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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.
> 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.
No. But it's not prohibitively expensive, generally adding a couple cents per kWh to your total costs**. The amount of peaking/storage required depends on a lot of factors, including climate, diversity of generation (e.g. wind + solar has much higher statistical reliability than just wind or solar, as they tend to run counter to each other), and the amount of long distance transmission (HVDC/HVAC), for 1) geographic diversity of weather, 2) sharing common peaking resources, and 3) timeshifting of loads/generation. A recent study in nature estimates that a nationwide US HVDC network would cost 0,3 cents per kWh but save 1,1 cents per kWh in generation/peaking hardware costs. The cost of peaking (and type) depends on location. Hydroelectric turbine house uprating makes for very cheap peaking where available (transforming baseload hydro into peaking hydro). Pumped hydro can be affordable, but only in limited areas. Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade. In the US, where natural gas is cheap and plentiful, the vast majority of new peaking capacity is NG. In countries where natural gas is expensive, other fossil fuels are used.
Also note that up to a certain level of penetration, solar actually does more to help remove variable generation (load following plants) than it imposes (peaking), as daytime loads are higher than night, and are higher on sunny days than cloudy days.
** - A peaker that's used only several hours a year may charge $2/kWh or so... but you're not buying a lot of kWh from it. A load following plant that's used a bunch every day may only charge $0,1/kWh... but you're buying a lot of kWh from it. It all depends on what sort of power you're needing to buy.
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.
What about at night?
Fortunately the wind blows at night. Here is a wind resources map for the United States. Lots and lots of consistently windy areas. Wind is cheaper than solar currently and in nine out the ten nations that top the renewable energy charts, there is more wind capacity than solar, and this is likely to remain the case.
With the use of high voltage DC transmission lines (a technology that has been in use since 1930) electricity can be shipped coast to coast with minor losses. 800 KV lines can transport electricity from one coast to the other with about the same losses as existing grids, about 6%. Constructing a national long distance electrical "highway" makes most of the "problems" perceived with renewable energy disappear. Just like now, there is not going to be just one source of power in the future, so solar does not have to do it all.
Even is solar "only" supplies the daytime peak load, this is half of the total electricity demand. In North America it is convenient that 40% of the entire U.S. population lives on the Eastern Seaboard, so that when it has its evening demand peak, the sunny west is three hours earlier and would still be producing a lot of solar electricity. Then there are proven power storage technologies like pumped water storage. Just considering existing pumped storage capacity, and capacity expansion that has applied for permits, we are looking at 76.7 GW of PS capacity in the U.S. which is 7.5% of U.S. peak electricity demand.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
>> people who hate coal are punishing ....
Yes, and rightly so, because burning coal is literally destroying our ecology and ultimately, planet.
> 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.
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?