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Clinton Plan To Power Every US Home With Renewables By 2027 Is Achievable
Lucas123 writes: As part of her campaign pledge, Hillary Clinton has said she would make it a priority in her first term to increase the number of solar panels by 500M and U.S. installed solar capacity from 21 gigawatts (GW) today to 140GW by the end of 2020. Her plan, is to increase solar, wind and other renewables so that they'd provide 33% of America's electricity by 2027, enough to power every home. While the plan may sound overly ambitious, experts say, it's not. Today, renewables provide about 15% of America's power. Shayle Kann, senior vice president at GTM Research, said the Clinton's renewable energy goal is doable, but with caveats. In order to achieve the goal, current programs, such as federal tax breaks for solar installations (set to expire next year), must continue and future initiatives, such as Obama's Clean Power Plan that will begin in 2018, must not be curtailed. Considering that if elected, Clinton wouldn't take office until 2017, the her campaign goals could be more bravado than reality. Clinton, however, is not alone. While most candidates have yet to announce their clean energy plans, Clinton's Democratic contender, Martin O'Malley, also came out with strong support for the end of fossil fuel use and a full clean energy economy by 2050, and creating a national goal of doubling energy efficiency within 15 years.
Solar is currently the most expensive renewable by far.
Huh? This thinking seems outdated. Average solar has reached (and beaten) cost parity with all competing generation except for about the top 50%, top 25% of wind projects, and nearly all consequential new hydro proposals. ABY is adding solar yield projects with better returns than prior wind and hydro projects developed under more lucrative subsidy regimes... Projects are breaking ground with PPAs in the sub 6 cent range. First Solar, Recurrent Energy are successfully building projects and generating gross margins of 15-20% by selling power at 0.0387 $/kWh and .047 $/kWh respectively. They are doing it for 5 and 6 cents all over the world, even locations without subsidy. That is competitive with virtually any new energy construction. Companies building owning these projects are and will outgrow the global economy for foreseeable future (absent all subsidies) and then become the most impressive profit machines in the history of markets within a few decades. Minting money from fully-depreciated assets like the world has never seen (haha, except from current utilities :) ) I don't think you fully comprehend the economics of a maintenance free, nearly indestructible, fully-depreciated, solid state, money making machine. And thus business plan can scale to several % of global GDP without a hitch...
but the technology just isn't there yet (at least without tremendous expense).
Huh? Specifically what are the technological challenges? Today's technology will likely generate 70% of its nameplate capacity 50 years from now. All components are now offered standard with warranties that will last the entire amortization period. Solar panels and micro inverters would be among if not the most durable and reliable products in your home. Solar energy is available at higher energy density than necessary for single family construction and multi family construction less than 4 stories, aside from that there is no shortage of cheap land, even cheap land at favorable transmission and distribution locations.
There are tens of millions + homes all over the country for which a homeowner with good credit can go net positive energy using a cash flow positive PV investment (e.g. PV + financing = cheaper than utility bill) and actually provide a pretty good return on investment that has lower risk and better return than many different financial vehicles that would be sold to you as part of a balanced portfolio. For a solar array producing power after the 20-25% amortization period, the reduction in total cost of ownership for the home over the lifetime of these components will be tens of thousands of dollars.
You are clearly not up to speed on the technology, the production costs, the financing, or the global explosion in the industry.You have rested on some older state of knowledge too long. The technology awesome. The economics are extremely favorable. The only barrier is the transition to an enlightened long term view about power production. Don't blame cheap, high performance technology for man's failure to identify the obvious advantages of long term thinking.