Slashdot Mirror
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.
...a large majority of their population is shitting in the bushes.
Seems to me some priorities are a bit off.
Considering CO2 emissions, I'd say it's hard to find a dirtier energy source than coal. So no, it is not equivalent.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
With coal, you can make it night all the time.
Solar may be in some contexts cheaper, but that may not continue for the long-term. Solar power experiences value deflation, where the more solar power there is, the less it is worth (because unlike conventional power sources, it all peaks at the same time). This can lead to serious limits on how much solar a given area is likely to have http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-innovation. Either the cost per a panel needs to go down by a lot, or the storage and transmission costs need to improve by a lot. The last link includes an estimate that in order to really get solar to succeed one needs an approximate cost of around $0.25 per watt. If one improves batteries and transmission that may not be necessary, especially if we have enough other sources of power, such as wind, nuclear, hydroelectric (which unfortunately has probably gotten close to its peak in much of Europe and North America), tidal, and geothermal. Nuclear is going to definitely be a part of any long-term solution, but one has silly things now like Sweden trying to give up all fossil fuels at the same time they phase out nuclear power http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-first-fossil-fuel-free-country-in-the-world-a6684641.html and they call that "green."
At least in most places, we're very far from where solar can be even without improved transmission and storage. In much of the US, you can get home solar and have it pay back in a few years. The solar panel cost guide is a good place to start http://www.solarpanelscostguide.com/. Or, if you want to help other people out while helping the environment you can donate to Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ which helps get solar panels for non-profits like schools, homeless shelters and science museums. Every little bit helps.
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.
And how! like the whole landscape is removed. and also when you burn it. Even if you manage to scub some of it you still got a lot of heavy metals to deal with. And then of course there's the CO2 released. Don't forget shipping it takes fuel as well.
With solar, you're polluting at the manufacturing site. But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy, a ton of water,
What's a ton of energy? Could we perhaps get this energy from say, the sun? And the water, it's still water when you got done right? didn't do the old E=MC^2 vanishing act. You just borrowed it like rented beer. So yeah maybe this month you could not water your crops. That is an impact.
I don't doubt there's a toxic load from solar cells. I'd believe much of it is hidden unaccountable in China. But I'm not persuaded by your grab-ass cost benefit analysis. I'm also inclined to believe solar cell manufacture can over time become cleaner but how do we make coal much cleaner.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, we have no numbers for India, just a statement from one guy saying “I think a new coal plant would give you costlier power than a solar plant". Someone decided this is definitive and we can now announce that "Solar is now cheaper than Coal". Of course, we don't know if he meant installed capacity, or actual cost per kwh, but heck what does that matter. Nor do we care about the other systemic costs associated with transmittance.
transmittance, not transmittance....sorry
That guy is incompetent. The way he compares cost of each solution just doesn't make sense at all. You need to compare over a lifetime the total energy produced in both cases including maintenance costs. If you cannot produce electricity at night, what is the cost of this? You have to buy electricity outside the country? Build another facility just to provide electricity during the night? This guy should be fired.
Achille Talon
Hop!
This is commonly repeated but it is wrong at multiple levels. First, the primary thing that matters is CO2 levels, and since solar power has positive energy return on energy investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested there's now way it produces net CO2. That's before we get to the fact that coal is one of the dirtiest power sources in existence both in terms of CO2 (produces more per a kilowatt-hour than either oil or natural gas) and the fact that coal releases many other nasties such as particulate, heavy metals (especially mercury) as well as NOx and Sulfur Dioxide. Moreover, cradle-to-grave studies for batteries and solar have been done and they've pretty much all conclusively shown that solar pollutes less than coal. See for example summary here https://www.renewableenergyhub.co.uk/solar-panel-cradle-to-grave-analysis-and-environmental-cost.html or see Maggie Koerth-Baker's excellent book "Before the Lights Go Out" about the history and future of the electric grids, which includes many references to detailed studies establishing this.
With solar, you're polluting at the manufacturing site.
You don't have to.
But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy
Cost of silicon is now 40 cents per Watt peak. The cost of the energy to grow the silicon is included in that.
and then by the time you mine enough lithium to keep the country going at night,
You wouldn't use lithium for large scale static batteries, but cheap molten salt.
Or the many people in developing countries who can't afford to give a fuck and will be the most hardest hit by global warming.
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.
Not cheapness, but storage.
Have a cheap, easy way to store energy for days without leakage? You just became the next Rockefeller / Carnegie/ Vanderbilt / Gates.
