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US Projected To Lead the World In New Solar Installations This Year (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: The U.S. solar market is expected to grow 120% this year, with 16GW of new solar power, more than double the record-breaking 7.3GW installed in 2015. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. When accounting for all projects (both distributed and centralized), solar accounted for 29.4% of new electric generating capacity installed in the U.S. in 2015, exceeding the total for natural gas for the first time and it will put the U.S. ahead of all other nations with regard to new solar installations for 2016.
are you a sockpuppet?
It's easier to win if you are screwing the competition: https://slashdot.org/submissio...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As the US is bigger than e.g. Denmark, just saying they are largest means not that much to me. Sure, it is a lot, but how much is it per person and where will they be on the list then?
And 29.4% of new energy sounds nice as well (wind was even higher with 39%), but what is it in the total amount of energy and where is the US in that (trow in wind if you like)
This reads like the average CEO presentation where a lot of numbers look nice, but mean nothing. At least not really.
So I would like to see:
1) Numbers per person.
2) Compare it to ALL of the energy (including car fuel) not only new installs
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So you mean to say that they don't have much installed yet which makes it really easy to double the amount they have within the next year?
So.... what is that in AC Wattage units? (Considering I've worked at several power plants I ought to know this.)
Reading towards the end of the article it seems to indicate 100-200 MW total, which is not worth bragging about considering how much electricity we produce and consume in the United States.
The plant I work at now consumes around 100 MW when running, we have 6 on site gas turbines producing 20MW each.
Solar Photovoltaic and solar thermal unfortunately do not have a good track record for going up to the 500 to 1000 MW range which is what you want for a nice utility sized power plant. Maybe we could have more small solar power plants, unfortunately they have a large foot print in terms of space used. (How many square miles would it take for a 1000 MW sized PV plant?)
Before anyone even starts, de-centralized power is in 'development' stage. I see rooftop solar as more of an energy saver/efficiency more than anything else but not a 'break even' per se. I expect most of the coal plants in the U.S. will get replaced with natural gas.
The real interesting thing will be when all the nuclear units that went online in the 70s and 80s need to be replaced... fun times ahead.
Last year I called SolarCity, they are offering to install panels for "free" to your home, then sell you the power for less than you're paying now.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No up front cost, no maintenance, guaranteed power for less than you're paying now.
Why NOT say yes?
Except, they won't install in my area. They WILL install 2 miles away, because that is a different electric energy provider that gives bigger rebates than mine does (I live in a co-op that doesn't provide huge rebates and tax incentives).
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So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
Even utility scale solar, which I've looked at investing in purely from an investment point of view, requires tax dollars to make work.
http://www.absolutelysolar.com...
FIT Program Areas
FIT â" LADWP: The Department of Water and Powerâ(TM)s new solar Feed-In Tariff program. Buildings and land in the city of Los Angeles and parts of the Owens Valley are eligible.
Look at the very bottom of that page:
http://energy.gov/savings/ladw...
And there is the program, promising to pay FAR above the "going rate" of power.
So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.
The tax break ends this year they have to purchase now or lose the tax incentive.
Baa Baa (as in sheep since I don't know what noise lemmings make)
A few interesting points from the article:
1. Almost 40% of the distributed PV capacity in the U.S. is located in California. The next nine states after California account for another 44%, according to the EIA.
This is key because CA pays one of the highest kWh rates in the US (places like Hawaii are higher, but there aren't that many people there).
http://www.bls.gov/regions/wes...
San Francisco pays 40% higher energy prices on average than the rest of the US. So of COURSE solar makes more sense there. But it doesn't most other places.
California's leadership in distributed solar capacity is driven by a combination of factors, including high electricity prices, a large population, strong solar resources, and state policies and incentives that support solar PV, according to the EIA.
2. One of the factors spurring growth last year and this was the impending expiration of the U.S. government's solar investment tax credit (ITC). That measure, passed in 2008, offered a 30% tax credit for residential and business installations. It was due to expire this year, and the tax credit was supposed to drop to a more permanent 10%. In December, however, Congress passed a three-year extension on the 30% ITC.
