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Power Science

Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth In Less Than a Decade (bloomberg.com) 504

Solar power is now cheaper than coal in some parts of the world. In less than a decade, it's likely to be the lowest-cost option almost everywhere, reports Bloomberg. From the article: In 2016, countries from Chile to the United Arab Emirates broke records with deals to generate electricity from sunshine for less than 3 cents a kilowatt-hour, half the average global cost of coal power. Now, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Mexico are planning auctions and tenders for this year, aiming to drop prices even further. Taking advantage: Companies such as Italy's Enel SpA and Dublin's Mainstream Renewable Power, who gained experienced in Europe and now seek new markets abroad as subsidies dry up at home. Since 2009, solar prices are down 62 percent, with every part of the supply chain trimming costs. That's help cut risk premiums on bank loans, and pushed manufacturing capacity to record levels. By 2025, solar may be cheaper than using coal on average globally, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The solar supply chain is experiencing "a Wal-Mart effect" from higher volumes and lower margins, according to Sami Khoreibi, founder and chief executive officer of Enviromena Power Systems. The speed at which the price of solar will drop below coal varies in each country. Places that import coal or tax polluters with a carbon price, such as Europe and Brazil, will see a crossover in the 2020s, if not before. Countries with large domestic coal reserves such as India and China will probably take longer.
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Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth In Less Than a Decade

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:45AM (#53597243)

    What about at night?

    • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:49AM (#53597277) Homepage
      You need some method of storing energy gathered during the day.
      • by Rob Lister ( 4174831 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:53AM (#53597303)
        Is the cost of this method included in the $0.03/kwh?
        • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:23AM (#53597507) Homepage

          No. But it's not prohibitively expensive, generally adding a couple cents per kWh to your total costs**. The amount of peaking/storage required depends on a lot of factors, including climate, diversity of generation (e.g. wind + solar has much higher statistical reliability than just wind or solar, as they tend to run counter to each other), and the amount of long distance transmission (HVDC/HVAC), for 1) geographic diversity of weather, 2) sharing common peaking resources, and 3) timeshifting of loads/generation. A recent study in nature estimates that a nationwide US HVDC network would cost 0,3 cents per kWh but save 1,1 cents per kWh in generation/peaking hardware costs. The cost of peaking (and type) depends on location. Hydroelectric turbine house uprating makes for very cheap peaking where available (transforming baseload hydro into peaking hydro). Pumped hydro can be affordable, but only in limited areas. Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade. In the US, where natural gas is cheap and plentiful, the vast majority of new peaking capacity is NG. In countries where natural gas is expensive, other fossil fuels are used.

          Also note that up to a certain level of penetration, solar actually does more to help remove variable generation (load following plants) than it imposes (peaking), as daytime loads are higher than night, and are higher on sunny days than cloudy days.

          ** - A peaker that's used only several hours a year may charge $2/kWh or so... but you're not buying a lot of kWh from it. A load following plant that's used a bunch every day may only charge $0,1/kWh... but you're buying a lot of kWh from it. It all depends on what sort of power you're needing to buy.

          • Rei mentioned a lot of interesting factors. The bottom line, the tldr, is basically:

            We can store energy from afternoon sun for a few hours and use it to cook dinner.
            On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.

            Another HUGE factor is energy needs versus current electricity usage. Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses wi

            • by ranton ( 36917 )

              In summary, evening is okay, cloudy weeks aren't

              Peaking power plants typically run at under 10% utilization year round. During cloudy days these typically natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels. Combine that with the fact that typical solar panels still run at around 20% efficiency with dense cloud cover you could reduce the number of traditional power plants by at least a factor of 10 by replacing them with solar plants. And this is without trying to store electricity as an alternative.

              All of the "pr

              • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @12:15PM (#53598439) Journal

                > natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.

                Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason. That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.

                > All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning

                Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.

                Suppose you just want to be a cheerleader, so you just sing the praises of solar electric, and pretend that it can replace, rather than supplement, other sources. Then you end up encouraging people to think solar is "the answer" and they therefore oppose natural gas and nuclear infrastructure, leaving you stuck burning coal for 50 years longer than necessary. That's what has happened. We could have gotten rid of coal in the US by 1975. We're still burning a shit-ton of coal, which spews radiative substances directly into the air, because rather than talking honestly about an energy mix that actually works, half the population decided to romanticize solar and wind, and avoid mentioning in what ways they don't work so well. If, 50 years ago, the leaders of Greenpeace said what you said above (use solar when you can, natural gas and nuclear when you can't), we wouldn't be burning coal today.

                • >> natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.

