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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.
Whenever I hear about all the stupid comments and grandstanding from politicians trying to pander to a scientifically illiterate (American) public I despair. However when I look at the (long predicted and now achieved) strides in solar power, a see a "ray" of hope.
Finally solar power is becoming cost competitive even with coal. Hopefully in a few more years and certainly less than a decade it will be decisively so. At that point, one hopes, renewable power will no longer be a political decision but a purely economic one.
This, of course, won't solve global warming, certainly not "over night" (ha ha). The vast build up of CO2, thermal lag and feedback loops (permafrost melting) means we will be dealing with this for generations to come. But it might slow down the buildup enough so that new carbon sequestration technologies created (again by scientists and technologists) can fix the problem for good.
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.
Um... yeah, that North West Oregon Housing Authority (NOHA) has really been cooking the books, probably getting kickback from the corning insulation people
Wherever You Go, There You Are
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
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.
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?
Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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? :D as they store enough heat to run a few nights without sun.
Because neither PV plants have a gap (you don't need much power at night, or do you?) nor do thermal solar plants hang behind nuclear power
Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The public largely rejected nuclear, yet reality says all those electric cars will need to plug into something.
Nuclear isn't called nuclear anymore. It is called "broad sustainable energy mix". The public will see windfarms and solar, because they take up space, and meanwhile here and there, new nuclear will quietly be built, and if by then anyone objects, they can cite urgent need to reduce emissions, given we've already built so much wind and solar and yet, oddly, we still have a ways to go to reach the targets.
There are basically two sides to the eco movement. The 70s folk who grew up reading The Ecologist and concluded humanity is a cancer on the planet. Meanwhile the other lot are basically, yeah we want better cleaner lifestyles, but we still want a lifestyle, with jobs and housing and children, with convenience and growth, with better lives for everyone.
Various planning restrictions are being eased to make windfarms possible, on the basis that the environmental targets are urgent and more important. That same workaround can be applied to nuclear. The way to get more nuclear is to never mention the word.
In the meantime, gas is there to make up for the variability in solar and wind. Once everyone wants to plug in their car to charge, everybody will want "sustainable energy".
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.
"suffers from spikes and lulls in availability and cannot be easily transferred across the US due to an aging and outdated power transmission system." that makes the case for solar to be on roofs so its production is for local use. Centralized power generation is for the older technologies
"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?" - they are more likely to support power storage like batteries which is developing into a large market. Solar companies can then offer the whole package of generation and storage.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
> 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
Solar can only get cost competitive with coal when it exists as a supplemental power source. It cannot take over baseline supply due to intermittency so it can only serve to shave off daytime peaks.
Storage? Sure, but that costs money and shaves off efficiency. And if you want to go full solar you need to expand the farms so they can:
1. Cover all daytime demands.
2. Produce enough surplus to charge all the battery banks to cover the sunless hours.
3. Produce even more surplus because some days are cloudy.
The topaz solar farm, peak production 550MW, is 25km^2 in area. Average production estimate is 125 MW = 1,096 GWh/year.
A baseload power plant, classic numbers, are 1000MW, 90% uptime. So 900MW average.
To replace one of those, assuming perfecft efficiency battery storage, you need 180km^2 of solar panels that produce 4GW electric at peak. This also means that battery storage needs to be colocated unless you want to build a new grid too.
US total power consumption 2008: 4,401,698GWh. That's 4016 topaz solar farms, again ignoring efficiency losses.
This is 100400km^2.
That's 1/3 of the surface area of germany.
That's a circle with the radius 180km( or diameter360km )
That's you standing on top of the world tallest building and only seeing solar panel all the way to the horizon.
In fact YOU COULD STAND ON TOP OF A BUILDING IN THE CENTER THAT'S 2400 METERS TALL (3x Burj Khalifa) AND WOULD STILL ONLY SEE SOLAR PANELS ALL THE WAY TO THE HORIZON!!!!!!
In short: The solar future doesn't look as bright once you start to scale it.
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.
Coal plants have no trouble lasting two to three times solar installations
Too bad that doesn't apply to the coal itself.
Because they will be closed long before their stuff become harmless.
So their stuff will become a public funded problem.
-- Laurent Pointal
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
Why do so many people find economical solar energy so upsetting?
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.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Whilst living on this planet the sun will provide us with all the energy we need if we can just work out how to harness it effectively. Save the Fissile materials for when we *really* need them, like if/when we get into deep space exploration.
There are enough fissile materials for 100,000 years worth of power, once you put thorium and breeders and non-traditional uranium sources into the mix. Even if this is off by an order of magnitude, a 10,000 year supply of power lasts longer than recorded human history. To me, this is a reliable enough supply (and one that can be used TODAY) that I support its use until we bridge to some form of terrestrial fusion, and/or solar energy.
Let me ask you this: If we started now and built even just enough natural gas plants in the US to replace every erg of coal power that are currently used here, what would the effect on US carbon emissions be? Don't sweat the limits of the gas supply, it's a thought exercise. And this doesn't even attempt to consider all of the other crap that coal puts into the environment.
