huge market crash upcoming? buying GS now
IPO quality tends to decrease the further you get into the economic cycle. If that truism is true I suspect that WeWork is a textbook case. It’s just complete garbage and admits as much.
Making the roads seems unspeakably extra. Why do we need to be able to drive on our solar panels again?
Really don’t understand why people are so against solar energy.
3 Likes
Who is against solar? It’s probably going to be 60-70% of total power generation in a surprisingly short time.
I don’t know enough about the technology to know if it’s possible, but, assuming that it is, being able to deploy solar (a) in a way that allows for the land to be used for additional purposes at the same time as it is harnessing energy and (b) closer to population centers seems like a cool idea. Again, I’m just grunching on the tech, but if office parks in Phoenix or LA could be servicing their power needs via their parking lots or the nearest highway, that seems like a bfd. (Of course, if the parking lot only generates enough to power the hand dryers in the bathrooms, then lolme)
Hippie punching.
You obviously haven’t been to LA for a while or paid attention. The majority of schools for example have solar carport parking structures, as do tons of other big parking lots. And there’s lots of solar on big commercial buildings. But this is in other places too. I saw some of it in Wisconsin when I was there last winter.
This is the parking lot at my kid’s HS.
1 Like
One of my more well researched business ideas is to become a distributor of solar + battery residential systems. Once it’s possible to give a door to door salesperson a clip board and have him knock on doors saying ‘can I interest you in a solar system? It’s 100 a month for unlimited power use up x point’ it’s going to be about how many systems we can build more than how many we can sell. I’ll take responsibility for selling as many systems as they’ll allocate me.
Obviously in the meantime there are going to be plenty of utility scale solar projects, but utilities seem to hate them because of the duck curve. Getting people to take a solar project when they already have the daytime covered is the challenge.
Micro if storage has made a giant leap in the last year or two I really want to hear about it. I was under the impression that battery supplies were limited, being competed for by hybrid and ev manufacturers, and way too expensive for utility scale storage anywhere but extremely rural areas where building a power plant was always super dubious. To the best of my knowledge that was why so many solar + storage setups were in remote parts of Australia.
This is a two year old take, and I take no responsibility for its accuracy now… but I would love for solar + storage to be cheap.
Yeah driving over solar cells isn’t a great idea - I don’t think, but this is the roof of the Costco closest to you (? Irvine ?) and it’s what the roof of almost every Costco in California looks like.
1 Like
So this is how we power the entire nation? Again I am never saying solar isnt cheap and good. I am saying it won’t scale to be a primary energy source without enormous investment and huge infrastructure changes, which, given the state of things, I doubt.
Solar plus storage is actually not that expensive, even for residential, if you know the right people. Door-to-door sales of solar is very common in SoCal, though not as common as telemarketing. Neither are good sources for getting a good installation at a good price. Pretty much the whole point of door-to-door is that you get high prices from suckers. Unfortunately I’ve seen the underbelly of businesses that operate like that when I used to subcontract for some of them.
If you, or anyone else, are interested in way to get into solar in one way or another, feel free to pm me.
No. It’s the best resource for SoCal. I’d be into wind too, but it’s not practical at all in the city and it’s almost entirely big commercial, utility, too rich for my blood territory. Hydro and biomass are big too and biomass should get bigger. Energy production and storage opportunities vary locally, but ultra-high voltage transmission lines (already being used in China) for long distances are something we should develop too.
Also, the amount land to generate that much power isn’t lacking. 1.2% of the land of the Sahara would power the entire world.
Edit: I think wave power has potential too.
Also, energy efficiency obviously. Massive amounts of wasted energy.
Yeah. I live in the mid-Atlantic and my only trip to LA was going to Disney as a small child, so I’m guilty of both ignorance and very outdated knowledge. I just picked LA b/c I think of it as “big place that gets lots of sun.”
Always appreciate your insights, btw. I know this is an area where I should be way more educated, so I always like when you drop some knowledge.
So we’re clear here, 1.2% of the sahara is twice the size of massachussets
New Jersey has been very aggressive and has a lot of solar. It’s 4th per capita behind AZ, HI and NV. More than CA.
So?
Nevada is about 12 times as big as Massachusetts and it’s not like all of the solar would be located in one place. Every large commercial building in the southern half of the United States is how big? And then there’s still tons of desert, parking lots, roofs of houses, etc.
Santa Ana winds in so cal. What we need, obv, is turbines with blades made of solar panels. Gonna get started on a patent. (I’m not.)
Interesting how little wind power there is in so cal. Guess the wind doesn’t blow consistently enough. That or cancer from the windmills.
Yeah, there are several locations where there’s good wind and I’m sure more could be developed, but it’s not like the plains.
Part of the “problem” is that there isn’t a lot of demand for energy now. Shutting the dirtiest power plants in stages would be good.