This will create massive pressure on the price of oil. Why would anyone in their right mind not try to sell it off as fast as possible as it won't be worth much in a few years.
Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa).
[1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...
Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.
This comes up often, but not really. There is no good replacement as cheap as oil from plant sources. Plants require a LOT more labor, processing, and producing it requires huge amounts of space. That's why we use oil and nothing else. If it was competitive, oil would have been replaced by plants long ago for chemical use.
i.e. Abu Dhabi could consume much more solar especially as a large demand for power is for cooling (storing cold water, freezing some food further is a much cheaper way of storing power than batteries as it is load shifting.)
Basically oil is out of mind for generating electrical power on an industrial scale as its way to expensive so it is not competing with that. See every small island powergrid investment over the last 5 years.
Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements.
20% worst case degradation over 20 years is an minor issue. Easily planed for in the financials of such a plant.
What exactly needs maintenance in a Stirling engine? Please be concrete.
Based on which data?
I don't doubt that Stirling systems could be cheaper, but I'm not seeing them yet. I also flatly refuse to believe that a moving-parts system can last 25 years without maintenance, even if just regular oiling, while solar panels should still have 70-80% of their output after 25 years with no maintenance. It's the inverters and batteries that require maintenance or replacement.
(There are claims that solar thermal storage + Stirling is cheaper than PV+batteries, which are much more plausible, but where are the installations, big or small?)
Specifically, I was and am referring to:
Secondly, it's a concentrator system with a two-axis tracker. That's going to require maintenance, however trivial. You can clearly see a chain-and-sprocket arrangement at about 1:20 in the video. If you have a chain technology which is maintenance-free for 25 years, I know a lot of cyclists who'd be interested.
And in my initial post, I unequivocally stated that one of the biggest problems with the integrated Stirling engine is that no residential kits are available at the local hardware store.
Don't believe the hype. Modern batteries are junk.
In a couple of decades we might also have fusion power, and this time it's probably going to work because we have much better superconductor magnets. We can make the whole reactor much smaller.