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
I think the solution to all this is to move to a system where everybody has a big battery or capacitor bank in their house. That way we can get rid of the need to ramp up the power. The power draw will be basically constant, and we will be able to make do with a much smaller capacity on the grid. It's not cost effective to do this yet, but as battery prices come down, it will become cheaper, and eventually make sense to have something like this in your house. Combine that with a couple solar panels on your roof, and you've cut down the strain on the power grid by a very large amount.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
But when there is an ideological agenda, there can be a lot of confirmation bias.
Start with the title, "New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again." Is this an objective, nerd-centric assessment of scientific fact? Or is it a victory-lap "Eat stuff all of you doubters and deniers"?
The concern is that Renewable is not quite ready for Prime Time and being jammed down our throats.
Lead Acid batteries are tricky to maintain and if not maintained well then their in-out efficiency falls ~50% pretty quickly.
Li-ion is better on both fronts, but Lithium is scarce.
There are other storage technologies, Pumped Hydro http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm being the most tried and tested one, but Pumped Heat http://www.isentropic.co.uk is being developed now, and there's Tidal lagoons, and hot salt, however none of these are domestic in scale.
I think in general economies of scale and effciencies of scale mean the storage will be done on the grid and not in the house, much like Gasometers http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/London-Bristol-gasometer-2.jpg for the gas grid.
foo
Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
Just need a big power cable and we will be all set.
*facepalm*
You really don't understand the difference between global and local climate, do you? A 4 degree C change in local climate doesn't mean that much. A 4 degree C change in the global average is a catastrophe.
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.
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
It's not even all of that one political party. Just a vocal section of it.
It's pretty sad when CHINA can agree on this, but the radical right wing cannot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
foo
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.
Why invest in short term solutions?
Because you don't go directly from the Wright Brothers to the Space Shuttle in one step. There are intermediary steps involved, because that's how technology progresses.
Waiting for the perfect technology instead of using incrementally improved solutions has you getting nowhere at all.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
And things like Solar, Wind, and Wave wave aren't usable as baseline "brown" power. Because their generation sources are not stable and dependable. BUT, they can be used, alongside existing hydro and geothermal to offset demand spikes.
In other words, you don't use nuclear power to "fill in". You use nuclear as your baseline. You use everything else to fill in.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.
We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data.
The age of the Earth is totally irrelevant in this discussion. What you need to look at is the time constant of the relevant physical phenomena. Suppose an evil alien race injects a ray into our sun that makes it 10% weaker. How long do you think it takes for us to notice clear effects ?
Pumped Hydro has the advantage that there very little leakage loss from the store, and in fact if you put the top lake in a place where it rains a lot the store gets topped up for free.
I don't know of another storage technology that has this advantage.
Having said that maybe 80% in-out is good enough, and a mix of storage technologies is probably a good idea at this time, so, to be clear, it's not that I'm against batteries in houses, just that I don't think that will answer all of the issues required to be solved to produce the renewables + storage solution I'm looking for, and other, more centralised stores will be required.
I've heard of a Canadian housing development that uses solar thermal (water in black pipes on the roof) to heat up a big underground gravel store to keep the heat until winter when it's used to provide a district heating system, which probably isn't that efficient but it's effective enough and reasonably cheap, and very maintainable.
foo
which is why its NOT competitive with coal (really, nothing is).
If nothing is competitive with coal then why are all the coal plants in the US being retrofitted to run off Natural Gas?
It's because the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe. This makes the jet stream wavier, and that causes localized cold weather:
http://www.weather.com/science...
The reason for the extra Arctic warming has several reasons. One being that the air is dry, which means that increasing CO2 blocks a larger portion of IR. Secondly, the reduced sea ice area exposes more dark water to the sun.
The whole global warming arguments gets old. There are plenty of other arguments that can be used to encourage changes towards greener solutions. Solar power is free and space on roofs is also free to be used. It's free energy and considering our peek usage is during day light (overall usage, not residential) it seems like an ideal solution.
Solar panels were expensive and the reason is because they weren't being researched due to a lacking interest (double edge sword). Since many solar energy programs have been put in place by government, the solar cell output increased and the cost has dropped by more than half..
Check your math! That is clearly wrong simply by taking the number of people on the planet and dividing up 3.6m miles between them, 1 average person obviously only needs a fraction of roof space to supply their power.
Math done, 3.6m miles = 1331 square meters per person, that's orders of magnitude wrong.
You need to go back to school, Solar power doesn't generate heat it collects heat/energy, big difference.
Absurd statement because of lack of quantity / perspective, have you blackened out your windows to prevent bird deaths? Destroying the desert, sounds like a massive exaggeration to me.
So solar only requires 3x the ground space of nuclear if you exclude mines, processing plants and nuclear storage. That sounds pretty good to me.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Actually its not. The TFA makes the same comparison so many do with solar. That is per watt installed. Which is total bullshit. That watt of installed power will only produce 1 watt, for about 30min on just one perfectly fine day in the summer, if its in space. I like to call them brochure watts. Since real installations are probably never ever going to get that claimed watt in any real life conditions.
The average power you get out of 1GW of solar panels is at best 32% of the peak (in practice it is quite a bit lower, like 25%), and only in summer. It is much lower in the winter months, and you will often need to "time shift" all that energy.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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