Solar is Waiting in the Wings
January 9, 2008 |
Three energy experts over at Scientific American just hatched a grand plan to dethrone coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power from their posts as reigning energy giants in the U.S. The authors conclude that by 2050, solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions. They write,
Solar energy's potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation's total energy consumption in 2006.
The authors project that solar energy could provide 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity grid and 35 percent of its total energy, including transportation, by 2050. What's more, this energy would cost no more than today's conventional power sources.
But for now, solar is waiting in the wings, listening for its cue. What's needed, of course, is for the government to throw some funding at solar -- over $400 billion in subsidies would do the trick. To be parceled out over the next 40 years, it's still a substantial investment, but the payoff would be well worth it, say the authors:
Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.
Solar technology could do great things for this country, but it needs a boost -- something bigger than what the private sector can provide. We won't be able to adopt promising new technologies like solar unless we create an entirely new energy infrastructure. Such a project will more resemble the creation of the railroads, the inter-state highway system, personal computers, the Internet, and the space program than the installation of catalytic converters and scrubbers, or the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals. The latter involved mere technical fixes, not wholesale technological revolutions.
We need an ambitious public investment commensurate to the colossal task at hand. How about a ten year commitment to buy down the price of solar? Whether through auctions or carbon taxes, federal carbon regulation has the potential to generate tens of billions of dollars annually for public clean energy investments. See the Breakthrough Institute's "Fast, Clean, & Cheap" for more on our own plan on how and why to make it happen.
Comments
The bottom line for me is that a carbon tax isn
By muskel on 2009 09 26
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By marie on 2009 06 23
I have been reading Climate Progress for over a year. It's entertaining and topical, but I agree with all your criticisms of Romm. He shuts down debate with anyone who disagrees with him in even the slightest detail.
I have now been moderated to death and then banned twice on his blog. If you read the comments that survive they are now all of the "Joe you're a fantastic guy I want to have your babies keep up the good work" variety.
By Robert on 2009 05 24
Nice tone. I read Romm. He's a smart guy, and I think his heart is in the right place on energy and the environment. But he doesn't seem to be capable of really weighing the facts in an impartial manner. This is easily apparent every time he attacks you guys. I wish Podesta would rein him in a bit and let him know that this whole debate and movement is about more than proving Joe Romm right or wrong. It's about getting the best energy and climate policy we can get, and as soon as possible.
By Jackson on 2009 04 25
Wilmot, a couple things. First, devoting auction revenues to compensating consumers does not mean subsidizing utility bills to offset rate increases. If you give money back to households via a straight check (dividend) or a tax credit, they will be able to afford dealing with rate increases. However, since the rates (cost per unit) still go up, they are still incentivized not to purchase as much electricity or carbon intensive goods. So it doesn't end up all back with the power companies. Second, none of the auction revenue is "committed" yet, so hopefully some does go to research. But research usually gets overlooked in the rush to subsidizing deployment, because (I think) research labs aren't as heavy campaign donors as (even clean) energy companies. Finally, what presents a bait and switch for unrelated spending? Hopefully, political accountability, remember there was a bit of a push to spend this money on healthcare a little while ago, but that really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so its been dropped.
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 24
I agree. A tough carbon emission price, with cap auction revenues dedicated to real solutions (including a renovated national grid), and no phony offsets, is the only hope of doing anything meaningful in the time (20 years) we have to make a difference on global climate change. It is also the only hope of making clean power attractive enough to stimulate investment in clean tech. I believe that a call to action will get a good response from the American people, provided they can be assured that this is not just another fraud on the part of their government to sneak through a tax to pay for more earmarks and bailouts and wars. Dirty power is cheap in America, and we should get used to paying what the rest of the world pays for clean power. However, the recent Senate vote on consumer indemnity amendments seems to indicate which way the wind is blowing. Consumers want their cheap power to continue, and are not willing to make substantial sacrifices to pay for pollution controls. Politicians therefore be under pressure to promise them that cap revenues will go to offsetting the rate hikes that can be expected when the utilities go to their friendly local PUCs. So what then is the purpose of the cap auction, if the proceeds will get shuffled around and wind up back in the power companies due to compensating rate hikes? Practically none of the proceeds will go to research and development because they are committed to consumer indemnity. And how about the possibility of a bait-and-switch to get more revenue for non-related spending, a repeat of Social Security? What prevents that?
