Fuel Cell Performance

>>The system still works in the winter if there is no
>>supplementation, people still can take showers (though less
>>often), they still live in a non-freezing house (though more like
>>50-60F), they can still use communications and lights (just half
>>as often) -- in all cases they can do conventional activities but
>>just less often or with less comfort if supplementary electricity
>>or fuel is not available for those three months. This is a very
>>different worst case winter scenario than evacuation to somewhere
>>warm as is the case now or in an SPS future if the supply services
>>or grid fails for whatever reasons.
>
> Or they could live in a cave and use even less electricity.
>
> I must say that I'm glad you're not my insurance actuary. If you
> believe that suffering every day for 3 months is better than a twice
> a decade evacuation from my home because of a severe storm then
> you'd be driving risk assessment departments nuts.
>
> To throw out another far-out scenario, when all your neighbors are
> being evacuted because of the snow storm you'll have to get up on
> the snow-covered and icy roof and shovel that snow off so that you
> can have enough power to boil some water and your family can huddle
> around the radiant heat given off and have enough electricity to
> call the emergency services to come and help you with the broken
> back you got from slipping off the icy roof.
>
> Yeah, this makes sense!

In such a scenario (massive snowstorm placing six feet deep of snow over
PV panels), people might use their backup system (like propane
cogeneration) to avoid getting on the roof until the weather improves.
Also, PV panels typically generate heat and so would melt the snow off
of them. And if this was a really big issue long term PV panels could
have heaters under them or built in or people could just use a snow rake
or even invent a roof robot that cleans them off safely. These problems
you raise are all solveable with off the shelf solutions or simple
extrapolations of current technology which can be deployed incrementally
starting now.

The point is we got into all this from looking at how to spend $87
billion for US national security. I'm proposing an approach that is
inherently secure and can be implemented now in part and improved later;
you are proposing with SSPS+Grid something that in twenty years is still
inherently insecure and has to be propped up with a strong central
government and the military, and if that security fails (terrorist
attacks against the grid in winter) will potentially lead to thousands
or more of casualties from hypothermia, as the government likely as not
will say the power will be back in days even if they know it won't and
no one will evacuate until it is too late -- such as when the Bush
admisinstration had the EPA lie about air quality in Manhattan
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823-03.htm
immediately after the 911 attacks. Besides, where are million of people
in the North East going to evacuate to? Extrapolation from local storm
damage doesn't work when the whole grid has failed everywhere by damage
induced by an active and continuing adversary (say a group who has
hacked the computers governing the Grid, hit the major pipelines in the
US, boobytrapped things for workers, spread low level radioactive waste
by taking out a big nuke plant in an area, etc. -- the sorts of things
outline twenty years ago as possible in the book _Brittle Power_).
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid1011.php
Or see a more contemporary comments:
http://www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/brittle-power.htm
"The blackouts in North America and London and the southeast show how
vulnerable we are to equipment failure, system overload or terrorist
attack. Indeed in both New York and London the reaction on the street
was that it was a terrorist attack. The irony is that we spend billions
of dollars on attacking Iraq, impose Draconian security and civil rights
clampdowns in the name of homeland security, and yet do nothing about
our decrepit power supply systems either in terms of system upgrades,
redundancy, regulation or diversity of supply."

--Paul Fernhout