Comment Re:Buggy whips? (Score 1) 769
Seems like it is only a matter of time until coal power goes away. It will be a long time, granted, but in the next decade or two solar will get so cheap that the impact on traditional centralized generation will be quite severe. I guess they are watching what is happening in Germany with horror and realizing that is their future too.
Actually, the Germans seem to be looking at Germany with horror: Der Spiegel, before the new energy law was passed, published a statistics in which it showed that Solar, one of the sacred cows of sustainable energy, had produced next to zero in a six month period including the winter. Moreover, no one has published a viable estimate of the costs of upgrading the energy trasmission network to cope with the high volatility/low energy production density of a system overwhelmingly based on renewables.
anyway, in the meantime German industry is talking with its shoes: new chemical plants are based in the USA, not Germany. of course, plaudits to the Germans for being more ecological, but I cannot but remember that the lowest energy footprint if you look at Earth from space is North Korea, not actually a place attracting droves of ecologically minded citizens from all over the world.