Slashdot Mirror
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.
Please stop confusing price and cost. How many stupid articles do we have to read that conflate the two very different things?
I suspect as solar becomes ubiquitous we may see more DC options.
Photo voltaic has become very compelling plus we don't fund people who want to kill us when we buy photo voltaic so that's always a plus.
But molten salt is pretty compelling for solar as well.
Coal is already uneconomical compared to other resources even without considering the pollution cleanup costs. Old coal plants didn't have to comply to the new pollution laws until last year (well 2015 so I guess now barely two years ago) and were polluting large areas with mercury.
Nuclear is great as long as you ignore decommissioning and fuel storage and human nature. i.e. humans get sloppier and cut more and more corners over time until something bad happens. I'd feel more comfortable if nuclear were restricted to small (5000 house) self contained plants which didn't even allow humans in the loop and which shut themselves down automatically. And we need to build a breeder reactor to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude. But it has to be crazy secure. As in put it on an army base secure.
Solar, wind, and tides are the way to go tho. All have minimal cleanup costs, minimal problems on failure, fail by tiny pieces rather than as a whole, and costs are plummeting.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't like to reply to ACs, but your feedback seems meant to be legitimate, so I will assume you're not trolling. Even though the *facepalm* is a bit presumptive. I've clearly spent a lot more time thinking about this topic than you have.
I honestly can't imagine what you have in your house that would reach hundreds of amps on the proposed DC bus. Note that I am not advocating the DC bus running all the heavy appliance loads, but rather only all lighting and consumer electronics loads, something like 1 kW at 24V DC would seem adequate. Telecom has used 48V DC for a long time, so there is some precedent that could be leveraged for designs in this area.
Furnaces and ovens could easily be placed on exterior walls offering limited loss paths to the storage system. These are design changes that would be not dissimilar to those that happened as coal furnaces were replaced by electric ones. People adapted both existing homes and new designs.
I think the environmental concerns driving alternative energy are mostly overblown, but I'd like to see power generation at the home in the name of self-sufficiency and to decrease the global conflicts over energy.
You're overlooking the simplicity to the solution. You put the batteries IN the oven, dryer, washing machine, etc. They charge slowly during daylight, and consume from their own batteries on demand, and can have very short distance conductors large enough to consume whatever amperage the batteries can supply with little to no loss. They are already large appliances so accommodating batteries of significant size wouldn't be a problem. If the industry could adapt a standardized battery module that would roll into the bottom of the unit for easy replacement then so much the better.
Better known as 318230.
> Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?
Unfortunately they don't produce more power when the wind is stronger than normal, and as you mentioned most have to be shut down for storm winds.
That sucks because the power of the wind is proportional to the CUBE of it's velocity. Wind at 40 MPH has 64 times as much power as wind at 10 MPH, but we can't harvest all that extra power. Instead, power captured by turbines is basically capped at their normal production, so power output only falls with lower wind speeds, it doesn't increase with higher speeds.
This is really frustrating, being unable to capture most of the available power on windy days, but it's unlikely to change. The difference in the amount of force applied to the turbine and it's parts is really significant. Imagine trying to build a keyboard that works with light touches on the keys, and also works well when you bang it with a hammer.
OK, so just WHERE has nuclear actually worked long term? Ignore Chernobyl and Fukushima for a bit - even with various and disparate types of governments and payment options, civilian nuclear has gone exactly nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, but hardly to the point where it was 'too cheap to meter'. IIRC, that was precisely the terminology that nuclear power adherents were spouti
Canada? South Korea? Take your pick. The medical reactor near Ottawa that supplied around 50% of the worlds supply for specific radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment is over 60 years old. The new reactor that was supposed to replace it has had multiple problems...almost all of them due to NIMBY's and environuts complaining about the new reactor. Even about the old reactor -- when they wanted to upgrade and have a 4th safety pump and storage fallback...environmentalists were protesting that. So that old reactor keeps chugging alone. Then there's places like Bruce Nuclear 2nd largest nuclear generating station in the world. It's been in continuous operation since 1977 at one reactor or another(8 reactors total), and they're looking to expand and build 4-8 new reactors to go along side the existing ones. It's also the 2nd cheapest operating per kWh plant around, including referb costs for B1 and B2, it's around $0.07-0.08kWh(base price is around $0.04kWh). Compared to solar which has an initial cost of between $0.52-1.50kWh in "recuperation costs" for the deployment.
