"The future is solar" isn't some hippy fantasy, it's a sincere market projection. Apparently, a robust, distributed, decentralized, sustainable power grid is unbelievably the actual long-term direction of free-market forces.
There is some other interesting economics at play. Solar is more suitable for local, small scale production for a few reasons including relative costs and the way those costs are distributed (capital cost vs variable cost).
That in itself is interesting for all sorts of reasons, many of them applying to countries like India with infrastructure difficulties.
About 7 years ago I visited Cow Bay, north of Cairns, Australia and past the end of the grid (it ends at the Daintree river, I think). All the B&Bs, houses, hotels and such were running on Diesel generators. Smelly, noisy... People turn them off at night. I wonder if solar has replaced much of this yet.
If local solar reduces the need for power infrastructure in areas where marginal costs are highest, I wonder if the economics of grids changes in some sort of useful way generally. Maybe the cost savings in marginal infrastructure reduce overall costs meaningfully. If governments (or the quasi independent private energy players) are too broke or disfunctional to provide good central power, there's an alternative. When telcom infrastructure was simplified by mobile, that had a big impact in places that never had wired infrastructure in the first place but got mobile phones.
The same thing has played out in mobile telecom vs wired. The 3rd world has leap frogged those who had to move from wired to wireless. For residential, micro grids are a totally viable solution where bulk storage happens at what would have been the substation. Generation happens at the edges and point of use, storage happens on a block or neighborhood level. Absolutely required load at night can be pretty low.
Erm.. I assumed when he said about capital vs marginal costs of solar it was because the capital is not too high(compared to coal and other power stations/generators). Wouldn't nuclear be the opposite. I can imagine proper waste disposal alone costing more than a solar setup.(I know the solar setup for a small farm-house was very cheap).
In the age of global terrorism, local nuclear is a no-go from the start.
Dirty bombs hardly make sense in terms of headcount, but their psychological effects would be tremendous. Therefore, security around nuclear installations will remain high - and that's easier to organize and cheaper around big, centralized stations.
absolutely. thorium and thorconpower.com comes to mind. Recent news on supersonic jet comebacks makes me optimistic that eventually someone is going to pickup nuclear and challenges the status quo.
Which is a real pity as we traded the flu for cancer when we discarded nuclear in favour of carbon. What will those that will have to live through the fallout of the coal era have to remember ?
"The future is solar" isn't some hippy fantasy, it's a sincere market projection. Apparently, a robust, distributed, decentralized, sustainable power grid is unbelievably the actual long-term direction of free-market forces.