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California Has Become the First State To Get Over 5% of Its Power From Solar
Lucas123 writes: While the rest of the nation's solar power generation hovers around 1%, California clocked in with a record 5% of power coming from utility-grade (1MW or more) solar power sources, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group and the Energy Information Administration. That's three times the next closest state, Arizona. At the same time, 22 states have yet to deploy even one utility-grade solar power plant, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. Meanwhile, the rest of the world saw a 14% uptick in solar power installations in 2014 for a total of 54.5GW of capacity, and that figure is expected to grow even faster in 2015. While China still leads the world in new solar capacity, Japan and the U.S. come in as a close second and third, respectively. In the U.S. distributed solar and utility-grade solar installations are soaring as the solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year. The U.S. is expected to deploy 8.5GW of new solar capacity in 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group.
5%, in one of the sunniest states there is.
Seriously, guys, that's just pathetic. And that's considered newsworthy?
In the US it is newsworthy. "Mined energy source" lobbies are very powerful here.
Recall that Germany, at the same latitude as Maine, USA, had one day where 52% of the electricity was supplied by renewable energy sources.
So, yes, this is embarrassing news that this is news in the US, but at least it's a step in the right direction
To be fair: the radiation released by a nuclear power plant in normal operation mode isn't a problem.
It's the failure modes that are problematic.
bickerdyke
There are complex issues to wide scail deployment.
First is what I think is a short term political problem. Where the energy industry is fighting the change, and lining the pockets of political parties that are willing to make sure things don't change. Technically solar power is more akin to conservative ideals, as it allows the individual to generate their own power without having to handle what big brother says.
Secondly solar requires consumers to buy in. In terms of price even with tax incentives for my home and usage it is about the same price. So there is a hidden cost for me to find a source and deal with the salesmen trying to find a good deal. So it makes it more expensive then current energy. Other forms of energy you don't need a huge buy in. They buy some land, build a plant and the community has power. Just as long there are more people benifitting from it then who are harmed society is happy.
Third trees. Contrarary to the world view of Americans, we like trees a country that is 50th in population density means a lot of us lives in more rural areas, and our homes have a fair amount of tree cover that we do not want to get rid of.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The sad part is that states like Florida are making it harder to install solar. On top of that, Florida is fighting energy efficiency. Other states are adding fees to solar users at the behest of the utility companies.
I live in California and am getting solar installed later this week though not nearly as big of a system as I'd like due to limitations of my roof. PG&E has some of the most expensive electricity in the country because of our state's corrupt public utilities commission. Average rates are around $0.194/kwh (compared to Santa Clara $0.113/kwh). PG&E has been quietly lowering the thresholds to push people into higher tiers of power as they make their homes more energy efficient. On average I'm paying well over $0.19/kwh so solar makes perfect sense.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
First there is no knee yerk reaction. Germany voted anti nuclear 25 years ago. But the later Merkle government reverted that voting. After Fukushima, they reconsidered and reverted back again to the original old plans.
Secondly there is no anti science or new scientific discovery. Germany is drowning in nuclear waste, we have no idea where to put it safely. All existing deposits turned out to be a desaster and need to be closed and cleaned up. Possible future deposits for waste don't exist. And it is unlikely, we find a good place in our own country. Right now our politics, COSTLY as that, is to keep our own waste in our own country instead of exporting it into a third world country
However if your sim city knowledge is so superior, you are invited to come to germany, run for office etc. Unlike the USA you only need to have German citizenship to run for President or Chancellor, you don't need to be born here.
However I suggest to read a bit more about energy production. You will hardly convince one to build or agree to a new nuclear plant when a wind plant is much much cheaper. :D but I guess you know that renewables are cheaper than nuclear ... just wondering why you promote them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here in Portugal, my electric bill states we do at least 30% from wind sources, and overall +70% is renewable. We rarely get outages, and we have a very decent supply of fossil-fuel from North Africa. We have a lot less surface area than California (~100.000 vs 400.000 km) , and probably less sunlight time overall, considering cloudy days are like 30% of the year span. Let me know when a state gets even close to that!
The point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is this:
It's a start.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Considering the pace at which this energy was added to the grid, it is news worthy. Considering coal (and large hydro and nuclear) are all about ~9% each in California, it will only be a handful of years until solar surpasses power production from each coal, nuclear, and large hydro.
