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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.
> 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 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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
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.