http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/26/165419/251/#comment29

All this worry about storage and baseload power has become irrelevant with studies on diversely located wind and smart grid power management.  It is a holdover from anti-renewable talking points, somehow internalized by environmentalists.

I think that we argued about it for so long that the wrong headed objections about dispatchability and so forth took on a life of their own.  That and the ocasional uninformed visitors that didn't realize storage was not the huge problem everyone seemed to think it was a few years ago, keeps these discussions going.

The really rough part about touting solar at under a few  dollars per watt to compete with other sources on price, has always been that the sun only shines around 2 to 4 thousand hours per year, brightly and directly enough to produce power.  Depending on location and climate.

That means every watt of solar produces around 2 to 4 kwh of electric power per year.  2 to 4 kwh is worth 22 to 44 cents retail.  So the payback period on $1 per watt solar is around 2 1/2 to 5 years. 

Boost that with a 10 cent per kwh subsidy, diverted from big fossil, nuclear, and agribizz energy corporations, and the payback would be cut nearly in half.  A great investment!

But actual installed solar will be closer to $2 or $3 per watt, even with the $1 per watt PV cell manufacturing cost.  But that's around 3 to 8 years payback period.  Still not a bad investment.  Free power after 8 years?  

Plus there is enough roof space suitable for solar, that with conservation (like geo heat exchange cooling/heating) and cogeneration of solar heat from PV panels, that most power needs, even enough to power plugin hybrids can be provided by roof and wall mounted solar.

Then of course there is  solar furnace and large scale wind to power energy intensive manufacturing and electric mass transportation.

And biogas for distributed backup power.

This is all practical now, we are only waiting on subsidy shifting to get it off the ground. Of course this is far from common knowledge.  Our leading hope for this energy policy is Barack and I doubt he has heard of most of it at all.

He needs illumination. Let's have a revolution.