In October of 2013, Karl Ragabo was interviewed on the Talk Solar podcast from Beth Bond of Decatur, GA. This was shortly after the first version of the Value of Solar report was issued by IREC. Listen to it below:

This presentation is particularly valuable for people, like municipal regulators, who sometimes interact with, purchase from, and make decisions affected by utility company practices yet do not know from where many of them are coming, and how much of a business model disruption distributed PV generation and storage threatens.

Mr Ragabo’s deep history with renewable rate setting and PV generation is summarized here.

‘Wärtsilä introduces new hybrid solar PV and storage solution’

(Image courtesy of Wärtsilä, and you can read more about the above solution here.)

Readers may notice the PV farm in the figure above was placed in a sparsely treed area, resulting in trees being cut down. An interesting discussion might ensue, either here in the comments or in a future post, if there is enough interest, regarding the costs and benefits of substituting large scale PV farms for a relatively undisturbed natural ecosystem.

Another interesting point is whether or not losing ground to zero Carbon energy generation is indirectly a cost of failing to address and cost-in climate change. Companies and people look to things like Carbon pricing and Carbon taxes as the most direct effects, or increases in rates to pay for zero Carbon incentives. On the other hand, to the degree to which zero Carbon energy is, hands down, the best long term bet an energy investor or consumer can make (see below) means companies which ignore this, particularly utilities, have a lot to lose.