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MIT Report Says Current Tech Enables Future Terawatt-Scale Solar Power Systems
Lucas123 writes: Even with today's inefficient wafer-based crystalline silicon photovoltaics, terawatt-scale solar power systems are coming down the pike, according to a 356-page report from MIT on the future of solar energy. Solar electricity generation is one of "very few low-carbon energy technologies" with the potential to grow to very large scale, the study states. In fact, solar resources dwarf current and projected future electricity demand. The report, however, also called out a lack of funds for R&D on newer solar technology, such as thin-film wafers that may be able to achieve lower costs in the long run. Even more pressing than the technology are state and federal policies that squelch solar deployment. For example, government subsidies to solar are dwarfed by subsidies to other energy sources, and trade policies have restricted PV module and other commodity product imports in order to aid domestic industry. Additionally, even though PV module and inverter costs are essentially identical in the United States and Germany, total U.S.residential system costs are substantially above those in Germany.
"What the study shows is that our focus needs to shift toward new technologies and policies that have the potential to make solar a compelling economic option
In other words, it presently is not a compelling economic option. If you ignore costs, you can scale of course,we already knew that. So this study is big waste of time and money, should have just bought some solar panels with that budget.
The cost isn't different between US and Germany, The way it's paid for is different. Germany subsidizes solar power far more than the US. Just because tax revenue is spent, doesn't mean it's cheaper. One of the biggest reasons for it being uneconomical is that there is still the huge amount of hazardous waste that needs to be disposed of from the manufacturing process. It may be less of a carbon footprint, but green energy it is not.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
PV = what?
Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or is that not a technical problem?
Step 1 - plant lots of trees
Step 2 - wait
Step 3 - burn the trees
What do you do about solar power in the winter though? Especially in northern latitudes where the "day" lasts all of 8 hours with very weak sunshine, it can't substitute for anything. Wind has the issue of randomly stopping for up to a week. If a utility wants to build a week's worth of energy storage then batteries need to be less than 10% of their current cost.
The article about the article is an accurate summary of the actual article. Current solar tech does not make much economic sense,
True... and false. Economic viability is not a dichotomy. The truth is, it makes sense right now, in some markets, and doesn't make sense in other markets. As the technology gets cheaper, it makes sense in more and more markets.
so we are spending billions to subsidize it, rather than spending enough on research and development of new tech that does make sense.
I agree that it makes sense to spend on research and development of new tech. A nice side effect of this is that subsidizing new tech almost always has spin-off applications that weren't previously forseen.
The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with protecting the flow of oil. They were pumping as much out of the ground as they could and selling it on the world market. Then using the money to kill people by the tens of thousands.
One day you might stop dreaming and wake up in the harsh light of reality.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
It seems to be that storage of energy is really the more critical factor. If we focused on something like rotational fly-wheel storage systems that would be a better strategy. To be able store terra watts of power for weeks or months at a time would be ideal. Then solar would be able to just feed into that store. Of course the engineering challenges of keeping a large disc spinning at high RPMs would be immense I suspect.
I did read through it. Not every page, although there are some good laughs in there, and some good information too. This is clearly agenda driven research, and from MIT it's full of really impressive formulas to attempt to bring certainty for things that are fundamentally uncertain (aka the future)
here are some notes on their findings:
* lots of stale data (data as of 2011, 2012) :)
* no stability in the pv market forecasts (see figure 6.1, every year the forecasts are dramatically revised, we're ahead of schedule, and the forecasts look linear where capacity seems to be growing exponentially.
* didn't include stationary battery storage - I guess they didn't get a chance to catch tesla's battery announcement, and quarterly results phone call
As for the policy recommendation, here are my notes:
* their recommendation only is for the federal gov't, not for individuals, companies, industry, states, municipal, etc. I suppose they want the rest of us to wait around
* they want more direct investment in pv companies, and less rebates for pv installations
* grid level investments are more efficient then residential rooftop deployments "there is simply no good reason to continue to provide more generous subsidies for residential-scale PV generation than for utility-scale PV generation."
* they really want a price on carbon (specifically the stuff humans exhale), and continue to equate climatechange with only co2
My overall thoughts:
* less efficient solutions are more desirable ( as they build redundancies, less centralized control, less planning)
* investing in pv companies is better left to the capital markets then gov't officials
* rebates for solar deployment will help for a few more years, but it seems that as technology reduces the costs, these rebates will have less impact on demand
* the economics of energy industry is going to shift, and the fixed costs of the grid could fall on an increasingly smaller percentage of consumers.
So what I am reading is that our federal and state governments have policies designed to squash solar energy while putting on a public posture of encouragement of solar energy. Sometimes humans are so depressing it makes a man want to jump off a ledge.
Solyndra and many other similar government subsidized companies that died at the same time (~10 other PV/Solar companies) demonstrated the CdSeTe technologies are NOT financially viable and that the US non-position even in silicon PV makes it irrelevant and uncompetitive. Solyndra's marketing/business plan was self-evidently Fail with only a minor knowledge of how start-ups work and how the existing PV market was structured at time and now.
US production of PV amounts to less than 3% of world production of any type. US consumption amounts to less than 5% of world production of any type. Economically: the US is simply irrelevant and a non-player. (The leaders in both of these are China, German, and the rest of the EU, which is >95% of production and >85% of consumption)