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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.
If I felt so inclined, I'm sure I could dig up post-upon-post from previous slashdot stories about how unlikely solar (and wind) power is to take off in any meaningful way, and how electric cars will never be a thing. We are just at the beginning, and the economic incentives took only a few year to become reality. I'm guessing that is due in no small part to subsidies paving the way for investment and growth that so many complained about. An industry, and really a way of life, is slowly being built from the ground-up. It's pretty exciting to watch!
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
And clearly the massive government investment in both R&D and incentives that let companies achieve economies of scale did nothing to create the current environment where, with the technology developed and economies of scale on hand, companies can make an unsubsidized profit even without subsidies - right? The two things are totally disconnected.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Clearly you neglected the bit where previous alternative energy interests were directly pandered to. Without that, this new solar project would have no way to transmit it's power.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's something I've never understood here.
if you have land for wind power, why would you not want solar spread around it in the safety zone of the tower? Same lines can carry all of the power. Lower real estate cost. Why is it that I only ever see or hear about a solar farm or a wind farm and never an energy farm?
Maybe someone here more familiar with the topic can help me out, or tell me that it's being done and just not talked about much.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Wind turbine generation is such shit. If you have a lot of constant, unending wind, it seems like a good idea; typically, solar outclasses it by far.
My analysis of solar has changed in the past month. I last looked half a decade or so ago, when the ROI for solar was 19 years; it's now 2.5 years. Seriously. What the fuck? The arrays are more efficient, and they're down from like $3.84/W for shit-efficiency panels that degrade rapidly to $1.81/W for high-efficiency panels that degrade by less than 0.7% per year and are guaranteed to have above 80.7% efficiency 25 years into their lifespan--with god damn microinverters and advanced monitoring systems. When did this shit happen? I can generate 9,800kWh/year with optimal placement, 9,200kWh/year with simple placement, and thus about $1500 of electricity and $1700 of SRECs.
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Government subsidies are what keep petroleum 'competitive'. Where would we have been without them?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
But it's ALSO true that government subsidies can accelerate the development of practical cost-effective technologies
It's ALSO true that government subsidies can slow development by pushing inferior technologies into mass production before they are ready. Subsidies can occasionally be justified, but in the case of solar, the billions spent on subsidies would have been far better employed on R&D to find technology that made economic sense, rather than mass deployment of technology that did not.
Solyndra gets a lot of criticism, but it's important to note that the program as a whole made money for the public AND spurred energy growth. How is that not a win-win? There were dozens of companies involved, and a few of them didn't pan out, but it is unreasonable to expect a 100% success rate.
First off, what magical world do you live in where every investment in a higher-risk financial product pays off? What I couldn't give if I could invest in the world you envision ;) The program as a whole already broke even after just three years in play. All of the outstanding loans are now just profit for the government.
Is this the highest interest rate investment the government could have earned money with? Of course not. But that was never the point; it helped the companies that succeeded vastly scale up. While making money. And not only do they get the interest payments, but they also indirectly get the tax revenue from all of these much larger companies and all of the knock-on effects.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Have you been to west texas...? It's basically a desert. There isn't much environment to disrupt.
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!
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
Can we all just start to admit that wind and solar farms have their own negative environmental implications just like everything else.
Straw man argument -- nobody ever claimed otherwise. Obviously, anything humans do has environmental implications.
The claim is that wind and solar farms have less environmental impact than the use of coal and other fossil fuels they intend to replace.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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"
governments to step in and choose winners and losers
I get so fucking tired of this "picking winners and losers" bullshit. Venture capitalists do this all the time. Do you think the people who do analysis for the Department of Energy are bunch of drooling morons? Backing technology development that is in the public interest is exactly what governments are for. Just like venture capital, some of it is going to pan out and some of it isn't.
They're working on it, but it's difficult.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
While taking over a desert to lay out a giant solar power farm, roof top units are probably more ideal. A large portion of power is lost through transit. I have heard calculations from 65% to 84% of power produced being lost from generation to the time where a device is powered. I don't much care for those kind of losses. Smaller and distributed sources of power generation help to create a more robust power grid.
