What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

While I am 100% on board with the "carbon bad, not carbon good, global warming = real, made by man and a real prick of a problem" message, the biggest fault made by people like Maher etc in prosecuting their case to the "sceptics" is reliance on bad information.

For example, the sums have been done on solar and wind, and generally speaking, wind is only borderline viable for supporting a society (and that's only if you don't add the cost of some form of buffering/storage). Solar, particularly home roof grade, is fucking awful, and essentially a waste of time compared to tracking mass production arrays. In terms of energy to build/install/maintain/remove, it barely pays for itself. Solar thermal is also more efficient (helios arrays etc), but the two best bang for buck technologies for producing massive amounts of power at a very low carbon cost are nuclear and hydro.

And they are two technologies that people seem to want to get rid of. Germany shuttered it's nuke capability after Fukushima (and added more coal capacity). Italy's solar market has fallen in a heap, France is almost carbon neutral only because it is predominately nuke powered. One of the original climate change warriors, Dr. James Hansen of Nasa, is fully supportive of nuclear power, and get's constantly lambasted by green types because they do not want nuclear power to play a part.

Refutation of solid science and willful ignorance is not solely the province of people who deny climate change, and it's no less deplorable.

Fucking ridiculous video hiding a somewhat significant point.

The human race can't break up with fossil fuels...

All the wonderful renewable tech we're banking on just isn't capable of supplying enough energy to support our modern post developmental lifestyle. Sure, solar thermal, PV etc are interesting, but unless you have some developing country (aka China atm, but might be India in the future) absorbing the carbon cost of building the panels and tech, the sums don't work out for people personally, and the return on energy invested doesn't work out for the planet.

If you've seen the current state of the Chinese air quality or general environment, you'll understand that for every clean tech device we set up in the west, there is a terrible hidden cost being dumped somewhere else in the world. Except "global warming" is global, so sweeping this shit under a foreign rug isn't going to save us..

With 1.8bn ppl with zero power and another 700+m with intermittent, unreliable power, and a bunch of countries switching off their nukes (and replacing the load mostly with gas/coal), no matter how much we want to break up with the lousy bitch, we can't and won't...

Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. The solar powered heat ray he is credited with inventing is thought by some to be a myth - but it may well have functioned based on the results of several experiments over the years.

Archimedes' heat ray was supposedly used in the Siege of Syracuse to focus sunlight onto approaching Roman ships, causing them to catch fire. Some have theorised that highly polished shields may have been used to focus the sunlight, much in the same way modern solar thermal farms use parabolic collectors.

Parabolic mirrors were described and studied by one of Archimedes' contemporaries, mathematician Diocles in his work "On Burning Mirrors", so their existence and possible application was known in the same time period as the Siege of Syracuse.

Over the ensuing centuries, various parties have attempted to prove or disprove the existence of Archimedes' heat ray using materials Archimedes would have had available to him at the time - and also with more modern materials.

A test in the 1970's by Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas using 70 mirrors measuring 1.5 metres by 1 metre set fire to a mock wooden ship at a distance of around 50 metres. In 2005, an experiment by students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology using 127 small mirror tiles at a distance of 30 metres from a wooden target resulted in a fire after 10 minutes of perfect conditions. A repeat of this experiment for the Myth Busters television series found Archimedes' solar powered "death ray" was unlikely to have performed as reported and that other weaponry available at the time with the ability to set fire to ships, such as catapults, would have been far more effective and likely used.

More recently, the authors of Green Power Science have demonstrated the solar powered death ray was indeed possible. Using just 27 ordinary flat mirrors of various sizes, they were also able to set fire to a model wooden ship. Under ideal conditions, the mast of the model caught fire in under a minute. They believe Archimedes could have had access to many parabolic mirrors made of highly polished metal that would have provided a more focused reflection than flat glass mirrors; and also the necessary manpower for a substantial manual "solar tracking" system to keep sunlight focused on the ships for long enough to set them ablaze.

http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=1006

I have a suspicion that Green technology is the next boom market.

I'm sure somewhere there is a fledgling 'solar thermal' or 'tidal energy' startup that will be the next Microsoft... But i don't have the confidence to invest

you don't need any fucking scifi to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Reservoir-augmented solar thermal power plants and battery-powered cars could do it now easily if people would accept a doubling of the cost of electricity and having to hot-swap an identical rechargeable batteries at a gas station every 150 miles instead of filling up every 300 miles.

