That’s possibly true, but has nothing to do with potential. I ran a house on solar in Phoenix for ten years. I fed oversupply back into the grid during the day and drew from the grid at night and on a net basis effectively produced all the energy I used. Every single house in California could at the very least be producing their own daytime energy. The problem is one of investment.
Are you looking for something like this?
The other factor is efficiency. We’re getting better, but the current photovoltaics max out at about 26-29% efficiency. Current Consumer level is around 17%, and will max around 20%.
An in depth read:
Also, efficiency decreases over time with PV’s.
Turning the ugliness of a desolate, mostly unpopulated landscape into the ugliness of a solar farm is no big deal at all. No one is going to cut down forests or drain wetlands to install solar panels. And even in cities, covering roofs with solar panels shouldn’t oppress anyone considering the decrease in their electricity bills.
KevinC
5440
Unpopulated and desolate I agree, but I throw down my glove and call for kanly over saying our western deserts are ugly!
Deserts can certainly be beautiful. But there’s a difference between a living breathing desert and a few hundred acres of useless polluted scrub on the side of the highway somewhere…
Scuzz
5442
So do lots of Euro countries have these desolate ugly deserts to fill with solar panels? Does England? It kinda depends on the country and it’s geography, doesn’t it. When they start building solar farms on the Rhine or the Seine let me know.
Scuzz
5443
I believe as of some near date every house built in California will have to have solar panels. Many homes built here now include some panels. I would like to see every commercial building be required to have solar. But there are huge areas in every city where the owners cannot afford solar, or have no interest in installing it.
We looked into leasing a solar system, it is all the rage here now. Get panels installed and sign a 20 year lease for a fixed price. One catch is that the power generated can only be a percentage based on your previous use, which means not a lot is going back into the grid. Especially in high use months.
I don’t think the leasing options I’ve seen are very good deals. I bought my system outright and it paid for itself in about 8 years, so I was happy with that. If we hadn’t sold the house, I would have looked into batteries as well.
Rooftop solar isn’t going to drive a grid, but it sure can be part of the solution.
Scuzz
5445
There have been cases here of people having the sale of their home fall thru because of a solar lease. I am not sure why (other than cost) that would matter but it has happened.
You should always buy rather than lease if you can afford it. And batteries are now being offered with some of the leases, my neighbors lease came with one. It will power a couple pre-determined circuits in a power outage. That could be big in some areas.
That’s weird. It reminds me of when we sold that house. We sold to a young couple buying their first house. I spent some time showing them the system, how it worked, etc, but the wife kept asking if they could shut it off if they didn’t want to use it. I never really understood what she was asking. I mean, it was there, stuck on the roof, collecting solar radiation and generating electricity. It’s not like you had to add gasoline or stoke the fire occasionally. It was basically part of the house. To me it was like asking can we turn off the doors if we don’t like them?
Edit: of course, those were the same people who made me hire a pool company to send a diver into the deep end and replace the drain in the floor of the pool with an anti-suction drain. I understood the safety concern in the abstract, but the pool was ten feet deep, and no child was ever going to be trapped by the flow of water through that drain. God himself couldn’t get down there without a real struggle.
Yeah, they do. Countries are big. And they have lots of unused space for wind and solar farms, even in densely settled nations. Consider the vast wastelands caused by strip mining in central europe, for example. And England isn’t wall-to-wall villages, either, though it’s admittedly got to focus more on offshore for wind farms. But rooftops throughout the world can be profitably used for solar power, even in cloudy countries.
antlers
5448
Rooftop solar is fine, but windfarms, solar plants, hydroelectric and tidal power stations are environmental disasters. The only way to get the energy the future is going to need without laying waste the environment is to go nuclear.
I don’t even know what this means.
If only “keep Earth habitable” weren’t such a radical, politically unpalatable position.
Oghier
5452
It’s not unpalatable to Dems. But for the narrow purpose of getting a Democrat elected, climate change isn’t the most important issue for people. Maybe it should be, but it simply isn’t.
The party (and the eventual nominee) need to be attuned to the priorities of the voters. For most voters, the top item will be healthcare, economic justice, college costs, or something other than climate plans.
Email server management became a top issue in 2016*. How did that happen?
IOW, Dems/the left need to learn how to make an issue a top issue if voters do not inherently view it as such.
(*I know in reality that that was a backdoor for “we can’t trust her.”)
Yeah, it’s called leadership!
In any case, if that’s the realistic state of our politics, I may still freely state that the realistic state of our politics is madness. Maybe Cockroach Herodotus will put it in his book.
France mandated this for new construction in commercial zones in 2015. A quick Google search found this article that makes it seem like it’s effective, and on its way to meeting targets.
