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Renewables Are Set To Overtake Gas and Coal By 2027 (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Renewable energy, including solar, wind and hydroelectric will overtake natural gas as an energy source by 2027. According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, ten years later those same renewables will have surpassed the largest electricity-generating fossil fuel: coal. Solar and wind will account for almost 60% of the $11.4 trillion invested in energy over the next 25 years, according to Bloomberg's New Energy Outlook 2016 report. One conclusion that may surprise, Bloomberg noted, is that the forecast shows no golden age for natural gas, except in North America. As a global generation source, gas will be overtaken by renewables in 2027. The electric vehicle boom will increase electricity demand by 2,701TWh (terawatt hours), or 8% of global electricity demand in 2040. The rise of EVs will drive down the cost of lithium-ion batteries, making them increasingly attractive to be deployed alongside residential and commercial solar systems.
especially about the future....Berra
Title and summary don't agree. There is a difference between "surpass coal and gas by 2027" and "surpass gas by 2027 and surpass coal by 2037".
Even ignoring the date differences, there's a difference between "surpass gas", "surpass coal", and "surpass gas and coal".
And let's not get into the whole base load thing. Gas and solar isn't baseload, but coal is....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If renewable resource are really going to overpower coal and fuel in 2027, it will really be helpful for mankind.
Not really.
Large scale maybe, but if every home could provide 75% of their load through local solar panels during a hot summer day then the overall grid will be better. As the usage wouldn't spike as much.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I see no reason why polluting industries like (oil/gas companies) should be subsidized at all. Frankly, we should be taxing them based on how much pollution they emit and how damaging it is. We are eventually going to have to remove CO2 from the air and it's going to be a pricey project. We might as well start saving money for it now.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Not only biased, looking for investor money.
227-3517
Question is, is there enough factory capacity and available rare earths to MAKE sufficient solar panels to do so ?
Logistics is always the tough part of the solution.
The inconsistency of solar and wind will do nasty things to our electric grid if much more is added.
Really? You're an expert in engineering of electric grids? You have clear data on how there is no way to mitigate any adverse effects of increased solar and wind power? You have unambiguous evidence that a distributed and smarter grid is somehow impossible? I've never seen any credible argument that proves we couldn't substantially increase the amount of wind and solar we use but maybe you have information the rest of us do not?
Really we should be developing more hydro and nuclear.
How do you propose to seriously increase the use of hydro given that most of the major rivers that can be dammed already are? We could scale hydro some but where is your evidence that it will be able to provide double digit percentages of our power needs?
In principle I don't have a problem with more nuclear (fission) power but in practice I don't see it happening. Yes the state of the art has improved (and I'm aware of the details) but unfortunately not enough to really make a bulletproof argument that it is truly safe. The fact that only governments are willing to insure them is proof enough of that. Really the only hope for nuclear power is a breakthrough in fission I think and that seems to always be 20 years in the future...
And we shouldn't be trying to stamp out coal.
What we should be doing is trying to get coal to cost the full value of its impact. Right now coal is subsidized AND it doesn't include the cost of mitigating CO2 and other pollutants that burning coal generates. If we choose to use coal the cost of using it should include the full cost of any externalities it currently gets to ignore - in otherwords the cost of cleaning up the burning of coal should be in the price we pay for it.
The answer is yes. There aren't substantial rare earth requirements for silicon PV
Large scale maybe, but if every home could provide 75% of their load through local solar panels during a hot summer day then the overall grid will be better. As the usage wouldn't spike as much.
I've wondered for a long time why we don't have every commercial building rooftop covered in solar panels. Particularly any building that utilizes air conditioning. It's just wasted space right now. Rather than put the panels in fields somewhere, use the space we already have for something productive.
I realize there are some economic and technical hurdles but in principle it's insane not to use solar panels on rooftops wherever possible. Install some battery systems and smarts to the grid to distribute the power adequately.
Question is, is there enough factory capacity and available rare earths to MAKE sufficient solar panels to do so ?
Factory capacity is an adjustable resource and if the demand is there the factory capacity will follow. There are plenty of rare earth minerals available. We aren't actually utilizing much of the capacity available but if solar panel production scaled sufficiently it would become economically viable to open up more mines. The US has substantial rare earth reserves as do a few other places but there currently isn't enough demand to justify reopening the mines at this time.