Just standardize the battery, then you pay a gas station say $100 for a fully charged battery and sell them a depleted one for $80. Gas station has shelves full of re-charging batteries. Voila, the ability to take electric cars to any range conveniently, given a slight conversion of infrastructure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

One Tenth of New Mexico would only receive 4*10^20 J of sunlight in a year, and the US uses 1.2*10^20 J per year, so he's assuming an efficiency of 30% for the whole process, including photosynthesis, refining and transportation of the final product? I call bullshit. Photosynthesis is typically less than 1% efficient, and even the most efficient known species of algae convert light to biomass at 3-6% efficiency.


Humans use 5*10^20 J per year, and over 80% of that is fossil fuel.

Only 4*10^24 J per year of sunlight reaches the earth (do the math)

Assuming photosynthesis efficiency of 1% and fermentation+distillation+transportation efficiency of 25%, you would have to cover 1/25 of the earth's cross-section with biofuel-growing (that's at least 1/4 of the total arable land, depending on latitude) to cover the world's energy needs. Burning biofuels still produces atmospheric pollution like ozone and nitrogen oxides. Elecrtic cars will pollute the atmosphere less than any biofuel internal-combustion car.

Anything based on photosynthesis is going to be wildly inefficient compared to solar thermal generators.

U-238 is 138 times more abundant than U-235. U-238 breeder reactors work, but are more expensive to operate than U-235 reactors. Reprocessing spent fuel to extract the half that's unused is currently more expensive than mining fresh uranium. But as oil runs out, energy prices will go up, and more expensive ways of generating energy will expand. Uranium power generation based on breeder reactors could power the world's current rate of energy consumption for at least a thousand years with current proven uranium reserves, but nobody's even bothered to look at more expensive ways of recovering uranium. In the long run solar will have to be part of the solution. The earth receives 4*10^24 Joules of energy per year from the sun, while our worldwide fossil fuel consumption in 2004 was 4*10^20 Joules.

Solar thermal generator plants can store energy via phase change to be more reliable. For example, Solar Tres stores 6,250 tonnes of molten sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate (assuming a density of 3g/ml that's about a 10m x 10m x 20m tank). This is enough to provide a 16 hour buffer for the generator (600 megawatt-hours). So it can generate continuously at peak capacity except in winter. Electricity demand is always higher in summer than in winter, because in the winter your random electrical appliance electricity use supplements your environmental controls (almost all used electricity is converted to heat) while in the summer all of your electricity use works against your environmental controls (generates more heat that your AC has to remove).

If about 0.1% of the surface of the earth were converted to solar power stations, that could supply all of our current energy use. But the rate of consumption is increasing exponentially as population increases exponentially and THAT MUST STOP. Who's going to vote for the global 2-child policy that will probably be necessary to avoid annihilation of the environment and subsequent annihilation of mankind? Mankind needs another big round of moral progress to save itself from itself.

As time rolls foward, the more money these corporations pump into pseudo-science bullshit to stem the flow of renewable, sustainable energy forms from taking foot, the more emboldened it makes those who are in the business of ridding humanity from its oil/coal dependancy.

Non-energy corporations are waking up to the fact that once initial investment capital has been paid off from an economical energy source, the fuel for the energy thereafter is 100% free, and virtually unlimited, with extremly low maintenance and upkeep costs. Long term, switching over is far cheaper than keeping the status quo.

So to all those asswipes who think we have no control over global warming, who have no idea about the physics thats seated behind the theory of global warming (which by the way, in scientific nomenclature, a 'theory' is the highest level of prestige awarded to human understanding, theories explain facts under observable and crucifiable situations), who have had no formal education in even physics 101 where thermal dynamics is taught, who have never read a book in their lives, and have a slippery, astro-glide encased grasp on any concept of economics, I give you, a big shut the fuck up, sit down, and accept that renewables are the way of the future, wether you fucking like it or not.

So sick and tired of these stall tactics that are continually pushed in the face of humanity for no other reason than to promote corporate greed, all at the expense of the humanity they sell their shit to.

/rant

To appeal to the corporate, democratic, industrialised capitalists out there still on the fence about global warming and our need to act or not. Put the whole debate out of your head, and think from your hip-pocket.

Imagine a world where the energy required to run everything in your house, is literally, free.
It is uninterrupted, enviornmentally friendly, unlimited, free energy.

From a business point of view, even if this energy, after investment capital was paid off (read: wind, concentrated solar thermal, geo-thermal or wave power), was sold for 3c/kwHr, you would still be making a huge proffit. And, worst case scenario on maintaining status quo, you would be save near total annihilation of the human race.

There is no sane argument against going to electrical cars, powered up by a grid that sources it energy from 100% renewable and sustainable energy, anyone who claims otherwise is a fruitcake.