicon Shortage
http://pv.energytrend.com/pric...
(While this one is not current, it's an indicator that financial markets make this an extremely volatile commodity)

DumpWatch: Silicon Tariffs Will Change the US Solar Industry in 2015
https://agmetalminer.com/2014/...

By contrast solar cells for use in space can use lower grade materials and still achieve higher efficiencies than in-atmosphere photovoltaic cells, even after we consider microwave transmission losses from orbit to rectilinear ground antenna arrays which are unnecessarily spread out in order to keep the Sierra Club from having kittens.

And yes, we should be building more nuclear plants, for desalination in California, if nothing else.

You may see an increase in people disconnecting from the grid all together but I would suggest that will remain a fringe component for the foreseeable future. Battery costs are too high

At least one expert disagrees about battery costs. He expects lion batteries to reach rough cost parity with lead-acid for capacity by 2030, and lion is a lot cheaper to operate than lead-acid (better temperature sensitivity, many, many more cycles to 50%, etc).

For the most part, they already have.

US Solar subsidies in decline:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...

Australian subsidies in decline:
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...

China cuts solar subsidies:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

And yet it hasn't stopped solar deployments. Because even without subsidies, they're now cost competitive. Utility companies can't use the canard of government subsidized energy any longer. Yet they've invested - as the Economist notes - half a trillion in fossil fuel plants worldwide. I'm proposing a solution that at least prevents a utility meltdown during the transition period.

The Forbes guy says the cost reduction is largely due to subsidies and incentives. But he also says we need to worry about depletion of silicon too like worrying about depletion of fossil fuels.

Also, Clean Tech supporters often assert that the point of competitiveness will be accelerated because conventional energy prices must rise, primarily because of depletion of fossil fuel resources. But they don’t seem to think that the depletion of silicon needed to make photovoltaic cells; depletion matters, but the rate of depletion is often exaggerated.

. This guy says depletion of fossil fuel is over estimated and depletion of silicon is something to worry about. This genius does not seem to understand half the mass of planet Earth is silicon! Silicon dioxide is sand/earth/mud/rock. Of course it costs tons of money, energy and effort to separate silicon from sand. But we are not going to run out of silicon before we run out of fossil fuels. And the capital markets will listen to this Einstein because he writes for Forbes. Not to you and me because we are Dilberts who work a wage and write in Slashdot. Eventually solar will become cost effective, and there will be a mad rush into it. This is how booma and busts are created, methinks.

No nuclear plant would ever get any insurance without a goverment backed cap - this is a simple economic fact.
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/true-cost-of-nuclear-examined-in-new-study_100002882/