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Scientific American's Solar Grand Plan
Maria Energia writes "Scientific American Magazine proposes a huge, far-reaching plan to get solar energy powering 69% of America's electricity needs by 2050. The costs and technology are ready, they say, but huge changes to our transmission system will be needed."
I remember way back in high school (okay 4 years ago) and in some college classes the teachers were always talking about how the US power grid was a joke even compared to some 3rd world countries. And now with the whole terrorism thing, it's even worse to have a crappy power grid. I read a thing about how other countries have way better and more adaptive and efficient and safe power grids like Japan and stuff. We needed to replace it like decades ago but nobody ever wants to pay for it. So I figure if we need to gut 90% of the system anyway, why not do it when we really ought to switch to solar at the same time too. That's gotta save money doing them both at once.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Instead of a blog post about the article, you can also read the article.
/. article is a blog post about the article, but it doesn't need to be a blog post about a blog post about an article...
Of course this
Developers: We can use your help.
Of course, while the Green factions that are all about energy will be all for this - they'll be fighting the Green factions that are all about saving every tiny scrap of land from human usage.
With the majority of the greenies attention diverted to internecine warfare... the rest of us can get on with building nuclear power plants.
I thought the plan sounded pretty cool, but couldn't help but to think they had glossed over some details that are likely to make the total cost of the plan skyrocket, like the current production rates on Solar Cells or the cost of replacing them every 25 years as they degrade. The biggest problem is that the whole plan is so grandiose and expensive that it would be impossible to get through Congress, even if it does end up saving bucketloads of money in the end. The plan also handwaved through the "What if it's really cloudy over the entire Western US in the middle of winter?" question.
I do have to say that this was thought out more than most grand energy plans I've seen, but it still smells only maybe 3/4 baked.
I read the internet for the articles.
I wrote an article on my blog with some related thoughts about solar. In particular, I've considered installing solar panels on my roof, but my geographical region has a tendency to accumulate dust very quickly, so I'd be out on the roof cleaning the panels all the time if I were to have any chance of breaking even.
So my thought was that some enterprising company should buy up a few acres of land (or rooftops), and let individual homeowners sponsor small batches of solar panels, like 5kw or 10kw, in exchange for some sort of credit on their electric bill. A system like this would dramatically reduce the barriers to entry for individuals who'd like to pay for solar power, as well as vastly increase the economies of scale. Does any system like this currently exist?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Cover near useless deserts with solar power then use the power to either convert to hydrogen, or just pump down the power lines. As energy prices rise and solar become more efficient and cheap, you should be able to do the cyclical thing. You know, spend X dollars for solar and land, then after selling energy off, you buy more solar and land. Better yet: go to the stock market and get your X dollars jump started. Once we cover deserts in solar then we start experimenting on solar panels in space to shoot microwaves down to earth. Eventually we get the a sort of Dyson sphere of solar panels out in space harvesting as much energy as we can from the sun. Of course this doesn't happen in our lifetime, but hasn't that always been one of a technophile's dreams?
God spoke to me.
...after being a subscriber for 21 years.
They had exhibited a definite political point of view, no doubt due to the change of editorship. I noticed the new 'tone' of their articles for several months before writing them in 2003, telling them that as a longtime subscriber I was unhappy with the polemic, political stance that they'd decided to take. By 2005, I'd had enough - they no longer were simply describing science or explaining the cutting edge of science discourse; they had decided to become a liberal advocacy magazine and I decided my subscription was better spent on what I was looking for. I've found it in the excellent and much more timely Science News - no political crap, just an update on the newest SCIENCE.
Hey, they don't need my paltry subscription; I'm sure that despite the two letters I sent, they couldn't care less that I'm gone. But I did what I felt was right, and I'm happy about that.
-Styopa
Why should there need to be subsidies for this? Oil is at $100 per barrel. A few years of this expensive oil, plus a couple years of more mass production, and most of this "plan" will happen on it's own.
Solar and wind are much closer to being competitive than even a few years ago. Nuclear power is cool again. And who cares what happens with emissions in the US anyway? The greatest emissions increases are going to be in the world's factory, China.
Find ways to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil fuels and we can forget about this CO2 nonsense and go back to worrying about people starving to death from poverty.
