Just a couple of comments on solar power.<\/p>\n
I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on house and business roofs. There are several benefits, but primarily that power is generated right where it is used and so transmission costs and losses are almost eliminated. Roofs will last a little longer too by reducing sun and rain exposure. And in the summer the sunlight and power that doesn’t hit the roof lowers the temperature in the attic a little, reducing the cooling bill. It may increase the heating bill a little in the winter, but in Arizona that’s an acceptable trade-off.<\/p>\n
The negative of solar, wind and other alternative sources of power, however, is that it is not available 24 x 7 x 366. The power company may use less fuel when the alternative sources are active, but they still need to have enough capacity to provide ALL the power for times when there is no sun or wind. The big problem is energy storage — a way to efficiently store the extra energy created by the sun or wind and distribute it when it is needed. Current chemical batteries are just not up to the task. Several other ideas for energy storage are in the works, including compressed air, raising and lowering water levels, and heat storage using molten salt or other materials, but until the problem of energy storage can be solved, alternative energy sources will have a limited usage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a couple of comments on solar power. I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}