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New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again
Lucas123 writes Solar energy installations beat both wind generated and coal-fired energy for the second year in a row, according to a new report from GTM Research. While solar only makes up about 1 percent of U.S. energy, in 2014, it added nearly as many new megawatts as natural gas, which is approaching coal as the country's primary energy source. Solar capacity grew 32 percent from 2013 to 2014 and GTM is predicting it will grow 59% YoY this year. Just two years ago, in 2012, coal represented 41% of new energy capacity and solar only 10%. Last year, coal was down to 23% of new electrical capacity. Solar capacity growth last year represents a 12-fold increase over the amounts being installed in 2009. Key to solar adoption has been falling costs across market segments and states.
The summary and TFA are carefully choosing their words to make it look like a land slide sized change in energy production, when all they are really talking about is subtle rates of change. But even these twists can't disguise the fact that 23% new energy is still done with coal.
In fact, the solar and wind aren't even meeting replacement needs for coal and gas plants taken out of production due to failure to meet environmental standards, and being too costly to upgrade. Old Coal plants are more often replaced with New Coal plants than they are with wind or solar.
Missing from those figures (because they don't represent New Production), is the number of coal and gas plants upgraded to meet environmental standards.
Its not all bad news. The best wind and solar sites are being heavily developed, cherry picking the most promising sites. And the arid south west is sprouting lots f solar farms. But we need to ramp up both wind and solar many fold before we can even think of retiring coal.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What are you talking about? factcheck From factcheck: "Rep. Gary Palmer falsely claimed on a radio show that temperature data used to measure global climate change have been “falsified” and manipulated." and "Even as these claims of data manipulation have resurfaced, there is now a general consensus that 2014 was the hottest single year since temperature record keeping began. This same conclusion has been reached by NOAA and NASA, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the World Meteorological Organization. The United Kingdom’s Met Office said that 2014 was among the warmest along with 2010, but it is impossible to say for sure that 2014 was hotter. According to NASA, nine of the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2000, with 1998 the lone exception."
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
Yeah... wooo hooo Solar produces many giga watts of power, while coal continues to spread CO2, uranium and heavy metals at an increasing rate
Does it bother anybody else that nuclear isn't even mentioned in passing in the linked article?
It has been well documented that Solar has a high initial energy cost for production, suffers from spikes and lulls in availability and cannot be easily transferred across the US due to an aging and outdated power transmission system. Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
The dreaded capacity factor again :)
As you pointed out, a solar plane might have a CF between 13% (who builds a solar plant at sucha place?) and 33%.
Likewise a coal plant has not a CF of 63%, but a range from perhaps 60% for a load following plant, and something like 85% - 95% for a base load plant.
I personally don't see a difference between a dispatachable coal plant that idles at less then 10% of its load over night, just to keep it warm, and peaks to 90% of its max over daytime versus a solar plant that idles during darkness at 0% and ramps up following daylight to 100% around local noon (or what ever daytime the plant owner decided to have its maximum.
Please people, if you want to throw around CFs then start to grasp that this 'metric' is extremely tricky and not really usefull for comparing power plants. Every power plant serves a certain purpose: base load, load following, midrange power, peak load, balancing power, reserve power, a combination of balancing/reserve like pumped storage, a combination of load following/peak power and balancing like combined gas plants, a mix between base load and mid range for wind and solar (yes, the other midrange / load following plants have to shape their load around the variation of the wind and solar plants) etc. etc.
That said: for laymen who want to know if they should have a private solar plant on their roof/in their garden or invest into a local wind project wikipedia capacity factors are irrelevant. Missleading at best and disastrously wrong easily.
To calculate the viability of a plant at a specific place ... that might be your place, you need reference data of the previous years about hours of suneshine for _every day_ not an average over the year, same for wind. And don't make the mistake to use wind speed averages. 2m/sec and 8m/sec might average out as 5m/sec but so does 4m/sec and 6m/sec. The power production in both cases will be hugely different.
Assuming you have capital costs of like 10% of the investment as interest, being of by 1% or 2% with your (wrong) CF based calculation might change that 10% to either 8% or 12% ...
Regarding wind and especially solar you also want to check at which time of the day you might get the best prices. Instead of going for a high CF and produce most solar power around local noon, you might have a better price at 4PM and depending on latitude (because of sunset time) you might turn your solar plant slightly towards west.
In germany e.g. roof top solar that points south gets much less subsidiaries then solar plants that are significantly tilted to the east or west (since a few years) because most of our (private) solar plants are tilted due south.
