There Are Now Twice As Many Solar Jobs As Coal Jobs In the US (vox.com)

According to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, the solar industry now employs more than 260,000 people even though solar power provides just 1.3 percent of America's electricity. Last year, the industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide. "Solar employs slightly more workers than natural gas, over twice as many as coal, over three times that of wind energy, and almost five times the number employed in nuclear energy," the report notes. "Only oil/petroleum has more employment (by 38%) than solar." Vox reports: This chart breaks it down by job type. The majority of solar jobs are in installation, with a median wage of $25.96 per hour. The residential market, which is the most labor-intensive, accounts for 41 percent of employment, the commercial market 28 percent, and the utility-scale market the rest. Now, mind you, comparing solar and coal is a bit unfair. Solar is growing fast from a tiny base, which means there's a lot of installation work to be done right now, whereas no one is building new coal plants in the U.S. anymore. (Quite the contrary: Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) So solar is in a particularly labor-intensive phase at the moment. Still, it's worth thinking through what these numbers mean. One argument you could make about these numbers is that all this employment is, in a way, inefficient. If the solar industry hopes to keep pushing costs down and become a major U.S. energy source, it will likely need to become less labor-intensive over time. But labor costs are only one way to think about the issue. There's also a political angle here. America's energy system is inextricable from policy and politics, and an industry that creates a lot of jobs is inevitably going to have more influence over that process.

Comments

Well, once the panels are installed

[I'm New Around Here]

the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. We should not support jobs that may disappear at some point in the future.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[PoopJuggler]

Yeah, just like how there's no automobile jobs now that everyone has a car.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.

Don't worry. By the time this becomes an issue everyone will be replaced by robots anyway.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[skids]

Once the panels are installed, there will be jobs installing the storage facilities, and after that, there will be no electricity bill other than equipment maintenance costs, so less reason to work as many hours.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Ol Olsoc]

the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.

Insightful enough.

But that's just how these things work. Once upon a time, coal was king. But now it's falling. When the NatGas Frackers came through my area, they employed a lot of people for a few years. Then the wells were built, and they moved to another state.

Even if by some Executive fiat, we moved back to coal, we'd have to deal with the combined effects of automation and that the rest of the world is dropping it. So we won't get exports.

In other words, like you said, the jobs are gone.

But people tend not to think much beyond next month. When the Frackers came to the area, all you heard about was jerbs, Jerbs, JERBS! As if Fracking was the majic pill that was going to give these folks jobs for the rest of their days.

But the wells were drilled, new pipelines were laid, collctors and compressors, and the system doesn't need many people to keep it up and running - at least compared to the initial jobs.

So yeah, solar industry jobs wil probably follow a similar pattern. A huge boom, then trailing off. The days of thinking that a person is going to do one job, the same job, live in the same town in the same houhse your entire life, and not have to learn to do anything else is no longer a rational idea. Things change too quickly.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the panels are installed, there will be jobs installing the storage facilities, and after that, there will be no electricity bill other than equipment maintenance costs, so less reason to work as many hours.

The problem with solar as much as anything is you can't go off grid that easy. You need power at night or batteries. The most efficient way to heat and cool with solar is currently some form of heat pump. What if a new house did something like this.

Deep well with sealed water source heat pump. Shallow, extremely well insulated area below the house, or perhaps in the house that hold say five hundred gallons or so of water. I'm not sure of the exact number, but your going to need a large amount. This is based on a hot water heater using about 36,000 btu for an hour to heat it, which is enough to heat a smaller well insulated house.

During the day when the sun is out the electricity could be used by the heat pump to heat the house as well as to directly heat the water in the reserve. During the night the reserve heat is used to heat the house, instead of the heat pump. This might even work with an air sourced heat pump, since it would be operating during the day.

So basically the heat pump would extract say 4 times the energy from the earth than put in, store it, and then it would be released as heat from the water at night. The system would be fairly simple so should last much longer than batteries, at least for that bit. I'd assume radiant heating would be used at night...

Batteries would not be eliminated, but since you don't have to heat with them, a more manageable size should work.

This could also work in summer, but in that case you would have to bring the water cold enough to cool the house at night. I'm not sure if cold floors would be a good idea though something should be feasible.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[mlts]

Not really. Solar panels are becoming as tied to a construction project as roofing materials, and other basic building supplies. Even after buildings are retofitted, there are always new things coming up, new technologies that are iffish now, but are maturing (tinted windows which may run at 1/20 the wattage a normal panel, but with the sheer square footage on a south side of a building, it might be worth doing, when the price for the tint becomes that cheap.)

Solar plants will continue to expand. With HVDC transmission methods, there is a lot of desert that can be used for solar, and with roughly 3.5% transmission loss per 1000 km, this can be a viable way to provide a few GW to a city. If the transmission loss is too great, it isn't too difficult to pull CO2 from the air and make ethanol, propane, synthetic diesel (Audi has pioneered this), or something similar as a way to fuel non-electric vehicles and stay carbon negative. Heck, with enough power and a source of water, thermal depolymerization becomes possible, which is an extremely good way to dispose of plastic and have a usable resource for fuel or manufacturing.

Solar technology will only improve as well. Panels may be near maximums of energy output, but better MPPT controllers and energy storage will be the focal point eventually as the bottleneck moves from panels.

The nice thing about solar is that it is stupidly easy to set up compared to any other energy source [1], and it is relatively maintenance free, because everything is solid state on the grid, and off the grid, the only component that wears out are batteries.

[1]: A cast off car battery, a surplus panel, a $8 PWM charger from eBay, and some 12 volt light bulbs can power the lights on a detached building indefinitely. I don't know any other energy source that can sit there and do that. The Aussies go a step further and stick refrigerators with solar panels on them in the middle of nowhere so they can get a cold one even if on the back 40. I don't know any other energy source that can do that... nuclear perhaps, but with all the fear about nuclear, you will never see a basketball-sized reactor just for powering a small building.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The whole coal process is mature and optimized for efficiency. Solar is, comparatively, in its infancy.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[fahrbot-bot]

the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.

And once the coal is gone those jobs are gone ... and the mountain tops, hill sides trees and wildlife are gone from surface/strip mining and the water has been polluted from runoff and the air is sooty and hazy from burning the coal. Actually, I guess the out-of-work coal miners can go on to restore the environment and clean the water - assuming (a) they (and we) haven't all died off and (b) the EPA is still around to make someone clean it all up -- and the taxpayers will pay for it.

Problem solved.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar panels last about 20 years, then need to be replaced. So even when solar stops growing (which won't be for a very long time), 5% of the panels will still be getting replaced every year. Some of the electrical components may also need replacing after less than 20 years, and of course they do need maintenance once in a rare while. So that's quite a bit of labor.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Solandri]

As I said last time, this is not a positive stat for solar. Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar. So if solar employs 2x as many people as coal, that means solar is 2 * 33% / 0.6% = 110x more labor-intensive than coal per kWh of electricity generated. If anything, this is a great argument against solar power. They need to get those labor figures way, way, way down (two orders of magnitude) if they want solar to become an economically viable (without subsidies) source of electricity.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

But the pollution that their manufacture caused will affect us all for decades to come.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar has been around for 182 years and its cost has been decreasing exponentially since its discovery. (It started out really high)

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument going on depends on what the jobs are.

There are 'seasonal', 'temp', and 'full time'.

Season is every year industry X needs Y+/- Q number of people. They are every few months out of a job but its mostly OK they get it back again. Think theme park worker in New York vs Florida. In NY they close the theme park in winter whereas in FL they never close.
Temp is job needs to be done one time need X people. At end of job they are out of a job. Think construction worker.
Full time is job does not end need X people. Again think theme park worker FL vs NY.

Now depending on what is going in solar if most of the jobs are of the 'temp' type. Meaning crew of dudes shows up to put panels on every house in a city. Now that job may last 2-3 years. But at the end of the job they are out of it.

What we are seeing is the 'ramp up' on jobs for solar. Think about all of those coal plants out there. At one point it was a pretty groovy job to be a coal plant construction guy. Now not so much as the plants are mostly done. With the occasional one demolished or rebuilt. For a bit of part time work here and there.

If you read the article they touch on both the points we are making. Right now it is high touch but that will fad out as construction fills everything in. At which point it will probably be much less labor intensive than coal. But it will also not exactly be a high paying job either.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[thinkwaitfast]

This works fine and well, the problem is that when you are hit with a week long ice storm and stop producing energy or storing energy after the second day.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar.

That is a misleading stat, since NO new coal plants are being built, while solar installations are growing rapidly.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[thinkwaitfast]

Source? They last a lot longer than that in my experience, degrading at an industry standard of ~1%/year. After 20 years, they'll still produce about 77% of their original rated power and 70% at 30 years.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

Solar panels last about 20 years, then need to be replaced.

No, they are warrantied for 20 years. That means that the manufacturer thinks that most of them will last at least that long. The warranty is usually for 80% power production. Even if they fall below 80% production, they are still producing power, and don't "need" to be replaced.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[h33t l4x0r]

That's the wrong way to look at it. Let's take a look at how much power $100 worth of solar panels generates over 20 or 30 years vs $100 worth of coal.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Misleading ? What a thing to complain about in this thread the whole topic is meant to be misleading.

It's the broken window fallacy dressed up for rubes to stupid to know of it.
http://www.investopedia.com/as...

The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source. If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[MatthiasF]

Even if you do not believe in the negative effects of the use of coal (global warming, pollution, atmospheric radiation, etc.), you still need to keep in mind the fact that there is a finite source of that energy. If we use up all of the fuel now, we will have no energy to build alternative energy sources later.

So, it is in our best interest as a species and a nation to invest in alternative longer-term energy solutions when primary finite sources of energy are cheap and plentiful now.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.

Nope. Coal is currently about $42 per ton, which is about $2 per million BTU. Gas is not only cheaper, but gas plants are also simpler and cheaper to run. Gas plants are faster to adapt to fluctuations in demand, and can even serve as "peakers". They work well in a grid with intermittent wind and solar. Coal plants can't do that. They overproduce in the troughs when they dump excess power on the grid at low prices, and they can't ramp up for the peaks to take advantage of price surges. This is why, in America, not a single coal plant is under construction or even being planned. Coal no longer makes economic sense.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Correct I should have stably priced over the long term.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

You mean the way biofuels were the way to the future ?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...

Or the way we now burn fossil fuels to include ethanol in gasoline ?

At some point solar may be the best, and when that happens there will be no stopping it, or maybe it won't. Going nuts before there is an actual advantage with power plants that don't compete on their own is stupid.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

Then you unstore the energy from before.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

not really. It will provide work when the robots take over everything else. Not joking.

The robots eliminating all other fucking jobs, its good to see them being created elsewhere. Good, American work that can't be outsourced

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Namarrgon]

it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source

Sorry. Not even if you ignore coal's hundreds of billions annually in externalised costs.

It's not even the most abundant. There are roughly 2.4x10^19 BTUs of known coal reserves. We get that much energy from the sun every 8.25 days - just on the land surface alone, not even counting oceans.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[pkinetics]

Isn't that if we had 100% efficiency capturing at 100% flat surface area?

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[bankman]

So yeah, solar industry jobs wil probably follow a similar pattern. A huge boom, then trailing off. The days of thinking that a person is going to do one job, the same job, live in the same town in the same houhse your entire life, and not have to learn to do anything else is no longer a rational idea. Things change too quickly.

You're absolutely right, it's just rather unfortunate that the (vocational) education system doesn't prepare people to be this flexible. Apart from hard skills which can be trained, look at how many people and even regions still identify as miners or steel workers. And it's not just in the US, you can see this in other countries like the UK or Germany too. It still takes an enormous effort to retrain, reskill and mentally repurpose communities that were focused on one specific industry for a long time.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

You mean the way biofuels were the way to the future ?

What is your point? That although coal is stupid and uneconomic, we should burn it anyway because biofuels are even stupider? Do you think that makes any sense at all?

There is no question that current biofuels policies, including American ethanol subsidies and European wood pellet subsidies, are not cost effective, and may even be environmentally counterproductive. But that in no way justifies burning more coal. They are different issues.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[angel'o'sphere]

Tge jobs are about installing new power plants.
So your analysis makes no sense.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

then you'll have to stop supporting fossil fuels too because they'll run out eventually.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

and they didn't land men on the moon either....

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

doesn't matter if its 50 years, stuff will need to be replaced. i expect panels/batteries would be replaced as more efficient panels are developed even before the current ones expire.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Freischutz]

Isn't that if we had 100% efficiency capturing at 100% flat surface area?

With that kind of abundance of energy, does it really matter? If we can consistently bring down the price of each kilo watt hour of solar energy below that of coal, coal will be dead. With the carbon footprint it creates, the pollution it generates and the damage that comes with it, coal is a liability

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

" It's the best solution for energy needs right now"

Apart from needing to be built. Which isn't just collect a load of polish or mexican brickies and get them on it. And the fact that the cost of safety and the cost of non-safety are massive. And that it's gonna take 50 years even if we went balls-to-the-wall to get a more significant fraction of power down as nuclear, that it's just getting more and more expensive, while solar gets cheaper, and that solar can start producing profitable electricity when only part complete, not so much nuclear, yes, it's the best solution.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Smidge204]

Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar.

Just as an FYI; about five years ago, Coal accounted for over 40%.
=Smidge=

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[F34nor]

Strawman argument so it has no bearing. Also you might note A. Corn is the worst possible biofuel. B. All biofuels are in fact solar. C. We have pipeline and liquid fuel storage and transfer infrastructure. D. Liquid Hydrocarbons are energy dense. E. We have fuel burning devices already in use.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[F34nor]

Once you start drilling MTI estimates that you can provide 100% of US energy needs from geothermal anyway. There are also ice batteries, kinetic energy storage, vanadium batteries, liquid sulfur, and even just pumping water into pressure vessels or uphill.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Bongo]

To be a little glib, the future of energy economics is just two things: gas and pork.

Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".

At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant. If the future is really without oil and coal and nuclear, as greens want, then everything will be gas.

(This post intentionally simple and glib to make a point.)

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant

At the end of the day, gas will run out/get expensive, and renewables will be backed by storage.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[silentcoder]

Define solar. Because photovoltaics have only been around since 1955.
If you define solar so broadly as to include "boiling water with a lens" then why not count "making a fire with refracted sunlight" and say it goes back thousands ?

Word meanings rely on context, and in this context we are talking about the solar that is used to produce electricity, today. The tech before 1955 was frankly grossly inefficient. I suppose you could argue that tower-solar is a direct evolution of the same technology but that is also by far the smallest part of solar in the world because it's so costly to build. Equivalent-output PV's can be done for a fraction of the price.

Above all, solar though has one major economic advantage: it scales DOWNWARD as well. You can do a small-scale installation (i.e. power-one-home) and not pay much more per unit than the guy building a giant solar farm (indeed, he will likely consider it beneficial to buy more advanced units with things like solar tracking, will need additional security and constant maintenance staff to maximize his investment - and may actually end up paying more per unit). That matters for several important reasons. Firstly - the massive infrastructure costs involved in rolling out an energy supply is a lot less prohibitive when it can be spread across thousands of volunteers who only pay for a small part each, secondly it means that this market is ripe for entrepeneurship. Coal and nuclear, on the other hand, are natural monopolies due to their prohibitively high upfront costs (which is why the vast majority of the world's coal power plants are built with taxpayer money - and even in the US the only way to convince anybody to invest in it was to offer them protected monopoly status).

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

In many places geothermal energy only lasts a few decades. The ground holds a lot of heat, but the transfer of new heat is really slow.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[realxmp]

Gas got that way because y'all invested pork in gas pipelines, processing and storage infrastructure for gas. Why not pumped storage instead? That way you benefit all forms of generation, also instant start.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Hardly a strawman, evidence of past misdeeds and a willingness to distort the facts on the part of the environmental lobby.

Once again why is it important to invest in deploying technologies that will never pay off ?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

That although coal is stupid and uneconomic,

Here let me play that game, "Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"

The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

That's a levelized cost and it doesn't say what you are claiming it does.

Try reading the before Tax Credit column. Then take into consideration that Geothermal and Hydro can't supply the power coal can.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[gtall]

Yeah, solar never wears out, and electricity demand will be constant in the years to come, no new uses for solar will ever arise.

Now once you have bought your car, you'll never need another one. Hey, this is great, we've discovered infinity.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Freischutz]

It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.

The problem with nuclear is always going to be the same. It is a technology that can fail catastrophically and render large tracts of land uninhabitable when it does. One can argue that if a nuclear plant is properly run and safety standards are enforced then nuclear is a viable option and that is true. The flaw in that argument is that it only takes one ambitious corporate weasel trying to suck up to his bosses by cutting costs through nixing safety procedures, buying sub standard parts or cutting personnel to the point where the employees managing critical systems are over worked and constantly exhausted for there to be another Chernobyl. The worst enemy of nuclear is always going to be the corpocrats running the energy companies and their ongoing efforts to maximise their profits at the expense of anything else.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the guys from finance will come and claim: you simply borrow energy from the future and return a bit more later at the current interest rate on Joules/kWh or whatever.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Salgak1]

then you'll have to stop supporting fossil fuels too because they'll run out eventually.

. . . so will the Sun. (grin)

Rarely mentioned, is that solar cells degrade over time, although nowhere near as much, or as quickly, as in the past. . . Eventually, they will have to be replaced as well. . .

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

There used to be 20.000 employed by GM in Janesville, WI. Now its 300 so there is some truth to what you are saying.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[3247]

This is only true if your goal is high unemployment rates.

If solar is much more labour intensive, this means that it provides much more employment. And the overall cost is only slightly higher, c. 100 $/MWh for coal vs. 125 $/MWh for solar (projected costs for 2020, source), and this does not even include the higher externalities (i.e. costs paid by others, such as damages to the environment and health) of coal.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

Train loads of coal also degrade over time. Pretty quickly, as a matter of fact.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Shut the fuck up.
Even the summary points out its a meanibgless stat because its apples to oranges. Go back to coals infancy, when thr plants were being built and before the single miners could operate machine oulling out tons per day and youll find similar "inefficiency". Thats not even the right word. Its not inefficient, its merely the boom phase of a boom bust cycle. Is The keystone pipeline inefficient because construction would support ~20k jobs but only 35 once completed? Thats not an valid way to measure inefficiency. Your comment is foolish and the stat irrelevent ti efficiency.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

You may try to add some references to your wild claims.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Wtf kinda ignorance is that?

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[cmseagle]

When the NatGas Frackers came through my area, they employed a lot of people for a few years. Then the wells were built, and they moved to another state.

Are you sure about that? Where are you located? In most places, the frackers ceased operations because the price of oil fell through the floor and it stopped being economical to drill new wells.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Oh hell why not

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a...

Without tax subsidies that expensive solar plant will not pay off against the coal plant. What's more that's from the Obama EIA which was trying to kill off the coal industry.

Hey next time how about doing a little background research for yourself.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Another use for metric to use for perspective is that the amount of solar energy incident upon the earth every hour is as much energy as all humanity consumes per year.

And theres 8760 hours in a year, basically 9000x more energy than we even need presently.

  So we don't need 100% captured 100% efficiency. If we can manage to tap into just a percent of a percent of that energy we've met the energy needs of humanity.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[CrimsonAvenger]

Okay, let's.

A 3KW solar system will run in the $5K+ range

$5K of coal is in the timezone of 725MW-hr.

New Orleans gets about 2650 hours of sunlight per year, so 20 years is 53K hours of sunlight. 3KW for 53K hours is about 160MW-hr over 20 years. 240MW-hr over 30 years.

So, $5K of solar will give you about 2/9 the energy that the same amount of coal will give you over 20 years, or 1/3 of the coal over 30 years.

And that's best case (right now), since the 5K cost for the solar is a minimum, not an average. And hurricanes (yes, you can ignore the hurricanes if you're somewhere inland, but then you probably won't have the 2650 hours of sunlight per year - Washington DC, for example, averages 2K hours, so they'd get ~75% of the return on the solar.)

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Bullshit

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Research aays the oaid shill... as he reprats the loe that Obama tried to kill off coal.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dywolf]

Not really an argument against. It'll just become another wear and tear maintenance item like in the other part of homeownership.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[AmiMoJo]

Gas is just debt. A cheap loan that will have to be paid back with interest one day. Preferably paid by someone else.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Research aays the oaid shill... as he reprats the loe that Obama tried to kill off coal.

Do you have anything besides nearly incomprehensible ad hominem ?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

Bullshit

Well gee all I had were numbers and calculations you might be able, with a little simple math, to follow for yourself.

But please tell me how a power plant that costs more to build now and will not get any cheaper over it's lifecycle, will cost less than one that is likely to have it's costs decline over time ?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to former president Obama.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

This same BS was posted a week ago here on /. It is a misleading stat as they use different rules for what counts as a solar job vs a job in coal. For instance, they count a truck drive who occasionally delivers a solar panel as a 'supported job', but they never included those types of 'supported jobs' in the coal numbers.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

The prices are already similar enough that your claim that solar will never pay off is clearly bullshit. Now add in the hidden cost of coal, the fact that coal will be getting more expensive in the future while solar will be getting cheaper, and it is clear what is the better choice.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Solar panels are becoming as tied to a construction project as roofing materials, and other basic building supplies.

Complete horse crap. Solar is being installed in less than 5% of new construction.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[dreamchaser]

There are far fewer jobs per car produced now then there was even a couple of decades ago. Sure there will still be jobs in solar, just not nearly as many.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[SharpFang]

Way longer.

Desalination of sea water using nuclear fusion energy, transport as steam to agricultural areas, and providing water to plants.
a.k.a rain.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

But why are all our modern gas plant shut down? We were told that gas was both cheaper, more flexible and a lot more friendly than coal plants. But despite that they were build for free (as in with tax payer euro) and given to the free market (privatized) they all went bankrupt. All of them. Not one single gas plant survived in the competitive market of energy production.

It has become even worse because although the gas plants are flexible, there are no more people who run the gas plants. When we desperately need the energy from gas plants, we can't all of the sudden hire trained people for a week to run the gas plants and then fire them again. Instead we now shut down electricity in a selected area. Because many people protest against living without electricity (note we do live in the western world in the 21st century, not the 19th century), the politicians had to agree with firing up the most polluting coal plants (build in the 40's) again. A law as banned to construction of new coal plants, so we can't even build less polluting coal plants.
 
We also still use nuclear energy. The plants had to be replaced in the early nineties. In the nineties the politicians of that time already introduced a law to ban nuclear energy, so we had to keep open the old plants. But green energy technology would improve so much that we would be producing more green energy then all nuclear plants combined before the year 2000. We are now 2017 and we are still using the same nuclear plants. The green energy is still only good for 1-20% of the production (1-20 also shows how unreliable green energy is). Although a lot of tax money was spend on flexible plants running on fossil fuel (gas plants!) to address the unreliability of green energy, we are polluting even more than before. Old coal plants are still running 24/7 and diesel generators are used to power industry/offices because the green revolution has brought to us an unreliable electricity grid.

I'm not a climate change denier, nor do I believe that coal should be used. But the green energy revolution also bans the only viable alternative to CO2 pollution: nuclear energy. If we finally realize that green energy is still a niche and that we need to build nuclear plants to cover our energy needs for the next 20-30(- 60?) years, we will either keep on using coal plants or either give up our economy and choose to go into a deep recession.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[DirkDaring]

So no one maintains the panels? How does that work exactly?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[silentcoder]

True, but you stopped too soon. Lots of that rain water ends up in rivers, running down to the sea. Humans have been using that water to turn turbines for many centuries (there are pictures of water-wheel powered metal presses dating back to the middle ages - it was a major tool in the production of early chain mail, and water-wheel mills are even older), and for almost a century now we've been using it to produce electricity.

So the Hoover damn's hydro-power... counts as solar !

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Beside the fact that the actual article is written by a totally biased and the numbers are a lie?? Coal is the cheapest, every country uses it agrees, only countries without coal try other stuff. Natural gas is moving up that chart, but nobody wants to do that for some reason. Right now the whole energy industry was regulated out of existance for the most part and we were all sold a bill of goods that started and ended with Lies.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[DontBeAMoran]

Pics or it didn't happen.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[havana9]

I think also that double stage (direct-coupling and steam turbines) methane power plants could be more efficient than tradirtional power plants.
You could also easily use a litte gas/heat generator for a condo. Like the Italian made TOTEM originally developed by Fiat because they were able to build more Fiat 127 engines than car bodies...

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[SharpFang]

You also have enormous air and water reserves, which are the primary ingredients in production of IRFNA and UDMH, pretty stable oxidizer and fuel for hypergolic bipropellant rockets. So why are you still importing crude oil from Middle East for the airplanes? Excellent performance, very modest price, not very complex engines... well, the exhaust gases are kinda poisonous, but aren't car exhaust fumes so, as well?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA has some of the best solar tech in the world, and solar is about at cheap as coal, but with much less capital outlay. (Look up levelized cost of electricity by source -- and not that it doesn't include the significant health costs of coal, and, of course, CO2 pollution.) So if you're concerned about competitive advantage, then solar is a big deal, and will continue to be a big deal. The USA /could/ surrender that advantage to China, in the name of preserving an old and dirty industry.

How about we let the markets decide, eh?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

We are learning a lot about our deployments of wind and solar and continue to improve both technologies. Just like building the first hydro-electric dam wasn't a waste of money even though coal was available at that time, too. If we don't get involved with a technology and wait until coal is used up or the environment is too messed up, do you think we can just skip all the product evolution stages of solar and wind overnight? It takes time to iterate on these things, and many product evolutions and associated research.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Fragnet]

Apart from slashdot publishing a press release from an industry body, which it seems to do regularly with no embarrassment whatsoever, please tell us how much all this is costing the tax payer? The entire industry is based on tax credits and subsidy.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Lest we forget, the solar industry is directly subsidized (as in the government cutting actual checks paid to recipients, not allowed deductions against future earnings) at an amazing level. The federal and state governments directly subsidies:

A) basic university and corporate research into solar energy
B) building of solar panel factories
C) training solar panel installers
D) and cover up to 50% of the cost of purchase/installation of commercial and residential solar panels

Then, once installed, the local power company is required, by law, to purchase every KWH your solar power system generates at highly-inflated rates, regardless of any need on the part of the utility.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds good. Calculate the difference between the market price for coal and the royalty the treasury receives for it, and let us know how much revenue the american taxpayers have missed out on by allowing coal companies to produce US coal over the past 150 years.

Now repeat for oil and gas..

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

Right. We should support coal because of the ongoing jobs of destroying mountains in order to burn them. And solar panels never ever need to be replaced or serviced.

This might be the dumbest argument I've ever seen.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Bob the Super Hamste]

To make the point clearer I like this. If we covered 1% of the earth's surface with 1% efficient solar panels we could meet our current energy needs.

