thelastsasquatch,

Your point about trade offs is right on.

The scary thing too is that the USA is talking about 120 new power plants and we have two, a whole two, that are synfuel, under construction (there may be one completed . . . ?) and apparently they are small plants at that.

We have a local Supervisor race underway, and Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is in my backyard. One of the candidates wants to stop nuke power and talks about building thousands of PV systems on homes in our county. Wonderful idea, but the solar industry right now is having supply problems. And a whole six silicon plants for PVs under construction around the world as of last fall. Anyone have better figures on this?

That is what is striking to me. Good ideas not being executed at any required scale to make an immediate difference.

Six solar power plants producing 6,000,000 kilowatts of power per year when it is used in panels, but 600,000,000 kilowatts if used in line focus, and 6,000,000,000 kilowatts if used in point focus.