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Next Texas Energy Boom: Solar
Layzej writes: The Wall Street Journal reports: "Solar power has gotten so cheap to produce—and so competitively priced in the electricity market—that it is taking hold even in a state that, unlike California, doesn't offer incentives to utilities to buy or build sun-powered generation." Falling cost is one factor driving investment. "Another reason for the boom: Texas recently wrapped up construction of $6.9 billion worth of new transmission lines, many connecting West Texas to the state's large cities. These massive power lines enabled Texas to become, by far, the largest U.S. wind producer. Solar developers plan to move electricity on the same lines, taking advantage of a lull in wind generation during the heat of the day when solar output is at its highest."
So when the economics make sense, investments follow, without the need for governments to step in and choose winners and losers. Who'd have guessed?
That's true. But it's ALSO true that government subsidies can accelerate the development of practical cost-effective technologies, by getting them scaled up earlier.
I don't know about Texas, but in Denmark it is extremely common to use the land next to the towers to collect solar energy. But mostly using photosynthesis, for growing food.
PV panels on the ground is great for deserts or other places where there are not a lot of alternative uses for the land. In farmable areas it might be a better idea to place the PV panels on rooftops, where you can't grow crops and you also have a connection to the grid nearby. One day we may run out of empty rooftops but we still have a long way to go.
GOP Texans object when they are required to pay higher taxes to subsidize unprofitable energy projects whose only stated benefit is cooling the planet. We, unlike many, can see that the only true objective is lip service to environmentalist, and greater money/control running through their fingers. Grow up!
Well, I drive through a lot of massive wind farms in Texas a lot and that land usually IS being used.
Usually for agriculture. Lots of cotton, corn, soybeans, cattle, etc. are raised around turbines.
BINGO! The West Texas plains were a boon to wind prospectors. Every energy company with any renewable aspirations bought/leased a patch of land and threw up a wind farm. Just one problem...nobody lives in West Texas. It's open range for hundreds of miles. The very conditions that made wind possible left a very real problem. All that electricity needed to get to Dallas but the power line to Dallas was at capacity. All those wind turbines producing electricity and nowhere to send it. Storage tech was prohibitively expensive (If electricity is selling for $0.09 kWh storing it at $0.10 kWh doesn't make financial sense.) so into the earth all that electricity went. So ERCOT set out to build more capacity around 2008. Those lines went live in 2013. Combine that with technology making CSP even cheaper and you've got the next gold rush on your hands.
Full disclosure, I work for Nextera Energy. Parent company of Lone Star Transmission who operates a stretch of those transmission lines.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
And this helped by funding chinese solar manufacturers.... how?
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you had read the article you would know that Texas doesn't subsidize solar. The made a vast improvement to their power grid that would allow private businesses to do what they will with it. In fact you will probably find that this measure is quite popular in Texas as they are quite proud that their state has its own energy grid. The key difference here is that Texas owns its own power lines, and any investment in their lines directly benefits everyone.
Energy as a whole is very well done in Texas. When I lived their for 5 years I had a choice between at least 5 power companies at any address I chose, and I could select the source of my power, be it hydro, wind or solar. Renewables isn't some crazy conspiracy to the people there. Just another option.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
What happened to fibreglass cars? They used to the next big thing, no rust etc.
Too easy to damage, too hard to repair. Even Aluminum is easier than fiberglass, you just weld in a new section. Also, a fiberglass body is just landfill when you're done with it, aluminum or steel is highly recyclable — aluminum actually moreso, because the resulting alloy is more similar to what you started with. Recycled steel is brittle. We used to make cars out of mild steel here and then when they got crushed they would make them into harder steel and make Japanese cars out of them. Now we make cars out of hard steel too, and when they get crushed, they make dishwashers and shipping containers. But Aluminum cars will just get made into more cars.
Aluminum is more of a PITA to repair than steel, but no plan is perfect.
We don't use space frames wrapped in non-structural body panels because that's an inefficient use of space. It's cool for a race car but doesn't make much sense for a street car. You can only really build a sports car that way, which is why only sports cars are (or were) built that way; Corvette, some Ferraris, etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are again failing to understand even the simplest principles of diversified investment. Since we aren't magically omniscient and can't see into the future, it is necessary to invest in every kind of renewable energy technology in order to find out which ones are the most useful. Many people always held the opinion that corn ethanol in particular was stupid, but it was still just an opinion when not supported by real world data. Also note that if oil prices had stayed as high as they were during the Bush presidency, ethanol would (still) be competitive with gasoline - and this is likely to happen again at some point, so having distribution infrastructure and cars to utilize it is a good buffer against price shocks.
Your numbers are way off. It is true only 35% to 16% of the energy contained in the fuels eventually reach the customer in the form of electricity. But line losses are not 65% to 84%. Transmission losses are typically less than 10%.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
> I disagree mostly because solar really didn't get cheap until the Chinese began to flood the market with panels, around 2010-2011 or so.
It wasn't the Chinese so much as solar grade silicon production. Prior to about 2009, demand for silicon for solar cells was smaller than for electronics. So solar piggy-backed on existing silicon foundries. But electronics-grade silicon is expensive (~$400/kg) because even one defect can ruin a chip. Eventually solar cell production got big enough that solar-grade silicon was worth it's own foundry lines. Defects in a solar cell just degrade the output a little bit, they still function just fine. The lower quality product was much cheaper to make ($18/kg last time I looked). Since the raw silicon was a major component of final panel cost, you had dramatic cost reductions for a few years.
Now we are back to more incremental cost reductions, but the panels are now so cheap that the "balance of system" (panel mounts, labor, wiring, inverters or transformers, permits, etc.) is the majority of the cost, and that's where work is being done to reduce them more.
Solar cells are a major piece of the puzzle, and arguably the biggest piece.
There are other things falling into place as well.
Relatively inexpensive MPPT controllers. Yes, these require an inductor coil to get the voltage from the panels (100+ volts) to a usable voltage/amperage combination for the battery bank. To boot, most MPPT CCs are multi-stage, so batteries are not boiled when near 100% SoC.
PWM controllers are cheaper, and because solar panel technology is so relatively cheap, it might be cheaper to throw more panels on as opposed to using a smarter charge controller. In fact, I bought a decent 60 amp, 12 volt, multistage CC with a voltmeter and ammeter for $8.
Inverters are not standing still. One can have a choice between charging solar batteries for off-grid use, using inverters to feed the grid, or anywhere in between.
The component that sucks the most is still batteries. They don't hold much energy relatively, and need to be replaced every 5-10 years. Even here, there is progress. For "drop in" batteries, there is a "Smart Battery" brand that goes where flooded lead-acid batteries are used. A battery charger that works with LiFePO4 is required, but since the special discharging circuitry is on the battery, this not just provides a longer usable life, but lead-acid batteries get damaged if drawn below 50% SoC, while lithium batteries can be drawn down a lot further (3-10%) before suffering ill effects.
What is happening with solar is a combination of the above factors, which gives energy independence, which builds momentum behind it. It used to be that solar power was for hippies, but both the far right and far left have embraced the concept, and it is more of a mainstream, "why not?" as opposed to "why" concept, especially with RVs, camping, and boating.
Solar has been on a consistent and predictable downward trend since 1860 (when solar was discovered). It follows an exponential curve just like Moore's law, the difference being Moore said that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months and in solar the metric of $/watt halves every 5 years. This has been going one for a century and a half. Kurzweil et andere have lots of graphs on technology like this. With or without government investment.
"On a sunny summer afternoon, the facility could provide more than 5% of the city’s power needs at a price—$50 per megawatt hour—considerably below other solar projects. In July, Austin Energy announced bids for a new round of solar construction that were below $40 a megawatt hour."
That's 4 cents per kWh.
Wow.