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Solar Power Capacity Installs Surpass Wind and Coal For Second Year
Lucas123 writes: Residential rooftop solar installations hit a historical high in the first quarter of 2015, garnering an 11% increase over the previous quarter and a 76% increase over the Q1, 2014. New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a new report by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Residential solar installation costs dropped to $3.46 per watt of installed capacity this quarter, which represents a 2.2% reduction over last quarter and a 10% reduction over the first quarter of 2014.
This is intended to make solar look splendiferous.... obviously since more are installing it, on the merits of course.
Two problems:
1. This is not a free market - the federal and state govts are massively subsidizing solar, which they do not for coal or oil. This means the relative numbers of installs are not a sign of the merits of each or an honest indicator of the free choice of the choosers; a very big government finger is on the scale.
2. Coal??? Really??? The house I grew up in had a coal bunker, but I have not seen one in decades. Nobody would be doing a new residential coal install even if windmills and solar were not available. Residential coal went the way of the dodo bird when propane, natural gas, and home heating oil became available. In fact, if none of those were available today and only coal was, people would STILL not do new residential coal installs; the society would go with coal gas. Pipes beat shovels any day.
Oh, and no doubt some left-leaning ninny will whine that I was wrong and "big oil" gets subsidies, but this is factually wrong no matter how many times propaganda sites funded by NAZI collaborator Soros post it. A Subsidy is when government gives somebody someone else's money to encourage some activity - this is not what happens with "big oil", but it DOES happen with EVERY so-called "green" energy source. A Tax break is when government lets somebody keep more of his own money, which is what indeed happens with "big oil". Tax breaks are NOT interchangeable with subsidies - they work differently and have very different effects which is why they both exist and governments use each of them in different situations.
Providing a court system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Providing a police system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building a road system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building tanks...stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building tanks and parking them immediately in the desert with no intention of using them...stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
My point... your point is not really as strong as you think it is.
You had a say in the matter. It was every election in an even numbered year since you started voting. I don't like a lot of stuff the government does using money it takes from me. But I live in a democracy, not a dictatorship of me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Capacity installs.
Basically it's talking about new installs versus already installed capacity.
Not overall capacity or utilization in the overall power budget.
Never mind that solar installs tend to be smaller and MUCH lower capacity than a coal burning plant.
Also, there's the fact that coal provides more power in the US by more than an order of magnitude.
So yay. We went from half a percent to 0.51% total power input.
And oh darn. We maybe stayed around 20% at coal.
Basically this is a "Rah Rah" article. Kind of like a small company that puts on big, slick productions and appears bigger than they are.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Is it the 'best' way to spend our money to get carbon free electricity? That matters when you look at what needs to happen to make a real impact on a global scale. Seems like that is a question many don't like to ask.
Actually it's a question that many have asked and determined that, yes right now it is. It allows the re-use of existing infrastructure co-located directly at the energy consumer negating transmission losses. Combine it with storage which I think everyone can agree is something that is becoming mainstream and you have a system that can take a very serious dent out of the daily energy peak and cut household electricity carbon emissions (I'm so specific here because as we all know electricity is only a small portion of our footprint).
Funny side note we just installed 35kW of solar panels on the roof of our main switchroom at work to offset our huge air-conditioning bill. The panels made the switchroom cooler by keeping the sun off the roof and covers the air-conditioning energy. The punchline: I work at a natural gas power station.
Yes, but a load following plant is yet more expensive than nuclear, which is the most expensive method of large scale power generation we have currently.
But it still has a worse load following pattern than the one built in to solar power.
"A 100 MW wind farm is not a perfectly good substitute for a 100 MW coal plant."
Only by definition a perfectly good substitute would only be another 100MW coal plant. Which isn't a substutution at all. Indeed in many characteristics the solar plant would be a BETTER substitute. That is definitely not perfectly matching the results of a 100MW coal plant, though.
"Typically the load factor for wind is in the 25-35% range"
Given we're talking about solar, so what?
Given that coal is somewhere around 40% to 60% for a more expensive CHP system, and less for a carbon capture coal system, and nuclear is around 60% too, again, so what? All that difference means is you have more panels installed. Or you make them solar tracking, which is more expensive. But since you can place solar panels where they won't add any more used land, the additional acreage is a nonissue: it's worse for coal or nukes since you can't put them on your roof or in your basement. Not at 100MW scale.
"Small scale embedded generation (i.e. rooftop solar) has an additional problem which is that of grid failure detection and anti-islanding"
It isn't small scale. 1,000,000 solar panels on the roofs of a city is not small. It's just not taking up any new space.
Moreover, your nuke plant has problems with grid failure detection (this caused a recent problem with a nuke plant in the USA, remember). So if it applies to all energy generation at industrial scale, it is not a problem of solar.
"hence there is a tendency for a severe grid imbalance to trigger cascading disconnections of small generators"
But since we have Spain, Greece, Germany and several other countries and states in the USA that have large solar installation but have not found any new problems with having done so. Indeed the use of renewables was blamed for the shortage when both the UK's largest coal and nuclear power stations went offline unexpectedly for long periods of time when in actual fact the presence of so much renewable meant our balance of payments was less affected than would otherwise have been the case.
It seems you make up problems and posit them as problems solar have to overcome when it's either entirely hypothetical or a feature of every generation system, therefore not a discriminating factor.
"This has happened in the UK, and very nearly caused a country-wide blackout."
No, that was due to the above mentioned fossil fuel and nuclear power station going offline taking their massive production offline, in the case of the nuclear power station, for nearly a full year.
Building a new Dungeoness isn't considered an expensive problem of nuclear power, though, despite such a thing being necessary to back up the generation of energy via nuclear reactors.
> We'll see how well solar competes when it gets (almost) the same tax treatment as other power sources
You mean when we dump billions of dollars of into a military side-project and let that flow downhill into the panel prices?
Yes, I await that day.