I heard they make good towels, too. :P

I was quoted $21,000 to install a solar system on my house. It's only 3000 sf, so don't go thinking it's a mansion. This technology is so stupidly unaffordable. How long until there is affordable pricing for this stuff? Question. When high efficiency solar is available for individuals, why bother with spending money on energy efficient homes? I paid 8K for a high SEER A/C last year, could have gotten the lowest SEER for about half the price. I'm all for using less and conserving, but these prices kill me.

The truth behind solar power is that is it great for small applications (radios, road signs, etc.), but it is FAR too expensive for practical household or industrial use. On average the solar panels, batteries, and wiring required to produce electricity runs over $1000 per 100 watts. That would mean equiping a home to run off solar power would run $50,000 to provide 5 kilowatts. While that might be fine for a tiny home, it would barely run a 2000 square foot house unless you are willing to give up central air, heat, and other modern marvels of the 20th century.
This is one of the major deceptions of our new president's energy plan. You can claim all day long that we can convert to solar energy in ten years, but the technology to make that happen is still decades away.
The way to go is nuclear energy. Despite the rabid hatred the press and environmental groups have for nuclear power, it is clean and relatively safe. The French have been using it for decades to provide a large percentage of their energy without mishap. Despite the premises of most Sci-fi movies, nuclear power plants do not blow up like bombs, the radioactive material is easy to track, and it takes a little more than a typical high school graduate to refine stolen radioactive material to build a nuke bomb, even if it is just a "dirty bomb."
But until we get someone in government to stand up to the alarmists and biased lefties, we'll just keep paying high prices and burning coal.

what about toxic nuclear waist that has to be put away? that's not -clean-. it friggin toxic! and while no, i dont think that a Chernobyl will happen at the drop of a hat. but Chernobyl proves nuclear enery isnt clean or safe.

Chernobyl was caused by a crumbling Soviet system rife with corruption and no oversight or safeguards. It was just one example of many epic environmental disasters that took place in the Soviet Union; Chernobyl was just impossible to cover-up.
You can find an example to disprove the rule in any situation. And yes, nuclear waste is toxic. But then so are the by-products of burning coal and all other fossil fuels. The volumn of waste produced by nuclear power plants is FAR less than the pollution caused by other, more traditional power plants. It can be managed and stored in ways that fossil fuel pollution can not. Nuclear waste has been transported by rail across this country for decades without a single major incident of contamination. Your statement is an example of someone hearing hysterical, unsupportable arguments made by the media and environmentalist and believing it without supporting data. Again, France (and I'm certainly the last person to praise the French) has used nuclear power for generations without mishap.
If we want real clean energy and the hope of transforming toward hydrogen power, nuclear is the way to go. If you want to be saddled with oil for the next 50 years, plant windmills. Until the technology catches up with the pie-in-the-sky promises, solar power is a pipe dream.

My biggest problem with Nuclear is its cost. Nuclear reactor manufacturers advertise that their equipment can be installed for around $2 per watt of capacity, so a 1 GW reactor would be a $2 billion project. In reality, these huge construction projects run much higher. For example, the expected cost of constructing two 1 GW reactors in Florida is $17 billion. That's $8.50 per watt of installed capacity, and it's a price point that several solar technologies already beat!!

One source for this info:
http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html

House, powered by solar energy is still only for green-mad people. It is still way too expensive and reliable. The only way to encourage people to use it is to do some tax reductions by governments. But again, with electric cars becoming more and more popular electricity consumption will increase dramatically, so it is time to think how to cover that increase...

Solar can power appliances, more so if they are DC then changing it into AC.
Heating and cooling are not good to do with PV though. You can still heat with solar and cool with a few other creative solutions that are much more viable then trying to do everything with electricity.

You don't need to go off the grid with solar either. The wet core batteries need to be replaced every few years (just like a car) so what happens to all the toxic acids and lead from the batterys? Recycled? Better look at that closer if you think thats a green soltion.

You can keep your existing wiring and eliminate the batterys by installing a reverse meter system that keeps the connection to the power grid.

A few of the power companies will even pay you for your excess power that you feed back to the grid. Most simply give you energy credits. That basicaly means you don't need to create 100% of your power or store it localy. Durring peak power mid day when your not home, your pushing power onto the grid, then at night your drawing power back from the grid, done correctly you can end up even or slightly ahead of the game.

They do not pay for themselves though before its time to replace most current panels...

Keep in mind that more sun means more heat, more heat makes PV work poorly. So a PV cell that can do X in the lab might only do a fraction of that at 113 in the desert sun. You also need to keep them perfectly clean and no partial shade ever touching them.

Its good they keep improving the PV cells. Somday they might actually be viable instead of a novel source.

hebramleigh ever watched Chernobyl seconds from disaster. Chernobyl Was nothing but human error and miss-communication. The same thing could have easily happened at the Trojan Plant when it was still operating, or any other nuclear plant in the US.

hebramleigh - Don't go blaming "lefties" for a lack of support for nuclear power. The issue has more to do with a "not-in-my-backyard" mentality that transcends any kind of political ideology.

