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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!”
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).
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 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.
It's possible, but you'd need to severely curtail the losses that occur when pushing electricity across long distances. I think this can be done using superconductors, but they're very expensive.
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.
There's not much that could stop China's massive rate of solar installs. This isn't like a dam, where you can save pretty much all of a project cost by not building it. Solar these days is a very capital cost-dominated industry, if you count all manufacturing stages together. The factories are already built. They're not going to just idle them. If their rate of power demand growth drops as a result of their economic situation, it's going to be power projects involving resources that could be directed elsewhere that will be cut.
Even in this economic situation, though, China still is going to have serious demand for capacity growth.
It's interesting to see how much solar now looks like wind a decade ago. But that's a good thing. Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
Germany>USA>China
love is just extroverted narcissism
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"?
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.
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
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of China's existing load is served by some really nasty coal plants; mostly burning fairly low-grade coal('ideal' coal still makes the global warming types nervous, since burning pure carbon in an oxygen atmosphere puts out more CO2 than does burning hydrocarbons, which put out a mixture of CO2 and water vapor; but real-world coal tends to come with goodies like sulfur and mercury; and unless you have suitable enforcement of scrubber user and the like, they show up quite merrily in the stack output). Even if the economics alone don't necessarily add up; the percentage of the Chinese population that is now wealthy enough for 'breathable air' to rise above 'adequate food' as a demand is much higher than it used to be; and the CCP can only afford so much discontent. Unless Chinese solar is abhorrently expensive compared to the estimates I've seen for US installs(which seems unlikely); there would be a strong case to be made for government subsidy/regulation aimed at, at least, shutting down some of the coal units upwind of major population centers.
Unfortunately the stupidity of Politics / greed would put the kibosh on that but one can always dream / hope that we'll put aside our differences and share our resources one day.
Geothermal is another alternative that is basically ignored.
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.
Indeed. China's current situation isn't just a large environmental cost... it's also a large financial cost. Medical care, sick days and disability cost an economy serious money.
I'm sure China would love to be able to shut off a large chunk of their current hardware today. But they need more, not less. It's amazing the lengths they've gone to try to stretch what they have... for example, pumped hydro to let them shift daytime loads into the night. China has nearly half of the world's large pumped hydro stations, including two of the three largest. They really need daytime capacity.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
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.
Shocking! China has 4 times the population of the USA too. But I think you knew that :)
Presumably using an electric furnace, which is a common sight these days.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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?
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
Interesting that Nicola Tesla wanted to do this: http://www.damninteresting.com....
Greed is the root of all evil.
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.
Your statement about penetration levels is seriously dated. What they've found in Germany and Hawaii and other places where solar is reaching 30% of power generation is that everything people assumed about maximum amount of solar energy is wrong. It was all theoretical anyway but what they find is that those peak generation periods you allow rates to fall to zero then people will jump in with storage technologies (batteries, fly wheels, pumped hydro, etc) and will use that free peak power to generate stored energy that the grid can use later. Recent research is indicating that rates as high as 80% generation by PV would be sustainable.
The reality is that it will never reach that point because a balanced portfolio of solar, wind and either geothermal or nuclear and you can meet all needs and power rates will probably fall with periods of free power. But this will require total deregulation of the power market. Honestly at some point in the future power generation will be a commodity service with minor profit margin. I expect that grid maintenance and operation will at some point need to be picked up either by a non-profit or government due to the lack or profit from generation and power rates will fall through the floor. This will be good for everyone. 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One can melt an enormous amount of steel with 140 GW of power.
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.
You can't replace coke with electricity. Learn how steel is made.
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.
"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.
Electric arc furnaces are used to recycle steel all the time rather than using coke for it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It would be nice to see the same investment in nuclear power in the USA.
Let's face it, we're all going to be speaking Chinese soon. The rate of growth is insane, and they now make everything, so I'm really wondering how we remain competitive in the next 10-20 years?
