>> even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications.
> So say you. and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed >>And it wouldn't be 1% that big without tax breaks and solar had to compete against other energy sources on merit alone. A case of the talking point that refuses to die. Sure solar PV benefits form tax breaks; news flash - so does oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, ethanol, wind.. You name it. Selectively harping on about the "tax breaks" (feed in tariffs. and all forms of subsidy) that solar and wind enjoy; while conspicuously ignoring the vastly larger subsidies given to nuclear, oil, gas or coal is not being fair with the facts. As I pointed out earlier the nuclear sector in the US just got a more than eight billion dollar loan guarantee from the feds, without which that project in Georgia would never be able to get funding. Can we please keep it honest? > You harp on dilute. well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well >>Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. False analogy.. The doughnut is the end product not the source. That calorie bomb's dough was made from wheat that had to be grown in a field somewhere; the oil it is saturated with also was squeezed from seeds that had to be grown somewhere; as was the sugar it is covered with. As I said, you present a false; analogy; by that token I should speak of the awesome all electric acceleration from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds of the Tesla roadster - whose battery packs had been charged from solar PV sources. The Tesla is an equivalent all electric bomb that compares very favorably with your doughnut (I know which one I would rather have). Either compare source to source; or end product to end product. > So what if solar is dilute >>So it takes a great deal of land to produce anything worthwhile, so environmentalists will start screaming bloody murder that it's harming some desert lizard few have ever heard of. You don't seem to like environmentalists do you? I gather seeking to preserve for future generations the benefit of a living planet is something you find offensive and worthy of derision. Nice man. As I previously pointed out - practically every metro area on the planet has enough viable areas located within its urban fabric (such as south facing roofs, walls, road, parking lot and other non-green/water surfaces) to provide for all of its electricity requirements 24X7X365 from solar PV alone (if adequate energy storage of some form is available). We are very far from this, of course, and the current grid could absorb somewhere between 25% - 35% of wind/solar electric energy without needing any major retrofits or improvements - and that includes any major new sources of energy storage. In reality energy has always been a basket of sources - and will continue to be so. I can foresee natural gas turbines existing far into the future - utilized as spinning reserve and powered increasingly by synthetically produced biogas. What will happen and is happening is that solar PV is going to capture a growing share of this mix. The continuing rapid decline in its per unit cost will guarantee this. > The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will and are in fact evolving. That is one hell of a lot of hand waving! Imagine how big and how expensive a battery would have to be to power your big screen living room TV for 36 days, or your iPhone for 20 years; well one gallon of gasoline has enough energy to do that and it only costs about $4. Can you find a $4 battery that can do that? You seem to misunderstand the requirements for utility scale battery systems, which are quite different form the unique requirements of a car or portable electronic devise (in which energy density is very much critical) Utility scale energy storage batteries are stationary installations. If you are going to argue something it helps to clearly understand the requirements of the system one is arguing about. Either we are talking about iPhones or we are talking about grid scale electric energy storage systems (which by the way can be many things, such as pumped storage for example - Japan has huge pumped storage capacity for example) -- so which is it? >>Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. I'm not saying batteries can't get better and cheaper someday, but making them will be a much bigger challenge than putting a thorium reactor online. Utility scale flow batteries are nearing market. They can scale to huge sizes because the reagents are stored in external tanks - which could be really big tanks, and are flowed through the reactor in which in one direction current is produced and in the other current is absorbed and the reagent is re-reduced and the tanks are re-filled. Such batteries would cost millions of dollars, and have associated tank farms, but can scale to very large capacities. There are quite a few candidates that are playing for various niches in the electric energy storage market. This is a very lively sector with a lot of venture capital floating around it (the payoffs could be huge), and things are moving pretty fast. > Solar PV - IMO - is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths >>How well do they work at night? They sleep soundly at night, having done their work in the day. The current continues to run, because during the day they have produced surplus power, which has been stored and is drawn down at night. Somehow this seems difficult for you to grasp; power generation can be coupled to energy storage; increasingly it is in fact going to be. Chris John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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