Logistics is always the tough part of the solution.
My background is in industrial engineering and I'm also an accountant. The logistics of solar panel production are a solved problem. The hard part is the economics. You have competing fossil fuels being sold below actual cost (their cost doesn't currently include the full cost of the pollution they generate), you have solar panels that are getting more competitive every day but still are pretty expensive, and we have a grid that needs updating to handle large scale solar. Scale would solve some of the cost problems but technology improvements are still needed to really get them where they need to go.
Too little, too late humaaaans!
Maybe disrupting the grid is a good idea.
Destabilize the grid enough and the demand for self-sufficiency grows, most importantly increasing the demand for home energy storage systems, both dropping their prices and and improving them. This would probably also drive an improvement in home energy efficiency and related technologies, like smart panel boards that can do intelligent load prioritization and shedding.
Large scale maybe, but if every home could provide 75% of their load through local solar panels during a hot summer day then the overall grid will be better. As the usage wouldn't spike as much.
Sure, and how about the winter? Spring? Fall? You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss. When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage. In some parts of the world renewables are a pipe dream and only work when there's something else(mainly nuclear, coal or hydro-electric in Canada) there to back up the energy that's not produced when the environment itself doesn't cooperate.
Om, nomnomnom...
"...those same renewables will have surpassed the largest electricity-generating fossil fuel: coal."
Well, obviously. Aren't there efforts to make coal "illegal"?
Despite not having labeled the vertical axis on thier graphs I am going to guess this is a somewhat reasonable extrapolation. However it completely misses things like new regulations and new technologies. If we still power our electric cars with lithium ion batteries in 2040 it will be a sad day indeed as it's not unlikely a better battery technology will come around by then. It's actually pretty likely this report will be far off the mark.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ?
Probably substantial and it should be factored into the cost of any products that use them. My guess is that the pollutants that result from such refining are substantially easier to mitigate than the CO2 and other crap that spews from every fossil fuel power plant, mine and transport. If for no other reason than scale. I'm no expert so I could be wrong but I doubt it. The amounts of rare earth minerals needed for a typical solar panel is minute. Compare this to the (literally) tons of coal burned for every human on earth it seems improbably that the pollution footprint for the rare earth mining and use would be greater than the footprint for coal mining and use.
I don't think anyone who understands the technology is arguing that there is no pollution from wind or solar. There clearly is. But it also seems clear from the available data that it is an improvement. We're looking for least-worst here. There is no useful form of power without some drawbacks. Even photosynthesis has some negative implications in certain circumstances. Where the problem lies is that some forms of energy (particularly fossil fuels) aren't realizing even close to the full cost of the pollution they generate. It's a tough problem. The solutions are mostly straightforward (taxes mostly) but politically that is very difficult to realize.
I do not agree with you, but I ,ll defend to the death your right to say it...
So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load?
Some renewables already do work identically to base load sources (hydro, geothermal, solar thermal, etc) so to some degree the answer is clearly yes. The other arguments are more nuanced but also at the end are a clear yes.
With sufficient scale, more variable renewables like wind and solar effectively load balance themselves by being geographically dispersed. The wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere during the day. As long as you can transmit the power where it is needed, the variations are smooth and the problem is functionally identical to dealing with fluctuating demand. The grid already deals with variations in demand and supply so this is nothing new and we're no where close to our limit in being able to handle variation.
There also is the option of further smoothing of fluctuations with power storage systems (batteries, hydro storage, etc). Generate power from your solar panels during the day and put the extra into batteries for use overnight or on cloudy days. The goal is to smooth the variations not eliminate them.
The biggest flaw in the base load argument however is that it assumes that we cannot have some fossil fuel power sources. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate them altogether (which is probably impossible anyway) but to reduce their impact to less than what the Earth's climate regulation can handle. Right now we simply have more CO2 and other pollutants being generated than the planet can handle. If much/most of our power comes from renewables (plus probably nuclear) and we have to supplement from time to time with fossil fuels that's fine. We just need to get the fossil fuel use low enough that climate change doesn't render the planet uninhabitable.
