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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."
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.
...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
Deserts aren't useless; they're filled with lots of natural flora and fauna, just like any other ecosystem, and unlike other ecosystems, are quite delicate.
For human use, deserts (at least in North America) are excellent farmland for many crops because of all the sunlight and lack of bad weather and natural disasters. They just need irrigation, which has been done here in Arizona for around 1500 years by the Anisazi.
You don't need land to make solar power. Just stick solar panels on all the "useless" rooftops of all the buildings. The only thing most rooftops do is keep rain out of buildings, so why not cover them with solar panels? Of course, some stupid HOAs will probably scream about it because solar panels don't meed their aesthetic guidelines.
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.
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
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.
Ever since power electronics were invented, DC transmission works just fine. It has the advantage of not needing to have huge chunks of grid in phase with each other(so you don't get staged collapses like in 2003).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.
France? FRANCE? Jesus, if France is so great, why don't you go eat a croissant.
In fact, why don't you open a bottle of fine Veuve Clicquot champagne, slice off a sliver of delicious Comté and put it on a CRACKER. A little WHEAT cracker, shaped like a rose. And then perhaps you'll eat the next cracker with a delicate pate, prepared by the finest Michelin 4 star chefs in all of Paris. Suppose you take your Francophile self strolling down the Champs d'elysee with a beautiful woman on a lovely evening in the City of Lights. Why not stop in at an art museum and see an original Renoir? Sure you would, you crazy Eurocentric beret-wearing art fan. Oh, and I suppose there's even more culture in store for you, you sophisticated denizen of Gaul. You probably could even attend a Puccini opera and not need a translation, since you're a polyglot. Oh you make me sick with all your Frenchy French French French, thinking you're better than what we produce in America.
That's right, if you don't like America, then NO HOT DOG for you. No bun, no ketchup, and no weiner. Keep your French's yellow mustard too.
The French nuclear power plants are pretty neat though.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Because to power each server at 12VDC from the 1 megavolt long-distance DC transmission line, you have to string together more than 80,000 servers in series. Then when one server blows out, all 80,000 go down along with it. Then you have to test them one at a time like a string of Christmas lights until you find the bad server, which could take weeks.
Of course, some stupid HOAs will probably scream about it because solar panels don't meed their aesthetic guidelines.
Check out solar PV Shingles.
Life is not for the lazy.
I would be delighted to see solar on every rooftop in the nation - or in the world.
However I do think it important to point out that a single flat square mile with dedicated professional maintenance would be far cheaper and more efficient than TEN THOUSAND scattered rooftop patches of ten thousand roof-owners and ten thousand power conversion units connecting to the grid and ten thousand separate maintenances and other issues.
Did I mention ten thousand? Ten thousand for EACH square mile of solar landscape offset?
The economies of scale become especially significant if you have a company operating a hundred square mile or more field. And each hundred square mile field that would equate to a MILLION or so itty bitty individual rooftop installations.
Commercially owned buildings with mega-size rooftops might... just might... be worthwhile serving that building itself. Millions of individual home solar rooftops can't be a general rule until you can slap it down like roofing shingles in a way and at a cost that the home owner wouldn't be massively distressed if for some reason it completely quit working and went unrepaired.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.