WTF does that complaint have to do with this article?
What are they smoking?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
How does spending money on something, make it cost competitive?
That's like saying if I spend $100 on a $110 widget, and then pay another $10 for it, it becomes cost competitive with a different $10 widget.
(I am not ignoring the possible advantages of energy that has lower CO2 emissions. I'm just bitching about Sciam's newspeak. Is deception really necessary?)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
From the SA article...
The federal government would have to invest more than $400 billion over the next 40 years to complete the 2050 plan. That investment is substantial...
I dunno. What president in his right mind would ever spend 400 billion on a national security issue?
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/010275.html It's an ambitious plan that could sharply decelerate CO2 emissions and increase the US output of "green" power. Heroic plans require heroic proof. A critical analysis follows.
Some high level critiques are the following:
* Shifting peak load from day-time to night-time would not occur until solar displaced all natural gas plants and other swing units--i.e., all of excess air-conditioner demand over night-time demand, and all of the additional day-time usage that would occur as the price between day-time and night-time power usage equilibrated. This obviates the need for any wind-storage of solar power until well later.
* Compressed-air energy storage will become less useful as the price gap between day and night power diminishes. This undermines the case for near-term night to day storatge and will only be economical under this plan for day-to-night storage after day-time power is sufficiently cheaper to support the capital outlay. (Ironically since the solar installation is of the hockey-stick variety, compressed air storage may become viable for night-to-day energy storage well before solar becomes a relevant portion of energy supply.)
* Current photovoltaic production is about 2 GW of which US installation is about 8%. The plan calls for 84 GW of US installation by 2020 which would require 45% increases in solar installation every year for 13 years. Capping the installation at 10 GW/year installed, the ramp up becomes 70% per year 2006-2014.
* These growth rates are implausible without a $2.80/watt subsidy taking the installed price of $4/w to $1.20/w which is equivalent to $0.05/kwh. That would mean $234 billion in subsidies just to get to 3% of needed installed capacity by 2050.
* Polysilicon shortages are holding back photovoltaic growth so in 2007 and 2008 a growth rate of 20% is more plausible. That would require doubling production every year from 2009-2014 to hit the installed base of 84 GW by 2020.
* 84 GW by 2020 would be just 16% of average load and with a peak watt of electricity generating only 6 or 7 hours per day in the Southwest, it would be about 5% of total electric power generated.
* For this 5% of energy generated, we would be subsidizing it over 200% of the value of the energy generated--that is for $0.06 of electricity, it would require $0.14 in subsidies.
* At the end of the period, there is no guarantee that prices will be low enough to compete with coal, natural gas, nuclear or wind.
* If solar becomes viable and can compete with other energy types and begins to displace other types of power, prices for those types of power will drop. The total cost of solar will have to beat the marginal cost of coal or nuclear to dismantle an existing plant.
Consider investing in terrestrial solar power for security reasons or as a contingency, but it's a lot of faith to get the case to work for half of daily electricity demand.
You obviously just skimmed the article, glossing right over the part where they describe the solar-powered lasers mounted on the generically-engineered photosynthetic-scaled sharks. Sure, you get f1rts p0$T but you look like a fool who can't RTFA.
Whole Foods is doing something similar; refer to http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/issues/greenaction/solarpower.html for the corporate view.
PBS's science program Nova did an episode about solar energy (title: "Saved by the Sun"; broadcast date:April 24, 2007) , and talked about the Whole Foods concept (transcript at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3406_solar.html); a brief excerpt of the transcript here to whet your appetite:
If I were Saudi and Libya and Algeria and Chad, I'd carpet the whole freaking Sahara and the Rub-al-Qali with solar cells. Those places sure as hell aren't any good for anything else. And as global warming continues to heat up the planet and desertification increases, we just get more useful land for solar cells. Win-win.
I piss off bigots.
Just think, if we had spent our nation's taxes on this instead of a foreign civil war in a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11, we would still have about $700 billion left over, and still get most of our oil and gas from Canada and Venezuala like we do today.
Plus, with such a system, the solar energy supply would make our national energy supply much less vulnerable to overseas terrorist attacks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here's a plan for solar power for California that could actually work.
