Bright (YC W15) raises $4M to bring solar to the developing world
medium.com
medium.com
And fossil fuels have a really great energy density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
It is quite common that a family could afford 1$ of fuel a month for kerosene lamps, but not the 20$ for a solar charged battery led lamp. As the 20$ even if a great investment after 2 years is out of reach.
Solar starts to make a whole lot of sense if there is no or only a primitive grid to hook into. i.e. compare the boom of mobile phone use in Africa.
A KM of high quality copper wire is not cheap, either. To a central powerplant, distribution of fossil fuel to decentralized power plants is very expensive and very wasteful.
The economically developing world has a great problem in accessing capital, not in investing it usefully.
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/buffett-stri...
Also, most solar worldwide is large solar farms. Rooftop is a yuppie gimmick of no significance.
The Union Of Concerned Scientists seem to disagree with you that its a "yuppie gimmick".
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/clean-energy/increase-renewab...
There were under a million private, rooftop solar installations, which are each very likely under 1KW. Which amounts to maybe < 1GW total? Which amounts to a percent of a percent of the solar-farm output. Which fits in the category of 'gimmick' very nicely.
{Edit: math, thanks for pointing it out?}
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...
It puts residential and distributed commercial (so small installations at businesses and the like) at over 4 gigawatts.
Replying to your edit: ~1 GW of rooftop solar would no longer be a percent of a percent... It is the case that utility scale installations dominate, but rooftop is not insignificant:
http://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-industry-data
(One of the bullet points there is that more than 1 GW of rooftop was installed in 2014)
1 million times 1 KW is a Gigawatt, not one 1 Megawatt.
"Already, the average size of a rooftop solar system around the country is 3kW – and many of the new systems are well above that. According to Johnston’s data, 5kW systems are now the most popular in the progressive “solar” states such as Queensland and South Australia – while 3kW remains the most popular in NSW and W.A. That is probably a reflection of the tariffs paid for exports to the grid.
Of course, Australia still has some way to go to catch up with the US – where according to SunPower, which specializes in solar leasing products, the average size of rooftop solar systems has gone to 8.3kW.
That’s got something to do with the size of the roofs, and also the tariff measures. Most places in the US get a 1:1 tariff, so the incentive is there to put on a larger system."
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/28/graph-of-the-day-super-s...
With widespread solar that just gets flipped, as the peak solar production maps better to peak usage in most places, so a pumped hydro system might pump water at midday using cheap solar energy, and release the energy in the evening or nightime and "peaker" gas plants would fill in what night-time wind production, nuclear and hydro (depending on the local resource base) can't cover.
This is already starting to happen, you see news stories every so often about prices going negative at peak solar times in various countries. Once it happens often enough that it's no longer headline grabbing, then people can build business cases around using (and/or time-shifting) that cheap energy, just like people did with cheap nuclear power at night.
There is also the mess it creates with the grid. The business model of electrical companies is that in your monthly bill you pay for both power and for the grid that delivers it to you. If everyone puts solar on their roof it destroys the business model of the electrical companies and in the occasions where you still want to use grid power (at night, cloudy days etc) your rates will inevitably be higher or someone else has to pay for maintaining the grid and your socializing grid usage.
I think most of the hype around solar is way overdone. Too much solar can really can do lasting damage to an electrical grid and cause massive economic harm. This has happened in Germany where they subsidized renewables so much that they pushed out reliable power from the grid and now they are having the subsidize gas/coal generation so the grid will remain reliable. Furthermore, electricity prices have gone up enormously causing large industrial companies to move abroad or scale back operations. Electricity is the lifeblood of an economy and arbitrarily raising prices and messing with how electricity is delivered and managed can have large unintended consequences especially when decided by politicians who know nothing about the science or business.
You're right electricity is heavily regulated and has been for quite some time. Despite the regulation however most companies generally operate as a lowest cost to consumers basis. Consumers ask for the lowest prices and electricity companies tend to oblige.
When politicians decide they very often have some vested interest as a priority and try to raise rates by handing special favors to certain industries.
What makes you think when politicians make decisions based on whats best for consumers vs. whats best for whoever donated to their campaign? If you think renewable energy companies don't hire lobbyists you suffer from a disconnect from reality.
Also, you didn't argue my main point which is solar isn't competitive to other sources. Should everyone pay more for electricity?
The obvious, standard, free market answer to this (which it seems you'd be in favor of given the political elements of your argument) is some kind of carbon tax. With externalities accounted for wind and solar are the obvious market choices for new generation capacity (and efficiency is rewarded with correct prices too). They're often the best choice now even without this market correction, and continually drop in price to make this more common. That's why we're at some kind of tipping point and the old vested interests realise they're in danger.
(Note in actual implementations of this they often either return the money raised directly to consumers, or cut other taxes to compensate, so you pay more for some things, but still come out aheadahead overall).
You can see Elon Musk sigh every time he mentions this as it's so obviously the right answer, but politically toxic in the US, for no logical reason, despite it being the market friendly, small government answer. A tax specifically designed to phase itself out over time. Instead we've got a strange web of government subsidies and regulations because the democrats like those kind of thing, and the libertarian side of things has been bought off by the vested interests.
In fact the opposite is true. The only reason solar is being adopted at all in almost every region in the world is because of government subsidies.
(Source: I build solar and wind farms for a living).