Perhaps then solar detractors will rubber neck at the remarkable progress in the industry. It will be hilarious over the coming decade as the raw economics drive us to abandon domestic resources (coal, gas) in favor of Chinese (or Malaysian) manufactured solar panels. Exporting billions of dollars to China after handing them this giant industry (inevitably one of the world's largest) on a silver platter.
I wonder how the myopic thinkers will react to this scenario. Of course, we'll have to wait a decade for them to realize what has already happened.
It's [solar energy] going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Sorry Bob, the devil is looking elsewhere to fill quota, and even good drink will be scarce during the Generational Purge due to a loss of the 'Just In Time' food supply chain. Modern cannibals will find scarcely a week's worth of cans on the grocery shelf and perhaps another few weeks in distribution centers, but this will serve only to swell the ranks of the migrant Cannibal Armies that will actually conduct the Purge.
The Cannibal Army is the ultimate (and last) achievement of any failed modern civilization. The only reason the history books are not chock full of 'em is that historians are delicious, and there has never been enough population to achieve the necessary critical mass, collapsed societies to this point have always left numbers few enough to live off the land, and retained enough know-how to do so. That is not true today.
Ask anyone on the street if they know how to solder a joint, sow seed, plant a cow or where delivery pizza comes from and they haven't a clue. But ask them if they could figure out how to eat someone and they will quickly nod assent. It is not only instinctive it is infused into the culture. The recurring theme of pursuit and car chases in popular movies expresses the primal knowledge necessary for cannibalism.
The cannibals will be ruthless, they will employ cleverness and the use of technology to scour the land. Your stationary survival enclaves will be the favorite feast of the first wave, where all the cherished ideals of small sustainable energy, and those who practice it, go into the cooking pot. Domestic cattle and other animals will be mere appetizers in this Moveable Feast, because cannibal armies have no patience to raise them. Disease from improper preparation will claim some, but the critical mass will persist until there is only one Cannibal Army left in California.
That last cannibal army, great in number, will then march on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to absorb and consume the small group of engineers and scientists who have gathered there to preserve the remaining fruits of civilization, and for hot showers. Cannibals are easily swayed by reason, you might say they are even attracted to it, because wherever reason exists there are yummy people to consume. And consume they will until the last corn-fed game is exhausted. And then they will turn on each other and feast until human population levels out and reaches a sustainable level of -1.
The fate of California's energy policy is foretold in Lucifer's Hammer. Devour this book.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Why don't you build integral fast reactors? They are capable of consuming the existing way and create power in the process. They also can't melt down even theoretically since a runaway reaction is not possible with them. At least you would generate power cleanly from your EXISTING waste. It is far better to use the waste than bury it and you do less damage in the process.
So far I have not been very impressed with decisions being based on actual science and careful thought in Germany. It has certainly not been my experience with anything regarding GMO where almost every German I have run into is against it period and no discussion is possible. They do want the life saving medical treatments though that are possible with GMO they just don't want them developed here.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
The pace of PV installations in the U.S. is accelerating as the federal government's solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year.
We've been through this before. All of the graphs on this page assume last year's growth will continue unabated. But what we're really seeing is a rush to grab as much of the subsidy as possible before the free money goes away.
"Scail"? Scail. You wrote "scail". That's a fale.
Wow, LeVar Burton! What's the next book on today's Reading Rainbow?
That is all.
You're partly wrong.
It was Italy that voted against nuclear in 1986. 2 reactors where working at that time and had to be shut down. In 2011 there was another referendum to reenter the nuclear powe production, but italians confirmed they'd like to remain nuclearless.
East Germany (not todays Germany) shut down in 1990 its last nuclear power plant due to security concerns, and no new reactors were planned or build afterwards.
In 2000 Germany (now united) decided to gradually reduce the use of nuclear power, and thus in 2003 the first power plant went offline. Others followed in subsequent years. In 2010 they decided to slow down the decommissionment and let the reactors live a few more years. In 2011, after the Fukushima tragedy, Germany decided to shut the reactors as soon as possible. 8 reactors were then shut down immediately, and the rest will be shut down in steps till 2022.