Can one even find solar panels that shitty as I thought most were in the 12-18% efficiency range and the really cheap printed solar shingles being like 8% efficient. So using realistic numbers like that we would be down to 0.1% of earths surface area needing to be covered by solar panels. This does ignore the storage problem but there are a number of battery and storage technologies available that would allow things to work when the sun isn't shining that don't degrade like the common solutions most propose. So at the individual household level something like a bank of nickel-iron batteries to store and level household consumption. Then going up a layer have some large sodium sulfur batteries at sub stations and generation plants for storage and load leveling. For large scale storage have some huge pumped storage locations and use old mine pits as the low reservoir as we have dug some huge holes over the years. But that is just crazy talk.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[jabuzz]

Almost a century, I kindly refer you to Cragside

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

First electrical power generation from a water turbine started in 1870 (it was the worlds first hydroelectric power station) to provide electric lighting using an arc-lamp which was replaced in 1880 with Swan incandescent lamps.

By my calculation that is 147 years, which is considerably longer than a century. Only an American could think that hydro power started with the Hoover dam.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

With coal, you constantly have jobs supporting creating those KWh.

With solar, the panels get installed and they work for decades with minimal labor. It's not like there are guys driving around big containers of sunlight or something.

The number of jobs correlates with the growth of the industry. But you already knew that.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to turn autocorrect back on.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Bongo]

I'm all for new tech, be it batteries or fusion, or heck, even storing energy as... gas (something about mixing hydrogen into it).
But until that day...

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, guess I should go out and spend my $5k on a heap of coal I can put in my backyard. Then I just throw an extension cord into the pile and electricity comes out, right?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[cusco]

this is not a positive stat for solar

That's only a problem if you see people having jobs as a bad thing. At one point the petroleum industry was insisting that Venezuela modernize its extraction processes to lower its labor costs. Chavez replied, "Those labor costs are jobs that support families. Now pay for our oil bitches." They eventually did modernize to some extent, but it was more because of worker safety and environmental concerns.

without subsidies
When are you going to propose that the fossil fuel industry function without subsidies?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, you disingenuous fool.

Coal costs $45.5/tonne, not $42 (http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=coal_prices). Moreover, you can't actually get 100% efficiency extracting the energy from coal, you'd be lucky to get 30% wall plug efficiency. The energy density is ~35 MJ/kg -> 9.7 MWh/tonne raw -> 3 MWh/tonne wall-plug. (PS 35 is the upper end for energy density, 10-20% lower is normal)

$5000 / ($45.5/tonne) * 3 MWh/tonne = 330 MWh, not 725. So solar is *at worst* 50% over 20 years.

Next, solar at small scales is less cost efficient than at large scales. It's not really fair to compare small-scale solar (3 kW of panels is *nothing*) with 100 tonnes of coal, which no actual human could reasonably store and use. Large-scale solar is under $1.3/W right now, so your $5000 can actually get you 3.8 kW -> 200 MWh after 20 years, and within spitting distance of coal after 30.

Not sure if you're a shill or just misinformed, but yeah. WRONG!

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[necro81]

$5K of coal is in the timezone of 725MW-hr

Since you haven't provided any links to back your data, I have to ask: is that energy value just a conversion of the raw BTUs, or into electricity delivered to end users. It's a really important difference, since most coal plants are only 25-35% efficient in creating electricity from raw heat. If you are quoting the raw energy content as heat, then I'd argue you need to discount it by a factor of 3-4x, since most coal is burned to make electricity, and PV creates electricity directly.

Here's another approach: the wholesale price for electricity is, depending on the region, something like $25-50/MWh [source]. Unfortunately, the breakdown doesn't tell us the cost for each source (coal, nuke, gas, etc.), but let's argue that it's on the low end: $25/MWh. That captures the cost not only of the fuel, but also the operating costs of the plant, profit, paying off the loans to build the plant, etc. On the other hand, a large pile of coal is pretty useless for generating electricity without all the rest of those costs, so I'd say it's fair to include them.

At $25/MWh, a $5k purchase would get you 200 MWh of electricity, which makes PV look much more favorable.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Triklyn]

... please learn how to spell.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[silentcoder]

I'm not an American, I knew the Hoover wasn't first, but I hadn't realized we'd been doing it quite that long. And I honestly wouldn't have considered a generator at a private house to be comparable to hydropower for cities.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

The Obama administration did not land men on the moon. That is true.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking moron lol. "Oh noes, coal is soooo much more efficient than solar power!" - MORON

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[jbengt]

Without tax subsidies that expensive solar plant will not pay off against the coal plant. What's more that's from the Obama EIA which was trying to kill off the coal industry.

Actually, according to the link you provided, which is projecting to 2022 costs, the only electricity sources beating photovoltaic without tax breaks are geothermal and combined cycle gas. And the only sources worse than coal are offshore wind and solar thermal. That said, it also discusses big regional variations in costs, so, of course, don't depend on solar in the winter in Alaska (and don't build a large scale coal plant far away from customers and existing coal transportation infrastructure).

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for one thing, coal isn't delivered in trucks - you'd have a line of trucks stretching down the freeway from every coal plant to keep it burning, and clouds of coal dust hovering over every highway.

Coal is delivered by barge, or by train. And those jobs are most definitely included in the stats.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

And how much subsidy is given to the incumbent coal technology in allowing them to spew effluent out the stacks 24/7 with no costs? We're all subsidizing that with increased rates of respiratory disease, to say nothing of climatological effects.

If coal had to pay the costs for the pollution, every plant would shut down tomorrow. Or, at least, that's what the industry says every time cap and trade gets discussed. How is that not a subsidy again?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[liquiddark]

Solar costs continue to drop. Coal, being a mature technology, is variable pretty much strictly by way of market volatility. In 3 years, your 3KW becomes 5-6KW. In 10 years, it becomes 10KW, which is to say, cost-competitive.

Developing policy for a future in which coal is anything but an afterthought is a bad plan.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

Geothermal heat pumps are a thing already. Heat pumps work great when the 'outside' bit is sitting around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is perfect for something buried around 20 feet down.

Atmospheric heat pumps are a lot cheaper to install, but just can't keep a house warm efficiently when the air temperature drops below about 20 degrees F. Geothermal gets around that, but with far higher installation expense.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

A whole lot less than to deal with health costs, environment AL cleanup, etc.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

The difference being that coal will continue to need that high labor costs, while solar's labor cost is a fraction during its 35 year span.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

This is why integrating into the roof is a damn good idea. If you need to replace the roof every 20 to 30 years anyway, may as well replace the degraded PV cells for more efficient ones from 20 to 30 years of tech advances. And PV cells are recyclable.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

I will assert that nuclear power is wonderful. Done right, it is safe, efficient, provides a lot of power density in a small amount of space, and with thorium reactors and gen IV tech, it can last a while.

There is one problem though. You hire someone to build it, there is zero penalties for the contracting company to take shortcuts. The reactor head that holds the rods? Make it out of a cheaper steel. The computers used to monitor it? Use an off the shelf OS like the reactor is some throwaway IoT toy, not one rated for nuclear grade production. We had contractors who would not even bother grounding shower heads, or using Loctite to make cracked battery casings look new. Then, there are the workers hired. Education sucks in the US. Ask virtually anyone on the street what a SCRAM condition is, at a university, and they will say that is when the cops are busting down the front door at the frat house.

Then what happens if the balloon goes up? Maybe a lawsuit which will stay in the courts for decades at most. There is no such thing as piercing the corporate veil any more, so the execs will not face consequences for it.

Because of the fact that there is no financial incentive to do anything but the absolute cheapest, corner-cutting level of work, coupled with the fact there is no actual consequences for leaving ecological disasters, nuclear is out of the picture for now. We are in the days of "it builds, ship it", not "take pride in your work."

Solar, on the other hand is idiot resistant. The two worst things with solar are getting electrocuted (which is an issue with -all- energy sources), and having a panel physically fall on someone's head. Someone putting panels up can knock back a few PBRs, piss on the panel, fall asleep, wake up, smoke a doobie for the headache, and then complete the job. Panels are also easily inspectable, and you can tell if they are working with basic tools (multimeters, Hall effect amp meters.) Panels can also take a lot of abuse, compared to a control or fuel rod that can snap if someone decides to swing it around like a quarterstaff.

tl;dr: Nuclear is great, but we don't have companies with any interest or responsibility to make it safe, and we don't have the knowledge with the front-line workers to actually safely implement it. Solar, any dipshit can install while drunk and stoned.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

Not true. It depends on how fast you pull it out.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[MachineShedFred]

The pollution from their manufacture happens once, in a local area, for production of panels that will last for 20 years with zero pollution per watt generated.

The pollution from the incumbent energy generation is continuous, airborne, and causing death and disease for miles downwind for every watt generated.

I'll go with the solar panels.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymice]

No, that's based on a common confusion propagated by scientifically ignorant media and politicians.

Green energy & renewable energy are two different things. Biofuels are convenient because they're renewable and fit better with our current infrastructure. Few, however, could be called "green".
The problem with green energy is that most sources are comparatively volatile (wind, solar, etc) or politically complicated (nuclear).

Renewable green energy is the way to go, but the process of redesigning our infrastructure is long, complicated & expensive. However the longer we put off investing in it, the more invested we'll become in our dirty, finite energy sources.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

That is false. A number of the gen 4 designs CAN NOT fail. That is why it is so important to get these in as baseload power combined with geothermal and hydro.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[luis_a_espinal]

the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.

Just like mechanic jobs that went poof now that everyone has a car, or plumber jobs that went poof since every house has a fucking plumbing system installed.

Hell, look at construction? All the dudes that build the house I purchased are now on the curb because the house was built. There is nothing else to do in that industry, ever after.

Jesus man, I know that many people do not understand the basics of economics, but you bro, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with you.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[EndlessNameless]

Silicon-based photovoltaics have only been around since the 1950s, but the first photovoltaic cells date back to the 1880s.

Granted, the early selenium cells were horribly inefficient compared to modern ones, but the same is true of all first-gen technology when compared to its successors.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

Actually, those with small modular reactors have a strong incentive to make it foolproof. IOW, with the gen IV thorium, they can not fail even if unattended.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

And we really need to require 100% of all new buildings below 6 stories to have on-site unsubsidized AE that => the HVAC energy. That will lead to efficient buildings.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

Actually, the better panels are lasting 30-35 years, not 20.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[luis_a_espinal]

Misleading ? What a thing to complain about in this thread the whole topic is meant to be misleading.

It's the broken window fallacy dressed up for rubes to stupid to know of it. http://www.investopedia.com/as...

The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source. If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.

WTF are you talking about? Why? We know for a fact that coal leaks mercury into our water cycle, and that it is far more expensive to build a coal plant that filters as much of that shit as possible than to just burn natural gas. The EU was our primary coal buyer, and they moved away from that shit. China could have been our customer, but 1) they are coal self-sufficient and 2) they are also moving away from it. India is also moving away from it...

... and so on and so on. There is a coal glut, a diminished demand and the cost ration of coal vs natural gas increases as the cost of using the later decreases.

So how the fuck do you suggest we build more coal plants? How do we finance them? How do we keep them running? With what money? The conditions nowadays make coal plants a fucking money pit.

Sure, we have the largest coal deposits on Earth. We also have a lot of dirt around and hydrogen in the air. The value of a thing is not a mere function of its abundance or lack thereof.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

Nope. The pollution from solar is minor esp when compared to coal

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[luis_a_espinal]

I'm all for new tech, be it batteries or fusion, or heck, even storing energy as... gas (something about mixing hydrogen into it). But until that day...

While you wait for "until that day" other people are working hard to make that shit happen instead of being sheeple naysayers.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

We have had panels up for 4 years. We had a hailstorm that tore up our hail-resistant shingles. Had to remove the panels and put them back on to change the shingles. Btw, the panels were perfect after being hit with golf balls and baseball's for over 30 minutes.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Please provide evidence for "the environmental lobby". I want names and specific acts.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Your numbers are off.

Here's a hint: You're pricing a solar system, not solar panels.

Do remember the specified conditionals.

Good luck burning coal at a rate long enough to last 20 to 30 years though.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

So build a new plant after a few decades and after a few more decades the old plant is ready to use again and you don't need to build any more unless demand increases. The earth is a giant radio active decay heat source that will last for millions of years. Geothermal has high up front costs, but much better operating costs and longevity than wind and solar. A windmill or solar panel is completely useless after a few decades. Right now it is more cost effective to pull oil and gas out of holes in the ground than heat, but we are learning how to put holes in the ground better and cheaper all the time.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

yes, the earth has got about a billion years left before it burns us up. I think degradation of solar cells is known about as there is a warranty period on them so, in a sense its good new as there are still jobs to be had once that happens

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[religionofpeas]

The point remains that the flux of new heat is small. So, yes, you can make it last longer by not using it, but that's kinda pointless. A better way would be to combine it with solar, and pump the heat back into the ground on a sunny day.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[hey!]

Because we'll never need more power.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let's take a loot at how much power $100 worth of solar panels generates ... vs $100 worth of coal."

"Okay, let's." ... then your entire example is "$5K". Sure, you use equal figures for coal vs solar, but what happened to the $100 figure?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[amiga3D]

Solar is the future of energy, and in the future it will still be the future of energy. I've been hearing about how solar will obsolete all fossil fuels for almost 50 years now. I believe it will, one day. I don't see that being in the next 2 or 3 decades. Having said that, I'm all for continuing to work at it. It's being installed all around and will continue to grow. The future will come one day.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing the cost of direct electrical production (solar) with just the cost of the fuel (coal). You need to add in the cost of getting the coal into useful electrical power.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

"All biofuels are in fact solar."

So is coal if you want to get all technical.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[amiga3D]

Can Not fail? I've heard that before, usually right before a catastrophe. Safe as hell I'll buy. Can not fail? No.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[amiga3D]

I suspect that 20 years from now advances in techniques and efficiency might make replacing them desirable.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/gi... "The Gigafactory will also be powered by renewable energy sources, with the goal of achieving net zero energy." its happening

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably should specify: they fail -safely- now, instead of catastrophically.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[hey!]

Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".

Appeal to the stone.

At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant.

This actually isn't true. Some energy from renewables are stored, sometimes on a rather large scale.

In the long term the "non-renewable" energy problem will resolve itself, because non-renewable energy sources just aren't... renewable. In the short term, I have to say your logic escapes me. You seem to be implying that the only way an energy source has any usefulness is if we get all of our energy from it all the time. That's really only true if you don't have the technology to build load-following non-renewable power plants.

Eventually, as the percentage of intermittent renewable sources like solar become high enough, then we'll be forced to add over capacity plus storage. But in the meantime a non-renewable joule saved is a non-renewable joule earned.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[hey!]

I think the best energy source is a mix of sources joined on an advanced electricity distribution system. This allows you to build out various sources to the point where their marginal costs start to rise. I have no doubt that nuclear can play a key role, but I'd be against a crash program which made us dependent on it, because even if that would work in the short term it doesn't give us time to develop experience with the technologies we'll need or prepare for decommissioning.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

i'm not arguing against anything apart from negativity about solar and hopefully solar on homes and business becomes the norm as soon as possible.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

nope but if the panels double their efficiency, people will replace especially once the warranty runs out and they should be a lot cheaper. in todays society people replace their phones etc even when they don't need to, they just want bragging rights and imagine how bad thats going to be with todays millennials

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Barsteward]

more fool you if you do not have a back up plan.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[hey!]

Of course that ice storm can also bring down transmission lines.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Those laborers go out and buy food, cars, houses, and that helps local businesses. Even when we reach saturation of the market, those arrays will need to be maintained.

As it is now, China is beating us in innovation and installation of solar technology. Part of the blame goes to the deniers in Congress.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[F34nor]

Well the government was acting as a lender of last resort on highly speculative investments. This is a benefit of government we can take risks that market will not. This is good because the capital markets are not interested in building a better mouse trap they are interested in their own profit. It is almost impossible to get a loan for a first time process, product or idea. Also Solyndra was only 0.0001 of the budget and that loss was offset by other profits from the same program. Do you like highways, nuclear power, cell phones, satellite communication, weather prediction.... all government largess.

VERY little you deal with a is free market capitalism. Who do you send a check to every month? Mortgage, insurance, cell phone, cable, phone, power, gas, water, sewer, & whatever not a single one is a free market. None. You wouldn't want to live in a true free market capitalistic utopia anyway. The first rule of free markets is that like communism everyone makes the same amount of money. With no barriers to entry and transparent information there is no economic profit to be had. All profits are eventually driven to zero.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it is in our best interest as a species and a nation to invest in alternative longer-term energy solutions when primary finite sources of energy are cheap and plentiful now.

You mean like the various nuclear technologies that could provide us almost limitless energy for the next several millenia, but no one wants to talk about because scary scary radiation?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

$5K of coal is in the timezone of 725MW-hr.

This number seems like fiction. The cheapest price I can find from today or projections to 2020 for coal from any survey or report comes in at 60$/MWh, which amounts to a grand total of 83.33MWh, not accounting for any environmental or health cost side-effects. That number is an order of magnitude off from 725.

Even with your dismal opinion for the future of solar (that runs counter to all Wh/$ graphs/trends we have), 240 > 83, by almost 300%. Solar gets cheaper and more energy efficient per surface area every year.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

With that kind of abundance of energy, does it really matter?

640k watts should be enough for everybody.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[F34nor]

Yep; it just contains a shit load of particulates and mercury all bound up in the mix so fuck that.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but your asphalt shingle roof needs to be replaced about every 20 years. (some people say 15...mine is 17 years old and going strong...)

At the least you'd need to remove and reinstall the panels and probably replace some of the install as doing that evolution without breaking anything would be pretty amazing.

Point being that there are significant costs that aren't accounted for in most comparisons.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[F34nor]

It is a strawman. We are talking about solar. In this case we will call solar A. We are also talking about coal here we will call it C. Let's call corn E. Our argument is roughly A>C therefore E has nothing to do with the conversation. Introducing E is a strawman, a terrible example of something unrelated that you can knock down to divert us from the conversation at hand.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

Here let me play that game, "Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"

Whatever. You win, the strawman loses.

The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.

Wind is already cost competitive with coal. On current trends, solar will be within a decade, and is already the cheapest source of energy in some markets, such as Hawaii.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[PoopJuggler]

Bingo. This is why we fail. We train people and give them the idea that technology is static and their skill will last them a lifetime. We should have subsidized programs in place to retrain every 10 years so that our workforce can adapt to emerging technology.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[LynnwoodRooster]

While I agree with you about the long term goal, I think the length of that term is highly skewed to try to favor solar and wind and others. The reality is that the US has over 250 years of proven fossil fuels (not including coal) reserves within the US, at current usage rates (just the Green River formation contains approximately 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, and we consume about 19.4 million barrels a day. The math says that's 211 years right there). Yes, we would not need to import a single drop of oil or single cubic meter of gas for the next 280 years if we so chose.

We have the time runway to do it right, we do not have to rush headlong into a wrong solution. Targeted solar works well for some places, but we would be much better off as a species and nation to pursue fusion with most of the money and jobs being spent on solar and wind. Yes, it will take a few decades - maybe a century - to achieve, but the benefits are vastly superior to either solar or wind.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with nuclear is always going to be the same.

Don't forget that nuclear is incredibly capital intensive, and very centralized. Solar, Wind, and to a lesser extent, Natural gas are much cheaper to build, more decentralizable, and have minimal risk in the event of failure.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[LynnwoodRooster]

Renewable, maybe in Nevada. California doesn't consider hydro a renewable resource so that share of the Gigafactory's power wouldn't be renewable. At least in Tesla's home state...

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[LynnwoodRooster]

Wrong, you disingenuous fool.

So your point is that coal does not beat solar as bad as his numbers show, but that coal still beats solar by a solid 50% in terms of realizable energy per dollar?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[LynnwoodRooster]

Just think of the number of people we could employ if we also hired another 50,000 to break those solar panels every year? We'd double the employment!

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[cyberchondriac]

To be fair, the article did point out that coal plants are already built; solar still has a great need for installation and growth, thus a large part of the discrepancy in labor requirements it's still a relatively fledgling industry. What will be interesting to see is how well solar works out once it's established a more dominant presence on the grid. Some of that will depend on how often panels need to be repaired or replaced, but I'd like to see it do well.

Besides, I think that alternate energy has the potential to be to this decade (or the next) what the IT boom and the Internet was for the 1990s, an explosive tech industry which catalyzes huge economic benefits and employment. Not to mention cleaner air.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa there...$5k for 725 MW-hrs? That may be what coal costs (wholesale, not including capital costs associated with the production) but if you do the math, that works out to less that $0.01 per KW-hr. I pay much more than that by the time it gets to my meter. Solar is cheaper...now.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back and read the rest of the comment. I'll wait.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Any drain the government pours money down draws lots of flies.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[sonicmerlin]

Pretty sure it's reached its limits though.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[sonicmerlin]

Solar cells from the 70s are still something like 70-80% of their original efficiency. They die slowwwwly. Far more likely in such time is we'll find better materials that are much more efficient to replace them with. 20% conversion today is pretty low. If we could get that up to 30 or 40%, that would enable solar even in cloudy climates.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[sonicmerlin]

Natural gas is cheaper than coal.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

How long do coal power plants last for? 50 years? 80?

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[skids]

Of course it wears out. But very slowly. So slowly that by the time you need to replace it you can buy replacements at less than half the original cost, and most of the work was mounting the brackets and copper anyway, so a retrofit is going to be much cheaper.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Your coal numbers are definitely not "in the timezone" of 725mWh.

It takes about 1.04 lbs of coal to generate 1kWh (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2)
Coal costs about $46/ton (2,000lb) for power plants (http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=coal_prices)

$5k of coal is 108 tons (~217,000lbs)

So $5k of coal can generate about 220,000kWh or 220mWh if you prefer. Or, when comparing cost of solar vs _coal fuel price only_, it's essentially a tie. Once you add in all the other coal direct costs (plant construction/maintenance, plant labor, etc.) and all the coal externalized costs (pollution, etc.) solar power easily comes out significantly ahead, at current pricing.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just use residential pricing for solar and grid scale for coal. That makes sense.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Well after twenty years they've lost only about 20% of their effecientcy.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[silentcoder]

I looked it up a few months ago, because I was trying to do comparison of the KSP tech tree with how space technology developed in our world. One of the inaccuracies is how very late in the tree solar panels become available. The date I found was 1955. I didn't read anything about selenium cells that existed prior to that. Have you got a source ? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[thomn8r]

And the panels are being made in China

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

Here let me play that game, "Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"

Which game is that, competing to see who can say the stupidest thing? People who pay attention to this stuff know that we'll be burning coal for a long time to come.

The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.

The point is that we, the people, can have concerns beyond next quarter's profits. The question is not "what's the cheapest way to get electricity for March 2017?" It's "how can we best invest our money for the long term?" If we build up a lot of solar and wind manufacturing capability, the prices will come down, and in the near to medium future we'll reap the benefits of cheap solar and wind power. By investing money now, we can save money down the line, not to mention cut back on all the ill effects of coal burning.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

First, you're disregarding the disadvantages of burning fossil fuels.

Second, why do you think that doing it right requires more time? We know solar and wind work, and we know how to make the generators in commercial quantities. The basic research is over*, and the current goal is to make renewables in large quantities and reduce costs. This is best done in large-scale production, which is pretty much what we've got now. Waiting for a perfect solution when we've already got a good one is often stupid.

Third, why do you think there's a strictly limited budget for energy research? Federal subsidies and research money for all forms of energy are peanuts in the national budget. The politics say that, if we cut money for solar and win, we're not going to automatically spend it on fusion research. I'm all for increased fusion research, but it isn't an exclusive or.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

A thriving economy destroys jobs and then takes the freed-up workers and gives them better jobs. Ours is having some serious problems, but the principle is the same. We couldn't have had the industrial revolution without destroying the bulk of agricultural jobs.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

Chernobyl couldn't happen today (at least not in reactors not built by the Soviet Union). Fukushima is the current model for a major disaster, and it wasn't that bad. It's not the power industry's fault that the media focused on mostly harmless radioactive leaks to the exclusion of an earthquake and tsunami that killed something like twenty-five thousand people.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

The Earth will go before the Sun does, to be fair.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Crashmarik]

The question is not "what's the cheapest way to get electricity for March 2017?

Well for most people it actually is. For people building the plants, the proper question is what is the best return on investment for building a plant in 2017 that will be retired in 2057 ?

By investing money now, we can save money down the line,

By making bad investments now we will save the cost of making good investments later ?

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[Ol Olsoc]

When the NatGas Frackers came through my area, they employed a lot of people for a few years. Then the wells were built, and they moved to another state.

Are you sure about that? Where are you located? In most places, the frackers ceased operations because the price of oil fell through the floor and it stopped being economical to drill new wells.

Northern PA. You are right, they did overdrill and the bottom dropped out of the gas market. But the concept still holds. Once the drilling and pipeline is done for whatever reason, the majority of the jobs go away. What is left is a few people who check on the wellheads and brines if any, and the collection pads. It's just the nature of the work. Unfortunately, a lot of people fooled themselves into the idea that this would create careers.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[WindBourne]

again, this depends on how deep you are, in what stratas, and how close to the bottom edge of the crust.
It is easy to think geothermal is the same everywhere, but it really is not. Here in the western America, we have loads of nice geo-thermal spots where we can draw MWs of energy and it will continue to flow for centuries.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

To perform a successful analysis you have to look at all the factors. You are focused on this one factor and draw your conclusion from that. No one is building coal plants in the US now (I'm sure there is one or two out there, but the generalization holds). The reason is that it's too expensive. While you may need less people per MWh generated, the initial size of investment for coal is gigantic, and in an industry that has little to no long-term regulatory certainly that is a death knell for future investment.

Companies that own generation won't need as many employees if they avoid coal and nuclear, other things equal, because most of the jobs aren't in generation, but rather installation and manufacturing. That is a benefit for those companies terms of reduced ongoing overhead costs. Add to that the lower variable costs, the growing boycott of coal stocks, and it's really not a difficult choice. This applies for solar, wind, natural gas, hydro, and geothermal.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

Limited geographical availability for new generation is usually the referenced issue.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when the cheap gas ends? Natural gas is 1/4 the price in the US compared even to other countries where gas is "cheap" like Russia. Some say that the cheap gas will last for 100 years but that seems a bit optimistic considering that the transportation infrastructure is still catching up to the cheap prices.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Namarrgon]

Which part of that link are you referring to? Is it Table 1b, where it quotes a fully levelised, unsubsidised cost of $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal? And that's without even counting the pollution, health, and climate costs of burning the coal.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Namarrgon]

Levelised cost, before any tax credits, is $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal - which makes it very clear that new solar is much cheaper than new coal. That is, nobody would ever want to build a new coal plant, at least not in the US, when there are so many alternatives that are so much cheaper.

Obviously, existing solar plants are far cheaper than existing coal plants, per MWh, since solar has near-zero generation cost.

The only way coal could win any comparison is by comparing only the fuel & running costs of an existing coal plant to the full amortised cost of building & running a new solar plant - and only if you ignore all those massive external costs too. And even then, solar still wins that comparison in some regions (onshore wind wins in quite a lot of regions).

So please be more specific about what you're claiming?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Namarrgon]

Yes, and of course captured solar energy would be a lot lower, not unlike how the Carnot limit stops us capturing anything like all the energy from the coal reserves. Both require corresponding investments in infrastructure, equipment, distribution etc to make use of it too.

