And the profits grow

[Kevin]

I agree with you that only solar will be enough, and further I have to believe the amounts you are mentioning, but I am not so negative. Highly likely everybody who loves in a house (so not apartment building) will have his whole roof decorated with cheap plastic solar panels in x years. Calculation on efficiency are always done using an average lightness during a day (so not calculated for the Sahara). Add a few small wind mills (the 50 cm diameter kinds), and energy saving, and we will for sure be able to be self sufficient (I mean connect the whole thing to a back up generator or batteries or simply use a switch to connect and disconnect to the main electricity grid. Solar power panels can also be combined with sun boilers, so that they can also use the heat from the sun directly.

I my street they are, as we speak, installing geothermal heating for our water...pretty neat (Sweden wants to be the first carbon neutral nation, whatever that may mean).

That solar power might also help a lot for cars we can see when looking at the solar power challenge that they have in Australia every year. Those cars drive 3000 miles with an average of over 80 km per hour. Of course they are not cars in which you sit comfortably but nevertheless quite impressive.

Just as an FYI some good basics on generals of solar energy (including the numbers that Kandrathe is using) can be found here: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewab...ergy-works.html it's very pro solar source, but it covers terms and concepts nicely.


Now onto some personal anecdotes and information. UMR (my alma mater) won that race a few years back, and they've won the one held in the US several times as well. I know they won SunRayce (the US version) for the overall title one year, not just the University bracket. So I've seen the vehicles up close and personal, as a student I even did some work for the team one year.

It's pretty much a very lightweight foam, some electrical motors a bunch of batteries, and solar cells. I think it was in 2003 when they dominated and I know there were several times they were limited by the speed limits on the road, 55 MPH for most of the course length. They could have gone faster at many points, there were some great shots of them passing regular cars on I 44 with the solar car going 70 MPH, the speed limit, and the normal cars only doing 65 or so. There is a lot of time spent in those races, after you hit the check point, of taking the cells off the vehicle and holding it at best angle to get more charge into the batteries. But there were times in 2003, where they were running top speed and getting enough power to add charge to the batteries. But as you mentioned those vehicles are not something you could do much in at all.

One application of solar cells on vehicles I have seen that was nice was a 'trickle charger' on the military vehicles. It was a 6 inch by 6 inch panel connected to the batteries that would slowly add charge to them if it got any power. Not a big deal but made a huge difference in time between battery replacement and the vehicles that had the chargers could generally be counted on to start. Some of those vehicles sit for 2-6 months between usage. Having that trickle charger made a big difference on them. Not that this application made any difference in the amount of diesel the vehicles burned.

Solar water heaters are definitely something I'd like to see more widespread, they seem to be pretty effective. I'm a fan of doing more of the little stuff like that to help out. More intelligent dwelling design. As you mentioned, if things are economical, getting solar collectors up on houses to help generate power. You can already get devices that let you feed power into the grid if you have excess, and you can pull out of the grid like normal if you need it. Some people actually get a small check from the power company each month because they generated more power than they consumed. The initial set-up fees aren't unreasonable for stuff like that. But if you can get some solar collectors on your roof, and for folks that live in the country can get a windmill up it can help. Windmills on farmland, especially animal grazing land is becoming more popular as they don't take a lot of usable land up. The issues with birds and such still have to be dealt with, it's not a zero environment impact solution, but I'm a fan.

So yeah, a large amount of oil goes into generating electricity (same for coal and natural gas and cutting dependence on those fuels is a good thing too) so cutting that usage is good. I'm a fan of centralize the less clean power generation sources since you can be more effective in controlling the pollutants they produce, but the cleaner sources, like solar and wind, while there isn't a major issue with centralizing them, I don't see any major drawbacks to decentralizing them. 10,000 sources producing 1,000 watts each seems to be as good as one source production 10 Mega Watts. OK that's not entirely true. That single source can deal better with the changes in demands for power. Even with lots of folks producing small amounts of power and feeding it into the grid you'll still need your lager point sources, and they can be solar or wind so be it. If a few still need to be coal or oil, I'm alright with that too.

And yes you have to worry about economies of scale in these issues too, but I think the scales will be large enough for most all of them that using several solutions will still like provide a better answer than just trying to back a single option.