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China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader links to an article on MIT Technology Review: It's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States. According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
What's that in percentage of total eletric power?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Arf! You go Sino Asians!
For crying out loud Carter Tried.
Watt is a unit of power. The energy is just the integrated power, so one GW*hour is a gigawatt-hr (a unit of energy).
economic adjustment to massive malinvestiments (like solar) and over capacity (like steel). I wouldn't be trumpeting this trend. World markets are simply not demanding solar. Left wing governments do, to the economic ruin of us all.
Solar panels are rated by how much power they produce under full sunlight, usually defined as 1000 w/sq meter. Hence the rating in GWs. The actual amount of power output (GWHrs) would depend on mounting location and how much sun they happen to see throughout the year.
The sun is always shining down on earth somewhere. Is it possible to transmit electricity so that the power is distributed across (most/some of) the planet? That would mean no, or shorter, interruptions during the night.
Gigawatt is momentaneous production, what you are thinking of is Gigawatt hours (GWh) and that would be what this produces per hour.
The world will add 121 gigawatts in the year 2016 (from 200 gigawatts to 321 gigawatts). China will add 15 gigawatts. This means China will be responsible for 12.4% of the new solar gigawatts. China has around 1.35 billion people, compared to 7.125 billion people worldwide. This means China has around 19% of the world population. So they are actually adding less per person than the world wide average.
. . . .can we assume that these panels are being deployed in the less-developed hinterlands ? Between sunlight being blocked, and the need to clean particulates off the panels for best efficiency, one would reasonably guess that urban applications of solar in China are minimal. . . .
It's peak power rating, as most plants are rated for. To get the average power generation rate you have to multiply by the capacity factor. For fixed tilt, industrial solar in a good location you may get upwards of 25% capacity, but don't expect better than that. Heliostats improve that figure. Random rooftop installations or solar in less than optimal regions yield significantly reduced capacity factors.
I assume this is mostly industrial scale fixed-tilt in as good of locations as China has (China is pretty bright, but not as bright as the US desert southwest). I'd wager they get about 20% capacity factor.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge
Poor "an." Why doesn't "an" get a capital letter?
Of course the real question is why all the other words do, when No-one Ever Writes Anything Else Like This.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Is this GWs produced per hour? per day? per year?
GW is an unit of power. GWh is an unit of energy. The question how much GWs solar plants produce per day is like asking how much horse power produces a petroleum engine per day.
A lot of people's supply chains have been disrupted, because China is modernizing, building industrial scale solar and wind nationwide, and took all their coal plants offline to convert those they could to cogeneration.
Which is a good thing.
But it has meant they have reduced use of steel and coal dramatically.
Many modern universities and entire cities on the coasts of the US and Canada now require all new construction be built with either super efficient HVAC or with load-bearing roofs and electrical systems that can handle rooftop solar. Since 2004.
The future is here, you just can't see it yet.
Fossil fuels are dying off.
And, good news, solar and wind creates, on average, about 10 times the jobs per GW that fossil fuels do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Against solar city? Seriously, China invests far far more into coal plants and mines each year. Heck, China is around 1100-1300 GW of coal plants ( Chinese gov numbers do not agree with what locals claim and what the plants are ). And this is growing at ~52 GW/ yr. Solar will not make a dent in their coal unless they stop building new plants and stop their old ones.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Germany>USA>China
love is just extroverted narcissism
Use Wp (or GWp if you prefer). Personally I like J, but it's only a scaling factor so no big deal.
Jesus gramps, how old are you?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
What is an "epic solar power binge"? Is that Cantonese for "power trip"?
25% is really about ultimate max for fixed tilt. The real world average is much lower.
To put it in perspective, 15 gigawatts of production would (if operating at full capacity) generate about 0.6% of the world energy demand from 2008.
It's a lot of new solar, but also only a small percentage of what is needed.
kWp can be converted to a rough estimate of produced energy per year by taking it times 1000 for a fixed installation at middle-European latitudes and climate. 1kWp yields roughly 1000kWh per year under those conditions.
divide those numbers by about four to compare to the world's combined nuclear capacity of 384GW. or coal's 1500+MW.
