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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coal plants have no trouble lasting two to three times solar installations
Too bad that doesn't apply to the coal itself.
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?
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.
*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
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.
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 ?
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