In 2010 solar accounted for 0.1 percent of electric generation in Colo. http://www.eia.gov/renewable/state/colorado/
Consumers in that state and elsewhere have excellent reasons to wait: 1. PV is sure to get cheaper and more reliable as time progresses. 2. The history of govt incentives is that they go away.

Posted By Dana1 on 10 Apr 2012 05:15 PM
...snip...
PV is great and all, but the bang/buck is still pretty lousy compared to efficiency improvements at the load. 
...snip...

Let me offer this generalization for two cases:

1.  Case 1 - Retrofit of house at least 15 years old, or built to code significantly more lenient than current code.  Should I think about: (a) solar PV or (b) adding insulation and upgrading HVAC systems first?  Almost always the answer will be (b), look at adding insulation and upgrading HVAC system first.  However, if this is a deep energy retrofit (a rare case), solar PV should be evaluated after new-house code standards have been met with the thermal envelope. 

2.  Case 2 - New house built to code.  Should I think about: (a) solar PV or (b) insulating well beyond code, including super-insulating to approach Passive House standards?  In this case, the answer is not automatically (a) or (b).  When I ran the numbers on my new house, I found the payback for solar PV was about 7-9 years, while increasing attic insulation from R-38 to R-60 was 28 years payback, adding 2" of XPS to the outside of the R-20 filled 2x6 framing was 42 years payback, and going from R-14 to R-19 on the crawlspace walls was 29 years payback.  I live in a high solar insolation level climate, and have fairly inexpensive natural gas ($0.72/CCF) with a 97.5% efficient furnace, but 7000+ heating degree days.  For retrofits, there are usually subsidies for upgrading insulation, while for new houses there are not.  For this Case 2, you should not automatically assume (a) or (b).  You need to do the calculations to make decisions using BEopt or whatever calculational approach that you like. 

In both cases above, thought should be given to shading and/or passive solar heating, depending on climate, which can be accomplished almost for free in many cases.  This is typically easier for Case 2 above, new construction than for Case 1, the retrofit. 

Posted By toddm on 10 Apr 2012 05:43 PM
In 2010 solar accounted for 0.1 percent of electric generation in Colo. http://www.eia.gov/renewable/state/colorado/
Consumers in that state and elsewhere have excellent reasons to wait: 1. PV is sure to get cheaper and more reliable as time progresses. 2. The history of govt incentives is that they go away.

Based on your link and similar for earlier years, check out the growth rate of solar energy in Colorado through 2010 as shown in the attachment, and I bet there is a big jump for 2011 since utility-size projects came on line in 2010 and 2011. 

Between solar, wind, hydro and other renewables, the total renewable contribution to generated energy in 2010 was just over 10%, again from your link.  I think Colorado currently ranks 4th in the country for solar electric.     

I did not understand your item 2 above.  If government incentives are going away for rebates for installing renewable energy, why would folks not want to take action before the incentives disappear? 

Concerning your item 1, PV is already very reliable, with the weakest link being the inverters, which have typical lifetimes of 10 or 15 years.  I cannot think of another form of electricity generation that has better mechanical reliability, since there are no moving parts.  The installed cost for solar PV reached a minimum (unsubsidized) cost of between $4/W DC and $4.50/W DC last year, and costs over the short term are expected to increase slightly.  Who knows about the long term.   

Gordon Moore did a pretty good job of predicting the future. According to Moore's law, the number of transistors on a microchip, and hence computing power, doubles every 18 months. There is no reason to believe that PV wouldn't follow the trajectory being silicon based as well. Surely there are many labs tackling degradation as I write this. (Degradation being the steady loss in output as solar cells age.)

As for changing policy, what would your economics look like if net metering went away?

What happened to the guy who stated that cancer research could suffer from funding solar energy?

Is this a guns/butter sort of thing?

edit to add: Just tongue-in-cheek questions in response to a political hit-and-run attack.

Posted By ICFHybrid on 11 Apr 2012 09:13 AM
What happened to the guy who stated that cancer research could suffer from funding solar energy?

