Change-over to enewable energy

projected total global power demand

already in place, supplying 4 percent

Chinese solar panels are selling for something like $1.25 per peak watt. Your 2p is a tad optimistic.

You still have to install them, invert to AC, connect to the grid, store energy somehow for when the sun sets, and clean up after wind storms blow all the panels away.

The thing that disturbs me about residential solar is that the panels are bolted right to roofs, over the shingles or whatever. Envision leaks. Roof maintanance will now involve removing and replacing the panels.

Efficiency is better if panels are kept clean. Imagine how many homeowners are going to die falling off roofs, trying to wash solar panels with soapy water.

John

Yeah, electronics is irrelevant to you. It's too real.

John

Horseshit! If all the CO2 were removed from the atmosphere your body would forget to breath and you would die. Not to mention the devastation of plant life.

?-/

Theoretically, these sources are useful for local loads in specialized situations. Economically, they are disasters - the government involvement (read: interference) is proof.

Q#1: Which half? Half-assed!

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cent of the projected total global power demand

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cent are already in place, supplying 4 percent

:)

And whats that per mean watt, several times more.

New build can do it better, by fabricating solar panels in shingle/ slate/tile form, but the vast number of retrofits are stuck with those problems.

And when all those other services we count on are cut due to lack of funds, it'll be slaughter.

NT

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That particular issue in electronics was (and is) irrelevant to the question being discussed. You were just trying to be unpleasant, a skill which you are definitely trying to master. Sadly, you aren't Richard Steven Walz, merely an obnoxious jerk with a limited imagination and a depressing tendency to recycle bad lines.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Wrong. Raw natural gas can contain up to 8% CO2, which is removed - along with the other less-than-useful compnoents - before the methane, ethane, propane and butane arefed into the distribution system.

You can assure me all you like, and you will still be talking nonsense. You can't evacuate a large city fast, but deep underground CO2 leakage isn't fast. If the city threatened was big enough, and valuable enough, the alternative approach would be to install a shallow network of gas-porous pipes and pump them down well below atmospheric pressure.

Barendrecht wouldn't be in that catagory, and 43,000 people could be evacuated pretty quickly. The 1995 Rhine

The 1995 Rhine floods forced the evacuation of 250,000 people and millions of farm animals in a couple of days.

No, it's toxic only in very high concentrations - 5% is disabling and

Nor have they remained safely stored underground - under extremely high presures - for millions of years in (some) natural gas fields.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's the current situation with solar panels. Mark Z.Jacobson and Mark A.Delucchi are envisaging a thousand-fold larger market with the consequent economies of scale.

Sufficiently large thermal solar plants seem to be close enough to break-even that if we built enough of them to supplyu 20% of our total energy needs.simple economy of scale would put them ahead of burning fossil carbon (and that isn't going to stay cheap as we burn up all the most easily extracted stuff and have to compete with the chineses and the Indians for what's left).

d:

And burning fossil carbon like there's no tomorrow isn't already a disaster? Not as big a disaster as we'll have to cope with if we keep at it until we've raised the global average temperatures by another degree Celcius or two. We've already raised the temperature of the Artic by some 3 to 4 degrees Celcius over the past century, and the Greenland ice sheet is already sliding off into the ocean at an alarming rate. There's six metres of sea level rise in the Greenland ice sheet, and rebuilding every port around the world could be rather expensive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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cent of the projected total global power demand

percent

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cent are already in place, supplying 4 percent

It isn't mine, it's Mark Z.Jacobson and Mark A.Delucchi's figure.

Perhaps they are figuring economies of scale for a thousandfold larger market; typically these the halve price for each factor of ten increase in production, which would only get your figure down to $0.20, but the authors may know stuff that we don't about latest generation of nano-structured solar cell materials

Mark Z.Jacobson and Mark A.Delucchido seem to set a lot of store in the capacity of hydroelectric power to fill in when the sun is down and. More of their solar power - 20% of the capacity needed - is thermal solar, which can store energy as heat. Solar panels are listed as supplying 14% of the energy budget, possibly just to drive air- conditioning systems.

We've been able to build structures that don't get blown away by anything short of a tornado for a century or so now. Tornados haven't made the US mid-west uninhabitable, so it does seem to be a risk that we can live with.

Big deal.

Imagine hown many entrepreneurs are going to invest in cherry-picker style panel-cleanig rigs once there are enough solar panels to provide a steady flow of business. You shouldn't have to try too hard - it's all Adam Smith's invisible hand of the free market.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So we should rely on power distribution through Libya, Tunisia, Algeria?

Which bit of energy security don't you understand?

Trolling again I see.

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We haven't got a lot of choice. Since the Arab Spring there does seem to be some prospect of stable demoncratic government in these areas - oil companies do seem to like military dictatorships, despite their unfortunate habit of coming apart when the dictator gets past it, or just greedy, as happened with Saddam Hussein.

The bit that says our current arrangements are "secure".

Simple statement of fact. You've made it perfectly obvious that you don't understand the scientific case. You do have enough sense to follow the denialist trolls that are published from time to time, but not enough sense to work out that that their arguments aren't remotely persuasive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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And they were good enough to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Are yours?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Do you have any idea about the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Let me give you some numbers: its about 0.04%. Dangerous concentration is 5%. But you'll feel to start the effects at 1%.

If you lock someone up in a closed room that person will not be killed due to the lack of oxygen but due to a toxic level of CO2.

Well the UK was fine until the AGW nuts came along. Plenty of coal to keep things running and plenty of shale.

Of course those stupid enough to rely on foreign supplies of gas have regular problems.

John said it quite well: " You are trolling to find reasons to argue and insult people".

the projected total global power demand

already in place, supplying 4 percent

Residential solar doesn't make sense to me. The economy of scale is all wrong. Solar water heating makes sense in some climates.

John

Running air conditioning with solar power makes sense, since during high cooling demand, the power production is also high at the same time, thus no energy storage is needed. It also reduces the peak power demand from centralized power stations and reduces the distribution network peak power levels.

The only reason there is a residential PV solar market in the USA is because of heavy subsidies. Which means that the economics is, with current technology, silly.

John

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With respect that doesn't require an article to add up. Read some fo the psych articles published if you doubt that. Mine were intended to be tweaked where needed, so anyone can see what the problem is

NT