Place something witty here
Yeah, because there are no subsidies for fossil fuels.... oh, wait... about $5 trillion a year.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Where the model broke down is that we let them fail. We are supposed to keep sending them orders for stuff and park the products in the Mojave desert. It works for the defense industry, but the government screwed up and actually let Solyndra die rather than converting it into a perpetual contractor like so many defense companies.
As if millions of birds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly burned to a crisp.
Unfortunately most of them ran into windows and cats before they got there. A few managed to land on a live wire, get hit by a car or eat some poisoned plants first. One amazing bird managed to successfully fly through a wind turbine to reach its destination of concentrated solar power. http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
This "boom" is really just another observation of the scramble to grab federal subsidies before they dry up next year. Once the full cost of PV is carried by the owners the economics will change.
Yes government subsides sure did accelerate ethanol production capabilities, didn't they? And that boondoggle may have slowed the development of alternatives. Like solar.
It's central economic planning, period. Why are we debating this ignorance?
I own 4 Community Solar units even way up north here in Seattle, and my last electric bill, before I got more efficient washer, dryer, fridge, showed $81 for electricity used, but I had $43 per unit, which means show me the money, baby!
Adapt. Because nobody's waiting for you to get your rear in gear.
Note: Passive solar is 10 times cheaper than active solar, so do that when you buy a new house and build it to allow for active solar. Here at the UW we have patents for solar film (like car wraps), window screens, and even have an all-electric Formula 1 race car that can charge from a solar panel.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yeah, the government never should have sunk all that money into ARPANET, it would have just happened by Immaculate Conception when the economics made sense. Come to think of it, all that money the government sunk into quantum mechanics made no sense until there was use for it, then it would have miraculously evolved from its primordial ooze by bootstrapping itself into usefulness.
Wow, economics is truly miraculous, able to conjure...well...just about anything out of nothing.
The chance of "accelerating" into a wrong direction is prohibitively high. For just one example, consider the case of telephony — by granting AT&T the official monopoly on phone service, the US has "accelerated" wired connections (by mandating that even remotest dwellings be connected upon owners' request).
This delayed the onset of wireless communications by decades... The technology for tiny portable cell-phones of today did not exist, but a stationary two-way radio could've been placed into every house located "too far" for a wire to be economical.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is classic misunderstanding of Republican ideals. They're not against renewables per se. They're against subsidizing the sale of technologies which can't self-support themselves. If/when the technology is able to compete economically on its own with existing technologies, they are more than happy to use it.
The error is actually in the environmentalists' thinking. They support wind and solar unconditionally regardless of cost. They then assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since the GOP opposed wind and solar in the past, they erroneously assume the GOP must oppose wind and solar unconditionally. (I narrow it down to environmentalists because most of the people on the left are aware of cost constraints.)
In fairness, there is a non-monetary cost associated with pollution which many GOPers leave out. But if you factor that in, then nuclear ends up being the best choice of power source at present. And most environmentalists oppose nuclear so I can't give them credit for correctly factoring in pollution costs.
Yes and No.
(Disclosure: I used to work for Solarworld).
I partially agree because it was the introduction of *massive* tax/tariff subsidies from the EU member governments (most notably Germany) that drove a lot of development and growth, which led to the rise of solar-panel makers like Solarworld, Q-Cells, etc. (all based in Germany). I think only First Solar is the only big boy that's based in the US.
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. Before China, solar panels cost around $2.50/Wp; after China started the flood, they could be had for as cheap as $0.75/Wp.
All that said, you get what you pay for... Solarworld for instance has the 25-year power output warranty, 17-18% conversion, and high wattage densities (255+ watts per panel), whereas the real low-end Chinese stuff is barely warrantied for a year, might get 10-12% conversion, and might get you 160-200-watt panels (in real-life testing; forget the label's claims).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It is also true the private sector can block development of new technologies when it seems too risky or threatens an existing profit center. E.g. the way GM killed off the EV-1 electric car.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Actually the price of PV cells dropped at an amazingly consistent rate since 1987 (the oldest figures I could find) when it was $15 per watt.
