Well I’ve been in the solar business for 25 years and I continue to put in systems every day every week that completely Crush electric bills siding from a small residential system to giant megawatt systems and I can tell you the fact is the photovoltaic cell is still one of the greatest inventions mankind has ever come up with solar plants are not going to run the grid however they do you work they don’t need subsidies and there is no mechanism for them to break down or fail it’s quite incredible
Now of course the government has funded boondoggles and idiots like Solyndra which I called a fried from the gecko and Venetto solar people who got $100 million and produced marry a product so I’m not going to excuse them but I will say hands-down that the photovoltaic module is a revolution
Peak demand for electricity is 5pm.
You’ll need a great big battery to get through the night...
which I called a fried from the gecko
lizard meat has its uses...
Oh my yes... like I said earlier, the idea of “doomed” is vastly exaggerated. Some people WANT this. Grant it to them. But eagle-chopping is really bad form. (I don’t think the older style of windmill, such as we see in pictures of Dutch countryside, had this problem. Modern long bladed turbines do.)
In your experience, what’s the break-even period for a home solar installation? How much longer would that break-even period be if we had “real” interest rates instead of the current fairyland, Fed-depressed, zero interest rates?
“a fried from the gecko”
Posting from our cell phone, were we?
You may be interested that Masimo (derived from the acquired Spire Semiconductor PV) is building a photo-voltaic bucky-sphere array, based upon existing concentrator conversion cells, to capture a 2000 sun flux from a 3000 K artificial light source. The first prototype will only use relatively inexpensive single layer cells of 11% efficiency for a thermal regimen.
Nearly commercial units are slated for field testing within 2nd half 2017, if the PV cooling system testing returns satisfactory results, and no surprises pop up. Upgrade to multi-layer PV at ~40% Eff. for a commercial product is the near term goal.