I'm actually for paving over desert with solar panels and storage systems and UHVDC to carry it around continents, could actually power the world. But this piecemeal approach isn't aggressive enough
Really?
Can someone tell me what the new chocolate ration is?
It increased to 20 grams, up from 30 grams a month ago!
Dark Reflection
The air pollution might actually be one driver for solar deployment: yes, it will definitely reduce effectiveness in the short to medium term; but the quality-of-life costs of some of the nastier power plants make them desirable targets for retirement in order to improve public health and reduce dissatisfaction.
If a given city is so polluted that it's cutting solar efficiency; that's a good sign that the people there probably aren't happy about it. It'll involve a bunch of shuffling around of the grid; but you would likely make people considerably happier if you can shut down the worst pollution sources, tide yourself over with power from elsewhere on the grid, and then get increasing amounts of local solar as the worst of the smog eventually settles out or blows away.
China needs to get their priorities straight. Apparently China currently has 4x the number of flu cases as the USA.
love is just extroverted narcissism
24% is typical for fixed-tilt commercial plants in the the US desert southwest.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
I'm pretty sure that they've always had a five year plan(the 13th five-year-plan implies 65 years of five year plans; so somewhere between 1951 and 1956 depending on where we are in the 13th five year plan) and the PRC's nominal start date is ~1949, with the nationalists mostly out of action by that time; so this is not exactly a new thing.
That said, the degree to which the 5 year plan, rather than operationally 'private sector'(yes, often heavily state or politician owned in various ways; but they certainly act like capitalists or crony capitalists rather than commies) developments, has certainly dwindled over time.
And the US desert southwest is about as good as it gets. Average overall CF is lower.
so if every (1.35 Billion) chinese person had ONE 0.3 kw (=300 Watt, 2 m x 1 m) panel
they would have:
1'350'000'000 *0.3 kW =
405'000'000 kW =
405'000 MW =
405 GW.
assume 4 hours of peak sunshine per day = 1'620 TWh per day : )
show me how much cheap steel can be made and exported using solar energy, versus how much can be made burning cheap coal. then we'll talk.
And the US desert southwest is about as good as it gets.
Much of central and western China gets as much sun as the American SW, and the sun is often brighter because of the higher altitude.
Here is a map of where China's solar plants are actually located. Most of them are sited where the people are, rather than in the sunniest locations.
FYI: China is building solar power even if there is no one using the power, as a way to prop up the industry.
Not really. The desert southwest is good, but there are places that are better. You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant. Which would be win-win for everyone (well, except Russia)
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
A typical nuclear plant produces 1GW (typical range: 0.5GW to 5GW). Last time I looked, been a while, I think the estimate was china needed more than 10 new nuke plants per year for sustained growth. So in context this is an enormous advance. Of course that's not 24/7 power. But with enough excess capacity they could even pump water upstream of the Dams or desalinate water.
the unit of measure here is power not energy. it's not a battery.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That went so far over your head they gave it a callsign.
It seems that nine times out of ten, these articles botch the units and say something stupid like, "Produces xx gigawatts of power per day" or "enough to power xx homes per day".
In Poland we had 5 year plans *every year* during Soviet times. Each year the plan would be better!
Except once we had a 7 year plan, and the teacher made us put little 'siodemki' [7s] on the Christmas tree. This was the great gift of Stalin!
And in spite of planning, you still had to wait in line for three hours to get 300 grams of meat, but perhaps that was the plan....
Panels are usually rated in Wp (peak wattage), which is an instantaneous reading taken under optimal conditions (of both light and temperature).
Typical top-end panels pump out about 240-260 Wp - call it 250Wp. This means you'd need four top-end monocrystal solar panels to get 1 kWp, 4,000 of them to get 1 MWp, etc.
Mind the "peak" portion though - typical daylight production is averaged to something like 50-60% of peak (to account for stuff like clouds, the sun not being perfectly perpendicular to the usually-fixed panel, high temperature degradations, etc.) This means that you usually have to overbuild by at least 40-50%...
