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Solar Is Now Cheaper Than Coal, Says India Energy Minister (climatechangenews.com)
An anonymous reader cites a report on Climate Change News: India is on track to soar past a goal to deploy more than 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2022, the country's energy minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday. Speaking at the release of a 15-point action plan for the country's renewable sector, Goyal said he was now considering looking at "something more" for the fast-growing solar sector. "I think a new coal plant would give you costlier power than a solar plant," he said. "Of course there are challenges of 24/7 power. We accept all of that -- but we have been able to come up with a solar-based long term vision that is not subsidy based." In the past financial year, nearly 20GW of solar capacity has been approved by the government, with a further 14GW planned through 2016 according to the Union Budget.More details here. "I met this man in Meghalaya, who has a solar set-up for his homestay. He mentioned that only the initial setting up costs you much," Deepika Gumaste, a travel writer told Slashdot. "But once you have set it up, the operating costs are not much and more importantly, the environmental costs also go down. Good on your pockets too in the long run." It is worth pointing out that India is currently among the handful of nations that is increasing its coal consumption, according to a Guardian report from late last year. Also see: India aims to become 100% electric vehicle nation by 2030.
When you consider that each has about the same environmental impact, one is not really cheaper than the other. You're just playing a game of whack-a-mole with the pollution.
With coal, you're polluting at the generation site. With solar, you're polluting at the manufacturing site. But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy, a ton of water, and then by the time you mine enough lithium to keep the country going at night, I seriously doubt you're going to be easier on the environment than coal.
NREL forecasts that if we build a modern grid and implement smart metering then we can potentially beat the problems of regional and daily variability in Solar and wind. But short of that these will cap the amount of this that can be deployed in the intial stages.
If you don't do that then you can run into a problem where you need to have energy sources spooled up but not producing to cover short falls, expected and unplanned.
Thus what we need is a breadbasket of many different renewable energies including geothermal, ocean, hydro. We may need things like the thermal-solar plants not just for their own power production but as batteries to store energy from PV solar and wind.
If we just keep pushing the thread on the cheapest possible renewables (PV solar and wind) we will be building a fragile system.
Germany discovered that it's tax incentive system didn't adequately take those effects into account. As a result it's actually shifting from nuke and natural gas to coal in a race to the bottom to have the cheapest form of neccessary backup power. It appears that they may stall out on further deployment until they can remedy the right balance.
the US has the advantage of a much larger mass and many time zones (not to mention more sun-- germany is compared to alaska). Thus we can buffer across this range if we build the grids. And smart metering can be more effective if we can use it across many regions as well. Smart metering offfers an approach to buying time and smoothing surge demands to allow other systems to spool up.
So the risk we face with something like a carbon tax or other flat incentives for solar and wind is that there's no inherent balancing of the funding across the breadbasket of sources, many of which might not be competitive in terms of KW/hr.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Much of the population is shitting in the bushes due to cultural heritage. You can't simply build toilets and call the problem solved. There's years of teaching people how to act hygienically.