I assume they are stalling until the government pays for it, one way or another. Real manufacturers rarely have that option, as it is reserved for energy companies.

a) Raise the price of the Jeep Wrangler to the highest point where they can sell out the 150,000 production number, or
b) Invest $5 billion in a new assembly line — and remember, the Wrangler is due for a redesign in three years (the military-inspired Jeeps have a 10 year design cycle, the current one was introduced in 2006, meaning the next one is due in 2016), meaning that the new assembly line would have only a three year lifespan?

The reality is that they ARE expanding the Toledo factory to add a new assembly line… but by the time the new building is filled and equipped, it will be for the 2016 Jeep Wrangler, not the current one, which will keep producing the current model until the day that the workforce walks across the street to the new assembly line to start producing the next model. So now you know why you can buy a $45,000 Jeep Wrangler that costs them maybe $15K to make :).

They may not want to buy more because it would require an expansion of their grid to new sources, and that isn’t cheap or quick. I really get suspicious when corporations won’t sell what people want. Real capitalists would get more, not refuse to sell more.

Someday…

Because of the Mississippi River system coal is cheap down here and there is a coal plant in Pensacola. Needless to say, the Florida Republicans wouldn’t think of actually hurting the feelings of the energy industry, so all we get is talk about renewables and no action. The real fight is going to come when the state runs out of water, so the current plants just won’t work, and that is going to happen because of the growth, agricultural, and industrial non-policies in the state. The state will be flat broke because of all of the tax cuts, and there is no one to make the improvements necessary to head off any of the problems.

California seems to have finally gotten a grip on fiscal policy, but Florida never will. We have so much solar potential, and it is just being ignored, just like climate change, because of the people who win Republican primaries.

If people would invest in solar panels down here the benefits would be instantly obvious in reducing the biggest energy cost we have – cooling during the summer. That’s what causes brown outs and rolling black outs in places like California. If you consume all of the power in your house to operate your air conditioner, you are still saving money, and the grid is unaffected. It doesn’t help with lighting, but it would certainly reduce the extra hundreds of dollars that air conditioning costs you during the summer, as well as reducing the peak load on the grid. When I replaced my air conditioner with a new Energy Star model, my electric bill dropped $50/month. It paid for itself the first season I used it.

Once the technology is in place, the next problem will be convincing the for-profit utilities to use it. That is going to require government action, because I can’t see them doing willingly. I would like to see taxes on carbon emissions, to help them see the future, and reduce our carbon footprint so Florida doesn’t totally disappear under the waves.

Germany gets about 25% of its electricity from renewable sources now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

I suspect that this is pushing the limits of what the grid can accommodate without a substantial buffering capacity.

Don Sadoway has a really interesting technology for industrial-scale batteries:
http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html

They are working on it, and have deep-pocket investors behind them. I’ll note that in this Ted talk he describes a battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container that stores 2 MW-hr (2,000 kW-hr), which is getting to be significant.

If you cycle it every day, that means it buffers 730,000 kW-hr of electricity over a year, and if you get 15-years out of a battery (a WAG), it buffers just over 10,000,000 kWh of electricity over its lifetime. At 10 cents/kW-hr, that’s $1M of electricity buffering. If you can make the battery for $100,000 (a number I made up), then you increase the cost of the electricty by 1 cent/kW-hr over its nominal selling price, which looks viable.

Best
Jim

Everything is expensive until it is scaled up and mass produced. Solar cells, like most electronic parts, either fail early or continue for years. There are new versions coming into the market every year that are more efficient and easier to manufacture. Storage is the only major problem that needs to be addressed.

All that is really necessary is the vision to look at things in the long term and make the necessary investment now.

As a result, Germany dominated solar production for most of the past decade, and also drove down the manufacturing cost per module.

While solar is not generally at cost parity with fossil fuels, it is quite close now, in large part because the German tariff created the demand required to bring economies of scale to the manufacturing side.

Best
Jim