Yeah. 10 years.

Look at the actual number of times the battery can be drained and recharged. With regular use, how much capacity do these units lose over time?
And how soon into the battery's life-cycle will a replacement be needed to continue meeting the needs for which it was bought?
Incurring, yet again, the cost of replacing the battery.

As for how long Tesla's batteries are sold out for? Who cares? It's code-speak for "They'd be great...if we could get one..."

"it won't be long" is usually rah-rah-speak for "yes it will be"

The current limits on number of charge cycles for newer battery tech is a major problem. One that rules them out, currently, as some sort of actual storage medium. Because they'd be getting replaced on roughly an annual basis. And I don't care who you are or how much money you have. They aren't THAT cheap.

Then it'll almost be on par with non-renewables. At least during the day...

Again, I'm not being negative. I'm saying that the phrasing and usage is deceptive (the whole Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics thing).

And I acknowledge that solar has achieved new milestones in adoption. For that, I'm glad.

What I'm saying is that trying to compare it to another power generation sector that's producing 40-50x the power is misleading.

For Solar to be a truly major contender, they need at least an order of magnitude in growth. And I'm somewhat pessimistic that the US can actually achieve that level of growth. Even over a longer term.

As for "total renewable energy". I'm just going to laugh derisively and leave it at that. Quite simply, with our ever-growing energy demands, renewable energy quite simply CANNOT support the entire energy industry. You could carpet the US in PV cells and toss up solar thermal and wind farms willy nilly, and it still wouldn't cover it.

Geothermal and Hydro *might* cover baseload "right now". But remember that we're pretty much at peak hydro in the US right now, for environmental reasons. And geothermal isn't something you can just drop everywhere. So they can't grow to keep up with demand.

Realistically, some sort of solution that includes nuclear is our best option.
Sure, nuclear is dirty in its own way. But it's a way that can be managed and minimized. And you're not blowing the byproducts up a stack and into the environment.

The thing is, they're NOT talking about installs. They're comparing number of installs versus base installed capacity and trying to draw a correlation with the number of installs versus installed capacity in a different sector of the power industry. One that is supplying over 40x the power that total solar does, in facilities that take longer to build and are generally more energy-dense than solar is.

It's apples and pears.

Hell, it only makes sense in pretty much the entire mobile industry.
Ads, on a transfer-limited device (like phones) are, essentially, theft of resources.

Oh, must I be?

I have nothing against the solar industry.

I simply dislike deceptive comparisons like this, worded in such a way that it magnifies the accomplishments and contributions out of any recognition with reality.

No. Currently the solar energy industry is in the neighborhood of "statistical anomaly".
Nobody's threatened by a statistical anomaly.

But trying to compare growth in the solar industry at this point, to something entrenched (and nearly peaked, as coal is in the US), it's like comparing baseball statistics between MLB and and the Poughkipsie Pee Wee League.

In other words, would it change how you look at the data if I told you:

"We sold 10 home sausage grinders last quarter, this quarter, we did 11. In this same quarter last year, we did 7 installs. While GrindCo, who only makes industrial-plant-sized grinders the size of a 4 story building, only had one install this quarter and none at the same time last year."

That's, essentially, what's being said here.

Again, I don't mind that the solar industry is growing. I just dislike the deceptive wording that makes the industry appear larger and attempts to magnify the contribution it provides.

Capacity installs.

Basically it's talking about new installs versus already installed capacity.

Not overall capacity or utilization in the overall power budget.

Never mind that solar installs tend to be smaller and MUCH lower capacity than a coal burning plant.

Also, there's the fact that coal provides more power in the US by more than an order of magnitude.

So yay. We went from half a percent to 0.51% total power input.
And oh darn. We maybe stayed around 20% at coal.

Basically this is a "Rah Rah" article. Kind of like a small company that puts on big, slick productions and appears bigger than they are.

Never mind that the damn XBox One can't output the resolution and framerate necessary to keep people from barfing their brains out.

Idiots.

Way to take interesting technology and turn it into an utterly useless joke.

Why not just announce compatibility with the Phantom Console while you're at it!

Basically this is dancing around actually answering "Is your department doing this?" and "Do you know who is setting these up?"

We know he pretty much ALWAYS comes back...

Oh wait!

RIP Sir Christopher.

The US is also 37x the total land area, has 5x the populace, and isn't anywhere CLOSE to as uniform in the sense of general climate as the UK is.

Remember, you can't simply install wind turbines "anywhere". Wind conditions have to be right. Too little, as your turbine sits idle most of the time. Too much, and it sits idle all the time as you don't want excessive wear on the turbine. And there's an area in the US known as "Tornado Alley" It's roughly the size of the entire UK. Installing wind turbines down in that region would be insanity.

Also, the sheer size of the country introduces logistical problems in terms of power transmission. Sure, it's all well and good to set up a wind farm in BFE. But what do you do when your nearest grid tie-in is several hundred miles away?

Again, that's for the owner and trainer to decide.

Not the race organizers. Their only concern is "did the horse qualify?"

As soon as a horse asks me "Pppplease Massah! Can I not run the bad race?", I'll look into it.