I know we haven't spoken in a while.

[t3hbastard]

Its not that I have nothing to say its that I so often have to much. There's a lot going on in the world right now. My life has been fairly stable lately but most of my plans and schemes have been put on hold while I sort out a revised grand timetable.

Comments

[xforge]

By now, every skyward-facing surface on Earth should be coated with photovoltaic cells. But they're not because we're all astoundingly fucking stupid.

[t3hbastard]

Honestly, when I see how fast the technologies are advancing it might work in our favor to be late adopters and avoid some of the upgrade costs. We do have to start very, very soon though. A decentralized power grid would do more for our nations ability to handle disaster than nearly anything else in that price range. Also any reduction in foreign fuel dependence would have the obvious benefit. Also clean fusion would be ab excellent National Project.

[mrdennings]

really up untill recently it wasn't really cost effective to to do that. however there have been real break throughs making solar cells use 100% of the available sunlight.
http://gizmodo.com/5076530/solar-panel-quantum-leap-near+perfect-light-absorption-possible

[xforge]

Yup, that's the awesome all right, but even if we'd just started plopping them on every available rooftop back in the 70s, the increased demand would have caused manufacturing to ramp up, which would have lowered the price per unit until we could cover the exterior of that Tesla roadster with 'em for less than $1000. Like t3hbastard suggests, by now we'd be in a lotta trouble paying for upgrades to newer, more efficient systems, but it'd be easier to pay for 'cuz half our damn GDP wouldn't have gone to other countries to pay for gasoline.