                  >Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason.
                  >That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap
                  >when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.

                  Are you including solar in your mix with nuclear and natural gas? I hope not, because nuclear

              • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @12:34PM (#53598605) Homepage

                A fun thing about solar thermal plants is that it's easy to integrate a peaker directly into them, using natural gas to generate steam when there's not enough solar heat and demand is high. SEGS was the first large scale plant I'm aware that combined both solar and natural gas, although there's a lot of them now.

            • by nasch ( 598556 )

              Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?

              • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:59AM (#53598287) Journal

                > Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?

                Unfortunately they don't produce more power when the wind is stronger than normal, and as you mentioned most have to be shut down for storm winds.

                That sucks because the power of the wind is proportional to the CUBE of it's velocity. Wind at 40 MPH has 64 times as much power as wind at 10 MPH, but we can't harvest all that extra power. Instead, power captured by turbines is basically capped at their normal production, so power output only falls with lower wind speeds, it doesn't increase with higher speeds.

                This is really frustrating, being unable to capture most of the available power on windy days, but it's unlikely to change. The difference in the amount of force applied to the turbine and it's parts is really significant. Imagine trying to build a keyboard that works with light touches on the keys, and also works well when you bang it with a hammer.

            • On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.

              Doesn't have to be. When you have a big storm that knocks down the power grid would you rather have some power for part of the day or no power for any of the day? Having solar cells on your roof insulates you from some of those problems. Furthermore solar cells still work even when the weather is bad and it is cloudy. Not as well of course but it doesn't have to be a bright clear day for them to provide some utility.

              That said it's a moot point. Not like the grid is going away and you have the option of

            • On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.

              You're doing it wrong. And "cloudy" is not the same as "solar plant produces too little energy"

              If you own a house, your system can cover your house for quite some time. And should. Weeks is not an unreasonable design goal, particularly with an energy-efficient home. Also, solar still produces energy when overcast [youtube.com]; just not as muc

          • Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade.

            That would be great, I hope that happens.

        • We can still reap the benefits of a hybrid approach Solar by Day, other sources by night.
          Normally we use less power at night. So we can still have a benefit.

          • But don't you also have to pay to keep those facilities running? Isn't the 3 cents/kwh just added on top?
            • by Rei ( 128717 )

              If your "peaker" was a high capital source like nuclear, yes. But nuclear's not used for peaking, fossil plants are. And the majority of the costs of a fossil plant are the fuel, not the capital costs for the plant. A fossil peaker costs about $1/W in capital costs, compared to about $1,50/W for a new solar or wind plant. How much you can share that peaker depends greatly on your particular power environment, anywhere from 1:1 (every watt of nameplate wind/solar needs a watt of backup) to a tiny fractio

        • Is the externalized cost of pollution included in the price of coal-generated electricity?

          We need to start seriously understanding ALL the costs, not just the design, manufacturing, and distribution costs.

          That's the sign of a mature civilization, IMHO.
    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      Worst case scenario you can use natural gas then (or other renewable options like hydro and geothermal). Best case scenario is battery technology is also cheap enough that it becomes more widespread. This isn't a tough question.

      • by LTIfox ( 4701003 )
        Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?

        That's why solar _must_ be cheap for markets to clear - one needs a backup to use it. That backup (might be idle capacity or additional long distance power lines or whatever) costs money.
        • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:20AM (#53597911)

          Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?

          Peaking power plants, or power plants that generally only run when there is high demand, are generally gas turbines that burn natural gas. It is common for peaker plants to run only a few hours a day with well under 10% capacity. This is not a new problem. Electricity storage continues to become cheaper and as time goes on there will be less need for these types of power plants, but we have them now and could build more if they help us transition to more renewable energy sources.

          • by LTIfox ( 4701003 )
            My point wasn't that this is an unsolvable problem. My point was that it is an expense. Peaker plants produce _horrendously_ expensive electricity. To compensate for that solar absolutely must be substantially cheaper than traditional power supplies in order to make it worth the trouble.
        • Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?

          Using fossil fuels sources and not forcing them to pay the full cost of the pollution and carbon they generate is even more expensive in the long run. Fossil fuels are what should be the alternative break-glass-in-case-of-emergency fuel source. They're useful but dirty and we should be trying to minimize their use as fast as possible.

          That's why solar _must_ be cheap for markets to clear - one needs a backup to use it.