Is this a guns/butter sort of thing?

edit to add: Just tongue-in-cheek questions in response to a political hit-and-run attack.

I'm still here.  I just didn't want to keep replying at the risk of offending. I do appreciate everyone's input re: energy efficient building.  I only hopped in on the topic because I feel a personal responsibility to correct misinformation regarding economics, and I didn't want to become a board pest by continuing a debate that no one wanted to have.

THat being said, your comment really misses the economic point.  What I said was that the "costs" of funding gov't solar energy programs (indeed, any gov't programs) are paid by society at large, which means those dollars are not spent on things that the taxpayers would otherwise have spent their money on.  Since the taxpayers presumably would not have spent their own money on solar panels for other people (or themselves), then they didn't see that use as the most efficient/beneficial uses of their money.

Instead, had the gov't not commandeered their money, those people may have chosen to spend that money on something that they prefered to spend money on, such as food, preferred charitable endeavors (i.e. cancer research), Ipads (i.e. electronics), or whatever.  The follow up suggestion that I was claiming some direct relationship between solar panel funding and cancer research is ignorant at best.  That my point was missed entirely shows just how little economics is taught and understood in this country.

This entire thread is representative of the source of misunderstandings that fuel our economic problems.
 
Quite simply, gov't makes nothing and generates no prosperity.  Outside of protecting our life, liberty, and property, government is limited to redistributing income and hindering economic prosperity via economic controls.  I could not begin to explain how in a mere internet post, but, this thinking that gov't can spend our money better than we can (i.e. central planning aka socialism aka communism) is the biggest and most widespread economic fallacy in the world today.  How many times does this have to fail for us to realize that CENTRAL PLANNING DOESN'T WORK?

Don't take this as an attack on green energy, either. It's not.  Central Planning is not something that happens overnight.  It's well intentioned and small tweaks over time that result in a society and economic system that is no longer free or respesentative of capitalism.  See our insane IRS tax code for an example of how well-meaning and small changes can add up to an albatross of bureaucracy that is economically stifling.

It is those small changes -- regardless of how well-intentioned they are -- that we must resist because they ultimately result in a loss of freedom and prosperity.

Without government regulation the unified grid and it's benefits would disappear, leading to local & regional grids, in some cases local monopolies, in others competing vendors with a duplication of capital infrastructure.

Without government regulation and funding the roadway grid would be a real mess, giving all new meaning to "gridlock" with toll-booths on every privately owned segment, and no overarching traffic plan.

Federal funding has wrought both the benefits and ills of large-scale hydro & nuclear power. Was that a mistake?

Distributed small and mid-sized grid power sources makes for a more reliable grid than the large-central model, but takes a large number of investor/owners to implement.

Most homeowners won't make energy invesments in their home unless it has a sub-3 year simple-payback (and even then many balk.) Code-minimum R values are based on a 20 or 25 year present-value of future utility savings. Are building codes a bad idea?

Without larger entities to guide (or in some instances mis-guide) energy policy modern industrialized societies couldn't exist. The degrees of freedoms given up to attain the benefits of these societies will vary from country to country, but the market alone simply can't solve issues like climate change or air & water pollution.

Germans have in fact voted to accept the financial costs of greening-up their grid, (and doing it without nukes.) Are they less free? If the German public changes their mind, they can (and will) vote differently. The US has yet to achieve a similar level of consensus on energy policy or carbon policy, but one benefit of German policy has been to fully commercialize PV production on a massive scale leading to lower costs for those who want to implement it. Administrations come and go, incentive-based programs do too. But for those with financial time horizons longer than a couple of decades, PV at current prices flies without further subsidy in parts of the US that can use the peak-shaving, assuming we don't break up the regulated-monopoly approach to managing the grid.

Posted By toddm on 11 Apr 2012 08:21 AM
Gordon Moore did a pretty good job of predicting the future. According to Moore's law, the number of transistors on a microchip, and hence computing power, doubles every 18 months. There is no reason to believe that PV wouldn't follow the trajectory being silicon based as well. Surely there are many labs tackling degradation as I write this. (Degradation being the steady loss in output as solar cells age.)

