The plans to have a carbon tax intend to make it revenue neutral. So the carbon tax would be offset by reductions in income and sales taxes (or VAT in Europe) along with increases in various rebate programs for the lower-income groups.
What is so hard in grasping that? Depending on geographic location (hint: India) you can point them (nearly) anywhere you want and get the exact same amount of power.
No. There's an optimal direction everywhere. The difference in India is that since it is closer to the equator the direction matters less. This also isn't terribly relevant for most of the world since most places aren't that far South.
For a reason. We have a certain goal to reach, we used "subsidizes" to reach it and the closer we come the more subsidizes get canceled or "changed". That is not a "solar power problem" thing but a management of political decisions.
The slowdown in German solar growth started *before* the change in subsidies.
why are you arguing that solar power peaks at the same time (not counting even that India is so big from east to west that it spreads several geographical time zones, so if every one would place his solar panels due south it still would not peak at the same time but you have a 3 hours wide plateau)... when it clearly does not?
It does. We've already been over this. You have to pay some points in efficiency if you direct your panels in other directions. And yes, you can take advantages of having multiple timezones, but that requires efficient transmission. You may note that in the post you initially responded to with your liters of vituperation, I specifically mentioned transmission as being relevant. I'm also not sure why you continue to focus so much on India and Germany when I already pointed out that India has only a very tiny amount of solar, and isn't representative of what other countries can do, and that both countries are well below the saturation points discussed by Sivaram and Kann.
So to summarize, Germany and India are well below the levels where these issues start to become highly relevant. India has many natural advantages that other countries won't have and has very little solar to start with. And this completely ignores the issue that solar goes away completely at night.
It appears that you may be trying to argue against a misunderstood position: no one in this conversation is arguing that solar is a bad idea, or is arguing that we shouldn't have more solar power. Heck, I've spent a lot of time on Slashdot essentially pumping solar and wind as energy sources. That doesn't mean that under current projections we should expect solar to solve anyone's energy problems by itself without massive improvements in either solar tech, transmission, storage and likely in all three. Switching to 6 or 7 percent of power from renewables isn't going to cut it by itself.
If they can get this to work it will also be better for the environment in terms of energy use, CO2 and methane production. Right now, my wife and I are both not complete vegetarians but very rarely eat any form of meat. This is for ethical, environmental and financial reasons. In her case, she'd be probably pretty happy never eating meat, whereas I've got a strong craving for it generally that is a little annoying. I'm really looking forward to vat meat.
So, if I make a comment where you think I'm using my own reasoning, the problem must be I'm overestimating my own intelligence over experts who think carefully about this, and if I point out that I'm largely using an analysis by a set of experts, the problem is experts just repeat what is commonly accepted in their fields. This seems like a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.
Most of your comment doesn't actually address the point and is in general unhelpful condescension. It might help to maybe think that if someone is discussing this and hasn't at all claimed that pumped hydro works like the Hoover Dam, why you feel a need to spend a paragraph saying that it doesn't. This is at best off-topic. It also isn't productive to put more or less random phrases in bold.
You seem to be also confused about basic geometry. The entire point of pointing panels in a south direction is that that gets a maximum amount of sunlight. Yes, pointing them in other directions will move their peak, but it reduces the total power daily which means that the functional result is that the you get fewer kilowatt-hours per a dollar. And even given that, one still has them not functioning at night.
Your focus on Germany and India and what currently works there also misses the point of Sivaram and Kann's analysis which is looking at what happens when solar hits very large fractions of the total power. Germany for example has around 7% of its power coming from solar right now, and Sivaram and Kann are looking at what is necessary to get more than about 20 or 25% of power from solar. But even at 7% one starts seeing some of the effects they are talking about, with the amount of solar that Germany added in 2015 being substantially lower than what is added in previous years. See http://renewables.seenews.com/news/germany-adds-about-610-mwp-of-solar-pv-in-h1-2015-486825. India is a different situation than what Sivaram and Kann are discussing for similar reasons: solar is about 1% of India's electricity production, and India has substantial advantages over most other countries because it is closer to the equator and thus has more sunlight during its winter months.
