What's the back up plan?  It is the natural course of humanity's journey to robotically exponentiate the production of solar collection and storage The ONLY way solar will ever make it big time is IF it is mass produced in robotic factories. Therefore, it doesn't really matter from which robotic factory it comes from, as the bulk of the work will be in local installation jobs around the world. Yes on Solar prefers each country to have many competing such factories that also make all the parts including lithium iron phosphate (not li-ion) batteries by advanced machine automation. Only in this way will an exponential growth of solar energy (and jobs) result. We must figure out what is the BEST technology... There's a thousand different ways to collect sunlight. However, on the very large scale needed to compete with fossil fuels, there are some wrong ways too. Global warming is caused by excess CO2 (for the most part), however, if too much infrared is emitted from light that would not otherwise be converted into it, we could have problems, especially since a full 2% of the Earth's land would have to be covered with the dark (15% efficient) panels in order to power almost 10 billion people at close to a per person western energy consumption. This is the equivalent to 5 times the power the world currently consumes! Should it be the power tower and molten salts, the Stirling dish, the CPV dish, the CPV fresnel?... Again, there's a wrong way. The trough. It is less efficient and... Imagine this, fully 1.75% of the land COMPLETELY BULLDOZED OVER. No thanks! On a much smaller scale, though, these concerns are just trivial. What about rooftop? In the USA, there are about 100 million homes. If each had a 10kW system, then there would be a 250 million kW capacity (after 25% capacity factor figured in). Which should translate into 2.2 trillion kWh per year. Remember, this is per perfect conditions for 6 hours per day, every day, across the whole country, even in winter. Total US energy consumption was 98 quadrillion Btu, which if converted, should be about 29 trillion kWh. This is for ALL refining, agricultural, industrial and residential but realize that close to 2/3rds of it was wasted in the conversion process into useful power! We could (eventually) power almost a full quarter of our daily needs including transportation with just rooftop solar alone! We will still need huge amounts of land, just to provide power to make the solar infrastructure, infact, it takes up to 3 whole years just for a panel to energy pay for itself (the EROEI) and we need either a massive amount of LiFePO4 batteries (also produced in robotic factories for like 10% of current costs) or molten salts (for thermal storage). Chances are, the BEST solar solution would entail an EROEI of less than 1 year. Concentrated solar thermal with molten salt storage has an EROEI of only about 6 months, and wind power (even with all those large concrete foundations) has an EROEI of about only 3 months! To recap, parameters for deciding what the best solar collection are: Efficiency, Ability to be made for almost free by advanced machine automation, Integration into the cheapest energy storage, No massive bull dozing, Least amount of infrared emittance, Greatest EROEI, Simplicity, And longevity... Any other parameters? We need to put all these parameters into a think tank, a super computer, or better yet, a game. Eventually, the "best" solar energy collection and storage will be known! Deniers... XSCO2... It's as undeniable as that! The deniers can NOT refute that humanity has converted over 100 CUBIC miles of FF's into XSCO2. Thus the simple argument is this "How dare you say it is Ok to change the very composition of the air!" In return, they say "The air had many times that amount of CO2 in the past, so it IS ok". To which I reply "It has been hundreds of thousands of years since CO2 levels were as high as what we've caused. You're talking millions and even Billions of years ago, when the air reeked of massive dieoffs...anyways, again, it's not nice to mess with mother nature!". They will spout off things like "But Al Gore is a liar, blah ,blah, blah... WHICH IS TRUE (bear with me)... Because he does NOT promote the proper solutions, however, we must still give him credit for helping with global awareness. We MUST understand WHY there are deniers in the face of the greedy political landscape in which we live. You see, deniers are wrong about the science... but they don't care! They are RIGHT about the fact that we can't allow yet another layer of taxation slowing down our energy supply. And they DON'T understand (just as Anthropological Global Warming proponents don't either) that there are ways of making (almost) clean and unlimited energy. Robotic factories could be used to make solar panels and batteries for TEN X cheaper... but, instead "they" allow bankruptcies (and give way to China for the best battery, the LiFePO4). Unlimited closed cycle nuclear such as LFTR or IFR has been developed and proven (albeit briefly) to be on the order of thousands of times safer than conventional nuclear (meltdown PROOF)... but