TL;DR - that's a real big frigload of panels that they're looking to build and install.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How much power are they using producing all these solar panels? And how does that compare with the energy they use to produce the McDonalds play toys that entertain our kids for 2 minutes before we though them away.
The raw material for solar panels is polycrystalline silicon. Due to increases in oil prices, subsidies for solar panels in Europe and elsewhere, the price of polysilicon spiked tenfold from $50/kg in 2005, to $475/kg in early 2008.
China went on a crash building binge, in an attempt to capture the business and drive out non-Chinese competitors. They were too successful, and together with the world recession of that time (lower oil prices and end of subsidies), collapsed the price to $16/kg by $2012.
What to do with the surplus they could no longer export? Why, PV the heck out of their own country and hopefully put a lid on pollution. Ironically, polysilicon production is hugely energy-intensive, so that each production facility pretty much needs a corresponding (coal-fired) power plant.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Might sound like a lot of panels but it's not really. If you put panels on every roof in the US we'd be producing more than 10 times the total power we need and the peak production would be far beyond anything anyone could consume. We only need to cover something like half the roofs in the US to generate more power that we'd need for decades.
It's not very far from there to methods to use that power to store it so it can be used outside production hours and there are a LOT of ways to store energy. Power shifting becomes very cheap when the peak power rate is zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Molten salt reactors can reach temperatures of 800C making air cooling viable. That means even in a desert the plant can produce power. A typical coal plant can get to 300C, making water cooling necessary for efficient operation. Steam cycle nuclear is similarly constrained.
Not only can molten salt reactors operate without water cooling it can load follow like natural gas turbines. The turbines used for both natural gas and molten salt nuclear are very similar, the difference is how the heat is produced. Coal, solid fuel nuclear, and some natural gas plants use steam which is very slow to react to changes in demand, if load changes too quickly the turbines can be damaged.
As the amount of energy from sun and wind increases the load seen on the grid can change much more dramatically. Not only do you have people turning electrical items on and off but the energy sources can come and go with changes in weather. This need for peak power is usually met with natural gas. If we get molten salt reactors then we can replace the natural gas power plants.
What I expect to happen over time is that people will realize that with a nuclear power plant that is capable of load following, and the cost to run it varies little based on the load, that wind and solar will become unprofitable.
Right now wind and solar are basically proxies for natural gas, since with every watt of capacity from wind or sun there must be a watt of reserve in natural gas. We are seeing coal power plants getting replaced but not with wind and sun but with natural gas, the windmills and solar panels are there for government subsidized greenwashing. When the US federal government gets their thumbs out of their asses and starts to do something meaningful about our reliance on fossil fuels we can expect a nuclear renaissance of sorts. At which point I expect to see wind and solar to fade as grid power.
If what I predict does not come true then so be it, so long as the USA is providing its own energy instead of importing it from Mexico or China.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It is the theoretical power output for a given cell surface area illuminated per standard unit of solar illumination. The real number is a lot lower, due to many factors such as sun angle, atmospheric conditions, ambient temperature, cell degradation etc. To get the total energy generated you need to multiply by the day length by day numbers.
China now has about 30GWe in nuclear power capacity, plans to have 60GWe by 2020, and 150GWe by 2030.
I point this out because the articles linked above might lead people to think that China is abandoning it's nuclear power for solar power, it is not. They are investing in a number of energy sources and I believe that they are wise to do so. It would be nice to see the same investment in nuclear power in the USA.
To all of those that will inevitably reply with doomsday scenarios of piles of radioactive waste, meltdowns irradiating schoolyards and hospitals, and on and on, just don't. We don't build power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima any more so the scaremongering based on those failures do not apply, we can build them better now. We can build them better because we learned from those mistakes. We can choose to join China in this new nuclear powered age or we can watch them surpass us in technology, in wealth, and in military capability.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant."
So that once again, Europe will be critically dependent on the Middle East for its energy.
So Africa and Australia are really the ideal places for Solar power.
Australia is always more than happy to ship as much coal, gas and uranium for China. They can ship Australia solar panels. Which will provideAustralia with cheap, clean energy.
ouch, stop please your too fucking funny, it hurt so much.
