Posted on 11/10/2006 11:33:50 AM PST by aculeus
look at xsunx.com
Since my Freedom 35 is so ancient, tell me:
What do you sail?
What do you consider a "non-ancient" design (given that sailing itself is a fairly ancient form of marine transport)?
Why do you consider marine solar generation "ancient"?
What alternative form of marine electrical generation do you consider "modern" (perhaps your boat is equipped with a nuclear reactor)?
Why do you think installed kilowatt/hr capacity would go from $1000 to $1,000,000 - I thought I explained this!
You're babbling. This has what to do with output storage (in particular, output storage on my boat)? Or perhaps you wish to outlaw battery development along with solar development, so that we can be assured that our future electrical needs will always be supplied by mid-20th century technology.
the rest of us don't want to freeze in you solar utopia.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!
Outlawing a stupid, dangerous idea would work for me! Call me when solar works when the sun goes down or under 3 feet of snow.
Your Luddite view that solar power should be outlawed "for the good of the people" is rather strange for a conservative. Grinding technological innovation to a halt by law is about as anti-capitalist a position as I can imagine.
Solar will either swim in the marketplace, or sink. As I made clear, I view the future of solar generation to be discrete usage, not central generation. This is borne out by solar's rather successful niche usages (such as my boat) -- i.e., while it is efficient in a number of circumstances, it is not efficient in a number of other circumstances. Rather like Iceland, which uses geothermal steam to generate electricity simply because there is an abundance of geothermal steam in Iceland.
either ALL the grid works, or ALL the grid does not work - thats why the big plants.
Whoo boy. Your view of electrical generation as big and central or nothing is odd, to say the least. There are already abundant micro-generation plants that supply electrical power to discrete industries, for the practical reason that wholly centralized generation leads inexorably to wholly centralized loss of power when the central generation plant and/or grid goes down.
Surely, as one purporting to have an MBA, you recognize this exceedingly obvious flaw in centralized power. And surely you realize that industries world wide have already protected themselves against this flaw.
As for your panic that, if enough radicals use alternative power sources, central power will become uneconomical, I think I'll let the market shake that out. I really abhor it when "central planners" like you decide what is good for the rest of us -- mainly because you inevitably turn out to wrong.
As for the last two paragraphs of your post, personal insult is fashionable on the internet, but it isn't argument.
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