          Every source of power needs backup. Powerplants of every description have to be idled for maintenance now and then. Storms knock out parts of the grid. Demand sometimes ex

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 )
      In general, we use much less power during night-time., but some solar systems (in particular, solar-thermal systems) provide power a few hours into the night. We're also getting better with storage and transmission also which helps, because one can then not only store solar power for use when the sun is not out, but also move power from areas where it is still out to where it is. High-voltage DC is really great for this, and we're also starting to have superconducting transmission lines like the Holbrook li
      • by Nutria ( 679911 )

        the fact that we have superconducting power lines falls into the ...

        completely impractical fantasy realm.

        From the Wikipedia article:
        a 600 meter long tunnel
        a 13,000 U.S. gallons (49,000 L) liquid nitrogen storage tank
        a Brayton Helium refrigerator,
        a number of cryostats

        Now run that across 200,000 miles (heck, let's chop it by 67% because of better efficiency: 66,000 miles) of transmission wire: that's 2.3 billion gallons of liquid nitrogen, and certainly more helium than we have access to.

        • No one is suggesting that we run superconducting lines everywhere. They work best in specific types of locations where the total amount of electric power going through a very tiny area is very small; that's why they choose to use superconducting lines for Tres Amigas. Holbrook itself was more experimental but it works fine. Note also that the refrigeration equipment actually scales pretty well, so the amount of helium you need scales at a much less than linear rate, so even if one did want to make continent
        • by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:44AM (#53598149)

          Impractical fantasy you say? There is also a 1 km liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting installation in Essen that has been working just fine as a part of Essen power grid for several years already. This installation has replaced a 100kV AC powerline. No helium was needed and not that much liquid nitrogen either thanks to a good insulation. It just works.The reason for that installation was a different one, though - there was no room left in the underground channels for additional power lines and that superconducting cable transfers 5 times as much power as a normal copper cable with the same diameter.

    • What about at night?

      There is always sunlight somewhere on Earth.

    • by higuita ( 129722 )

      In Portugal, the excess energy from solar (during day) or wind (usually during night) is used to pump water upstream back to hydroelectric dams reservoirs, back to potential energy, to be used later, when there is no enough wind or solar energy. Of course, like any solution, it have its limits and all countries know that they have to have several energy sources in parallel, so when one is weak, the remaining ones should fill the gap... Even coal, if for some reason the a boiler stop working, you have to fe

    • by careysub ( 976506 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:46AM (#53597683)

      What about at night?

      Fortunately the wind blows at night. Here is a wind resources map for the United States [nrel.gov]. Lots and lots of consistently windy areas. Wind is cheaper than solar currently and in nine out the ten nations that top the renewable energy charts, there is more wind capacity than solar, and this is likely to remain the case.

      With the use of high voltage DC transmission lines (a technology that has been in use since 1930) electricity can be shipped coast to coast with minor losses. 800 KV lines can transport electricity from one coast to the other with about the same losses as existing grids, about 6%. Constructing a national long distance electrical "highway" makes most of the "problems" perceived with renewable energy disappear. Just like now, there is not going to be just one source of power in the future, so solar does not have to do it all.

      Even is solar "only" supplies the daytime peak load, this is half [mpoweruk.com] of the total electricity demand. In North America it is convenient that 40% of the entire U.S. population lives on the Eastern Seaboard, so that when it has its evening demand peak, the sunny west is three hours earlier and would still be producing a lot of solar electricity. Then there are proven power storage technologies like pumped water storage. Just considering existing pumped storage capacity, and capacity expansion that has applied for permits, we are looking at 76.7 GW of PS capacity [inel.gov] in the U.S. which is 7.5% of U.S. peak electricity demand.

    • What about at night?

      Ever heard of a battery? Plus just because you use solar during the day doesn't preclude you from using other sources of energy when it isn't available.

      One of the best things about solar is that solar is particularly useful for air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak costs for those systems are highest when the sun shines the strongest for obvious reasons. A solar array can flatten those costs out very nicely. Honestly it's a mystery to me why every grocery store doesn't have a solar array on their roo

  • What kind of solar are they talking about? Photovoltaic? Surely this doesn't include storage or converting to AC does it? The article doesn't say.

    • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:00AM (#53597345)

      I suspect as solar becomes ubiquitous we may see more DC options.

      Photo voltaic has become very compelling plus we don't fund people who want to kill us when we buy photo voltaic so that's always a plus.

      But molten salt is pretty compelling for solar as well.

      Coal is already uneconomical compared to other resources even without considering the pollution cleanup costs. Old coal plants didn't have to comply to the new pollution laws until last year (well 2015 so I guess now barely two years ago) and were polluting large areas with mercury.

      Nuclear is great as long as you ignore decommissioning and fuel storage and human nature. i.e. humans get sloppier and cut more and more corners over time until something bad happens. I'd feel more comfortable if nuclear were restricted to small (5000 house) self contained plants which didn't even allow humans in the loop and which shut themselves down automatically. And we need to build a breeder reactor to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude. But it has to be crazy secure. As in put it on an army base secure.

