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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.
Comparing capacity alone does not produce a clear picture. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel. In the real world conditions vary which causes output to vary. The capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%. The capacity factor of a coal burning plant is 63.8%. A watt of coal capacity is worth from 1.9 to 4.9 times as much as watt of PV capacity.
Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not. That make coal power more stable and valuable.
Harvesting the energy around houses and decentralizing the grid will have an impact on the IT industry to develop technology to manage it. It seems to me that adopting wind and solar would present some really interesting challenges and opportunities for manufacturing as well.
With politicians crapping on about jobs growth but not where it is coming from it seems to me this is the elephant in the room.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Fusion: I honestly think it ends up being an issue of scaling. 'Double' the dimensions of your fusion chamber and you end up using 8 times the resources, but get 16 times the power. I'm afraid that by the time we get it figured out, it'll turn out that the *smallest* practical plant is something like 20GW, and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
I don't read AC A human right
> Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
Because they got used to the military paying the bills and generally babysitting them. It has been too cozy for them having the military as a giant revenue "vacuum cleaner" sucking up tax money and pouring it into their pockets.
Hopefully that time is ending. Hopefully.
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?
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
Most existing plants were not designed to load follow, but nuclear certainly can load follow relatively quickly. Not quite as fast as gas, but pretty quickly. The size of the plant is a factor as well.
The solar industry wants as much money as it can get, so it will villify all other sources as much as it can. Of course, they can't attack wind because they'd split their base, and they can't attack gas because new gas installations enable the grid to handle new solar. Either way, the oil and gas industry is quite OK with solar base attacks on nuclear. They happily endorse it.
Even if global warming is wrong, releasing CO2 includes releasing a lot of other crap in the atmosphere. I find it hard to believe that people are so stuck on arguing if anthropological CO2 release is the cause of our current temps that they stop caring about all of the other pollution being released for the exact same reasons, which we know for a fact is extremely harmful.
I couldn't care less if we reduce pollution for the sake of "global warming" or "to stop particulates and heavy metals from being released", lets at least agree to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
Why bother with Li-ion or lead acid when there are batteries that can really stand up to abuse that have been around for over a century. Granted a nickel-iron battery isn't as energy dense as the other 2 but in a stationary install that is not a big concern. Add to it that they can be refreshed fairly easily after a multi-decade initial lifespan and they become a good enough solution. If one were to look for a better technology to install at the substation level there is always the sodium-sulfur batteries but those would be something I would want to keep out of the hands to the general public since I could see some dumb ass working on their home putting a nail through it with catastrophic results.
Time to offend someone
I had not heard of nickel-iron batteries before this[0], but they don't look promising:
"Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications" The poor charge retention seems to suggest that the in-out efficiency will be low as well.
There are other chemical batteries that would be better, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery springs to mind, and the sodium sulfur, you mention also has potential, but none of these seem to be as good as pumped hydro or pumped heat, tho maybe being a Mechanical thermodynamic/fluids guy biases me unfairly against the chemical storage.
Having said all that, my initial point was one of economies/effciencies of scale and I do not think your suggestions deny that, the best storage technology has yet to be developed, but storage technology is where it's at regardless of what power source you wish to use, even Nuclear could do with buffers to smooth out the lumps in the demand curve.
[0] My chemistry is good enough to know that you can make a battery out of any two dissimilar metals and an electrolyte, I'd just not specifically heard of Ni-Fe ones.
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