I carried too many zeroes, way too many. We're talking more about 50,000 turbines and 15,000 with efficiency.

THat's still doubling what we have today in entire country just to meet his NJ projections.

Humans causing the 6th great extinction on earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAVHLzTu7dI

The Solutions Project is short on details now because it's meant for a wide audience. It's highly produced and sorta founded by a documentary film maker and Mark Ruffalo. But, it is based on research done by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. He's published 4 books. The kind that cost $100 and are used in graduate courses. And articles and studies in Nature, Science, The Journal of Geophysical Research, Energy and Environmental Science, etc.

There are lots of details.

There are some relevant details in his paper Saturation Wind Power Potential and it's Implications for Wind Energy.

And, number of turbines is a little hard to calculate. Here's a residential wind turbine (not good for an urban resident, but for some people in some places it's a good source of power)



and here's a 722' 8MW turbine:

Increasing the albedo would decrease global warming. Albedo is the fraction of solar energy reflected from Earth back into space.

But, in 2008 it would have taken covering .07% of the Earth with solar panels to provide all the energy needs, so even if they decreased the albedo, I think it would be a far less significant effect than soot from fossil fuels decreasing the albedo of the ice at the poles. (something like 7% of the Earth is covered with ice - for now)

I'm all for Solar obviously though. I spent my morning dangling off a steep roof in LA putting some up.

Almost all recent population growth in the Mediterranean comes from immigration.

On the other hand, the US generally does have an anomalously high population growth rate for a developed country.

This article is a little dated, but is good. It's about the relationship between water and energy. We use a lot of energy to get and pump water and our power plants use a lot of energy.

In California, the State Water Project is the biggest single consumer of electrical power using 5 billion kwh/year - 2-3% of all the usage in Cali.

About 5 trillion gallons (about 2%) of water consumption in the US is for power production.

(assume I did my calculations correctly) It may not sound like a lot, but saving water is saving energy and vice versa. (some of this may not be as much of a concern for those of you outside of the West/Southwest)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...f-fuel/?page=2

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/33905.pdf

http://www.epa.gov/region9/waterinfr...terenergy.html

Take that, environment! AussieLand isn't having any of your ****!

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...u.html?stb=twt

This is not just about solar, but residential vs utility. In most places a large majority of solar has been in large projects. In the US, residential has been 1/4th or less of the total, but in Australia, because of that program, residential has been like 90% of their total. They've gone from 5% of homes having solar 3 years ago, to 19% now.

Idk, but it's quite possible their incentives should be adjusted.

While you're here, have you read that story about how the sun's expected output (of what I don't know) is expected to drop 40-60% by 2030?

Just saw something about it the other day. And clearly I'm an expert and totally understand the sun's output of sun ray units.

Edit

Here it is
http://m.slashdot.org/story/296617

First, it may or may not be a very good prediction.

Second, it is about solar activity, like sun spots, not solar output.

Third, "the little ice age" that coincided with a previous lull in solar activity was not a global cooling, but some cold winters in Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

This is about the current government thinking global warming is not a problem and the coal industry needs their support more.

I should have caveated that I know nothing about the current Australian government other than them shipping refugees to a prison on a tiny remote island.

Their recent pace of residential solar installations had really been astounding though.

The previous government was pretty good on the environment. You can do some searches on Tony Abbot quotes regarding environment and you know why the solar program is phased out.

C'mon. This would make us the equivalent of Hoth. Probably colder.

So you are saying there will be AT ATs.?

In this context, "solar activity" doesn't really mean what you might think it means --I don't have time to explain in detail.

My AT AT will have solar panels courtesy of microbet

Quit your job bitch.

Florida's Solar Power Amendment being challenged in the Florida Supreme Court by Florida's GOP Attorney General and Florida's utilities

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/...714-story.html

Yeah the battle there is getting ugly.

I'm very pro-solar but I do think the industry should be a little more accommodating as far as policy relating to grid maintenance. You wouldn't be able to sell electricity back to the grid if it didn't exist, so help pay for that ****.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articl...lar-in-florida

I don't feel like too much research atm, but I will just say that the cost to the utilities of rooftop solar is controversial. It saves them money as well. The bulk of solar energy comes during the highest demand periods where it is the most difficult (expensive) for the utilities to supply power.

Obviously at some point, the loss of revenue from the sale of energy to solar customers will be more than any benefits.

If the market/technology/prices ever get to the point where lots of people are going off grid, that's going to make things even harder for the utilities.

I've just skimmed this atm, but this is a paper on the cost and benefit to utilities of customers going solar. I read something like this a few years ago and it was pretty clear that solar was benefiting the utilities. Otoh, recently, it seems like Hawaii may have had an issue with too many customers not buying power from the utilities. I'm sure Florida is a long way from that being an issue. Florida is 20th in terms of solar per capita atm.

http://www.environmentamerica.org/si...ards_print.pdf

I was going to estimate how much more solar per capita there is in AZ, which has also been moving to have large connection charges, than FL - but FL is so low it's hard to estimate.

Seems like to go off grid you need battery storage tech to come a little further. Another 5 years maybe.

What I don't understand is why don't the utilities, seeing this threat, just ramp up utility scale solar rather than have their business model completely jeopardized?

They are to a large degree in the west.

In NC Duke energy has/had a program where they leased a customer's roof and they owned the solar. The utilities in Cali do some of that too, but only on very large commercial systems.