Reply #81: Solar's great, but how do you provide entire cities with electricity at night? [View All]

[LAGC]

Just like wind, solar can offset base-load requirements when the wind is blowing and when the sun in shining, but what about those times when they are not?

I'm thinking the dead of winter, when everyone has their electric heaters cranked up.

I've heard natural gas as a potential solution. But that contributes to climate change.

Are you prepared to endure rolling blackouts? If not, we need a reliable 24/7/365 energy source, and we don't have too many options available right now.

Again, if costs were no issue, we could theoretically build the massive energy storage (batteries) NOW. But they are prohibitively expensive, much more than even the solar panels themselves, and have a lot of nasty chemical by-products in the manufacture as well.

I'm confident we will have some major break-throughs in this area in the next 50 years that will greatly bring down the costs, so I'm all for ALOT of R&D funding in this area. But until then, what do we do? Seems like the choice is coal, nuclear, or natural gas. Only one of those choices is carbon-free.