storing hot water for domestic use is a trivial engineering problem. your 25% is wrong... it's more like 10% for a standard tank... and slightly better insulation would fix even that. there are tanks now with 3" of insulation that lose very little heat. also bear in mind that 10% number is only as big as it is because the amount of energy most people use for Domestic hot water is very small, like 40-50 gallons a day. it's not objectively very much energy in any case.

on demands don't make any sense for anyone right now.

we can greatly upsize tanks and store heat for space heat too. make ice for cooling. lots of ways to store useful thermal energy exist. between those and electric cars we have the capability to increase grid storage rather massively in a relatively short period of time with technology that exists today.

that's a fantastic fantasy you have there. that's why all those hard working african kids starving to death in the desert deserve what they got, right?

bullshit. large percentages of these installations have monitoring equipment built in. a 20% yearly degradation would be front page news on every oil friendly publication in the world and people would be storming congress in hordes to stop the subsidies if that claim were anything but BS.

If you are trying to heat, you can just store hot water directly or heat it with the PV. the tank isn't that big. lasts for a long time. very little maintenance or development required.

Here in the northeast you can get PV installed for $3.50/watt in many cases (PRE SUBSIDY). we broke the tipping point not long ago compared to our cost for grid electricity. I just updated a PV quote here and we'll do about 13kw array for about $45k. this morning's numbers, using canadian solar panels (not even chinese units). In some areas like the NW we won't hit parity anytime soon (cheap hydro) and a few others who are just burning coal with no thought for anything else will be slower too. but we're the leading edge, and most of our electricity is more expensive hydro, nukes, and natural gas... not the dirtiest mix around, and it has your magic wunderkid, nukes, well represented. that won't be saving us anytime soon. PV will make building nukes cost prohibitive in comparison.

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/pv-systems-have-gotten-dirt-cheap -- note, I know the writer of that blog, he's a sharp and very thoughtful guy who cares about environmental causes but has no patience for solutions that aren't.

also note: when he wrote the article, it was $4.50/watt. That was last fall, so the price has continued to plummet per watt. now, our grid electricity's standard offer will drop to 0.14, but that just puts it back to parity at $4.50/watt... and we're still doing a lot better at $3.50/watt..

finally, remember that distributed solar has very little in the way of transmission and overhead costs like centralized generation does. cost for generation is only part of the equation. backyard nukes might also benefit from that advantage, but really... cheap solar vs a backyard nuke? yeah, I wonder which one will win out. what we need is good, cheap, flywheel or capacitor storage.

he's probably confused because he doesn't consider successfully shifted external costs like health care, environmental cleanup, risk mitigation, lost resource production, war and military expenditures to be "subsidies". Of course, if we appropriately taxes the sources of those problems (fossil fuels, nuclear) to cover their costs, we'd be all green already. But of course that isn't a subsidy, right? it's just life without sufficient regulation of energy production.

He also apparently isn't aware that solar PV is already at parity with grid electricity over 25 years in a few parts of the US.

we now live in a world where 8 people who are dedicated an unafraid to die can kill thousands and send an entire country on a ten year pyhhric spending spree to attempt to guarantee their own safety. Most soldiers on the planet already meet this definition and religious fanatics add millions more.

You can never, ever cow a population so completely as to avoid that possibility now. the small cells are far more empowered in today's age than ever before. Your 1940's tactics are quite simply no guarantee of safety these days. If you conquer and rule an area you might be able to cow that population, but you cannot do it to the whole world, and unlike the old days that educated the men of the 1940's and to an even larger degree than was true IN the 40's a global war can be waged almost trivially easily by small groups of people in a way that was never true in the past.

  and at some point you will sacrifice so much in your quest to root out the enemy, that you'll lose out in the end anyway. you will spend yourself into oblivion trying.

That, incidentally, was Osama Bin Laden's own stated strategy for fighting superpowers. I'd say he did a pretty damn good job. We've adapted and appear to now be focusing on killing the controllers of the terrorist networks but they have gone cellular before and can do so again. Sabotauge and individually placed explosives can do so much more interested things these days than back in Hitler's day, don't you think?

when you can use a service and pay nothing extra for it, you might forgive a person's use of the word "free". it's certainly accurate in terms of its impact on that person's life. especially when the tax is collected in proportion to your ability to pay, so it's not like it's a "fixed expense" to any given person.

it's the ultimate insurance. everyone is in, no one is out, and there is no profit motive to denying you care, just a regard for the actual resources available. awesome.

if individual charity was adequate to solve these kinds of societal problems we wouldn't be having this debate because the problem would already be solved. Obviously there are not enough Ron Pauls out there to solve it through their own selflessness.

he didn't say you couldn't piece it together. just that A, it requires a very varied diet not practical for anyone but an industrialized person to achieve and B, it requires great attention to what you are getting in what you are eating that is unlikely to be practical for most people.

Not that you can't be a vegetarian for a long time. but there is a wall I've seen most vegetarians I know hit after about 10-12 years.

Really? How much of our military budget relative to strategic oil producing countries is born out in our gas taxes?
How much gas tax do we pay to work on medical effects from fossil fuel pollution?
How about to handle the effects of global warming?
How much are those public leases for drilling really costing? Is that really "fair market value"?
How much damage does BP and other producers do to their local environs, and how much of that do they actually pay for?

Fossil fuels are incredibly subsidized, by allowing them to avoid all the externialities they create.

Not sure how solar and wind "can't produce energy on their own"... their EROI is positive... and who cares if they require backup capacity? If you can keep it off 90% of the time, yahoo! Further that argument completely ignores load management technology which is rapidly becoming a reality here in the US with just the basic change of electric meters on homes. one more step from that to appliances or outlets that you can program to manage your own loads in response.

but we can just forget all that I suppose. coal roxors.

Without regulation, all the power is already with the corporations. So yes, there is no reason for them to get involved with government, because you just basically made there BE NO GOVERNMENT. Government kind of implies, you know, governing. not letting all the wealth concentrate in the hands of a few who can then trivially easily collude to turn the entire planet into a "company store" situation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system

As soon as you even begin to define and enforce even direct-victim crimes like bait and switch contracts, what should be considered fraud, etc, then bingo we're right back where we started with corporations trying to buy the point of view they consider most advantageous into leglislation. but with even less checks to their power. Unless of course you happen to be in command of gigantic piles of cash. which you of course EARNED every penny of through your hard, smart work, you pillar of industry you.

Ranked choice, 100% publicly funded elections, with an electoral apparatus of the government by, of, and for the people, not the cash cows. Then call bribery what it is and put people in JAIL for it.

the cost of solar has been reducing quickly.

I quoted a twice, from the same company, 1 year apart. the second quote added almost 30% capacity for the same price, after only 1 year.

times they are a'changing.

there is no such thing as true laissez faire. it's a smokescreen for exactly the kind of plundering we've seen. true laissez faire is basically anarchy, and it's the only thing that could possible be worse than what we have right now.

bullshit. there is nothing equal about the rights for everyone in a free market. the rich are much, much, much more equal than everyone else in a system that values only capital.

you and I agree that the problem is institutionalized bribery, and that is why publicly funded elections, ranked choice voting, and other safeguards are necessary in the electoral system to restrict the power of money in our shared, democratic institutions.