My point was more about how the sheer difference in magnitude makes arguments about abundance largely irrelevant.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Anonymous Coward]

whereas your nonexistent data is sooo much more reliable

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Namarrgon]

No sources for your costs?

First, solar panels are under $0.80/watt, so let's call it 5 kW for $5k, and average 4.92 solar hours per day in New Orleans (1795 productive hrs/year), typical 80% inverter efficiency, so 215.6 MWh over 30 years.

Second, a short ton of coal costs on average $45.66 delivered, and generates 1,927 kWh per ton, so $5k will get you 109.5 tons and 211 MWh.

Third, your whole premise of comparison is bogus, because it doesn't include any supporting costs: installation + inverter for the solar, and the entire cost of the power plant for coal, not to mention all the mining and transport infrastructure investment, which makes a pretty dramatic difference to final costs. A more reasonable comparison would be the Lifetime Levelised Cost of Energy of solar PV vs coal - and coal does pretty poorly there.

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[david_thornley]

Why do you think current investments in wind and solar are bad? They've been quite successful so far for relatively new technology. Like any new and growing industry, there will be a lot more investment spending and work than in a dwindling industry, and there are problems that will only be found and solved in large-scale commercial use.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[thinkwaitfast]

Much less common.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[thinkwaitfast]

The following is an a cut and paste from an email I received from a friend last week who live off grid and on solar. I don't have any of these problems...but I know what I am doing, most people don't:

Re: Finally a sunny day

I have to take advantage of the sun and get this out. Power goes out when sun goes down.[cut out personal stuff] Wish i could say i enjoy this, I don't. Its too much WORK living like this. Roads are destroyed by the weather and mud. Hard winter so far. How bout you?>/quote>

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Rakarra]

Haven't you heard of the big bad Soros boogeyman, who is apparently the genocidal maniac behind each and every liberal project of the last 20 years?

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[Coren22]

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...

I just had to.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying solar is really expensive compared to coal?

Re:So...

[skids]

No, it's in a different phase of industry life cycle, is all.

Re:So...

[Dog-Cow]

Being in a different phase may explain why it's more expensive, but doesn't in any way contradict the assertion that it is so.

Re:So...

[silentcoder]

Actually it does because it means your not comparing the same thing. This is comparing labour costs for installation versus labour costs for running an already-set-up system. That's idiotic.

If you compare legitimately you find that adding a solar deployment typically takes about 3 people. You can't DO coal that small, to add that you need a whole new plant - needing thousands of workers to complete over a period that can span decades.
Similarly you can compare post-install labour costs. For coal - well you still need prospectors to find fuel, miners to dig it up, truckers to deliver them and hundreds of workers to operate the plant.
After installing solar you need an average of ZERO labour for it's entire lifetime.

Comparing installation labour to running labour is fallacious at best.

Re: So...

[WindBourne]

And yet, it is not. We are paying less /kWh for our solar than for coal from Xcel. After 15 years, our system is fully paid for.

Re:So...

[Cajun Hell]

Yes, that's what they're saying. This story is about how solar isn't competitive yet.

Ultimately, the cost of any commodity is derived from it having used up peoples' time. The more jobs something requires, the more expensive it will generally be. When solar can get its total jobs per kWh to below coal's, it will finally be winning. But apparently that's still a long way off.

Re:So...

[Cajun Hell]

If you compare legitimately you find that adding a solar deployment typically takes about 3 people.

Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can buy. The ones you buy had to be made by a lot of other people (far more than merely 3) but they are way better. Just make sure you don't compare your 3-person-manufactured panel's cost, with the factory-manufactured panel's energy output, or you'll accidentally misrepresent the tech's overall effectiveness.

Comparing installation labour to running labour is fallacious at best.

You're right. The key is to "simply"(*) add them. The best analysis is going to comprehensively compare total man-seconds for solar to total man-seconds for coal (or nuclear, wind, etc).

(*) Some people might say that man-seconds sometimes don't compare to one another (e.g. skilled vs unskilled labor) but education itself contains many man-seconds of effort within it. This is getting to be a damn complicated spreadsheet...

Re:So...

[silentcoder]

>Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can bu
The 3 people were the ones doing the installing. I wasn't counting the manufacturers - because I BET when you calculate labour for building a coal plant you don't count all the people working in the cement factory or the brickyards or the steelmills but I promise you, you will not manage to build the thing without a lot of concrete, bricks and steel. The comparison to "people working on building the plant" is "people needed to install the solar panels on your roof" - which is the vast majority of solar in the world. Part of solar's superiority is that you actually CAN economically do it on small scales, there is no economic way to do coal to power your house, even if you could - your neighbours would sue the hell out of you for destroying the neighbourhood. Solar has none of those issues.

> The key is to "simply"(*) add them.
A sum that coal cannot possibly win, just the constant labour, every day, to keep it running will exceed the combined total for solar - probably by several orders of magnitude.

Not too surprising

[Brett Buck]

When you have an administration who effectively declared war on coal and coal producers, and shoveled billions of tax dollars in to various (mostly failed) solar companies - to launder the money - it's not a shock that there are more solar jobs.

Re:Not too surprising

[kwerle]

citation needed

Re:Not too surprising

[Jeremi]

So you're saying that government jobs programs work. Fantastic, let's bring back the WPA and get the unemployment rate down a few more percentage points. #MAGA!

Re:Not too surprising

[Bruce Perens]

It's definitely over-stating to say the solar companies are "mostly failed". Solyndra failed. It was an investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, so having it fail is a shame, but some portion of investments will fail.

And unfortunately there isn't any clean coal. Unpleasant facts don't go away just because you choose not to believe them.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you're a moron. The price of coal in the basement and natural gas killed the coal industry more than anything else, learn to read Trumpy. Go try another worker-subsidized bankruptcy lol?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/02/07/trump-makes-false-statement-about-u-s-murder-rate-to-sheriffs-group/

Is there ANYTHING you morons won't lie about? I'm actually seriously asking, I'm tending to doubt it at this point.

Re: Not too surprising

[pixelpusher220]

The snyde reference to Solyndra isn't quite you'd expect. That program made a profit https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

Re:Not too surprising

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Oh please...coal mining has become too expensive and unproductive to sustain itself in any reasonable way. Even with massive subsidies it would never make a comeback.

Solar and natural gas have eclipsed the coal industry, and nothing in the world is going to reverse that. You'd be better off starting a buggy whip manufacturing company than to bet on coal making a comeback. It's just not going to happen, and that's a fact.

Re:Not too surprising

[AHuxley]

Re citation needed
"Uttered in 2008, still haunting Obama" (04/05/12)
http://www.politico.com/story/...
"It’s just that it will bankrupt them"

Re:Not too surprising

[kwerle]

So I'm seeing a war that never actually materialized...

Re: Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, that program was intended to be a money loser. The idea was to invest in high-risk technologies that wallstreet wouldn't touch because they had no risk models for brand new tech in a brand new market. The expectation was that the price of whatever losses the loan program took would be outweighed by the social good of jumpstarting cutting-edge tech. Like Tesla, which paid back their loan 10 years ahead of schedule. So, a $5 billion dollar profit is just icing on the cake.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Context matters. He didn't declare war on coal, he declared war on carbon emissions. If anyone figures out how to burn coal cleanly and efficiently, they'd be most welcome.

If not, those hundreds of billions in external costs they've been getting away with ignoring for so long will catch up with them in some form; as a carbon tax or cap & trade or whatever, so that particular market failure will be corrected. The public is no longer willing to pay those costs - and it's a good bet that coal plants will become (even more) uneconomical, when the full costs have to be paid.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

In some parts of the world, unsubsidized solar is already the cheapest form of electricity. Each year panel costs keep getting cheaper too, which means the parts of the world where solar beats everything keep growing.

Re:Not too surprising

[Ol Olsoc]

When you have an administration who effectively declared war on coal and coal producers, and shoveled billions of tax dollars in to various (mostly failed) solar companies - to launder the money - it's not a shock that there are more solar jobs.

Bullshit.

What were all of these failed companies? And what was the path of th laundered money?

I'll bet you woulld have really been pissed off when coal replaced wood. One time wood was king, and when coal came along, it killed a lot of lumbereer's jobs.By the way, this is true, not bullshit http://explorepahistory.com/st... Fortunately however, all of the coal barons were of impeccable character and honesty, unlike these criminals who are so unamerican that they eschew black lung disease.

Alternative news report - O'Blama was seen at the great Bowling Green Massacre killing honest out of work coal workers with a broken solar panel, then holding up hhis mooslim birth certificate chanting to Allah, and giving his wholee classified information collection to Hellary, while he drank the blood of his victims.

See, I can spout bullshit too!

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

> Oh please...coal mining has become too expensive and unproductive to sustain itself in any reasonable way. Even with massive subsidies it would never make a comeback.

That's ok, my state will still be all fucked up once the coal mining industry collapses for good. Same with the frackers. Their industry is apparently going tits-up, but when they're gone all the hilltops will still be fucked. Yay externalized costs...

Re:Not too surprising

[Ol Olsoc]

Oh please...coal mining has become too expensive and unproductive to sustain itself in any reasonable way.

Mining it isn't quite like it used to be either. Even though it dosn't employ many people to do the work, one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain, and dump the tailings in the next valley over. Aside from freaking people out with the look, it pretty much completely destroys the local ecosystem that cannot be mitigated. All in all, not something most of us want in our ex-backyard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nookyler is a much better option than this: http://ohvec.org/high-resoluti...

Re:Not too surprising

[whoever57]

and shoveled billions of tax dollars in to various (mostly failed) solar companies

What of it? VC companies regularly expect about 1 in 10 companies to succeed. But more importantly, the green energy fund made a profit for the USA.

Or do you have some objection to the US government investing in the US and making a profit on the investment?

Re:Not too surprising

[dbIII]

The mining isn't that expensive but the fuel costs are not the only thing you need to pay to run a coal fired power station. Coal mining is likely to reduce but it's not going away - steel production needs coal for reasons of chemistry (reducing iron oxide to iron) and not heat. Of course the steel is probably going to be made in other countries.

Re:Not too surprising

[fahrbot-bot]

... one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain, and dump the tailings in the next valley over. Aside from freaking people out with the look, it pretty much completely destroys the local ecosystem that cannot be mitigated.

Don't forget water pollution from the runoff !!

Re:Not too surprising

[whoever57]

The mining isn't that expensive

Only because the mining companies only pay a fraction of the costs that society as a whole incurs. Most of their costs are externalized.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your dick out of your mouth and read asshat.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep we need to tax them for promoting plant growth.

Re:Not too surprising

[Crashmarik]

Sorry but it's disingenuous to say that made a profit when it's subsidized.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find the slight boost to plant growth is dramatically outweighed by the approx. $250 billion in annual health costs alone.

Did you know that about 100,000 miners have been killed in coal mine accidents since 1900, in the US alone? And a further 200,000 died from black lung disease.

Re:Not too surprising

[F34nor]

NPR just showed that Black Lung is dramatically underreported.

Re:Not too surprising

[F34nor]

About 8 years too late give or take but isn't that what Trump was saying he was going to do?

Re:Not too surprising

[gtall]

What you left unsaid was the cost of coal that tends to get left by the wayside. As others have mentioned, the degradation of the environment, the pollution, the lost lives to emphysema and other lung conditions, carbon pollution raising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, etc.

Re:Not too surprising

[gtall]

No, that isn't what Trump is saying he's going to do. He wants to privatize government expenditures. Take his alleged infrastructure program, it won't pay for government employment, it is a sop to his contractor friends. It probably won't result in an increase in jobs. However, taking credit where no credit is due isn't a problem for him. He is without honor.

Re: Not too surprising

[dywolf]

Thats not a war kn coal. They just advocated for de-externalizjng the costs, which even the indistry mnows would set them back. Thats not war, thats jaust making them pay for the costa they are currently getting to ignore by passing it off to the public.

Re: Not too surprising

[dywolf]

3%. Thats the number if failed companies. More than offset by thenother 97% of companies that succeeded jnder the loan program. The loan program made a profit for the government. So you ignorant shill talking point can gtfo.

Re: Not too surprising

[dywolf]

Sorry but its ignorant to say what you just said. The gov loaned out X amount of dollars. The gov then recieved back an amount larger than X in loan repayments. Ergo, profit. Just like any other loan with an interest rate larger than zero.

Re: Not too surprising

[MachineShedFred]

My goodness will you use the preview button for more than just an extra click between you typing and hitting submit?

Re:Not too surprising

[MachineShedFred]

You know how investment works, right? You give someone a sum of money, with the expectation that it gets paid back with a margin of profit should the venture succeed. This is exactly what happened. There was a profit paid back to the government on these loans.

Sometimes government investment doesn't even expect the paying back or the profit, expecting the societal result of the investment to be worthwhile. That is what a subsidy is. Money paid by the government in order to reduce the cost of change that the government sees as a good thing.

Why would you have a problem with a subsidy if it's paid back in full, with a profit? I would think that kind of subsidy would beat the shit out of the traditional ones given to oil and coal that never get paid back, and only add additional costs through environmental cleanup.

Re: Not too surprising

[WindBourne]

Please show us what O did that actually cost a single job in coal, and I will show a massive lie.

Re:Not too surprising

[whoever57]

Sorry, but you are apparently an idiot who can't read, or is blinded by your ideology.

Re:Not too surprising

[amiga3D]

Trump getting elected was one shot in that war. Trump happened as an answer to Obama and his prophet Hilliary. Just as Obama happened as an answer to the disaster that was Bush Jr. The bad thing is Trump is making the same mistakes as Obama did his first 2 years and then we'll have to deal with backlash from that which will cause things to spin out of control as we go from one crazy extreme to the other.