Solar Panels don't use rare earths.
And the answer is yes anyway ... producing solar panels is one of the fastest growing industries (not in the USA ofc)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Many events are perpetually 10 years from now. Diabetes cures, global collapse for various reasons, commercial fusion reactors, peak oil. My BS detector goes off for any dramatic prediction 10 years in the future.
When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
When wind speeds are so high that wind mills don't work, you have different problems than lack of electricity.
Hint: I suggest to read till what speeds wind mills actually do operate. And then check how often you have a storm that covers whole Canada that exceeds those speeds. I would wager it is already impossible to even have a storm that big, regardless of wind Speed.
In some parts of the world renewables are a pipe dream and only work when there's something else(mainly nuclear, coal or hydro-electric in Canada) there to back up the energy that's not produced when the environment itself doesn't cooperate.
And there are some parts of the world where people have electric grids and can transport electric power from the producers to the consumers, facepalm.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
He wants to re-establish coal, and leave the Paris deal.
He is just saying whatever will win him votes, and this is a great issue for him to go anti-establishment. Coal is big in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. He can't get to 270 without Ohio. Republicans haven't won Pennsylvania since 1988, but anything could happen this year. As James Carville once said: "Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between."
This is a wild, fantastic, totally unrealizable dream. The fact that people are sold this bs, and some believe it, is the reason your grandkids, or maybe your great-grandkids are going to starve. There is no way to reduce CO2 emissions without heavy emphasis on nuclear power (clean, incredibly safe) through about 2050-2060. Wake up, and support your grandchildren's right to live.
When wind speeds are so high that wind mills don't work, you have different problems than lack of electricity.
You mean besides reality? Well I sure don't know what that would be.
Hint: I suggest to read till what speeds wind mills actually do operate. And then check how often you have a storm that covers whole Canada that exceeds those speeds. I would wager it is already impossible to even have a storm that big, regardless of wind Speed.
Well let's see, depending on the site they can stop producing power here between 35-50km/h, how often do that happen? Depends on where you are of course. Alberta? BC? Quite often. Ontario? You near the lakes, areas like around Hamilton or London? Top of a hill where they like to place them? Well whatja know that's fairly often. Can't of course forget during severe weather too, and in a populous area like Southern Ontario, those sudden bouts of severe weather? Well you can get as little as 15 minutes notice, especially when they're lake driven.
And there are some parts of the world where people have electric grids and can transport electric power from the producers to the consumers, facepalm.
Yeah we have one of those in Canada too! Just think, it still doesn't work properly...
Don't worry if reality kinds flies over your head or anything. Because nobody is building power plants, transmission lines, roadway/rail/plane infrastructure 400-600km away from civilization because it's so cost prohibitive. That's doubly so when it becomes such a weak link that the loss of said infrastructure means no power for 2-3 months. Which of course is why in Canada we built our power generation facilities usually within 40km in remote regions, and it's still extremely expensive to do so and there is usually only one link to provide power.
Om, nomnomnom...
Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out. Except for places like Niagara Falls that tap the rainfall of a substantial portion of the continent, multiyear droughts are a weakness for hydro.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
So what you are saying is that we should try to control nuclear reactions and waste safely, something that historically we haven't been all that good at, instead of trying to solve the seemingly much easier problem of building high wind proof windmills and distributing them widely enough and with some storage to mitigate most of the intermittency problems.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just repeating these memes endlessly isn't going to help your cause. 7 in 10 Americans dislike the man, he's managed to completely destroy his chances in many battleground states. He's an inept and emotionally unstable man who, after November, will disappear, leaving the GOP fractured.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No. Coal will never be reestablished. But there is something very wrong about changing governmental regulations that result in whole communities being wiped out and doing nothing about it. I'm a #Never Trump but here he is talking sense. You can't simply destroy whole communities with a stroke of a pen. And the solution is not welfare and food stamps.
Nonetheless coal has been supplanted by natural gas and renewables are getting more and more cost efficient.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
We all know that wind speeds can reach those numbers, but unless it happens across a wide enough region, not all turbines will be affected. A good grid with decent dispersion of turbines mean it's very possible to get a usefully-stable baseload from wind.