So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.
http://energy.gov/public-servi...
Just a sample of some of the various programs to pay for solar and wind.
3. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. Last year, solar installations broke all previous records, but the amount was only 16% more than in 2014 with 7,260 GW of new DC solar power.
That sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, consider this:
In 2014, the United States generated about 4,093 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.
So the new DC solar power being installed is 7.2 billion out of 4,093 billion total. It is nice, but we could install that much every year for the next 20 years and it wouldn't make a real dent in the total.
Let everyone else waste their money buying solar panels, it lowers the demand for from-the-grid energy, which lowers the price of the electricity for which you pay...
I love it how it is phrased "U.S. leading in new installations!" vs "U.S. catching up to per-capita installed capacity already found elsewhere."
Gotta be #1, always!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Except when power companies are forced to buy the power generated from the panels at a premium price, everyone contributes to that subsidy
no, it means that due to having to pay over the market wholesale rate to solar twats, who also use the grid like a battery, less people pay for the upkeep of the power plants that actually keep the lights on (base load), this means that the poorer people who don't have the cash to waste on solar pay even higher prices, reverse robin hood!..
Eventually when enough self centered solar twats have it installed, the grid becomes unstable as the unprofitable base load (coal,gas,nuclear) get shutdown.
And before any idiot says "what about storage", There is not enough materials available to build enough batteries on the whole planet!!. and no, there is no miracle battery around the corner!!!. (look at the chemistry! if you want to know why!).
So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
To some degree you could say the same about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by governments to the tune of something like $5 trillion worldwide. Solar is just a small percentage of that.
The only difference is that you don't notice the subsidies for oil and gas but there is no question that they are there and substantial.
So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.
That's to be expected for an emerging technology. You subsidize a technology like this until it can scale up to the point where it can compete on its own merits. Solar is getting there but without some continued support the technology will not advance sufficiently rapidly. What doesn't make sense is subsidizing fossil fuels which are a mature technology and one we wish to deprecate the use of.
My favorite place to see fools waste money on solar panels are in locales that traditionally do not have much sunlight for most of the year along with significant amounts of snowfall. Boston in particular is rife with people who invest oodles of money into systems like this and then wait twenty odd years to have their solar investment pay off. Good luck getting any electricity when your panel are buried in snow.
Granted, if you're installing them to game your home's property value you might make that back a lot faster...
Nuclear retirements are easily covered. Should step up Oyster Creek and Fitzpatrick.
but with everyone else having been big on solar for years, it makes you look good to lie and say you will "lead".
The biggest problem is that Most Solar still has us hooking to the grid, and at whim of the state and the power companies.
The fact that the U.S. is very large in area, and low in population density. The Power Grid, isn't so effective then it is in say Europe, or Asia, however self sustaining Solar with battery night backup can be a good solution. Once we realize that the power companies are going to be obsolete in suburban and rural areas, And should just focus on cities.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Baa Baa as in the sound sheep (since I don't know what sound lemmings make).
nothing to see here - move along
The VAST bulk of these "subsidies" are not real money. No one is paying $400 billion a year to Exxon or BP.
Well I happen to be a certified accountant and the fact that some of these subsidies are not cash money doesn't make them any less real. In cost accounting it's called an externalized cost. Literally a cost someone else pays. There is a very real and measurable cost to that pollution which the companies selling fossil fuels do not have to pay for. That is in effect a subsidy to those companies because it relieves them of having to pay the full cost of the product they sell. It would be no different than a government helping a car maker to sell their car without having to pay for the steel they built the car with. It's no different than cigarette makers not having to pay for the health care costs that smokers incur from using their product. The fact that cash did not change hands directly does not make these costs any less real nor does it mean they are not subsidies.
You can argue about the exact number but that completely misses the point. The point is that there are HUGE externalized costs that we are not forcing oil and gas companies to deal with. That IS a subsidy. AND on top of that we also subsidize them directly to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollar annually worldwide.