      Solar, wind, and tides are the way to go tho. All have minimal cleanup costs, minimal problems on failure, fail by tiny pieces rather than as a whole, and costs are plummeting.

      • And we need to build a breeder reactor to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude.

        No we don't, and it doesn't.

        Currently nuclear waste volume consists of spent fuel rods which can be stored safely and permanently in dry casks. Currently power reactors need a core change every two years, one core load takes 4 dry casks to store. Dry cask storage takes about 25 square meters per cask (with generous "walk around space"), so that load could be stored in 100 square meters. Over a 50 year period this is only 25 fuel rod loads, or 100 casks, taking up 2500 square meters. Throw in all 100 reactor

    • by trg83 ( 555416 )

      I don't mean to pick on you so much as your question, but the limited thinking you demonstrate with mentioning AC exemplifies the self-imposed challenges we face by looking at problems with a limited frame of reference. There is almost nothing in your house that needs to run specifically on AC.

      LED light bulbs run great off low voltage DC, and the lights the new ones produce is fabulous. Almost all your electronics now run on low voltage DC, which means you're facing enormous losses throughout your house th

      • The problem with DC is up/down converting it. The power company uses 12.5KV to run for relatively short distances and it goes up from there. Transmission lines run at a few mil volts. For A/C a relatively simple transformer does the conversion. For DC, it gets very expensive. And it is all about IR losses, and the higher V is, the lower I is.

        • by trg83 ( 555416 )
          You are absolutely right. I should have mentioned I'm an advocate of generating energy where it will be used. I would suggest DC in the home based on a DC-generating energy source at the site.
        • DC to DC power converters have gotten much cheaper and more efficient, it's now cheaper to use DC for everything than AC.
      • by swb ( 14022 )

        The problem with DC branch circuits is the heavy gauge wire needed to keep voltage losses down, and even then you have to ask how much current you want to run via straight DC.

        My guess is that unless there was a major standards push, we'd have a mishmash of DC voltages. The "safe" bet would be DC runs in the wall of 48V (smaller wires) but I would bet much of the time you would be locally down converting that to 12V a lot of the time which would be pretty wasteful.

        This is a major headache on boats now, wher

    • by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:14AM (#53597867) Journal

      What kind of solar are they talking about? Photovoltaic? Surely this doesn't include storage or converting to AC does it? The article doesn't say.

      DC/AC/voltage conversion is semiconductor technology. It has been, and still is, benefiting from Moore's Law.

      A few years back I worked with a networking equipment manufacturer which put at least two (and sometimes three) layers of voltage-conversion regulators (DC/AC/DC) on a board: One to down-convert 48V (needed to get enough power through a few pins to run the power-hungry board), another near the load - because the conversion losses were far less than the resistive losses in the board would have been if the primary converters dropped to the loads' required voltages. I'm currently working with chips that stretch lithium battery life. They cost tens of cents and have efficiencies in the 90s%. AC/DC/AC converters have been in every compact fluorescent for years. Most wall-warts these days, and all laptop cord-bulges, are switching regulators, which is the same basic technology as an inverter. Getting a good sine wave to keep non-electronics loads (like motors) happy is only slightly more complicated than a basic switcher's sawtooth, and the bulk of the complication lives in a simple chip.

      Fifteen years ago a house-sized inverter was in the $5K range. By now the price, like that of home computers, is more determined by the market size and the costs of marketing and fulflillment than the electronics itself. With the generation down to cheaper-than-grid, economies of scale will kick in big time.

      Storage battery performance and potential price breakthroughs are coming so fast that the main problem is whether you can recover a battery plant's cost before the product is obsoleted by something better. Nevertheless, the electric auto industry (and to a lesser extent portable equipment like laptops) is driving the new tech into the market. (Expect a big downside hit on prices and upside hit on availability when Tesla and a couple other battery plants go into production.)

      I don't see any problem with the cost of conversion electronics or storage for nighttime and cloudy weeks inhibiting the deployment of photovoltaic, now that the basic panels are coming into competitive-with-grid prices.

  • "now seek new markets abroad as subsidies dry up at home" Yes, that sounds like solar products are now well on the way to being the cheapest form of power generation. Oh wait, we are talking about exclusive solar contracts in the petrostates? Yeah, I'm sure the market has spoken. Much of the world has demonstrated that nuclear power can be safe, cheap, and effective. Nuclear power should be regulated like the airlines; constant oversight, well regarded industry organs, and responsible, established manufa
    • OK, so just WHERE has nuclear actually worked long term? Ignore Chernobyl and Fukushima for a bit - even with various and disparate types of governments and payment options, civilian nuclear has gone exactly nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, but hardly to the point where it was 'too cheap to meter'. IIRC, that was precisely the terminology that nuclear power adherents were spouting.