You either didn't understand his point or you'd rather misrepresent it to score some quick vacuous "points". Neither is particularly fetching.
Sure, but what is the solution then? Subsidize pollution? Pay the coal mines not to produce, like the Farm Bill does with corn growers?
To be honest, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for these "whole communities being wiped out." Maybe they should have thought about that possibility before basing their entire economy on one industry.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's a theory and has about the same validity as predicting global temperatures for the next ten years. Once the reality of removal of subsidies and replacement costs takes hold, cheaper sources will be back.
Or regulatory improvements are needed to solve the mis-pricing of fossil fuels and reveal how uncompetitively expensive they are.
Exactly. This is actually what should happen first. Unfortunately it's such a political hot potato that it's really hard to make progress. Worse it has all sorts of geo-political implications too. No country wants to be the only one to pay full price for their fossil fuels because their ability to compete economically would be sunk.
Fossil fuels should be a lot more expensive than they currently are. Frankly, solar would be extremely competitive today if we adjusted to price for fossil fuels to include the cost of pollution mitigation.
We know exactly what Trump would do.
It's gonna be classy and it's gonna be HUUUUUUGGGEEEE, dripping in gold and marble.
And no loser poor people, anywhere.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sure, but what is the solution then?
By far the best solution is to give the coalminers financial incentives to pack up and move somewhere with jobs. In the long run, that will be much cheaper than putting them on welfare, or trying to move manufacturing or service jobs into these remote areas. As miners move away, the secondary economy will also contract, and the number of pro-coal voters will decline.
I'm 100% against applying progressive solutions such as the Farm Bill to Coal Country. But what to do?
Keep producing coal? No. We need to wean ourselves off coal and other fossil fuels.
But neither can we, with a stroke of a pen, wipe out whole communities. It's funny, that I, as a laissez-faire capitalist have a problem with this while so many progressives who pretend to have concern with the plight of the less fortunate think nothing of ruining lives. (I'm not saying that's your position - but I have heard from many so-called friends of the oppressed.
As far as "they should have thought about that possibility before basing their entire economy on one industry." That may be a legitimate point if the community planned it's growth in that direction and ignored economic realities. But in this case it's a government that in one fell swoop changes it's mind and poof, everything changes. I think the NYC subway system should remove all token booth clerks. They aren't necessary. But I don't think that these people should be thrown out of work. Put them elsewhere in the system. What would the unions say about that? They wouldn't want even that little bit of change. What would progressives think about putting so many hard-working people out of work?
What to do? That's longer than a quick post on slashdot can cover but it's not simply a f*ck you to these communities.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So every other community has to suffer because some people's dead-end careers need to be propped up? If the market is moving away from coal then it's moving away from coal. A more functioning country would have safety nets for the affected workers and a system of retraining.
You are on the wrong site. Only a total idiot would ignore the polls and think that Trump has a chance.
Only a total idiot would believe the polls.
The only thing that poll results prove is the opinions of those who were polled. They say absolutely zero about the rest of the population.
You're right. Let's not even bother with the election because absolutely nothing can change between a poll taken in June, and an election in November. Let's just crown Hillary now!
Wait, who's the idiot again? I'm thinking it's you.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Only a total idiot would believe the polls.
I didn't know Karl Rove had a slashdot account.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
50 Photos Taken At Right Moment 2016|Funny Photo Taken At Right Moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, that's not even slightly true. Coal mining has always been a horrible, polluting, dangerous business. Everyone involved with it has known -- or should have known -- for decades that it's unsustainable in the long run not only due to government recognition of its environmental impact (which itself has been a long time coming) but also the simple economics and the fact that mines are eventually depleted. These communities have had ample warning and opportunity to plan for this entirely expected and inevitable outcome!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Trump about 61%. Hillary about 55%. They're neck-in-neck in terms of unfavorables.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because coal is a cheap and dirty way to get power. At one time the US was mainly powered by coal - that's changed. At one time, China was mainly powered by coal - that's changing. Cheap electricity (which you get from coal) allows your economy as a whole to grow and improve, allowing for cleaner power installations in the future. It's a stepping stone.
The best way to lower use of coal is to grow and improve economies to where the higher installation and operation costs of non-coal based power can be tolerated.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
By 2027? I wonder, if we'll have the flying car by then...