Laptops, phones, electric cars, solar panels companies, and nuclear power companies (they can't transmit the power very far so the plants are uncomfortably close to cities) will beat your door down trying to shove money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I know India. Was born there. Almost everyday the minister of this or minister of that will make big announcement about something. Usually not much happens after the announcement. India does improve, things do happen in India. But usually at a vastly different time scale than what is announced by the ministers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And the panels, the cost of SI is the cost of the cells in the panels, not the bottom line price.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sure, if you ignore all the external costs of coal.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Large grids pretty much buffer local variations out.
Perhaps, but only if the grids are redesigned and rebuilt. Even then the grids aren't as large as you might think.
Texas is largely on its own grid, and likes it that way. We have stable power prices, stable power delivery, and don't have to deal with other state government whims.
Your water heater can pause for a while and pocket a rebate to boot.
That would require a new hot water heater, and it would require that I WANT it to pause. We have 2 hot water tanks, 50 gallons each, because this is a large house with 4 bathrooms and 5 people. At times, we'll have all 4 showers running, that sucks up a lot of hot water. Or perhaps the kids want to take a bath. That is the perfect time to run the clothes washer and dishwasher for Mom.
Maybe you have some thermal storage units
Oh goodie, you want to spend MORE money. You are one of those people who thinks you can solve everything if you're just allowed to spend everyone else's money as you see fit, without their permission.
Do you know why I have hot water heaters? They cost less than tankless units. The tankless units might use less energy over time (debatable, but lets give them that), but they cost twice as much money up front. The cost of natural gas to heat them is trivial.
The result is load shifting that buys time for alternative sources to spool up
People don't have to load shift today, why should they want a more expensive power system tomorrow where they do, while requiring all new stuff?
Frankly you can take those ideas and stuff them where the sun doesn't shine, that is about what they are worth.
It is still a pilot effort. But it will spread.
No, they won't... once regular people are told they no longer have control over the stuff in their house, they'll tell you to get stuffed.
It is clear that it's a bad thing. It will increase ocean temperatures and alter ocean pH levels, causing massive changes to a food source that feeds hundreds of millions of people. It will shift rainbelts, rendering currently arable land far less useful to agriculture (or far more expensive to keep under cultivation), while taking marginal agricultural land completely out of the food supply. It will see a slow but steady inundation of coastal areas, again, effecting hundreds of millions of people. It is already seeing formerly "tropical" diseases creeping to higher latitudes.
As to accusations of crony capitalism, how is not pricing fossil fuels for the actual costs they incur anything but handing fossil fuel companies probably the largest set of financial subsidies in human history? Do you think continue to allow people like the Kochs to profit massively off of an energy source that is heating the planet (and no, there's no debate that it's happening, not in the scientific circles, the WSJ is not a science journal and Frank Spencer stopped being a climatologist a couple of decades ago) anything but crony capitalism?
For chrissakes, even the Saudis know the days of oil as a major energy source are numbered, which is why they're working to create one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in history: http://www.reuters.com/article... .
If the market was able to produce a solution on its own, it would have been now. The market is going to need a kick in the nuts, and that kick in the nuts is making fossil fuels more expensive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or, to put it another way, you're willing to keep subsidizing, and likely at ever growing rates, the profits of the owners of fossil fuel stocks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In what universe? Fossil fuels are heavily taxed already.
The Koch brothers' profit or profit margin doesn't change much if the US government imposes additional taxes on oil and gas; they just pass those costs on to consumers. And if they really thought solar was a threat to their business, they'd just invest in it.
Furthermore, the Koch brothers are MIT-educated engineers and billionaires in the 70s; the idea that they take political positions because of future profits is laughable, in particular given their long history of support for libertarian causes, often opposing both Republicans and Democrats (including gay marriage and abortion rights, opposition to the war on drugs, opposition to the Iraq war).
Ah, the "kick in the nuts" theory of economics! How could I not know? Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.
What's needed in order to replace fossil fuels with, say, solar cells is a decrease in the cost of solar cells; that requires lots of incremental improvements to technology. Those improvements have been happening since 1980. Solar cells aren't competitive with fossil fuels yet because innovation actually takes time. Kicking scientists and engineers in the nuts will not speed up innovation.
In fact, artificially increasing the cost of fossil fuels has the opposite effect on innovation: it encourages and subsidizes the production of inefficient solar cells and discourages innovation because, after all, innovation isn't needed to compete. At the same time, it makes consumer poorer (by taking away their money) and transfers their money to politically favored corporations. That's what's been happening.
I also think that oil's days as a major energy source are numbered; however, if we adopt the "kick in the nuts" policies you favor, a transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a post fossil-fuel economy might be delayed by decades.
In any case, as far as climate change is concerned, any of that makes little difference: we are looking at 2-4C warming no matter what (even according to the IPCC), and for people like you to pretend that we can avert that if we just adopt the right governmental policy is either ignorant or simply dishonest.