As for changing policy, what would your economics look like if net metering went away?

Moore's Law has to do with miniaturization of components on microchips.  Since solar cells are area-based light detectors, making them smaller does not accomplish anything.  

Although subsidies may change, net metering policy is a contract between customer and utility, and is unlikely to be changed.  If threats were made to do away with net metering, I would hope that more communities would "do a Boulder" and form their own municipal utility (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Maki...ic-company).  Alternatively, individuals with grid-tied PV could certainly switch to off-grid systems, but those systems are not as efficient or cost-effective as grid-tied systems.   

If folks are interested in real energy independence and going solar, this is an excellent time to make that decision while rebates are available and solar panels costs have become more affordable than they used to be.  At least for the intermediate term, solar panel prices are not getting less expensive.  Hopefully over the longer term they will be.  The following is from the Administrator of the Northerm Arizona Wind & Sun Forum (http://www.wind-sun.com/ForumVB/sho...post114088),
"We are officially (more or less) declaring that the bottom has been hit in solar panel prices. I doubt that prices will get any lower to any significant degree. Over the past 3 months we have seen no significant price reductions from any of the manufacturers that we buy from, and one of the major ones has indicated that panel prices will probably be going up by a few cents per watt in the near future. This is not really surprising - panel prices have been selling near or below the actual cost of manufacture for nearly a year now, and it appears that most of the less viable company failures have happened or are in the works. There may be a few more companies that go under and some M&A, but I do not see anything that would indicate further price reductions."

Alright, Dana, bear with me.  I'll try to take these one at a time:

Re: roads and utilities -- this is really a straw man argument.  You're talking about the very extremes here.  Western goverments have gone WAAAAAY beyond just providing infrastructure items.  That being said, yes, the market would provide for these, as it provides for everything that is truly desired.  Profit motive has a way of doing that.  Hwoever, there are a few -- very few -- areas where a gov't monopoly can be viable because the nature of the thing itself lends itself to a monopoly, such as basic infrastructure.  One could make a pretty good argument that infrastructure is critical to the protection of property rights and is best paid for by Gov't to avoid the economic problem of free riders, among others.  The regional and local monopolies that you speak of is largely what we have today with infrastructure.  Most roads are built and maintained by the states (so 50 little monopolies) and,  to a large degree, that's what we have with utilility lines, too.  In my state, we have a couple of major utility players, along with a few municipalities and/or rural coops that own their own transmission lines.  So, I'm not really sure where the fear comes from with that.

Large scale hydro and nuclear power -- how do you know what would have happened without the federal gov't dictating these things?  They may have been created anyway -- or maybe not.  What rose in their places may have been better or more efficient.  The gov't is not the only big spender available.  People have wealth and the ability to pool that wealth for large scale projects.  Indeed, the gov't only gets its wealth by taking it from the citizens, so how can one suggest that only gov't wealth can solve these problems?  Gov't wealth is merely wealth taken from individuals.  Anyway, we really don't know what our power grid would look like under pure capitalism because it never happened.  What we do know, is that on a large-scale, long-term basis, only the free market maximizes prosperity.  The whole communism thing didn't work out well for the Soviet Union or Cube (or now Venezuela), and Communist China is only now experiencing growth because it is adopting free market principles.  NOTE: China's economy it is still very much state controlled, which is why a billion of its people are mired in poverty while a slim minority live in relative lavishness.  This simply reflects the general problem with gov't involvement -- even when well intentioned, it results in economic disparity.

"
Distributed small and mid-sized grid power sources makes for a more reliable grid than the large-central model, but takes a large number of investor/owners to implement."
 
