The myth of Photo-Voltaic

Don Lancaster is a wonderful resource for those interested in various alternative energies. He delivers a brutally honest explanation of why most of them are a complete waste of time. Today (go here and scroll down to the entry for September 15, 2005) he explains:

Another of the pv solar popular myths is that "extra" electricity on the grid is somehow "wasted" or "unused". In reality, there are typically six or more different types of electricity on the grid at any given time.

Their mix is continuously adjusted to optimize costs to a fraction of a millicent per kilowatt hour. Sources might include...

• Baseload Power is from low cost sources that run continuously but may be hard to start or change.
  
• Rolling Power is a source that is manned and ready-to-go at "full steam" that can be switched in only when and if needed.
  
• Peaking Power comes from more expensive sources that can be rapidly turned on or off and otherwise quickly adjusted.
  
• Brokered Power is bought and sold from other utilities to help even out supply and demand.
  
• Stored Energy has been previously saved ( such as pumping to a higher lake ) during lower cost times. This process is quite efficient at load levelling.
  
• Negawatts are conserved energy through demand reduction via time-of-day cost penalties or conservation incentives.
  
• Returned power is the tiny fraction provided by solar pv users through synchronous inverters when they have excess capacity.

In "net metering" states, any returned power is heavily subsidized and represents an obscenely unfair tax on the other utility users. A just and neutral policy instead would be for a utility to sell at current retail and buy at their current avoided cost. Any differential being fully justified by the additional storage service that the utility is providing.

If you are a few miles away from the commercial power grid, sure, PV is an alternative (actually a modest low-RPM diesel is a much better one) but to think that PV can compete on the free energy market without huge (taxpayer funded) subsidies is ludicrous. It also gives me no end of amusement to see all the "back-to-the-land" types rail against the "nasty chemicals" used in the manufacture of computer chips but they gleefully advocate placing yards and yards of them on their own rooftops...