It is worth noting that California is the #2 electricity consuming state in the nation (behind Texas), but has the lowest per capita consumption in the country, roughly half the average per capita consumption of the entire U.S.
They seem to be implying that is a bad thing, I don't know what the distribution of those states are but it wouldn't be very smart for Northern states to build a utility grade solar plant even if they wanted to.
Germany gets more power from solar than California (as a percentage), and they're about the same latitude as most northern US states. In fact, I think their northern border is much farther north than all US states.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Iowa was getting nearly 30% of their power from wind energy two years ago, already.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
A complex dilemma you've painted. :)
But it's all in the (your) mind
Yes renewable energy seems to cost more than conventional fossil but then the last has hidden costs regarding the environment now and in the future.
I'm really curious why you brought up the subject of trees, do you maybe feel we need to cut down trees for large scale PV deployment?
Like yesterday I ordered PV cells covering about half my garage roof and they'll be good for some 125% of my annual consumption and that's at 52 degs. North.
A few hundred square kilometres in some nice deserts (+ a lot of transmission infrastructure) would cover the needs of the planet.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yes for efficiency's sake the weather could be better but it's still quite well possible, you do realise these cells will even generate power on cloudy days?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Well, Maine promises to bring their new solar plant online just as soon as the clouds break.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Oh, not measurable in kWh?
Just type these five words into a search bar and be wiser: "energy needed to heat water".
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Did you know that Texas, home of Big Oil, produces slightly more than 10% of it's power from wind, about 14,098 MW according to wikipedia. They're the nation's leader in wind energy. Florida does solar better than anyone else, and for overall green energy, Washington (via dams, mostly).
In a related tangent, California claims to get almost 5% of their power from wind, though they only produce 5,917 MW from theirs, and have about 10 million more people, so somewhere, something doesn't add up.
My guess is that a lot of these "% power" claims, including the one in the article, come down more to clever accounting than actual, literal green draw.
When discussing Chernobyl, one must always keep in mind the proximate cause of the incident.
Specifically, the version of the NRC decided it needed to know how much energy they could extract from a meltdown in progress to deal with the meltdown. Perfectly reasonable notion - it makes a meltdown easier to deal with if you don't have to rely on dozen/hundreds of (relatively) small emergency generators for lights, pumps, etc.
So, they picked an out-of-the-way reactor, and pushed it as far toward a meltdown condition as they considered safe to do, and started measuring the energy output of the plant in that mode.
Unfortunately, they were wrong about how "far toward a meltdown" was "safe to do"....
So, the largest nuclear disaster in history happened because someone made a goof while trying a Real World (tm) SIMULATION of the largest nuclear disaster in history....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Three Mile Island was the most fantastic design ever. A catastrophic failure leads to absolutely no negative consequences except for that of a nasty red mark on the balance sheet.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Pathetic? Are you mad. It's fantastic. Take a look at a graph of solar power production from the 1970s to today? What do you see? Exponential growth. It goes up at roughly the same pace regardless of political party or tax incentives or gas prices. We're now at the point where the exponential growth is being seen and you say 5% is pathetic.
Look at the growth rates. The future is very bright.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
We are not born yesterday and it is getting to be irritating, these April fools jokes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Desalination, even the energy-hog reverse osmosis process we use now, would be an ideal application for the fluctuating power output of renewables. Because the fluctuations don't matter in that application, desalination would put a lot of wind and solar power to work without waiting for Smart Grid.
Considering just how far north it is, that's still impressive, if not to you.
Not just north, but also cloudy. But that is not impressive, it is dumb. Reducing CO2 is a global problem. They could have got that much reduction at half the cost if they had subsidized solar panels in Spain and then imported the energy. Or build solar plants in Egypt or Ethiopia, and then sold the carbon credits.
Thirdly, the 'idea' that coal emits noticeable radioactivity is a myth from the 1960s/1970s.
Really? Skip down to table 2 - German coal may not contain a large amount of Uranium, but it does have Radon, Thorium, and Potassium. Please read this post that I wrote using the data from table 2 for US coal.
I seriously doubt there's no U-238 in German coal if there is Ra-226 since they're related via the decay chain, and Table 3 disputes the lack of U in German coal - the ash and slag contain up to 411 Bq/kg of Uranium that has to exist in the unburnt coal.
