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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.
I know the average Slashdot reader doesn't bother to click through to the linked articles anyway. But to then just provide no clickable links whatsoever is a bit harsh, don't you think?
I installed 48 panels on my roof back in 2003 which generate up to 8.8 kW DC (7.5 kW AC). The installation generates 10,500 to 12,000 kWh per year depending on the weather. The total cost was $65,000 which after subsidies and tax breaks dropped to $31,000 - which is roughly the same as my installation would cost today before any subsidies. Since installation I've had to cover the meter rental (currently 16.3 cents per day) but I've had no other utility costs and no maintenance costs.
In the year before I installed solar, electricity cost me a tad under $3,000. Utility costs have increased considerably since then, so I've more than covered the cost of the installation. And I should have another 20 years of life in the panels. Perhaps more.
If you plan to stay in your house for 10 years or more, it may make good financial sense to consider solar. Based on my experience, it's certainly worth considering.
What do you mean by utilization rate? Do you mean the amount of energy a solar cell generates or do you mean the amount of energy generated at a time it is consumed?
You can call it circle jerking all you want, but an increase in the amount of renewable energy regardless of your other metrics is always a good thing providing the energy source pays for itself and offsets the energy that went into getting that energy. For solar we've reached that point a long time ago meaning at this point more = better regardless of how it compares to other energy sources.
The word "install" is not a noun.
Any verb can be nouned.
For the U.S.:
So solar has to have about 40% more installed capacity than wind to generate as much power. It needs almost 4x as much installed capacity as coal to generate a comparable amount of power. And it needs 5.5x as much capacity as nuclear to be comparable. Comparing power generation based on installed capacity is like trying to compare how much food people eat based on the size of their refrigerators.
The word "install" is not a noun.
Any verb can be nouned.
Stop verbing nouns!
This is all perfectly cromulent grammar.
Just so we are clear, you are calling Hungarian Jew George Soros, who was 15 in 1945, a nazi collaborator? Ok then Glenn Beck...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
The section on improved performance is quite interesting. The US averages 81% utilisation
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!!!
The point is that a 100MW nuclear power station is a perfectly good substitute for a 100MW coal power station. When it's mid-winter and the big game is on, and everybody is running heaters, lights and TVs and goodness knows what else, either of those plants will put out 100MW unless it's shut for maintenance. Not a problem.
But a 100MW solar station is useless as a replacement, it will produce only a fraction of the power, because "100MW" is peak, not mean or median output and the solar station produces its peak output for a few hours here and there, not regularly and certainly not on demand.
A 500MW solar station is a replacement, so long as it's coupled to a 100MW medium term energy store, just as pumped storage. But the headline power of that plant is five times as much.
So when "solar surpasses coal" that doesn't mean what it appears to, for example if you had 100 years of building the same capacity of solar as coal, you might think half the power generated would be solar, right? No. More like 10% would be solar. Only when there's 10 times as much solar as coal are you actually producing more power with solar than coal.
Not because solar is "bad", it's just _different_ and that matters.
It depends on the nuclear plant design, but in general a LWR nuclear plant has better load following characteristics than a coal plant (the compact core has low thermal mass compared with the large furnaces and boilers of a coal plant). Load following, however, may not be permitted under regulatory regimes (for example, in the US). The availability characteristics of a typical LWR are not much different to coal - there are longer, less frequent maintenance/refuelling periods.
A 100 MW wind farm is not a perfectly good substitute for a 100 MW coal plant. Typically the load factor for wind is in the 25-35% range, with off-shore wind being higher. However, the "firm capacity" (i.e. the capacity that can be relied upon) is poor - about 2% in the UK, whereas for coal it is about 85%.
Both wind and solar have very poor load following capacity - as they cannot automatically respond significantly to changes in grid frequency (except in the case of overfrequency), whereas most thermal plants have the capacity to automatically increase power, provided they are not at capacity, in response to a drop in grid frequency. Im Germany, this is partly mitigated by requiring that rooftop solar installations be electronically limited to 70% of their nominal capacity and/or be able to receive remote configuration updates from the utility, so that there is frequency reserve margin.
Small scale embedded generation (i.e. rooftop solar) has an additional problem which is that of grid failure detection and anti-islanding (i.e. the embedded generators must not be allowed to supply energy to the local area in the event of failure of grid connection). The problem is that grid instability is not easily discriminated from grid islanding, hence there is a tendency for a severe grid imbalance to trigger cascading disconnections of small generators, which makes the imbalance worse.... This has happened in the UK, and very nearly caused a country-wide blackout. It was only arrested when underfrequency protection started blacking out regions of the country in an attempt to reduce load on the grid.
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.
I explain why a 100MW solar farm (which is what this story is about) is a perfectly good (indeed in many ways superior) substitute for a 100MW coal power station.
Yeah, just as long as you build it somewhere where there's 24/7 sunlight and no clouds. Non-geostationary orbit maybe?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
> 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.
I live in Texas. There are several months out of the year where the LOW is still above 90. Good luck sleeping through that without AC. Maybe we should put some light bulbs above our panels so we can run our AC.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.