Since we get 45% of our power from coal, 25% from nuclear and about 15% hydro, the remainder can barely be seen in the pie scale. What possible good [outside of the rural home without wires] is this 1% of solar doing for us? The feel good factor is the reality.
I live near a historic gold rush town and some imbecile motel owner just placed an array of panels that look like a outdoor theatre screen in the center of the once most charming view of 1850's Californiana. When I was younger, I would have gone out there at night with a few hudson sprayers filled with auto enamel and painted them black.
Why does'nt Obama fill the white house yard with panels next to his wifes abandoned garden?
Open up all the closed east of Mississippi small hydro and you'll have beat solar by 5 points instantly. But, damn, a minnow might get hurt - never mind. Better to let that invisible cloud of mercury settle all over our landscape, and kill the minnows, frogs and people nice and slowly.
Our only hope is a small failsafe nuclear reactor, and eventually a true clean engineering solution to make power.
Grnma's firing up her 68' caddy right now to go buy some bottled water at the wally world. And she complains about 4$ gasoline? Most europeans are paying 7 to 8$ a gallon and driving cars that weigh as much as some of those behemouths that have to go sideways through the check out aisle. Enough fuel in one of them to heat your house for a month.
Dana - you like number crunching - how many BTU's in a 450 pound human?
Are you talkin' dead human, digested at 60% efficiecency by a cannibal, or are you talkin' source-fuel BTUs as boiler-fuel? Or are you talkin' BTU/hr emitted? (For the latter there's actually a number- about 700BTU/hr at rest. For a skinny 100lb girl you're talking about 425BTU/hr.)
Even failsafe nukes suck at ramp-up/down time, and you'd have to boil the Mississippi for cooling capacity during off-peak or suffer the days-long startup ramp. Until that fundamental physic changes, at more than about a 35-40% grid mix you'd be a screwed as France about what to do with the excess power. (France sells off-peak power in massive quantities to neighboring Italy and Spain at a financial loss, then buys peak power back at a premium.) During very hot periods under heavy demand the cooling capacity of the nukes themselves becomes an issue, and they have to throttle back, or risk overheating their cooling water. If that's our only hope, we're doomed.
Distributed micro and mini-generator grid sources turn out to be better baseload generators than they might seem at first-blush. Solar PV has the advantage of being only slightly out of phase with peak loads related to air conditioning (and A/C tends to be absolute annual peaks as well.) Broadly distributed PV has the effect of peak-shaving the A/C loads, even without smart-grid control. Putting A/C and chillers under grid control (and paying the owners for the ability to do so) is still cheaper than PV though. But the cost of small-scale PV has plummeted over the past 5 years, and will be at-parity with fossil generated power for lifecycle cost per kwh by the end of the decade (even without carbon taxes.)
Rooftop PV doesn't
have to look like bird-crap on a Cadillac, even if many installations do, and it's possible to use PV even in historical districts with a bit of discretion on placement. Much of those issues have been in the "barely regulated" category for some time since there wasn't enough going in to garner the political attention. But that is changing (and fast!), particularly for large-scale ground-mounted PV in bucolic New England pastures next to McMansion developments, or marring the grand vista on southwestern highways. But it sound like the very existence of the crummy motel in a funky gold rush town was already the first blight on the landscape, the PV array is just the icing on the cake?
As I understand it, there aren't many architects or rocket scientists making a living running a motel...
But that installation, in combination with dozens like it (in size, if not aesthetic) in the same area can take a signifcant chunk off the air-conditioning peaks, even when supplying only 5% of the annual total. The net effect on grid stability and grid capacity is quite a
positive one simply by placement of the peak-generator near the load. And that's the very
real good that 1% is doing for you. Solar output is also forecast-able by weather and time of day, easy for grid operators to plan for, and every oil or gas-fired peaker you DON'T have to fire up and idle to be able to deliver the peak load is huge, from a cost savings point of view. Not having to upgrade the transmission line capacity as soon in developing areas is also a significant savings. PV's inherent peak-power timing is worth subsidizing, even if it's considerably more expensive than getting there via efficiency (which is still a deep & cheap well to tap.)
Broadly distributed wind behaves much like a predicable (if uncontrolled) base load generator- the regional net output is readily quantifiable 24-48 hours in advance based on weather forecasting, and can be planned for by the grid operators. In conjunction with highly flexible gas-fired generators the mix can be readily "hardened" to deliver any arbitrary level deemed economic. In regions or facilties with significant thermal needs, hardening wind with mini and micro cogenerators works VERY well. (The bulk of Denmark's power grid is run with cogeneration & wind. The German utility LichtBlick is taking that a step further, and installing broadly distributed home-sized gas-fired ~10KW cogenerators that supply space heating and domestic hot water to the building owners, and paying them for the excess electricity. The control of the cogenerator is done remotely by the utility, which uses it to grid-harden their extensive wind resources, and they guarantee by contract to always have sufficient heat in the thermal buffer tanks for the home's thermal needs. They believe they can eventually achieve net-renewable power fraction of grid power at the 80%+ with this sort of system. This is in a country with crummy solar and even crummier wind resources to work with, yet they're doing it.
This is not an April Fool's Joke, and it's more than a feel-good:
In my neighborhood gas-fired micro cogenerators are net-metered in much the same way as PV solar, but the number of vendors is pretty small. The guy in the office down the hall from me has the ~
1.2kW Honda installed in his house, now finishing up his 4th or 5th heating season with it. Between the Honda and the mod-con that it came coupled with the system paid for itself in 3 years, but he's in a 20cent/kwh electricity market.
The US has far better solar resources than Germany, much of which is located near loads. We in the US also have decent wind resources that are already near loads (&/or existing transmission lines), and very substantial wind resources in the midwest that would require a significant grid-infrastructure upgrade to bring to market. We don't yet have a LichtBlick driving a smart-grids and grid-hardening schemes though, but that may come in time.
But by far the cheapest & deepest power resource available in the US is efficiency- cheaper and more cost effective than any new production, renewable, fossil, or nukes. This is one of many reasons why I'm a fan of mini-split heat pumps for space heating, at least in US climate zones 2 through 5 (even parts of zone 6.) Buying or subsidizing a nukes-worth of mini-splits for homes & offices heating with resistance-electric baseboards/furnaces has a far lower lifecycle cost than ANY power generation of similar capacity. And that's just a tiny tip of the efficiency iceberg. Yet people still piss & moan about lighting efficiency mandates that are NPV+ in a financial analysis of less than one year, let alone the half-decade or so it takes to break even on a mini-split in markets where electricity is still cheap. In 12-cent/kwh areas 3 year simple payback is typical on ductless heat pumps.