[The_Virginian]

SPG,

Keep in mind not everyone owns their own property...and not everyone has the gumption and brains to start a project like that and make sure the contractor doesn't "rip them a new one."

[yesplease]

Corporate types love big these monster projects that they can make big bank off of, but smaller personal systems make way better sense.

True that solar thermal is fairly easy to implement and cost effective at home for certain apps, but pigeon holing corporations certainly isn't a reasonable approach to anything. Like individuals, groups of individuals can be bad or good or whatever in between.

[smallpoxgirl]

SPG,

Keep in mind not everyone owns their own property...and not everyone has the gumption and brains to start a project like that and make sure the contractor doesn't "rip them a new one."

Obviously. But if you're looking for societal solutions to energy requirements, it's a really dumb approach to build inefficient homes and monster solar energy plants. Intelligently designing housing is a far more sustainable solution than building monster solar plants all over the place. Makes no sense to be wasting all the sun that falls on your house and then trying to collect sunshine 200 miles away and pipe it through wires to your house.

[taizee]

SPG,

Keep in mind not everyone owns their own property...and not everyone has the gumption and brains to start a project like that and make sure the contractor doesn't "rip them a new one."

Obviously. But if you're looking for societal solutions to energy requirements, it's a really dumb approach to build inefficient homes and monster solar energy plants. Intelligently designing housing is a far more sustainable solution than building monster solar plants all over the place. Makes no sense to be wasting all the sun that falls on your house and then trying to collect sunshine 200 miles away and pipe it through wires to your house.

We have extremes of heat and cold here in Idaho in the high desert. This area is prime for passive solar building, but unfortunately the existing housing stock is poor and most new houses are McMansions. So unless you give incentives to build better homes or for people to insulate the existing ones, even the rentals, all the talk of "sustainable" solutions is just talk. From what I see of housebuilding here, regulation is lax (people here don't like gov'ment telling them what to do). many houses have bad or no insulation - even newer ones.

I am renting university housing with base board electrical heat and basic air conditioning - my landlord doesn't care about my comfort or the bill which is passed on to me in the rent. There are no incentive to save energy if I'm paying this high rent and they haven't bothered to insulate the house or upgraded the appliances. They don't even have a recycling facility so I just throw everything in the dumpster. Yea I started of high and mighty, but if I have to drive to the recycling centre....forget it.

Many people are getting by from month to month and have no choice but to pay for the energy in the existing system....or else freeze or get heat stroke.

So yes the big solar factories are a bit ridiculous if energy is wasted.

[smallpoxgirl]

Yeah. That's exactly the problem. If you wanted to build an earthship so you didn't need the power grid, 3/4 of your building cost would be administrative expenses from fighting with the building codes people. If you want to build a $500,000,000 solar turbine power plant, the government can't wait to start stuffing green energy credit money in your pocket.

[patience]

taizee,

Back in 1975, a friend of mine moved from Indiana to Eagle, Idaho, and built a house in the high desert up out of the Columbia River valley. With solar technology available at the time, he built an earth sheltered, south facing home. It was super insulated, had triple pane windows, and maximum south window exposure, with a heat absorbing masonry wall in the south face. He bought a Kubota tractor and dug his own "cool tubes", 6 feet into the ground, put 600 feet of drainage pipe in the ditches and manifolded them into a concrete box. The outer ends of the tubes took in outside air, cooled it underground and a small fan pulled it into the house for cooling.

He retired a couple years ago from Hewlett Packard there, and never needed an air conditioner or furnace. The water heater leaked enough heat to keep the house warm through December, then a tiny wood stove did the rest.

It can be done in that climate, and it doesn't require high technology. But society DOES conspire to maintain the status quo, as you and others pointed out. His was an uphill battle getting it done, and would have been impossible if he had needed bank financing. Since he had no mortgage, he had no requirement for insurance, either, which allowed the wood stove use without paying high premiums. The savings on utilities and insurance paid him back several times for the home cost.

[The_Virginian]

Myths about Solar Energy

"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....

This and other myths according to the company behind the technology

I saw N O T H I N G on their site to back up what they said...

It was a Joke...

[yesplease]

Myths about Solar Energy

"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....

This and other myths according to the company behind the technology

I saw N O T H I N G on their site to back up what they said...

