Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities
By David Roberts 10 Apr 2013 grist.org
Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.
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Neuhardenberg Solar Park, Germany Coordinates: 52°36?50?N 14°14?33?E
That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
I’ve been thinking about how to convey to you, normal people with healthy social lives and no time to ponder the byzantine nature of the power industry, just what a big deal the coming changes are. They are nothing short of revolutionary … but rather difficult to explain without jargon.
So, just a bit of background. You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages... >MORE
http://grist.org/article/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Germany can Do It, why not here
Germany is the world's top photovoltaics (PV) installer, with a solar PV capacity as of December 2012 of more than 32.3 gigawatts (GW). The German new solar PV installations increased by about 7.6 GW in 2012, and solar PV provided 18 TWh (billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity in 2011, about 3% of total electricity. Some market analysts expect this could reach 25 percent by 2050. Germany has a goal of producing 35% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050.
Large PV power plants in Germany include Senftenberg Solarpark, Finsterwalde Solar Park, Lieberose Photovoltaic Park, Strasskirchen Solar Park, Waldpolenz Solar Park, and Köthen Solar Park....
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for bringing a laugh! 
satire and sarcasm. Should be a poster to download.
we could be energy independent in a matter of years.
Sun shades cool parking lots, pump out solar energy
Add up all the asphalt parking lots surrounding the nation’s malls, offices and commuter hubs, and there’s more than enough blacktop to pave over Connecticut. Envision Solar International hopes to tranform those barren expanses into green-energy oases by erecting forests of “solar trees”. About 12 feet tall, each “tree” is capped with a 1,000 sq-ft canopy covered in solar cells.
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/green_business/archives/2008/05/sun_shades_cool_parking_lots_pump_out_solar_energy.html
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Edit to add: I went looking on Google Earth to see the panels I installed in Coto De Caza in the early 80's and couldn't find any. We must have had 12 or 15 jobs out there. Coto was all electric then, now i hear there's gas. Every roof in So Cal should have solar. There's no excuse unless you can't get sun.
he keeps stalking me. i've asked him nicely to stop. He won't.
They just build the payments into a monthly fee that ends up being lower than what you are already paying for electricity. Here's a couple examples:
http://www.sungevity.com
http://www.verengosolar.com
Just be careful and check out the reviews before signing a contract; there's a lot of fly-by-night operators too.
None of those deals were around when we installed our panels ten years ago; we had to pay cash. The company we used got bought by another company, and I don't know if they are any good. But our solar panels still work, and the sun is never going out of business! 
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From that (an old German Air Force base-we've got a few)
to this in 3 years:
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and they just opened a new one:
Templin Solar Park 53°01?54?N 13°32?19?E
Doesn't it take at least 10 years just to approve a nuclear plant? And another 10 to build?
''...released a report that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press.''
- They have to have a picture of Kim Kardashian's behind if they want to get noticed by the MSM.....
...nope.
Their CEOs make millions every year. The reason the utilities can afford to pay such huge salaries is because they pass the costs along to customers. No one is worth that much money, no one.
The utilities have had decades to improve their infrastructure, but they say they can't because they're trying to keep costs to customers low. Of course, no problem passing along the costs of executive salaries to customers. 
In my experience, state or local agencies that approve rate increases seem to be in the pocket of the utilities they regulate. Where I live now, there is a request from an electric utility to raise rates by 45 percent by 2016. There is also no competition, so if you want electricity you buy it from this one company.
Cut executive salaries, and stop spending hundreds of thousands on ads telling us how wonderful you are. Pass the savings along to customers. Then--and only then--should a case for increases by made.
at any given time.
I find it helpful to think of electricity flow in terms of water - there are many analogous characteristics. With water in a hose, if the pressure suddenly increases the hose "gives" a little and doesn't blow up. The analogue with electricity is voltage. When the wind picks up suddenly and blows through a wind farm, there's a sudden increase in voltage, or electrical "pressure", that hits the grid. The lines can absorb some extra pressure. But if it gets too great, huge resistors are switched into the transmission lines which soak up this extra power and dump it as heat. That prevents wires from melting, but of course it's wasteful. So the utilities, ISOs (Independent System Operators) and RTOs (Regional Transmission Operators) try to smooth these voltage bumps with natural gas turbines, which unlike coal or nuclear plants can come online or go offline very quickly (in a matter of seconds). It's better than dumping the power as heat, but not much. Firing up the turbines and shutting them down makes them up to 30% less efficient than letting them run all the time.
Storage, on the other hand, with no mechanical parts to set in motion, loses very little efficiency in the smoothing process. By putting it first in the smoothing chain, you can get smooth out all of the sharp spikes, then finish the job with natural gas. It works.
There are significant problems which need to be overcome. Efficient electrical storage is prohibitively expensive. Then there's the complexity of natural inputs like wind and the sun, and the fact that there isn't nearly as much energy in these sources as people tend to think there is (geothermal and hydro are a different story).
You can see California's current supply and demand in realtime here (scroll down for renewables):
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
How CAISO balances California's utility energy:
I am a fan of renewable energy.
