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.
What about at night? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about at night?
Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about at night? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
In summary, evening is okay, cloudy weeks aren't (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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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
Depends if you want to solve the problems or cheer (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
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>> 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
Re:In summary, evening is okay, cloudy weeks aren' (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?
Unfortunately, no. Wind cube law vs structure (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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.
Yeah, it sucks (Score:3)
> It seems like stronger wind = faster spinning = more electricity.
Yeah stronger wind = a LOT more power, and could be a LOT more electricity, if you had infinitely strong, infinitely light materials with no friction.
> Are they designed to only generate power at a specific RPM or something?
Yeah they are designed to produce power most of the time, meaning they operate at the lowest normal wind speed. All the parts, from the bearings to the wire gauges etc are designed for that low-normal speed. To wor
Ps turbine RPM limited by transonic tip speeds (Score:4, Interesting)
> faster spinning = more electricity.
Along with mechanical considerations, another issue with increasing RPM is transonic effects at certain points along the blade. The tips of the blades currently move at nearly 200 MPH. That means airflow at certain points alomg the airfoil is probably close 250- 300 MPH relative to the blade. At 500 MPH (mach 0.7) things start getting real weird, there are a lot of problems. So much so that it was once believed that going faster than mach 1 was impossible. It turns out that planes can fly at mach 1.3, but the range between mach 0.7 and mach 1.2 is a bitch. All of that to say, you can't allow the blades to spin twice as fast because then transonic effects ruin your day.
Moot point (Score:2)
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
Cloudy weeks don't have to be a problem (Score:3)
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
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Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade.
That would be great, I hope that happens.
Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Interesting)
Batteries have been a decade away from a major breakthrough for the past 40 years.
The major breakthrough came in the 90s with the advent of the cell phone. Suddenly there was a huge market incentive for investing into battery research to maximize power density. That is why we have 200+ mile range on electric cars now, rather than the 30-70 mile range they could reach back then.
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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.
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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
Re:What about at night? (Score:5, Interesting)
The odds of the weather across all of North America being cloudy are virtually nonexistent. Power systems don't ever guarantee 100% uptime (not today, not in the future), because that involves planning against events that are finite but absurdly improbable. You plan for whatever 99,9+% uptime targets that you deem appropriate, with plans for how to fail gracefully. A single front does not stretch the entire width and height of North America. But nonetheless, diversity in power sources is good. Low pressure systems tend to bring clouds, but they also bring wind - just like how wind peaks at night, in contrast to solar's daytime peak. Also, peak solar seasons vary a bit from region to region, while wind seasonal peaks vary greatly from region to region (in the US, the west coast has a summer peak, while the central and eastern US have a winter peak).
Don't take my word that you can achieve statistically significant uptime without unrealistic peaking costs - read any of the studies on the subject. There've been a lot of them. It requires no new tech and no storage - although those have the potential to make things even cheaper and easier.
Beyond peaking and storage, you have entire industries where their costs are predominantly driven by electricity costs. Such industries are often quite willing to engage in curtailment agreements with power companies in exchange for cheaper rates. Which basically doubles as peaking. Here in Iceland, for example, we have aluminum and silicon smelters that import all of their raw materials, and export almost all of their products; it's worth it to ship everything to and from a remote island just for the cheap power. And boy do they gobble it up - even the smallest of the aluminum smelters uses more power than all homes and businesses combined. And beyond time-shifting of entire industries, there's timeshifting for particular hardware units in other industries. For example, chillers rarely run 24/7, and can also be timeshifted.
I'll reiterate that I think diversity is important. Picture a 100% solar world in which you have even intercontinental power transmission, ultra-high voltage DC doing hops of thousands of kilometers at a time. All of North America interconnected, running into Siberia and China from Alaska, to South America through Central America, and to Europe through Greenland and then Iceland (where there's already a lot of prep work underway for power lines to the UK). You have the whole planet equallizing you out and timeshifting - virtually no peaking/storage at all required. All well and good!.... until a major volcano goes off. When Laki here went off in 1783, the huge quantities of gases it kicked out altered the global weather so much that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans. Not from clouds, but a global stratospheric haze layer. There was plenty of wind that year, mind you, but very little sun! Being single-source dependent leaves you vulnerable. Regardless of what that source is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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All forms of power need backup (Score:3)
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
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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.
