Thank God For High Priced Gasoline

With all the renewed interest in PV technology (photovoltaic) I am revisiting some thoughts I’ve had over the years about the viability of putting one of these solar panels on my roof. After some brief checking, it seems that the price of residential systems for a medium size tract home is still too high for the average family and the payoff would take something like 15-20 years even if you live in the sunbelt (as I do). But even worse, this is a system that may only deliver 50% of your electricity needs.

Some firmly believe that massive utility-based systems stationed outside of town are the answer. Living in the middle of Los Angeles, I don’t think that is necessarily the best solution, mainly due to the huge energy demands of a metropolitan area that extends for a hundred miles.

Instead, I prefer the distributed approach, kind of like PCs versus mainframes. Of course, this requires the development of cheap PV systems that pay for themselves in 3-5 years. My opinion is that the tipping point for PV installations will be when inexpensive solar roofing tiles come on the market. This is not at all unrealistic and there are several companies tackling that problem as we speak.

There are a few other things happening that will make PV installations even more attractive:

• The cost of electricity will continue to go up, probably at an accelerated rate as demand increases and production costs increase.
• The emergence of electric vehicles that you charge up at home is not too far off. This is a whole subject in itself. I predict that in many communities more and more people will buy electric golf cart type vehicles for short trips to the market.
• The steady growth of electronic gadgets in our homes will continue unabated.

All these things and more will make the ability to capture free energy from your roof increasingly attractive. At some point, it will become a critical selling point when you go to purchase a house. No PV system = no sale.

Although I continue to believe that nuclear power should be a much bigger player in our energy plan (you need to generate electricity when the sun is not shining !!!), I just don’t see it expanding much until we can economically blast all of our nuclear waste off to Venus. Of course then there will immediately materialize an environmental group lobbying to save the environment of Venus.

The other major (clean) options besides PV are wind, wave energy, hydroelectric, and geothermal. I just came back from China so coal is definitely not on my list unless we are successful in converting it to a clean burning alternative. Of these other options, the largest potential source of energy is clearly solar and thankfully there are a whole host of companies working to develop inexpensive solutions to capturing solar energy.

We can thank the price of gasoline for finally creating the incentive to work on this problem.