By Wilmot McCutchen on 2009 04 23
Max -- You say "the high carbon price isn't a big deal if you compensate consumers for the price increases that come from cap/trade" and you are probably right on that. The recent Senate vote on consumer indemnity amendments seems to indicate which way the wind is blowing. Consumers want their cheap power to continue, and are not willing to make substantial sacrifices to pay for pollution controls. Politicians therefore have to promise them that cap revenues will go to offsetting the rate hikes that can be expected when the utilities go to their local PUCs. So what then is the purpose of the auction, if the proceeds will wind up back in the power companies due to compensating rate hikes? Practically none of the proceeds will go to research and development because they are committed to consumer indemnity. And how about the possibility of a bait-and-switch to get more revenue for non-related spending, a repeat of Social Security? What prevents that?
By Wilmot McCutchen on 2009 04 23
Hot fusion, supercolliders, and such pure science research projects, are black hole money pits sucking up all available funding for applied science directed to making clean tech work. So a call for more money will be ineffective if the existing funding priorities are preserved. Even for clean tech applied science, research money for new approaches will be scarce because DOE has already committed $80 billion in future funding to 16 contractors for the old stuff. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/news/news_detail.html?news_id=12150 This parting shot of the Bush administration (Dec. 18, 2008) makes sure no new technology can be investigated, reiterating the canard that we already know what we need, and all that is missing is more money.
By Wilmot McCutchen on 2009 04 23
Jesse, I'll respond to your FIRST/SECOND/THIRD points with 1/2/3 below...
1. You write: "There's just targets and a price signal. The only way the "cap's" mandates will be met is if there are readily available emissions reductions opportunities that are cheap enough to be deployed at scale without triggering the cost containment measures."
There will always be domestic offsets available for lower than the market price of an allowance, in any program that has any pretenses of offering fewer allowances each year than the year before. The market for allowances is so vast-- and the price difference between the allowances and offsets will always be too large to be arbitraged away-- that there will always be a backlog of investments in pending offset credits. By using public funds to deploy more wind farms, you are not reducing offsets but just incentivizing a few more coal plants to fire longer before they pass the baton to a gas-fired generator.
2. You write "a carbon price is a uniform subsidy. It applies the same to all clean energy forms. If it's $10/ton, then clean energy is that much more affordable relative to competitors, all forms of clean energy." Exactly, that's what makes it efficient. Then you write "But the prices of clean energy alternatives are NOT uniform." This is where policy gets dangerous. If solar is unfairly hindered by a collective action dilemma where no one is willing to step up and invest in a 2 year expensive project to discover a new catalyst that all other will then profit from, increase the appropriations for the DOE Office of Science and get started on it. If its 3-5 times more expensive than wind because...its 3-5 times more expensive than wind, than the system should deploy 3-5 times (or really way more) wind. Or set the equal "subsidy" (I'd call it a Pigouvian tax) and force solar to compete by becoming competitive, forcing the kinds of breakthroughs like CSP that will save us all money.
3. Jesse, I never dispute the need for public research, I even highlighted it in my question. But you're talking about something else entirely. On deployment of existing technology to satisfy existing market demand, private investors playing with their own money and playing for keeps will deploy capital much more efficiently than any Congressional PV spending program.
You also keep bringing up this ominous specter of the too-high carbon price, but the high carbon price isn't a big deal if you compensate consumers for the price increases that come from cap/trade. I know you guys keep harping on what the polling data shows but you can get a polled public to tell you anything you want. You could easily assemble polls ostensibly showing that the public strongly opposes everything Obama has done or plans to do. Do the policy right so that you can tout the environmental accomplishments without bankrupting voters and the public will go along with it just fine. You have to put more thought into how you compensate consumers than Congress is doing now, considering not just income but geographic variation in energy price increases they'll be exposed to, but it can be done.