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Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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What about at night?
There is always sunlight somewhere on Earth.
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"It's high noon somewhere in the world."
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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
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Are you somehow implying that having coal/coal redundancy is different than solar/hydro redundancy?
We run nuclear/hydro redundancy in my area. Are we doing it wrong?
Re:What about at night? (Score:5, Informative)
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 it? (Score:3)
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
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When you burn coal or gas, it doesn't turn magically directly into electricity. The heat of combustion is applied to an intermediary medium (such as steam) that then runs the generators.
Why is it that everybody thinks that the only way to use solar energy is direct from collector to powerlines??????
Burning gas directly drives turbines (Score:2)
When you burn natural gas in a gas turbine, which is I think routinely done in the USA, the burning gas/air mix directly spins a gas turbine. There is thus no intermediary medium as you claim.
That is one of the reasons gas is cheap to use. There's simply less capital involved in handling the intermediary medium. No boiler, steam generator, steam turbine, condenser, heat exchange.
https://powergen.gepower.com/r... [gepower.com]
--PM
Re:What about at night? (Score:4, Informative)
Oddly enough cock-womble appears to have the march on you. The UK at least uses a lot more power at night during the winter. See http://www.gridwatch.templar.c... [templar.co.uk] As ever a mixture of power sources is likely to provide the best results globally.
Re: What about at night? (Score:2)
"*I do not work for Scrabble"
Sure.... that's what all the darn Scrabble lobbyists say.
What type of solar (Score:2)
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.
Re:What type of solar (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Re:What type of solar (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't like to reply to ACs, but your feedback seems meant to be legitimate, so I will assume you're not trolling. Even though the *facepalm* is a bit presumptive. I've clearly spent a lot more time thinking about this topic than you have.
I honestly can't imagine what you have in your house that would reach hundreds of amps on the proposed DC bus. Note that I am not advocating the DC bus running all the heavy appliance loads, but rather only all lighting and consumer electronics loads, something like 1 kW at 24V DC would seem adequate. Telecom has used 48V DC for a long time, so there is some precedent that could be leveraged for designs in this area.
Furnaces and ovens could easily be placed on exterior walls offering limited loss paths to the storage system. These are design changes that would be not dissimilar to those that happened as coal furnaces were replaced by electric ones. People adapted both existing homes and new designs.
I think the environmental concerns driving alternative energy are mostly overblown, but I'd like to see power generation at the home in the name of self-sufficiency and to decrease the global conflicts over energy.
Re:What type of solar (Score:4, Interesting)
You're overlooking the simplicity to the solution. You put the batteries IN the oven, dryer, washing machine, etc. They charge slowly during daylight, and consume from their own batteries on demand, and can have very short distance conductors large enough to consume whatever amperage the batteries can supply with little to no loss. They are already large appliances so accommodating batteries of significant size wouldn't be a problem. If the industry could adapt a standardized battery module that would roll into the bottom of the unit for easy replacement then so much the better.
Re:What type of solar (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Beep Beep Beep (Score:2)
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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
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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
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Coal workers (Score:4, Insightful)
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?!?!?!?
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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.
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Not news (Score:2)
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
pricing (Score:2)
Just Burn Coal (Score:2)
Solar has ALWAYS been the future, but (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solar has ALWAYS been the future, but (Score:5, Insightful)
>> people who hate coal are punishing ....
Yes, and rightly so, because burning coal is literally destroying our ecology and ultimately, planet.
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Are you seriously asserting that dung-burning in developing nations somehow produces more pollution and CO2 than burning coal?
Fuck me, the people who want to keep digging it out of the ground just keep reaching further and further and making ever more moronic claims to justify their position.
Coal is dead.
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Calm down, everyone. (Score:2)
- Your friends, The Fossil Fuel Lobby
Let's be careful when talking economics (Score:2)
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.
Re:But .. but but but. Bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)
> Nat Gas is the cheapest.