It might help if you actually read what Sivaram and Kann wrote since they looked at the solar grids in a variety of countries, including Germany, Italy and Australia. They cite earlier research that suggests that with existing transmission and storage technology, Germany will have deep trouble exceeding 20% of power being solar. For all your talk about what "true experts" do, you haven't paid much attention at all to what other people are saying.
Instead of hurling insults it might help to actually read what people write, or even better look at the references they give. Yes, you can have plants that don't point South, but the end result is that the plant peaks at a different time, and its total production daily is lower. So there's a serious tradeoff. It might help to note that this isn't some "dumbfuck" doing the analysis but rather primarily the analysis by Sivaram and Kann, who are in fact subject matter experts and whose work is referenced in the links I gave. In fact, my personal opinion is that they area little overly negative, and solar has a better chance than they estimate, primarily due to reductions in storage costs, but I didn't mention that because that rally would be valuing my own intelligence over that of experts who have thought a lot more than I have about it. Now, do you have something useful to say or are you going to respond with another post that is highly redundant and primarily insults?
That isn't how a bell curve works. If you move a bell curve slightly to the left, the big change isn't in the average, but is in how much you have where you end up sampling from the extremes of the distribution. This is why for example, China doesn't have nearly as many top-tier soccer players as some much smaller countries, or how the best runners are almost all Kenyan even though the Kenyan isn't much faster than the average in most other populations. One very controversial example of this is how some populations (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) have many more Fields Medal and Nobel Prize winners than one would expect naively, but if you move the average intelligence up just a tiny bit, you get a massive change in how many really brilliant people you have.
The real Satoshi has a pretty obvious reason for not spending the the coins. It wouldn't be that hard to track down where they are spent and where that goes, thus making it easy to unmask them. In this case, if this person is actually Satoshi and he is being open about it, he loses the obvious reason to not spend any.
Author of niche-interest fiction hypes small providers of a formerly popular type of entertainment media. It's ironic that science fiction fans are so attached to the past.
I think the first sentence is a little unfair: Gaiman is extremely successful, and many of his works have reached the popular audience. Moreover, we live in an era where science fiction is highly successful and even mainstream, hardly niche any more in many ways.
As for the second bit, it shouldn't be that surprising. Much science fiction, or what passes for it, has often had a reactionary element. Look at how much science fiction involves feudal systems with sword fights. Dune and Star Wars are the most prominent examples but there are many more. Science fiction has often been accompanied by a romanticized interest in the past which is part of why the readership and authors blend so smoothly with fantasy.
Your analogy would be valid if somebody was reacting to street racing deaths (human behavior) by shouting for speed governors that prevented speeds above the speed limit, tiny gas tank sizes (to require more frequent fuel stops), and convoluted electronic interlocks that had to be painstakingly disabled every time you wanted to use the full performance of a "unregulated racing car" (aka, anything more powerful and sporty than a Nissan Leaf).
Analogy does not hold because most street racing deaths are generally just people involved.
Cultural context is obviously tough. It does seem like it was something closer to "murder" than "kill" since the same text mandates the death penalty for a bunch of different things which wouldn't be consistent with a don't kill rule. It seems that the Hebrew notion of murder was pretty different from the Norse one you are describing given that one could only be convicted base on the testimony of at least two witnesses. In that context, it seems like their archetypal case is pretty public.
As an English-oriented site, anything that needs to be expressed here can be done using ISO-8859-1, and even that's pushing it.
