Al Gore:Solar Surge

[cal04]

http://blog.algore.com/2011/04/solar_surge.html

Solar might soon be competitive with coal:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-05/solar-energy-costs-may-already-rival-coal-spurring-installation-boom.html

“Solar panel installations may surge in the next two years as the cost of generating electricity from the sun rivals coal-fueled plants, industry executives andanalysts said.”

“Large photovoltaic projects will cost $1.45 a watt to build by 2020, half the current price, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated today.

"The London-based research company says solar is viable against fossil fuels on the electric grid in the most sunny regions such as the Middle East.”

“We are already in this phase change and are very close to grid parity,” Shawn Qu, chief executive officer of Canadian Solar Inc. (CSIQ), said in an interview. “In many markets, solar is already competitive with peak electricity prices, such as in California and Japan.”

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Great news, and if a tsunami or quake were to occur on the Sun, well there you

go, no problem here.

[flamingdem]

2. Al needs to be everywhere right now and speaking against nuke power nt

[madokie]

3. Yes he does

Not many voices carries like AL's does.

[Prof Lester]

4. Read up on solar flares..

A really big one could fry our asses once and for all. Huge solar flares have occurred in fairly recent times.. as recent as the mid 1800s. A really big one, they say, would burn out all our transmission transformers. We'd never, ever be able to replace them all (not to mention the generators that supply the power in the first place) and basically we'd we back in horse and buggy days overnight and for the forseeable future.. centuries perhaps. All your solar panels would be fried out instantly by the way. The tiny wires would not be able to take the huge inductive current slap.

[Tesha]

5. Wow! You seem really confused!

Point 1: It doesn't matter how the energy is generated,
if a solar flare is going to cause a magnetic storm
here on Earth, it will affect the transmission lines
for *ALL* electricity, not just solar electricity.

Point 2: Solar panels are geometrically rather small.
They are essentially invulnerable to the geomagnetic
effects of solar flares.

Point 3: Solar flares will happen, whether or not
there's someone on Earth generating electricity by
catching the Sun's photons.

Then again, maybe you intended your post as a parody?
Lately, I've been almost unable to distinguish our
current "reality" from parody.

Tesha

[DCKit]

8. Prof Lester, can I call you Mo? Ok good.

OK, I won't go there, but if we do get hit with that huge of an EMG impact, it will ONLY be because there's an entire star behind it, and very few of us will survive, due to the gamma radiation.

It's kind of a crap-shoot, who wins? East or West?

[DCKit]

6. Give solar the same "incentives" as coal and nuclear, and it'd be "too cheap to meter". nt

[Gregorian]

7. Solar installations are happening at a crazy rate here on the coast of California

I'm seeing the signs posted at the installations. And the company trucks. Just the last six months have been an obvious increase in PV installations. It has finally begun, after forty years of just being a novelty.

[buddysmellgood]

9. Solar is the answer. In ten years, we won't need coal if we're aggressive

about conservation and solar.
"We can now design nanostructured materials that generate more than one exciton from a single photon of light, putting to good use a large portion of the energy that would otherwise just heat up a solar cell."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110325164217.htm