Business Week, Oct. 15, "Solar's Day in the Sun" gives an optimistic picture of solar collectors in the desert turning water to steam to drive generators. Supposedly there is enough sunlight in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest to provide electricity many times over.
Since a desert by definition has little water, where is the water for these plants going to come from?
If generation is concentrated in one section of the country, there will be a huge need for high-voltage power lines to get the power to other parts of the company. The line losses could be very great, possibly offsetting some of the promised cost savings.
Concentrating any resource increases risk of disruption, by criminal intent, by natural disasters, or by Murphy's Law ("if anything can go wrong, it will").
I think we should be looking for as much distributed, local power generation as we can with as many different systems as are feasible. I do not mean that each house or building should be completely energy, self-sufficient. We should start with very local energy with backup levels all the way up to a regional generation and distribution. It used to be that way, but over time centralized generation became cheaper. However, pollution and other problems have created costs that are not accounted for in centralized distribution.
