> Straubel ended his talk with a slide that featured a quote from Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister: "The stone age came to an end not for lack of stones. And the oil age will come to an end not for lack of oil."
I remember when calling long distance was a big deal. It cost real money, and multiple big companies specialized in it and competed fiercely. Today for Internet connected folks, long distance phone calling is too cheap to meter.
It's not just that the price fell, although it did. It's that better technologies came along--cell phones and Internet--and the remaining cost of long distance just become embedded in them.
It's interesting to think of where energy generation or storage costs might become embedded. Homes? Cars? Appliances?
How much energy storage do you have in your house right now? Looking around right now, I've got 3 laptops, 2 tablets, and a smartphone in view. We're slowly accumulating watt-hours, just as a side effect of buying mobility.
Great points, but about energy storage in the home, mentioning tablets and smartphones, those are insanely negligible. An iPhone has about a 6 watthour battery. A large TV uses about 240 watts, so hooking up your iPhone to just your TV gets you about 90 seconds of power. A typical 1000+ watt coffee maker or microwave or toaster won't even be able to make you coffee or hot water or toast because the iPhone's battery lasts about 20 seconds.
That's why the whole Tesla car battery and home battery is interesting, because the latest Teslas have about 80000 watt hour batteries, or the equivalent of having 13 thousand iPhone batteries in your garage, and the powerwall batteries they sell each have the capacity of about 1500 iPhones. If everyone had such an electric car and battery pack, intermittent sustainable energy would make a lot more sense, but phones and tablets aren't going to play any role in energy storage. Laptops with 100 wh+ batteries could play a tiny tiny role, but that market is all going fanless on ever more powerful and efficient mobile chips, so I don't see that happening either.
In most of Australia, while on new properties you don't have the include solar panels specifically, you do have do meet a particular energy rating. The easy ways of doing this are heaps of insulation, solar panels, and solar hot water. Also, water tanks and water-saving shower heads are mandatory.
A 1kW system is horribly inefficient. That's 4 modules, which even in series is not going to get you to grid voltage so you will have to use costly microinverters. Plus you have all the fixed costs of installation, inspection, switchgear, etc. that has to be amortized over a tiny amount of power. Silly. For most circumstances, 4-5kW is going to be the minimum economical installation. There are many people who know how to evaluate a particular site and customer needs to figure out what is and is not economical and how to accomplish that. The mayor, and you, probably are not among them.
This is why politicians need to stay away and let the market do its job. It's too easy to let ignorance or some temporary set of circumstances lead you to impose costly and harmful regulations with far-reaching effects.
No. And I wasn't making a spec. I'd be optimizing for something else, installed base, know how and a population of contractors kickstarted into action. This was a minimum, not forcing people to ONLY install 1kw.
and then most city will burn down because once a unit is on fire, there is no reliable way (yet!) to have firefighter safely turn panels down to avoid electrocution. especially damaged solar cells that can produce energy while being shorted as contacts melt
distributed solar is nice and dandy but it does have some share of problems to solve before becoming viable.
a solar concentrator in the desert, on the other hand...
I don't use a ton of electricity so right now if i lease I save like $15 a month.. Not worth being tied into a 20 year lease. If I buy I think my payback is like 8 years which isn't bad just not worth it yet for me.
I'm betting on panel prices will continue to decrease in cost and become more efficient so the cost of buying them is more like 10k and not 25k where it is about now.
I remember when calling long distance was a big deal. It cost real money, and multiple big companies specialized in it and competed fiercely. Today for Internet connected folks, long distance phone calling is too cheap to meter.
It's not just that the price fell, although it did. It's that better technologies came along--cell phones and Internet--and the remaining cost of long distance just become embedded in them.
It's interesting to think of where energy generation or storage costs might become embedded. Homes? Cars? Appliances?
How much energy storage do you have in your house right now? Looking around right now, I've got 3 laptops, 2 tablets, and a smartphone in view. We're slowly accumulating watt-hours, just as a side effect of buying mobility.