By squandering the revenue on non-public-good functions that the cap will already motivate private actors to do, you are providing less compensation for consumers, prices will still go up, purchasing power will decline, and you will have no chance of strengthening the cap later (before or after passage of original bill). This is as much a threat to put a damper on a strong incentive for private sector investment in clean energy as any legislated cost-containment. That will also have adverse consequences for any chance of us discovering anything exportable to China and India, who, by the way, seem intent on becoming the next France and leaving us in the dust anyway.
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 22
Max (and all), I actually turned your question and my reply here into a quick separate blog post here:
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2009/04/what_are_clean_energy_investme.shtml
Would welcome continued discussion here or at that blog post (probably at the other post is better)
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 21
Hi Max. You're missing a few things actually, but thanks for asking. First, the goal of investments is not to compel emissions reductions beyond what the cap mandates. The goals are several-fold. FIRST: you assume that the cap's mandates will be met without any further assistance. That assumption is wrong if any cost containment provisions, including safety valve/price offramps, discretionary price controls, massive use of offsets and/or borrowing from the future mechanisms are included. They are. In the Waxman-Markey bill (the latter two) and in every other climate legislation enacted or given serious consideration anywhere in any political economy in the world. If the bill has cost containment, there isn't really a "cap." There's just targets and a price signal. The only way the "cap's" mandates will be met is if there are readily available emissions reductions opportunities that are cheap enough to be deployed at scale without triggering the cost containment measures. That's where investment and a "tech push" is critical to maximizing the chances of meeting emissions reductions goals and to making up for the shortcomings of the "price/market pull" approach of cap and trade/carbon taxes. SECOND: a carbon price is a uniform subsidy. It applies the same to all clean energy forms. If it's $10/ton, then clean energy is that much more affordable relative to competitors, all forms of clean energy. But the prices of clean energy alternatives are NOT uniform. Wind is only a bit more expensive than coal (plus needs infrastructure build out) while solar is 3-5 times more expensive than coal, for example. Why should we want to make ALL dirty energy more expensive than the MOST expensive clean energy source we want to spur? Why not make dirty energy moderately more expensive, provide some market pull, and then use the revenues to fund targeted tech push strategies to push the development and drive down the costs (subsidized at first, real eventually) down to the price where the carbon price will take over? That gives you the same reductions, a better technology development pipeline and lower cost of compliance to the economy? Carbon dollars do double duty: first as modest market pull, second as critical funding source for targeted and effective investments to spur emerging technologies to scale and down the price curve. THIRD (and probably most importantly): we don't want to make clean energy cost competitive with coal WITH A CARBON PRICE. We want and NEED to make clean energy cheaper than coal. Period. Anywhere. In China and India and Brazil and everywhere else where the bulk of expected energy and emissions growth will occur, they demand affordable and scalable energy sources. Right now, fossil fuels are just about the only thing that foots the bill. The leaders of those nations have been pretty clear, over and over, that they won't put much of a price on carbon, if any at all. At least not for a LONG time. Since global warming is, after all, a global problem, we can't ignore this massive demand for affordable and abundant energy. How will that demand be met? With more coal plants, or with new clean and cheap energy sources? The answer will make or break our chances to stabilize the climate. Knowing that, the explicit goal of climate policy in the rich nations of the world should be to MAKE CLEAN ENERGY CHEAP. That argues for a limited role for making dirty energy more expensive through carbon taxes. We don't want to rely on a $50/ton carbon price to make clean energy sources competitive, for example. Especially not if there's little incentive in our policy design for those technologies to get much cheaper than that. We can rely on a modest carbon price to do some useful market pull and bring more mature clean energy techs to scale faster (and therefore down in price somewhat). But the real work can and should be done by tech push investments that can be targeted appropriately and steadily lowered in price as clean energy techs reach scale and achieve price and performance improvements. That's a strategy to MAKE CLEAN ENERGY CHEAP and to make coal obsolete in China eventually. If a climate strategy can't ultimately do that, then we're sunk. How does cap and trade do that? Thanks for the questions as always. What are your thoughts?