instead "they" insist on using the inherently unsafe water reactors... nobody but profit seekers wants that. You see, as long as we live in the age of money, we will NEVER see cheap energy. It takes trillions of dollars and billions of tons worth of fossil fuels, not to mention all that extra uranium being used in the 99.5% INEFFICIENT water reactors just to supply a years worth of global energy demand... And "they" want growth... That means keeping things as inefficient as possible in order to make even more money. Same is true about the solar panels and batteries, profit seekers will charge every bit they can out of every single little watt and amp hour! The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) can do ALL THAT using just a millionth (about 5,000 tons). This equates to reducing the energy market a million fold. But it does not have to. This is why I promote robotic factories that make batteries and solar panels. At least there will be millions of install jobs to make up for the loss of coal mining jobs and even more jobs for the conversion to electric cars... but we should use LFTR to power up the robotic assembly lines! The China Debate The debate on tariffs should be decided by order of jobs creation. Solar IS the most jobs creating element coming from China. Therefore put the tariffs on (almost) everything else BUT solar! There is a group of Americans promoting tariffs on Chinese solar panels called CASM. But they can not come up with a plan to make panels cheaper here in America, thus their plan would simply cut the effective installed capacity here (and a loss of jobs). There is another group called CASE which is against tariffs on panels. Yes on Solar agrees that solar installation jobs don't need inhibiting trade tariffs! Machine made solar panels that come from all countries (and 50,000 sq miles of install jobs per large country) is the VISION that Yes on Solar promotes! That said, perhaps its time to put tariffs on "all the other stuff" because TV's and toys do NOT create additional american jobs! Future decisions must outweigh the differences between republicans and democrats, left and right, and fashionable retort, because we can not base the future of energy on the past.   Take a   l o k   at the size of the sun next to Earth and Realize... There is no energy shortage... Storage Batteries (and supercapacitors) have the potential to cut the costs of electrical storage by orders of magnitude because they have not been perfected yet. They will eventually be mass produced on utility levels far cheaper than currently imagined and last for thousands of cycles. Of course, there are many different varieties, few of which will be that cheap AND have no raw materials supply issues into the TerraWatt level. Liquid Metal, Molten salt, "Air breathing" chemistries, And the LiFePO4 (not li-ion) The LiFePO4 is already good enough, being higly more efficient than an internal combustion engine. It should be the target of a global and robotic initiative as it has thousands (not hundreds) of complete discharge cycles! This new battery is better than anything else we use for energy storage, thus it is more than good enough to do the job! Ironically, the researcher's name who led the team that invented it is... John Goodenough! There are other ways to store energy such as compressed air, dams, giant flywheels and other combinations of these mechanical means, yet it appears that they can not be made much cheaper than they already are... With one exception. Molten salt. It is cheap, it has excellent heat retention and it has been proven. However, a steam Rankine cycle or a more expensive gas Brayton cycle is required to convert the heat energy into electricity. Thus efficiency of whatever solar collection used will be cut by either 1/2 (Braton cycle) or 2/3rds (normal steam generator). Transmission lines into other geographical areas insure more of a balancing out of RE thus reducing the need for "all out" battery and other storage systems. Combined, solar, wind, geothermal, and even biofuels can meet the needs of the future without being as cost prohibitive as they were in the past. Exponential Growth Solar PV has experienced about a 35% growth rate for about 30 years yet supplies the world with a tiny .02% fraction of its power. At this current rate, theoritically, solar would supply over 100% of ALL power to ALL things in less than 40 years! Obviously, a continued 35% growth rate is impossible unless competing robotic solar PV factories are considered a feasable and necessary scientific objective by the masses, and that we all DEMAND such development. Promoting high priced feed in tariffs do not necessarily lower PV panel production costs. Only a marginal feed in tarriff is acceptable as it would incourage streamlining of production. It is best to promote competing companies that have the backing to own the dirt, hire the lawyers, own all the equipment, including mining and thousands of "robotic arms", the tempering of glass, the big rigs, the hiring of thousands (if not tens of thousands) of installers, AND likewise for storage! In short, corporations