That's why the whole Tesla car battery and home battery is interesting, because the latest Teslas have about 80000 watt hour batteries, or the equivalent of having 13 thousand iPhone batteries in your garage, and the powerwall batteries they sell each have the capacity of about 1500 iPhones. If everyone had such an electric car and battery pack, intermittent sustainable energy would make a lot more sense, but phones and tablets aren't going to play any role in energy storage. Laptops with 100 wh+ batteries could play a tiny tiny role, but that market is all going fanless on ever more powerful and efficient mobile chips, so I don't see that happening either.
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/04/13/palo-alto-set-...
This is why politicians need to stay away and let the market do its job. It's too easy to let ignorance or some temporary set of circumstances lead you to impose costly and harmful regulations with far-reaching effects.
No. And I wasn't making a spec. I'd be optimizing for something else, installed base, know how and a population of contractors kickstarted into action. This was a minimum, not forcing people to ONLY install 1kw.
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/1977311/astronergy/solar-panel...
If we are arguing over buck or boost when it comes to solar penetration we arguing at the wrong abstraction level.
distributed solar is nice and dandy but it does have some share of problems to solve before becoming viable.
a solar concentrator in the desert, on the other hand...
I'm betting on panel prices will continue to decrease in cost and become more efficient so the cost of buying them is more like 10k and not 25k where it is about now.
I remember when calling long distance was a big deal. It cost real money, and multiple big companies specialized in it and competed fiercely. Today for Internet connected folks, long distance phone calling is too cheap to meter.
It's not just that the price fell, although it did. It's that better technologies came along--cell phones and Internet--and the remaining cost of long distance just become embedded in them.
It's interesting to think of where energy generation or storage costs might become embedded. Homes? Cars? Appliances?
How much energy storage do you have in your house right now? Looking around right now, I've got 3 laptops, 2 tablets, and a smartphone in view. We're slowly accumulating watt-hours, just as a side effect of buying mobility.