Solar Energy is Great, Burning Food for Fuel is Stupid

Another pretty good book I have read recently is "Earth: The Sequel" by Fred Krupp.  A somewhat leftist treatise of many different alternative energy options that exist in the world and where they are in current development.  There are some exceedingly viable and attractive energy options out there that are just barely out of reach as far as commercial deployment cost.  One of my favorites that I think really needs some more attention is distributed solar panels, i.e. we all have solar panels on our roofs.  This really makes sense to me for several reasons:

1. The "fuel" is free and won't diminish significantly for another 5 billion years, no matter how many people are using it, nor how much they use.
2. Peak generation time is during sunlight hours, which just happens to be peak usage time as well.
3. Terrorists (or natural disasters) will find it much harder to disable our power network if every building is a production unit.
4. With the panels on the roof, they really make sort of a "shield" against the sun, so my house absorbs much less energy, and the energy need for cooling goes down.
5. The roof is really useless real estate anyway, you can't use it for anything, if we can get something useful out of all that area, we may as well.

There are of course some drawbacks that need resolution:

1. The cost of implementation is grotesque, a 30 year payoff is simply not viable in my opinion.  We need to get that down to a 5-10 year payoff and many more people in today's ever mobile society (moving from house to house, about every 6 years) will be willing to pay the cost and do it.
2. The current "excess storage system" is that the excess power goes on the public grid and the power company pays you for it, thereby offsetting the cost of the power you use at night or during other non-generation times.  We need a long-term reliable local storage system.  Something like a bunch of batteries stored in the attic or buried in a vault near the house that does not require frequent access because they are some kind of maintenance free battery that can last through 12,000 cycles (30 years would be ~11,000 cycles).
3. Even with great local storage, we still need the public grid.  Solar generation is just too finicky, unless some major efficiency advances are made to solar technology (I'm talking 85% or better energy conversion), we just cannot generate enough electricity to power everything, all day long.  It snows where I live, and the roof is completely covered for at least 4 months of the year.  If you think I'm going up there to scrape the snow off the panels after every storm like I do the driveway, yer crazy!
4. We have to come up with a combination of materials that are plentiful and cheap to make the panels out of.  Once the above problems are resolved, millions of people will be flocking to the Solar Store to get their system.  We must take care that such a run on the materials will not impoverish some other industry or become self-defeating due to the high cost of the (now) rare and hard to obtain materials. 
   

A perfect current example of problem #4 is corn ethanol.  A commodity that was cheap and abundant, depleted by the overwhelming demand of energy production.  Furthermore, because of all the ridiculous subsidies on corn ethanol, corn is now a much more lucrative agricultural product, so farmers are planting fuel corn instead of animal feed corn, which drives up the cost of meat; planting fuel corn instead of human edible corn, driving up the cost of corn to eat; planting fuel corn instead of wheat, driving up the price of wheat and creating a worldwide shortage of the Staff of Life, which drives up the cost of nearly every other kind of food; planting fuel corn instead of following the scientific plan of crop rotation and letting land fallow, causing the land itself to become depleted.

One of the people interviewed for the book "Earth: The Sequel" was Bernie, who owns some kind of ranch getaway in Alaska, and is constantly searching for ways to make his ranch run on something other than the diesel generators that most out of the way places in Alaska run on.  He says it perfectly with respect to corn ethanol, here is a sound clip from the Recorded Books Audio version of the book:

http://www.advancemfgtech.com/burn_food_stupid.mp3