The inflection in price occurred in 1987. Prior to that the price was declining geometrically. Without the space program, it would probably be several years behind the current prices.
The price as of 2015 is 30 cents per watt.
At current rates of decline, the price will be under 10 cents per watt by 2020.
However, as you say -- quality panels will cost more, outperform, and last longer.
Solar cells are going to collapse fuel demand world wide. While the need for fuelbased generators will remain until we get better batteries (also improving about 5% per year pretty consistently for a long time) if we could cut fuel usage by 30%, it would probably collapse the price of diesel.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Who said economics had to be the reason for "governments to chose winners"?
Investors would happily enrich themselves all the way into a dead planet if that's where the money lies.
I don't think Solar could have gotten the critical mass without the incentives. Even with incentives, it took several decades to be a meaningful contributor. Quite honestly, the R&D incentive money is best spent on the challenge that follows, not the first-mover challenge: energy storage. By subsidizing the PV panels up front, you get the industry moving which will create its own R&D investment. By increasing non-dispatchable generation on the grid, you need to have improved energy storage and demand control solutions.
From the small view I have on where money was being spent, 6-12 years ago a tremendous amount of investment was being placed into these areas for technologies that are viable now.
Granted, not all $$ are spent with the same efficacy. That is the nature of R&D though.
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.
> 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.
Like those "green" scams Obama on which wasted money? No, the norm is for taxpayer money to be poured into sewer
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.
Government and civilization go hand in hand. Can you name one civilization that has ever existed that didn't have some form of government? Can you name one civilization that has ever existed that didn't not have taxation in one form or another? Yes, governments change from time to time by internal or external force but that's usually accompanied by a lot of turmoil and change in the underlying civilization.
Would the early R&D on wind power have been done as quickly (or at all) without subsidies?
I don't get why americans always repeat such myth.
Just because your first government was the english king, there is no reason to distrust every government. Well, Nixxon might have been an exception.
Subsidies can occasionally be justified, but in the case of solar, the billions spent on subsidies would have been far better employed on R&D to find technology that made economic sense, rather than mass deployment of technology that did not.
First: which technology besides solar is "better"? Or makes economically more sense? When we clearly right now are at the point where solar makes economical sense?
Second: the billions spend where likely not the US american billions but the European, notable German, so why do you care?
I guess you had preferred to wait till the oil runs out, that might be in 20 years? The oil price right now is something like $45. The highest price the last 5 years was something like $135 (or was it $150?).
With current usage patterns the oil price in 20 years might be something like $5000 per barrel. Obviously that won't be the case as demand will drop rapidly the closer we come to the "empty wells".
Anyway, in 20 years every solar panel -- regardless how efficient or cheap -- will be cheaper than oil. Without any development at all.
So: what benefit would have from that?
None ... you had wasted 20 years paying "to much" for oil/energy.
I rather have a cheap competitive panel right now. And what I and my fellow europeans expect from a government is exactly that: lay the legal framework and funding for new futur technologies. Fuck your stupid brain dead idea of "the free market fixes all", it took Obama to give you affordable healthcare for every one. By crafting a law! There was no free market fixing your third world problems. And there will never be a free market building you the next Fighter Air Plane, Carrier or other thing where the development cost is 100ds of billions!
Can't be so hard to grasp that there is no company on the planet, no investor, no consortium that could have propelled the progress in solar technology we made in the last 30 years further than the government funding did.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The lab where you used to work? Well, I'm convinced!
"Old man yells at systemd"
"GM" didn't kill EV-1. Government regulation did. CAFE didn't give them any credit for EV-1, and the environmental and liability costs of EV-1 were so high that GM was forced to crush them rather than accept decades of liability for an experimental design.
Why?
There are two pizzerias on my block today. Should the government grant one of them a monopoly — for great justice?
The survivor would then be able to use the increased economies of scale and improved bargaining powers to negotiate better prices on supplies to reduce prices. Oh, wait, their supplier would also have to become a monopoly, if we follow the same "let's avoid duplicating effort" principle further. And, being a monopoly anyway, why would anybody care to reduce the prices?
