RE: The Economics of Solar
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
The entire contiguous 48 states are south of England in latitude, so from that alone, solar makes more sense here than there, although local climate and cloud cover may affect that. But England is also notorious for rain. I saw a lot of wind farms on my solar eclipse road trip last year, and that make sense in many regions. Nuclear power originated in Idaho, of all places, and my uncle worked at Hanford down near the Washington/Oregon border on the Columbia River. There are also many hydroelectric dams on the Columbia. But coal and natural gas offer advantages, especially when power demand fluctuates above baseline loads and more generators need to be spooled up quickly to meet demand.
It's hardly rained here for months and the panels work even when it's cloudy, so it can be better than you might think. People up in Scandinavia have panels too.
We don't have a lot of hydro, but there are some hydro storage systems to deliver extra power for a while. Large scale batteries are coming in too. There are definite challenges, but it's not viable to burn fuel like we used to.