This afternoon I talked with a guy named Travis Bradford, who has a new book out called Solar Revolution (you can read sample chapters here). In it, he makes a rather bold and startling claim. To paraphrase:
In coming decades, solar energy is going to become the dominant energy source on the global market. This is true irrespective of possible increases in the price of fossil fuels; irrespective of possible global warming regulations; irrespective of government subsidies; irrespective of possible future technological advances. Even given conservative assumptions about all those factors, the tectonic forces at work in the global energy situation make solar's dominance inevitable.
Bradford is not some hippie dreamer. He comes from the world of corporate finance, investment funds, and other such things I don't understand. (He now runs the non-profit Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.) He doesn't make predictions idly.
Anyway, the Q&A will be up on the site in a week or two. This is just the kind of person I love to meet -- young, knowledgeable, forward-thinking, and in the thick of things rather than shouting from the sidelines. I may try to absorb him into the Grist Borg.
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sunflower Posted 12:42 pm
19 Oct 2006
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willa Posted 10:24 pm
19 Oct 2006
Twenty-two years ago when we installed our system, it was one of the first in our area, and no one made a control panel to regulate the charging of the batteries, etc, so Windy Dankoff (who subsequently started a company that makes the best RE-friendly water pumps out there) designed a mad-scientist affair made of seemingly spare parts screwed down to a piece of plywood; last year I finally replaced it, and the replacement looks like a stereo speaker with a digital readout, and should make the batteries last years longer. Our solar panels are huge compared to what's being installed today for the same capacity.
But the batteries? They're exactly the same. We're on our third (I think?) set of batteries, but they've all been basically the same, lead-acid batteries that have to have water added periodically, won't last forever, are extremely heavy, and are toxic to manufacture (although the recycling is pretty decent). Since the sun doesn't usually shine at exactly the same time we want power, solar is going to stay on hold until someone figures out how to store it better than this. It's fine as a grid-tied system, producing energy for the grid during the day and drawing from the grid at night, but that inherently limits the percent of our energy that we can ever hope to get from solar.
Maybe the answer is to partner it with other types of RE that have different limitations. That said, no other type is as clean, efficient, and maintenance-free as solar, so it will be hard to ever get enough of anything else to make up the deficit between demand and solar supply at night and in cloudy weather.
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sunflower Posted 2:43 am
20 Oct 2006
Casandra and I live in an all electric home near Seattle. It has a covered skylight that transmits 9 kilowatts of sunshine. The house is constructed with 125 yards (95 m3) of concrete and exterior insulation. The thermal mass solar storage is worth about 140 kWh and will last centuries, maintenance free.
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