Ah, the great new world without competition. Are you still sure, that's a good idea?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
Moving water up hills (or not letting it down -- letting hydro reservoirs fill up) is quite a good storage option on this scale.
Demand can also be shifted to some extent. You can within certain limits, choose when to cool a refrigerated warehouse, or charge an electric car. I imagine tarifs that make electricity cheap in the few hours after dawn and expensive in the few hours after sunset, for instance.
For the last awkward gaps, methane plant can be built that is designed to switch on and off quickly and run at a relatively low duty cycle. If you're that desperate you can make the methane from CO2 (or food waste).
I've seen reports significant gains in efficiency of making diesel from CO2 and electricity, to the point where that may become a storage option.
How do you remove the NIMBY bullshit? And the troops in?
Actually, the real problem is that we allowed China to dump on America. Had we not done that, then we would have a lot more manufacturing here and it would be even lower costs.
Thankfully, Solar City is doing it right. They got the infrastructure in place for putting up panels, got the costs down, and now, is focused on lowering the costs of panels by manufacturing their own. And yes, they will come down.
What is going to be a problem, is that China is going to manipulate the money again and dump on the west to revive their economy that is a total disaster.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If solar made economical sense, it would not need subsidies. Maybe it will not in the future ... but we're not in the future.
You missed the headline, or the article or the summary or all of it.
Solar energy is now the cheapest energy on the planet.
Oil will not run out in 20 years.
With current usage, it will. That is a no brainer. With replacement of current cars by electric cars it, won't. That is a no brainer, too. So try to comprehend what I write instead of jumping to knee jerk reactions and making a fool of yourself.
We are 10 years beyond "peak oil" ...
America's government has subsidized green technologies with billions of dollars Did it? Any proof of that? Over what course of years?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry, but it was evident from the start that corn based ethanol production was grossly inefficient. It *did* turn out worse than it might have, based on what was known at the start, but even at the start it was clearly uneconomic.
What ethanol fuel via corn was, was pork for certain Senators that held important positions. And it could be painted green, so it had some political benefit. It wasn't a reasonable approach, and it wasn't prototyped as reasonable approaches have been.
Governments CAN do good economic development, but only when the politics is right. They can also pour money down a rat hole. And that's what corn-based ethanol was. (Now there ARE corn based systems under development that might be reasonable. But they are based around using the leaves and the stalks, not the ears of corn. The only ear's of corn -> ethanol system that makes economic sense is bourbon (or, whiskey, anyway).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Because you can't just randomly call *anyone* specific, like you can with a phone.
If each pizzeria had to build their own road to your house another road to each and every house that they delivered to, YES.
Haven't you seen the old photos of tons of separate telephone wires from many different companies?
It sounds like you want a level of perfection out of government that is not humanly possible to attain.
That's not a straw man, it's a false equivalency. Solar and wind have dramatically lower environmental costs than coal, oil or even gas. The impacts aren't equivalent and shouldn't be compared as such.
Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
That is true until the daytime solar production approaches total daytime demand. Previously, base demand is supplied by coal and other slow ramping systems. During the day this base load supplies about 50% and almost 100% at night. The ramp up for daytime demand was handles by faster ramping systems such as gas and hydro. The problem comes when solar makes up for more than 50% of daytime usage. Without storage one would start ramping down the conventional production to make room for the solar production. It would then need to ramp back up again for night.
Moving water up hills (or not letting it down -- letting hydro reservoirs fill up) is quite a good storage option on this scale.
That would mean building reservoirs and there are a limited number of places that have enough drop to make it viable.
Demand can also be shifted to some extent. You can within certain limits, choose when to cool a refrigerated warehouse, or charge an electric car. I imagine tarifs that make electricity cheap in the few hours after dawn and expensive in the few hours after sunset, for instance.
That requires a lot of infrastructure that does not yet exist.
I've seen reports significant gains in efficiency of making diesel from CO2 and electricity, to the point where that may become a storage option.
This technology has yet to be installed on a large scale hence my point that more research and development needs to be done on storage.
All of these things could be done. My point is that there is too much emphasis on production and not enough one storage, demand shifting, etc. Too many people think that more production is the answer when it is only part of the solution.