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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.
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.
News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.
The marginal cost of oil extraction in the long run is pretty close to infinite. As a society that is the true marginal cost of current oil production. However, capitalism is woefully inefficient in this regard.
In terms of long term planning, whichever scalable renewable is/will be the cheapest is the winner.
Hint: That's solar. It may also be supplemented with tidal/wind/etc, but at the end of the day, solar will have to do the heavy lifting. That or fusion, but fusion has been 30 years away from viability for the past 50 years.
What really needs to happen is to remove all gov't subsidies across the board. Indeed this is what alt-energy maven Avory Lovins has been preaching for years, because he knows that without subsidies the fossil fuels can't compete with renewables. We are already near the tipping point where even the massive fossil fuel subsidies won't be enough to prop them up. The switch to renewables is just a matter of time. The only unknowns are how long it will take and how painful it will be.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Photo-Voltaic solar power.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Solar has also been "just around the corner" the last 30 years. It still needs to drop the price by almost 10x before it's economical as a partial alternative - and that's not even getting into storage. "Nest" and smart use needs to be here first, then partial micro solar deployment, then electric cars - that trifecta of electrical production, management, and storage is where the economics will finally start working.
Bingo.
If we ignored costs we could all eat caviar on the moon.
The main issue with solar is the depreciation. Assuming they last forever... they'd be absurdly inexpensive. Of course they don't. They tend to wear out after 10-20 years depending on what various manufactuers say.
But the really silly thing is that they are not built to be maintained. They can only be built at the factory and when they wear out you have to throw them out.
How green is that especially when the vast majority of the solar panel is going to be roughly identical to how it was when it rolled off the manufactoring line.
What we should be looking at AMONGST OTHER things is figuring out specifically what is not working with an old worn out cell and either how you prevent that situation through maintenance, redesign the cells so they can be maintained, or we need some sort of micro manufacturing system for solar cells.
If you could buy a machine that made solar panels... ideally not with silicon wafers... choose a cheaper material even if it is less space efficient. And then rather than sell the panels you sell the machine that makes the panels.
The guy with the panels on his roof doesn't even need to own the machine but someone in the area probably should have enough manufacturing capacity to maintain the existing solar infrastructure.
Look, all costs are just supply and demand. In the case of solar panels the issue is supply. There is lots of demand for them. The costs get pushed up by a lack of supply. So we need more production and that production has to assume lower prices because it will be a higher supply environment.
Democratizing the manufacturing of the panels solve the problem because the big industrial producers make more money with the cost of panels higher. It isn't in their interests to push the prices lower.
If you move those companies away from selling toast and instead selling toasters... we might get a dramatically lower price.
Someone is going to be upset that I'm advocating the less space efficient panels. The more efficient ones have unreasonably high quality control requirements to be practical in the applications I'm discussing. We need something simple and robust and cheap. Something that when it breaks or wears out can be patched or repaired without going to any great expense.
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News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.
The article about the article is an accurate summary of the actual article. Current solar tech does not make much economic sense, so we are spending billions to subsidize it, rather than spending enough on research and development of new tech that does make sense. Furthermore, subsidizes designed to encourage solar adoption, have instead been co-opted by the solar industry, and used to prop up inefficient domestic producers at the expense of better and cheaper imports. So the end result is that solar is more expensive to consumers, while the worst panels are being installed. No matter how dumb you think our solar policies are, they are actually even dumber than that.
And surely the many millions of dollars contributed by the Arunas A. and Pamela A. Chesonis Family Foundation, big solar and wind proponents, didn't influence this at all.
Considering that solar alone gets more subsidies than coal, gas, and nuclear all combined, I think it would be solar that crumbles without them. And the only resource getting more subsidies than solar is wind, so that's two renewables down the drain without subsidies. It was true a few years ago that solar wasn't getting as much subsidy love, but the world's changed. Maybe Avory Lovins and people like him should try to keep a little more up to date before passing judgement.