This reminds me of a tale about one ancient prankster, who promised a local ruler to teach a donkey to read — in 20 years (in exchange for room, board, and pay). Asked by a friend, if he is not afraid to fail — and face the consequences of the ruler's anger — he replied: "In 20 years either the donkey, or the ruler, or myself will die."
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Practical fusion power is (as always) only 10 years away. As a result, except for the few windy places on the planet where wind or hydro power is practical, renewables will become irrelevant. Incidentally a comet with 3.2 times the mass of Chicxulub will strike the earth in late May of 2023 causing a mass extinction event.
I have to wonder if these guys would still make their prediction if they knew they would face death by fire in 2027 if their prediction did not come true. Aside from hydroelectric, coal is currently the cheapest source of electricity. Considering the fact that most of the world is so poor they can barely afford basic food and shelter I don't see coal generated electricity disappearing any time soon. There is no way that most developing countries have the technical expertise to build or maintain massive solar or wind farms or the money to replace millions of solar panels when they reach EOL in 20-30 years.
If Greenies were really serious about practical alternatives to electricity generated by combustion they would be advocating nuclear rather than solar. Nuclear really could replace coal and oil for electricity generation in some distant, speculative future even without any tech advances. Now it is still too expensive and too highly technical for most countries though. Not just to build, run, and maintain them, but the cost of the electricity itself will be much higher than coal. Much cheaper than solar or wind power though. Solar is a rich person's electricity source and at least without fundamental advances in photovoltaic tech will not be replacing combustion in most of the world at any time in the near future.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Well let's see, depending on the site they can stop producing power here between 35-50km/h
That would be hobbyist wind mills and not such used for commercial power production.
A "real wind mill" shuts down in the range of 135km/h. Some obviously already around 100km/h.
This one shuts off at 90km/h: http://www.4coffshore.com/wind... because it is one of the biggest (~ 170m rotor Diameter).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Largest PV solar panel factory in the western hemisphere is opening in upstate New York later this year.
So, yes, even in the USA.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Coal isn't being destroyed by the stroke of a Pen. Fracking is destroying coal. The new coal regulations aren't even into effect yet and coal has already been devastated by competition with gas. Coal has gotten a free pass for nearly 300 years to dump uranium, mercury and dozens of other heavy metals all over our cities and crops. It's high time that changed, regardless of the impact to the industry. There is so much mercury in fish these days that you probably shouldn't even eat it.
What you see with Trump is selling the narrative that the coal companies would like to see sold. That is the idea that government regulations are destroying their industry, not competition with cheap gas.
Well, be honest - We've actually been pretty good at controlling the nuclear reactions when a profit motive is removed. The US Navy has a stellar operations record on hundreds of reactors over the years.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
There's several reasons. Some of them are going away, but others still exist. For example, many jurisdictions have legal issues with regard to 3rd party owned panels, which makes leasing and power-purchase agreements a non-starter.
Get those rules / laws changed, and you may start to see faster solar uptake.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Mostly for the same reason commercial buildings aren't covered in rooftop gardens in order to supply food to the cafeteria downstairs. It doesn't make any sense to the people who actually have to allocate their scarce resources toward accomplishing useful things.
The occupants of the building don't actually have to be the ones to install or utilize the solar array tough that certainly is an option. They can sell the space to companies that generate the power even if they don't need it themselves. As I said the space is a wasted asset right now. Cities have tons of underutilized roof space that would be perfect for solar arrays. It has the added benefit of generating the power close to the point of use to there are minimal transmission losses. I work in a building that has about 200,000 square feet of mostly empty roof. The occupants are industrial concerns. It would be a perfect place for the power company to install rooftop solar even if none of the occupants needed it. Doing so requires an investment horizon of a decade or so but a forward thinking landlord could easily turn a profit with the right setup.
When you say economic hurdles, what you really mean is "This doesn't make any financial sense to do, and it would cause a massive waste of resources (as shown by the resource costs vs. benefits), but I think people should maybe do it anyway." Wishful thinking doesn't make reality go away.
