How can we encourage people to use wind and solar energy all over the world?

Answer 1

Firstly, we need to improve the designs, costs, reliability, durability and longevity. Another factor is restrictive governmental red tape associated with wind technologies.

There are many solar technologies which are being used commercially, but in reality, the average person just cannot afford the current solar panels, let alone converters, storage batteries, meters, controllers, maintenance and installation costs to adequately say that they can be self sufficient. Solar cells and storage batteries degenerate, and often fail faster than is specified.

Wind power is a viable and cheaper alternative, watt for watt, and similar to solar when the sun don't shine, the equivalent is when the wind don't blow. But wind power is such an abused market these days with the production of cheap, nasty, unreliable and unsuitable hardware currently flooding the world. New technological breakthroughs in wind and solar are already appearing, but at what cost is this new advancement?

Other than Grid Connected systems, the storage of electrical power needs to be drastically improved and also be at least 75% cheaper and also much more environmentally friendly. I can envision lead acid batteries being a more of an environmental threat than used car tyres if we all used storage batteries, regardless of their recyclable qualities.

So, to encourage these technologies we need to improve the quality, lower the price and improve storage.

Until then, this is still nothing more than an idealistic fad. The people who really need it are usually the people that can't afford it.