I think the average residential install has a payoff of around 6 years. Many businesses much sooner.

Nuclear is good as dead. Being propped up currently and the future looks uneventful.

Depends on your energy market. Makes loads of sense in Australia, Hawaii, etc.

we were two steps from signing up with our power company for free solar. no up front costs. the only thing was, you had to sign a contract that you would use them as the host for the energy we produced. we backed out at the last minute. was uneasy not knowing enough about different schemes. just cant afford the upfront costs for solar on our own atm.

In the US. Not in Europe.

Hydraulic fracking already has. The new low price for oil is the price where it becomes profitable to frack it out in North America. SA basically drained their treasury trying to put the NA oil fracking companies out of business.

Also petro is not going away it is used for many many other things.

Efficiency in production and cost are hurdles but are definitely improving.

The major obstacle making it tough in all forms is the lack of "energy ice cubes" or batteries in addition to problems in transmission of the energy that is created. Solar and wind production are both problematic in that the peak production times aren't typically in line with peak use.

I'm glad to see improvement but it is still detrimental to our country to move away from coal and nuclear. Clean Coke and natural gas still need support and development if we want to be energy independent.

It would be outstanding if we could get to the point where solar or wind were legitimate for single home use and was reliable.

Do that British shit where they pump water to a high elevation before peak time and then release it during peak hours to power water turbines.

So government should FORCE solar on corporations even if it costs them 5 x's as much as traditional?

Not feasible, not reasonable, not democratic and not capitalist.

Corporations by nature will seek the best and most cost effective solution. If solar doesn't cut it they will look at other options.

at the cost of being able to set our tap water on fire and risking contaminating our water table permanently

I'm not going to start a big to-do with you, but Moore's law is specific to the fundamental physics underlying transistor fabrication limitations.

I hate being pedantic about it, but people have these unrealistic expectations about innovation based on our finally harnessing the size and speed of electrons that don't translate to harnessing other physical capabilities.

I appreciate good news on affordability and performance in solar and storage technology, but we are still in the infancy of seeing how it all develops. How many of these numbers are predicated on artificial subsidies and rosy predictions needs time to verify.

I'd need to see the numbers on that, particularly how much is coming from incentives. Just 2 years ago our EE senior class tasked everyone with coming up with an estimate for insolation. Payback hovered in the area of 15-17 years. My team came up with a plan that paid back with then current incentives in 12 years and we were interrogated six ways to Sunday vetting our methods and calculations.

Also important to remember, there's payback and then there's payback. A big portion of your upfront is your inverter and most inverters have a 15-year operating life, which means that every 15 years expect a sizeable portion of your upfront costs to recur.

MoF, a big key in our shorter payback window was that is we went with small inverters with a shorter life span but much lower cost on each panel instead of one big expensive inverter for the entire installation.

Sure, the batteries make sense in a few niche places.

I would say it is on life support in Europe also. Germany is closing all of their nuclear plants. The recent plants that are under construction (with the newer style technology) are way over budget even by nuclear power plant standards.

The UK is contemplating approving a plant that is already estimated to cost $20 billion (this is before overruns).

So, I would imagine it would be smart to invest in Solar?

I've never invested and know next to nothing about the stock market, but have recently decided to start educating myself in prep to get started.

Would this be a promising opportunity to begin that venture with?