After reading that stupid twitchguru article on solar energy possibly helping reduce the cost of gaming-energy needs I decided to do my own article.
 
1.  Why am I going to spend $10000 on solar panels to save $100 on energy costs.
2.  Leave your computers on at night to support the fact that if we have energy let's freakin use it.  Leave your computer on 24/7.
3.  Buy the old Pentium 4s that use a ton of juice to work and use 21" CRT monitors that have no power-save feature.
4.  Club baby seals.
 
Thank you.
 
**** yo' energy!

Why you hate solar panel so much, what did it ever do to you? :?  

I hate solar panels because they're expensive, fragile, and do not produce enough energy to warrant the expense.  Windmills are far cheaper and produce far more energy but do you see them everywhere?  No because they're also stupid.
 
Let's make some fusion reactors!  W00!
 
I also hate people who throw their biased and uneducated political views into website articles.  I don't care if you're conservative or liberal or just plain dumb you don't do that.
 
Word.

Yeah because you come off as the cream of the crop education wise.  "Solar power is dumb so waste energy as much as possible"    
 
 
Solar panels are expensive yes but they are a viable source of energy given enough of them.  And theres work being done to create panels that are 2-3x more efficient than current ones.  They've already come a long way.  Another nice thing is that if you put several panels on top of your house, you can run your house off them during the day, storing the extra energy for the evening, and if the batteries run out, you can still use normal power systems.  I've read articles about houses equiped this way and the power bill for such a house is like $25 a month.  In places like California, Texas, and Florida(where I live) where your AC is cranked 6-8 months of the year and power bills are $250-300+ that amounts to a huge savings over time.  When I build a house if I can afford it and live in an area thats nearly always sunny, I'll do it.  And its not like I'm a tree hugger or anything.  I'm quite conservative.
 
Wind energy is the same way.  The only limiting factors for wind(as well as solar) is space and finding a place to put them that is always windy(or sunny).  
 
And when you figure out stable fusion let the rest of the world know.  
 
Nuclear energy is the true way to go right now because its proven and tested.  With fuel reprocessing its a near endless source of power(its also required since theres not a whole lot of uranium left on the planet).

i have one thing to say.  STFU.
 
 seriously the initial investment is big but unlike fossil fuels it doesn't run out.   if you have a big enough solar panel and you keep it clean and maintained then it pretty much keeps going and also if a remote power plant fails you keep getting power as long as it is connected to your home.
 
  i think you are incredibly short sighted and perhaps you should run for your senate or whatever as you will get in no doubt

I agree nuclear energy is the BEST option for us at the moment... but the best of what we have.  
 
Someone needs to find a realistic solution for disposing of spent fuel bundles/rods.
 
Arg.
 
 

Solar panels maybe expensive now but in the future it will become very useful when there is no oil left we would be relying on the sun and nuclear reactors to produce energy.  
 
I guess scientists are using steam to power satellites because according to you solar panels are stupid.

 
Well unfortunately the US has a law that prohibits the storing of nuclear waste on US soil.  But theres currently a deal in progress to build a huge storage complex inside a mountain thats on an indian reservation inside the US.  It is not US soil and is a perfect place to put such a facility.  There is not that much waste currently.  The issue is that you can't store it all together because otherwise it'll all react together and create one gigantic nuclear explostion(depending on how much there is).
 
The issue against nuclear power isn't so much what to do with spent fuel as it is fear of meltdown.  Liberals and environmental groups keep saying that we're all going to die if we solely use nuclear power because the plants are going to blow up like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (or however its spelled).  Also if you reprocess the fuel, theres less waste left over and you turn some of that waste back into fuel.  Sure you also get weapons grade plutonium as a byproduct but hey.  This is why we don't want India doing reprocessing.

 
Very. A matter of fact ( i can't find the pics) one of the first computers or laptop that comes out don't even have a monitor/display and are only affordable for the rich.

 
So you must really fucking hate yourself then.

Have you considered the amount of energy that goes into PRODUCING solar panels?
 
That huge cost the guy was speaking of is high for a reason, do the math and tell me if a solar cell can recover the energy used to make it...within 10 years.  That includes energy from mining, refining, and transporting the raw materials, plus energy from the production process, plus energy from the distribution pipeline, and even the energy of us sitting here discussing it.
 
Solar panels last what, 15-20 years?  That's a narrow window of opportunity for it to recover the energy it cost to begin with.

 
Exactly. Good Point!   :!:

I hate to agree with someone this moronic, but he does have a point.  Spending money to set up personal solar arrays is kind of a waste from a financial viewpoint, since they are high maintanance, they have a huge up-front cost, and you'll never recoup your losses.
 
