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US Funds Aggressive Tech To Cut Solar Power Costs
coondoggie writes "The U.S Department of Energy wants researchers and scientists to 'think outside the box' and come up 'highly disruptive Concentrating Solar Power technologies that will meet 6/kWh cost targets by the end of the decade.' The DOE's 'SunShot Concentrating Solar Power R&D' is a multimillion dollar endeavor that intends to look beyond what it calls the incremental near-term to support research into transformative technologies that will break through performance barriers known today, such as efficiency and temperature limitations."
That's how research investments should always work.
Either low risk, small reward (typically funded by industry), or high risk of failure, but aiming high with benefits for all of society (typically funded by government).
I admit to reading the article (sorry), thus I know it's 6 cents.
A frightfully naive interpretation. How about this: the whole program is just a wash to put more money in the hands of corrupt politically-connected creeps. Look at the history of government funding solar power in America...any scandals come to mind?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Wiktionary: disruptive - Adjective: Causing disrupt or unrest.
MW: Disrupt - verb: to break apart / to throw into disorder. Origin: Latin disruptus, past participle of disrumpere, from dis- + rumpere to break.
Contrast with: "Disruptive technology"
But people are lazy, so they drop the context. Rather than adding the "technology", which would change the meaning (through context), they just say "disrupt" in the same way that we might say "grep" or "ping" in a non-technical conversation. It's annoying but if you challenge anyone about it they'd (probably) say that you should have deduced the context through the subject matter.
And yeah, it's totally an overused buzzword.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Even if solar panels were free, solar electricity still has a high hurdle to jump before it becomes competitive with other sources.
The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter.
The article isn't about electricity from photovoltaic panels mounted on roofs. It's about large industrial scale solar concentrators like this one. It has the potential to be cheaper than PV generated electricity and it keeps producing electricity after the sun goes down.
The natural counter-argument is the question: Should the government stop funding research simply because some of the funds will (likely) reach undeserving parties?
It's not black and white. If there's been a history of wasted resources related to this particular objective, then more strict regulation should be enacted (and the natural reply to this would be: regulation is both expensive and corruptible... I guess some middle-ground is necessary).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Probably. But they've tried the "let's wait until industry solves it" method for a few decades, and nothing has come out of it, so they're trying something new.
Because cold fusion doesn't seem to be coming any time soon. If it's possible at all, it's a very long term investment, which this isn't.
In my understanding, there are no problems of this kind to solve in geothermal energy. Drilling is well developed, heat exchange too. There's no particular challenge in manufacturing that could make it a lot cheaper if solved. There's nothing much to throw money at.
RTFA. ""The overarching goal of the SunShot Initiative is reaching cost parity with baseload energy rates, estimated to be 6Â/kWh without economic support, which would pave the way for rapid and large-scale adoption of solar electricity across the United States."
Because the result woudln't be something that can be driven on a real road. It would be a single ocupant tin can without AC or anything else.
Why are you talking about solar panels? This article is about concentrated (thermal) solar, not PV. Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than hammer out a post and remove all doubt, eh?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Achieving 6c/KWHr for baseload ie available any time you want it 24 hours a day, with solar is a fundamentally hard problem. You're up against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Solar energy is both dilute and intermittent.
Nuclear is far easier. It is starts out incredibly concentrated. Third generation plants like the AP1000 are extremely safe. If you don't want to reuse the waste it's easy enough to bury it 1 km underground where it won't bother anyone.
It's far easier to change the minds of people than the laws of Physics.
Looks like the USA and Europe will leave it to China to develop cheap nukes and become the driver of human civilization in the 21st century.
"Disruptive" really shifted the paradigm on buzzword market-babble.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I suppose somebody in government watched this video.
But the gov't shouldn't be subsidizing anything, it shouldn't be taxing/borrowing/printing and subsidizing with that money. It should leave people alone and should allow them to work it out in the market.
How would gov't know that the best course of action is these solar panels or anything for that matter? What gov't should be doing is stepping out of the way, dramatically shrinking its own spending (now 10% of US population is working for gov't, this includes contractors and military, this gov't force should be 100 times smaller).
But the point is that private sector has to figure out the way, companies must try and fail, most of them will fail, somebody will figure something and if that doesn't happen, then there is no way, and gov't spending is just a waste and another resource mis-allocation.