Amen, brother.  If we were only free to spend our own money, we would likely have smaller, less centralized power generation than we have now.  At least we can agree on that.  Government involvement rarely, if ever, decentralizes anything.  Too big to fail banks are a function of gov'tal interference in banking.  Without the Fed, banking regs, etc. we would have decentralized banking (i.e. lots of small and regional banks), and the Great Recession would never have happened.  Before the Fed, runs on banks resulted in short recessions.  Since the creation of the Fed (1913) we have had the worst depressions and recessions this country has ever known.  Ironically, the Fed was supposed to PREVENT long and deep depressions.  Wow, and we still believe in this crap?



"Most homeowners won't make energy invesments in their home unless it has a sub-3 year simple-payback (and even then many balk.) Code-minimum R values are based on a 20 or 25 year present-value of future utility savings. Are building codes a bad idea?"

This would NOT be the case BUT FOR the gov't involvement in housing.  The reason this is true is because peopel don't live in homes very long.  Why is that?  Because the Federal Gov't and Fed Reserve virtually guarantee cheap home loans to everyone for extremely long terms and with a tax break to boot.  If those things didn't exist, people would live in less expensive houses on shorter term loans for longer periods of time.  Do you think such people would be more or less inclined to think about the long term operating costs of their homes?  I'm taking the over (more) on that one.  Also, code minimums create a defacto maximums for the vast majority of people.  Why do so many builders build to code?  BEcause if it's good enough for code, then it must be good enough, right?  If we didn't have a code, people (builders and homeowners) would have to think about this for themselves.  Personally, I think that would be a great thing.



"Without larger entities to guide (or in some instances mis-guide) energy policy modern industrialized societies couldn't exist. The degrees of freedoms given up to attain the benefits of these societies will vary from country to country, but the market alone simply can't solve issues like climate change or air & water pollution."
 
The first sentence is unsupported, and, in my opinion, just wrong.  Large industry that needs a lot of power would fund its own electricity needs, if that's what were required.  Indeed, I am aware of at least one large industrial facility in my state that literally paid for its own electrical service to be built to handle its electricity loads.  It sold the facilities to the local utility with a contracted rate of electricity payments.  Of course, I think the market would provide electricity if electricity were demanded because that's what the market does.  The last sentence, I completely agree with.  The core function of government should be to protect our property rights -- so that the guy with the biggest stick doesn't always win by forcing his will on others.  Property rights=level playing field=maximum innovation and prosperity.  No one has the right to pollute someone else's property.  For this reason, I am in favor of reasonable environmental regulations for the purpose of protecting property. 


"Germans have in fact voted to accept the financial costs of greening-up their grid, (and doing it without nukes.) Are they less free?"

Yes, and it's called the tyranny of the majority.  If you accept that simply by voting its will, the majority can do what it wants without regard to the fundamental personal and property rights of others, then you will eventually have communism because the less-well-to-do will eventually out-vote the wealthy.  Or, in the alternative, you might end up with fascism.  In both cases, you tend to have very high concentrations of wealth with the politically powerful, and either way, it's a lose-lose for the middle class.  That's the fundamental problem with unfettered gov't. Govn't needs to be reigned in and designed to protect property rights and opportunity, not to guarantee (or even influence) equality of outcomes.

The Moore's law applied to photovoltaics is efficiency rather than miniaturization, and, yes, it does apply. IIRC, the University of Delaware hit ~ 50 percent efficiency by breaking light into the spectrum and "tuning" cells for the respective wave lengths. Commercial pv is 10 to 15 percent efficient. Additionally, in a decade or so, pv shingles or similar roofing will make your collectors look a Commodore 64, sad to say, Lee.

I have nothing against government involvement in, or regulation of, economy. But there is a difference between building Hoover dam and trying to steering consumer demand through tax policy, namely that one works and one doesn't. If solar continues to double each year in Colo. from 0.1 percent in 2010, penetration will be still be in single digits when the credits expire in 2016, assuming they last that long.

Nor can you have it both ways, Lee. If the credits do work, the grid in Colo. would soon have all the daylight generation it can handle, and the utiliities' choice would be to break the contract with net metering customers or foist the subsidy on everyone else.