Wasting power to combat the solar industry is retarded, but I suppose everyone can see that.  Regardless, using outdated, hot equipment is even stupider, as it requires more expensive equipment to cool it.
 
On a brighter, lighter side, at least there's no such thing as global warming (well, maybe there is, but as there's no definitive proof, I prefer to use power as I need it).
 
Just a thought....
 
Rant as you see fit.

I agree that solar panels are useful for some, not all.
 
I live in San Diego, and there are lots of homes around that use solar panels to heat their pools in the winter and pay for AC in summer.  It works out quite well.  Me and my Dad bought a solar panel at Home Depot when I was in high school for about $100.  We wired it up to a car battery and it has opened the gate at his house, year round, for over 6 years.  It is reliable and has never gone out, and most of all besides the innitial investment of 100 dollars and an old car battery we had lying around, free.
 
So, in short, it may not be viable and cost efficient for all, but for some its great.

do you know the term troll by any chance.

You can get off of that soap box now. You, like so many thousands of people, expect others to consider you politically thoughtful, because you lash out at something for a reason you shouldn't. Well, the fact is, you, like all those others, regardless of political stripe, are just an angry person.
 
Solar panels don't cost $10,000US to produce $100US of benefits... Perhaps $10,000US of panels might produce that much electricity- In the first week. Or in a poor month.
 

Solar panels, when constructed properly, and employed in the right places, can even pay for themselves within their first year; in the sub-tropic areas of the United States, such as Florida, Texas, and California, they can dramatically cut off electricity costs, since they will be running air conditioning very often throughout the summer, which coincidentally, is a very sunny time of year.
 
As for windmills, perhaps one day you might become educated enough to understand the concept of "NIMBY." Until then...
 
As for fusion? You're just being rediculous. Potential commercial applications may solve all the world's energy needs, but they are at least 20, if not 50, years away; the shorter estimates rely on some of the proposed suggestions/hypothesises (not to be confused with "scientific theories" ) pan out to be correct, as to why fusion's failed to result in a net gain of energy.
 
And as for your "hate," didn't you just say you made your own article? It appears to have a rather biased opinion. And, in fact, one I'd dare say has about zero education to it. The fact that you, like 99.999% of the media, and 90% of Americans, say "liberal or conservative," when both terms have been grossly mis-used for years now, is a dead giveaway.
 

When it comes to nuclear fusion, it's not how to keep it stable; scientists have done that. Heck, they can throw together miniature reactors for a couple thousand dollars apiece; it's the matter of getting them to produce more energy than they consume that's proven to be the tough part.
 
As for nuclear fission, (or simply called "nuclear" ) there's actually quite a bit of uranium left on the planet, certainly enough to out-last fossil fuels. It's the matter of finding a place to STORE all the waste that's created; not just spent reactor fuel, but all the materials from mining and processing it... There are solutions that can be developed, of course.

The Japanese have a solution, they recycle spent rods.  You know that "spent" rods are actually just rods that have too little usefull "fuel" left to creat an adequat amount of heat to keep the reactors running efficiently.
 
As uranium decays it produces lighter atoms, such as lead, that don't react, as well as a bunch of "less reactive" isotopes and elemements.  Removing the usefull materials is a fairly straightforward process.
 
Of course, not all of the uranium broke down into smaller atoms, or remained unused:  Some of it became highly enriched in the process or fused to become even more dangerous stuff like Plutonium, but still isn't reacting "fast enough" because of all the less reactive materials getting in the way.
 
The Japanese have lot of solutions, they even have plutonium reactors!
 
So the solution would be to continously recycle spent fuel rods until there's nearly nothing usefull left in them.  The remaining scrap would thereby be far less dangerous, and far easier to store.
 
In the U.S. we have laws against recycling spent fuel rods, because of the fear that having the material in too many hands could result in some of it disappearing into the wrong hands.  For this I have a solution:  Recycle spent rods at the same facility that extracts the ore in the first place, using added infrustructure and the same security precautions.

The cost is so high right now because its like anything else.  They're not being mass produced on a huge scale.  If they were needed for say a solar energy farm to power an entire state or even the whole country, the cost would go down.  As the price of oil goes up, demand for renewable sources of energy is also going up.  So I expect solar energy to take off in the not too distant future.  Nothings better than free.  If you take into account all the money spent keeping a gas powerplant going and purchasing the fuel, the costs would probably come close to a solar plant.  There all you need is mostly maintenance techs to keep the panels and housings maintained and a complex computer system to keep them at the appropriate angle and rotation.  
 
And like I said, they're working on new solar cells all the time to make them smaller and more efficient.