Storage is the big obstacle, but that will be overcome soon. As mentioned in the article, the incentive for storage is getting stronger.

I believe it will be within 5 years.

Or even sooner.

Industrial grade storage is already possible and proven in a production environment. See this Scientific American article from 5 years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night/


I think it's why an ALEC model law is being pushed to penalize home solar installations via property taxes in Arizona. I believe that solar is reaching the tipping point and if net metering is enforced in places like Arizona then all the power companies would be able to to is buy the power from the consumers while the sun is on their homes, store it in their giant batteries, and sell it back at night. They wouldn't get too much profit that way so the Koch boys don't like it. Not enough pollution I guess. I recently heard that they made up for that by getting Michigan to declare "pet coke" a renewable resource (wow!).

For those unsure of what "pet coke" is:

Petroleum coke is defined as a black solid residue, obtained mainly by cracking and carbonising of petroleum derived feedstocks, vacuum bottoms, tar and pitches in processes such as delayed coking or fluid coking. It consists mainly of carbon (90 to 95 per cent) and has a low ash content.

Update: Good news! Michigan is only considering declaring "pet coke" a renewable resource! Of course that's stupid enough but at least its not law yet.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/13/3448698/michigan-lawmaker-tar-sands-waste/

and they are already designing commercial sized stuff. They are planning to move to utility scale as of now. This stuff is on the cusp. The speed with which it will happen will, I believe, startle everyone.

I had no idea what it was.

Id be more a fan of a mechanical, probably water based, storage. You could actually double down and use it simultaneously for water desalinization, if you were clever.

Isn't potassium nitrite what they make bombs out of? And this salt storage is based on heating up massive quantities of it?

My bills are usually around $30, and my electric bills were NEVER that low. For May it was -$14.00! And in June there was a heat wave, which even with my high heat tolerance would usually run a bill of at least $100, and with my roommates who liked it cool all the time it could run $200-300 in a heat wave, and one roommate ran the bill up to more than $500. For me this June? $50.00!!! I want EVERYONE to have solar!

Solar will be a top research item for me. I can't wait to be the envy of the neighbors when I can keep food cold, cell phones charged, and the radio on after I return from a major storm.

I just looked them up. WOW! They both now have online cost estimators... and the cost to go solar is literally half what I'd figured several years back.

I just need to come into some moolah....

Coal is the sun crystallized into carbon. Uranium is the sun impregnated into tiny specks in stone. Methane is the sun suspended into a gaseous state. Everything comes from energy. Everything IS energy. And we don't have an energy source that is greater than the sun -- staring dead at us every day. It's as plain as the nose on our faces! People need to wake up and start kicking some asses out of their jobs.

- Because the people we've put in-charge of things are fucking idiots or crooks, or both.

K&R

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hydrocarbons, coal, methane, oil, etc., are solar energy stored in a chemical energy storage system. But uranium and other nuclear fuel are not sun related. Our sun did not create the uranium that lies in the earth. Most of the heavier than iron elements are all from the result of a supernova of another star (obviously not our star, sol) that blew up and the force was strong enough to fuse heavier-than-iron atoms together into the higher atomic number elements. Those stray elements coalesced together through gravitation and formed rocky objects which, after being captured into an orbit around a star, becomes a planet, such as ours.

The nuclear cycle for the sun, so far as we understand it, has the elements fuse up from hydrogen and helium into heavier and heavier elements, but stops at iron. In other words, iron is the "ash" of the nuclear burn cycle in the sun.

But otherwise, everything else you mentioned is spot-on correct.