Natural gas is highly subsidized, and even still no company has pulled a profit on natural gas since 2008.
Plus the costs, which can be huge, are externalized onto taxpayers and landowners.
Take Pennsylvania, which made $204 million on taxing shale, but road damage from nat. gas was over $3.5 bn. That's just one state.
Plus, many natural gas companies have stopped paying landowners en masse. What happens when their class action lawsuits start to come through?
Natural gas being cheap is a short term aberration.
For reference:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
Re:But .. but but but. Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Nat Gas is the cheapest.
Natural gas is highly subsidized, and even still no company has pulled a profit on natural gas since 2008.
Plus the costs, which can be huge, are externalized onto taxpayers and landowners.
Take Pennsylvania, which made $204 million on taxing shale, but road damage from nat. gas was over $3.5 bn. That's just one state.
Plus, many natural gas companies have stopped paying landowners en masse. What happens when their class action lawsuits start to come through?
Natural gas being cheap is a short term aberration.
For reference: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
I've been waiting for this to happen for a few years. The numbers are just getting more and more red. Even the Financial Times is comparing the shale industry to the dotcom bubble. The bit about crappy shale stock being sold by the cargo pallet to insurance companies and pensions funds sounds worryingly like the mortgage bubble. People are openly talking about similarities between the housing market crash and this shale bubble except, the shale bubble is 'only' 1/4 the size of the mortgage bubble. Well tell that to the people who will lose a large portion of their pension. Oops, the free market did a boo boo, nothing personal just business! Cold comfort if you ask me.
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This is the reason people should encourage their retirement funds and accounts to divest from fossil fuel assets. In 30 years they could all be worthless and the drop when it comes will be so fast no one will be able to react to it.
Re:But .. but but but. Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: But .. but but but. Bullshit. (Score:2)
Free to the state unless the operator spills and goes bankrupt without insurance. Just require insurance.
Re: But .. but but but. Bullshit. (Score:4, Funny)
Natural gas just safely floats away into the atmosphere and is biologically disposed of by Nature.
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Zero Hedge? The site run by "Tyler Durden" that predicts multiple times a day that the US economy is about to crash?
I learned about Zero Henge in 2009 when they guaranteed that the US financial system was about to have a "complete economic collapse" [zerohedge.com]. Needless to say, this never happened. But the article scared me for a couple years, until I realized that it, and the site as a whole, are full of shit. It's time you realized this too.
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Solar requires batteries, unlike coal, gas. (There are "pump batteries" which refill dams during daylight hours and thus act as a battery to store power for nighttime use).
I like solar energy but there are additional issues besides mere production.
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You should go back and read the post you replied to. I specifically described that storage is an associated and recurring cost with battery-driven solar plants.
Also, solar does not require batteries. That's just the most common way to do it. For instance, the solar system in my radio trailer [flickr.com] is 100% ultracap based. No recurring costs of any kind in the power systems. Right now, a home system requires a lot of space for such a thing, and new ultracaps are still pretty expensive (I haunt Ebay for used ones, t
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Secondly, in a hail-prone area, you use appropriate protection with the panels. It hailed all over my panels last year, big hail, too, and there's not a scratch on any of them.
About 4-5 years ago, I lost 2 of my panels to softball-sized hail. But they were 23 year old (Arco) panels. Newer panels are built to withstand a much bigger hit.
I've never heard of "appropriate protection" for panels that spend their life facing the sky. Best protection I had was my insurance policy. The same storm also dented the hell out of my steel roof.
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And also for coal, someone has to pay for the land and subsidy. Coal doesn't fall from the sky (other than sunlight, which literally does so), it has to be mined, and beside the coal mines you need tracks or roads to transport the coal to the plants. So Coal is also a big co
Re:No subsidy - then how much? (Score:5, Informative)
China knows about real costs, and they are building new coal plants at about 1 a week.
China is overbuilding unnecessary coal plants for the same reason they are overbuilding everywhere else. Cheap money and perverse incentives. Their coal plants are already operating at below 50% capacity. Their coal consumption has dropped for the past two years and the drop is accelerating.
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'Perverse Economic Incentives' would make a good porn movie title.