Really? I had a discussion a while ago with another user about an article related to the death penalty about whether the Ten Commandents have a command that should be better translated as "Do not murder" or "Do not kill." That was substantially difficult to do with having to transliterate everything. Similarly, there have been discussions here about the exact Chinese censorship rules and what specific phrases meant, which people had to discuss without actually quoting the actual text. These are just two of the examples I've seen here. I suspect that others can point out many more. Yes, supporting Unicode might mean that there will be emojis on occasion, and they'll get downmodded. They aren't any worse than comments calling everyone cows or whatever the most recent trolling fad is.
Dealing with climate change is not just a Presidential issue. Even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were elected and they put all their political capital into play just for global warming, the level of change wouldn't be that high with a Republican controlled House and Senate Congressional races matter also. Emily Cain for example is running in one of the most competitive districts in the country against an opponent who is bad not just on global warming but on other environmental issues also. You can go and donate to her campaign http://emilycain.com/
But outside politics there's also a lot of other things you can do. You can at a personal level reduce meat consumption, try to use public transit, buy energy efficient appliances and if you do buy a new car by a hybrid or an electric car like the Chevy Bolt or any model of Tesla. Outside a personal level, you can give to charities and groups which will help make real change. For example, Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ gets solar panels for non-profits including schools, homeless shelters and science museums. The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) http://self.org/ helps get solar panels for developing countries. Both of these help the environment while helping good causes. SELF is particularly important because it helps reduce the problem of global warming from developing countries which are industrializing. The Wind Energy Foundation http://windenergyfoundation.org/ is another good cause. Every little bit helps, so if you are uncomfortable (for understandable reasons) with putting money in to politics, there are a lot of non-political ways of helping out here. Solar and wind won't solve global warming by themselves, but they are a major step in the right direction, and every little bit helps.
I don't know if he is completely wrong about everything. Some of his predictions are spot on and others seem less so. For example, back in the late 2000s he predicted a one-world government by 2020. Pretty sure that's not going to happen. http://lesswrong.com/lw/diz/kurzweils_predictions_good_accuracy_poor/ has a good analysis which suggests that Kurzweil is more accurate than many other people making predictions but at the same time he's highly overconfident in his predictions. See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/.
I know it's ancient tradition and all, but it seems to me like people are probably one of the worst things you can put on your currency. No matter who you choose, it's going to piss off at least a third of the population immediately, and there's a good chance that in fifteen to a hundred years you'll figure out that, by modern standards, the subject committed multiple atrocities.
Well, it might help if one had money in the US that focused more on scientists and authors and the like than on politicians. Frankly and Jefferson both contributed to science but they are on our money because of their politics. That's in contrast to say the UK where they've had Jane Austen, Issac Newton, and Charles Darwin (ok maybe that last one pisses some people off). Other countries have also had Gauss and Mozart.
You are doing a lot of the right stuff personally. The rest you can do is rage awareness (talk to your neighbors but do so politely and look at studies about how to persuade people. You need to do it in terms of their values not your own values). Also, help donate to politicians who will help implement policies who will help the problem. For example, right now Emily Cain is running in Maine for the US House in one of the most competitive districts and she is very strong on global warming issues so you can go donate to her http://emilycain.com/. Her opponent, the current member there, Bruce Poliquin is not good on these issues. Also, you can donate to charities that help encourage and promote alternative energy. For example, Everybody Solar helps get solar panels for non-profits, like schools, homeless shelters and science museums. Every little bit helps.
Yes, this is exactly where better transmission infrastructure will help (one of the things I mentioned in the comment you are replying to). Right now, a lot of energy is lost in transmission. In the ideal setting, we'd have highly efficient grids that would deal with this sort of thing. There's a project to connect the three big US grids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation which will help out with this also.
Solar thermal is great for extending things certainly, but it doesn't really end up going into the entire night. You get very little power out of solar thermal after 3 or four after sunset or so. The real advantage of solar thermal is actually stability, since if it gets cloudy all of a sudden you don't have a sudden drop like you do with PV. As for batteries, it is far from clear that that used lithium batteries will have the efficiency or reliability necessary to do that much storage. And the people making the $0.25/watt estimate are taking current battery tech into account.
