Nanosolar’s cost for creating solar panels plunges two orders of magnitude
Nanosolar’s Solar Film Rolls Off Presses at 100 feet per minute – scales easily to 2000 fpm
In fact, municipal solar power plants are one of the most rapidly deployable forms of power: whereas it takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done (if ever given their carbon risk) or 5 years for a concentrating solar-thermal plant (also requiring a connection to the transmission grid), a municipal solar plant can be completed in as little as 12 months.
Furthermore, a unique feature of photovoltaic power plants is that they utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features. Enlightened utilities around the world are now recognizing these as a very good way to manage and improve grid power quality. This is especially a point of pain at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise.
… By feeding power directly into the (local, medium-voltage) distribution grid, they avoid the (long-haul, high-voltage) transmission grid which is expensive to build and expand, and they also avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming transmission voltage to municipal voltage.- Nanosolar blog
I wonder if I could manage to call the garage a local power station?