That's not at all what I meant but thanks for trying to put words in my mouth. Rooftop solar arrays have already been successfully installed on commercial buildings with long term contracts. Any circumstance where solar arrays make sense on an open patch of land will probably make just as much sense on the roof of a building AND be less wasteful to boot.
Coal only APPEARS to be inexpensive if you ignore the costs of spreading mercury and uranium everywhere in the fly ash, environmental impacts of mining and runoff, the long term impacts of health problems for employees and the global warming impacts of releasing massive amounts of co2.
If you consider those costs, and remediate them, then coal is significantly more expensive than other sources of energy
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/coals-cost-climate-change
All of this is brought about by economies of scale and the end of untaxed subsidies for fossil fuels and fossil fuel usage. Solar and wind are currently cheaper than non-subsidized coal, oil, and even gas.
And people like me are buying solar PV cells and replacing inefficient appliances (fridge,stove,washer,dryer) with new EnergyStar ones that use 1/10 the energy, and investing all that profit in our retirement accounts. Even renters can buy shares in Community Solar (so that it transfers when you move) or one of the Solar capital ETFs.
Adapt. Nobody is going to prop up your dying fossil fuel lifestyle, grandpa!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Your right, installing solar panels north of a certain latitude is just nuts, you know like Germany, that's at the latitude as Quebec and cloudy all the time, it would be just stupid to install solar panels there.
No, that's not even slightly true. Coal mining has always been a horrible, polluting, dangerous business. Everyone involved with it has known -- or should have known -- for decades that it's unsustainable in the long run not only due to government recognition of its environmental impact (which itself has been a long time coming) but also the simple economics and the fact that mines are eventually depleted. These communities have had ample warning and opportunity to plan for this entirely expected and inevitable outcome!
And everyone also knows that at some point in their life they will become unable to work and will need retirement savings, so there's no need for social security, right? People should plan and prepare. I could give a dozen similar examples, but you get the point.
Either you believe in social safety nets, or you don't. If you do, then it's completely reasonable to think that the government has a responsibility to help out people whose industry is being shut down, *especially* when it's the government that's shutting it down. If, on the other hand, you believe that people should take responsibility for themselves and their own futures, then you should apply that belief across the board which means expecting them to predict and plan for all sorts of life events.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ? **MY** background is as a geologist.
... and not a semiconductor engineer. Silicon solar cells (and for that matter, the rest of the glass-encapsulated solar array) don't require rare earth materials.
> You can't simply destroy whole communities with a stroke of a pen
We do all the time. Like when when banned asbestos. Or when the price of [insert commodity] dips below [critical value].
If your entire town is based on a coal mine and people stop buying coal, you leave.
This is how it's worked for thousands of years. Like Palmyra. Or Fort McMurray.
It's not like everyone hasn't been perfectly aware this was going to happen for the last 25 years.
> is there enough factory capacity and available rare earths to MAKE sufficient solar panels to do so
There's enough to make 65 GWp this year. At its peak in the late 1960s, nuclear was being installed at about the same rate.
That number, however, increases at about 15 GWp a year. By 2020 PV will be incompletely outpacing the install rates of pretty much any source ever.
And really, is that surprising? A panel is made up almost entirely of glass, by weight. What do you think a solar cell is? Tinted glass, basically.
And what's all this about rare earth's? Been reading the FUD pages about CdTe cells or something?
> You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss.
You've clearly never actually bothered to look a solar resource map, have you?
Canada has some of the best solar resources for its latitude. Calgary, for instance, has a solar resource not much lower than Mohave. Compare to southern German or Switzerland and we're downright balmy.
> When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
And again, you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you're on about.
Any power source, *any*, has downtime. We consider that in a figure known as the "capacity factor", or CF. Basically you take how much power actually comes out of the plant in a period of time, normally a year, and divide that by how much would have come out if it was running at perfect capacity 24/7. So that "too fast" gets lumped into the "too slow" and the "down for maintenance" and even the "tree fell on lines". All of that goes into the CF.
A typical reactor has a CF around 85 to 90%. A typical wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%. A reactor costs about $8 per watt peak, whereas a modern wind turbine is around $1.50/Wp. So even though you need three turbines to make the same amount of energy as that single reactor, those three turbines still cost you almost half as much. And that is precisely why no one is building reactors any more and turbines are sprouting up like weeds, yes, even here in Canada.
