Slashdot Mirror
Rooftop Solar Could Reach Price Parity In the US By 2016
Lucas123 writes: The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices of coal-powered energy and other conventional sources in all 50 U.S. states in just two years, a leap from today where PV energy has price parity in only 10 states, according to Deutsche Bank's leading solar industry analyst. The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs, Deutsche Bank's Vishal Shah stated in a recent report. The cost of solar-generated electricity in the top 10 states for capacity ranges from 11-15 cents per kilowatt hour (c/kWh), compared to the retail electricity price of 11-37 c/kWh. Amit Ronen, a former Congressional staffer behind legislation that created an investment tax credit for solar installations, said one of the only impediments to decreasing solar electricity prices are fees proposed by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities.
There was a wind turbine near me that was removed by local council order. It was one of those spiral tube looking ones and the person had put it up in their front yard on essentially a flag pole with guy wires.
The thing had a fair amount of slap in the pole which was kinda scary to watch. But the main thing was this thing screamed when its speed got up. Not sure what it was, whether it was the bearings, the motor or maybe the brakes but it started to sound like a jet turbine spinning up when it was going fast (and bloody hell did it spin fast!)
I used to drive past it on the way to and from work and could comfortably hear it over the car's engine and aircon with the windows closed.
Don't forget these imaginary "sicknesses" due to wind turbines. All the while forgetting the real health hazards of fracking. Thats the thing about "conspiracy" theorists. Is that they have the demor, and attitude of a truth seeking movement, ignoring the low hanging fruit of very obvious ills in society, to at best reach around conjectures and "what-ifs", that convienantly blame who they want to blame for society's problems.
Prices are so distorted at this point it is almost impossible to tell what anything costs.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The price of electricity is not just the price of generation.
The price of transportation is not just the price of fuel.
If you gave fossil fuels the same advantage of not charging infrastructure costs, taxes, government regulations on production etc... like you do with solar, you'd find that they are virtually free. There is no conceivable way solar is even remotely comparable until the government steps in and starts manipulating the numbers for the public good. You can argue that the CO2 issue is important enough to justify that interference, but lets not lie to ourselves about the numbers.
How many tax subsidies finance into your average power plant? How much are the indirect costs (ignoring CO2 emissions, let's just focus on locally increased health care costs from coal pollution, long term storage costs for nuclear waste, military adventurism for oil, etc.) of "traditional" fuels?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Other than the short term inconvenience of a major infrastructure project going in (oh no!) your long term view of the even longer term benefits of the site seem awfully jaded given the extremely low impact (i.e. none) to your daily life.
It lasted six years dude. The effects were even more obnoxious than I listed; I remember dusting the house every bloody day because they were stirring up that much dust and dirt. They destroyed our local roads and paid nothing towards the repair of them. I moved out of that area a full year after they completed construction and the streams still weren't clear. That's what happens when you clear cut thousands of acres of forest. The out-of-towners they trucked in for the job showed no respect to the local community. The complaints ranged from the trivial (speeding, ignoring stop signs) to the obnoxious (unnecessary jake braking at 3am, sexual innuendo on their CB radios) to the criminal (assault and rapes tripled in Wyoming County during this project).
Relations with the locals deteriorated to the point that people were literally pulling guns over road closures and other matters that seem trivial when viewed in a vacuum but which were somewhat understandable if you lived through it. I moved to the area in the middle of the project and tried to play devil's advocate in favor of it; I'm usually pro-development and at the time believed in wind power. After six months of living through this hell I had grown frustrated enough to join the locals in waging an undeclared war against BP and their subcontractors. My preferred method of acting out was to fuck with the 18 wheelers that tailgated me. "Hmm, 60 in the 45 isn't fast enough for you?" [sets cruise control for 30] "Oh, you're going to pass me?" [floors it] "Yeah, how'd that work out for you? Get back there bitch. That's right." [back to 30, rinse and repeat for 15 miles]
The sad thing is I'm really not the NIMBY type; I would have been willing to tolerate the obnoxiousness if there was a net gain to society, but on balance there wasn't. 141 megawatts and for that we destroyed 9,000 acres of formerly pristine wilderness. They could have built a nuclear power plant that would have consumed a fraction of that land while producing many times the power. In reality you wouldn't have to destroy wilderness to build new nuclear plants; there are plenty of abandoned industrial sites across CONUS that would accommodate them.