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 21
Remember when cigarette taxes were only going to fund anti-smoking programs and health care costs and the lottery was going to pay for schools? I do. "Clean energy" will be the bait and general fund revenue will be the switch.
By Robert L. www.neolibertarian.com on 2009 04 21
Jesse, what exactly is investing public money in deployment of wind farms and PV arrays supposed to accomplish if you do it with a carbon cap/trade?
Its one thing to address market failures like a lack of research and transmission, but deploying extra carbon-reduction measures in sectors covered by the cap will not compel emissions reductions beyond what the cap mandates. What am I missing?
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 21
Hi Payal, thanks for your work on this report as well. Excellent analysis. Yes, I noticed that the level of offsets allowed is set in absolute terms, not as a percentage of required allowances, which would make the volume of offsets allowed decline proportionately over time as the cap goes down (and would make more sense). Seems crazy to think we'd be able to find 2 billion tons of good reliable offsets today, let alone in 2040 or 2050 as you point out. Thanks for the comment.
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 20
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for your insightful blog and publicizing our report. Just a minor point, but the percentage of emissions allowance that can be met by offsets steadily rises over time (see the figure).
So by 2050 offsets can equal 2/3 of emissions allowances. Realistically, this doesn't make sense, because by 2050, one would expect source countries of offsets (India, China, Brazil) to also be reducing emissions, either through international agreements of their own domestic legislation. But this is what the bill allows!
By Payal Parekh on 2009 04 20
Jesse, sorry for the late reply.
On your last point, I would phrase it a bit differently. Compromise is inevitable, but I'm not sure that has to mean "cost containment," as in the kind of cost containment that is so aggressive it undermines the cap. Remember how before everyone talked about how a cap/trade would disproportionately hurt the poor? But that argument, while not gone, is generally muted now that policy makers have gotten serious about returning most of the revenue back to consumers to alleviate price increases. Its hard to scare someone with "your electricity bill will go up 10%" if the other side can say "yea but we'll mail you a check for $800 every year, more than the difference."
You could do this to address the regional cost issue as well, distributing some of the carbon revenue to states based on their vulnerability to a carbon price. Then, just like with the poor, there's no argument of "well what if the carbon price rises to X," because then the assistance goes up as well. So I'm still holding out hope that our need for compromise will not entail an overreliance on cost containment and other gimmicks, but obviously you can only be so optimistic after Waxman-Markey.
So if we take your point that offsets and assorted garbage will make their way into the bill, does that mean we need to spend the carbon revenue on clean energy? Maybe, but I think you have to be very careful to accomplish more than nothing. The cap sets the level of carbon reduction in the capped sectors, so from a practical perspective spending carbon revenue on deploying more wind farms than the cap otherwise would have compelled will lower the carbon price and a few coal plants will burn more coal or cofire less biomass or whatever to make it up.
You could spend the money on pursuing reductions outside the cap though, like protecting international forests, clean development generally, or trying to reduce our emissions in noncapped sectors (like agriculture). And most climate bills do some of this. But if you're spending on clean tech deployment in capped sectors, you're either raising or lowering the national cost of meeting the cap, but probably not contributing extra reductions beyond the cap. And I'd be generally skeptical, outside of addressing certain market failures such as transmission capacity and information problems with efficiency, that a broad program of energy deployment would really deploy resources more efficiently than private actors investing with their own money.
I could be missing part of your plan though. How do you see your deployment program interacting with the cap itself to exceed it?
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 20
Hi Paul, thanks for commenting. Involving a number of different federal agencies involved in energy-related R&D is key. That is principally DOE, but also includes DOD, USDA, NASA, NSF, and Commerce's NIST and the Small Business Administration's Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) fund. We need a government-wide focus on clean energy innovation to propel American into a clean, prosperous new energy economy. Hope you keep reading and commenting. Cheers...