Except, it never likely will. The problem with solar is not the cost of the panels, those are already dirt cheap. The cost is in land, labor, and other items needed to build solar out, either utility scale or distributed scale.
The panels are NOT "dirt cheap" though they are getting cheaper. The cost of land is generally not an issue - there is plenty of available land on rooftops or available cheaply in sparsely populated areas. The grid is already built. It needs upgrades but it needs those even if you don't consider solar in the equation.
We really AREN'T subsidizing fossil fuels. No one is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to Exxon to pump more oil.
Nonsense. We absolutely are paying billions to oil companies to pump more oil. It's not even a debate. 20 Seconds on Google would disabuse you of this false notion.
decreases every year. As for the tax rebate on solar people need to know that the fossil fuel extraction industry is getting the fossil fuel at a great discount and they also get tax subsidizes.
Would reality be different if someone who had something to say you didn't want to hear came from someone you already hated for that reason, or from someone you had never known before?
That's the problem with you insistently-low-information idiots. You think that being pissed off with someone's claim is enough to make that claim, and any claim they make in the future, automatically wrong. Because you feel it should be so.
YOU, and your ilk, are no different from the SJW types who insist that tales of inequality or injustice cannot be mouthed by a "privileged class". You just have a different target. NO OTHER DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER.
The WTO already have rulings against the USA on the canadian softwood lumber issue, which the USA, like every world agreement they don't want to personally accept, but insist others must or be crushed, have ignored.
The internet gambling one has led to the WTO allowing another nation to ignore the copyrights of USA for a time in redress.
The thing is the USA is quite happy to ignore and only if they get Russia and China to join in can they force the USA to compliance, whereas the other way round, only Russia and China can ignore USA's willingness to kill to get their way.
You keep talking shit, though. google it.
https://www.treasury.gov/open/Documents/USA%2520FFSR%2520progress%2520report%2520to%2520G20%25202014%2520Final.pdf
Oh, in THAT case, since you're not doing so well, you don't WANT it to be related to per-capita. China has lower per capita, but more capitas, so you ignore the per capita and go total.
Here, where the story isn't to your liking, it must be the other way round.
Typical idiot two-facedness.
Except when power companies are forced to buy the power generated from the panels at a premium price, everyone contributes to that subsidy
Except that doesn't happen anywhere in the USA. At best, some people get a halfway decent deal. Some people don't get anything back at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How does US know the data of other countries??
Seriously, it is LONG past time to stop the wind/solar subsidies and instead, take other steps:
1) require that all new buildings below 6 stories to have on-site AE that equals or exceeds the energy needed by the HVAC. This allows builders to decide how to deal with this, while also stopping the massive energy growth for buildings.
2) stop the subsidies for oil/gas drilling and instead convert them to drilling for geo-thermal energy. In particular, for those that convert old wells to geo-thermal. This will keep the drillers going while allowing them to produce clean energy.
3) add in more safe nuclear into our energy matrix. In particular, we need gen IV reactors, not the old gen III (or III+) that are too expensive to build.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's strange. If the Republicans could be wrong about solar, then maybe they could be wrong about global warming, or the environment, even.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
In actual practice, most of the US solar market that is not hooked up to the grid is not counted. Only industrial solar and commercial solar tends to be counted.
It's a lot bigger than that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I can spend about $8000 on a solar system that will save me about $1200 per year ($100 per month on average) in electricity costs. ROI needs to be 7 years or less. A system that takes 20+ years to pay for itself (and then only if nothing goes wrong), does not interest me. It's like an electric car. If I have to pay an extra $20,000 to buy one, it doesn't make any sense to buy one and only save $100 per month in gas.
Most solar installations need a battery to store the power. When the batteries fail they often go into landfill sites where they can leak.
US has more money to waste than most.