China's bubble is the elephant in the room. Until it pops, keep your finances very conservative. It is time to preserve value, not chase growth.
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Except that your analysis is not based on reality [klimapolitik.com.mx]. Most of China's growth to 2030 is expected to be renewables. And the unexpectedly fast drop in the price of solar since that Bloomberg energy analysis [theaustralian.com.au] was conducted (2013) will only be expected to increase that share.
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Competing techs don't have this little term in their cost formulas too?
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Indeed, and that's exactly what China does. Their HVDC / HVAC lines run almost exclusively from the interior to the coast, bringing power from worthless land to the power hungry urban centres.
Re:yes, and that's why... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the government were to "stay out of it", the oil, gas and nuclear industries would close up shop tomorrow.
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Re:yes, and that's why... (Score:4, Informative)
Based on the facts of the system. Fossil fuels are subsidized at rates that no other industry achieves. Oil alone nets close to 5 billion dollars in incentives and tax benefits and this doesn't even count underpaying the tax payers for the oil by as much as 50%. Coal is even worse, massive subsidies, free use of federal land and resources and often paying the taxpayers less than a penny per ton for the coal. Nuclear wouldn't even exist without the Federal loan guarantees and the federal government backstoping the disaster insurance. That doesn't count the tax cuts and subsidies the industry receives.
Solar and Wind receive two tax breaks, an accelerated depreciation schedule and a tax credit that goes away in 2020 for wind and 2024 for solar with both credits scaling down yearly until their final year.
Compared fairly the tax credits to fossil fuels over the past 50 years could have paid to replace the entire electricity gird a dozen times over. Fossil fuels receive more government subsidies than any other industry.
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Wow, variability in the power grid, we've never had to deal with that unsolvable problem before!
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USA is not the all WORLD!! This story talks about solar cost in the WORLD!!
Now go back to your hole and take Trump and Hillary with you.
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Coal is quite expensive and inflexible. It takes literally decades to open a coal mine, extract the coal and close it up again. And it is only feasible if there is either someone constantly requesting the coal, or if you have large storage capacities for unused coal, or if some governmental body pays subsidies for the time you can't sell the coal, and thus have to stop mining.
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IMHO, flywheels, water pump and electrolysis of water are the future for large amount of energy storage. All are simple to implement, cheap, reusable and can scale. Of course, not all places can use all of then, but all can use at least one of then.
Batteries will win. (Score:2)
[startup with concrete flywheels]
And superflywheels (of glass fiber) were considered for hybrid electric vehicles, decades ago. (They might even have been practical then. And might have gotten to market if the bogus silicon-breast-implant suits hadn't broken Dow Corning.)
But the battery technology just coming on line (driven by the electric and hybrid autos) will eat flywheels' lunch.
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EVERYTHING has to get replaced sooner or later. In a solar installations, panels are a significant part of the cost, but hardly the only one. Do you think that coal boilers run forever? That nuc plants never need maintenance?
Engineering has long figured out how to plan on replacing large, expensive things and still (oftentimes) making money.
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A maunder minimum doesn't appreciably reduce the amount of power from a solar panel.
Remember that the cosmic background is about 4 degrees Kelvin, and room temperature nearly 300. A few percent drop in solar output can cause a lot of cooling but only about the same few percent of impact on solar panel output. (Less, actually, or maybe even a gain, because the panels are a lot more efficient when they're cooler.)
Solar "activity" not same as solar output. (Score:2)
Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to 'mini ice age' levels:
Solar "activity" is not the same as solar output. It's the sunspot / solar flare / solar wind output. Last I heard the main issue was ts effects on weather (mainly via changes in cloud cover), not a reduction in insolation. (The sun cools VERY gradually, due to heating from gravitational contraction. If all nuclear processes stopped the sun would still be good for millenia.)
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However, it will not matter in US. At least for the next four years, the US has a government in denial..
Dude, that's just stupid. I love how people make such arguments. "This is the cheapest option available but because there is a businessman in charge, he'll pick more expensive options."
Or are you saying that just because someone disagrees with you, he knows less than you and is just in denial. After all, disagreeing with you means he has to be in denial, right?