California schools $
20M solar project - Page 18

 Sylvia Else wrote:

..because the makers have lead in their pants?

 
There's certainly no guarantee that it will materialise, but
experience does suggest that there is reason to be hopeful.

And "inventing a different technology" is making an artificial
distinction between the small incremental improvements which we know
about and expect and the slightly larger improvements that look less
obvious in highsight. Improving technology always involves changing
sonething, and some of the changes are more obvious than others.


They certainly look cheaper to me than they did when I was a graduate
student. Battery technology certainly hasn't improved dramatically
over the last fifty years - the inventors who were busy in that area
around the nineteenth century do seem to have picked off all the low-
hanging fruit, but the inventors did lose interest once the internal
combustion engine put paid to the electric car (whose popularity
peaked in 1912).

Perhaps the current market is just too small?

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 On 5/31/2010 6:58 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:

NONE of the subsidies address the economies of scale of emerging solutions.

Instead, they REWARD ripper offers for business as usual, paying people
to put known defective gasoline destroying net energy sinks on
inappropriate rooftops.

And SETTING BACK eventual net pv breakeven by many DECADES!

<http://www.tinaja.com/glib/pvlect2.pdf>
<http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu09.asp#d06-16-09>

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster                          voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics   3860 West First Street   Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml    email: don@tinaja.com

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

 
California is a very sunny place.  In a lot of it, just a little gain
from
some solar heat can save you from having to turn on the furnace.
Since
schools are generally large buildings, the volume to surface area is
large
so the solar heating system doesn't have to be all that big per
student.

Solar electric can make sense if you sell the excess power into the
grid.
Storage makes it not make sense.  It takes about 12 years for a solar
power
system to pay for its self assuming you get a mortgage to buy it.  If
you
have cash today, it makes a good way to invest for the future because
after
the system has paid its self off, you will get several year of use
before it
needs to be replaced.

 
The school day is poorly scheduled to take advantage of any solar
energy. They start way too early in the day.