Moore's law is mis-applied to all sorts of technology where the physical fundamentals have much firmer limitations. But Moore's law will not apply even to crystalline transistor structures forever. We have client designing building scanning ion microscopes capable of imaging crystals at the atomic level (you can see individual atoms in the image), and has developed ion implantation beams capable of building up femto-structures at a similar level. So while you can go 3-D with it but the number of orders of magnitude reduction of transistor size acheived over the last 50 years will not be possible to do for the next 50- you can't build a 3-atom transistor that works, and the half-life of transistors in the 10s of atoms will be very short due to every thing from thermal & physical shock issues (not to mention the cosmic-ray damage problem.)

I've heard people try to apply Moore's law to storage battery capacity & energy density too (really?). Given that batteries have been around for getting onto a coupla centuries now, and that barely 2 orders of magnitude have been achieved over that time span I'm not holding my breath until we cross the threshold of the next order of magnitude. Yes there IS progress on battery technology, but it's primarily been linear not even remotely exponential.

Looking at any 3 month window on the price of ANYTHING is a bit ridiculous, let alone PV, where there are multiple competing lower cost per peak watt than silicon. Even 3 YEARS isn't even a long enough time to predict the trend (witness the last 3 years, where the price dropped at breathtaking speed once the silicon-foundry bottleneck of the prior 3 years that had plateaued the price was unplugged by a comparative glut of new production of the raw material. Print-on-steel CIGS technology PV has a cost basis well under that of just the raw materials for silicon PV, and is rising to near-parity on per-square meter efficiency. Production capacity and refinements on those technologies is just getting started, whereas silicon PV is now 50+ years old. I expect CIGS & CdTe technologies to bury quite a few silicon PV companies over the next decade or two.


One might try to apply a Moore's law exponent to the efficiency of silicon PV to the known theoretical limits, but the time constant is nothing so short as with the speed & size development of silicon transistors.

Applying the trend line to the module pricing over past 3 decades is probably more instructive than over the past 3 years:

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-08-at-3.20.01-PM.png

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/naam-solar-moore_s-law-1.jpg << note the file name- maybe there's something to the exponential decay of price per watt akin to Moore's law, but it's hard to see how it'll ever hit 10 cents/wattl without using different materials)

See: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/

But note the time-constant- it's not dropping by half every 18 months ( per Moore & transistors), but rather halved in price every ~100-125 months- more than 5x as long. Buck-a-watt panel pricing isn't out of the question by 2020, and is all but certain by 2025:

First Solar (a CdTe PV manufacturer) has been soaring and gaining huge market share during the boom years of high feed-in-tariffs driving demand, but is hurting a bit this year (just like most silicon PV companies) now that the world markets have dialed back. But their short-term financial losses aren't a gross margin problem, but rather a capitalization of production capacity issue. Most PV companies have been in a mad scramble to expand as fast as they could in order to cash in on the high-margin high-volume of building out the European PV installations, and it's hard to start & stop on a dime. That one company alone is still doing well over $3 billion dollars/year in sales, and YingLi & Trina aren't far behind. (Suntech is still ahead of First Solar in gross sales, but the fundamental gross margin on their product isn't as good as with CdTe or CIGS.)

NanoSolar's marginal cost on larger scale CIGS panels is on the order of ~25cents/watt, and while they're still ramping up production there is still a very significant gross margin even at buck-a-watt panel pricing. Being privately held the hard numbers aren't available, but they are literally printing solar cells on steel- a process that has no analog in silicon PV.

If the US turns on the spigots even half as hard as the Europeans did to build out PV power these companies the race to the bottom in price will continue at a fairly fast clip, but they're all looking over their shoulder at competing technologies on the ascent.