PV = Watt?
FTTY
I've never given him a dime, though I did meet him once, briefly, back in the 80s.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
"If you ignore costs"???
That's rich, considering the immense externalities of oil, gas, and coal burning.
Ignoring costs for solar ... Do you even understand economics?
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
So what you're saying is, you're terrified of his ideas. You can't stand the thought of simply eliminating subsidies and letting the chips fall where they may.
What's the matter? If you're right, then fossil fuels remain more profitable than renewables and nothing changes.
If you still want to try to defend subsidies, all it means is that you're admitting that fossil fuels can no longer compete.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Depends on how you slice it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Large scale residential solar deployment though can end the price imbalance. As you need solar at the exact time the sun is out. If your solar unit generates 80-120% of your air conditoning power needs.
That will help with demand and load balance spikes. At least until we get Mr fusion that runs on fecal matter.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Assuming they last forever...
The old glass panels from 40 years ago do have an indefinite lifespan. It's the new 'efficient' stuff that wears out like our solid state hard drives.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
None of those taxes begins to account for the lack of disposal fees for fossil fuels.
If all fossil fuel users were required to collect and safely sequester the CO2 that they're allowed to spew into the air free of charge, fossil fuels would not be even close to competitive with solar energy. As it stands, the rampant use of fossil fuels is saddling future generations with hundreds of $Trillions of remediation costs. It only looks cheaper because you're kicking the can down the road.
In other words, it presently is not a compelling economic option.
You need to read about economies of scale.
It's pretty stupid to compare economic viability of 50+ year old industry (covering 90+% of market) with 10+ year old industry (striving to gain a percent or two).
I like how pragmatically Germans went after the solar: it makes sense in long term, thus it makes sense to start R&D sooner than later. And apparently it is going well enough that they are even planning to repel the subsidies (to much chagrin of some).
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If all fossil fuel users were required to collect and safely sequester the CO2 that they're allowed to spew into the air free of charge, fossil fuels would not be even close to competitive with solar energy.
No need for that, even. Just build the CO2-fixing cost into the sales of the fuel, like when you sell electronics in California or when you sell pretty much anything in the EU, and you're responsible for the waste. Consequently way more stuff over there is stamped for recycling. I have to throw away a ton of plastic just because nobody bothered to stamp a number on it when they molded it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You need to follow a few layers of links to find the actual "subsidies" he claims. What you find are pretty much normal business expenses being treated as business expenses for tax purposes; depreciation, capital gains, R&D expenses, etc. Those can't honestly be called a subsidy.
Photovoltaic (evil because rare earths) as opposed to thermal (evil because desert tortoises would have to live in the shade).
I see you haven't read much of the information linked to. The study doesn't show scaling presently will bring the cost down to fit their model. That is why they pin hope on R&D, and not scaling, to get us their.
Like I said, nothing we don't already know.,
Explain the difference if you can. I briefly looked into it and there seems to be a lot of solar panels that use glass still. They use different kinds but glass is quite common.
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In the long run it doesn't really matter. Renewables will win because... PHYSICS. Forget the fact that fossil fuels are finite, they are simply doomed by the plummeting price of solar and the ever-increasing price of petroleum. A glance at the long-term curve will be enough to settle the matter.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Hey bingo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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That is why they pin hope on R&D, and not scaling, to get us their.
And in your opinion, where from come the R&D money? From Santa Claus?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The old glass panels from 40 years ago do have an indefinite lifespan.
They don't have that, though. After 10 or 20 years there's noticeable reduction in output, and that's if they were made well enough not to fail due to thermal cycling. They're not going to last forever. They're still great, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been saying that for years. As with moth things in life, we're better if the government stays out of it. Given time - and not that much time, really - solar wins because it's better. Last I heard current PV panels still need rare elements and so won't scale to TW production, but technology marches on. Solar can't be base load because we don't have good enough batteries yet at scale, but technology marches on. These problems seem likely to be gone in 20 years.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Well, if you go and change the definition of subsidy, why can't I? Solar doesn't get any subsidies, it gets research and development aid.
Oh, and that oil? Didn't belong to the company. They didn't buy the rights to those resources in a sale.
The "tax" is them paying for the right to access those resources.
You DO agree that you should pay to take away something that belongs to someone else and doesn't belong to you and sell it, right? You agree that not paying would be called "a robbery", yes?
Sorry, I meant silicon vs. thin film. Here's a thing (caution, pdf). The panels, even the newest ones, last a very long time.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sorry if I am redundant. Some people offer 25 years warranties on these things. They degrade very slowly.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Having just started looking into this, it appears that the "cheaper better imports" are actuallyheavily subsidized. If you're going to complain about things, make sure to get the entire picture in there, especially when it's highly relevant to one of your main points.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
If we gave 2 trillion dollars to the solar industry, we'd have flying cars.
Military costs to protect oil field are ongoing and extremely expensive.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Lovins is a hack that gets money to tell the less knowledgeable greenies exactly what they want to hear, and they certainly worship at his feet and send him their money. He's a slick operator.
I don't care if you think Lovins is a hack/slick operator. Your name calling aside, Lovins' IDEA of removing all energy subsidies seems to have merit...at least to me. What is your objection to removing subsidies? Or do you actually agree with Lovins on that point?
I have to throw away a ton of plastic just because nobody bothered to stamp a number on it when they molded it.
Not much difference between you throwing it away or recycling it these days. China became much more strict about importing recyclables two years ago, plus the price of oil dropped. Unless it is stamped #1 or #2 it's probably headed from the blue bin to a landfill.
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.
Actually oil doesn't get subsidies, you are confusing tax breaks with government giving them money....
Oil is one of the most heavily taxed items you can buy.
You are aware that these two sentences contradict each other? If oil gets tax breaks, that means lower taxes.
Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
You cannot justify something stupid merely by pointing out that we do other things that are even stupider. Oil subsidies, and solar subsides are each stupid in their own way, and both should be ended, but they are two different issues. One does not justify the other.
http://energyinformative.org/l...
80% output after 25 years.
Decline is essentially linear at 10% per decade. So 70% output after 35 years.
I.e. put on 25% more panels and you are fine. Or use more efficient devices that use 30% less electricity in 35 years and you are fine.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
First Solar appears to be making the sort of panels you're talking about. :)
They use "CdTe Thin Film" :)
Can't seem to find out who actually sells the fucking things though. They might only sell to industry or municipalities which is a shame.
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You make me wish I had mod points right now, but you're already at +4 so I'm sure someone will get that last one in there for me eventually.
And what do you think ALL THE PLANTS ON EARTH photosynthesise with?
They use the carbon given off by decaying plants and animals. They do not consume all the carbon dug up from geological deposits, and even if they did, they would give it back up as they decay. Redepositing that carbon into geological strata is an exceedingly slow process that has been totally overwhelmed by the rate of our mining it.
Plants also aerobically respirate O2 and emit CO2 at night. They are not pure CO2 sucking machines.
Unsubsidised solar is already cheaper than coal, especially if you count externalities. Installing it on a wide scale is R&D. The grid needs to adapt, we need to learn how to do it in the real world.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You can't just end military expenses and you can't stop protecting oil trade in Middle East when you, as part of world oil market, depend on it.. It depends on foreign forces that you don't control. It is not stupid, it just reality that you may not like, but should live with.
What year are you from, 2005??? Recent solar plant in Dubai, electricity price 6 cents/kWh, no subsidies. Austin Energy has closed agreement with Recurrent Energy, price is 5 cents/kWh. Texas project probably uses federal tax reduction, but even without reduction it would be on par with natural gas plants. And natural gas producers use their own tax breaks and certainly do not pay all related costs that taxpayers pick up after them.
"In 2008 the World Health Organization and other organizations calculated that coal particulates pollution cause approximately one million deaths annually across the world". How exactly the coal industry is paying for these deaths? Are they providing free cancer treatment at least to somebody or leaving it up to the Government with their Medicare & Medicaid programs?
A glance at the curve reveals that it only considers the manufacturing cost of the PV cells, which (according to the MIT paper) is roughly 15% of the total cost of an installation. So...ECONOMICS.
I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
And that not to consider the loss to the economy when your neighbour falls on hard times.
There are good reasons quality of life is highest in the countries and places with the highest taxes and thus greatest 'common interest'.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
PV panels don't require any rare elements in general. Some of the common types use rare elements, but not all. And not all these "rare" elements are really rare, it is just their production isn't scaled up commercially. PV panel production can scale and get price reduction just fine, the only question is which PV panel type will prevail.
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."
Your point?
Medium PV degradation is about 0.5% year. CdTe panels are no different if done properly. Newer First Solar panels may be event better. Polycrystalline silicon may be slightly worse, but not much.
Aha, so you would rather live in a place where the strong get it all...
So what part of providing policing, building infrastructure, enforcing contracts, and preventing fraud means the strong get it all? I mean, more than they do now? Or are you trying to say that no one should be more successful than another, regardless of effort or ability? (I'm setting national defense off to the side, as that's a whole different argument that would just be a distraction here.)
Seriously, I don't get it - could you make your position clear?
I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
Everything any of us ever do affect the community. Having sex for purposes other than procreation means we won't be having kids that we might otherwise (and we do have a problem with native population decline - but you can reverse the example if you like). Every time you drive, you risk the lives of yourself and everyone near you. Everything we say might offend someone, somewhere, deeply.
Freedom always means the right to harm others, to some degree. We tolerate that harm, when it's minor, because freedom is more important. It's a matter of degree, not black-and-white. And I chose the toilet example carefully because the law doesn't help anything. A small percentage of water is used inside the home anyhow, and subsidies of water use for agricultural irrigation are the root of the problem most often when there's a shortage.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm OK with removing or limiting subsidies, and the idea does have merit. With that said, I don't think a national energy solution set can be optimal without government dollars and incentives used wisely. Subsidy elimination certainly isn't a Lovins original idea, and I would never say Lovins is completely wrong on everything. But, Lovins uses a level of reasoning that dismisses the details, and he's not really providing anything of value while taking money from anywhere he can get it.
Trina warranty:
For Polycrystalline Products (as defined in Sec. 1 a): 2.5 % in the first year, thereafter 0.7%
per year, ending with 80.7% in the 25th year after the Warranty Start Date,
For Monocrystalline Products (as defined in Sec. 1 b): 3.5 % in the first year, thereafter 0.68%
per year, ending with 80.18% in the 25th year after the Warranty Start Date.
That is different limit for each year, not 80% all the time like for most other manufacturers. In practice degradation will be lower than warranty.
R&D gets money from the sales. Subsidies help lower the entry barrier and grow the market. Larger the market - more money gets into the R&D.
Lots of things were not viable initially without gov't help. Public transportation, metallurgy, telecommunications, energy - are all the industries gov't helped to jump start by giving subsidies and tax breaks. Because there is no single party - or group of parties - large enough to finance the whole thing till it becomes, as you put it, "compelling economic option".
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
You can indeed justify something as being less stupid than the thing it replaces.
Except that subsidies for solar do not "replace" subsidies for oil in any way whatsoever. Currently, we subsidize both. We could choose to subsidize either one or the other, or neither.
I think, that you have illogically conflated subsidies for the thing being subsidized, and mean that solar is a replacement for oil. But that really isn't true either. Solar is mostly used for electricity generation, and oil is mostly used for transportation. Those are two different markets.
OK, nice statement of the obvious. But what is it I said that you disagree with?
On one hand, oil is HEAVILY TAXED from the consumer ...
Which is ostensibly a use tax on roads and transportation infrastructure.
Would you prefer a more Socialist approach to funding transportation and have people who walk, or bicycle, or drive less, or use a more fuel efficient vehicle subsidize people who get the most direct benefit from the roads and bridges? Or would you prefer to let our transportation infrastructure crumble?
In addition, since exhaust from motor vehicles is a large contributor to air pollution, a tax on gasoline can be seen as compensation for the external costs of burning fossil fuels. Laissez-faire free markets are notoriously bad at dealing with externalities fairly or efficiently. The lack of a gasoline tax or too low of a gasoline tax would be in effect a huge subsidy for fossil fuels.
An example of the tremendous economic inefficiencies of subsidies through insufficient taxing of externalities was the near total destruction of light rail in the United States. The fuel tax for commercial buses did not adequately reflect the advantage given to buses over rail due to the road infrastructure provided by the government. This led to the downfall and destruction of most of the light rail in the United States even though it is extremely more efficient than using buses.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Oh? I thought the PV panels efficient enough to be economically worthwhile were the gallium arsenide panels - it that wrong now? Getting more gallium isn't a matter of scaling up, as there no such thing as a gallium mine - it's a "waste product" of mining zinc and aluminum (bauxite ore), and is only economically viable because we need those metals for other things. Is there a new high-efficiency panel tech now that's not gallium constrained?
If we don't care too much about efficiency then solar thermal will always be there fore us, at about twice the price of current power generation IIRC. Not bad to fall back on if there were any truth to Peak Whatever.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Lots of things once were not "presently compelling economic options". Among them, computers that could be afforded by small businesses, digital television and offshoring information-handling jobs to foreign countries via high-speed data channels.
Things change. Sometimes they get kickstarted by government subsidies. Sometimes by a private concern with deep pockets and high expectations. Sometimes just by the onward march of technology.
"presently economically compelling" is about the WORST reason for not considering doing something I can think of.
I believe I know where your arguments are coming from but very few humans can survive on their own.
By design we are achieving best when working and living in concert with others and many cultures have shown that involves more than a simple 10-commandments style government.
What you now mention about this mini-government that builds infrastructure and enforces contracts is pretty much what we have and it is still ballooning because some are always looking for loopholes that then need to be closed again.
We probably agree there are quite a few instances where less government would have it's benefits but then there are as many that using the same 10 commandments see our advantage as their disadvantage.
If you want to increase control of your life you, as a minimum, have to become active in politics because that's where the limits of government are set.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And in your opinion, where from come the R&D money? From Santa Claus?
Primarily Uncle Sam.
You should head up the page to the subsidies argument, where you can bicker one way or the other about how the billions per year that the government hands out to green tech is or is not a subsidy.
My guess is you will find some way to justify the idea that it isnt a subsidy... just like right here where you found a way to ignore it completely.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
You are looking at this shit all wrong, which is why I wont even bother with your absurd subsidy figures.
The fact is that the federal balance sheets have a big fat (+) next to oil companies, and and big fat (-) next to solar companies. One industry is putting hundreds of billions net per year into the federal budget, while another is taking billions net per year out.
Biased much?
"His name was James Damore."
Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
A subsidy is money spent to encourage a particular behavior or industry. At best, you can say the money spent was a subsidy for the defense and health care industries, but there is no serious linkage between that money and oil production except for oil businesses that also happen to be defense contractors (such as Halliburton).
Yes, but then the government monopoly controlling utilities won't be able to embezzle millions of dollars per year from "public" utilities. Also, if they actually let people control their own energy how will they continue to finance their politician retirements?
It is all a question of per year depreciation in dollars.
Say I have something that costs 10,000 dollars and depreciations at a rate of .01 percent a year and then I have something that costs 10 dollars and depreciates at a rate of 1 percent a year. Which is better if they provide the same amount of power at manufacture? Obviously the 1 dollar system because its initial cost is so low that the depreciation in dollars doesn't matter.
What we need to do is get that number as low as possible by dollar and ideally it would be nice if the panels could be maintained right where they are such that they last basically forever.
For example, is it the coating on the cells that is wearing out? If so, could I suggest a flaking or shedding skin that breaks down as the sun effects it and then sell more of the sealing compound in a spray can or something. Then lets say every six months to a year you go on your roof... wipe off the panels and then give every panel a couple new coats of new sealant. :)
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Hey bingo
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That's hysterical. So why haven't we invaded any other country where they are committing genocide? There are plenty of them.
Because iraq was an oil country.
If we had 10% solar in the mix and oil collapsed to 25 dollars a barrel because the marginally most expensive oil sets the price, the strategic value of oil countries would drop significantly.
It's already happening. Alternative energy (and solar specifically) only needs to destroy demand for 1 to 2 % of oil and gas to drop the price by 50%.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Except that subsidies for solar do not "replace" subsidies for oil in any way whatsoever." correct, the solar subsidy should have replaced the oil subsidy. For oil still to have subsidies after all these years suggests its a "failed" tech but we all know its to keep campaign donations coming in.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"It takes a very small government indeed to provide policing and infrastructure, enforce contracts, and prevent fraud." true but if everyone was socially aware and all thieves, violence-driven, greedy, ego driven power-mad people were removed from the planet, we'd need an even smaller government. Its great having Utopian ideals.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Rubbish. Solar is already competitive (WITHOUT subsidies) in many markets, and that will only continue to grow. People who say otherwise have outdated information, or an agenda.
Check out this article, linked from the sidebar of the original article:
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
That's some pretty outdated FUD. Solar is already competitive (WITHOUT subsidies) in many markets, and that will continue to grow. From an article on the same site:
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/a...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
My guess is you will find some way to justify the idea that it isnt a subsidy... just like right here where you found a way to ignore it completely.
I haven't ignored it.
I simply can't understand your condescending tone about it.
It is pretty normal for gov't to jump start industry by helping it one way or another. It happened (and happens) in a lot of important industries.
But you are acting here as if it was something weird and unusual.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Except that, just before the invasion, they had announced that they would switch from selling the oil in US Dollars and use Euros as the currency for defining the price. This provided a strong economic incentive for the US to change the regime.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They're not going to last forever. They're still great, though.
80% output after 25 years.
So you agree with me? You could have said that in fewer words.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
For example, is it the coating on the cells that is wearing out?
Actually, the major factor influencing the life span of photovoltaic panels is the corrosion of the silver metal interconnects.
The plastic backing sheet slowly absorbs water from humidity and breaks down to create corrosive acetic acid.
The fastest breakdown is the hot humid (tropics), the least is cold dry (alpine).
This failure mode has been solved for the newest panels that are made with an impermeable glass back sheet instead of a PVA backing sheet.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
A big flaw in modern thinking is the idea that "government" is the best way for people to work together to achieve a common goal. Government ends up dominated by those with lust for power over those with skill at governing. Companies competing with one another does better for longer, as you get some weeding out of leaders who lack skill at governing, but it seems the lust for power still wins in the end, by eliminating that "competing" part. Better, but not great: we need a new path. Sadly, people want to turn everything into a fight between those two poles, rather than finding a way to move past them both.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Mr. D from 63: you add nothing to the discussion but useless volume, which is unwanted. All one needs is to live in Southern California to see solar's true effect: I live in a vast sea of homeowners with solar power, and yes, there ARE complaints: a few... a precious few... have had to endure an agonizingly long period before their panels were finally installed, and power provided. A few others have had other, shorter waits. Of all the thousands I run into with working solar panels, I see nothing but smug grins and satisfaction. I have yet to hear of anyone complaining that they wish they had not installed their panels. And then there are the few that have had solar for more than just a few years, who thank their lucky stars their solar panels saved them the problems of blackouts, downed power lines, food spoiled from such outages, and for being the hero of their neighborhood for being able to provide a little refrigeration to a few others to keep their food from spoiling as well. Then there is the issue of national security, which in this case depends on a lack of dependence on the grid... where would we be if EVERY ONE relied on the grid, and terrorists knock out power stations or manage to short out grid lines with Mylar balloons, or other simple implements? How many cars will be useless because they rely on gas stations that rely on electricity for their fuel pumps? What of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes or other disasters that knock out the grid for days or weeks at a time? The article does not even consider such factors. Where would we be, instead, if there is very little reliance on the grid, but rather home solar and battery backup, and lots of EVs capable of being driven on home - harvested electrons, as well as provide "V2G" capabilities-- I.e., being able to supply energy to the grid when brownouts or blackouts threaten? Solar is, by far, a saner option overall.
