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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.
Is he going to get me a jerb too?
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...
Want to guess why? Because one is subsidized and the other was successfully taxed and regulated out of existence.
Ken
No, you can't spell 'job'.
Ken
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.
Like that ever stopped anyone.
And they will still Build Natural Gas plants not Coal.
Indeed. Even if Trump was able to relax environmental requirements for coal (highly unlikely) there is no reason to believe that even more stringent requirements won't be slapped back on in four or eight years. Only a fool would build a new coal plant today. In America, none are being built or even planned. Coal is dead.
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.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
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.
Not any more. Have you looked at who's going to head the Environmental Petroleum Agency starting next year? Coal may not be petroleum, but I'm sure the EPA will conclude that coal is no more environmentally unfriendly than petroleum.
South Park reference.
Considering his appointees so far, my guess is he'll put you in charge of NASA.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
that still won't make coal more economical, if anything natural gas will still punt it.
Clearly you missed the most important part of their comment:
there is no reason to believe that even more stringent requirements won't be slapped back on in four or eight years
The Trump administration will only last 4-8 years.
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.
Better known as 318230.
This.
Trump and cabinet be damned, companies do what's best for them.
People who work in coal want their jobs, but investors will not be interested.
It's the Big Tobacco plot and [spoiler alert] it dies in the end.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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
in light of the Trump Administration. Solar is very cost effective when you account for all the externalities (e.g. pollution). But with enough deregulation that could easily change. Not that coal had been doing that will pre-Obama (a lot of it is used to make steel, and there's a glut of the stuff from China) but I could see a resurgence.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Of course, when being transported, it leaks. That's is a problem above 1.5-2% or so.
Ezekiel 23:20
"The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a Cabinet-level department of the United States Government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material."
They don't care about anything unless it has to do with radioactive elements. I don't think they particularly care about power generation by nuclear power plants, when it comes right down to it.
The EIA deals with electrical power generation, distribution and use.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Coal will never be economically competitive again, so it wouldn't really matter if we did make new coal plants illegal, which by the way we don't.
Someone had to do it.
Coal is dead as long as we can frack, baby frack!
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.
Even if they never put back stringent requirements, the economic benefits of coal are declining. Times change, we shouldn't have to act like it's still the industrial revolution. Remember in the UK it was people on the left kept wanting to keep coal in order to keep jobs but the conservatives didn't want to keep it alive on life support. Now in the US it's the opposite, conservatives want to keep it in order to keep jobs even if it doesn't make economic sense. The goal of the coal industry is to make money and not to be a jobs program, and the same goes for oil industry, solar industry, wind power industry, natural gas industry, etc.
And actually, because of grandfather clauses written into the pollution laws older Coal plants didn't have to start complying with the law until late 2015. Some of them have huge mercury pollution plumes extending miles from the plant which may come back to haunt us.as supersites in the future.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Never" is a long time, though I agree if coal becomes economically viable it won't be for a few decades.
The leakage from natural gas almost all occurs in the local distribution network used for domestic premises. This is because much of it is old cast iron pipe work.
Leakage of any sort in the high pressure transmission pipelines is generally catastrophic and so does not happen at any significant rate. You don't think a power station is hooked up to the high pressure transmission lines with a 50 year old 1" cast iron pipe do you?
Renewables/non-fossil will be 100% again, one day. They have to be, these are just reality facts.
The technology of today is the same as 20 years ago. ...
You use silicon like in the chips industry, dote it, like in the chips industry and basically thats it.
However 20 years ago the world market for solar power was extremely small (and all power markets where relatively small)
That is why Germany e.g.started subsidizing solar power about 30 years ago
The main reason is the capital intensity. Not many companies can build a multi billion fab for solar panels from their pocket money or get funding in such high amounts.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So there's bugger all reason to insist that there will be oceans of sludge (cf strip mining or on-site uranium processing), unless you insist on using designs that use them, rather than other designs that don't.
PS your mobile phone is only as small as it is because of rare earths. Better never buy one again.
Nat gas most definitely does not leak 1-2% during transport. Hell HP Hydrogen doesn't leak 1-2% during transport and that is the hardest gas to ship around.
Coal, on the other hand, is relatively expensive and labor-intensive to get out of the ground, even when strip mining.
Don't worry about that. Adahni is about to cut open the biggest hole in the world in Australia for a lovely new source of coal. That should bring the cost right down. Combined with the steady drop in demand I predict that coal will be far cheaper than natgas again within the trump presidency.
I hope that by the time coal becomes competitive again, I can move to a newly-terraformed Mars or Venus (or maybe even farther out).
And as your first act, you can rename it NERSA.