There are all sorts of ways that "facts" about renewables get twisted:
1) Capacity is often given in terms of "nameplate" capacity: what you get under ideal conditions. This is crucial for solar, in particular, because you can't ever get anywhere near "nameplate capacity" in the winter. For a lot of the US, winter capacity is only half of summer capacity, or less.
2) Maintenance costs are never included in the total price and, for solar, this can include such things as clearing snow off the panels in winter or cleaning the dust off the glass in the desert and so on.
3) Transmission is almost never included in the price. Texas built some nice, expensive wind farms in far west Texas. Then the state spent billions of dollars to bring that power back to the center and east of the state where it would be used. Those billions were not counted in the price of the wind energy, they were counted as "infrastructure" costs.
4) Balancing the grid with an intermittent source of power is tricky and can be expensive. Imagine a city where every house has a rooftop solar panel. Imagine a bunch of dark clouds blow in with an afternoon storm: other power has to be brought on quickly to make up for the solar loss. When the storm blows through, that extra has to be removed just as quickly. Keeping a gas fired plant on standby for this purpose is expensive and tricky. This cost is also not marked down as a cost of solar power, just a cost of operating the grid.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Then, 'way out past statistics, you find "renewable energy lies".
I still can have power for a very long time, and enjoy living a comfortable life, while others will be in the dark and cold.
It's not just about Money, it's about independence.
Give me one location that's good for solar, and I'll show you a thousand better locations for Nuclear.
Clearly, long-term (100-200 years, and possibly as short as 20) the solution is fusion. Period, end of discussion.
The problem isn't how we get off carbon-neutral energy, the problem is when. We need to do this ASAP. That doesn't mean we have to dump the idea of liquid fuels, either. But it does mean that the production of those fuels must be done in a carbon-neutral way.
I would strongly argue that what needs to happen is a massive manhatten-style project to get LFTR nuclear up and running, while at the same time we dump even more money into research programs like ITER and W7-X.
Why LFTR? Because it's a known technology that just needs to be upscaled to commercial deployment, and more importantly, not only can it easily produce 700-1000 MW per reactor, but the design is safe (no chernobyl or fukushima's), is not susceptible to nuclear proliferation, and can burn up those 'spent fuel rods' currently sitting in pools at most PWR reactors.
Even IF we get fusion well before LFTR is perfected, we will still need to deal with the 'waste' from PWR reactors. LFTR is the clear answer to this problem.
China is leading the charge to LFTR reactors, the US should follow suit. It's madness to replace our PWR reactors and coal fired power plants with natural gas. Burning natural gas is a complete waste of that resource. Petroleum products should be redirected to the chemical industry first, mainly for plastics.
I'm not saying solar, wind, and hydro can't be part of the answer, of course they can be. But to think we'll get away with just solar without having to do LFTR and Fusion is madness.
it lowers the demand for from-the-grid energy, which lowers the price of the electricity for which you pay...
In the long run yes. In the short run, no.
If I have two coal plants and can only use one to sell power. I charge you anyway for my other plant, idling or just sitting in cold storage.
Power costs wont go down significantly until I can get rid of my obsolet plant.
The single plant I'm using, regardless if I have a second obsolet idling plant: produces power for the exact same cost as before. The price can not go down. It only can go up. Until we have the turning point where coal is significantly cheaper than right now and I can/need to forward that cost benefit as a price benefit to you.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The navy exists to secure petroleum supply and shipping. There is little else it exists for that is not rounding error.
It could be argued almost all other power projection of our "Defense" department is for oil more than any other resource or industry: Air force, satellites, CIA, Marines, foreign army bases.
Except that doesn't happen anywhere in the USA.
Except, that it does, if you're a "utility". It just doesn't work for residential installations for personal consumption...
http://energy.gov/savings/ladw...
They pay a premium price for utility solar to make it work, raising the price of power for everyone. That is just one program, there are many more like it.
http://www.absolutelysolar.com...
I've looked at investing, the problem I personally run into is that their entire business model really depends on government money to work. The numbers just don't pencil out otherwise.