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152 comments on Thin Film Solar Power - Cheaper than Coal ?
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Solar power not only generates electricity during peak generation demand, it generates electricity on site during peak transmission demand. All blackouts due to high demand have occured during summer air conditioning peak, to date.
Avoiding the cost of the blackouts would have paid for the solar generation grids in places like Michigan, Ohio, New York, etc. Not just in California. It gets hot in the summer in the northeast, too.
We could have had solar power for free just by avoiding the costs of the blackouts.
On the issue of blackouts and solar; Grid-tie Solar will go down with the grid as the technical standards are currently written in the US. Grid-tie solar will help with the additional load on the grid during peak summer daytime demand. But will not function with the loss of the grid.
If you go solar grid-tie, at least go with a grid-tie w/battery back-up, then in-house solar can still function during the daylight even if the grid fails.
Some folks, out west, that install a pure grid-tie play will be disappointed that their AC will go down with the grid even if the sun is overhead.
FYI.
Grid-tied-solar if large remote solar arrays has the same failure mechanism as the grid.
That is not the result of the Feed-in Tariff. These are true economic lifeboats. They can easily operate decoupled from the grid to provide power at the point of need.
It is true that grid tie systems have to shut down in the case of an outage. This is to protect people working on the lines. But, it is not hard to include a switch that physically disconnects from the grid and allows stand-alone operation. You want to be sure you don't have loads that produce transients larger that the capacity of the array or that equipment could be damaged.
Chris