They really shouldn't be preventing private companies and people from trying more stuff with nuclear power, that's most likely the only true source of energy that we will be able to use once oil and coal and gas run out. Nuclear and at some point thermonuclear. Solar is great for local applications, but it will not replace the constant need for energy that only things like oil/coal/gas/nuclear/hydro can supply. At some point this will become the revelation that people don't have a choice and they have to rely on nuclear.
As I said many times - I want my nuclear car.
You can't handle the truth.
This will never, ever work. Even in theory.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
And then you have less research being done, and therefore less chance of success, because only those companies with enough capital to work without pay for years on end can actually participate.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
How do you think nuclear got started? Once we went beyond coal, gas and hydro the cost of developing new sources quickly got too high for the market to fund. We, as a society, need this stuff to ensure our future prosperity and comfort so we have to encourage development.
You could argue that government is bad at investing in things, but part of that is because it is the only body willing to invest in expensive new technologies where the risk of losing out on your investment is high. Just look at the number of failed ideas that came from nuclear R&D.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You could easily swap "solar power" for "defense systems". The scandals related to government support of solar power pale by a few orders of magnitude to the overt graft and fraud in military research and acquisition. What's your point? Are you suggestion that we shouldn't be funding either?
Look at your electric bill lately? You should thank your lucky stars that you aren't paying 6 dollars per kWh.
On a related rant: it amazes me how blithely unaware most people are about their personal energy consumption. Some might be able to vaguely guesstimate what they paid the utility company for electricity or natural gas last month, but very few could actually say "I used XX kWh of electricity last month. The cost of the electricity was $YY, and the cost of delivery was $ZZ." What is the typical cost per kWh for your electricity? Where is most of it produced? Using what fuel? About the closest people are able to come are to know what the price of a gallon of gas is near them, and how far they can get between fill-ups. That's a good start, but transportation is only about 1/3 of U.S. energy consumption. No wonder politicians can so easily manipulate the discussion about energy: practically no one knows anything about it!
Yes. Of course the "scandal that comes to mind" ignores the what, 99%+ of those funds that were NOT involved in a scandal there were put to work as intended. Heck, let's be generous to your point and say only 90% weren't scandal-laden. Also, solar power is now beating grid parity in parts of the US, largely thanks to solar incentives and investment over the last several years getting the market going. Not just in the US, but here, in europe, and in china as well. This is a huge moment, where those with enough capital in parts of the us (including the northeast) could choose to "prebuy" their electricity for the next 25 years with PV... WITHOUT incentive... and not lose money compared to grid electricity. In a few more years it's going to be a slam dunk.
Public policy works. Funding research works. Give up the tired, weak whining that it's not perfect. Waiting for teh "free market" to fix it all isn't perfect either, and it cares a lot less for the collateral damage of a sudden catastrophic shift than we do.
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/pv-systems-have-gotten-dirt-cheap
The argument goes like this: if the private sector invests in something risky and fails, it is Capitalism and it is Good; when the government does it, itis Socialism, and it is Bad.
All the argument is specious: CEOs invest in their golfing friends' companies, and they don't invest their own money: they invest the shareholder's. Think of the governement as a very large, highly diversify corporation (really, it is not very diversified, it mostly does insurance and has an army; but it also has a whole buch of minor subsidiaries doing a bit of everything). The question is, since the government is this huge corporation which cannot go bankrupt, what should it invest in?
Clearly, high risk, long-term stuff. In a way, like IBM. The only problem with those failed investments (and if you invest in high-risk stuff, you will fail most of the times) is that they clearly were way too application oriented and short-term!
On a more philosophical note, it is wholly reasonable that the governement does the high-risk stuff: it cannot fail. Also, we expect corporations to be profitable every quarter, whereas the government has the luxury of needing only to stay solvant -- which, when you can print your own money is not overly difficult.
The tech belongs to Germany, Japan, China. They did the research and raced to the bottom with production lines churning out many solar panels.
The key ingredient to solar panels (polysilicon) has a very strong U.S. player in the form of Dow Corning's Hemlock Semiconductor.
I think the more likely result is that without government intervention there would be no nuclear power at all.
How exactly do you insure it? There's no defined bound to how much a disaster may cost, which means that any insurance company would be insane to accept. Earlier in the thread there was a mention of the possibility of having Tokyo evacuated. How do you see an insurance company covering that? And what would the insurance payments be?