Anyway, if you want to throw around with CFs learn how limited their meaning is ... otherwise you shoot yourself into the foot if you build your own plant and make an idiot about yourself if you talk about big scale energy production.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Which Global Warming? The one which stopped 18 Years ago?
No, not that Global Warming, it's another one. You can't say that it has stopped or is dead, because all you need to do is look at a graph of global temperatures to see that this is not unprecedented. The global temperature peaked in 1940 and then didn't reach that point again until 1970. Global Warming didn't stop back then, despite that lull.
In fact, that wasn't a lull, it was more of a plummet then a rise. If you look at the graphs, you will see that the global temperature repeatedly plateaus (or even falls) only to continue warming a few years later.
It is totally premature to try to call the end of a major trend while you are in the middle of it. Just look at how noisy the data is for the period that you mention (which is just one reading). Who is to say that we wont see another step up in the next year or so followed by another plateau at a higher level? It certainly fits the pattern that we have seen in the past.
> Sure, it is technically correct
No it's not.
There are dozens upon dozens of reports, all easily accessible on the internet, that state in no uncertain terms that the US grid is perfectly capable of handing lots and lots of intermittent power. The last report I read, now outdated as its from 2012, said that California was able to use up to 100% embedded PV. That means you could install PV on everyone's home and office to net meter to zero and the grid would handle it just fine.
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/8A822C08-A56C-4674-A5D2-099E48B41160/0/LDPVPotentialReportMarch2012.pdf
Correct. Comparing different generation technologies by peak production capacity is like trying to compare the range of cars by looking only at the size of their gas tank. You must take into account fuel efficiency to get an accurate range estimate. LIkewise, capacity factor is analogous to the "efficiency" with which the power source can convert its potential capacity into actual energy.
Capacity factor for static PV installations in the U.S. is 10%-19%. The contiguous 48 states averages about 14%-14.5%.
33% is the max capacity factor for concentrated solar power - where you have reflectors tracking the sun all day and the panels/thermal salt bath mounted atop a high tower to minimize oblique incident sunlight angles throughout the day.
Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.
Most peaking plants (supply electricity as demand peaks) are gas, oil, and hydro. You can shut those off within about a minute of demand dropping.
Structurally these utilities need massive insvestments, long build times, beset by NIMBYism. They pay off only when there is a critical mass of users. Only when the cost of investment is amortized over a very large user base, these projects are economically viable. Once the user base falls below the critical mass they get into a death spiral. Costs keep increasing for the remaining users, and as they drop out, it increases for the remaining users even more.
Electric utilities are looking at exactly the same scenario. In 1955 if someone predicted the demise of street car lines within 20 years, they would have been laughed at. But in 20 years almost all of them became moribund. Except for very high density locales like Chicago, Boston and New York it is mere shadow of its former selves.
As solar becomes cost effective, finance companies will jump in and simplify the financing and installation headaches and make direct head to head comparison possible. "All you pay for is the electricity you actually use based on the meter. All you do is to give us permission to install solar panels in your property. Compare it directly with your utility bill". As affluent customers start using more of solar and use less of the grid, the utility company will start levying "grid-connection fees". And at some point people would start cutting the grid. Then cost will start going up for the remaining users and the spiral would start.
The electric utilities are well aware of the situation. That is why they are fighting so hard.
One way out of their plight is for the utilities to start installing more and more of solar. Solar generation neatly matches the peak demand. If they can use solar for peak summer late afternoon demand and run their gas plants for base load they can survive or stretch it out for a long time. But no matter what, coal is out. Even dirty coal is costlier than gas, not much cheaper than solar. Clean coal just can't compete.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The interesting thing about pumping more energy into a large fluid system is that it accentuates the amount of difference between the hot spots and the cold spots, making the hot spots hotter and the cold spots colder. (fsvo spot that means a moving 'lump' of fluid)
The main effect of global warming is to increase the violence and variability of the atmospheric stirring (commonly referred to as weather). Raising the temperature of 6 thousand billion tons (nb I use uk billions ie 10^12 so we're talking 6 x 10^15 here) of air by a half of a degree represents a lot of energy, that energy means more stirring, means more extremes of weather. It's hardly amazing to anyone who cares to think about it for a moment or two and who's studied a pan on the stove.
So yes, the cold winter you just experienced IS a product of global warming.
foo
Solar's relatively low cost/km^2 could become a difficult problem if it starts attempting to compete with other power projects purely on cost. Most cost/kwh numbers floated around don't factor in the total cost of owning and operating a solar installation, and only show the theoretical cost/kwh based on the equipment cost vs. power production. Right now, the driving factor for solar power generation is clean energy and not cost. I'd love for it to get down in cost to be competitive within the decade, but I expect that when that happens, cost might have to be not just equal, but significantly lower, to account for the solar field size needed to replace a standard coal plant. Lack of land availability can also become a damper on adoption in more populated areas, the areas that need the power the most.