Re:Not too surprising

[hey!]

So -- he's saying that if coal plants had to pay for the cost their emissions impose on other people then they wouldn't be economical. How is that a "war on coal"?

Re:Not too surprising

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain

There's nothing "new" about this. "Mountaintop removal mining" (MTR) has been going on for decades, and yes, it destroys the local ecology. It began in the mid-1970s in Appalachia if I'm not mistaken.

Re:Not too surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be under the impression that the money was simply given to solar companies, when it in fact was disbursed as loans. The repayments are greater than the disbursement (as is the case with loans) to the tune of 20%. That's what is generally considered a profit.

Re: Not too surprising

[Crashmarik]

The government loans out x dollars
The government provides x+y in tax subsidies
z (Y + y*z) ? No the government lost money.

Lets see if you can learn something.

Re: Not too surprising

[Crashmarik]

sigh x + x*z greater than (y+y*z)

Re:Not too surprising

[Ol Olsoc]

... one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain, and dump the tailings in the next valley over. Aside from freaking people out with the look, it pretty much completely destroys the local ecosystem that cannot be mitigated.

Don't forget water pollution from the runoff !!

Ugh. Usually there is a stream exiting the valley that gets filled in. Then we get orangewater. Fish love it! Great for people to drink too - just like sulfuric acid koolaid.

Re:Not too surprising

[Rakarra]

Trump getting elected was one shot in that war.

Right, so, start an imaginary war, then fire a real shot in response to it. Sounds like the Spanish-American War again.

No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[SensitiveMale]

That's what happens when the last President, along with the last Democrat presidential nominee, said that he was going to bankrupt the industry.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, what? You do realize that coal is not going to be around forever, right? At some point, the coal was going to stop being a source of employment, either because we ran out of it or because it became so environmentally problematic that it was outright banned.

And the industry should have been bankrupted years ago, the air quality issues alone should have done it.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh

Mate

Coal COSTS MORE THAN SOLAR NOW, and no volume of emotion you have for brown rocks you've never even seen in real life will change the economy here. Plus, it turns out that (unless you want to leave a huge fricken wasteland where the plant was) it costs millions to clean up after. Solar doesn't have that problem after you've taken the ore needed to make the panels outta the ground.

I REALLY hope you didn't think Trump was able to just change the economy to magically fix things for you & yours, or that Democrats hated you personally and were keeping jobs away.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama never said that and neither did Hillary. They did say that coal jobs wouldn't come back, and so we'd need to find another job for them to do. And they were right. Natural gas is killing coal right now, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Complain about democrats all you want, but coal is losing to automation, mechination, and competition.

Trump wants three shifts of coal miners per day and wants to boost natural gas production. What the hell would we do with all that? I guess free energy for everyone? Coal gassification? I guess we could make miners work with hand tools and wheelbarrows that'd slow down product pretty good. We could export it, but with so much supply it'd probably be too cheap to make exporting worthwhile.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it was the president/candidate and not simple market forces.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[SensitiveMale]

Obama never said that and neither did Hillary. .

No idea why I'm replying to an AC, but Obama & Hillary most certainly did.

Obama “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,”

Hillary “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[squiggleslash]

Obama quote is lacking context and absolutely does not mean he had been planning on bankrupting the industry, it's talking about building new coal plants with older technology (source and write-up here. It certainly isn't a suggestion that Obama plans to "bankrupt" the coal industry, simply to require new plants be built using modern, more efficient, technologies.

The Clinton quote is largely correct for context, though it should be pointed out it was in a larger discussion about improving conditions for blue collar workers by replacing coal jobs with renewable energy jobs.

Re:No shit Sherlock. That's what happens

[Rakarra]

I don't have a problem with the Obama quote. For a long time, the coal industry has been generating incredible amounts of pollution and pushing the costs off onto everyone else, whether it's health costs or climate change. An industry that privatizes profits and socializes costs is an industry being propped up and granted handouts. I've seen a hell of a lot more handouts to the fossil fuel industry than I have the solar industry.

When they count noses

[bferrell]

I always ask, how many dollars per nose.

There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.

Re:When they count noses

[Enigma2175]

I always ask, how many dollars per nose.

There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.

Why do you have to ask? That information is right there in the summary, unasked for.

Re:When they count noses

[PopeRatzo]

Why do you have to ask? That information is right there in the summary, unasked for.

Wait, you mean we have to read the summaries now? You're one of those fact-nazis, aren't you? Always trying to supply actual information where it's not wanted.

Re:When they count noses

[bferrell]

Because independently vetted figures are better than industry supplied, self serving figures are better?

Oh wait, as a people, we don't do that anymore. it might be contentious... Can't we all just get along?

Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a decided benefit to investing in renewable tech vs coal and the market has basically decided (for a variety of reasons) that coal is destined to go the way of the horse buggy and solar is the investment that makes the most sense in both short and long terms.

So I guess the question comes down to : why are GOP congressmembers so keen on "picking and choosing" a market they'd like to succeed despite the obvious market forces increasingly pushing the opposite direction? And I think we know the answer : old money funding their cronyism, and the preservation of it.

Re:Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they don't give a crap about market forces. They just care about making their donors richer. And the Democrats have been drifting that way for years.

If republicans actually cared about market forces, they would have demanded that the Democrats require medicare to negotiate drug prices and they'd stop all the anti-worker efforts in the form of union busting.

Re: Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not market forces. It's a combination of intense EPA regulation over the entire coal lifecycle, a sudden surge in natural gas production (which really isn't any better environmentally), and heavy subsidies of solar and wind.

Coal is artificially expensive.
Solar and wind, artificially cheap.
Gas is cheap because the costs are being ignored, hidden, or deferred.

Re:Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[gtall]

Here, I don't think it is old money, there isn't that much money in coal. It is more they figure banging the drum on coal jobs will get them re-elected. They don't think farther than their own re-election. The country can be completely wasted but as long as the get re-elected and their life style preserved, that's just find with them. They are no better than Trump and his Extreme Wetting for new executive actions.

Re: Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[dywolf]

Coal is artificially cheap. Those regulatoons you decry serve to de-externalize costs the jndustry had been able to ignoee for decades.

Re: Coal vs solar decided by market forces.

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, god damn it how dare the Environmental Protection Agency actually do something to protect the environment.

Fucking fascists!

This is just as true as it was last week

[MobyDisk]

I remember this story from when it was posted last week.

Re:This is just as true as it was last week

[pipingguy]

Reality defined via repeated headline assertions and creative statistics is called what again?

McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's dirty hippy energy. Real power is made by burning hydrocarbons.

dupe - cunts

[Anonymous Coward]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/01/28/0542239/solar-energy-now-employs-more-americans-than-oil-coal-and-gas-combined

Re:dupe - cunts

[Anonymous Coward]

Grab dupes by the cunt.

Trump Trump Trump Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Make Coal Great Again

Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

When I lived in West Virginia, coal stoves were very common (wood stoves too).

On a cold and damp bone chilling winter day, nothing warms as well as a coal stove. Coal smoke smells good too, sweet and not as acrid as wood smoke. Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel? Ha. You can't get enough electricity out of a solar panel to warm a house in cold weather, certainly not at the favorable cost/benefit ratio which coal provides.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Bruce Perens]

The solar system on my RV runs the 'fridge, so we cool our food "next to" solar panels. We heat it with clean natural gas, which warms every bit as much as we'd like it to warm, and doesn't smell, period.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal is the compressed bones of your ancestors, and the toasty warmth is their love for you.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you fit an entire solar system into your RV?

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Bruce Perens]

You can make a whole universe, and it fits just fine until inflation.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

hey dummy, your site got hacked two months ago.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Ol Olsoc]

When I lived in West Virginia, coal stoves were very common (wood stoves too).

On a cold and damp bone chilling winter day, nothing warms as well as a coal stove. Coal smoke smells good too, sweet and not as acrid as wood smoke. Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel? Ha. You can't get enough electricity out of a solar panel to warm a house in cold weather, certainly not at the favorable cost/benefit ratio which coal provides.

O RLY? We had coal heat when I was a kid, and that stuff had an acrid, acidic smell that brings back bad memories when I smell coal smoke even today. Stoking, removal of the ashes - a major pain in the ass. And the reason you got to feel the heat in the morning was that unless someone got up every three hours, the fire would burn out. Or you could bank it and get cold anyhow.

My NatGas super efficient furnace doesn't require me to warm up on damp bone chilling days because I'm already there. Seems like celebrating old hand cranked cars.

Unless you were trying to be funny - then Okay, carry on..

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar. On a wet day, the propane furnace (which vents exhaust gases to the outside) does a good job at drying the air inside. The best would be a wood stove like a Kimberly or a Cubic wood stove which not just dumps the exhaust outside, but does a good job at lowering humidity inside. No smell from any of that. If I feel like it, I can run a generator, use an electric fan forced heater, and warm the rig up that way.

All the while, the panels keep the batteries charged, and the refrigerator running. RV fridges are pretty thrifty on amps. They average about three amps on a 12 volt circuit, so if you have a good set of batteries and 200-400 watts (which isn't hard to do on a RV... there are a number of vans with 250 watts on the relatively limited space on the roof), you can run the fridge indefinitely. With a propane fridge [1], you are looking at milliamp draws to keep the control board and the propane control mechanism active.

The only time I need more than just power that can be provided by solar is if I have to run an A/C, and I'm not at a campground. Even a microwave can be run for a short time from a battery bank with a decent inverter.

[1]: RV absorption fridges are OK, but the RV industry is shifting to solar panels and compressor fridges, just because it is a simpler technology, and absorption fridges can run at greater angle off level without issue.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[thinkwaitfast]

You should get a heat pump and use solar to heat your RV

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[thinkwaitfast]

You can modify a chest freezer easily enough and run it to refrigerator temps for about 100wh/day. Chest freezers have much better insulation than a standard refrigerator.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[thinkwaitfast]

My neighbor has a wood stove and somebody gave her a bag of coal to burn. I thought it smelled really good.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Heat pumps can only do so much. I have a heat pump on my house, and a natural gas furnace. The heat pump is rated at 30,000 BTU/hr when the temperature outside is 60F, this output drops quickly with temperature. When it gets below 40F the HVAC system switches to natural gas because the heat pump would not keep up. So, one might say that I just need a larger heat pump. When the temperature gets to about -10F the heat pump would actually be removing heat from the house. A heat pump works on a temperature differential, if the working fluid is warmer than the outside air then it will lose energy, not gain it.

This does not apply to geothermal heat pumps but then RVs cannot have a geothermal heat pump by their very nature.

Another matter of heat pumps is their size. Getting a heat pump with sufficient capacity to heat an RV, and keep up with sub-zero temperatures, would be impractically large.

Heat pumps are nice, I have one, but they are not practical for many cases. When I had my heat pump installed I was told by the installers that I was the first person they had to request one. When I got it natural gas prices were high and seemed to be going up. I gambled on the heat pump because it seemed like a small cost (price differential on buying a one-way heat pump, AKA an air conditioner) vs. the lifetime cost of buying natural gas for spring and fall heating (since a heat pump cannot heat in winter). I lost that bet when natural gas prices took a dive.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[hey!]

Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel?

No, but I can imagine someone warming himself next to an electric space heater.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of like the situation of a moth going to flame. Coal smoke may or may not smell good, but it's definitely full of carcinogens, heavy metals and other toxic shit and you should NOT be breathing it if you value your health.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Anonymous Coward]

There are different types of coal. Some smell different from others.

Also, individual senses and tastes may vary.

This has been a public service announcement.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Ol Olsoc]

It's kind of like the situation of a moth going to flame. Coal smoke may or may not smell good, but it's definitely full of carcinogens, heavy metals and other toxic shit and you should NOT be breathing it if you value your health.

A lot of it is radioactive as well.

Let us not forget the great London smog of 1952 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - largely because of coal smoke.

But it is the tragedy of people not knowing or understanding, and yes for some even caring. If the air is clean because of working to keep it clean, people will wonder why we are spending money on it. So we are poised to return to the glory days.

Meanwhile, a vision of back to the future The Cuyahoga river. A river that caught on fire more than once. This is from 1969. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Just remember,regulations kill business. So when it catches on fire again, everyone bend over and take a hundred deep breaths, and revel in it.

Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire

[Ol Olsoc]

There are different types of coal. Some smell different from others.

Also, individual senses and tastes may vary.

This has been a public service announcement.

And it makes a great dessert topping as well - try it!

I work for a small, privately-owned solar company

[Anonymous Coward]

Last year was good, this one is going to be better than the one before. It's a great place to be. And for decades to come, there will be no end to the amount of untapped roofs whose homeowners could save on their electric bills from having solar panels installed.

Look at the graph!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since 2010 all of their job categories are flatlined except one -- installation.

So answer me a simple question: how can the manufacturing jobs be flatlined while the installation jobs are soaring???

This seems reminiscent of Roosevelt's Boulder/Hoover Dam project. Lots of work constructing the damn thing -- want to bet how many people it takes to run it in comparison? Would you be surprised to find that construction jobs soar when new facilities are being built? Building requires a large number of people for a short period of time; maintenance requires a small number of people for a long period of time.

As with any other type of infrastructure, it takes a lot of people to get it in place to begin with but not so many to maintain it. Solar has it's niche in rooftop installations in those areas where it's practical -- and in those places I believe they are virtually zero maintenance systems. So unless you believe these systems just up and implode every so often, expect this surge in installation jobs to fall off sharply as more and more systems are deployed.

For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The states where solar makes the most sense are mostly run by Republican'ts who went out of their way to kill the industry off via things like tinkering with net metering to make the expenditure not pay off quickly enough to make sense.