It might help if you try to read what people are writing with a minimal presumption that they aren't idiots. The point is that it peaks in any given location at the same time. In fact, you might note that I mentioned that better transmission is important: this is precisely why: better transmission lets you take excess solar from one area and send it somewhere without as much or without any at that time.
Except it doesn't peak everywhere at the same time. When it's dark in Connecticut, it could be still broad daylight in San Diego.
Right this is why transmission is so important: if one can transmit power efficiently then areas with excess power can transmit it elsewhere. Unfortunately, that's in practice really tough. Right now, the US has three major grids: East, West and Texas. In practice there's almost no interconnection between these grids. And Texas sometimes has more wind power than they can use in parts, but can't actually give it to the other grids. This leads to weird things like the cost of electricity in Texas briefly going negative http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2015/09/texas_electricity_goes_negative_wind_power_was_so_plentiful_one_night_that.html (what actually happened is a bit more complicated but that's essentially accurate). There's a very cool project underway to connect the three grids with a set of superconducting lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation. Unfortunately, that won't be enough by itself but it is a step in the right direction.
Considering the fluctuation in power usage over the 24 hour day, I'm not sure having localized drops in power-generation is necessarily a bad thing.
Unfortunately, when peak power consumption occurs and when peak solar output are are not the same time generally. Similarly, while there's least power consumed very late at night (1-3 AMish), solar stops being useful well before that. See http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10970858/flattening-duck-curve-renewable-energy.
Slashdot Mirror
The plans to have a carbon tax intend to make it revenue neutral. So the carbon tax would be offset by reductions in income and sales taxes (or VAT in Europe) along with increases in various rebate programs for the lower-income groups.
What is so hard in grasping that? Depending on geographic location (hint: India) you can point them (nearly) anywhere you want and get the exact same amount of power.
No. There's an optimal direction everywhere. The difference in India is that since it is closer to the equator the direction matters less. This also isn't terribly relevant for most of the world since most places aren't that far South.
For a reason. We have a certain goal to reach, we used "subsidizes" to reach it and the closer we come the more subsidizes get canceled or "changed". That is not a "solar power problem" thing but a management of political decisions.
The slowdown in German solar growth started *before* the change in subsidies.
why are you arguing that solar power peaks at the same time (not counting even that India is so big from east to west that it spreads several geographical time zones, so if every one would place his solar panels due south it still would not peak at the same time but you have a 3 hours wide plateau) ... when it clearly does not?
It does. We've already been over this. You have to pay some points in efficiency if you direct your panels in other directions. And yes, you can take advantages of having multiple timezones, but that requires efficient transmission. You may note that in the post you initially responded to with your liters of vituperation, I specifically mentioned transmission as being relevant. I'm also not sure why you continue to focus so much on India and Germany when I already pointed out that India has only a very tiny amount of solar, and isn't representative of what other countries can do, and that both countries are well below the saturation points discussed by Sivaram and Kann.
So to summarize, Germany and India are well below the levels where these issues start to become highly relevant. India has many natural advantages that other countries won't have and has very little solar to start with. And this completely ignores the issue that solar goes away completely at night.
It appears that you may be trying to argue against a misunderstood position: no one in this conversation is arguing that solar is a bad idea, or is arguing that we shouldn't have more solar power. Heck, I've spent a lot of time on Slashdot essentially pumping solar and wind as energy sources. That doesn't mean that under current projections we should expect solar to solve anyone's energy problems by itself without massive improvements in either solar tech, transmission, storage and likely in all three. Switching to 6 or 7 percent of power from renewables isn't going to cut it by itself.
If they can get this to work it will also be better for the environment in terms of energy use, CO2 and methane production. Right now, my wife and I are both not complete vegetarians but very rarely eat any form of meat. This is for ethical, environmental and financial reasons. In her case, she'd be probably pretty happy never eating meat, whereas I've got a strong craving for it generally that is a little annoying. I'm really looking forward to vat meat.