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 17
Hi CTF, thanks for the comment. In theory, I do tend to lean towards a carbon tax as a more transparent and straightforward way to set a carbon price, but like I said, a similar end goal can be accomplished through a cap and trade system with a price ceiling (or even a price floor as well), which makes it more like a carbon tax anyway. However, I'm not a fan of "revenue-neutral" carbon pricing, if by that you mean returning all of the carbon dollars to individuals or businesses through decreased taxes elsewhere or direct rebates. I think that defeats the primary purpose of the carbon tax, which is to raise significant revenues to reinvest in accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy. Given the political limits placed on carbon pricing, we are highly unlikely (I'd even say we flat out are not going) to establish a price signal on carbon that is sufficient enough to drive the transition to a clean energy economy at the pace and scale we need. Beyond that, there are many non-price-related barriers to a clean energy economy that the private sector cannot overcome, even with a better price signal on carbon. For that, we need a smart policy of targeted public investments in clean energy R&D, accelerated early stage commercialization and deployment, enabling infrastructure, education and low-cost financing to bring down capital barriers to efficiency. Almost all of those are "public goods" - i.e. their benefits are diffuse whereas the costs to any private sector actor would be concentrated and prohibitive. This is a role for public investment. Public investments built the railroads, highways, and fiber optic cables that united a transcontinental nation and enabled ever more efficient commerce. Public investments electrified rural America and irrigated the arid West. And it was public investment in technological innovation that gave birth to jet engines and commercial aviation, gas turbines and nuclear power, microchips and the Internet. Each of these smart public investments supported and catalyzed innovative American firms and businesses, spurred lasting economic growth, and served as the foundation of the nation
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 17
p.s. Max: thanks for the tip about the total allowances allocated in those years. I'll dig into the bill and see what you're talking about. Sounds weird, and haven't heard anyone else talk about that yet. What do you think about my concluding point though: that cost containment is inevitable, so we'd better be (a) thinking about the best kind of cost containment and (b) designing the rest of the policy to make up for the limits on carbon pricing that cost containment entails?
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 17
Max, thanks for the comment. Yes, I'm not "gaga" over the Waxman bill, that's for sure. There are still a lot of crucial details to be worked out, and what we have now is a discussion draft only, but I'm not at all excited by it. You can read more of my coverage of the bill here: http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2009/04/new_climate_bill_proof_of_misp.shtml The bill's authors try to make a big deal out of the fact that this is an "energy and climate bill", not a cap and trade bill, relying on the slough of additional regulations and standards in the bill, like the RPS you mention. But indeed, those regulations do little really to add to the bill's robustness, or even to help spur the development and deployment of clean, cheap energy technologies. For that, the bill should focus on reinvesting the proceeds of the carbon allowance auctions into clean energy development and deployment, enabling infrastructure (like a 21st century grid) and low-cost financing options to break down capital cost barriers for energy efficiency (in that order of priority, IMO). That would truly accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy in the U.S., create jobs, strengthen our economic competitiveness, lower the ultimate cost of compliance with the carbon regulations and actually make up for the limited price signal the cap and trade system is likely to produce (given all the offsets or other cost containment provisions). Watch the House Energy Subcommittee markup of this bill closely over the next couple of weeks. If Chairman Markey goes back to the kind of bill he introduced in 2008 (iCAP), which invested billions in clean energy, we may have something worth fighting for. If not, it'll be time to start from scratch while we wait for cap and trade to run aground somewhere down the line. (Note: our comments at the blog accept limited formatting and no html. We had a problem with it earlier and have turned it off. Sorry for the less-than-ideal comment formatting. We're trying to upgrade our comments fields soon. Bear with us!).
By Jesse Jenkins on 2009 04 17
I agree that cap and trade is fundamentally flawed and I hope beyond hope that Congress can move beyond it and work toward a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The bottom line for me is that a carbon tax isn
By CTF on 2009 04 17
Please include agencies that we normally wouldn't think were involved in energy conservation. I specifically name NASA. They can lower their carbon footprint per mission. NASA needs to remember how proud they felt when they invented the integrated circuit as a by-product of their work.
