Legal Bill

Lately I've been thinking about solar panels. Pretty much every new house I see down the cape gets solar panels. Every town in the state seems to be putting them up as well. Plus a number of towns here put up big windmills. Massachusetts used to have several nuke plants but they have been decommissioned over time. Not sure where my electricity comes from, but since it all comes through the grid I'm guessing it is a bit of everything. But I think I may get me some solar cells some day. What about you. Do you get power from a non-fossil source? Do you plan to?

(By the way, they will have to pry my internal combustion engines from my cold dead hands. But a Prius, Tesla or electric golf cart would be good for you.)

Lovetodrive2000

I don't think as individuals, that switching to solar panels will have much of an impact... unless tens of millions do it.

Just replace all those old furnaces, water heaters, etc with ultra high efficiency ones, and that will help. And again, need tens of millions to do the same!

Matt_in_VA

Question: By Hydro do you mean Hydrogen (as in powered cars) or Hydro as in Hydro (water) electric?

I personally think that because hydrogen powered cars are the closest thing to what people are use to, they have the best chance to evolve. One drives them, until the tank is empty. Stop and fill them up (just like gasoline powered vehicles). No re-charging down time involved.

boltonblue

First the good news, I think solar is here and has reached critical mass for a big roll out.
My sister got her house scoped and is scheduled for panel install in September.
I've actually been looking at the numbers of late and may be pulling the trigger soon.

Now the bad news.
All of this solar is going to wreak havoc on the power grid. Big energy generation takes a long time to come online and go off-line
Sometimes as much as 24 hours for the really big turbines to spin up.
The grid must also be power load balanced, I won't get into the details but this actually is fairly hard to do.
It is much much harder to to when you suddenly have a whole bunch of distributed sources dumping power back into the grid for a few hours.

The solarcity wall battery is going to make this a very interesting discussion.
Basically the ability to buy at a fractional rate and store the energy.

I wish my neighbor had this already.
His power got knocked out in the storm yesterday and we got to listen to his generator run all night.

fltsfshr

I did quite a bit of research on free standing energy for an island in the Keys. Solar panels only work in the sunlight. The output of a solar grid only seems to have virtue for charging. You need not only a large battery bank (which maybe Tesla will supply) and a secondary means of charging it.

I looked at self contained generators capable of recharging the battery bank including the cost of install and fuel delivery. About $20,000. Then I discovered you could buy a used Prius for 4K and a Prius comes with a power tap and all the other necessary controls.

fltsfshr

Heyitsgary

I'm a believer that in areas where solar is most feasible, it should be part of new building code. That would drive the demand, which would drive innovation. New roofing materials, panels, etc.. would come out that wouldn't make it look like you've got 'solar panels' on your roof. Today, I'd expect that companies in the business have 'forecasts' tied to nothing, and are hoping adoption continues. Legislation (which I don't think is the answer in many cases) would create some additional data for forecasting, and give some assurance to companies that their R/D efforts and costs would be recouped. The innovation that comes out would make solar in less feasible locations 'more feasible'.

With good planning, this would drive some change in the current energy providers and their systems to accommodate that. We're talking decades of work here, not years. I think people believe that alternative fuels are the answer. Changing the culture is the answer.

Legal Bill

Good question. I meant hydro-electric. I would have said fuel cells if I was going to list hydrogen, but I'm starting to think fuel cell cars are something of a false promise, at least at this time.

Legal Bill

It's simpler than that. Your not trying to substitute solar for the grid. You are trying to supplement it and reduce your usage of power from the grid. You put panels on the roof, use what you can, when you can, and put surplus power you don't use into the grid. You get money for that. When the sun is down, you take power from the grid. In theory, if everyone had solar panels the big commercial generators could reduce output during the daylight and then ramp up in the evening. However, as Jerry points out above, it is lot more difficult to do that in practice.