So, if I make a comment where you think I'm using my own reasoning, the problem must be I'm overestimating my own intelligence over experts who think carefully about this, and if I point out that I'm largely using an analysis by a set of experts, the problem is experts just repeat what is commonly accepted in their fields. This seems like a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.
Most of your comment doesn't actually address the point and is in general unhelpful condescension. It might help to maybe think that if someone is discussing this and hasn't at all claimed that pumped hydro works like the Hoover Dam, why you feel a need to spend a paragraph saying that it doesn't. This is at best off-topic. It also isn't productive to put more or less random phrases in bold.
You seem to be also confused about basic geometry. The entire point of pointing panels in a south direction is that that gets a maximum amount of sunlight. Yes, pointing them in other directions will move their peak, but it reduces the total power daily which means that the functional result is that the you get fewer kilowatt-hours per a dollar. And even given that, one still has them not functioning at night.
Your focus on Germany and India and what currently works there also misses the point of Sivaram and Kann's analysis which is looking at what happens when solar hits very large fractions of the total power. Germany for example has around 7% of its power coming from solar right now, and Sivaram and Kann are looking at what is necessary to get more than about 20 or 25% of power from solar. But even at 7% one starts seeing some of the effects they are talking about, with the amount of solar that Germany added in 2015 being substantially lower than what is added in previous years. See http://renewables.seenews.com/news/germany-adds-about-610-mwp-of-solar-pv-in-h1-2015-486825. India is a different situation than what Sivaram and Kann are discussing for similar reasons: solar is about 1% of India's electricity production, and India has substantial advantages over most other countries because it is closer to the equator and thus has more sunlight during its winter months.
It might help if you actually read what Sivaram and Kann wrote since they looked at the solar grids in a variety of countries, including Germany, Italy and Australia. They cite earlier research that suggests that with existing transmission and storage technology, Germany will have deep trouble exceeding 20% of power being solar. For all your talk about what "true experts" do, you haven't paid much attention at all to what other people are saying.
Instead of hurling insults it might help to actually read what people write, or even better look at the references they give. Yes, you can have plants that don't point South, but the end result is that the plant peaks at a different time, and its total production daily is lower. So there's a serious tradeoff. It might help to note that this isn't some "dumbfuck" doing the analysis but rather primarily the analysis by Sivaram and Kann, who are in fact subject matter experts and whose work is referenced in the links I gave. In fact, my personal opinion is that they area little overly negative, and solar has a better chance than they estimate, primarily due to reductions in storage costs, but I didn't mention that because that rally would be valuing my own intelligence over that of experts who have thought a lot more than I have about it. Now, do you have something useful to say or are you going to respond with another post that is highly redundant and primarily insults?
That isn't how a bell curve works. If you move a bell curve slightly to the left, the big change isn't in the average, but is in how much you have where you end up sampling from the extremes of the distribution. This is why for example, China doesn't have nearly as many top-tier soccer players as some much smaller countries, or how the best runners are almost all Kenyan even though the Kenyan isn't much faster than the average in most other populations. One very controversial example of this is how some populations (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) have many more Fields Medal and Nobel Prize winners than one would expect naively, but if you move the average intelligence up just a tiny bit, you get a massive change in how many really brilliant people you have.
The real Satoshi has a pretty obvious reason for not spending the the coins. It wouldn't be that hard to track down where they are spent and where that goes, thus making it easy to unmask them. In this case, if this person is actually Satoshi and he is being open about it, he loses the obvious reason to not spend any.
The real Satoshi Nakamoto is worth at minimum around a half a billion dollars.
Author of niche-interest fiction hypes small providers of a formerly popular type of entertainment media. It's ironic that science fiction fans are so attached to the past.
