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Existing Solar Tech Could Power Entire US, Says NREL
derekmead writes "A new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds that solar holds more potential to generate more power (PDF) than any other clean energy source. The NREL broke things down into four groups: urban and rural utility-scale photovoltaics (giant solar plants, basically) as well as rooftop solar and concentrated mirror arrays. Between those technologies, which are all already on the market, the NREL reckons there's a proven potential for solar to hit a capacity of 200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone. For some perspective, 1 gigawatt is what a single nuclear power plant might generate, and it's more than most coal plants. A gigawatt of capacity is enough to power approximately 700,000 homes."
Solar power towers can store energy efficiently in molten salt and achieve continuous output.
I did a quick calculation. Using 100W = 3 square feet.
That is roughly 3.2 square miles/gigawatt of solar cells.
200,000Gigawats would be 640,000 square miles, or roughly 16.8% of the US land mass.
I'm just saying - the numbers they are throwing around are a bit amazing. Further - what happens at night? Do they have a decent storage system for this juice?
Have you compiled your kernel today??
1) Today's systems are cheep enough that the lack of production at night doesn't keep them from being profitable to install. In addition solar's best energy producing hours are peak energy drawing hours when electricity can be more expensive.
2) Residential solar systems can be grid tied into local power systems, or a system of batteries at the place of installation.
3) The United States Government owns huge tracks of land. Google "government land map" and you should see. Those desert areas would be perfect for solar plants.
4) Eather the drop in solar panel prices will be enough to offset their loss of efficiency in high heat, or a new design that will be efficient in the heat will come out.
5) Maybe
6(2nd 5?)) They've caused the price to fall like rock. That's awesome from the home solar installer's perspective. I've seen systems as low as $0.82 per max watt output most recently, and prices are falling even further. The business isn't over, but it's a bloodbath of companies getting out classed.
7(6?)) Unless there are amazing drops in prices I see solar staying the more economical option.
8(7?)) Nuclear reactors take 20+ years to build. The cost of solar will long since be cheaper than nuclear by the time any plant could be built.
Also the comparison number in the article is wrong. A typical nuclear plant produces 2-4 GW power, not 1 GW. 1GW might be the amount per generator for a multi-generator plant. These sorts of articles would be more convincing if the advocates of solar power didn't understate the amount of power produced by competing sources, or underestimate the amount of power required per household, or (in this case) both.
Actually, unless I messed up the math, this study is saying that the solar technology we have right now could be deployed to easily generate that much power, in the US alone.
Wish I had mod points for you. I had a similar experience when I looked into it. The numbers just didn't add up and the upfront cost is crazy. If you could get solar panel costs down to about 10% of where they are now. you could get some traction. But right now, it's just too much for most of us.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station outside of Phoenix has 3 reactors producing combined 3,875 MW.
I sum up 192,922 GW total from the NREL study.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight) says there's 1.361 KW per square meter of solar irradiance. This would serve as an upper bound, since solar panels are not 100% efficient, but should prove the point.
Wikipedia also says the United States is 9,826,675 square kilometers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states). One square kilometer is 1,000,000 square meters, giving 9,826,675,000,000 square meters for the United States.
9,826,675,000,000 square meters * 1.361 kW/square meter = 13,374,104,675,000 kW theoretical maximum. That's 13,374,104 GW.
Unlikely. If there was an easy and cheap way to use solar power, why wouldn't they? Of course part of the problem is that monopolies and government subsidies often distort the market when it comes to energy, but if there was truly a way for people to get cheap, reliable, easy solar energy, solar would be very popular. The problem is, solar is not cheap. And going off the grid by installing your own solar panels is neither cheap nor easy.
One day, solar energy will be cost-effective in many places, but not today. Solar energy is great if you want to move off the grid, or if you're in a remote location, but for the average American, it simply isn't cheap enough yet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Correct but it solves the main issue of solar power: That it's not available during the night.
The molten salt keeps hot for days so intermittency is no longer a significant issue.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm in the northeast, a very low-end power user (bottom quartile), and the math still doesn't work out for me on PV. What DOES work is solar thermal to warm up a tank in the basement that sits before the hot water heaters (preheating water) and pumping heat into the living space via baseboard radiators. Unfortunately, those systems are not as cookie-cutter, so getting someone to put them in is almost impossible.
Unfortunately, all the energy saving stuff I see seems geared for newer homes or homes in sunny and hot areas. Where I am, people generally don't even have Air Conditioning, they have 110 year-old homes that aren't well insulated (and often can't be without $15K of asbestos remediation and $5K of rewiring, neither is subsidized). I have yet to meet a contractor who understands that I want windows on the south and that ALLOW lots of infrared in.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Would it cost money? Sure. Then again, one tank of gas for a pickup truck costs $100 right now.
No, it isn't. A typical rare earth mine produces enough thorium to power to planet over a given year, and there are thousands of such mines, many of which are currently uneconomical because of thorium contamination (thorium isn't useful for much other than nuclear fuel, and is expensive to store/dispose of without reactors to burn it).