Please be prepared to develop and deploy inventions that inexpensively ameliorate the symptoms of global warming, or which inhibit global warming. Simple schemes, such as putting white roofs on houses on California, have had nonzero effects.
By Paul Klinkman on 2009 04 17
huh, sorry for the huge clump, I swear I typed it in with paragraph breaks...
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 17
Jesse, its refreshing to see someone in the environmental community not go gaga over the Waxman bill just because it has a Renewable Electricity Standard (which doesn't increase the carbon reduction under a cap/trade anyway, it just makes you pay more for the same amount).
I would be careful citing the Friends of the Earth report on carbon trading though. One of their recommendations is to ban banking of allowances for use in future years, which I had never heard anyone seriously suggest before. I doubt you could find an economist who wouldn't agree that would seriously increase price volatility, not decrease it. There were a few other very curious proposals in there as well.
On offsets, I don't think the right criticism is that "there's no way we can get 2 billion good ones." If, like the CDM, only X million are certified, that would still be a net plus if we could monitor/verify them. But we can't. Like the Stanford authors you mention wrote, (full study available at: http://www.ucei.berkeley.edu/PDF/seminar20090213.pdf ) there are just fundamental incentive and monitoring problems with any offset program.
Finally, a couple more gimmicks that Waxman-Markey engages in. 1) The cap actually doesn't decline for the first 8 years. I'm confused where the idea that it does comes from (though the EPA administrator is given some authority to tweak things down the line. But you never know who will be president in 2012, much less 2020. In 2004 political consensus was Democrats wouldn't win another election for a longgg time). Check out pages 360-361 in the bill text here:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090331/acesa_discussiondraft.pdf
4,770 million allowances in 2012, 4873 in 2020. In the intervening years it doesn't even stay stable or anything - it bounces around between 4666 and 5391. Weird. I mean the path's a bit irrelevant because of banking, but point is way more emissions allowances (and so actual emissions) are authorized for as long as anyone's planning on still being in office.
2) The "strategic reserve" of allowances to buffer price spikes is really just an absolute price ceiling. This is because its a virtually limitless pool of allowances because it dips from every year in advance, and proportionately more from later years, when proportionately more reductions are supposed to take place already. And then its continually refilled by purchasing offsets after allowances are expended. An actual "strategic reserve" would be a great idea, but to do it responsibly you'd have to fill it with extra allowances from a price-floor in the early years, or at least borrow from years in the soon-future (within 5 years or so). Borrowing from decades in the future is just punting to the future, just like not passing anything would be.
By Max Epstein on 2009 04 17
It's true that more politically powerful alternative energy industries will have an advantage in winning the biggest chunk of the public investment pie - and all the more reason for why we need a strong clean energy lobby in Washington.
By Lindsay Meisel on 2008 01 17
This paper raises two interesting points.
First, it is clear that public investment into a new energy economy will create winners and losers in private industry. The authors of this paper who are part of the solar industry stand to gain from a $420 billion dollar investment from the federal government encouraging. If government seriously considers significant public investment into new, low-carbon technologies, many other industries will be at the table lobbying for support. What worries me is that the alternative energy industries with the most political influence are the least promising: corn-based ethanol, "clean-coal," coal liquification, etc. Under its mantra for $30 billion of annual public investment into energy research, I'm interesting in hearing Breakthrough's approach to ensuring this money is invested into promising technologies, not just those with strong political lobbies.
Second, I have heard many environmentalists agree that there is no silver bullet substitute for fossil fuels. The common argument is that a diverse mix of small and geographically distributed renewables will need to replace oil, coal and natural gas. Yet this paper demonstrates some of the advantages of emphasizing one technology. Large scale commitment to solar allows us to maximize its efficiency by redesigning the electricity grid to transmit electricity efficiently from the Southwest; large scale solar panel production also creates economies of scale that drastically reduce the price of production. The paper makes me wonder where the correct balance lies between a diverse energy mix and an efficient energy mix concentrated on a few key technologies.
The discussion here and in your book has me engaged and excited. Keep it coming.
By Peter Weisberg on 2008 01 17