The Navy has surplus electrical power and the ocean as a cooling system on the aircraft carriers that would do this: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5007123&cid=46703095

Promising if the press release’s hopes prove to work out.

The usual economics of electric power generation trade-off capital for operating cost. Equipment for peak power generation is usually cheap but has a high operating cost which is justified by the high price of peak power. That high operating cost comes from fuel, usually natural gas, gas turbines being relatively cheap per watt.

Once you have enough solar and wind to meet peak demands, you don’t need “extra” generation capacity for the peak. You just need something productive to do with the off-peak power in excess of needs. Electricity to hydrocarbon fuels is exactly that.

True but most people are going to look at the economics of adding solar to their roof.

One way to look at it is as an investment. I realise that some states in the US make it ridiculously difficult and/or expensive, but let’s presume you have a sensible local arrangement. For someone with a small amount of capital to invest, there are very few better investments. We have a small system which doesn’t cover all our needs all the time, but we do have 2 quarters a year when our power “bill” is a credit. Seeing as we spent less than $4000 in the first place, that’s pretty good. We couldn’t have paid all our grid-supplied power costs from the interest on that amount for those quarters alone, let alone the reductions during the other, higher power use, six months of the year.

When you look at the sort of other spending people make on their houses – swimming pools, fancy benchtops in the kitchen, new bathrooms – solar isn’t such a big spend and it’s getting cheaper all the time. And it saves you money even when it doesn’t make you money in places where FITs are absent or paltry.

If they are going to store it they then have to determine what the return will be over their expected time in that house and whether they can retrieve that investment if they move. Given the mobility of today’s citizenry along with divorce rates etc. I suspect the average home ownership term is quite a bit lower than it used to be – see http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=110770&channelID=311 – by year 15 ~50% have moved on and right now for storage solutions that’s about the payback time last time I looked.

Also, I want to see electric snow blowers and such. Electric riding lawn mowers. They would be QUIET.