Posted on 10/12/2011 4:11:05 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Low demand continues to hit the global solar market. As price drops continue, some solar firms have been reportedly trying to sell their in-house equipment. However, demand for the equipment is low.
Oversupply continues to cast a cloud over the solar market. Many firms have been forced to sell solar products and materials with low prices to maintain cash flows. As the fourth quarter is the traditional low season and lowly-priced solar products have failed to stimulate demand, most firms have been unable to operate at full capacity, leaving little room for used equipment in the market.
During previous boom times, many firms in Greater China were keen to add new equipment for capacity expansion. But after the market started taking a downturn, the new equipment has been left idle and become a burden.
(Excerpt) Read more at digitimes.com ...
This is why Obama is shutting down all other sources of electricity or making them so expensive as to make solar competitive.
It seems to me that if solar power had any practical application, it would be in large plants or warehouses that have many thousands of square feet of roof space, especially in the south or southwest. You never hear of that, so I suspect that it just isn’t economically feasible.
But do-gooders sure do love to hype solar as the be-all, end-all.
When you do a cost amortization of going Solar, you are looking at 10+ years before you break even. Of course, this assumes some very critical things.
For instance, will technology advance and your system will be woefully over-priced and inefficient; thus have to be replaced before you break even?
Will a hale/wind storm take out your investment? Will insurance replace it?
Will it truly work ‘as-advertized’?
Will the cost of electricty go up, to justify the cost of this addition?
Will you have a job in ‘x’ months, so you can keep your home, and realize a gain on your investment?
With the economy as it is, and solar energy efficiency and technology where it is - it’s nearly impossible to make a compelling reason to switch now.
Every concern you raised here is the reason why we decided not to use Solar for our home, and trust me, I’d love nothing more than to call up and tell my power company to go sexually interact with itself.
I wish hydroelectric were an option for our property, but we don’t have a strong source of natural running water. Of course, as soon as someone would do something like that, in addition to buying the equipment, there are probably hundreds of permits, and when you’re done, some jackboot from the EPA will probably shut you down and then some.
Experience with trying to shut down power plants and convert to solar energy and wind power in Europe has been a real disaster.
The huge fluctuations and surges in power levels from the multitude of tiny distributed solar and wind farms has proven to be very destructive to the power grid when there is too much available and they still need the conventional nuclear plants as a bock up for when the sun does not shine or the wind is not blowing.
Unfavorable conditions for wind and solar power production seem to more frequent than favorable conditions.
There have been major mismatched conditions between power generation and the demand for power. So at times the system is stressed with very high demand and low availability which causes brown outs and power shut downs like we saw in California when Grey Davis (Dem) was in office. At other times demand for power is low and power production is very high which overloads the system
Wind and solar power production in Europe also as proven to be unreliable and more expensive than anticipated due to frequent breakdowns in the very complex wind turbines and and the solar cell systems
That makes a lot of sense.
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