Incidentally, it fails from an economics standpoint just as badly (if not more so) as it fails from an environmental one. That wind farm produced the staggering total of ten permanent jobs. A conventional power plant employs hundreds of people and doesn't require thousands of acres of wilderness. Heck, even the small businesses around here that install solar panels usually employ more than ten people.
I'll repeat: Wind power is a joke.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Why? That’s just silly. Solar users sell power when prices are high and buy power when prices are low, but their billing is based on kWh, not cost, so the power that those customers get credit for during the day has a much higher value to the power company than the power that they get back at night. The power companies make a huge profit off of those solar users’ surplus power compared with what they would be paying for peaker plants. They can readily afford to absorb the infrastructure cost even if the customer is consistently producing more power than they consume.
If you’re going to go to that scheme, then to be fair, they should have to pay time-of-day rates, where every kWh that the solar panel users provide gives them three or four kWh at night in return. And no power company wants that.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The power companies make a huge profit off of those solar users’ surplus power compared with what they would be paying for peaker plants. They can readily afford to absorb the infrastructure cost even if the customer is consistently producing more power than they consume.
In many (most?) States the power company isn't making any profit off this energy. Deregulation (a misnomer, actually they just changed the regulations) separated the supply/generation side of the business from the transmission side of the business. In New York State the utilities were forced to sell their generation facilities back in the 90s by the Public Service Commission. Customers are in turn forced to pick an "energy supplier" from a list of dozens of companies, the theory being that competition brings down prices. Of course this hasn't panned out in reality because electricity and natural gas are commodities; the price difference between the various suppliers is statistically meaningless even for customers that purchase large amounts of energy. I laid them all out in a spreadsheet once upon a time and the difference between the highest and lowest was less than 1%.
Of course, I digress. Bottom line, in New York State and many other States the utility isn't actually seeing any profit from your sale of solar energy. It goes back into the statewide electricity market and is bid on wholesale by spectators that then sell the energy back to consumers. The utility is only allowed to charge the usual transmission fees for this energy, which is a flat per kWh fee (with demand charges for larger commercial/industrial concerns) that doesn't vary based on the source of the energy.
If you want to make net metering competitive you'll have to attack this regulatory scheme that tried to improve a natural monopoly for a commodity by introducing false competition. Even at that it won't really be net metering because there's a non-zero cost associated with synchronizing your power supply with the grid. The fairest way would be to combine net metering with an additional flat monthly fee to cover the interconnection costs.
Of course, all of this is a moot point so long as the utility isn't actually allowed to touch your power but has to sell it into a virtual market that seemingly exists just to provide some middlemen with a profit opportunity.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You know they're desperate when the only argument against new technologies they can come up with is that they're ugly.
A lot of money is being spent here to reclaim waterfront property for green space, nature reserves, parks and recreation. Ugly comes at a price that not everyone is willing to pay anymore, and the geek needs to see that clearly.
...at least in Scandinavia.
I often drool over the prices in China, cheap CHEAP and functional solar panels I could have gotten for pittens. But the taxes are so high that it evens out the score. Which is kind of strange since the government is subsidizing solar power anyway, but it's all lost on the import tax alone.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Call me whatever you'd like, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Things got so bad that they couldn't even convict the people that pulled guns on BP employees; they essentially got jury nullification because the DA couldn't find 12 people in the entire county that didn't know someone who had been trodden upon by BP or a subcontractor thereof. My actions paled in comparison to what some people did, and yes, they were passive aggressive. I won't apologize for them either. You live through it and see how long your patience lasts.
If it makes the green people here feel any better that same area is the middle of the Marcellus shale natural gas boom. The gasholes are every bit as obnoxious as the wind people. They do employ more locals than the wind farm, so they're somewhat better tolerated but at the end of the day they're every bit as disruptive to the local life and ecology.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Well they've been trying really hard to push the whole green-energy crap here in Ontario. We just hit our "winter" and all that, the winds are now high enough that the windmills are stopped, and it's generally now so overcast that the solar stuff doesn't work. Thank goodness that we have a a pile of nuclear generation here, otherwise people would be freezing to death.
Om, nomnomnom...
Aboard an incoming flight, you can see Beijing's air long before you can see anything of the city itself. Looks like a big inverted bowlful of smoke about 5 km high and 50 km in radius.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.