Simple passive solar design features for home construction and passive solar hot water heating are sound investments, but solar power is a wasteful and counterproductive investment for large scale energy production.
1) You don't get any solar energy at night; you get less on cloudy days, less in the morning, and less in the late afternoon. That makes large scale solar power schemes horribly inefficient no matter how high we can pump up the theoretical peak output of solar panels. The cost of energy storage systems, batteries and other complex systems on top of high panel costs makes solar impossibly expensive for large scale use. We need synthetic liquid fuels to run farm equipment, cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc., and to make synthetic fertilizers. We can manufacture these fuels with solar power, but at many times the cost of using nuclear power. You have to run synthetic fuel plants 24 hours a day to be economically viable. If you must use fossil fuel or nuclear reactor backup power at night to keep a synthetic fuel plant running, then why bother to have solar power at all? Duplication of energy resources is a needless expense. Any power plant must output power 24-7 to be economically valuable for large scale use.
2) The surface area of the earth we would need to cover with solar panels to collect significant amounts of energy makes it impossible on a practical economic and human level. Solar advocates have suggested that we could satisfy 69% of United States daytime electricity needs for the year 2050 by covering 34,000 square miles of our Southwestern desert with solar panels, thus turning it into a vast DEAD ZONE. It will never happen.
3) Solar panels will always be exposed to the weather, and their lifespan is short, about 25 years at maximum. Unlike other power systems, solar panels cannot be repaired and upgraded to extend their useful life beyond their very limited lifespan. This fact dramatically increases their cost per kilowatt hour compared to other more affordable alternatives. Who will guard solar panel installations covering millions of acres? Solar panel theft is a big problem in California right now. Giant solar ovens using mirrors are less likely to be targets of theft and are somewhat less expensive on a BTU/watts collected basis, but the land area required to produce significant amounts of energy makes them a joke. Solar power is great for running pocket calculators, remote vacation cabins, and other small scale HIGH COST per watt uses, but solar power is inherently the wrong choice for large scale power grid use.
4) As William Tucker points out in "Food Riots Made in the USA" (see
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/007jlljc.asp?page=2&pg=1 ), solar power is an extraterrestrial nuclear power system where the nuclear reactor is located 93 million miles away from us in outer space,...the sun. We need terrestrial nuclear reactors right here on earth so we can affordably capture their HIGHLY CONCENTRATED energy without taking up huge amounts of land space. Our extraterrestrial nuclear power source is great for growing crops, but its output is far too diffuse and intermittent for large scale energy grid use and for producing synthetic liquid fuels.
5) In 2009 the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides official energy statistics from the U.S. Government, projected the estimated cost of electricity from U.S. power plants of different varieties that will come into service in the year 2016. These average levelized costs, expressed in 2007 valued dollars, includes all costs of construction, financing, fuel costs, and all other operating costs. The EIA also lists the expected Capacity Factor (CF) for each power plant type. CF example: a power plant with an annual average operational CF of 85 generates at its rated capacity an average of 85% of the time during the year. A power plant with a CF of 100, that can be used 100% of the time, would be ideal. As capacity factor drops, economic efficiency drops, usefulness drops, and real-world costs increase.
Natural Gas in Conventional Combined Cycle @ 8.34 cents per kWh (87 CF) - Not carbon free; small footprint; cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.
Conventional Coal @ 9.3 per cents per kWh (85 CF) - Not carbon free; medium footprint; causes approximately 24,000 U.S. deaths per year due to air pollution, which also damages buildings. Judged in total, coal is not cost effective due to the environmental damage it creates.
3rd Generation Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power @ 10.48 cents per kWh (90 CF) - Carbon free; small footprint, very high CF, and cost effective. ***Note - As previously stated, these figures are for new construction projects coming on-line in 2016. Our older legacy light water reactors currently produce electricity at a cost of about 2 cents per kWh. In comparison, the Hoover Dam hydroelectric station currently produces electricity at just .0186 cents per kilowatt hour.
Geothermal @ 11.67 cents per kWh (90 CF) - Carbon free; high CF; small footprint and cost effective. Geothermal is not considered a renewable energy source because hot geothermal wells eventually run cold.
Wind @ 11.55 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (35.1 CF) - Carbon free; extremely large footprint; not cost effective due to unreliability and very low CF. Most wind turbines shut down when wind speeds drop below 3 to 4 meters per second or rise above 25 meters per second, greatly reducing their total average energy output and making their contribution to our nation's energy grid unreliable, unpredictable, and unnecessarily costly.
Solar Thermal Mirror Oven @ 25.75 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (31.2 CF) - Carbon free; extremely large footprint; not cost effective due to unreliability, high construction cost, and a CF even lower than wind power.
Solar Photovoltaic Panel Power Plant @ 38.54 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (21.7 CF) - Carbon free; extremely large footprint; very high construction cost; cannot be updated after manufacture; relatively short lifespan, the lowest CF of all. Solar panels are absolutely not cost effective for large scale power production. Photovoltaic manufacturers brag of their success at producing large amounts of solar panels based on their theoretical maximum output capability, but they do not tell the media and consumers of their incredibly high costs and the fact that theses renewable power projects are like lazy employees who only show up for work a small fraction of the time.
Proposed Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor @ 6.0 cents per kWh (over 90 CF) - Carbon free; small footprint; highest CF available, highest cost effectiveness. If things go well, the actual eventual cost per kWh may be at or even lower than the original 3 cents per kWh projection which I doubled to 6 cents per kWh to allow for cost overruns. LFTR technology's tiny ecological footprint makes it the most environmentally harmless energy source available.
The only non-carbon energy sources that are seriously useful for large scale production are hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and geothermal power. Germany has spent huge amounts of money on expensive solar panel schemes and has gotten very little usable energy in return for its enormous investment. The appeal of solar and wind power is largely about poetry and symbolism, sending a love letter to mother nature saying that we care. Poetry is fine, but we need huge amounts of energy to support the 6.75 billion human inhabitants of this planet, and billions will starve to death if governments try to use solar, wind, wave energy, biofuels, and other poetically correct energy sources as a replacement for fossil fuels. It takes so much energy to produce food that big mistakes in energy production will always result in big increases in food prices, which automatically translates into dramatic increases in avoidable deaths due to malnutrition and related illness.
Christopher -
http://biofuel.50webs.com/