I think the first sentence is a little unfair: Gaiman is extremely successful, and many of his works have reached the popular audience. Moreover, we live in an era where science fiction is highly successful and even mainstream, hardly niche any more in many ways.
As for the second bit, it shouldn't be that surprising. Much science fiction, or what passes for it, has often had a reactionary element. Look at how much science fiction involves feudal systems with sword fights. Dune and Star Wars are the most prominent examples but there are many more. Science fiction has often been accompanied by a romanticized interest in the past which is part of why the readership and authors blend so smoothly with fantasy.
Your analogy would be valid if somebody was reacting to street racing deaths (human behavior) by shouting for speed governors that prevented speeds above the speed limit, tiny gas tank sizes (to require more frequent fuel stops), and convoluted electronic interlocks that had to be painstakingly disabled every time you wanted to use the full performance of a "unregulated racing car" (aka, anything more powerful and sporty than a Nissan Leaf).
Analogy does not hold because most street racing deaths are generally just people involved.
Cultural context is obviously tough. It does seem like it was something closer to "murder" than "kill" since the same text mandates the death penalty for a bunch of different things which wouldn't be consistent with a don't kill rule. It seems that the Hebrew notion of murder was pretty different from the Norse one you are describing given that one could only be convicted base on the testimony of at least two witnesses. In that context, it seems like their archetypal case is pretty public.
As an English-oriented site, anything that needs to be expressed here can be done using ISO-8859-1, and even that's pushing it.
Really? I had a discussion a while ago with another user about an article related to the death penalty about whether the Ten Commandents have a command that should be better translated as "Do not murder" or "Do not kill." That was substantially difficult to do with having to transliterate everything. Similarly, there have been discussions here about the exact Chinese censorship rules and what specific phrases meant, which people had to discuss without actually quoting the actual text. These are just two of the examples I've seen here. I suspect that others can point out many more. Yes, supporting Unicode might mean that there will be emojis on occasion, and they'll get downmodded. They aren't any worse than comments calling everyone cows or whatever the most recent trolling fad is.
Your freedom to make decisions on your own ends when those decisions endanger innocent people around you who didn't consent to be hit by your car.
Dealing with climate change is not just a Presidential issue. Even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were elected and they put all their political capital into play just for global warming, the level of change wouldn't be that high with a Republican controlled House and Senate Congressional races matter also. Emily Cain for example is running in one of the most competitive districts in the country against an opponent who is bad not just on global warming but on other environmental issues also. You can go and donate to her campaign http://emilycain.com/
But outside politics there's also a lot of other things you can do. You can at a personal level reduce meat consumption, try to use public transit, buy energy efficient appliances and if you do buy a new car by a hybrid or an electric car like the Chevy Bolt or any model of Tesla. Outside a personal level, you can give to charities and groups which will help make real change. For example, Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ gets solar panels for non-profits including schools, homeless shelters and science museums. The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) http://self.org/ helps get solar panels for developing countries. Both of these help the environment while helping good causes. SELF is particularly important because it helps reduce the problem of global warming from developing countries which are industrializing. The Wind Energy Foundation http://windenergyfoundation.org/ is another good cause. Every little bit helps, so if you are uncomfortable (for understandable reasons) with putting money in to politics, there are a lot of non-political ways of helping out here. Solar and wind won't solve global warming by themselves, but they are a major step in the right direction, and every little bit helps.
Do you have a citation or a source for this? I don't recall almost anyone predicting mass cell phone uses even in the mid 1990s.
I don't know if he is completely wrong about everything. Some of his predictions are spot on and others seem less so. For example, back in the late 2000s he predicted a one-world government by 2020. Pretty sure that's not going to happen. http://lesswrong.com/lw/diz/kurzweils_predictions_good_accuracy_poor/ has a good analysis which suggests that Kurzweil is more accurate than many other people making predictions but at the same time he's highly overconfident in his predictions. See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/.
