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.

Comments

Total Capacity

[cirby]

Not total delivered.

So when you see that 9.5 gigawatts of solar compared to 8 gigawatts of natural gas, it's more like 3 gigawatts of average solar output versus 7 gigawatts of gas...

Re:Total Capacity

[pointybits]

They're playing some tricks with the numbers to get capacity factors close to 0.3, which is physically impossible unless all your PV panels are super-high efficiency and track the sun. But this isn't the sort of thing you can just cover up. It's trivial to calculate the actual capacity factor for PV solar:

• Installed peak capacity at the end of 2014 and 2015 was 18,173 MW and 25,459 MW respectively. So figure average capacity for 2015 was (25459 + 18173)/2 = 21,816 MW.
• PV solar generation for 2015 was 23,232 GWh.
• There are 8766 hours in a year (factoring in leap years).
• (23232 GWh) / (21.816 GW * 8766 hours) = 0.121 capacity factor.

Yeah sure, there's a conspiracy to cover up the real numbers. Or, you know, you might have botched your calculations. You took the solar output from large utilities only and divided it by the total solar capacity including distributed generation.

Solar capacity factors of >25% are relatively easy in the sun belt and can go as high as 36% with tracking and a high panel-to-inverter ratio (Lawrence Berkely study, 2014 figures).

Solar for your home

[FrankHaynes]

Florida voters narrowly (and surprisingly, to me) defeated a constitutional amendment that was funded by Florida Power & Light and other very interested parties that would have made it difficult and expensive to install solar power in the home. A rare victory for common sense in Florida.

http://www.miamiherald.com/new...

Google tells me that a ballot initiative by the Good Guys failed to achieve enough signatures to make the 2016 ballot (due to some scam artistry by the polling company they hired) so they will try for the 2018 ballot.

https://ballotpedia.org/Florid...

I'm not comfortable with amending the Constitution for something as specific as this, but I suppose they figure the legislature could be bought out by the incumbent power companies if it were a mere lowly law on the books.

Re:Solar rated highest in 2016, but...

[Dan East]

The market is going to do whatever is cheapest. It is now cheaper to get natural gas out of the ground because of fracking, and the reserves available are so massive that it makes sense to invest in natural gas powerplants as they will be supplied with cheap fuel for a very long time. It is also cheap to burn natural gas because it doesn't require scrubbing and other processing of the emissions to reduce pollution.

The price of solar has continued to drop - panels have been way under a dollar a watt for a while now ($0.79 a watt buying 6,000W of panels at a time, and I'm sure power companies get even better deals buying bigger quantities). The way these are now being utilized (just fed into the grid when they can produce power without battery storage, inverters, etc) is very economical for power companies to invest in.

Coal, on the other hand, is relatively expensive and labor-intensive to get out of the ground, even when strip mining. Further, it takes expensive scrubbers to remove pollutants from the exhaust when it is burnt, which further increases the cost to use coal. Both of those factors combined (fracking and solar prices dropping) simply make other sources of energy cheaper to produce and utilize than coal for generating electricity.

If you were to ask the question "Why didn't we start doing this 20 years ago?" the answer is because we didn't have the technology to mass produce solar this inexpensively, and we didn't have the technology to produce natural gas this inexpensively.

Vapor-ware, literally

[Anonymous Coward]

While the sun doesn't shine, electrical power is still needed. Hence, the amount of non-solar power has to be the same with or without solar plants. However, many of the non-solar power plants cannot easily be started or stopped (excluding the turbines possibly used to burn the natural gas). Now that standby capacity has to be running, to cover nights and clouded days. While its running, and the electrical power is not used, it has to go somewhere. Heating water is quite efficient at using surplus power...

Breakthrough in storage would be much more interesting than yet another few % on some electrical, wind, ...