Even if we ignore the Uranium and go with just the average levels of Th and K, we get a total activity of 435 Bq/kg, which is ~3.5x the lowest US value detailed in my other post. That means 1 kg of average unburnt German coal contains 29 BEDs. When burnt in a 'new' plant (assuming the 1% up-the-flue rule) each burnt 3.45 kg of German coal results in 1 BED (banana equivalent dose, 15 Bq) out the stack. I don't have figures for German coal consumption/year, but that's still quite a lot of fissionable material going up the stack. The US alone emits a minimum of 11 tonnes of U and 2.7 tonnes of Th - that's 70.25 billion (10^9) BEDs best case and 7.025 trillion (10^12) BEDs worst case.
Mass-for-mass, average unburnt German coal is 4.35 times as radioactive as your average banana.
Is it noticeable? Certainly. Is it dangerous? Probably somewhat. Is it worth "The sky is falling" hysteria? No.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
There is no base load problem. 30% of base load and on good days 100% of it already comes from wind. :)
Your problem is: you don't know what base load actually means/is
Base load in Germany is around 40% in summer and in winter about 45% of 'peak load'. 'Base load' is the amount of 'load' you feed into the grid, regardless of demand. That means the 'base load' plants are not dispatched, they just run at a close to max output. It does not matter if your midrange and peaker plants shape their load around fixed 'base load' plants AND varying demand OR around varying demand and varying solar/wind input. The challenge for the peakers and midrange plants (and for balancing energy) is just the same.
Yes, the idea that EVERY kind of coal is radioactive contaminated is bullshit. And if you collect it an deposit it somewhere it is not more radioactive then the highest yielding uranium ores. And collecting something and depositing it, is not the same as emitting and polluting the environment. The highest contaminated fly ash is 'just ad the edge' that it would be commercially viable to
You can google for the amount of 'dust' (mercury etc.) that is emitted by a german plant. It is in the range of a few kg per year.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And that start is growing with double-digit percentages. AND, the majority of new power generation projects in the US (and worldwide) is already renewables (solar/wind/etc), so the trend is only going to accelerate.
Naively projecting that 5% solar power forward at 14% growth per year leads to 50% solar power in 18 years and 100% solar power in 23 years. Of course, that's not an accurate model of what will happen -- a better model would be an s-curve, with the maximum currently unknown -- but it does give a good idea of the rough time scale involved. Around 2 decades until solar power is saturated? That's not so long.
It took a while to get going, with the required government support for the basic research costs, but now this is a self-sustaining free-market endeavour which means it's a trend that now cannot be stopped, thankfully.
Cutting CO2 is not the entire picture, though. With that in mind, it ceases to be less "dumb" than you think. Building the PV installations in Germany creates money for Germans to spend in the German economy. It also generates experience in the sectors involved. Sending money to Spain keeps the money in Spain.
Not only that, but when you say 5%, it sounds rather small.
When taking a look at the actual numbers behind the percentages, it's a bit more dramatic. In 2013, California generated and used 296,628 GWh of energy on their grid, according to this. If energy usage was flat (not likely) than solar is now generating 14,831.4 GWh of energy in California alone.
That's hardly nothing, and definitely not "whoop de do da."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Coal generation in California is only ~7%. That change your outlook any?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Getting a core non-critical is the _easy_ part. Change of core geometry, loss of moderator, pretty much anything will take the core non-critical. The cooling down part is what is tricky. You don't just have a big chuck of material at some temperature that simply need cooling, the core will continue to generate gigawatts of heat due to the decay of short-lived isotopes for several days/weeks after it has been rendered non-critical. Simply dumping nuclear lava on a concrete floor will not work. You have to spray it or flood it with borated water which will produced copious quantities of highly contaminated hot water, steam, and hydrogen. You can't keep all that material in your containment building...
The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi clearly demonstrated that containment buildings are all but worthless.
I'm curious. What is it about solar energy that spurs such surprising anger among this segment of Slashdot readers? What did solar energy do to you?
My theory is that admitting that solar energy works means admitting that those g_dd_mn hippies were right. After all, hippies are never right, so solar energy cannot work.
Q.E.D.
Replace 'hippies' with 'Al Gore', 'leftards', 'commies', 'alarmists' or a similar label according to taste.
