Is it practical to generate all US power by solar PV?

[jim hardy]

Economies rely on growth and expanding customer numbers.

There's the rub. Unlimited growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
At some point an economy needs to switch from a growth mindset to a maintenance mindset. Nature does that with her organisms, by age twenty we are physically as big as we'll ever get and we spend the rest of our life hopefully maintaining the body and growing the mind.

If we built cars to last forty years instead of ten everybody could have two or three of them. We'd employ more people maintaining them and fewer building them. Same for TV sets and refrigerators. We might even learn to understand and do routine work on them ourselves. This being the age of technology, why isn't more practical stuff like toaster repair in the primary curriculum ?

Law of supply and demand applies to labor just like any other commodity. As Asia mechanized and entered the labor force manufacturing moved there. We Americans tried shifting our economic base to approving one another's mortgage applications , that went bust in 2008. Now we've shifted it to paying one another's doctor bills and that's going to crash too.The Law of Diminishing returns is as much a natural law as are Newton's three.
Carbon fuel and steam let the human race mechanize. Carnot tells us what are the practical limits of those heat engines, putting a number on just how far we can take them .
Renewables are less power intense than coal. But not less labor intense.
Might it be that Mother Nature's grand plan for us is to become a species of thoughtful tinkerers tending to the machinery that provides us a comfortable existence from the daily contribution of the sun ?
After all, when Mother Nature gets a design perfected she quits tinkering with it, to wit the shark and the VW Beetle.

A paradigm shift from a gadfly throwaway society to a reverent one that cherishes and takes good care of what it has would be a maintenance man's utopia.
Anorlunda appears to be already there waiting on the rest of us.

But I'm just a burnt out old maintenance man.

disclaimer - My electric consumption runs from ~400 to ~900 kwh/month, mostly hot water and in the summertime, airconditioning.

old jim

 

[jim hardy]

Spend your way out of debt? Only if you spend it on something productive.

 

[Dale]

Closed for moderation

Edit: we will have to leave it closed. There is a lot of political discussion mixed into the technical discussion, and no clean way to split them. I gave up after tagging 50 posts for deletion.