You're assuming the market is rationally optimizing for lowest cost. But we all know a market is just an aggregation of a bunch of people. These "markets" are comprised largely of people who wore bell-bottom jeans for about 10 years from the late 60s to the late 70s. So assuming they'll make rational power-use decisions is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think you're correct.
Does wind or solar have any cost of the fuel?
Surely capital maitanence costs hugely factor in, and more so than fuel costs.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
NASA is very important to the Republicans even if they don't want it doing Earth science. It is very efficient at distributing government spending across the country and no politician will want to miss their chance at getting their more than their "fair share".
A siginficant amount of leakage occurs at the well site and the processing plants. For example, there is "leakage" (but, according to those who've measured it, not as much as the EPA estimates) at well sites is from "pneumatic" controls that use and bleed gas pressure to operate valves, etc.
Also, I lived in a house built in 1917 with gas pipes original to the building (you could still see remnants of the original gas lights) and none of them were cast iron, they were all steel. I can't remember ever seeing a cast iron gas pipe. i'd bet that most non-industrial "leakage" is from blown out old style pilot lights, hard starting appliances that let some unburned gas out while lighting, and the like.
From a practical perspective the "cost" of fuel for Wind and Solar is the cost of capital (return on equity / debt interest). The government has cleverly eliminated the equity component of funding renewable sources of power through tax credits, meaning only the relatively cheap cost of debt is a factor. The main modification to the GP is that three things matter: 1) Initial Capital Cost (amortized + required return on capital) 2) Operations Cost 3) Fuel Costs
Since solar and wind has no fuel cost, the "fuel" is most equal to the "initial capital cost".
Renewable energy has had the perfect storm. Renewable energy is nearly 100% initial capital cost. As I said, nearly no equity is required due to the federal funding acting as the equity. Debt rates were at all time lows in the US during 2016. Just as the "cost of fuel" changes for all the other power plant types, the "cost of fuel" for Solar and Wind will change over time. The fed just increased interest rates... that is a ~5% cost increase directly but also could raise the potential equity requirements due to increased risk. If the federal tax credits expire that is over a 100% increase in "fuel" cost because the ~5%-8% debt needs to be supplemented by 30% more capital but at 15%-20% because it is equity. So renewable "fuel" could easily cost 250% of what it is today in just a few years.
The idea is that the actual cost of installing renewable energy will decrease over times such that the initial capital cost is lower and the incentives will no longer be needed. I think this thought process is illegitimate, primarily because it neglects that currently a developer of solar or wind is able to literally not put a dime into a project. It is all Government Equity + Debt. People lie, cheat and steal when their own money is not on the line and the number of renewable companies that have gone belly up is massive. Who knows how many of these operations are truly "profitable" vs. how many are just zombie companies barely covering debt while building up a bunch of deferred maintenance. History seems to indicate that most are not wildly profitable even when all the money is free.
Private capital needs a clear path to a high return to justify investment.
Is he going to get me a jerb too?
It is so quaint and cute that so many people think he's actually going to follow through on his multitude of campaign promises.
Build the wall, put her in jail, and unless we somehow do a CCC level makework project, those coal miners aren't getting their jerbs back, certainly not mining coal, for what there is left of it is automated just like the rest of mining.
Coal mining in my area is quick and automated. And Limestone (dolomite) mining is so automated that what took several decades to do back in the 40's and 50's can now be done in a couple years.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"They just have to be!" - a last desperate grasp at dying technologies.
Don't get me wrong, they will continue to have a use on the grid - just not the same use. Until storage becomes cheaper than peaking**, fossil fuels will continue to be used as peaking. Natural gas in particular makes an excellent peaking fuel. But their days as baseload are at an end. Renewables have gotten too cheap over the past decade. These $1.50/W renewables plants - sometimes even closer to $1/W - are just insanely cheap compared to alternatives, even taking into account the capacity factor and need for peaking or storage. The Trump administration could slow the replacement of fossil fuels by revoking the PTC and the ITC, but they're not that big; it will only slow the fossil fuel phaseout, not prevent it. If they wanted to prevent it, they'd have to actively penalize renewables relative to fossil fuels.
** Hydro plant uprating is currently cheaper than peaking. But without a nationwide HVDC grid, it only provides localized peaking. Li-ion prices may well make storage a cheaper option than fossil fuel peaking if some of the current price forecasts are met (price halving due to some of the large production scaleups in development, like the Gigafactory and others) - but are more expensive than fossil fuel peaking today. Compressed air storage is also generally more expensive than fossil fuel peaking. Solar thermal storage likewise. Sometimes industrial loadshifting is cheaper than peaking. Pumped hydro can be cheaper than peaking, but it requires the right geography, and again, without a long-distance high power grid, only provides localized peaking support.
