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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?
> 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 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.
China knows about real costs, and they are building new coal plants at about 1 a week.
China is overbuilding unnecessary coal plants for the same reason they are overbuilding everywhere else. Cheap money and perverse incentives. Their coal plants are already operating at below 50% capacity. Their coal consumption has dropped for the past two years and the drop is accelerating.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
The problem with DC is up/down converting it. The power company uses 12.5KV to run for relatively short distances and it goes up from there. Transmission lines run at a few mil volts. For A/C a relatively simple transformer does the conversion. For DC, it gets very expensive. And it is all about IR losses, and the higher V is, the lower I is.
Wow, variability in the power grid, we've never had to deal with that unsolvable problem before!
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
> 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.
I think he's talking about how terrorists often fund their operations by selling oil they've seized, among other things.
EVERYTHING has to get replaced sooner or later. In a solar installations, panels are a significant part of the cost, but hardly the only one. Do you think that coal boilers run forever? That nuc plants never need maintenance?
Engineering has long figured out how to plan on replacing large, expensive things and still (oftentimes) making money.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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 spouting.
Fission has failed as a significant civilian power source. It is too complex, too dangerous and Capex costs are too high to be viable. Too big to fail doesn't work in power plant world. Which is an interesting thought when everyone's dreams move on to fusion. Unless a Mr. Fusion type device gets developed, the 'classical' fusion plants are going to be enormously expensive and have multi decade lead times. Exactly the kind of thing that is killing fission. Nobody, not even governments, can afford to put that much down for that much time without an return. Especially when much cheaper technologies exist.
Might was well move on to fantasizing about warp drives.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
Do you want a nuclear plant in your community? It doesn't matter how safe it is, nobody wants huge industrial installation in their backyard. The distributed nature of PV solar has a number of other benefits as well - it's much more resilient in case of a natural disaster, it's not a target for terror and cyber attacks, etc, etc. Finally, nuclear is not as cheap as you think. The upfront costs are enormous and cost and schedule overruns are the norm, in other words, it's very risky investment that requires government incentives and guarantees.
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.
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.
In summary, evening is okay, cloudy weeks aren't
Peaking power plants typically run at under 10% utilization year round. During cloudy days these typically natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels. Combine that with the fact that typical solar panels still run at around 20% efficiency with dense cloud cover you could reduce the number of traditional power plants by at least a factor of 10 by replacing them with solar plants. And this is without trying to store electricity as an alternative.
All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable and most are hardly even worth mentioning, other than to refute myths that is.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What about at night?
Ever heard of a battery? Plus just because you use solar during the day doesn't preclude you from using other sources of energy when it isn't available.
One of the best things about solar is that solar is particularly useful for air conditioning and refrigeration. Peak costs for those systems are highest when the sun shines the strongest for obvious reasons. A solar array can flatten those costs out very nicely. Honestly it's a mystery to me why every grocery store doesn't have a solar array on their roof. On days where there is lots of sun they'll get lots of solar power and when it isn't shining so strongly they probably don't need as much solar.
Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?
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.
Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?
Using fossil fuels sources and not forcing them to pay the full cost of the pollution and carbon they generate is even more expensive in the long run. Fossil fuels are what should be the alternative break-glass-in-case-of-emergency fuel source. They're useful but dirty and we should be trying to minimize their use as fast as possible.
That's why solar _must_ be cheap for markets to clear - one needs a backup to use it.
Every source of power needs backup. Powerplants of every description have to be idled for maintenance now and then. Storms knock out parts of the grid. Demand sometimes exceeds local supply. Solar is nothing fundamentally different in that regard.
> 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.
'Perverse Economic Incentives' would make a good porn movie title.
China's bubble is the elephant in the room. Until it pops, keep your finances very conservative. It is time to preserve value, not chase growth.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.
Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason. That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.
> All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning
Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.
Suppose you just want to be a cheerleader, so you just sing the praises of solar electric, and pretend that it can replace, rather than supplement, other sources. Then you end up encouraging people to think solar is "the answer" and they therefore oppose natural gas and nuclear infrastructure, leaving you stuck burning coal for 50 years longer than necessary. That's what has happened. We could have gotten rid of coal in the US by 1975. We're still burning a shit-ton of coal, which spews radiative substances directly into the air, because rather than talking honestly about an energy mix that actually works, half the population decided to romanticize solar and wind, and avoid mentioning in what ways they don't work so well. If, 50 years ago, the leaders of Greenpeace said what you said above (use solar when you can, natural gas and nuclear when you can't), we wouldn't be burning coal today.
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...
> It seems like stronger wind = faster spinning = more electricity.
Yeah stronger wind = a LOT more power, and could be a LOT more electricity, if you had infinitely strong, infinitely light materials with no friction.
> Are they designed to only generate power at a specific RPM or something?
Yeah they are designed to produce power most of the time, meaning they operate at the lowest normal wind speed. All the parts, from the bearings to the wire gauges etc are designed for that low-normal speed. To work well at higher speed (and MUCH higher power), they'd have to be designed differently and therefore not work at lower speed. Obviously there's a lot of engineering, but one example is easy enough to picture, a bearing. Imagine a shaft and bearing designed to handle 500 horsepower. You grab the shaft and try to turn it with your hands. It's probably not going to turn - a big beefy part designed for a lot of power will have a lot of friction.