that can "do it all" (just like oil companies do today)... Tens of Thousands of Square Miles In the last century, paving machines made civilization as we know it possible. By converting about 50,000 sq mi of land into roads and highways, "anything" was possible. In this century, it should be considered "normal" that the same amount of land will be used for solar panels. Robotic manufacture (needed for this to happen) is not anymore a stretch of the imagination... And imagine all the installation jobs! This one great human endeavor alone would insure unlimited clean energy, decreasing CO2 emissions, employment, and thus many positive things that are indirectly related. Other Options I believe that in order of potential, the list of clean energy sources is as follows: Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean currents (which I believe is a "no no"), biofuels such as sugarcane, wood, algea, etc. (but not corn ethanol) and then wave and tidal. Fossil fuels are out of the question due to concerns over excess CO2, obvious land degratation and fossil fueled depletion. However, they are still required in order to power the transition into the best next energy infrastructure. Sequestration of CO2 from fossil fuels is too expensive, and dangerous to meet our energy needs, let alone, power our transition into acleaner, almost limitless, energy future. Yes on solar does not promote carbon taxes unless on a very small percentage and ONLY if ALL proceeds go towards building the advanced machine automation of renewablle energy parts and storage needed to overcome any economic losses (that WILL result when restrictions are placed upon energy). Although necessary as a band aid, conservation and mitigation is not the solution! The ONLY other tech proven alternative to power growing planetary civilizations is closed cycle nuclear. When people hear the word "nuclear", they are most likely to think about the kind of nuclear used today which is called the light water reactor (LWR), which should obviously not be expanded due to well deserved disrespect and fear. This reactor is inherently UNSAFE because it needs "engineered" safety, which means, if you walk away from it, it WILL melt down! There are different variations but they all need pressurized water to work and water for core cooling. It is also very inefficient, infact, an MIT study concludes that the once through LWR cycle can NOT sustain civilization for more than just a few decades by itself! It spits out about 100 times the waste as other reactors would, and these wastes obviously are not containable for the hundreds of thousands of years it takes for them to decay back down to natural (safe) background levels. However, there are many different ways to split the atom, and if we don't, somebody else will. China is looking into it. Thus, as with renewable energy, we need to know the BEST way, if we are to consider it at all. Physicist prefer an efficient reactor design, in order to power growing planetary civilizations... The best and proven alternate reactor design is the liquid fluoride THORIUM reactor or LFTR. No enrichment needed, thus no depleted uranium. It fissions already spent fuel from the LWR, thus very little geological waste issue. Once started, it fissions thorium which is four times as abundant than uranium. It spits out about 1% the wastes of a LWR AND these waste decay back down to safe levels in less than 500 years (which may be manageable given that there is so much less of it). It does not need a huge containment shield (because it does not "want to" blow up) because there are no high pressures (however, should be earthquake and bomb proof). It can't melt down because the fuel is already molten. And it was already proven at ORNL fifty years ago. It wasn't needed, at the time because it was not the path to weapons, uranium was. The only problems with LFTR is that it also spits out radioactive materials. However, its wastes are about 100 times LESS than that of the LWR and decay back down to safe levels in a time period that is about 500 times LESS than that of LWR wastes. It has no long term experience, and its parts may have to be replaced more often than in the LWR (due to the nature of the much higher temps and salt). No problem. At ORNL, they simply shut the power and walked away from it every weekend! In fact, it was originally designed to be put in an airplane (Aircraft Reactor Experiment or ARE)! Perhaps the best selling point for this totally different kind of energy source is the fact that you can hold a LIFETIME supply of energy in the palm of your hands! Please, do not promote conventional nuclear energy. There is a FAR better way to split the atom. Please feel free to search all the things written on this page and let me know if I am mistaken about anything. Thanks for reading... and please promote a path to clean energy! Hit "remelt" and see what happened... "Our journey is intertwined" (Ancient internet Proverb) It is the natural course of humanity's journey to robotically exponentiate the production of solar collection and storage

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