Mercedes ditching diesels in North America

Ductape wrote:
Yeah,let's all hang onto existing technology, there's nothing new to be invented or improved on.

Perhaps we'd be better off with horses and whale oil.

On a more serious note, I feel badly for people who fear the future. Remember when we were all young and anticipating the next day with eagerness for what new things would come? A lot of that gets lost as we age.

The future just is... it's all neither good nor bad, it's what you make of it. And if I had the perfect foresight that some on here claim ;) , I would invest appropriately and get rich.

But I don't need to be rich to buy solar. I paid for mine with no government assistance. Free power, every day. :B

Not trying to pick a fight here, just debating. If you're off-grid, that's a great use of the technology and you're not affecting others. If you are on-grid, you are being subsidized by the government and/or other ratepayers. The power company has to buy and maintain the infrastructure to provide you with your full power needs at night and on bad weather days. Yet, you're not buying the amount of electricity that corresponds to the infrastructure for your peak and intermittent usage. Somebody else is paying for that. If you have net metering or a feed-in tariff that credits you at least as much for power you feed into the grid compared to what you consume from the grid, the power company is losing money on every watt hour you feed in.

Up till now, every grid tie system is being subsidized in some way. This is changing as the politicians are starting to accept that the infrastructure as we know it cannot handle massive intermittent power sources. What happens if some area is running mostly on solar and a big cloud rolls in? Is there some huge magic alternative supply that can fill in with no notice? There probably will be some day, after a lot of time passes and a lot of money is spent on it. The government policies are redistributing the money, but it's not free.