Don't worry, people who actually know what they are doing have the problem well in hand. As you can see, if you read the article.
> Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out.
That's simply not true. In almost every area I looked, hydro was at about 1/2 capacity. And that's counting economically doable sites, using conventional technology.
For instance, here in Canada the James bay has about 35% more capacity that they simply never bothered to build out because there was no market. Here in Ontario none of the northern rivers have really been built out. There's 25 GW in northern Alberta unused. Those upgrade alone, put together, are equal to what has been built. And if built, they're enough to power the entire country and all our cars.
> The inconsistency of solar and wind will do nasty things to our electric grid if much more is added
Older projections say the problem starts somewhere around 25% of total generation. Right now the US is around 10%, so "much more" is really "MUCH more".
However, since those projections were published any number of locations have pushed right past that number with no ill effects, The software has improved faster than the installations.
It's really quite maddening to see people here on /. claim that something is impossible when its a software problem.
So you don't want to go with the capitalist response, of encouraging certain market behaviors and discouraging others through the use of taxes. You want the government to simply ban coal, and spend large amounts of your tax dollars to move away from fossil fuel-based power.
Ok. If that's how you want to play it.
It's a defrayed cost that can be addressed when the country has enough money. If the choice is deal with an issue in the future, or stay 3rd world and economically repressed - most will choose the former. And in the LONG run (like 100-150 years) the environment is better off - environmental quality tends to rise with GDP per capita.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well let's see, depending on the site they can stop producing power here between 35-50km/h, how often do that happen?
I'm not an expert, but knew immediately your numbers were bullshit...
Wikipedia entry...
A wind turbine is designed to produce power over a range of wind speeds. All wind turbines are designed for a maximum wind speed, called the survival speed, above which they will be damaged. The survival speed of commercial wind turbines is in the range of 40 m/s (144 km/h, 89 MPH) to 72 m/s (259 km/h, 161 MPH). The most common survival speed is 60 m/s (216 km/h, 134 MPH).
Just another day in Paradise
Yes, but the parent is in so far right that they shut down power production much earlier (than at your "survival speed").
On the other hand that is for distributed power production no problem. A huge storm with high wind speeds is traveling over a nation very slowly, e.g. with 30km/h or so. So you have ample of time to shut down wind mills in the direction of its movement and power them up again behind the storm: and you likely make a huge surplus anyway as energy production of a windmill increases with the cube of wind speed.
If a wind mill is rated for 5MW at something like 7m/s wind, it will produce _320 MW_ at 28m/s, and that is below shut off speed.
So if a (really huge) storm would cause you to shut down 90% of the windmills in that area, the rest will still produce 3 or 4 times more power than all the wind mills together in normal conditions.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
People may not like Trump, but at least he isn't under investigation by the FBI and just biding time until the charges hit.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Even if we reduce natural gas use in electricity generation, there will still remain a massive amount of natural gas, oil and propane used for heating, cooking and industrial processes.
We should replace natural gas heating with geothermal heat pumps.
I'm not an expert, but knew immediately your numbers were bullshit...
Well it's a good thing you live in Ontario. Please by all means let the people of the SWON know this immediately and that you're a subject expert. While doing so, please inform the provincial government of Ontario of this. I'm sure you'll have set position for the life of the government.
Oh wait, you mean wikipedia isn't the end-be-all of information? Well damn, guess you're outta that job huh.
FYI, last summer storm that blew through here had 119mph winds. And seeing multiple rotating cells with sustained wind speeds above 70mph happens more often then people realize. Also keep in mind that this is one of the worst governments that the province has elected in the last 20 years, outranking even the NDP days of Bob Rae.
Om, nomnomnom...
You seem to have a reading comprehension problem. I never said I lived in Ontario, though some of my family does, and I've spent a significant amount of time there. I also never said higher speeds couldn't be an issue for wind turbines, but the claim of 35-50km/h is utter bullshit.
Just another day in Paradise
I have heard of no evidence of this being true, do you have some kind of link to even a single news story about this?
The only news articles I find with the keywords "Trump under fbi investigation" all talk about Hillary being under investigation.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?