Om, nomnomnom...
The odds of the weather across all of North America being cloudy are virtually nonexistent. Power systems don't ever guarantee 100% uptime (not today, not in the future), because that involves planning against events that are finite but absurdly improbable. You plan for whatever 99,9+% uptime targets that you deem appropriate, with plans for how to fail gracefully. A single front does not stretch the entire width and height of North America. But nonetheless, diversity in power sources is good. Low pressure systems tend to bring clouds, but they also bring wind - just like how wind peaks at night, in contrast to solar's daytime peak. Also, peak solar seasons vary a bit from region to region, while wind seasonal peaks vary greatly from region to region (in the US, the west coast has a summer peak, while the central and eastern US have a winter peak).
Don't take my word that you can achieve statistically significant uptime without unrealistic peaking costs - read any of the studies on the subject. There've been a lot of them. It requires no new tech and no storage - although those have the potential to make things even cheaper and easier.
Beyond peaking and storage, you have entire industries where their costs are predominantly driven by electricity costs. Such industries are often quite willing to engage in curtailment agreements with power companies in exchange for cheaper rates. Which basically doubles as peaking. Here in Iceland, for example, we have aluminum and silicon smelters that import all of their raw materials, and export almost all of their products; it's worth it to ship everything to and from a remote island just for the cheap power. And boy do they gobble it up - even the smallest of the aluminum smelters uses more power than all homes and businesses combined. And beyond time-shifting of entire industries, there's timeshifting for particular hardware units in other industries. For example, chillers rarely run 24/7, and can also be timeshifted.
I'll reiterate that I think diversity is important. Picture a 100% solar world in which you have even intercontinental power transmission, ultra-high voltage DC doing hops of thousands of kilometers at a time. All of North America interconnected, running into Siberia and China from Alaska, to South America through Central America, and to Europe through Greenland and then Iceland (where there's already a lot of prep work underway for power lines to the UK). You have the whole planet equallizing you out and timeshifting - virtually no peaking/storage at all required. All well and good!.... until a major volcano goes off. When Laki here went off in 1783, the huge quantities of gases it kicked out altered the global weather so much that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans. Not from clouds, but a global stratospheric haze layer. There was plenty of wind that year, mind you, but very little sun! Being single-source dependent leaves you vulnerable. Regardless of what that source is.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
A fun thing about solar thermal plants is that it's easy to integrate a peaker directly into them, using natural gas to generate steam when there's not enough solar heat and demand is high. SEGS was the first large scale plant I'm aware that combined both solar and natural gas, although there's a lot of them now.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Batteries have been a decade away from a major breakthrough for the past 40 years.
The major breakthrough came in the 90s with the advent of the cell phone. Suddenly there was a huge market incentive for investing into battery research to maximize power density. That is why we have 200+ mile range on electric cars now, rather than the 30-70 mile range they could reach back then.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
> faster spinning = more electricity.
Along with mechanical considerations, another issue with increasing RPM is transonic effects at certain points along the blade. The tips of the blades currently move at nearly 200 MPH. That means airflow at certain points alomg the airfoil is probably close 250- 300 MPH relative to the blade. At 500 MPH (mach 0.7) things start getting real weird, there are a lot of problems. So much so that it was once believed that going faster than mach 1 was impossible. It turns out that planes can fly at mach 1.3, but the range between mach 0.7 and mach 1.2 is a bitch. All of that to say, you can't allow the blades to spin twice as fast because then transonic effects ruin your day.