The fact is that there is so much thorium in Earth's crust, you hardly need another energy source. If we ran out after 100,000 years, we would start mining other planets and moons for the stuff. It is so energy dense that such operations would be economical, even with our current primitive technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
Well you could even be using free-breeder reactors, or well anything in between too until it becomes cheaper? So what's stopping you besides wacknut environmentalists and NIMBY nuts? CANDU reactors can use anything for fuel, nice huh?
But here you are complaining about "greedy nuke plant operators" and yet we have greedy *insert other power plant operators* and we have even worse super-greedy wind/solar operators. Who get lovely feed-in-tariffs of 40-80c/KWH to sell their electricity. That's what we pay for in Ontario right now. Oh yeah, really good. Right on track by 2015, most expensive power in North America.
Hey, it's so bad in Germany that there's over 1m people that can't even afford their power anymore. And the price per/KWH is now over 20c.
Thorium reactors are an alternative, but they're a stepping stone, like other nuclear technologies. Technologies that environuts, and nimbys' get their panties in a twist over.
Om, nomnomnom...
* inverters blow out, occasionally needing replacement
* sometimes you use more power than the panels can provide (especially if you have a garage)
* a home with north-facing roof or on the north side of anything bigger than it doesn't fare so well.
* as sibling said - the sun goes down every day.
True.
* if you have kids, odds are good they're going to throw something onto the roof. Odds are better that it'll be hard enough to crack the glass on a panel.
Not true. Panels are designed to withstand pretty heavy hail hitting it at terminal velocity. Unless your kids are shooting at your roof with a gun, the panels should be fine.
* even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp
Not true. Standard guarantee is that panels will be at the 80% mark or higher at 25 years.
Finally, to make a panel, you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces for the wafers/cells (letting alone wafering, cell processing, panel construction, etc). It has to come from *somewhere*...
True. But energy payback time is down to between .5 and 1.4 years depending on exact technology used. That's from the EPIA March 2011 white paper, and things are surely better now.
Sure you can. That's the entire concept of a peaking plant and any oil plant would be rigged for peaking. It's too expensive to run it as base load.
Peaking plants can and do spin up and down quite quickly. The GE LM6000 (basically a modified 747 engine) units they use in one of our newest natgas plants can go from standing still to maximum output in under 5 minutes and back down at about the same rate.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
> * even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp.
Nope. That's when their warrantee expires, but that don't actually "do that" in the field. My car didn't magically stop moving when it hit its 80,000 km power train warrantee either.
Arco started serial production of panels in the early 1970. Those that can be found (most were scrapped, some sank in the ocean) are producing an amount not easily distinguishable from 100% of their post-burn-in power rating. That's after 40 years. This is not atypical. Study after study after study has shown that there is no real degradation after burn-in, and the warrantee is really covering mechanical failures.
The same is not true of inverters. Most of them have a 10 year warrantee and last 12 to 15. That is something everyone expects to improve as operational frequencies increase. Microinverters almost all come with 25 year warrantees now.
> you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces
The panels "pay off" their energy in 2 to 3 years. Thin-film versions in 1 or less.
And before you say it, do you know where concrete comes from?
> You repeated essentially exactly the same statement
Essentially exactly the same?!
The original statement implied that the panels *would* degrade to 25%, Mike pointed out that that's simply their warrantee. As I said earlier, my car had a 80,000 km power train warrantee, but I'm far beyond that and it's still working fine.
> go bankrupt at the end of 25 years
In 25 years the inflation adjusted price of PV will likely be very close to zero.
> See here [wikipedia.org] - not an industry shill.
I helped write that article (and wrote most of the related ones, like LCOE and $/watt), so I can same with some authority that you're missing the point. The point was about the *energy payback*, the ratio between the energy used to make the panel to the energy it produces over its lifetime.
> TOTAL system levelized cost
I find it more than a little amusing that you complain that Mike is an industry shill, then quote numbers from an industry shill to show him why.
The EIA numbers you quote were compiled before the price of PV imploded. If you'd like to run the calculations again with modern numbers, you can try the math I put in this article:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/your-own-grid-parity-pv-system/
And before you start, contract tenders for mid-scale commercial systems are currently going out at $3.50, all in.
of course it adds up.
For starters, the Chinese have a MUCH cheaper labor market than we do, mostly because they pay their people in crap for wages, and in government connected businesses, they use slave labor from the political prisons.
China has an unofficially stated goal to dominate the economy of the planet. The way they are doing this is by dumping cheaply made goods on the worldwide market and undercutting existing suppliers until those suppliers collapse. Then once there is no more significant competition, they raise prices back up.
They did this exact thing with the Steel industry back in the '70s and '80s, and now steel is FAR more expensive than it was then, but the American (and others) steel industry is all but wiped out. Same with the garment industry. China pretty much OWNS the commodity clothing market, and the electronics market, and the manufacturing almost anything market. They have been doing this for YEARS and people are only now starting to catch on.
I'm all for Free Trade, but it only works when everyone plays by the same rules. When one player (China) is obviously rigging the game to destroy everyone else, then it's time to change the rules. In the meantime, Avoid buying things made in China as much as possible (it's not possible anymore to completely avoid it. Chinese made crap is everywhere.)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory