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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
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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