In the meantime, for sub-10kw arrays the "rest of system" cost now dominates the installed cost, whereas 3 years ago it was still the $/watt of the panels driving the numbers. There is incremental progress being made on that front too, with smaller/cheaper/better inverters and better approaches to racking/mounting. But there are no fundamental reasons why PV (even silicon PV) can't beat the lifecycle cost per kwh of fossil fired generation before 2020, even without taxing carbon to recover the costs of the environmental damage.

jkieffer  writes: 

"Large scale hydro and nuclear power -- how do you know what would have happened without the federal gov't dictating these things?  They may have been created anyway"

WhAAAAAAAhahaha ha... hee hee... ha  ha...... ...MERCY!

"... -- or maybe not. "

D'ya think?

Without the power of eminent domain (even crossing state borders) and the ability to negotiate the international issues where it affects water an wildlife issue across international borders the scale of hydoelectric development that happened between 1935-1960 simply could not have happened, nothing even close. 

Private capital won't even touch nuclear now (long after it's a mature industry) without federal guarantees, let alone take on the STAGGERING R&D budget it took to make it happen in the 1940-1970 time frame.

"   "Germans have in fact voted to accept the financial costs of greening-up their grid, (and doing it without nukes.) Are they less free?"

Yes, and it's called the tyranny of the majority. "

REEEaally? 

If there was ever a country sensitized to tyranny-of-majority issues, it's post-war Germany ( for good historical reasons.)  I doubt there's a case to be made for Germany's energy policy being fascist or communist (outside of hardest of hard-corps libertarian circles, anyway.) They have a political process and a constitution-  it's isn't "policy by referendum", or anything close to it. But if the national consensus there changes, so will the policy, but gored-oxen are compensated for in that process.

Seriously, we will continue to disagree on a whole lot o' stuff, but I won't waste more space here on it here.

To be clear, silicon engineering in PV chips will be Moore-like in its successes, but I didn't mean to imply that it would follow the same 18-month arc. Obviously, there is a real limit -- 100 percent -- in how much you can gin up efficiency.

Posted By toddm on 11 Apr 2012 03:18 PM
...snip...

Nor can you have it both ways, Lee. If the credits do work, the grid in Colo. would soon have all the daylight generation it can handle, and the utiliities' choice would be to break the contract with net metering customers or foist the subsidy on everyone else.

There seems to be some confusion with what is meant by the terms "net metering" and "subsidy."  Net metering does not represent a subsidy.  Net metering, as applied in Colorado and many other places, means that the utilities will reduce my bill for the amount of power that they do not supply to me.  I still pay a fixed monthly connection fee to meet their fixed costs.  If I generate an excess of electricity and put it on the grid, they will pay me slightly under 3 cents/kWh, and sell it to other folks on the grid for slightly over 10 cents per kWh.  However, they have to maintain the power lines, balance the grid, etc., so that is a reasonable deal from my standpoint.  It saves them some of the capital costs of building new power plants to meet peak load.  (Xcel just failed to get permission to build a nuclear power plant in Pueblo, Colorado, which would have been for base load, but would have cost us billions.) 

As we exit from the Petroleum Age over the next 100 to 200 years, utilities will get better at storage of intermittent power from renewable sources.  Currently, electricity demand almost everywhere in the U.S. and most of the developed world peaks during the day and early evening, so it is a nice match with solar electric production (PV and solar thermal generation of electricity). 

I won't belabor everything, but I can't let this go without pointing out the obvious errors -- and I do so respectfully, as I respect your opinion.

In most, if not all, states, public utilities have the right of eminent domain.  So, even private parties could condemn the proper land for a large scale utility project.

As for private money not touching nuke without federal guarantees, do you think that might have something to do with onerous GOV'T regulation?  This is a big intertwined ball of gov't regulation and control that has to be completely unwound to recognize true economic freedom and the prosperity that it brings.  Further, how do we know no one will touch nuke without federal guarantees?  We have federal guarantees available, so we don't really know what would happen without them.

Germany may not be fascist or communist -- yet, but it is darn sure highly socialist, the central planning aspects of which are critical to both political structures.  But, that's beside the point -- central economic planning is never as efficient as the private market.  No number of claimed isolated instances of socialist successes will ever change that verifiable fact.  Hell, the Soviets had a great army, so they were successful, right?  I mean, without socialism, they never would have had such a powerful army, huh? 

