Even so, their final conclusion stands: it will likely be cheaper to “waste” some excess electricity in times of exceedingly high supply and low demand and have overbuilt generation capacity than to store that power for weeks or even months.

With all of that said, we will almost always be in the same or better position with distributed generating capacity than with localized energy generation – fairly independent of what storage technology does. And actually distributive, smart storage only helps this situation.

While it is definitely not a bad thing to build more PV, the OPTIMAL solution would be to make it all distributed. As these panels last at least 30 years, the decisions made now will likely effect us for the majority of our lifetime.

However, I still haven’t read this one thoroughly.

But as far as utility scale solar: Utility Scale PV is not something to fight for. While it is better than FFs and Nuclear, PV is one of the best technologies to use for distributed generation and, until we have cheap and ubiquitous storage, we can only have so much PV capacity on the grid before it stops being beneficial. (This is because of the energy generation profile – producing the most during the day and nothing at night. While this is not the problem most make it out to be, it does establish a limit as to how much we can economical put to the grid, which is, the average noon-time demand – or, a heck of a lot. Even so, it is a limit.) With this, it would be ideal to use as much of this capacity in distributed set ups as possible.

The Power generators should be focused on pump-up hydro and CSP for their dispatch-able nature and wind for the majority of the energy generation.

If only politicians actually ran through the numbers and understood the engineering limits and benefits of each technology… Ah, one can dream…

While I’m on, have just seen a piece on a UK national news channel about the failure so far to agree a mutually acceptable wattage price for a proposed French installation and the very real possibility that it won’t go ahead, much to the embarrassment of the UK government!