XogGyux wrote:You are wrong. Solar technology has existed since the 50's.
Ah, so has artificial intelligence. It's the combination of declining cost and increasing effectiveness that leads to widespread use.
In fact is almost as old as nuclear yet less than 1% of US electricity is produced by this means, and far less for the rest of the word.
But the cost per installed watt has declined by
two orders of magnitude since the 50s, and will continue to decline.
The idea that a technology that has existed for 70 years and is not even close to 1% will become the majority in years i assume you mean either 51% of the us, or at least the single largest market share (at the moment i believe its coal at ~30%) its preposterous.
Really? In 1975, electronic computers had existed for over 30 years, but far less than 1% of households had one. Within 20 years, over 90% of households had one.
Specially since we are far away from the battery technologies we would need to make the system viable.
But probably a lot closer than we are to practical fusion power.
Look I am not opposed of solar as a bridge or as possible alternative specially in isolated parts where access to centralized power is a problem. But consider this, the VAST majority of home installed solar cells are not currently using batteries to store that energy for the night. How do they manage to power their homes during the nighttime? Well because they are not 100% off the grid. During the day those solar panels supply the electricity to the house and and "extra" electricity is pumped into the plant (basically sold to the plant). Which is cool but if you wanted to use this system you could not get rid of a single oil/coal/nuclear plant in the word, best you could hope for is that you wouldn't have to run those plants during the daylight (which would be very inefficient and and unrealistic specially in the case of nuclear plants.)
But practical, low-cost, high-capacity electrical energy storage is coming.
Now to really really get rid of solar you would need massive batteries on every single one of the 120million + in the US, all business and buildings, etc. And i'm not talking about a car battery here, i'am talking about massive batteries or batteries array.
That is a lot batteries which lets be honest it is not the greenest of all objects you can fabricate.
There are lots of alternatives in the pipe, like flywheel storage, which has been proposed for cars, and capacitors.
Now what you said about energy hitting earth is true. There is a lot of energy. There is also a lot of energy in our planets core, there is a lot of energy in the supernova 100 million light years up. Not because there is a lot of energy somewhere means that we can EFFICIENTLY, safely and more important to our topic, green, recovered.
But unlike those, solar energy is available right here and right now, at the earth's surface, in vast quantities.
One gram of any substance (lets say water) has enough energy to power a single light bulb for 30,000 years! but until we figure out how (or if its even possible) that we can exploit that we cannot even consider that as a reasonable alternative.
But solar is already reasonable, and has been for hundreds of millions of years: plants use it, and animals extract it from plants. What's really preposterous is thinking we can't make major advances on nature's system within the next few decades.
Now it is true battery technology is improving. In 20 years we might have carbon nanotube batteries half the size and twice the capacity for a fraction of the cost and weight of current batteries. But EVEN if that were true.... there are still drawbacks to solar OTHER than batteries. For one, the sun changes throught the day and throught the seasons, so you either need a massively overkill system (so that it has enough reserves to last you through those months) or you cannot use those system in particular areas of the country.
"Overkill" more aptly describes the amount of solar energy available to be tapped. Night is the only serious difficulty, and it is solved by better storage. Even on a cloudy winter day, the solar energy falling on a typical house in a day is far more than that household's energy consumption needs.
Dirt, shadow from trees, all of that reduces the efficiency so you need an additional layer of maintenance and/or reserve to meet those problems. And lets not forget about the most obvious issue here. Nuclear fusion is literally the same process that our sun uses (and it is just as clean) why would you go through the middle man of panels, 100 million miles of space and 10km of earth atmosphere when you can go straight to the source and produce it?
Maybe because we aren't in the middle of a frickin' STAR?
Yes you might say well this technology doesn't exist just yet... but hey! remember those amazing batteries you were talking about? they don't exist either!. In fact with current technology, even if we say lets do it no matter the cost, we wouldn't even get close to implement such a system in the US simply because there is not enough lithium in the whole world to put the necessary batteries in every single US home, car and business. Now, there are other technologies being researched, but the same is true for fusion!
Fusion is inherently very, very difficult to pull off. Batteries are not, and storage need not be batteries.
I think solar will play a major role for sure. I think in the next 10-20 years more and more houses are going to even include some with its construction. I think someone will come up great roof tiles that work as photocells (actually i think elon musk showed some not too long ago) and this will be great. However with less than 1% of the electricity produced in this country produced by photo voltaic cells and with virtually 0% of the households with the necessary battery storage needs met solar energy is as far from being viable as it is recovering the power of the lightning!
The cost per installed watt of solar power has fallen by
two orders of magnitude just in the last 50 years. And there is a positive feedback criticality waiting to happen: as costs decline, more people will want to go solar. More people going solar enables greater economies of mass production, further reducing costs, resulting in even more people going solar, etc.
Nuclear fusion is the future.
I'll bet you that solar accounts for a larger fraction of all human energy use than fusion as far into the future as it makes sense to speak of human energy use.
Although realistically, even if we ignore politics and decide to work towards that goal i don't think we will get there before the last quarter of this century for any significant part of the US energy be produced by clean sources.
IMO most will be clean by 2050.