Cant find the article, but read about a break thru several months ago from one of the major defense contractors. Stated that they developed a way to create photovoltaic panels that are now 80% efficient at a huge cost reduction. I was simply stunned it wasnt front page news because of the implications.
I have an old Mother Earth news article on how to build a solar water heater for $30 Photovoltaics cost a lot more and I think have a payback of about 10 to 15 yrs. Basically either the cost for them needs to come down a lot or the cost of competing alternatives needs to go up a lot, for it to make sense to put money into them. The issue of storage for solar generate power isn't really a problem. You use excess power generated to pump water back above a dam, and then convert it back when needed. Solar or Wind aren't used as baseload because they aren't there all the time.
It takes less than 10 years, sometimes less than 5 years to pay back on PV, depending on where you live. Don't worry, with electricity deregulation, you soon will wish you bought them early. Solar panel price is actually decent, it can potentially go even higher. You have to be realistic, it is warrantied for 20-25 years and their potential life is projected to 40 years, if not longer. Just based on electricity you can justify a big chunk of the price, but then there are the other dynamics. As for pumping water in a water tower, via Hydroelectric style, just not efficient. The numbers do not really work out. Does not make sense on large scale generation either. The water tower technique is the least favorable out of the "old" techniques of preparing for peak loads. Best schematic created so far is PV with Fuel Cell. Only problem is the fuel cell and the lack of promise for mass fuel cell usage. Other than that, the most logical step is grid connected distributed solar, which helps out during key peak loads, hence decreasing reliance on gas/coal/oil.
Once I saw a program on TV in which Governor of Montana was lobbying for coal power technology saying that Montana has enough coal to fuel the US needs for the next 30 years at price between $1-2 a gallon equivalent of oil. It is all a matter of new investment into a new or discarded field. $16T for the investment is mind boggling unless the price of Solar tehnology comes down by 75% atleast. Windpower seems to be more in use but main problem being the noise pollution, results in not applicable in the residential areas. Also electricity generated by wind turbines is not storable, I think, might be wrong also. Also heard of some companies using the sea waves to run dam like turbines but this technology is also in its early stages only.
Your assumptions are wrong, show me a solar investment that has a payback of 5 years and I'm in! Deregulation is a good thing....this isn't commie russia...this the US, we are capitalists, and just like rates on long distance have dropped dramatically over the last 20 years, so will electrical rates. Once the door of competition is opened, and the environmental wackos get out of the way of human progress. Rates will come down....solutions will be found.
I haven't the foggiest. I doubt it's that much higher, though, than the operating costs per megawatt per year for other power generation technologies. Coal fired power plants need maintenance too. Martin
Denmark has 20-25% of their electricity demand met by wind power. They are running into grid stability problems, but they're still building wind power so they seem to think they can deal with it. Of course they have inter-ties with the rest of Europe that lets them export or import their way out of some of their storage issues. The US is a long, long way from any stability limit on wind power as a component of our generation portfolio. Eventually we will need to upgrade our electrical grid which is woefully inadequate and technologically outdated anyway. You can solve some of these stability problems with dynamic demand rather than dynamic supply or storage. With a smart grid and real time pricing, industrial customers have an incentive to match demand to supply. This provides distributed energy storage to the grid from whoever has the lowest cost to "store" energy. For example a food warehouse can let the temperature rise a degree or two when energy is expensive and run their compressors when energy is cheap. A nation's worth of refrigeration is a lot of energy storage. Then there's plug in hybrids... but now I'm getting all tree-hugger on you guys. Martin
We need to attack the MidEast oil dependency problem, with the same tenacity, that engineers & scientists tackled the technical problems in the 60's of going to the moon. The problem is that big oil companies are so entrenched in present day politics. Here's some new technologies that are being developed for solar energy. Solar shingles and solar paint: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/catc-nf.html And spray-on plastic solar material that produces energy on a cloudy day using infrared rays instead of the visible spectrum: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0114_050114_solarplastic.html