by Bob Rinear, The International Forecaster:

I think that solar has been suppressed, because energy is power. THEY don’t want you to have any power, they want it for themselves. When someone has the power to flip a switch and shut off your electricity, or your water, you’re not very independent are you?

I had no idea that the article I published on the weekend was going to get me so many responses. In that article, I was talking about California’s new push to have all houses built after 2020 to include some amount of solar power on them.

Without redoing the whole article, I spent some time talking about the costs, and the burden to the lower classes that cannot afford to install panels, but who will be paying more for their electricity as the new homes with panels, will consume less from the grid. Someone’s got to pay the Electric company for maintenance, etc, and if there’s less revenue coming in, they will hike prices on remaining consumers.

But I think that what got me the most “push back” was my “love” for solar. So the first thing I want to do is clarify my position.

YES I know about the Government tax incentives and rebates. YES I know that their efficiency decreases over time. YES I know that at some point roofs might need new shingles and it’s a mess removing panels, I get all that. But…

I hate the idea of being a slave to anyone or anything. Jim, why do we like buying gold and silver? Because we hate the idea of being a slave to the Fed’s and the Treasury with their bogus “fiat” money, money that’s printed out of thin air. And of course their push for a digital currency will make us even more slaves to the system.

Right now, YOU people reading this are slaves to the power company. You have no choice but to pay your electric bill, or go dark. How many of you have a truly viable way to keep your home running if the power company cuts you off? I don’t see many hands up. So, part one of why I love the concept of solar, is that it is a “hope” that one day, people could be free to use the power of the sun, instead of the power from the corporation up the street.

Part 2 to why I love the idea of one day having truly affordable panels and marvelous storage technology is the individuality of it. It was just 7 months ago that Hurricane Irma came roaring across my state. Tens of thousands of people had no power for WEEKS. Why is that? Because they’re hooked to a spiderweb grid, and an outage 10 miles from their home, took out their power. IF solar was perfected to the point where it was affordable and truly self sufficient, the effects of a giant storm like Irma, or the monster that ate Puerto Rico, would do 1/10th the damage to people.

To THIS DAY there’s people that still don’t have power from that storm. This is from NPR:

In Puerto Rico, roughly 150,000 homes and businesses are still waiting for electricity. That’s 11 percent of the island’s customers. Many have been waiting since before Hurricane Maria, when Hurricane Irma grazed the island six months ago this week.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Electricity please, enough already, help us – those are the messages that you find on signs taped and tacked to utility poles in Barrio Borinquen, a mountainous community in the municipality of Caguas. Drive high enough up the mountain, and you reach a plateau. That’s where community leader Jose Oyola was waiting for me just before sunset. He pointed to the hundreds of houses dotting the valley and hillsides below, all dark except the ones with generators.

Do you see my point here? If solar was affordable, and battery technology was allowed to move forward to where storage of solar power, was efficient, those people in Puerto Rico would not be dark. I challenge any of you to try and live for 7 months with no power. Give it a shot. You’ll fail.

So, my love of solar isn’t because I think that it’s so great right now. I get the flaws, I really do. It’s still too expensive, the panels don’t last forever, the efficiency fades, and storage is horrid. I get it. However, one thing is constant and indisputable. The sun dumps a thousand years worth of photons on the earth every day. We are capable of transforming some of them into electricity. Does it not make sense to try and perfect an energy source that is FREE for the taking each and every day?

Question; is solar still not perfect because we can’t make it so? Fat chance. Solar is a disruptor of magnitudes. Do you think that the power companies really want the perfect off grid solar solution? Uhm, nope. How about the oil companies? Do you think they want to see off grid power from the sun that’s as reliable and cheap as they are? Uhm, nope. Do you think the natural gas or coal people want to see that? Of course not.

This is from April 2011 in the San-Diego Union-Tribune:

America could have been steadily weaned off of its oil addiction instead of drilling in deep waters. In 1974, Congress enacted the Solar Energy Research Development and Demonstration Act to stem the nation’s dependence on oil. In the following years, $6 billion was spent to improve photovoltaic production levels, reduce production costs and stimulate private sector purchases.

So what happened to deter progress?

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