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Solar Is Top Source of New Capacity On the US Grid In 2016 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. electric grid continued to transform in 2016. No new coal plants were added, and solar became the top new source of generating capacity. Combined with wind, a small bit of hydro, and the first nuclear plant added to the grid in decades, sources that generate power without carbon emissions accounted for two-thirds of the new capacity added in 2016. These numbers come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which asked utilities about what sources they expected to have online at the end of the year. These numbers typically show a burst of activity in December, as projects are raced to completion to take advantage of the tax benefits of reaching operational status in the current year. Overall, the EIA recorded 26 GW of new capacity added to the grid in 2016. This includes a small amount (0.3GW) of new hydropower and a smattering of projects collected under "other" that produce a similar magnitude. Notably absent from the list is coal. Also absent is distributed solar, meaning panels installed on homes and other small-scale projects. Distributed solar accounted for about 2GW of new capacity in 2015, and the EIA notes that the incentives for these projects haven't changed considerably in 2016. Even without that 2GW, solar comes out on top, with 9.5GW of new additions this year. At 8GW, natural gas comes in second place on the EIA's list, followed by wind at 6.8GW. Thanks to the opening of a new reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee, nuclear also joins the list for the first time in years, adding 1.1GW of capacity. Combined, wind, nuclear, hydro, and solar account for 68 percent of the new additions, making 2016 a low-carbon year for the U.S. grid. Assuming distributed solar this year is similar to its 2015 levels, the percentage of new non-fossil generation goes up above 70.
Other sources of power are already legal and in use currently.
Let's put the numbers in perspective direct from the EIA:
Coal 33%, NG 33%, Nuclear 20%, Hydro 6%, Petroleum 1%, Biomass 1.6%, Wind 4.7%, Geothermal 0.4% and....
solar 0.6%. (yeah, 0.3% if it adds to 100%, thanks to EIA for the rounding error)
So in 2017 solar might hit 1% and probably max out. NG will continue to increase with easy access to fuel. Coal is declining although may stabilize. Renewables will be around but probably will never top 10%.
Nothing to do with any administration, these are just economic facts.
Want to guess why? Because one is subsidized and the other was successfully taxed and regulated out of existence.
No, it's for the same reason there was no capacity added from burning whale oil, namely that it's not economical. Natural gas (#2 on that list) is what kicked coal to the curb, not environmental regulation. There's lots of articles covering this, such as this one from not-exactly-a-bastion-of-liberal-thought Reason magazine.
How silly. Those fossil fuel 'subsidies' tooke the form of deductible business expenses, the same as any other business is able to deduct, while the solar industry is subsidized with actual cash payments of taxpayer money to cover around 50% of all solar generation programs... no the solar generation plants get the same deductions for their business expenses as fossil fuel companies do.
Do you imagine that the federal government cuts checks to oil companies?
It wasn't that long ago that our current President promised to tax and regulate the coal industry out of existence...
Ken
So that 9.5 GW of solar capacity is only generating about 1.15 GW of power on average. If you add the 2 GW of distributed solar (rooftop panels) it works out to 1.39 GW average generation.
Natural gas is a bit of a wild card, since it (and hydro) is typically used to follow peaking demand. That is, you don't run them full tilt. They top off power generation to match demand. But its (and hydro's) capacity factor is historically around 0.40. So NG's 8 GW translates into 3.2 GW of average generation. Hydro's 0.3 GW translates into 0.12 GW of average generation.
Wind's capacity factor is about 0.25. So its 6.8 GW capacity works out to 1.7 GW of average generation.
Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9. So the lone new nuclear plant at 1.1 GW capacity translates into 1 GW of average generation.
So in terms of actual power generation:
The U.S finally managed to open it's first offshore wind farm. A whole of 5 turbines producing a paltry 30Mw of power, by comparison Europe added some 419 turbines producing over 3000Mw last year alone.
Do you imagine that the federal government cuts checks to oil companies?
Yes, I do.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Argh, the comments section of Slashdot is getting completely unreadable when the subject is something that is even vaguely related to global warming. Hordes of trolls rush to tell us that the globe is not warming, that this is all just a vast conspiracy by all the scientists in the world to get more research money.
Come on, can't we get something interesting? I remember that even last year there would be plenty of comments talking about insolation, capacity, load balancing, grid-level storage, price, subsidies, etcetera. Now it's just this nutjob shitfest.
entropy happens
to get capacity factors close to 0.3, which is physically impossible unless all your PV panels are super-high efficiency
How did you conclude that panel efficiency impacts capacity factors? That doesn't make sense. Efficiency as a multiplier scales both maximum and average generation from a unit of insolated surface. The ratio of these two therefore shouldn't change (modulo possible spectral sensitivity effects for direct insolation vs. overcast for the different technologies, but these aren't in any simple way connected to overall efficiency).
Ezekiel 23:20
No, actually pretty similar on average; the solar may even edge it. The nuclear reactor obviously has higher power at night, but much lower power during the day than the solar. The average capacity factor of solar is about 10-20% depending on location, so 9GW of solar will produce somewhere between 0.9GW and 1.8GW on average, whereas this is a 1.2GW reactor; and the solar was installed much, much more quickly, and probably cost roughly the same or even less than the nuclear.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Current panel prices are sub $0.40 a watt wholsale and install costs have begun to fall as fast as panel prices. IIRC installed pricing is now arround $2.50 a watt, this is a price I never thought we would see. 5 years ago it was nearly $5 a watt installed.