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?

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

As a person who has had a solar system on their home for 9-10 years, let me say you are WAY off.
First, my system paid for itself in savings in under 8 years, and I missed out on a lot of rebates available today. My system should have another 10 years before I need to do major maintenance, by which time there will almost certainly be cheaper, better units to replace mine. In short, my system will save me from paying for around 10-11 years of energy costs, or to put it another way, 1/2 of my energy cost for a 20 year period.
I absolutely hate reading people talk about how bad solar is, and how it's not economically viable, when I know they are 100% wrong on those points from personal experience, not from anecdote and third hand miss-'information'.

Second, on top of the savings, I also saved thousands of dollars on lost groceries because my refrigerator doesn't stop working when the power goes out, which happens here around 1 week per year on average. My lights never go out, unlike my neighbors.

Given the sheer number of solar systems within the game it's sounding more like a single-player experience for the most part, with the occasional solar system being designated as a community hub. Overall though I fear this game will be as short-lived as Spore despite some pretty awesome coding/technology in both of these games.

The possibility of there being "NO life elsewhere" is less than of there being life elsewhere. As a matter of fact, there is a bigger chance of finding another solar system containing virtually the same planetary bodies -in virtually the same orbits- as our solar system, than there is of "no life elsewhere".

Oh and @ChaosEngine, stop arguing with Shiny. He's been brainwashed by his cult. Even if you showed him how they did it, he wouldn't believe you.

Upvote for Galacduck!

My bet is that there's probably quite a lot of life out there. I'd be willing to put money on the possibility of life even within our solar system (Europa maybe?).

But equally, most of it is probably very simple. Evolution is an energy intensive process, and we are lucky that earth has an abundance of energy.

So let's say there 1,000,000 planets with life. It's quite possible that the chances of complex life arising are low, such that there might only be 10,000 planets with anything above single-celled organisms and maybe < 100 with intelligent life. So let's say that all 100 of these civilisations make it to our level of technology and a few maybe even beyond.
They would all probably be ~1000 light years from their next nearest neighbour.

Then there's the issue of timing. They might have evolved and died out a long time ago. It's possible that we will one day get a message from another civilisation that's already gone extinct and the message was sent millennia ago.

Given all that coupled with the incredibly brief period of time we've actually been listening, I'd be far more surprised if we had made contact.

Unless someone invents FTL, then everything changes.

I use slightly less than that myself on average, but we have solar water heating (supplemented with gas), so that's a good savings (especially since it also heats the hot tub), and we replaced all our light bulbs with led bulbs when they became feasible last year. Now, we usually read between 400 and 1000 watts during the day (depending on how many lights I have on, and if the refrigerator is cycled on or not.) That's running a big screen TV, computer, and often ps4 almost all day, every day. We also have electric stove and oven...and I weld, adding somewhat to our total.

Yes, my battery bank is only useful for power outages. It's enough to keep the lights on and the fridge from thawing, but not much else. We get about 3-4 hours out of it if I don't notice the power went out, but can make it all night if we conserve. Our system is grid tied, and first powers the home, then tops off the batteries, then sells any excess to PG&E. To date, I've never drawn the batteries down to zero...but we do have a small generator to supplement it when the power's out for days. The average home would certainly need more, but a 10kwh battery should be plenty to make it through an average night without AC (we don't have AC here).

My current system could not produce that much, but close. I live in N California, one of the foggiest areas in the US. Because we have a renter, an electric hot tub, dishwasher, and electric washer and drier, we use slightly more than we generate at this point, but my system is upgradeable to 6500 watts of generation (I have less than 1/3 of that now) when panels get cheaper...and when I can find space for more.

My system is not flat to my roof, and I have 2 strings of 8 panels. With the solar water tubes, it takes up most of the south 1/2 of my roof (1200 sq ft home). I could maybe fit 4 more panels up there and still be able to walk around them to clean them, but any more and I'll need some mounting structure. I really want to add a small wind turbine to generate at night or when there's a storm...solar doesn't work in the dark.

In America, we still have some rebates for people adding solar to their homes, but they are drying up fast. 15-20 years ago, you could almost do it for free if you got every rebate available.

We used to have about 1-2 weeks of power outage where I live per year, and that was part of why we did they system. We hated having no power and losing food every year, and also hated paying the ever rising cost of electricity. Before adding our system, we had $4-500 a month electric bills, now we have <$100 in winter and sometimes a negative bill in summer...we pay our bill once a year now, lump sum at the end of 12 months.
On to your second post....
I often think...electric cars were popular and the norm in cities before Ford came along. It's still astonishing to me that it was basically dropped for a century as a technology (with minor exceptions). I'm glad someone had finally gone back to it and is trying to fix it's issues. If I could afford a Tesla, I would have one.

I also agree, people won't adopt the technology as long as they have to sacrifice lifestyle for it. I said the same thing, but I found that I don't change my lifestyle at all with my solar system, I just pay lower bills. I determined that buying a system would pay for itself in under 10 years, with the lifespan of a system being about 20 years, that's 10 years of free electricity! That all assumes electric rates didn't go up, and they certainly have gone up...but not for me. You just need to be sure you install enough panels to supply all your power, and you're there.