And so, with all that, what it your point related to large scale solar generation. What does this study tell us that we don't already know? I sure don't see it in your list of anecdotes.And maybe you should look through the study which indicates that the solar PV technologies you are speaking of are not the ones that will get to to the large scale solutions needed. Again, something most of us already know, but clearly not all.
I think solar is great, and wind is great, but I also know the challenges of addressing the energy needs of society on the national and global scale, and its not got anything to do with what is good or not good during occasional blackouts.
Sounds like you heavily invested in oil, think it is some kind of panacea, and that the party will never end! Wrong, fella. Recently, gasoline prices spiked here in California because three refineries went offline... one of those refineries went offline strategically, which is to say that the refiners knew that if they took that exact point to do elective upgrades, they knew they would stifle supplies and gain by millions of dollars due to increased demand. Oil companies, whether domestic or foreign, do not have our best interests at heart. And those that champion fracking are foaming at the mouth at environmentalists, despite the fact that now there are areas having earthquakes that never had them before because of fracking, there are ranchers with epidemics of deformed and stillborn livestock in areas where wells are being tainted by fracking, and yet fracking is still not proving to even be financially viable. You are wearing blinders... all that matters to you is the dollar... so long as it's money in your pocket, the rest of the world can go to hell. Solar, on the other hand, does not need to put bucks in your pocket to provide lasting stability for everyone... Solar does not benefit billionaires year after year the way oil does... Big Business hates solar because... and ONLY because... There is, no way to corner any make the poor poorer (as oil does) and the rich richer (as oil does). Solar power, and cars powered by electricity, have the magical quality of raising all boats equally, not just the rich. Every homeowner with a solar panel on their roof or an EV in their driveway knows that is true.
True; and Big, Business foams at the mouth about how solar and EV- and battery-related R & D is receiving any funding or subsidy at all, yet Big Oil has received trillions in subsidies and other assistance for something like a hundred years now, and they don't want anyone to take note of that.
Yes, but I'm data driven. Facts won't sway people who decided emotionally that solar sucks immediately but over time they will have an effect. Statements of opinion won't ever sway them.
We really should dump about 100 billion into alternative energy and batteries. The subsequent reduction of oil demand, and reduction in oil prices would have enormous payoffs to future defense savings. Just imagine if oil demand was permanently cut by 50%. The "fair" price of oil would probably drop to $30 a barrel.
A large part of the current drop in prices was due to demand destruction. The majority was due to overproduction called on by an excessively high price sustained for too long.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We subsidized security for the oil companies. Oil prices would be (much) higher if they had to pay their own security costs. As a result, there would be a higher incentive to conserve oil and to develop alternatives to oil. The security costs to oil are lower than they should be because they are almost all provided at tax payer expense.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We subsidized security for the oil companies.
Which oil companies were those? And security from what danger? And what does most of that two trillion cost, like VA hospitals and plush DOD contracts have to do with security? Just because a vast sum of money was spent and a certain highly visible group, oil companies slightly benefited, doesn't mean that the whole expenditure is a subsidy for that group.
