Oh, and it is natural that PV manufacturers will support centralized power. They will support any one who is buying their stuff! They would have to be remarkably stupid to say “We will only sell to decentralized/roof top power projects,” and I would have to be pretty stupid to claim that. Good thing I didn’t, so I’m not sure how this evidence is in any way relevant.

Oh, and it is natural that PV manufacturers will support centralized power. They will support any one who is buying their stuff! They would have to be remarkably stupid to say “We will only sell to decentralized/roof top power projects,” and I would have to be pretty stupid to claim that. Good thing I didn’t, so I’m not sure how this evidence is in any way relevant.

•I’m not disputing that decentralized alternative energy can’t meet base load requirements for the US now. Centralized can’t either, and that is likely to be the case for some time as we build the gear needed to actually generate all of this power. I’m just proposing that while we are in the investment and research phase, that we should aim towards building a decentralized system, due to the benefits I’ve outlined. There will be a number of critical technologies coming out in the near future that will make the idea of decentralized power much more viable, such as new home energy storage systems. I am not proposing that we can snap our fingers and have this all be done instantly, that’s a straw man.

•I’m not disputing that we have plenty of free space, though I would personally prefer to use space we are already occupying for more than one use, rather than cluttering up wild areas better used for preserving natural resources with energy generation gear. We have millions of acres of roof space waiting to be used for something in this country, I tend to think it’s better to start there.

•If you are using independent power, until you run out of the energy that you are using the transmission lines are not used. This results in negligible transmission loss. If you have extra, beyond what is needed to charge your batteries or whatnot, you can send it to your neighbor through a smart grid designed for such load leveling. But we need to build the new grid to handle many sources of generation now if we want this to work. BTW, I made a mistake with my 30% figure, by including losses due to keeping the generators hot in off peak hours along with the 7% or so in pure line loss. I’m sorry for this mistake, but as far as I can tell this is the only inaccuracy in my article. Would you care to point out some others?

•Your neighbor’s experience with wind damage notwithstanding, if his panels had been secured properly they would have continued to provide power even if the neighborhoods electricity had gone down. If the high voltage transmission cable had snapped in the wind it could have caused a fire too. This anecdote doesn’t really undermine my point. The east coast blackout is ample demonstration of the fact that widespread outages can occur even without a bad weather event to precipitate it, and the only people who had power during that period were people with distributed power (i.e. generators and alternative sources.)

•Virtually every independent solar system I have seen has some form of energy storage, be it a pressure tank, a battery bank, or something more exotic. When the sun goes out, you get energy from that, not a gas turbine somewhere. Frankly, we already have such turbines all over, I’m not sure why these loans you are talking about to build such things would be necessary.

How do people in low wind, highly cloudy areas get their power?

How would we justify the expense of putting wind turbines and solar panels in places where they would produce only a fraction of what we would get in the best locations?

If you’re arguing decentralization in order to reduce transmission costs and transmission losses you have to balance that against the cost of installing many more panels, turbines, etc. in order to make up for poor siting.

Makes no sense to cover rooftops in foggy Seattle when you could put a fourth as many panels inland and ship the power for less money.

Makes sense to extend the Intermountain Intertie from Utah on up into windy Wyoming and let that line bring abundant evening wind to SoCal rather than build huge amount of storage to save daytime solar for evening use.

As a general rule, make power as close to where it will be used as possible.  But make wise decisions.  Sometimes it makes more sense to use centralized systems.

Centralization means that we don’t have to overbuild each local system because we can share supply.

(Back to my system – I’ve got more power than I can use/store in the summer, but not enough in the winter.  I could use someone else’s surplus winter hydro/wind.)

There’s a 30% federal subsidy for homeowner solar.  In my book that’s a pretty major government supported project for getting PV on people’s roof tops.

I believe there are small wind subsidies as well, but I’m not up to speed on wind.

I do know that you really don’t want wind on your roof.  You do not want to live with that amount of vibration transmitted through your house.  Wind belongs out in the yard, on top of a tall stick.

Recognizing transmission and integration costs are important, but one needs to be clear what they are talking about.

There’s even a small loss between panels and batteries.  That’s because it doesn’t pay to install wire large enough to carry 100% produced power.  On really sunny days one can’t use all the power created so common practice it to size one’s wire for a 2% to 5% loss.

On days of small sun you’re not going to be pumping at full power.  On sunny days my batteries are generally full by noon.

Were I on the grid I could ship big hunks of sunny day power to others.

There’s no free lunch.

I’ve got about $10k in my system.  I have to replace the batteries every 5-8 years (a couple thou), but some generator gas for when the sun lets me down, and replace my gen every few years.

(I’ve cruched the numbers for a wind generator to fill in for when the sun hides, but gen and gas is much cheaper.)

I’ve got my power usage down to a minimum so I’d guess that I’d save a lot of money were I hooked up to grid power.

But there was this $300,000 charge to hook up….

Thermal solar (what I suspect you mean by ‘large scale’) has the ability to include heat storage which makes it dispatchable and allows it to provide power when the sun is not shinning.