It sounds, to me, like efficient electrical storage, at a reasonable cost, is key.
I didn't realize efficient electrical storage would benefit not only renewable energy, but also coal and oil and gas and any other non-renewable energy sources.
If I may, I found a wiki link talking about grid energy storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
There is much in the wiki to digest.
From the wiki, it seems having a smart grid is an alternative to grid energy storage. It seems to me, having both, having grid energy storage and having a smart grid, would be best in the real world.
It seems our reference to the "smart grid" is not where we are making the grid smarter, but we are making the devices that demand energy from the grid smarter.
This wiki article had a link to another wiki article on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
I found a site that discusses electricity storage.
http://www.electricitystorage.org/technology/storage_technologies/technology_comparison
Is it fair to suggest, based on a link from this site,
pumped storage is the best, current choice, for electrical storage?
I have an idea we view electric cars as cars with a different source of energy.
Could we, perhaps, also view electric cars as mobile batteries on wheels?
In an ideal world, would you suggest we have renewable energy sources putting power into pumped-storage hydroelectricity, with electric cars acting both as a means of transportation and as a source of power able to feed power back into the grid and act as an emergency backup should there be an interruption in power from the grid?
I actually like the idea homes could have solar panels that charge electric vehicles. Then I would suggest power from electric vehicles could flow back into the grid, on demand, when the grid requests power.
I am becoming a big fan of electric vehicles. Sadly, the initial cost of an electric vehicle is beyond the amount I can afford. I hope, in time, electric vehicles, will become cheaper, with longer ranges, with reasonable recharge times. I guess my hope is we will have wonderful advances in battery technology.
Is this a reasonable picture to paint of a future with renewable resources, with grid storage, with electric vehicles, with smart devices, i.e. having a "smart grid", drawing power from or giving power to the grid?
Thank you for the link to the California site.
Enjoy! 
Storing electricity is a different problem. We can do it, we went to the moon in 10 years. I think we can do a better job. Our money and scientists have different priorities.
Here's an 18 year old tech solution for heat storage that was applauded by Bill Richardson, ex Energy sec:
In 1995 Solar One was converted into Solar Two, by adding a second ring of 108 larger 95 m² (1,000 ft²) heliostats around the existing Solar One, totaling 1926 heliostats with a total area of 82,750 m² (891,000 ft²). This gave Solar Two the ability to produce 10 megawatts—enough to power an estimated 7,500 homes.[1]
Solar Two used molten salt, a combination of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate, as an energy storage medium instead of oil or water as with Solar One. This helped in energy storage during brief interruptions in sunlight due to clouds.[1] The molten salt also allowed the energy to be stored in large tanks for future use such as night time—Solar Two had sufficient capacity to continue running for up to three hours after the sun had set.
Solar Two was decommissioned in 1999, and was converted by the University of California, Davis, into an Air Cherenkov Telescope in 2001...Solar Two's 3 primary participants were Southern California Edison (SCE), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)."We're proud of Solar Two's success as it marks a significant milestone in the development of large-scale solar energy projects," said then U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
"This technology has been successfully demonstrated and is ready for commercialization. From 1994 to 1999, the Solar Two project demonstrated the ability of solar molten salt technology to provide long-term, cost effective thermal energy storage for electricity generation.", Boeing
On November 25, 2009, after 10 years of not producing any energy, the Solar Two tower was demolished[1] The mothballed site was levelled and returned to vacant land by Southern California Edison. All heliostats and other hardware were removed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project
That is 18 year old tech. Imagine if a fraction of the cost of the bogus wars was spent on perfecting this heat storage.
What if a trillion dollars was spent on battery technology? Do you think there would be better batteries and perhaps ways of storing the output from PV farms?
FYI, if anyone cares I just put 31 PV 255 Siliken panels with Enphase micro inverters on our roof ($35K). My power company Excel Energy paid for half (50%) of the project cost via a program called “Solar Rewards”. The Federal tax credit covered another 30%. The system net meters (runs backward to the grid) and will pay for itself in ~ 7 years. My 2012 September monthly bill for natural gas and electricity was $1.24 –seriously! I live in Minnesota! I say come on in the water’s fine. Just be VERY careful about the PV contractor you choose.
and the land it sits on.
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Located in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not situated adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs.
The facility is on 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) of land and consists of three Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactors, each with an original capacity of 1.27 gigawatts electrical, current (2007) maximum capacity of 1.24 gigawatts electrical,[3] and typical operating capacity 70%–95% of this. The plant is a major source of power for Phoenix and Southern California, capable of serving about 4 million people. The plant provides about 35% of the electricity generated in Arizona each year. The plant was fully operational by 1988, taking twelve years to build and costing $5.9 billion,[4] eventually employing 2,386 people.[5] The plant employs 2,055 full-time on-site workers.
The Nuclear plants will take land too. The difference is the Solar plants won't contaminate the soil for 30,000 years.
What you all know as The Sun, is actually my cannabis flowering lamp.
But there's plenty of energy left over, so you guys can use the rest.
