Comments on: The Economics of Distributed Renewable Power — Why We Should Democratize the Electricity System, Part 2

By: The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Renewable Power | CleanTechnica

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:50:30 +0000

[…] of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 3 of 5. Click for Part 1 or Part 2.The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Generation While technology has helped […]

By: Ben Courtice

Ben Courtice — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Nonsense. The basic message of this article is cheap=good=the way of the future. By which yardstick we may as well stick with coal.

Solar thermal is the only renewable technology (other than hydro) with proven capacity to deliver reliable round-the-clock power at any large scale. PV and wind just don’t do it: they are great, the more the better, but they need to be complemented with dispatchable power. Geothermal is great where you’ve got it, but it’s limited (like hydro).

The low costs for PV, in this brain-dead market-driven world, are putting at risk the development of the most necessary technology – solar thermal. By all means keep installing PV, but if we don’t get the economic policy to build CSP we may as well just keep burning coal. The climate is already overloaded, we have to aim for zero emissions not some kind of “compromise” with the laws of nature.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 21:58:00 +0000

Solar Tower plant from SolarReserve can now provide Base load capability. Something PV simply cannot do.

The lazard source for LCOE is Feb 2009, too old in this fast moving technology. please get an updated source.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:49:00 +0000

What is interesting to me is that solar power is almost half the cost of gas peaking. Seems to me it would be in the power utilitys’ best interest to install as much solar as possible. Since peak solar happens to coincide with peak demand.