No, this is not going to be a screed about the environmental benefits of solar energy over the burning of even supposedly clean fuels like natural gas. That is an important case to be made, but I'll not make it here.
I propose instead to take on natural gas on the simplest economic basis, that of supply and demand. For while natural gas prices are at their lowest in a very long time there is one fundamental difference between the sun and an earthbound finite commodity such as natural gas and that is that the price of that commodity responds to supply and demand and the price of sunlight does not. All the rest is smoke and mirrors.
I call your attention to a fairly recent article in Finding Alpha entitled "Natural Gas Has Nowhere to Go but Up"
http://seekingalpha.com/article/530191-natural-gas-has-nowhere-to-go-but-up
Written by industry expert Kenneth Worth, this article suggests that at current 20 year lows, it is uneconomical to pump natural gas and certainly not to frack it using the latest and most expensive technologies. I do not intend here to debate whether natural gas is due to rise now or later but will instead suggest one iron clad law about it; namely that it CAN go up or down in price. Indeed if you look at the price of natural gas over the last 20 years (neatly conveyed in a chart in the same article) you will note that in the last 4 years the price has fallen from $14 per mmBTU to $2 per mm BTU. No one would ever argue that the price couldn't rise again. One thing should be obvious to any casual observer, however,...if we converted the car fleet to natural gas...it would rise...and by a lot!
Contrast that with energy from the sun. No matter how much we consume of it, the sun will continue to shine. The price of sunlight for our purpose is essentially zero. We are not betting on something that might drastically increase in price leaving us holding the bag. The vast majority of the cost of solar energy is the up front installation of the project. Once built and deployed, the array will produce energy for the next 40 years or so with little or no additional capital expenditures required. Compare that to a complex system where the raw material must be extracted, piped all over the country and then burned under controlled conditions (hopefully with a discrete distance from population centers)....lots of maintenance there.
The sad truth is that this simple distinction; between something that nature provides for free and something for which some highly interested party is going to charge you as much as he can, explains why solar energy has no constituency and why there will always be someone to yell drill baby drill. Nobody can get rich selling sunlight but they can sure get rich buying a commodity like natural gas on the cheap and then selling it to the gullible public when they've already spent money on the darn plant!
In 2008 gasoline was below $2 per gallon in 30 states. Imagine if you went out and bought the biggest Hummer you could find. How much would you be hurting now? Natural gas is the same thing. Case closed.
Great article by a supergenius.
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