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
Okay, stop right there. Solar is a DC source by very definition.
A definition is something artificially man-made to explain a certain term. Solar power is DC simply because there is no suitable design that produces AC.
So for all practical purposes, solar power is DC. Until a suitable (and commercially viable) A/C design exists, I'm more interested to see the OP's original question answered.
other sources of power will become legal again.
Oh you mean like Coal, currently taking 20 BILLION in tax subsidies already?
That was stupid, even for a Trumpist
Okay, stop right there. Solar is a DC source by very definition.
A definition is something artificially man-made to explain a certain term. Solar power is DC simply because there is no suitable design that produces AC.
Oh for crap's sake.
That's what inverters are for idiiots!
The reality is the solar industry employs twice as many people as the coal industry (200,000 vs 100,000), and they are cleaner jobs too. But many of those jobs are in Democratic-leaning California, which isn't where Trump's base is.
> So in 2017 solar might hit 1% and probably max out.
Given the 75 GW utility solar pipeline (built, contracted, and announced), that's not likely:
http://www.seia.org/research-r...
Assuming a 20% capacity factor (average vs rated capacity), the 15 GW of average output is more than 3% of total US electric use.
> IIRC installed pricing is now arround $2.50 a watt,
Depends where it is installed: http://www.seia.org/sites/defa...
Residential averages $3/W, while Utility tracking is down to $1.21/W. Tracking systems tilt the panels to follow the Sun, thus get more watts for more hours than fixed-tilt panels. The extra 10% it costs for tracking hardware is more than made up by the extra output, so they are now the best option in terms of cost per kWh produced.
There's actually not much difference between the two. It's pretty easy to retrofit a plant to use the other fuel source for generation.
Relatively "easy" to convert a coal plant to gas (you're boiling water to make steam, so you can "just" change the heat source. This ignores that some coal plants are designed with temperatures you couldn't really achieve with gas).
However, it's impossible to convert a gas turbine to run on coal, unless you turn your coal into syngas first.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Sorry, I did speak too generically. The point I was intending to get across is that most of the solar being deployed now does not have storage nor inverters capable of meeting demand. For example, say a home has 1,000 watts of solar power and a battery storage array. They may need a 5,000 watt inverter to operate their home, because their peak demand (such as while running a washing machine) will be much greater than what the solar can produce instantaneously. The way power companies are employing solar is to simply feed into the grid when they can, thus they never need more inverter capacity than the maximum the solar panels can produce.
Better known as 318230.
India's Narendra Modi says solar is cheaper than Coal in India already.
Coal isn't prohibited in the USA, its just uncompetitive.
Meanwhile in unrelated news, Brazil's Itaipu dam on track to produce 100 TWh in 2016, equivalent to an average power output of 11500MWs throughout the year. Hot damn ! They installed 20kW net worth of solar PV at Itaipu just to say its also a solar plant ! Nothing like having 18 turbines, each as powerful as an old nuclear reactor turbine.
Top rooftop solar panels already at 24% efficiency. In a few years it will break 30%, which means over 500 Wp per panel.
No it won't max out. There's this thing called the PowerWall and PowerPack that fundamentally changes this whole debate. PowerWall 2.0 just came out, 14kWh storage, built in inverter, higher power. And the large scale PowerPack 2.0 now has 200kWh of storage at a lower $$$/kWh price.
No later than Q2 2017, the 3.0 versions will be announced which combined with either Tesla Solar Tiles or even cheaper solar PV will make living off grid almost as cheap as being connected to the grid.
American Samoa Ta'u now runs almost 100% on solar using the old Powerpack 1.0. Next comes Hawaii smaller islands. By 2020 a large chunk of tropical islands without grid connections to shore will be running on solar, its already cheaper to do solar than diesel.
I bet Hawaii will be 100% renewable before 2030. Not because solar is cute, but because it will be cheaper. That will also make solar cheaper to end consumers than being connected to the grid, including 2 days worth of battery storage.
PS: I'm also very much pro nuclear, but so far the nuclear industry is only humming in China/South Korea/India/Russia (mostly). It seems to be waiting for molten salt reactors and/or thorium.
You need an inverter that matches your production, not your demand. Its called grid tied net metering.
For instance, I need 3000-3500 kW PV production to meet my 600kWh/month demand. My peak demand is likely 4x as much, but I don't need a bigger inverter, unless I go off grid, which makes no sense right now.
Here in Brazil we must sell 100% of our grid tie production to the grid then buy it back as needed. So the Solar PV inverter has no job in consuming electricity at all.
I think you misinterpreted my comment...
My point was that fossil fuels are finite. We WILL definitely be using all renewables (and maybe nuclear), one day.