Goal: power 100% of Southern California's air conditioning load from solar energy within eight years.
Why Southern California? Because there's enough sunlight for solar power to work well. Why air conditioning? Because peak air conditioning load and peak solar power output happen at the same time. Peak power load for all of California is about 42 gigawatts, and about a quarter of that is Southern California air conditioning. So we need about 12GW of solar panel capacity.
Technical approach. Applied Materials says they're ready to build the first "gigawatt" solar panel plant. By that they mean a plant that produces in one year enough panels to generate a gigawatt of peak power. Two such plants can make enough panels to do the job in six years. No new technology is necessary.
Paying for it Raise electric rates on hot summer afternoons. Anything bigger than a 3-bedroom house has to have time-of-day metering.
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The article states that endpoints of transmission lines would have DC->AC conversion. What about skipping this step for data centres, where all equipment runs on DC anyway? I didn't see anything in the article mentioning this....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
by 2050?
Of course France gets 70% of its electricity *today* from nuclear power. But lets ignore the proven viable solution to the carbon problem, and go with the pie in the sky approach that won't work for decades even by the most optimistic estimates...
When will people get it through their heads that solar is not a viable replacement for fossil fuel? Most of the country isn't even sunny enough to use it. The parts that are, aren't sunny *all the time*. When night hits, the entire country would brown out. We don't *have* the kind of battery technology to store the entire country's power supply overnight.
What do people expect to do about the northern parts of the country? Don't they realize you have to generate electricity relatively close to the point of use? Power lines aren't superconductors. They offer resistance, and the electricity dissipates the further you try to send it.
Solar power *clearly* does not scale up, yet people still keep trying to push these projects because solar gives them a warm fuzzy feeling.
Nuclear on the other hand is immediately usable, and the problems that it presents in terms of spent fuel are solvable by reprocessing. Additionally, advances in reactor like breeder reactors technology promise to increase future fuel efficiency and decrease the radioactivity of spent fuel. From a technical perspective it is clearly the correct solution to our short and long term energy needs, and is the only technology that can end our dependence on fossil fuels. However, when you point out arguments like this, people normally give you a science fiction story about "beaming" solar power from huge solar arrays in space. Here's a hint, if we could beam energy around efficiently, we wouldn't be using power lines.
First, we create a special legal entity to actually do the building of the solar panels (or whatever else the capital-intensive process is, because this works for just about anything). Then, that legal entity creates a bunch of special pieces of paper, called "shares". (For the ecologically conscious, they don't *have* to be paper anymore -- most are just entries in a database.) These shares are sold to the general public, although in practice buying shares from a new legal entity is sort of risky so only extraordinarily large members of the general public, who can pay for large staffs to evaluate risk, participate.
We tried having shares split up ownership of the outputs of the legal entity, but that was just a whole lot of work and ended up with weird rounding issues, so instead we settled on having the legal entity sell its products to the public and then divvy up profits to the shareholders, pro-rated based on the number of shares they hold. And if you decide you don't care for your shares anymore? You can sell them to somebody else. In principle, this right persists in perpetuity (although in practice, sometimes the business fails). Indeed, some of the legal entities organized like this have been in continuous operation for hundreds of years, and on a day to day basis you deal with hundreds of younguns who are only a few decades old.
It's a great system. Distribution of risk, great efficiencies of scale, minimal inefficiencies to transaction costs.
(Now, personally, I like buying bits of nuclear power plants rather than bits of solar power panels but, hey, I won't quibble with how you spend your money.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
George W. should've put those billions we sunk into the war into this project instead. We could've gotten out of the Middle East, and we be much more secure politically and economically. Instead, we threw all of those billions down the toilet, with a less stable Middle East that likes us a lot less, and a rickety economy.
the whole plan is so grandiose and expensive that it would be impossible to get through Congress
TFA says it would require $420 billion in subsidies over 40 years. That's small compared to the Medicare prescription drug plan, which will cost $724 billion over the next seven years.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
High voltage, AC or DC, is more efficient for long-distance transmission. It is easier to transform AC voltages to than DC to DC. This arrangement goes from AC to high voltage DC to AC. This has been around for some time; I saw one of these in Los Angeles, California, for something called Pacific Intertie.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton