Tom's Comments

Should we have centralized generation of solar electricity and distributed generation that feeds into the grid. And, is the Southern California Edison project to install 250 mw on commerical roods a hybrid? It is a centralized project spanning a large swath of Los Angeles but it is distributed in the sense that it is installed on individual roof tops.

Can we blanketly state that centralized prouduction of solar will be chaper than installations on consumer owned rooftops that are done on a one by one basis?


What I'm trying to get at is this. Is there a good argument for distributed solar if the alternative is centralized PV or CSP?

Ironic, strange, and pathetic that Senator McCain, who claims to care about global warming failed to show up for the cloture vote that killed things like the RES. Too busy losing the presidential campaign I guess.

California should spread the dollars available for PV systems around a bit by placing an upper limit on the amount of PV that is subsidized. People installing systems of, for example, 10kw should not be subsidized for being such electricity hogs. If they don't set an upper limit, they should provide a greater subsidy for the small system up to 4kw and then decrease and phase out the subsidy at the higher levels.

Also, provide for higher rates for those kw utilized over the contribution from the solar panels.

Amazing. The author's only source is the hydrogen association. The author did not even bother to provide or seek some balance.

If all we wanted was industry propoganda, we could have gone to the web site ourselves. Pathetic. If this is indicative of the quality of the research on this web site, we cannot rely on it.

You failed to note the most obvious change. In the years cited, Colorado had gone from a Republican dominated legislature to one controlled by Democrats. Now, we have a Democratic governor, so the rate of progress should increase considerably.

Natural gas will peak just as oil will. We should have begun a serious effort to transition away from fossil fuels years ago. Progress continues to be made in bringing down the costs of solar and wind. There is evidence of that right on this site, including a breakthrough by SolarPower that occurred just recently.

Fossil fuel will continue to go up in price as the cost of solar goes down. An investment made now in solar will look better as prices of fossil fuels go up over the next decades. Considering depletion and the current crisis in global warming, we simply cannot wait until the day when solar is "competitive" with natural gas, oil, or coal. If we simply let the market decide, we will not be able to make the transition that must begin now.

It is the marginal increases in greenhouse gases that count, not the background level of greenhouse gases, regardless of the source. If you are five feet tall and the water is rising, it's the last few inches that count, even though the bulk of the water brought up the level to just below your nose.

If you are appalled at the so called ignorance of this blog, go over to realclimate.org; I'm sure that you will feel more comfortable peddling your theories amongst experts.

The article failed to address the carbon and energy inputs necessary for this process. Yes, most of us know that the feestock itself is supposedly neutral, but without knowledge of all the inputs necessary for this process, it is not possible to evaluate the energy return or the net carbon impact.

There is very little that will actually result in less petroleum use, including the obvious remedy of doing something to encourage conservation.

The Democrats are not much better than the Republicans as they want to be the party of "no hard choices". Predictably, the are using ethanol as the new free lunch. Require the auto companies to allow the use of ethanol, and, voila, everything is solved. But wait until consumers begin to actually understand what ethanol does to their gas mileage and hence their per mileage fuel costs. Unless there is a very large differential between gasoline and ethanol, you won't see many consumers switching.

The Democrats have discovered a new way to pretent to solve the oil problem without actually doing anything which would cause anyone the slightest bit of inconvenience or responsible action to conserve.



The American way of life is secure.

Does anyone know where they will get their carbon fiber?

While this is commendable and even inspiring, it is noted that Aspen consumes twice the national average in energy per capita, mainly due to all the car and jet travel in and out of Aspen. The City of Aspen has also done a great deal in this area and is to be commended.

But the Ski industry, in general, has an almost impossible task of meaningfully cutting their impact as long as they have so many empty (heated) Ski homes and so much impact on energy use from transportation.

Look at I-70 in Colorado any day of the week. It's one big traffic jam, largely created by the existance of all these ski communities. The ski industry needs to get behind rail travel to and from the slopes, and fast.

I am interested in the reasons why there is excess wind power,i.e., why the grid cannot use the wind power when it is produced.

Obviously, an abscence of immediate demand will result in unused wind power. The question is, could we solve this problem by pushing the widespread development of Hybird PHEVs or pure electrics to take up the slack. Recharging batteries seems to be an attractive option since the recharging could be done on an intermittent basis.

Hydrogen seems like better than nothing, but at what cost? Are there other alternatives, such as better load management which could deal with this problem. Perhaps the SOLAR PV market would also have a role to play here as the batteries supporting these systems could also be charged on an intermittent basis at night or on cloudy days.

If ethanol were purely a substitute for our current oil consumption, I would say that it is a marginally useful source of fuel. Without clearly mandated goals for fuel reduction, howerver, I fear that it will be merely an addition to rather than an alternative to our current consumption of oil.

GM is touting its flex fuel initiatives as if this will solve our dependency on foreign oil. And yet they continue to tout their behomothic trucks and SUVs and more and more horsepower. The fact is that it still requires a lot of oil to produce ethanol regardless of what study one believes. Ethanol will not make us independent. At best, it will just slightly reduce on dependence and have a negligible effect on greenhouse emissions.

And, as the author says, the land use issue still needs to be addressed.