When I was a freshman at the University of Rochester, I took a tour of the school’s laser fusion lab. Mostly underground, the facility featured a football field of light amplifiers and mirrors culminating in a bombardment chamber in which was situated a target pellet containing deuterium and tritium. They only ran the thing at night so it wouldn’t soak up all the city’s electricity. It took more power to produce a fusion reaction than they got out of it.

I was duly impressed with the scale and goals of the place. The graduate student leading us around said we would have fusion power plants in 20 years.

I said, “No way.”

He looked at me as if I were a bug, and I probably did have bug-like tendencies. But my father was a nuclear engineer, and I knew first hand how long it took to design, build and license fission plants, which was a well established technology. Fusion plants? Forget about it.

This was in 1982.

Fusion is the power of the future, and it always will be - which is too bad, because I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov, and I took it as a given we would have flying cars and nuclear reactors the size of walnuts.

However, I am happy to say that I have lived to see the power of the future, and it is solar. I know the power of the future is here today because people are building companies with the expectation of making lots of money from it.

Although I am a sucker for big power towers and molten salt, the everyday awesomeness of distributed generation (DG) solar power is dawning on me. The technology is well established, and siting issues are trivial compared to many other types of power plants, meaning that they can be placed where the electricity is needed most. The infrastructure and interconnect issues with DG solar are real enough, but if you take a step back, they are relatively straightforward.

When people talk about the problems of DG solar, these sound more administrative than technical. Requirements for power conditioning and grid management exist. The solutions are known and have even been enacted, as in the case in Germany. California is likely to follow suit with its own grid policies. Eventually, states will sort out net-energy metering, possibly to nobody’s satisfaction, but it will be sorted out.

The power of the future is all around us today. S