NO. You learn how steel is made. Iron is made with coke. There is a distinction if you are going to be a smart ass.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
They're building lots of new infrastructure. Demand can't be met purely via steel melting.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
Geothermal is fantastic, it's green and very much a favorite of environmentalists - it just isn't available very widely. Where it exists, it's great and a lot of places that have the potential for it and aren't using it really ought to start, but the vast majority of the world is just too geologically unstable for it. There is exactly one active volcano on my entire continent and that's further away from my country than Moscow is from London. There's just no way shipping geothermal from there could compete with even the hydro we get from our closest neighbors (who have high mountains and big dams) and even that provides only a fraction of our power. The bulk is still coal with one nuclear plant.
The grand irony is that I live in one of the most sunshine rich states on earth and yet solar still hasn't gotten much government assistance - nearly all solar installations are individual private ones. It's improving slowly but we could gain so much from investing in it properly. A country with an energy crisis which we could solve entirely in 2 years using solar, yet somehow we're flirting with more nuclear (by, of all companies, the people who built Chernobyl) which would not have it's first generator online for at least 20 years... and that's assuming it doesn't run over estimates which would be a global historical first.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Tesla for all his genius didn't know what we know today. Sure you could use induction to transmit power, but to do it over any significant range you would be producing RF that would have made the communications revolution impossible - and killed a great many people.
We do have some technologies which were developed much later that are essentially the same end-goal but they are very niche in their uses. Microwave power transmission is an example. It works fine for point-to-point line-of-sight transmission where cables are impractical (a good likely candidate for powering certain space missions in the near future with the huge advantage that your big energy sources can stay on the ground and you don't have to carry them to orbit) - but can you imagine beaming power to our homes using microwaves ? People tend not to take too kindly to being boiled alive...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
when done at gun point.
And Environment Impact is the sound of a rifle butt cracking a skull.
I agree that Tesla's idea for wireless power transmission could potentially have horrible unintended consequences. My recollection though was that the em frequency he envisioned for transmission was much lower than microwaves.
IMHO, it is much safer and more practical to to store solar energy where it is used than to transmit it across the planet. Better still, use it for daytime demand to supplement other sources that power night time demand.
I was just pointing out that world wide wireless power transmission is an old idea supported by people whose ideas cannot easily be dismissed.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Interestingly it was done at the frequencies he had in mind. Early crystal diode radios often worked without a local power source. An antenna is basically a conductor that gains an electric current from induction from electromagnetic waves. The frequency of the current matches the wave so you can interpret signals from it. Those radios were able to run on just the current from radio wave induction into the antenna. But they were tiny, needed very little power and could only tune AM. You get microcurrents at the levels radio works at. At the levels you would need to power household devices you would utterly drown out everything else (hence I said the communications revolution couldnt happen) and you probably would kill people. Microwave works better because you can focus it on such a narrow band. That means you can send a signal strong enough to power your satelite without killing every other transmitter or roasting your neighbours. Power over wifi is a modernday commercial household techmology using Tessla's idea. It also only works for very tiny ultra low power electronics.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
High voltage DC is very useful, but not a panacea. It can carry nearly 50% more power than AC at the cost of more complicated handling. (AC is dead easy to step up and down in voltage, and a lot easier to switch on and off because of the 120 times a second the voltage goes to 0. There are solutions for this in DC, but they aren't as simple. Caveat: I haven't learned much about power line transmission in about the last 15 years.) Since it's always at max voltage, it will have less distribution loss than AC, although I'd have to sit down and calculate how much.
So, if we're talking about a transmission situation that's borderline or a little over for AC, we can use DC as long as we replace pretty much every piece of major equipment on the line. If it's way beyond feasible for AC, it will be infeasible for DC.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game. If you can greatly reduce the CO2 emissions, and it's currently looking like we might be able to because alternative energy is getting seriously cheap, then we can stop the really bad things happening; even if we still use coke for some things.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game.
True. If you get enough non-carbon power, you can do things to reduce carbon output in areas not traditionally powered by electricity. Hell, enough nuclear and you can yank CO2 out of the air.
I don't read AC A human right
You can also use charcoal, although it's more expensive. Charcoal is potentially zero-carbon because it's produced from biomass.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"charcoal is ultimately a source of solar power. So yeah. Hell, just bury the wood/charcoal and you have carbon sequestration!
I don't read AC A human right
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.