Last edited Tue Mar 6, 2012, 12:33 AM - Edit history (1)
Going viral means becoming wildly popular in a short period of time. Something renewables do not qualify as. The market has been growing reasonably as the technology matures and incentives/rebates are available to fund installations, though there are more that its fair share of hucksters in it.
As for the funding structure in CA, it is a declining subsidy program of which I have taken considerable advantage. Malibu is not what I would use for sample community. Heavily transient and lots of renters. Look for landed gentry kind of places.
My colleague has been following the prepper trends for quite some time as to its impact on the social fabric. An outgrowth of that has been more people either prepared or actually dropping off the grid and going to renewables, a significant retreat from the commons. The latest group to get interesting in prepping is the really wealthy. They have their own retreats, can easily afford to stockpile, and go independent of utilities. It is starting to make some inroads and there are clearly some social impacts. When you no longer need power from the grid, you quit paying for the grid. That saddles the older, poorer areas with older power plants and no way to fund them.
It will be interesting to see how the electric utilities are allowed to handle that if it becomes an issue. A precedent may be water where many of utilities moved from a quantity model to a connection model in terms of the majority of revenue as serious conservation took hold.
Again, this is a colleague;s view more than my own. She is coming at it from non-technical POV, and it may have some merit. Those with the means can take advantage of the emerging technology and effectively dump the rest of the burden on those less well off. While it is reasonable to expect some of that to happen, how wide spread it is and how it is handled remains to be seen.
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