Howard_T

Four Problems Facing Solar Power Companies

On top of the reasons posited in the article, solar power also has the problems any business faces: where do I put the production facility and how do I get the product to the consumer?

To produce commercially viable amounts of power, solar needs to have a very large array located somewhere that the sun shines nearly all the time. In other words, we are talking about the desert southwest. I'm not too sure that the same environmentalists who are urging the replacement of carbon-based energy will be too thrilled at having several hundred square miles of fragile desert environment destroyed. Assuming that this problem can be overcome, you now have to transmit this power to where it will be used. Here in the northeast, this would mean around 2,000+ miles of transmission line. How do you overcome the line losses? Do you build periodic substations to boost the voltage? If you are to depend on energy storage in a "smart grid" infrastructure, it hasn't yet been looked at from an engineering economics viewpoint, and perhaps the means to store the energy don't even exist in a practical sense. Allie, you may be correct that solar is inevitable, but it has a very long way to go before it is a proven and reliable technology on a nationwide, mass-market scale.