Portugal building giant solar farm

[Gerbil Rebellion]

Good point, I wonder what he would have said now within the same constraints of his experiment(?) or research.

[Wobs]

Originally Posted by HydPhyll

Anyway I digress (again!) If I had the space I would quite happily get PV and solar heating panels and sell them cheaply but legislation, power companies, media are keeping the costs high and we think this is a good thing this economic dragon.

Again, confirming what i said.

It is the fact that people are prepared to pay that much more for renewables that is one of the things that keep the prices high. If this wasn't the case, no-one would buy them as they are currently expensive.

The idea that mass production will bring the price down has its limits. PV especially, as has already been said.

If the environmental idealogy wasn't there, no one would be willing to pay the extra "to save the planet", and manufacturers would be forced to drive prices down more. Greed it may be, but economic realities should not be ignored.

[Richard]

Originally Posted by Centrillium

Fair's fair though, and on closer inspection, I see that this much PV isn't necessary. It would deliver 20,000 kWh over the course of a year, allowing for day and night, cloud cover, etc, while a typical household only requires 4,000, so I'll concede that much - £10,000 for a solar roof that would meet household needs, although this makes no allowance for losses in battery storage etc

A better option would be to simply stay reliant on grid-only power and invest your £10,000. At 5% compound interest a year, you could pay your electricity bill out of the interest alone + have a bit left over to re-invest. Then after how ever many years you want to do this for, you'd have paid all your bills at no additional expense to yourself and still have your original £10,000 plus whatever interest you saved after paying your electricity bill.

[Richard]

Originally Posted by HydPhyll

I can see you are tied into restraints of wanting to prove something wrong on cost, unfortunately with too many people thinking that way they will never allow the price to come down. Financial cost is a man made desire, a desire for profit. Environmental cost is the reality and that is what we should measure things in.

Financial cost doesn't necessarily involve profit, although obviously the required profit margin can be taken into account easily enough in a cost-benefit analysis.

Standard economics is still useful in terms of environmental protection though as shouldn't be dismissed. Since we don't have unlimited resources then we can't tackle all our environmental problems at the same time, so we need a way of deciding which ones are the most important and need our immediate attention and which are less important and can be dealt with later.

For instance, suppose we have three environmental problems: A, B and C. We have enough money to tackle one of them but not the other two, so how do we decide which one takes precedence over the others? If we simply write down a list of environmental criteria then this doesn't really help since it doesn't provide any way to compare options e.g. suppose the three options A, B and C relate to air, water and land pollution respectively. The types of pollution related to these three issues are not always easy to compare. For instance, is tackling sulphur emmissions to air more worthwhile than tackling, say, nitrate pollution in ground water? Or maybe we should be dealing with heavy metal contamination in the ground? Unless you have a common unit to compare these three pollutants then how can you know which one deserves to receive funding? By putting things into an economic perspective, we allow options to be directly compared (i.e. we put things in terms of money).

If you just use environmental criteria then often what happens is that you are just left with a number of long lists that can't be compared in terms of costs/benefits, leaving you with no clear idea of how best to proceed.

[Gerbil Rebellion]

Thank you for the explanation but as well as my early life experiences in business I did study envrionmenatl science and as economics is a big thing in this world we did study the way in which economics and the environment can help or destroy each other.,

I would like to poiint out again that as we want the same thing and have the same basic goals in life to stop all this friggin bickering and actually start trrying to work together to find solutions. We probably all have the answers in a small part and if we worked together we can make it happen and work.