In fact, in the parts of the southwest (areas which also happen to be conservative Republican strongholds) where there have been proposals to build new plants, there's always a public outcry. People are worried about safety, aesthetics, a drop in property values. People even make the same argument about freakin' windmills!

I, for one, am a liberal who is all for cost-effective nuclear power. I am convinced of it's relative safety, and there are new designs that are orders of magnitude safer than Chernobyl.

Check out this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

It describes small nuclear power plants, the size of garden sheds, able to power 20,000 homes for seven years on one batch of fuel, using a design with no moving parts, encased in concrete, and buried underground - thus eliminating the possibility of a Chernobyl type accident.

The target is 10 cents per Kw, and the cost would be about $2500 per home.

The particular design is so safe that is is used by student researchers.

BTW- Tatsu.ZZmage - I don't care what they say about Chernobyl in that documentary, there was far more to blame than human error. The design of the plant was substandard to begin with, with nothing more than sheetmetal as a containment dome. Furthermore, it was poorly maintained.

I can't say I could never happen here, but US plants are far better designed and maintained.

Heat is a shortcoming of all generators. High ambient temperature reduces the ability of any generation source to produce name plate rating.

All generation equipment, I am aware of, has short-comings of some kind from cost to loss of a prime mover such as solar, wind, thermal, gas, oil, nuclear, water, etc. It is best to have a diversity of generation sources so if one fails you have a fall back energy source. Most people do not relize electric utilities are required to keep an energy source in "hot reserve" to replace any loss of generation (5% water, 7% thermal) within two different time frames: 10 minutes to "borrow" energy from the system as a whole and 30 minutes to return to compliance or face stiff fines. Look it up on the NERC.com website.

I have worked in the energy industry for many years. Unless we find some kind of large storage battery capactiy, neither wind nor solar will be a primary source of energy. The 20% target wind energy target quoted by some is laughable or the trade-off is an unreliable grid system.

Distributed generation or local generation is probably one of the best ways to get away from a grid based electrical system. Again, it would require a community to have a mix of generation locally, including micro-nuclear units and individual or locally owned large fuel cells (multiple individual fuel cells). For safety, the electric grid, though reduced in scope and size, would be required for back up until we have a truly independent way to generate local energy.

Until then, we are stuck with slowly struggling toward an energy independent future. Obama has the right idea to create incentives to move that way but it will not be a fast transition. But then, unless there is a crisis, we never move fast anyway like the herd and tribal animals we are. $200 / barrel oil, when it arrives within the next decade, will go a long way toward creating that crisis.

SammyB; great post, especially considering many of the previous. I would disagree with your wind statement; in the west where I live wind BENEFITS from the grid simply because there are high wind loads many places at once which is conducive to maintaining a grid average but is not reliable on a local level. Current configuration of the grid is somewhat dangerous for other reasons, but that would be for another topic. In the west we could get to about 15-20%, but it will take years.

I have priced out solar panel applications and researched local and national rebates where you can get anywhere from 20 to 60% of your money back. PV’s are not at the stage where they can provide all the power for most applications, but that is hardly the point; a partial system will result in system savings, and stabilize many grid systems during peak operations with the feed-back meter mentioned by Arron. These items combined can make for a 2-3 year payback (as on my office building).

PV is not the only solar; they are reflective power plants (now less expensive to run that coal) and passive solar. These are regional and a small percentage, but still part of the puzzle.

As said previously; there is no magic bullet. There are hundreds of energy solutions (including nuclear) that will reduce dependence and carbon emissions (the most immediate being conservation and raising efficiencies of operation) that can be applied regional or locally with efficiency standards and regulations and, better yet, incentives. Few of the items will come quick or easy, however, I hope, we as a nation are not too short sighted, lazy or stupid to innovate and implement.

I think it is just great that Germany is leading the world in solar power! People tend to think that you have to live in Florida or California ar Arizona to have enough sun to make solar power work. But it's Germany doing it! Not Italy or Spain or Greece. We tend to think of those countries s sunny - not Germany. I hope some people here in the US are getting in on the idea of innovation!

On nuclear and chernobyl, the failure of chernobyl was partly due to the design, the moderator was graphite rods, withdrawing the rods stopped the reactor. In US design reactors, water is the moderator - a built in safety, and so if the reactor overheats, the water is heated to steam, and the reactor stops. There is no possibility of a chernobyl type incident, even if all the controls were taken out in some way, the reactor by design cannot meltdown.

All valid points.... but lets not wimper about tech not being suitable just yet. We (as a world) have developed more in the last 10years than the last 100. Technology is going to become more rapid! just compare the old brick cellphones to todays models. I am so looking foward to the next ten years... I just hope I can keep up!!

I believe house solar energy should be considered more of an energy supplement. Meaning it may not provide enough energy for your home but it will reduce power you need from the grid. so you would still have power bills but you would save some money.