I know it's ancient tradition and all, but it seems to me like people are probably one of the worst things you can put on your currency. No matter who you choose, it's going to piss off at least a third of the population immediately, and there's a good chance that in fifteen to a hundred years you'll figure out that, by modern standards, the subject committed multiple atrocities. Well, it might help if one had money in the US that focused more on scientists and authors and the like than on politicians. Frankly and Jefferson both contributed to science but they are on our money because of their politics. That's in contrast to say the UK where they've had Jane Austen, Issac Newton, and Charles Darwin (ok maybe that last one pisses some people off). Other countries have also had Gauss and Mozart.
You are doing a lot of the right stuff personally. The rest you can do is rage awareness (talk to your neighbors but do so politely and look at studies about how to persuade people. You need to do it in terms of their values not your own values). Also, help donate to politicians who will help implement policies who will help the problem. For example, right now Emily Cain is running in Maine for the US House in one of the most competitive districts and she is very strong on global warming issues so you can go donate to her http://emilycain.com/. Her opponent, the current member there, Bruce Poliquin is not good on these issues. Also, you can donate to charities that help encourage and promote alternative energy. For example, Everybody Solar helps get solar panels for non-profits, like schools, homeless shelters and science museums. Every little bit helps.
Well, natural gas has its own problems, since fracking in its current form produces a lot of methane which is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 and this has contributed to a spike in methane levels http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/17/us-likely-culprit-of-global-spike-in-methane-emissions-over-last-decade. But if we can get that under control and get the technology to be well-regulated, then yes, natural gas looks really appealing then.
Yes, this is exactly where better transmission infrastructure will help (one of the things I mentioned in the comment you are replying to). Right now, a lot of energy is lost in transmission. In the ideal setting, we'd have highly efficient grids that would deal with this sort of thing. There's a project to connect the three big US grids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation which will help out with this also.
Solar thermal is great for extending things certainly, but it doesn't really end up going into the entire night. You get very little power out of solar thermal after 3 or four after sunset or so. The real advantage of solar thermal is actually stability, since if it gets cloudy all of a sudden you don't have a sudden drop like you do with PV. As for batteries, it is far from clear that that used lithium batteries will have the efficiency or reliability necessary to do that much storage. And the people making the $0.25 /watt estimate are taking current battery tech into account.
Most smart meter plans don't have you unable to use appliances at some times of day but rather if you want, you have to pay more. Not the same thing.
I actually haven't read their work in great detail. http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201636.epdf has most of their argument, but it seems like it doesn't have all the details.
It might help if you try to read what people are writing with a minimal presumption that they aren't idiots. The point is that it peaks in any given location at the same time. In fact, you might note that I mentioned that better transmission is important: this is precisely why: better transmission lets you take excess solar from one area and send it somewhere without as much or without any at that time.
Except it doesn't peak everywhere at the same time. When it's dark in Connecticut, it could be still broad daylight in San Diego.
Right this is why transmission is so important: if one can transmit power efficiently then areas with excess power can transmit it elsewhere. Unfortunately, that's in practice really tough. Right now, the US has three major grids: East, West and Texas. In practice there's almost no interconnection between these grids. And Texas sometimes has more wind power than they can use in parts, but can't actually give it to the other grids. This leads to weird things like the cost of electricity in Texas briefly going negative http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2015/09/texas_electricity_goes_negative_wind_power_was_so_plentiful_one_night_that.html (what actually happened is a bit more complicated but that's essentially accurate). There's a very cool project underway to connect the three grids with a set of superconducting lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation. Unfortunately, that won't be enough by itself but it is a step in the right direction.
Considering the fluctuation in power usage over the 24 hour day, I'm not sure having localized drops in power-generation is necessarily a bad thing.
Unfortunately, when peak power consumption occurs and when peak solar output are are not the same time generally. Similarly, while there's least power consumed very late at night (1-3 AMish), solar stops being useful well before that. See http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10970858/flattening-duck-curve-renewable-energy.