Did I just tell you to imagine grabbing your shaft in your hand and feeling the friction?
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?
Unlikely. They would operate in an unsafe way, pay massive salaries to their owners, then go bankrupt with the owners keeping the profits and the costs pushed onto the tax payers. That's the thing. Government can't really "get out" of these industries because if a bad actor causes terrible damage and goes bankrupt there's nobody else to clean up the mess. And since the government and therefore the tax payers are going to get stuck with the bill, it's pretty reasonable that they have a say in how things operate.
Main problem with this economic analysis is that solar is only half the equation.
Solar requires batteries, unlike coal, gas. (There are "pump batteries" which refill dams during daylight hours and thus act as a battery to store power for nighttime use).
I like solar energy but there are additional issues besides mere production.
> 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.
You're doing it wrong. And "cloudy" is not the same as "solar plant produces too little energy"
If you own a house, your system can cover your house for quite some time. And should. Weeks is not an unreasonable design goal, particularly with an energy-efficient home. Also, solar still produces energy when overcast; just not as much. The linked video shows a 75 watt panel generating about 6-7 watts on a 100% overcast day, which is about 10% of the panel's rated rated power. You can be frugal (and on a temporary basis, extremely frugal) with your power use. You can construct an energy efficient environment (even in an older home.) You can insulate (and if you're trying to save money, you should. One of the best money-saving investments you can make. Trade some space for a constant reduction in expenses. And noise. And increase in comfort and temperature stability. Sheets of insulation are very inexpensive, particularly when compared to heating and cooling costs. Read up on, and pay careful attention to, condensation and moisture barrier issues when building internal secondary insulating layers.)
If you live in other than a home you own, then you get what they give you. Sorry about that. You might want to consider trying to GTFO of there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You should go back and read the post you replied to. I specifically described that storage is an associated and recurring cost with battery-driven solar plants.
Also, solar does not require batteries. That's just the most common way to do it. For instance, the solar system in my radio trailer is 100% ultracap based. No recurring costs of any kind in the power systems. Right now, a home system requires a lot of space for such a thing, and new ultracaps are still pretty expensive (I haunt Ebay for used ones, though, and they aren't so costly.) But those curves are changing in increasingly favorable ways.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Solar energy spills cause CANCER and even third degree burns.
Natural gas just safely floats away into the atmosphere and is biologically disposed of by Nature.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is the reason people should encourage their retirement funds and accounts to divest from fossil fuel assets. In 30 years they could all be worthless and the drop when it comes will be so fast no one will be able to react to it.
Based on the facts of the system. Fossil fuels are subsidized at rates that no other industry achieves. Oil alone nets close to 5 billion dollars in incentives and tax benefits and this doesn't even count underpaying the tax payers for the oil by as much as 50%. Coal is even worse, massive subsidies, free use of federal land and resources and often paying the taxpayers less than a penny per ton for the coal. Nuclear wouldn't even exist without the Federal loan guarantees and the federal government backstoping the disaster insurance. That doesn't count the tax cuts and subsidies the industry receives.
Solar and Wind receive two tax breaks, an accelerated depreciation schedule and a tax credit that goes away in 2020 for wind and 2024 for solar with both credits scaling down yearly until their final year.
Compared fairly the tax credits to fossil fuels over the past 50 years could have paid to replace the entire electricity gird a dozen times over. Fossil fuels receive more government subsidies than any other industry.
Secondly, in a hail-prone area, you use appropriate protection with the panels. It hailed all over my panels last year, big hail, too, and there's not a scratch on any of them.
About 4-5 years ago, I lost 2 of my panels to softball-sized hail. But they were 23 year old (Arco) panels. Newer panels are built to withstand a much bigger hit.
I've never heard of "appropriate protection" for panels that spend their life facing the sky. Best protection I had was my insurance policy. The same storm also dented the hell out of my steel roof.
>> natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.
>Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason.
>That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap
>when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.
Are you including solar in your mix with nuclear and natural gas? I hope not, because nuclear power has a lower carbon footprint, lower cost, and fewer deaths per energy produced than even solar. I'm finding it real hard for a utility/nation/whatever to use solar power when nuclear power is available. If new air cooled nuclear reactors meet their claim of being able to load follow then those natural gas generators would be used only in the highest peaks and for emergency on-site power for the nuclear reactors.
I don't see the USA getting away from natural gas anytime soon. We have so much of it, it's great for heating and cooking, with a bit of effort it works for transportation, it's cheap, clean (as in little to no soot, sulfur, etc.), relatively safe (which isn't saying much compared to coal but still safe), great for peak and base power, and did I mention we have a lot of it?
About the only thing that I see replacing natural gas anytime soon is an artificial gas, synthetic methane. The US Navy has been experimenting with this process, a nuclear powered "seawater to jet fuel" process to create synthetic hydrocarbons. Making methane from this is not only nearly trivial now, it is also a very good way to transport and store energy through an existing national (international?) infrastructure.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Zero Hedge? The site run by "Tyler Durden" that predicts multiple times a day that the US economy is about to crash?
I learned about Zero Henge in 2009 when they guaranteed that the US financial system was about to have a "complete economic collapse". Needless to say, this never happened. But the article scared me for a couple years, until I realized that it, and the site as a whole, are full of shit. It's time you realized this too.