Re:This is why Solar isn't taking off! (Score 1)

While the ability to distribute power has its benifits, there are some downsides as well. One, by moveing high power over long distances, you lose a fair amount of your power. The physics of the transmission lines means they are lossy, and so you will lose your power. By having locally generated power, you lose less in the tranmission. Two, when you have a large grid that's tightly integrated, a failure at one point can do damage to a huge section of the grid. Case in point, the large blackout in the Northwest a few years ago was caused by a single sub station shorting. A huge section of the country was dark for days due to one small station. If we weren't so tightly coupled, that wouldn't be possible. And my favorite 'negative' aspect of national grids is interstate power brokering. Enron, before thier famous adventure in accounting was buying and selling power to different markets that had different prices. Remember when California was going through the rolling brownouts in 2000? During the time, Enron, and others were buying power in CA and selling it to places like NM and Texas. So the people of LA were going through brownouts while thier power was going to Texas. I'll admit, this last one is really more a result of poor energy managment policies on the state side, and lack of corprate responsibility on the company side, but it's still the integraded grid that makes it possible.

I think that there are several good reasons to go to distributed power generation though. The big one for me is local solutions can vary from place to place. Like you mentioned, solar electricity in Michigan isn't going to be a good solution. But what about hydroelectric? Or wind? Or.... It seems to me that by reducing the size of these huge power plants, and reducing the cost of making them we can find better solutions for each area and come out ahead.