said William Morder via tde-users:
| I am planning at some point to get a solar setup, panels, power station, | etc.. At the moment, they make the power station about the size of a | small guitar amplifier, and it can power a whole 4-bedroom house for a | few days. Or something like that. And the solar panels fit into a case | the size of about a briefcase, or maybe an artist's portfolio. Not too | unwieldy.
The cost is the small nuclear device necessary to get enough light into a dinky solar panel to power much of anything. Ask someone who has a big solar array on the roof -- a *big* solar array -- if they've been able to either drop commercial electricity or actually balance things out by selling power back to the utility.
Problem is, solar is astoundingly inefficient (except for solar water heaters) because we don't have photovoltaic efficiency. There is work in Japan on a technology that under some circumstances gets 25 percent efficiency, which is an order of magnitude better than the stuff in use now, and that draws power from pretty much any light. But . . . even then, solar panels reduce their efficiency over time, leaving you with a bunch of useless, toxic junk. Likewise the electricity storage methods.
| An electric vehicle seems a good idea, too, if the used ones ever come | down far enough in price, and have at least a 200-mile range; then I can | go to and from the city on a single charge. And electric vehicles are | low-maintenance, compared to the fossil-fuel burning beasts.
Except when you have to replace the batteries, which you'll soon have to do with most used ones, which costs more than the electric car itself. And the old battery disposal fees are very high.
It ain't soup yet. And were we even to come up with 100 percent efficiency photovoltaic cells, which we can't and won't because it's impossible, the issues of storage remain.