It was a Joke...

What is there to back up?

[gnm]

Myths about Solar Energy"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....

This and other myths according to the company behind the technology

I saw N O T H I N G on their site to back up what they said...It was a Joke...

What kind of gun/mag is that Virginian? Oh, and I agree with SPG....

[Jupidu]

I've read a booklet half a year ago about building a small house with a framework of wood. The spaces between the beams was filled with a mixture of mud and straw. The mud has to be placed during one winter under the open sky. I think it's because of better handling.

The same should be good to insulate a house (cheap and very healthy).
1. A wooden framework around the house.
2. Fill the spaces.

Cow dung is very rain repellent if it is dry: i had to clean the ground of a former cow stable a few months ago and by mistake i dropped some water of it - no effect.
Perhaps this can be used as a part of that mud-straw-mixture to give a certain rain security. Or the surface of the mud has to be covered with other materials (wood boards, whitewash?).

[TheDude]

Mega Solar : the World’s 13 Biggest Solar Thermal Energy Projects. Some of these are in the 500 MW range so it is proven tech, just isn't cost-competitive with FFs quite yet. The energy storage aspect is attractive, but most grand schemes for solar power I've seen go down the route of massive buildup of PV and huge storage systems - or global grids.

Do agree that better insulated housing and installation of low temp collectors etc. is a more sensible approach; might take wings on a local scale, too. But you leave Con Ed out of the loop in doing so.

[yesplease]

Mega Solar : the World’s 13 Biggest Solar Thermal Energy Projects. Some of these are in the 500 MW range so it is proven tech, just isn't cost-competitive with FFs quite yet. The energy storage aspect is attractive, but most grand schemes for solar power I've seen go down the route of massive buildup of PV and huge storage systems - or global grids.

The energy storage aspect is where it doesn't compete w/o including externalized costs since it has to go up against nuclear/coal baseload when there isn't much if any demand, but as for daytime use it's getting close even w/o including externalized costs since it's competing w/ NG peaker plants and alla that.

[copious.abundance]

--> Fortune Magazine <--

[...]

That's putting it mildly. A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants.

The race has barely begun - finished plants are years away - but it's blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world's best solar real estate right next to the nation's biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.)

[...]

[Daniel_Plainview]

Some buyers "are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500."

Stunning ......

[KingM]

Some buyers "are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500."

Stunning ......

I don't care if you're a doomer or a cornucopian, this has bad investment written all over it.

[yesplease]

I don't care if you're a doomer or a cornucopian, this has bad investment written all over it.

It depends on what CA does w/ Carbon credits/incentives.

[heroineworshipper]

And you'll be subsidizing all those loans after the real estate collapse.

[frankthetank]

Wouldn't it make more sense to put panels on the roof of houses and tie it into the grid? Also wouldn't solar hot water even make more sense considering how much heat is produced each day by hot water heaters that currently run on gas or electricity?

[3aidlillahi]

Wouldn't it make more sense to put panels on the roof of houses and tie it into the grid? Also wouldn't solar hot water even make more sense considering how much heat is produced each day by hot water heaters that currently run on gas or electricity?

Or how about the best idea from a technical and economic standpoint: geothermal! CA is sitting on a pretty large fault which they could use to pump water into the Earth, heat it up, pump it back up and use to generate electricity.

The rest of the US (or nearly all of it) can use geothermal heat pumps to provide nearly all of the energy needed for heating and cooling, thus reducing home energy demands by only 50-60%. Heat pumps are relatively cheap, $10 grand per system (for a 2000 sq ft house or so) and it pays back within a decade, and that's without subsidies in most cases.

But we'll go with the massive techno-fix that will cost taxpayers billions and will probably be overstated and never live up to the hype.

But, yes, solar panels on roofs would probably be ideal. You wouldn't lose a bunch of energy from the long transmission lines, etc. However, then you would need individual battery systems for each house (or maybe community, hmm...), which makes it less ideal. Or at least even with this system.

[Kingcoal]

Wouldn't it make more sense to put panels on the roof of houses and tie it into the grid? Also wouldn't solar hot water even make more sense considering how much heat is produced each day by hot water heaters that currently run on gas or electricity?

Now you're making too much sense Frank. Have a couple more beers.