The battery thing is really mostly for non-grid tied systems, or emergencies. Most people don't use batteries at night, it's simpler and cheaper to just sell power to the grid during the day and buy it back at night if you can, using them as your battery. Perhaps this battery will change that, but with lead acid, it's hard to make them worth the cost.

Panels aren't that expensive, really. In many areas, with rebates, they can be near free. (some companies will even give them to you and split the power generated off your roof). It's a myth that solar is expensive...when compared to non-solar. Mine are paid for by bill savings already (8 years + in) so I'm saving money with them now, and my lifestyle has not suffered in the least. I have lights on if its dark, I watch TV all day, and use the computer all day, have tons of electric devices I use, and soon will power a pond, etc. I often think that my life is a much better example of how you can be 'green' without much change than Gore's. He really doesn't seem to walk the walk, but he can sure talk the talk.

Spoilers do follow:

What bugged me most was that as a last ditch attempt to save humanity, the NASA successors in the film decided to spend all their time and resources on sending first scouts, then hopefully colonists through an unprecedented wormhole, in the hopes that a suitably survivable planet might be found on the other side. To judge by the film, a lifeless, icy waste without a breathable atmosphere was considered a decent candidate.

So against that background, we come back from the wormhole to a city-sized space station, complete with lawns and baseball.

Why all the trouble? With that level of tech apparently within reasonable reach, why not at least consider colonizing a planet in our own solar system? Why risk everything on a complete unknown?

Federal Rebates for Home Solar Systems.

Riding Light: A journey of a photon through our solar system has been added as a related post - related requested by messenger on that post.

Your video, Riding Light: A journey of a photon through our solar system, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

If humans disappeared then nothing. An empty world with nothing happening and no-one to see it. A void sphere expanding out from our solar system at the speed of light with the last of our transmissions, in every direction and forever.

Unless and until sophonce appears again. Then the lights come on and the universe can see itself.

it's been a really bad week for my back and lots of meds have been needed, which impairs my math skills. My mistake there...and I've retracted that....and I apologize.

It's no problem. It's completely understandable for what you're going through over there. I'll say a prayer for you and your family. Hopefully some pain free days are coming your way soon.

Doing the math correctly, I see you ARE right that it's about 400 times the distance.
But they (and so you) are wrong that it's 400 times the "size". You are right that the radiuses/diameters are a ratio of 400-1. That's different from size, even 2d size.
It may seem semantical, but to me it's an important distinction. This is what I took issue with mostly, since I was CERTAIN the actual "size" (in 3D) is no where near a ratio of 400-1, but closer to 64 million -1. Even in 2D it's nothing like 400-1.

Point taken..you were just trying to be accurate in the way the terms were defined.

Also, I'm not intentionally ignoring your point, it is an interesting fact that the ratios are close, but only coincidental IMO, certainly not 'proof' of anything supernatural.
EDIT: even if they were a perfect ratio, it would only suggest a physical law of motion we don't know or fully understand yet.
I would be interested to see a list of other planets and their moons to see if any other planet/moon (or combination of moons) in our solar system shows the same ratios. Neither answer would make me think anything supernatural however, it's just not that kind of question in my eyes.

Taken by itself, it is an extraordinary coincidence if you deem it as such. Yet, when you pile on the many other factors that have to line up for us to have life here, I find coincidence isn't the appropiate word. Now, some say that because it is such a huge Universe, there are bound to be planets like these (which isn't proven, btw)..and we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves on one of them because we would expect to find conditions which allow for our existence, given that we exist. I don't think that is a persausive argument.

There is a good analogy about this that I borrowed from the net:

"Suppose you are to be executed by a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all of them aiming rifles at your heart. You are blindfolded; the command is given; you hear the deafening roar of the rifles. And you observe that you are still alive. The 100 marksmen missed!"

Taking off the blindfold, you do not observe that you are dead. No surprise there: you could not observe that you are dead. Nonetheless, you should be astonished to observe that you are alive. The entire firing squad missed you altogether! Surprise at that extremely improbable fact is wholly justified - and that calls for an explanation. You would immediately suspect that they missed you on purpose, by design."

Yes...you are correct....I either did my distance-math backwards, or missed a button entering the distance to the moon into my calculator...it's been a really bad week for my back and lots of meds have been needed, which impairs my math skills. My mistake there...and I've retracted that....and I apologize.
Doing the math correctly, I see you ARE right that it's about 400 times the distance.
But they (and so you) are wrong that it's 400 times the "size". You are right that the radiuses/diameters are a ratio of 400-1. That's different from size, even 2d size.
It may seem semantical, but to me it's an important distinction. This is what I took issue with mostly, since I was CERTAIN the actual "size" (in 3D) is no where near a ratio of 400-1, but closer to 64 million -1. Even in 2D it's nothing like 400-1.

Also, I'm not intentionally ignoring your point, it is an interesting fact that the ratios are close, but only coincidental IMO, certainly not 'proof' of anything supernatural.
EDIT: even if they were a perfect ratio, it would only suggest a physical law of motion we don't know or fully understand yet.
I would be interested to see a list of other planets and their moons to see if any other planet/moon (or combination of moons) in our solar system shows the same ratios. Neither answer would make me think anything supernatural however, it's just not that kind of question in my eyes.

Awesome !
Funny thing is.... in a straight line it would have exited the Solar system !!!