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Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth In Less Than a Decade (bloomberg.com)
Solar power is now cheaper than coal in some parts of the world. In less than a decade, it's likely to be the lowest-cost option almost everywhere, reports Bloomberg. From the article: In 2016, countries from Chile to the United Arab Emirates broke records with deals to generate electricity from sunshine for less than 3 cents a kilowatt-hour, half the average global cost of coal power. Now, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Mexico are planning auctions and tenders for this year, aiming to drop prices even further. Taking advantage: Companies such as Italy's Enel SpA and Dublin's Mainstream Renewable Power, who gained experienced in Europe and now seek new markets abroad as subsidies dry up at home. Since 2009, solar prices are down 62 percent, with every part of the supply chain trimming costs. That's help cut risk premiums on bank loans, and pushed manufacturing capacity to record levels. By 2025, solar may be cheaper than using coal on average globally, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The solar supply chain is experiencing "a Wal-Mart effect" from higher volumes and lower margins, according to Sami Khoreibi, founder and chief executive officer of Enviromena Power Systems. The speed at which the price of solar will drop below coal varies in each country. Places that import coal or tax polluters with a carbon price, such as Europe and Brazil, will see a crossover in the 2020s, if not before. Countries with large domestic coal reserves such as India and China will probably take longer.
What about at night?
If the government were to "stay out of it", the oil, gas and nuclear industries would close up shop tomorrow.
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The only thing is, all of these dumb rednecks desperately want to die early from some kind of coal-related illness. Is there some way we can still make their dream come true, even as solar gets cheaper by the day? What hope is there that they can still die of black lung in mid-life, like they so desperately want? Won't somebody please think of the coal miners?!?!?!?
I don't respond to AC's.
> Nat Gas is the cheapest.
Natural gas is highly subsidized, and even still no company has pulled a profit on natural gas since 2008.
Plus the costs, which can be huge, are externalized onto taxpayers and landowners.
Take Pennsylvania, which made $204 million on taxing shale, but road damage from nat. gas was over $3.5 bn. That's just one state.
Plus, many natural gas companies have stopped paying landowners en masse. What happens when their class action lawsuits start to come through?
Natural gas being cheap is a short term aberration.
For reference: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
I've been waiting for this to happen for a few years. The numbers are just getting more and more red. Even the Financial Times is comparing the shale industry to the dotcom bubble. The bit about crappy shale stock being sold by the cargo pallet to insurance companies and pensions funds sounds worryingly like the mortgage bubble. People are openly talking about similarities between the housing market crash and this shale bubble except, the shale bubble is 'only' 1/4 the size of the mortgage bubble. Well tell that to the people who will lose a large portion of their pension. Oops, the free market did a boo boo, nothing personal just business! Cold comfort if you ask me.
Gee, if we were allowed to build pipelines, then road costs would approach 0.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
What kind of solar are they talking about? Photovoltaic? Surely this doesn't include storage or converting to AC does it? The article doesn't say.
DC/AC/voltage conversion is semiconductor technology. It has been, and still is, benefiting from Moore's Law.
A few years back I worked with a networking equipment manufacturer which put at least two (and sometimes three) layers of voltage-conversion regulators (DC/AC/DC) on a board: One to down-convert 48V (needed to get enough power through a few pins to run the power-hungry board), another near the load - because the conversion losses were far less than the resistive losses in the board would have been if the primary converters dropped to the loads' required voltages. I'm currently working with chips that stretch lithium battery life. They cost tens of cents and have efficiencies in the 90s%. AC/DC/AC converters have been in every compact fluorescent for years. Most wall-warts these days, and all laptop cord-bulges, are switching regulators, which is the same basic technology as an inverter. Getting a good sine wave to keep non-electronics loads (like motors) happy is only slightly more complicated than a basic switcher's sawtooth, and the bulk of the complication lives in a simple chip.
Fifteen years ago a house-sized inverter was in the $5K range. By now the price, like that of home computers, is more determined by the market size and the costs of marketing and fulflillment than the electronics itself. With the generation down to cheaper-than-grid, economies of scale will kick in big time.
Storage battery performance and potential price breakthroughs are coming so fast that the main problem is whether you can recover a battery plant's cost before the product is obsoleted by something better. Nevertheless, the electric auto industry (and to a lesser extent portable equipment like laptops) is driving the new tech into the market. (Expect a big downside hit on prices and upside hit on availability when Tesla and a couple other battery plants go into production.)
I don't see any problem with the cost of conversion electronics or storage for nighttime and cloudy weeks inhibiting the deployment of photovoltaic, now that the basic panels are coming into competitive-with-grid prices.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Rei mentioned a lot of interesting factors. The bottom line, the tldr, is basically:
We can store energy from afternoon sun for a few hours and use it to cook dinner.
On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
Another HUGE factor is energy needs versus current electricity usage. Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses with natural gas and heating oil, transportation is by diesel and gasoline. One European country that brags about its clean solar energy burns trash for heating, as well as diesel. If we want electric cars, electric trucks, electric heating, etc we're going to need eight times as much electricity as we have now. So suppose there was a major breakthrough in physics that allowed us to store as much electricity as California currently needs for a cloudy week. That would still be only 12% of their ENERGY needs for the week.
Solar has ALWAYS been the future, but you don't punish consumers by forcing more expensive energy on them when it isn't ready.
Solar will get here. It may be here in 10 years. It may take 20 or 30 or even 50. But it will get here.
Until then, use the cheapest energy possible, the best energy for the application, and the best energy source available for that region. For example, Africa needs coal. Now. However, people who hate coal are punishing Africans.