re: #483 LudwigVanQuixote

Well, it then matters what dependence you want. We do not have lithium in this country and we get our nickel from either Canada or Russia. Only a small number of folks make solar panels in this country. Evergreen in Marlboro, MA is probably the only large manufacturer of efficient ones. Aten makes panels, but they only make sense if you can devote a lot of real estate to them. GE makes some wind turbines, but most of them are made by an Indian firm. If you want a big lead-acid battery bank, you will deal with Rolls-Shurette from Canada. They used to be in MA, but moved a while back to get nearer the source of raw materials. Also probably to get away from the ratty tax environment. Most of our yellowcake is imported these days. Bottom line, except for coal and to a lesser extent ng, most of our energy supplies have a foreign country in the critical path.

At present, the climate models are still in the preliminary stage from my viewpoint. Jamming solar and wind on people instead of using coal only increases the cost of energy and does an transfer of wealth between the interior of the country and other places. Since energy is a prime input to almost everything, an increase in the cost of energy will result in a decrease in productivity for the final products expressed in dollars in per unit of output.

I have a reasonably large solar panel array and a 50KWH/100KWH 20/100 hour discharge rate battery bank, charge controllers, inverters, distribution panels and the whole mess. This machine is being powered off of it as I type. I have been in the trenches with solar power. Not all is neat and clean as people would have you believe. It is not install and forget either with the battery bank. Feeding electricity from a residence back into a net meter is not a done deal. 50% of the time during the day, the grid is outside of IEEE spec. My inverter does not consider that stable enough to sell back into. Bottom line there is that I may put a secondary panel in and run more of the in-house circuits off the inverter. I was hoping that I could use the net metering as a large “battery”, but I can’t. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt. Its a hobby or a government’s sinkhole. Not much else.