In the end I do not consider it to be a solution to the worlds energy problems.

Yeah, solar's a heck of a lot more useful for space than it is for dirtside use. Many hundreds or thousands of square mile super-thin solar panels rolled out as close as they can safely be to the sun to run a massive industrial antimatter complex (bit arse particle accelerator)? Yeah, sure. Tons of bulky, heavy, inefficient panels spread all across our landscape that couldn't possibly produce energy all that cheaply in the first place (even if these were available today, so what, wow, it's only going to cost me like 18 cents a kwh? Great!), not such a great idea. While we're on that topic (you environmentalist types) how hard are solar panels to recycle? I'd imagine they're pretty difficult, and they're full of toxic materials. So what happens twenty years after hte massive solar stepup when those panels are wearing out and need to be replaced? Massive introduction of pollutants caused by that vs the gradual introduction of co2 which not only is still only a trace element in the atmosphere but isn't proven to be a significant greenhouse gas (and it'd have to be SUPER significant to do damage at the levels its in our atmosphere, even if we quadrupled or quitupled or multiplied it by a hundred times)... I'll take the "man made" global warming any day. You know that the extremes of cold on the earth kill way more ppl than heat right? And global warming much more significantly affects those cold extremes than the hot ones... so by any realistic measure of potential global warming over the next century or so its actually a net benefit for humanity...

You can see how sad al-gore is can't you? How lonely? How happy he is that people are finally paying attention to the goracle? You were paying attention when the man who first "discovered" man made global warming denounced his own theory and was called senile by the goracle (who was first turned onto global warming by the same man).

Silly liberals :P you're just determined to destroy our planet but don't worry, we won't let you :P

The type of solar generation that is competative today is not solar cells. A much simpler technology is to use mirors to concentrate light from the sun and heat oil that is then used to boil water. The hot oil can be stored to keep the power generators going at night. Southern California has vast open empty space with lots of sun. The problem is getting permits to build. This is the same issue slowing wind generation. The NIMBYs will fight this for years. The mirrors and hot oil require vast amounts of space, but the Southwest has an abundance.

A revolution in affordable solar cell technology is just around the corner. No matter how you dress it up, disposing of depleted nuclear fuel cells still poses enormous problems. The disposal of this material has not kept up with the plant development. There are too many examples of seepage etc from various disposal sites. Consider the consequences of this stuff contamination our water systems. Until we can overcome that issue it would be unwise to radically increase the use of this energy technology.

First off, no one is going to do everything with Solar, that'd be silly to electrically heat water when you can do it Thermally from the sun. There is no SILVER BULLET, that can do it all, it's a Alternate Energy solution, a complete system. Check out the calculator at www.alternateenergycentral.com it demostrates certain technologie, specific to your area, and how long it will take to recoup your money, sometimes in under 10 years, and then free electric after that. Not to mention, you're saving resources.

it need to become more efficient to become more affordable for everyone. It's still way too expensive for the ordinary family

The biggest problem with electric power
A) to cheap
B) you dont know how much you use
C) to much politics, we could have been green 20 years ago
D) Thermal, white coal, wind, sea turbines ...
E) replace old light bulbs
F) Dimm the lights off in Las vegas

Nuclear energy is a short term solution, wich like oil is estimated for another 55 years if wel all would use it. After that those concrete garbage is only taking place.

But hey why care ?, we got global warming, and you and I and politics we are verry good in ignoring it all.. we got this since we had acid rain.. and even then we refused to act on it. So I bett 500 dollar, our climate will be destroyed by ourselves in the next 10 years

I have 36 panels on my roof. My bill ( EDISON) used to be 900. a month. Large house , large family I know. I moved out remodeled my house and added 2 refrigerators, 1 freezer, 1500 sq. feet, 6 tv,s , and I work out of the house now so I have 3 computers running at all times. My bill is 150. The best part is going out to the meter during the day and watching it spin backwards.

Solar energy is still very costly. But, we shouldn't be disheartened. There are scientists who have started claiming to have re attainted an efficiency of 80 % whereas present commercial efficiency is 15 - 17 %!

LLet's hope they achieve required efficiency; till then we'll have to wait!

Azfar A Khan
azfar44@hotmail.com

Saw that comment hebramleigh left about nuclear energy. Maybe I am just completely uninformed, but I like The Natural Step Principles - one of which says that if you mine things faster than the earth's crust can absorb it, don't do it! I think it's cool that there don't seem to be the same safety issues associated with nuclear plants anymore - but I don't want to leave a 50,000 year legacy of highly radioactive waste behind. Why is there no discussion about that? Can some nuclear physicist explain to me what should happen with highly radioactive byproducts accumulating with new nukes coming online? We are a closed system, for heaven's sake!

Pwonk

No worry be happy. I make all the world safe using negronuclear power. With the amount of BS I spew, and the atomic waste that spews out of Rham's asss we can POWER the world. Praise me Allah!, er I mean God.