I am with you on this ledow. Just yesterday I ran into a couple oohing and aaahing about a pathetically tiny human being. Hardly 10.5 pounds and 19 inches long, without any hair. And this couple is totally over the top, painting a new room, getting new furniture, wondering what to name this human etc etc for this tiny member of Homo sapiens hardly 5% of the size of the parents.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes, the idea that EVERY kind of coal is radioactive contaminated is bullshit.
Right, just the majority of available coal. We've used up the most convenient deposits of it, just like everything else.
And if you collect it an deposit it somewhere it is not more radioactive then the highest yielding uranium ores.
Which suggests the question, is that actually that wonderful? Also, whether it's being collected. Maybe in Germany. Not in the USA or China, though.
The highest contaminated fly ash is 'just ad the edge' that it would be commercially viable to
...make poisonous drywall out of it, as they have done in China?
You can google for the amount of 'dust' (mercury etc.) that is emitted by a german plant. It is in the range of a few kg per year.
Assuming you believe those figures.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But every single form of energy is subsidized by the government. So why are we singling out solar again?
Do you feel the same way about nuclear?
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, they picked an out-of-the-way reactor, and pushed it as far toward a meltdown condition as they considered safe to do, and started measuring the energy output of the plant in that mode.
No. No. No.
read,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
read,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
and read more.
The test plan called for a gradual reduction in power output from reactor 4 to a thermal level of 700â"1000 MW.[32] An output of 700 MW was reached at 00:05 on 26 April. However, due to the natural production of xenon-135, a neutron absorber, core power continued to decrease without further operator actionâ"a process known as reactor poisoning. As the reactor power output dropped further, to approximately 500 MW, Toptunov mistakenly inserted the control rods too farâ"the exact circumstances leading to this are unknown because Akimov and Toptunov died in the hospital on May 10 and 14, respectively. This combination of factors rendered the reactor in an unintended near-shutdown state, with a power output of 30 MW thermal or less.
A KNOWN problem with Xenon accumulation in the reactor was the cause of the problems. This is a long standing problem. If you shut down a nuclear reactor (including running it at too low of power output), you have to shut it down completely, and let Xenon decay before you can restart the reactors. There is no shortcuts. But these people wanted to shortcut the wait of a few days so they could run their test that was already behind schedule. They thought they could do this manually.
NO ONE wanted to run Chernobyl anywhere near melt down conditions. That had nothing to do with the turbine tests.
If you want power surges, you ignore Xenon and you get massive power surges as it gets cooked off. Just like Chernobyl - they got their nice power surge and a nice steam explosion. None of which had anything to do with the turbine tests.
But every single form of energy is subsidized by the government. So why are we singling out solar again?
No, it really isn't... this is a common misconception by people who don't really understand this stuff...
The government does allow lots of tax breaks for oil and gas drilling, that is true. But they allow similar breaks for almost any kind of business investment. The ones for oil and gas are a bit more favorable, but they aren't FREE MONEY.
The government is not writing checks out of the general fund to pay people to drill for oil.
The government IS writing checks out of the general fund to pay people to install solar.
That is a huge difference.
The tax breaks for oil and gas can only save you money if you have other investments to write them off against, and even then you must have spent money on the oil and gas drilling first to be able to claim the deductions.
The 30% the government will pay towards solar installation is a TAX CREDIT, not a TAX DEDUCTION. That is a massive difference, one well worth understanding before claiming oil and gas gets some huge break.
Yes renewable energy seems to cost more than conventional fossil but then the last has hidden costs regarding the environment now and in the future.
For better or worse, we have decided to not price those future costs into our power bills.
If we did and we taxed carbon directly (not some credit scheme, but just a direct tax on carbon production), then you might well see the uptake on solar and wind shoot through the roof.
Right now, installing solar makes no sense, at least not at the residential home scale. The payback is measured in decades.
Part of the reason for that is the cost of labor to install the panels, grid tie, etc.. The panels themselves are no longer expensive, but the labor part doesn't change much.
If my cost of power went from 10.7 cents per kWh to 25 cents per kWh, those numbers change very quickly.
----
The interesting thing is that while solar and wind would become very competitive if we had a carbon tax, so would nuclear. Right now nuclear is having a hard time competing with coal and natural gas due to the low prices of burning those.