I really think that something will need to be done to facilitate distributed solar via rooftop in order for solar to take over as a main power source. Right now, its too dangerous to build a business model around solar leasing via home rooftops because the rules are changing so frequently and the rules are different everywhere you go.
99% of scientists disagree. We DO know that climate change is real and that it is man made. Only in the US, and only in one political party is it still up for debate! Everyone else in the world has alreafy acknowledged the science as valid.
Therefore it's something that ecologists and other anti-capitalist hippies would like, therefore allowing solar or renewables would be like letting them win. And that's why solar energy must be fought at every turn!
Seriously, that is why the rank and the file rightwing moron on the street are so upset and angry at solar and wind: it looks like the hippies were right, therefore they were wrong in attacking them. And by attacking them again here, they re-entrench their insistence, since giving up would be admitting even more error on their part and absolve the hippie of being wrong again.
Finally solar power is becoming cost competitive even with coal.
Capacity =/= generation. Generation is generally 20% of capacity due to solar's awful capacity factor, which is why its NOT competitive with coal (really, nothing is). I would love for this to be true, because as a tech solar seems like the elegant solution we need-- you make the panel, it magically makes energy, win win! Except thats not the reality. Things like latitude (germany is pretty far north, for example, which affects their generation), the fact that panels dont last forever (need replacement after 15-30 years), their high cost to make, and their low efficiency conspire to kill "the dream". Enough soapboaxing-- lets look at actual figures.
(Sources from wikipedia, and from thence many other sites)
A chart of energy prices by source, Germany. Note how coal is generally 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of solar.
US DOE estimates for 2019 (scroll down for chart). The fun facts--Total system costs (per mWh):
* Coal (various types): 95 - 147
* Natural gas (various types): 66 - 128
* Advanced Nuclear: 96
* Solar, Thermal: 243
* Solar, PV: 130
Note the first column, which is where solar really gets thrashed. Your installed solar capacity may be 1000MWh, but your average output over the year will generally be 200MWh because your capacity factor sucks. Go towards the poles, it will be far worse (as Germany is discovering). Take a look here, you can see that while Germany has a boatload of solar capacity (beating out everything else), its actual generation lags behind everything except gas and hydro.
Im not cherry-picking these, either; one of those links youll note appears to be to a "green" site. Im just grabbing the first links I see, which mesh with every other piece of info I've seen on the subject. The TL;DR is that solar is crazy expensive and not really a great pick for northern countries. Maybe Im wrong and Germany will hit 100% of its generation year round eventually-- but I seriously doubt it. Solar is great as long as you dont expect it to carry the full weight of your country's energy needs; its really not made for that.
The real tragedy to me is that Germany is scaling down its nuclear, with the upshot that its still having to rely heavily on coal. If we did live in a world driven by science and rationality, we would see solar / wind / nuclear on an upswing and coal on a downswing. Thats not happening because many "green" types will worry about the nuclear boogeyman, and claim that if we work for 100 years we can possibly get solar to be cost competitive and efficient enough to actually generate a country's energy.
1. Heavily regulate coal, increasing costs.
2. Force plants to close, decreasing generating capacity.
3. Crow about the fact that Solar out generated coal and is cost competitive.
Solar hasn't improved. Coal has been artificially handicapped.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
NiFe batteries (i.e. Iron Edison) models are starting to get a foothold in the solar storage battery market. Their main selling point is the fact that they have a very long usable life and are very stable. They have a relatively poor energy density in volume compared to lithium variants, but for storage battery installations, this isn't as big an issue as in a smartphone.
The main selling point of the Ni-Fe batteries is their ability to take abuse and neglect and still function. This is what becomes critical for installs in individual homes where one could assume that the home owner will just ignore them for extended periods of time. They may be more expensive up front for a given capacity but their lifetime cost should be much less given that they have a lifetime measured in decades instead of single digit years. Yes they do have a higher self discharge rate higher than other batteries but in an application where they are not being used for long term storage that should be of less concern. The low energy density is also not a big deal in stationary installations since they aren't being moved.
Pumped hydro may be more efficient but there you need the space and geography to support it and it would be good for large scale storage. For more local storage, using better batteries like sodium-sulfur batteries at the substation level to smooth things out..
Time to offend someone