Random Thought on Electrical Power Generation
It's 2:47 AM and I'm laying on the floor of my son's room waiting for him to go back to sleep. He tends to wake up in the middle of the night and come trundling into our bedroom and crawls into bed with us. Ah, the joys of Four. But I digress
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The battery capacity issue will also likely be resolved eventually, when the market wants a solution for it.
Also, as I said in that thread, I'm not sure that the "cost effectiveness" of fossil fuel generated electricity is the reality, given all the hidden costs of the process. Just think of the ecological impact of Exxon-Valdez and Deep Horizon, plus any number of other spills. None of the recovery costs for those are factored into the calculation for the cost of using fossil fuels. Besides, significant impact on an ecological system goes much beyond the economic consequences, i.e., the "cost" of the Deep Horizon spill is going to be more than just what we lose in revenue from fishing and tourism industries.
Finally, I doubt any technological advances could make it so that solar can become the sole provider of energy as fossil fuel is now for us. We are spoiled. Terribly spoiled. The only way we can maintain our current rate of use is by extracting fossil fuels in an unsustainable manner. Perhaps nuclear can completely replace fossil fuel at comparable price, for a while, but extractible uranium is also a limited resource. So, as far as I can tell, the way to move forward is first to reduce our use rate, and then use a myriad sources of renewable energy to supply our need, adjusting for location and feasibility. We will probably still use coal, but not as the only source. And as Timmet is wont to say, we can do all of this, without even making significant compromise to our standard of living.
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