How long will it be until energy like solar and wind become cheap and compatible with our infrastructure?

Question

By our, I mean the United States. Sources would be nice also :)

Answer 1

Wind, in a good location is cheaper than all but coal now, except for the subsidies coal gets.    Its easier to ship coal to where you want it than it is to move wind power though, so until we get a superconductor grid wind or solar won't be a large percentage of what we use.

Answer 2

We are almost there now, one innovative American company is printing

solar cells, and will bring the cost of solar panel down to 11cents a watt in the near future, I will give you a link to them, I followed the link trying to find out where, how, and when they would be on the domestic market, and it is really interesting to read.

http://www.nanosolar.com/

Also there are some real advances in wind generators, some of them I consider works of art.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:V...

http://www.pacwind.net/

Answer 3

It'll take massive improvements in energy storage technologies for those technologies to even become useful since they aren't reliable enough to handle the load of a power grid by themselves and need backup power from somewhere for still nights, right now that backup power is usually natural gas.

Even should better large scale energy storage come about you'd then have to factor the cost and environmental impact of that into calculations of the cost and environmental effects of wind and ground based solar and you'd also need a pretty good overcapacity due to the low capacity factor of the politically correct power sources (wind turbines typically have a capacity factor of 20% so count on having to buy five times the capacity you need).

Once you do all that things don't look very attractive for wind and ground based solar (but that's partly the point, people who demand the useless technologies aren't demanding nuclear power).

Add to that the fact that wind and ground based solar are only viable with some pretty heavy subsidies, especially given the limited amount of power they generate, their inability to scale to supplying an entire country and that current practices don't take into account the cost or environmental effects of the backup power (nowadays usually natural gas).

Solar power though is very promising if you can put the panels in a place that isn't dark half the time, estimates for space based solar do indicate that it'd be quite competitive if built using lunar or asteroidal resources and they'd be very reliable (since the sun almost always shines in geostationary orbit), of course we also lack the space infrastructure needed to actually do that and aren't likely to get it for a few decades.

Answer 4

Wind power and solar power is compatible with the current infrastructure at the moment.  The cost of wind power and solar power is dropping rapidly as development breakthrough are made in designing and refinements of these renewable energy sources.

At the moment buying and installing wind and solar power is not a cheap option. There are government tax breaks as mentioned here: http://www.residential-wind-power.com/20... that will reduce the purchase and installation cost of these technologies but you will still need to fork out a fair sum of money to get the ball rolling.

Solar and wind power is not a instant return on investment as it will most likely take 5+ years for the installation to pay for itself in electricity savings.  After this time has passed though you will be reaping the rewards.

The use of wind power is rapidly increasing as it is a clean and green energy source that the majority of the world has access to.  This article shows that the use of wind power has increased massively over the last few years: http://www.residential-wind-power.com/20...

There is also the option of building your own wind turbine that can start as low as $100 - http://www.residential-wind-power.com/20...

Answer 5

Check this out. I signed up for it I should get my panels in a year. Which is fine since i can't afford to spend 30,000 to 40,000 to buy my own. my rates are locked in and won't go up. For the length of my contract. and we all know the electric company will do nothing but go UP.