On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 01:32:22 -0700, mike wrote:

On 8/14/2017 3:08 PM, Winston Smith wrote:
On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 13:55:15 -0700, wrote:

http://www.americanthinker.com/artic...rgy_fraud.html
Solar is undependable. It does not work on cloudy days or at night.

Nuclear plants don't work while they are down to change fuel rods?

It stops
working if a cloud passes in front of the sun. Yuma, Arizona, is the
sunniest city in the U.S. Even in Yuma, there are 50 cloudy days and 365
dark nights a year.

You really crank your AC and run a ton of lights at 3 am do you? In
most places, solar output matches peak-load. You build the solar
capacity to supply the difference between day and night. It's very
costly to build a conventional plant sized for the peak day load and
then let it sit at low capacity all night. The plant costs money
whether you are running it or not.

Your solar system costs money 12 hours of darkness every day and
runs inefficiently for about half of the remaining 12 hours,
unless it's cloudy or winter.

Adding solar to the electric grid does not displace conventional generating
plants. Those plants are still there. They just work a little less, sitting
idle when solar is working.
And you still pay depreciation and insurance and salaries and business
costs and distribution maintenance and new installations and and and
whether you generate electricity not.


If you're willing to have rolling power outages because the grid can't
supply
the peak load on cloudy days, solar may be just the thing for you.
Go live in a third-world country for a while and see how you like it.



The only money solar saves is the fuel that
would have been consumed by the plants that are idle because solar is
generating electricity.

The generators have a life time. Any time they are not running is time
before they have to be replaced.

Natural gas plants, or coal plants, consume 2-3
cents worth of fuel per KWh.

How much when you factor in the disastrous effects on the aquifers
from fracking?

Nuclear plants consume 0.4 cent per KWh

How much when you factor in the never ending problem of what to do
with spent fuel rods?

What do you do with the waste from solar cell production?
Or battery replacement?

and hydro plants don?Tt use fuel.

There you go. Build lots of dams and electricity will be flat out free
for everyone. Ray-o-nomics.

First thing you have to do is kill off all the tree huggers that
want to decommission dams.

Residential rooftop solar electricity costs 15 cents, and usually
considerably more, per KWh.

Mostly sold by small time dealers. They mark up the equipment
unconscionably and then prohibit you from having storage so they get
to be the broker between you and the grid forever. If you sell your
house, you have to find a buyer willing to accept the deal you made
with the solar guy. Do you think there might be a better model?

If markets were not distorted by political influence, rooftop solar would
hardly ever be competitive.

True, the solar con-men could not make their sale without tax breaks
and controls on what the utility must pay for your energy. As with all
good flim-flam schemes, those breaks will go away as soon as they get
big enough to hurt government income and the homeowner will find
themselves at the short end of a life time contract. Do you think
there might be a better model?

I'm listening...

But political subsidies and artificially high
electricity prices make rooftop solar competitive in many places. For
example, in California, many owners of large homes are charged over 40 cents
per KWh in certain ?otiers.??. These politically inspired rates make solar
competitive for those owners of large houses.

Sometimes the power companies say it's cheaper than building new
conventional plants. See above base and peak load.

The flaw in this pitch is that your old technologies are only cheaper
as long as they are already existing and you don't have to build new
ones. How long since a new nuclear plant went up?

The fuel cost to operate an existing solar system is ZERO. Might be a
hole in your analysis.
Maintenance, distribution, regulation, fees...

A cost of a new conventional plant and a new solar plant is what you
need to compare. The framework is how to supply new energy to an
expanding market. Do that and your "fuel only - the plant is paid for
and free" analysis collapses.

Heck the local water company will pay me handsomely to remove a swamp
cooler and replace it with refrigeration. They are flat out against
the wall finding new water sources to supply a growing population.

Just as in utility scale installations, the true value of rooftop solar
electricity is the cost of fuel consumption avoided when the solar is
operating. The result is that the utility is often effectively forced to pay
retail rates, typically about 13 cents per KWh, for electricity whose true
value is about 3 cents per KWh. The owner of the rooftop solar also loses
money unless his retail rate is in excess of the 15-cent, or more, cost per
KWh.

If the value is 3 cents, why doesn't the power company charge me that.
It's ludicrous to pretend production cost is only fuel and then go on
to pretend production cost is the same as retail. You compare
operating cost of existing systems with installation cost of new
systems. You have very liberal ideas on the economics of commerce.

The 11 reports
assign a value from a low of 3.5 cents per KWh to a high of 33 cents per
KWh. This wide variation in the value of solar surely indicates that solid
accounting methodology is absent.

Or different service areas, with different solar insolation, and
different peak-solar to peak-demand timing, and different regional
fuel costs. All costs are equal to everyone ??? Another liberal idea.

All the reports by advocates of rooftop
solar found that the value of the electricity to society was greater than
the current retail price of electricity. The three reports from utilities
found the opposite.

Wow. The salesman told me his Gizmodic-7 was the best and Brand X was
junk. That's a surprise.

How do the advocates of solar assign a value to society?

Here we go off the liberal deep end. Nothing to do with dollars and
cents, nothing to do with cost and markets. Ray wants to build a
better society.


I don't think we have any rational options other than some form of nuclear
for the long term. AS long as we're not investing in making nuclear
safer and reigning in regulatory blockages, we're losing ground.
"Just say no..." is not a reasonable strategy.
Just saying no to solar is not reasonable either. We need to invest
the type of funds into renewable energy systems, solar included, that
we have invested in nuclear systems before we can reasonably say that
nuclear is better. Certainly using the solar energy from the past, as
we are doing now when we burn fossil fuels, is not any kind of
reasonable long term strategy. And so far we have proved that we are
not willing to make the investments to make nuclear plants and the
associated waste they produce safe for the long term. And the hazards
from radioactive waste aren't just the radiation. A lot of the waste
is extremely poisonous just by itself, nevermind the extra risk of
radiation poisoning.
Eric