White House goes solar - symbolic gesture towards boosting Chinese Economy?

[Darwin333]

Recently the TCO of power production for solar (in optimal locations of course) is now lower than nuclear. Not only that wind requires a substantial investment in the grid which is inherently wasteful. It's easier to stick a solar panel on a roof than a windmill.

Regarding subsidies, these can eventually go away because costs of panels continue to come down and coupled with benefits associated with increased demand on the economy of scale, it should not be many years before it's cost effective for a large part of the nation to disconnect from the grid.

The alternative is that we strangle the baby in the crib and kiss the Saudi's butt for more oil.

One minor correction, solars goal isn't to disconnect from the grid. That requires storage and storage is extremely expensive, prone to failure, and has a short expected life cycle compared to the rest of the system. The goal is to offset your energy usage and as a bonus solar usually produces the most power when we use the most power. You still must rely on the grid for some of your power though which is ok. Much easier and cheaper to supplement solar with other energy (wind, nuke, hydro, etc...) than it is to produce, service, and dispose of enough batteries to run even a fraction of the homes in the US.

Solar is only practical in areas that already have human structures - cities. Wind turbines are the most feasible solution in areas not inhabited by humans. A huge majority of the US is open space - perfect for wind mills. Blowing the federal budget on solar panels only covers a tiny portion of the US compared to what could be covered with wind. Also, building a large enough wind grid provides a constant 24/7 flow of wind power because the wind is always blowing somewhere. This is not true with solar because the entire country goes dim at night.

Don't get me wrong, I like wind power too but we had a rich fucker willing to put his own money up for wind power and we couldn't even get the damn transmission lines built. I have zero faith in the dozens of entities that would have to work together, land issues, easements and right of ways, etc... actually getting shit done in any sort of reasonable timeline. You are right, certain areas aren't suitable for solar and certain area aren't suitable for wind either. I am one of those "all of the above" guys. As far as limited resources, those assholes in DC don't seem to think our resources are limited.

 

[woolfe9999]

I support a distributed model over a centralized one, and believe it's important enough to make it a priority of research and development.

The reason for this isn't because of the needs of the moment, but about the near future (which I will define as the next three to five decades). Consider that the world population is bound to increase and that people will enjoy a higher standard of living overall. When planning for such a day it's ill advised to wait until the crisis is upon us. Oil is a poor choice because there isn't enough to keep up with demand. Coal is an option, but that has its own problems which I won't go into for now.

In any case the cost and complexity of traditional centralized systems will increase as demand does as will the possibility for failure. Imagine what happens when that really big solar flare hits. People speak of conventional vs. nuclear, but power generation is one thing and getting it to the end user when needed is an entirely separate issue.

On site systems are more robust in the sense that if one system fails then that is all which is affected. Even then it's possible to have homes based on clusters so that one small group of joined power connections has a back up. It's a "grid" but perhaps a better one. There needs to be consideration given to optimal power topologies, but again with the goal of decentralization. Otherwise the expected need of future consumers means we had better start building power generation systems like mad starting now. Then we have to add to the network when it's time and power distribution over distance is quite inefficient.

It makes more sense to develop technologies which could feed individual dwellings or a group of them. If each home in meets it's requirements at time of construction it's much easier than expanding something which has increasing liabilities as it is scaled up.

IMO, this is something which should be pushed by the government as a Manhattan type project, bringing in the best minds from academia and industry. We are trained as a society to think of the next quarterly profit statement. That's a foolish model to base a future world on.

I'm not disputing that solar has the potential to be a game changer. I don't really know that much on the subject other than articles I've read over the internet, but my impression was that assuming you have an existing nation wide grid (we do), which has been upgraded (it is), then the centralized model is more cost-effective due to economies of scale.

I see your point about failures not being so catastrophic with a distributed model, however.

- wolf

 

[Darwin333]

I'm not disputing that solar has the potential to be a game changer. I don't really know that much on the subject other than articles I've read over the internet, but my impression was that assuming you have an existing nation wide grid (we do), which has been upgraded (it is), then the centralized model is more cost-effective due to economies of scale.

I see your point about failures not being so catastrophic with a distributed model, however.

- wolf

When was the grid updated or what updates are currently being done?