There are not a lot of ways of storing energy in ways that are actually useful..
learn how to do math, look at chemistry and physics then please try again!
The sun is always shining down on earth somewhere. Is it possible to transmit electricity so that the power is distributed across (most/some of) the planet?
You lose less by storing it nearby rather than shipping it long distances. Storage technology is still improving rapidly, too. Long distance transmission is improving slowly or not much at all, and is unlikely to have a major breakthrough short of discovery of a hot-day-temperature, non-type-A superconductor.
Given that, there's no good reason to get into the politics, environmental hassles, solar flare and terrorist vulnerabilities, etc. of additional transcontinental and intercontinental electrical transmission just to even out the load while avoiding storage.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Economics as much Ecology is what is driving this. China has fully grasped that shipping money out for oil is just a huge parasitical drain on their economy going to countries that don't exactly promote world stability. Every watt of energy that is generated through solar is potentially a watt not bought from sponsors of terrorism as well as a watt not resulting in that money being shipped outside the economy.
Thus by looking at the big picture it is sensible for a country to spend quite a bit more on a per watt basis for homegrown energy than imported energy as that money continues to then circulate around your own economy. This is doubly important when the currency being used is not your own as oil is mostly purchased using USD.
Another benefit that is big picture is that by mastering the mass production and understanding of solar technology and its related technologies China will pull further ahead in its ability to become a world leader.
Then, as an added bonus, there are the eco benefits. Another benefit for a country that has still not yet built a comprehensive power grid is that solar generation is somewhat distributed. This fits perfectly with filling in gaps where not enough power can easily be supplied to some areas, combined with the fact that much of the Chinese powergrid is of an older design and in desperate need of replacement. This then allows for a modern power grid much more capable of working with a distributed and ever varying power source such as solar. Many western countries have older but comprehensive power grids that really aren't distributed generation friendly, nor do they want to be as the power companies aren't so big picture oriented.
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them. Less than a third is converted into electricity and the remaining more than two-thirds ends up being re-radiated as infrared, which generally doesn't make it back out.
Were you worried about a greenhouse effect boost from carbon dioxide? What about that from leaving solar panels out in the sun?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well gosh, you could just lift a weight up with an electric motor and store electricity that way. Let it drop and generate your power. See, the thing you missed was, when somebody else said something kinda like what you said, you know, the person whose idea you're copying... they were probably talking about price. But see, if the thought experiment is that you have 10x the total power, well cost doesn't matter in the same way. Now, even at 15% storage efficiency using something like rocks, it works out.
Storing electricity isn't hard.
Learn how to think for yourself, then you'll understand which math to use. Don't worry about the physics, you're not even up to the use case.
Congrats! Only a hundred more years of this and you will produce about as much power as one nuclear reactor during the daytime. When it's sunny.
when done at gun point.
And Environment Impact is the sound of a rifle butt cracking a skull.
In what sense is Sahara the Middle East? Look at a map!
Naaa! There's enough people in China to employ 'panel cleaners' by the millions! And, polution should start clearing up with more and more solar going in.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
It's American political geography 101.
Middle East is where Arabs (and Jews, but they're special) live.
Arabs are Muslims who live where it's hot and there's a lot of sand.
Muslims live in Sahara.
It's hot in Sahara, and there's a lot of sand.
Therefore, Sahara is Middle East.
If you don't believe me, just ask any Trump voter.
If you have ever been on a software project that used iterations and milestones for planning, you've done the equivalent of a 5-year plan.
Sahara is Middle East in the sense that it consists of Muslim countries that we would rather not have anything to do with, for any reason, ever again. The whole point of solar power is that we capture the sunlight that falls on us, beholden to nothing and no one.
Gotta love that post-hoc rationalisation.
Own your words and admit that you didn't think about the geography.
It makes as much sense to say that the Sahara is the Middle East as it does to say that Indonesia or Pakistan are the Middle East.
And this despite my agreeing that a massive advantage of solar power is that it can offer many countries a greater degree of energy independence.