      Fission has failed as a significant civilian power source. It is too complex, too dangerous and Capex costs are too high

      • There are only 3 cost effective uses of nuclear power: 1-weapons production, 2-medical isotopes, 3-mobile power. The reason nobody is building nuclear power is because it's crazy to spend $0.25/kwh when oil is $0.05/kwh and solar is $0.06/kwh with batteries.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        OK, so just WHERE has nuclear actually worked long term? Ignore Chernobyl and Fukushima for a bit - even with various and disparate types of governments and payment options, civilian nuclear has gone exactly nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, but hardly to the point where it was 'too cheap to meter'. IIRC, that was precisely the terminology that nuclear power adherents were spouti

        Canada? South Korea? Take your pick. The medical reactor near Ottawa that supplied around 50% of the worlds supply for specific radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment is over 60 years old. The new reactor that was supposed to replace it has had multiple problems...almost all of them due to NIMBY's and environuts complaining about the new reactor. Even about the old reactor -- when they wanted to upgrade and have a 4th safety pump and storage fallback...environmentalists were protesting that. So

    • Do you want a nuclear plant in your community? It doesn't matter how safe it is, nobody wants huge industrial installation in their backyard. The distributed nature of PV solar has a number of other benefits as well - it's much more resilient in case of a natural disaster, it's not a target for terror and cyber attacks, etc, etc. Finally, nuclear is not as cheap as you think. The upfront costs are enormous and cost and schedule overruns are the norm, in other words, it's very risky investment that requires
  • Coal workers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:22AM (#53597497)
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08... [nytimes.com]
    https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

    The only thing is, all of these dumb rednecks desperately want to die early from some kind of coal-related illness. Is there some way we can still make their dream come true, even as solar gets cheaper by the day? What hope is there that they can still die of black lung in mid-life, like they so desperately want? Won't somebody please think of the coal miners?!?!?!?
    • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

      Not really. However, all those mountains they live in would be great places to put big wind turbines. Somebody local has to construct and maintain those things.

      Perhaps it doesn't have quite the glamor of living 8+ hours a day underground breathing coal dust in constant terror of a gas leak or mine collapse, or ripping the entire side of a mountain off to get at the goodies underneath (incidentally drinking the runoff). But it is something.

      • by DogDude ( 805747 )
        There's lots of things they could do and lots of things that could be done in that part of the country. Unfortunately, there seem to be vast swaths of population (ex-coal miners in Appalachia... ex-farmers in the Midwest... ex-factory workers in the Rust Belt, etc.) who seem hell bent on not learning to do anything new, and insisting that the world stop advancing decades ago, or whenever it was that they imagine times were good for them.
  • This is not exactly news. On the one hand, it's true; solar is considerably cheaper than anything else in large swathes of the developing world and has been for a while now. It's only going to get more-so. However, that's only the case if you use it to offset grid usage; a complete off-the-grid solar system, with enough storage to see you through the night and the odd cloudy day, is still going to cost you more over its life than the equivalent grid supply. The costs are heading down, and it's not far o

  • Just let electricity prices vary more dramatically throughout the day depending on supply. People will soon enough adapt. I can remember overnight storage heaters full of bricks that were heated with less expensive off-peak electricity, people will install their own in-home or in-community storage facilities when they get sick of paying the premium for non-solar electricity.
  • Seriously you're Americans. What's with all this hippy commie renewable bullshit. Burn the fucking coal. It can't hurt anything or anyone.
  • by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:37AM (#53598087)

    Solar has ALWAYS been the future, but you don't punish consumers by forcing more expensive energy on them when it isn't ready.

    Solar will get here. It may be here in 10 years. It may take 20 or 30 or even 50. But it will get here.

    Until then, use the cheapest energy possible, the best energy for the application, and the best energy source available for that region. For example, Africa needs coal. Now. However, people who hate coal are punishing Africans.

  • We've managed to get our puppet government installed, so there will be no crisis for the fossil fuel industry any time soon. You'll have plenty of time to move your personal interests out of those companies while staying below the radar of what regulators may still be on the job later this year.

    - Your friends, The Fossil Fuel Lobby
  • The future is solar but when Hillary talked about the economic boon from solar, she fails to mention all of those brand new solar panels will be built in China.

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes

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