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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!”
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.
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.
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! --
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not part of the quote? Who ever came up with that? And anyway, English title casing rules are easy to deal with... https://metacpan.org/pod/Text:...
Right. On the internet WE ALL TALK LIKE THIS.
My phrase "paving the desert" was metaphorical only, the energy needs of the U.S. could in fact be met by less than 100 square miles of solar panel in Nevada. So "paving over the area of a city (Milwaukee WI specifically, 97 Sq Mi) in the Nevada desert", how about that?
While China is building all this solar they are also building nuclear. China currently has 30 operating nuclear reactors, and 24 more under construction. They plan to have 150GWe capacity in nuclear power by 2030.
China figured out how to build nuclear power economically, I suspect that we can as well.
Now, where are my slippers?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.