If I pay you a million dollars to incentivize you to pull weeds from your lawn, then that is a subsidy to pull weeds from your lawn. If I spend a million dollars to pull weeds from your lawn, then it isn't weed-pulling that being subsidized. But you can be sure that spending a million dollars to do a thirty dollar job is subsidizing something.
Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
You cannot justify something stupid merely by pointing out that we do other things that are even stupider. Oil subsidies, and solar subsides are each stupid in their own way, and both should be ended, but they are two different issues. One does not justify the other.
I think the point is that if you have Policy A which costs $100 and Policy B which costs $1,000,000 then you should be more concerned with sorting out the latter.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Did you really just say the words "no subsidies" and "Dubai" in the same sentence.. cus subsidies does not mean what you think it means.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It really isn't if you get away from that bullshit "capacity" cost of like $X per watt. That is not a useful measure here in any way at all.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
"German borders" are highly related to oil do. Putin would not have resources to revise border lines in Europe and revive Cold War without money from oil bubble.
It is obvious that without US interference Kuwait as a country would have been goner long time ago and Saudi would follow. And you are trying to deny that it has nothing to do with oil?
You wrong. Most common PV is silicone now and they are less than $1/W. CIGS is promising and competitive right now, but it didn't taken over whole market and it is unclear if it ever will as silicone PV price is dropping, and other thin film technologies exist too. The United States Geological Survey estimates gallium reserves to exceed 1 million tonnes - not exactly rare, even if current price doesn't make gallium mines viable. Most gallium is wasted and can be recycled if demand gets higher, and gallium price is actually going down for the last few years.
Just in Iraq and Kuwait alone...
BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp,
Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum Co. Plc, Chevron, Getty Oil Co., Gulf Oil, Japan's Arabian Oil Co. , Mobil Corp, Shell International Petroleum Co. Ltd., Texaco .
You do remember the oil fields burning right?
You do remember the U.S. shooting dozens of million dollar a shot missiles per day for weeks to defend oil interests right?
Alternative energy will greatly reduce terrorism incentives and more importantly, funding.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The longer they last and the more maintainable they are the better the economy.
What is more, the panels are typically not recycled along with more electronic shit in this country. It mostly goes to a land fill somewhere. You should know that.
As to it being expensive to do things in precisely the way the factory does it... of course. The point is to do it in a way that takes logistical limitations into consideration.
As to communism, I am advocating communism no more than a person that says he'd like to be able to cook his own food is advocating for communism.
People own tools and fabrication equipment already. You can go to the hardware store right now and buy a Dremel. Apparently that makes you a communist.
I fucking hate politically charged language when it serves only to introduce drama and sophistry into what is otherwise a very simple discussion.
Which is my long winded way of saying, don't bring fucking politics into a discussion about solar panel fabrication. It is obnoxious.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No, I didn't say that. Just like I didn't say that spending a million dollars to weed a small lawn has nothing to do with weeding a small lawn.
You do remember the oil fields burning right?
That's not a subsidy. It was in the Kuwait's government interest to stop that ASAP.
You do remember the U.S. shooting dozens of million dollar a shot missiles per day for weeks to defend oil interests right?
Why shoot missiles for a million a shot when they could have done the job for 10k a shot? You do apparently remember how expensive those missiles were, so why can't you connect the dots?
Alternative energy will greatly reduce terrorism incentives and more importantly, funding.
Terrorism is very cheap and oil isn't going away for a very long time. And we also have to consider the economic harm of overbuilding alternative energy. That too can create the sort of poverty and corruption that is fueling much of the current bout of terrorism/asymmetric warfare.
We really should dump about 100 billion into alternative energy and batteries. The subsequent reduction of oil demand, and reduction in oil prices would have enormous payoffs to future defense savings.
The idea was presented to me some years ago that we're busy using up the world's oil so that they can't use it to operate war machines, primarily fighter jets. Maybe when that's gone we'll switch over to alt power. If we haven't all choked or washed away or cooked, first.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"