But, those tactics only distract from the broader truth -- in pursuing that grand army, the USSR was putting lipstick on an economic pig.  Socialism and central economic planning have NEVER produced long-term prosperity in the long history of this world -- ever.  Yet, here we are, intelligent people arguing its merits. 

Please take the political discussion to a more appropriate forum.

No misunderstanding, Lee. If utilities pay for generation they don't need someone has to subsidize said payments. In a gross example, when two thirds of Coloradans are net metering, the other third better have big daytime loads, and they won't in nonairconditioned Colorado. Two alternate scenarios: utilities roll back rates to reflect the low value of sunny-day generation. Or generating companies blanket Denver with lobbyists and swag to protect their investments by scuttling others'. Unless you have a lobbyist, or a written contract, or both, I wouldn't expect to come out on top of that one. "Doing a Boulder" won't help unless the municipality builds storage or conventional generation as well. If conventional generators can't compete in the day, their night-time rates will reflect that fact. Not that 2/3s of colorado will go pv any time soon. The government is a poor judge of what consumers will embrace, as am I and just about anyone short of the Steve Jobs class. Hamhanded starts and stops do more damage than good.

Jkieffer, the nuclear power industry in the 1950s lobbied Congress for limits on damage claims arising from a nuclear plant accident. The resulting Price Anderson Act also puts the government on the hook after the utility pays the extent of its private coverage, and absolves both of punitive damages even if the accident results from gross negligence. So, no, the nuclear industry would not exist except for special treatment by Congress.

toddm- As I pointed out earlier in this thread, as solar penetration rates increase, then energy storage will need to be addressed (see reference to ADELE above). You are mistaken about Colorado not using air condiitioning, and the implication that usage does not peak during the day and early evening. See Figs. 14 and 17 at http://www.cprl.ars.usda.gov/REMM%20Pubs/Increasing%20the%20Percentage%20of%20Renewable%20Energy%20in%20the%20Southwestern%20United%20States.pdf 
This diurnal load variation is typical for all developed nations, and Colorado is no exception.  Solar PV combined with solar thermal electrical generators with thermal storage do a nice job of meeting the daytime and evening requirements, and tall commercial wind farms do a nice job of meshing with the solar to meet nocturnal needs using the nocturnal jet.  Conveniently, yearly electrical load variations also peak in the summer when solar generation peaks.

Posted By jkieffer on 11 Apr 2012 03:09 PM


  Why do so many builders build to code?  BEcause if it's good enough for code, then it must be good enough, right?  If we didn't have a code, people (builders and homeowners) would have to think about this for themselves.  Personally, I think that would be a great thing.

Most (90%) of builders would build to minimum code because it costs them the least amount of money and most homeowners don't know or don't care about insulation.

Codes are a good thing because I would not trust builders to build a quality home if there were no codes in place. It would be like having a roadways without rules and regulations, it would be a disaster.

Back to the topic, what is the best place to find out about PV pricing and equipment?

States like Arizona still have less PV in use than countries like Germany, which has a lot less sun than Arizona does. 

From Lee's website, in a description of his home:
" Energy Star rated ceiling fans throughout, with no air conditioning "

To summarize, were residential solar electric to be more than a bit player in a decentralized, non capital intensive electric grid, we'd need centralized big dollar storage.

To elaborate on government hamhandedness: Tax credits for high dollar energy projects automatically cut out the half of Americans who would benefit most, those being the folks who pay no federal taxes but genuinely need help with heating and cooling bills. We might be down to the top 10 percent of filers before we find people who can recover the credit in a reasonable timeframe of two or three years. Add to that, the credit scores necessary to qualify for capital improvements that your average neighborhood banker truly doubts that he could recover in a foreclosure sale. There is still a limited benefit here from people like Lee who are demonstrating the value of solar electric. But it's harder to stomach claims that tax incentives could add up to more than that.