Also, a lot of the subsidies have now expired, so the cost of providing service has increased.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, out-competed by China of course. They make most of the world's PV panels now. America had its chance to get in on that market, but fossil fuel interests delayed investment too long, so that ship has sailed.

As for a 100% renewable grid, it's completely feasible - read some of the many studies that discuss this. Solar + wind + hydro, wind tends to pick up as solar falls off, wide distribution offsets a lot of the intermittency (west coast solar can supply east coast peak, and the wind's always blowing somewhere), so you need only a little storage to even it out the rest of the way.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Enigma2175]

For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.

That's why solar thermal with a molten salt reservoir makes sense for utility-scale solar. For example, the Crescent Dunes project in Nevada can store 1.1 GWh of power which is 10 hours if it is running at full capacity (110 MW). This allows you to timeshift the power between when the sun is shining and when demand is greatest. Solar could conceivably power the entire grid with a mixture of these plants and PV plants. Not that I think it should, it's quite expensive and nuclear would be more efficient at providing baseload power but solar thermal plants are great for providing peaking capability and to help smooth out inconsistent PV and wind sources.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

BS. China got ahead three ways:

1: They hacked US solar companies, stole IP, and started making panels.
2: They sold the panels for below the cost of the rare earths it took to make them, just because it would put US panel makers out of the market.
3: China has the only rare earth mines in the world for some items, so they can control the price.

Even Europe has put tariffs on Chinese panels.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[dbIII]

Very good idea, I've loved it for decades, only nobody is putting the money up for anything big so large scale thermal plants with a tiny generating cost per MW do not get built. With photovoltaics, the cost for a GW of capacity is insane but the unit size is tiny so they get bought a few at a time.

nuclear would be more efficient at providing baseload power

So the PR says but nobody is putting up the money to build those either for the same reason as above.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

https://www.scientificamerican...

12 cents a kwh before transmission ?

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

Facepalm.

Nobody is putting money into coal because the risk of insane regulation is too high. You don't want to have a 40 year investment killed in year 10 because some fanatic at the EPA faked data.

As for nuclear try again one we just had one go live

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

There's 60 reactors under construction worldwide

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

The reason more nuclear isn't being built at a high rate are liability issues and nimby.

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

P.S. Really at least hit the wikipedia or something before you say shit like that.

I mean were you just hoping that nobody knew nuclear power plants were built ?

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[dbIII]

You again? So you've moved the goalposts from local to global to encompass places with planned economies.
You win your special little game!
Now can you just piss off and stop following me around while we get back to why the above poster is not getting a nuke plant in their state, the one next door or even the same continent?

Re:Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

Now can you just piss off and stop following me around while we get back to why the above poster is not getting a nuke plant in their state, the one next door or even the same continent?

LOL sure go grab some facts it will be a nice change of pace. I just gave you a feed straight from the horse's mouth , you could try assimilating them.

Re: Look at the graph!!!

[dywolf]

Flatlined but nonzero would indicate that they have as many workers ad they need in manufacturing.

Re: Look at the graph!!!

[dywolf]

Judging by the quantity of post you seem to be required to make the paint you very much with his bullshill posts.

Re: Look at the graph!!!

[dywolf]

Judging by the quantity of posts they must not be paying you very much for these bullshill posts you keep making.

Re: Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

innumerate to the end

Re: Look at the graph!!!

[Crashmarik]

What's your going rate for being an idiot ?

Dupe. Posted a few weeks ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they compare to job counts in the nuclear sector?

Jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy when Obama spent 8 years trying to destroy coal and subsidize solar. What do you expect? This isn't free market, it's about trying to buy a result with US taxpayers money.

Coal is OVER

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Coal is OVER, done, finito and it's never coming back, no matter what Donald Trump or anyone else says.

Sadly, the gullibility of coal miners appears to be as deep as the shafts they used to drill. I can't blame them for wanting their industry back, but I do blame them for being so irrational as to not recognize the fact that it's simply never going to happen.

Re:Coal is OVER

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to Uber Trump, the great news is every coal miner can get a gig with Uber immediately!!!

Re: Coal is OVER

[Anonymous Coward]

You really don't like coal miners. Personally I prefer wind over solar, I'm not climbing up there to fix them though! But most of our electricity where I live is the old hydroelectric generation.

Re: Coal is OVER

[dywolf]

Please. We dont need an uber trump. The regular one is bad enough.

Coal to gas conversions?

[Michael Woodhams]

"Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas."

How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions? Clearly you need to be near a gas pipeline. Can you just replace coal fired boilers with gas fired boilers, or is it more complicated? If instead you're using gas turbines, there is much less commonality between the old and converted power station, and less reason to convert rather than start with a green field.

Re: Coal to gas conversions?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not quite as simple as changing a giant lightbulb would be, but yes, it is done. Most often because the plant itself is old, inefficient, and needing severe maintenance and overhaul.

For example, Intermountain is being converted for about half a billion dollars.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[dbIII]

How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions?

It isn't.
I was involved on the edge of one of those proposals in 1994. Putting gas burners in a boiler is a huge waste of fuel and in the long run just gutting the building and putting gas turbines in makes a vast amount more sense than all of the very difficult mucking about with water, steam, etc you have to do with a large thermal power station. Within a very short time running costs of a retrofitted plant would exceed the cost of getting gas turbines. With the idea of reusing the site we couldn't even use the existing stack because the exhaust temperature of the gas turbines would be a lot higher. In the end new turbines were placed elsewhere since selling the site made more sense than trying to reuse a small portion of a very large site, and we would get very little savings by having existing walls, roof and an antiquated switchyard.

Also I think the bit you quoted is simplistic and misleading with the source either not being entirely honest or not having a good grasp on a very major factor.
The plants are closing because they are old and nearly all of the ones closing have exceeded their design life but are kept going by increasingly expensive repairs. Parts of boilers don't cost a lot to fix since they can be done a few tubes at a time, turbine blades can be replaced a few at a time, but turbine rotors are a different story. A combination of heat and stress means they will be dangerous to use eventually with replacement as the only option (and a waiting list of years for a new one - though spares are often kept). Those old plants are going to have to be replaced entirely with something new, and since nobody wants to outlay the huge amount of capital for a large thermal power station they get replaced with stuff you can buy piecemeal instead of putting down the cash for gigawatts of capacity at once.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[AHuxley]

The problem for that is a nation needs lots of cheap gas. Importing e.g. a pipeline exposes a nation to balance of payment issues, international politics and hard currency questions.
If a nation has lots of gas, export might be a worth more than just selling it cheap for local power.
So if gas is cheap, cant be exported at a profit and a nation really wants brand new gas turbines?
Who to buy from? A brand that has a history of gas, nuclear and other turn key turbine builds that are delivered on time, within budget and have quality spare parts?
Or risk a lesser brand who might have to have done turbine work often? Do they have a history of really poor quality spare parts that have to have contractors try to fix complex issues soon after repairs? Try some second-hand gas turbines?
To get all the energy out of gas, the turbine build needs to be really modern, smart and be supported by great workers with all the long term support.
So the coal plant is closed and a really modern, able get the most out of all the gas used turn key project is delivered.
If all the energy is needed out of gas, a new turn key design is the way to go. A decades old spare part hunt in decades is not fun for any big upgrade project.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to convert the Coal fired plant to burn BioMass.
No new fossil fuels being dug out of the ground.

Yet your new President made all those promises about reopening coal mines.
He really is on top of things isn't he.
Oh wait, he does not believe in Climate Change.
Burn that coal baby burn that coal...

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[schweini]

Out of curiosity: why is the conversion so inefficient? I would imagine that gas powered power plants also heat up water, and run their turbines on steam?

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[jjmcwill]

No.

https://energy.gov/fe/how-gas-...

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[schweini]

Oh, ok! So basically a jet engine! Thanks.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[dbIII]

Out of curiosity: why is the conversion so inefficient?

Gas turbines are just so much better than using a gas flame to boil water.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good article on the subject:

The most likely candidate for a coal-to-gas conversion are 50-plus year old units, less than 300 megawatts in capacity and generally early generation sub-critical utility boilers - the least efficient, most-costly to operate and with the lowest overall capacity factor in the coal fleet. The majority of these older, inefficient units are located in the eastern United States. Typically, these plants have limited or no air quality control systems already in place, and the cost of adding an AQCS to comply with regulations is prohibitively high. Most plants west of the Mississippi River built in the 1960s or later aren't as attractive as candidates for fuel switching since they are often larger, more efficient and tend to burn Powder River Basin coal, a cost effective fuel with a more favorable emission profile than the bituminous burned by many eastern plants.

And here's a list of conversion projects being tracked by environmentalists.

Re:Coal to gas conversions?

[dbIII]

Actually some of them are jet engines (although a purpose built device is better). A backup generator at a small power station I did some work at was a 1950s Rolls-Royce Avon jet engine recovered from an old British fighter jet some time in the 60s or 70s. I think it's still in use because despite it's age it wouldn't have a lot of hours on the clock.

Subsidized

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the industry is heavily subsidized with Gov funds in order to balance the books.
It's almost like another government welfare program.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/08/11/can-solar-power-survive-without-government-subsidies.html
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/22/the-solar-industry-cashes-in-on-government-subsidies/
https://energy.gov/savings

Who cares about the absolute numbers

[NotInHere]

Just tell me how many people in the electoral college they represent, and I predict, the coal workers have more.

"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Chas]

Like hell!

Do you have any idea how BIG the install base for solar is going to get?

Right now, solar and solar + battery are at the worst it's ever going to be again.

There's, quite literally, enough first-time install base out there to keep every person currently doing it until they die of old age, with a HUGE backlog of jobs.

And while the panels eventually drop off in efficiency after 20-30 years, there will be enough retrofit work in a couple decades to keep the industry going strong for pretty much EVER.

Not to mention a bit of extra capacity planned into an install can keep an install self-sufficient for decades beyond the initial lifespan.

Another generation or two of improvements in panel construction, battery engineering (with accompanying drops in price) and management software, and we should start seeing fully-integrated solar power and solar power+solar water heating "kits" hit the market. And that's when solar is REALLY going to take off.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Anonymous Coward]

It is in the 'ramp up' stage. Yes, there will be jobs everywhere. Look to the recent oil shale boom as to what the graph will look like. For solar that graph will be extended. But everything will eventually be 'built out'. That is just a mater of time and money.

You are almost there but want it to be 'jobs forever'. There will be just as there will be jobs for coal for a long time. The need will diminish. Probably faster than you are counting on. The graph will be a huge hump then a long drawn out tail. Because of the very reasons you state. The panels are getting better. What used to last 15 years now lasts 25-30. That is not going to slow down. Instead of 500sqft to power a home maybe I need 50. The amount of work done will decrease and the time to replaces will fall off.

I have seen crews come through and reshingle entire neighborhoods in under 2 weeks. Not exactly an awesome job done. But it is just a mater of being methodical and having a big enough crew. If you think the up coming work is going to be top tier work. I *highly* suggest you find a better inspector.

It will probably be more along the size of the shingle/roof industry. In fact those two will probably be the same ones doing the solar installs. Its steady work. Never a shortage. But at this point everyone has a roof...

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[radl33t]

kits are plentiful, they are limited by regulations. You can't put power into the grid without permission from the utility, which typically has rules set by a governing body (PUC)

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Chas]

"At this point, everyone has a roof"

Yet people still replace them periodically.

And new construction creates new roof space all the time...

The number of jobs it's going to create in the next 30 years or so will be phenomenal.

It'll correct downwards again after the initial build-out, but maintenance and new installs will still keep a certain modicum of people more or less permanently employed.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Chas]

What you look of as a "kit" is still little more than a bunch of components with the barest integration done.

In the future we're going to see stuff that you simply unfold, place, hook up a couple wires and power on. Minimal actual "assembly".

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[david_thornley]

FWIW, there are reasons you need somewhat expensive equipment to hook up your own generating capacity into the power grid. Probably the most fundamental one is that the distribution system uses AC, and the lines have to be in phase. Another one is that, if you just hook your solar plant up to the grid, there's going to be a power failure and linemen are going to start working on charged lines thinking they're uncharged.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[radl33t]

Yes, the rules themselves are important. Implementations vary, however.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[radl33t]

No. Plenty of kits are plug and play up to the point of interconnection. Its frankly impossible to fuck up a power optimizer / micro inverter kit. There is no future reality where you will "unfold" and install a grid-connected multi kW solar array without multiple permits and approvals. You just aren't going to willy-nilly mount 1000 pounds of equipment to your roof and feedback to the grid without both building level and interconnection approval.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Chas]

I understand that about the permitting and approvals process.

The grid tie and permitting for install will ALWAYS be the boat anchor in the solar scenario.

I just anticipate the installation and setup process to grow more and more idiot proof.
Most of the people doing installs for themselves do some research. The rest have solar sold to them as "bling" and they're essentially just given an "idiot meter" to show them "SAVINGS!"
What we're likely to see more of are more of the "blingers" trying DIY or DIY upgrades and doing something to put themselves in competition for a Darwin.

Re:"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[DeVilla]

Your explanation reminds me of people who where trying to turn our town into a shipping hub for sand to be used in frac mining. They were promising riches from a booming market. When asked they would say the demand was unlimited as they get a thousand yard stare and start talking about the promise of millions to be had for the town. A year later we were reading about about the ship yard on the river being backed up with mined sand because the frac miners learned how to decrease their "unlimited" demand.

I expect we'll have to switch over to something renewable and at the moment, solar+batteries seems the most plausible. But you're making it sound like a too good to be true sales pitch.

Re:I work for a small, privately-owned solar compa

[AHuxley]

Thats the good part of supporting great local, skilled workers. The system design if its a unique dormer home, not facing a good direction or shaded at times.
Then helping people get every solar rebate or solar tax credit in their state or federally over the years.
Later questions about upgrades to support home battery systems.

Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[mbeckman]

These employment numbers are an anomaly. If they were actual sustainable job, they would be the most inefficient energy jobs on earth. Coal and natural gas account for most of US electricity, with nuclear and hydro falling in 3rd and 4th respectively. Renewables (not including hydro) account for 7% of total generation, with solar at just 0.6%. So more solar workers than coal workers sweat away open a boondoggle: producing just .6% of the power America consumes.

Re: Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[Anonymous Coward]

All coal jobs are solar jobs. So are hydro really.

Probably a lot of gas ones too.

And to be honest, without other stars, nuclear materials would not exist.

Therefore, it's almost certain that 100% of energy jobs in the US rely on the sun, or other stars.

And really, without the sun, we'd be frozen or starving, so 100% of all American jobs rely on the sun.

You're welcome.

Re: Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Tidal energy gets quite a bit from the Earth-Moon system.

Re: Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres perpetual motion energy in the ethers!!!!!

Re:Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[DeVilla]

Not sure why are a marked off topic. These numbers make it look like fossil fuels are more efficient even in the number of people they require. If these numbers are false (I haven't fact checked you) then it's a number of other things, but not off topic.

Re: Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Bogus moderation! This is spot on topic!

There would be more jobs

[dbIII]

There would be more jobs but ideological opposition to solar meant that all the US funded research and development ended up being used for free by the Chinese to make panels to sell to us.
If Carter hadn't put solar panels on the White House and Reagan hadn't taken them down to show how politically different he was maybe they would be seen as the space age technology they are instead of something "green" to hate just to toe a party line.

Re:There would be more jobs

[radl33t]

Yes, this is one of the amazing(ly sad) outcomes. 50 years of basic research and the US then stopped short of growing an industry. Instead let China invest $100b and reap the rewards of what is now a $200b/yr industry on its way to $1T/yr industry with millions of jobs. Seems like a smart investment for a nation state to make. If only ideologues understood the US doesn't exist in a vacuum. The entire world is rallying around new industries and we're about to double down on a dead end. lol. If only I could live to read the history books.

Re:There would be more jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the reason they're "green" is because conservatives let liberals define everything. Solar is a type of self sufficiency. You generate your own power. Most conservatives are all about you taking care of your own and not asking someone else to do it for you. Solar is a piece of that.

So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[Wrath0fb0b]

So the 2015 numbers are 33% coal and 0.6% solar. Or in other words, about 50 times as much coal power nationwide. Normalizing it that way, the solar industry takes 100 times as many workers to produce the same every as coal.

Now, you can argue that solar is a nascent industry and that a lot of the labor is in the build-out. But for now, this is a pretty silly (and expensive) sideshow.

Re:So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[h33t l4x0r]

Coal gets an instant return on investment, you chuck it into the fire and you get heat. Solar has a future payout. It's hard to believe that you can't grasp that concept but let's put it another way: nobody is starting new coal mining operations, but plenty of smart investors are getting into solar. Why do you think that is?

Re:So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The new solar jobs are great; clean the panels with a rag...

Re: So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[dywolf]

And coal used to be 40%, and silar 0.1%. Who gives a shit? Its not even relevent. Coal is mature with no new buildouts, and a single miner can today produce what it used to take 100 to pull put of the ground. How can you shills seriously argue against it on the basis that it provides too many jobs?

Re: So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[Wrath0fb0b]

Jobs are the input of the industry, not the output. Producing the same amount of power with less labor is a good thing.

You might as well argue that we should build roads by having crews of men busting rocks with hammers because it will product 30 times more jobs than using modern heavy equipment.

Re:So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[Wrath0fb0b]

I agree, there is a bright future for solar.

We will know that future is here when solar can deliver the same amount of power as existing fossil fuels for the same cost, counting both labor and materials. This article is emphatic proof that we are not there yet, given the enormous labor costs associated with solar.

I really do have every hope that some alternative form of energy gains traction and reaches the kind of efficiencies needed to displace the old methods. But that hope is not some blind cheerleading that is willing to celebrate before the underlying numbers justify it.

Re: So normalized to the percentage of source ...

[david_thornley]

Sure. However, coal is providing relatively less electricity in the US, and we're ramping up wind and solar. This means that coal power is not employing people to expand the industry, while wind and solar are. To get a good comparison, we'd have to wait until wind and solar are deployed pretty much everywhere they would be.

Or you can look at the costs, which have to include workers' pay.

Not for long!

[Anonymous Coward]

One imagines Donny will crush this sort of thing.

Only because of unequal comparisons

[mysidia]

If you're counting the work involved in wiring Solar panels into peoples' homes as Solar jobs,
then you should be counting the work involved in installing normal Electrical service into peoples' homes as Coal/Natgas jobs.

Re:Only because of unequal comparisons

[cmseagle]

The difference is that people would be installing electrical with or without the existence of the coal/natgas. They would not be wiring solar panels into their homes without the solar industry, obviously.

Re:Only because of unequal comparisons

[AmiMoJo]

No, the equivalent job would be connecting new coal/gas power stations to the grid, and those jobs are counted.

Re:Only because of unequal comparisons

[mysidia]

AmiMojo: That would be a fair comparison, if they were Only counting centralized solar plant installs as Solar jobs,
but that's not what they are doing. Their solar job count is effectively a count containing extra workers installing peoples'
home electrical systems, with a little extra work for a secondary power source.
But the amount of the job that is solar-related is miniscule compared to the amount of the electrical wiring work,
considering the small task of mounting a bunch of panels is a brief task and can easily be done by roofing people.

By doing what they're doing, they are counting work involved in installing normal house electrical as Solar jobs,
but almost all that work installing house electrical is work that would need to be done even if Solar wasn't being installed.

In the 21st century, people need electrical wiring coming into their building and feeding a panelboard, so they
can turn things on in their house.

It's a fair comparison if they only consider labor hours spent actually mounting panels.
Just about everything else is just house wiring install work, and a job involved with any electrical system being installed with
secondary power source capabilities, such as Gasoline generator, which people commonly use.

So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal?

[RightwingNutjob]

In a similar vein, I hypothesize that there'll be a whole lot more farming jobs once we drive "evil agribusiness" into the sea and go back to organic, cage-free subsistence farming. Every man for himself, plus a bunch of pig catchers to take the place of the cages.

Re:I work for a small, privately-owned solar compa

[thinkwaitfast]

I got an email flyer for the company I bought my solar panels from and they were adverting for 14/watt ($140/kw).

For a semester long design project I had in university, I created a very detailed solar simulation and concluded that at below 26 /wattp, solar beat even hydro in cost. And it was a very detailed model including every known parameter (except labor which varied too much and was a one shot expense).

Not a proper count

[bugs2squash]

I think it under represents the jobs coal creates. There's pulmonologists, oncologists, climate scientists, lobbyists, politicians...

And it's still nonsense

[Namarrgon]

Given that approximately zero people are required to actually generate that 0.6% of solar power, I'd say coal is the one looking inefficient - look at all the manpower required simply to keep a coal power plant maintained and running, let alone constantly fed with coal that's been surveyed, mined, processed, and transported to the plant.

Maybe try comparing manpower needed by each to actually add a MW of capacity, instead of to generate a MWh - then you might have a comparison that doesn't look so appalling for coal. Oh, and be sure to stick to utility-scale installations too, since residential coal power isn't popular.

Not about the jobs...

[joao.cordeiro]

WhatsApp moves decisions on the US is the profit, not the job count..

Re: Not about the jobs...

[joao.cordeiro]

Stupid auto corrector..... It wrote WhatsApp in "what moves"

Then that means nearly free power.

[Anonymous Coward]

And if it's free, as in no cost ('cos no jobs in solar any more), then we can start doing more things with power and expand the economy, just like we did with cheap oil. Creating more and newer jobs.

Except it wasn't subsidised.

[Anonymous Coward]

It had a government loan which it paid back, with interest. You know, the "profit" thing. Rather disengenuous to call a loan THAT WAS PAID BACK a "subsidy".

That it isn't more expensive is, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

For huge swathes of the USA solarPV is cheaper than coal right now. Even despite the mismatch in subsidies, and risks. THAT says a lot more about the relative costs.

Look at your own link

[dbIII]

Look at your own link - "planned" and "under construction" are two different things and your own link does not support your irrelevant claim. Also given the Chinese press it's best to count actual operating plants coming on line instead of claims about what might be happening somewhere.

Re:Look at your own link

[Crashmarik]

Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily, with over 60 reactors under construction in 15 countries.

Over 60 power reactors are currently being constructed in 13 countries plus Taiwan (see Table below), notably China, South Korea, UAE and Russia

Ho hum ho hum.Maybe you shouldn't try searching before speaking. You do need to comprehend the results after all.

Is this supposed to be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice how the title of the article, and the article itself, takes it as a fait accompli that solar is 'good' and coal is 'bad' - no doubt because of the mythical 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which they conveniently renamed 'climate change' for when global COOLING occurs over the next three decades...

www.wattsupwiththat.com
www.climatedepot.com

Re: Is this supposed to be a good thing?

[dywolf]

Wow. That was pathetic. i mean whatever theyre paying you, its eay too much.

You counted the ones starting construction in 2018

[dbIII]

You counted the ones starting construction in 2018 in that number as "under construction", while even the ones slated to start this year would be too much of a stretch for an honest person to include.
I know you have trouble with the calendar and thought Bush stepped down in November, but seriously this is even more ridiculous. Why bother to try something like that? It's a bit of an insult to everyone who has the misfortune to read your posts.

it means solar is more expensive than coal

[Anonymous Coward]

What this shows is that solar is a lot more expensive than coal, because you have to hire and pay for a lot more people to make it happen.

This is not good.

People generally have been led to think jobs are a good thing. They are for the person in the job, but they're bad for everyone else, because the more people you need to provide a product or service, the more expensive it is.

Re:You counted the ones starting construction in 2

[Crashmarik]

Start *

* Latest announced year of proposed commercial operation

It really does help to read the fiddly bits.

Matter of fact if you were clever enough to follow the links

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

You would see the number of "PLANNED OR ON ORDER" is actually 160 nuclear reactors

That's one hell of a lot for something no one is building, according to you.

Repeal those unnecessary burdens.

[sethstorm]

Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules

Those rules aren't really about clean anything, just the removal of coal at the whim of environmentalists.

Re: Repeal those unnecessary burdens.

[dywolf]

Who needs clean air?
F that noise, right?

Re:Repeal those unnecessary burdens.

[PPH]

at the whim of environmentalists

Not so much. Coal is being replaced by cheaper natural gas. Gas made cheaper by advances in fracking technology. Which is by no means a friend of the greenies.

Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

Why are you following me around?
Is your life that empty?

Re:Why are you following me around?

[Crashmarik]

Why are you following me around?
Is your life that empty?

How is it a nobody like you comes to be a paranoid megalomaniac ?

Anyway I see you are trying to derail so either come up with some data to make your case or at least apologize to the OP about trying to pass shit off to him.

Re:Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

That dishonest and blaming the person you've decided to follow around? No wonder you've got an empty life.

Re:Why are you following me around?

[Crashmarik]

That dishonest and blaming the person you've decided to follow around? No wonder you've got an empty life.

Well I can certainly agree you are dishonest and blaming person. Freudian slip or just need to confess ?

Re:Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

Ah - another utterly pathetic nitpick on top of the denial. A least I'm not the only one you attempt to bully according to your posting history - but fuck - you must have been incredibly bored to waste time on all that petty harassment.

Re:Why are you following me around?

[Crashmarik]

Ah - another utterly pathetic nitpick on top of the denial. A least I'm not the only one you attempt to bully according to your posting history - but fuck - you must have been incredibly bored to waste time on all that petty harassment.

Endless projection on your part. Tell me are you ever going to correct your statements about the number of coal and nuclear power plants being built or are just going to endlessly deflect ?

Re:Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

You were quite correct once you moved the goalposts to include China - a first for you and those dozens of attempted corrections you have been haunting me with.
So you win - will you piss off and stop your pathetic and childish attempts to bully me and others now?

Re:Why are you following me around?

[Crashmarik]

So you win

You're the only one here that views this as a contest.

will you piss off and stop your pathetic and childish attempts to bully me and others now?

You are on a technical discussion forum. Someone giving you the correct facts isn't bullying, it's helping you. Your inability accept when you are wrong is part of your problem. Look at the Above, there was no "Except China", "Except Russia", "Except Europe", " Except the U.S."

If you stop trying to turn it into a pissing contest when you are wrong, the problem resolves itself.

Re:Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

So if the first actual fact (only after changing the context to an irrelevant one of China and Russia) out of so many attempted corrections helps me than what about those large number of mistakes you've made?
You lose your silly new game - now please piss off.

Re:Why are you following me around?

[dbIII]

are just going to endlessly deflect

Answer the question in the subject line before attributing actions you take yourself to others.

Coal is a poor option

[sjbe]

The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.

"Most abundant energy source"? Nope. Solar energy is far more abundant and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground. The earth receives more energy in one hour from the sun than all of humanity uses in an entire year. "Cheapest"? Wrong again. Currently natural gas is cheaper in many cases at today's prices. So is on-shore wind, geothermal, and hydro. Nuclear is about equal to coal. Solar PV is competitive even without subsidies and falling fast. If you take into account the full cost of coal (including pollution) then it isn't even close to the cheapest option for power generation. Coal only seems cheap because we don't require coal plants to mitigate the full cost of the pollution (including CO2) that they produce. Yes the US has a lot of coal but the best thing we could possibly do with that is to leave most of it in the ground.

If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.

Why would we do such an idiotic thing? Natural gas plants currently make a lot more economic sense and while not clean are certainly cleaner than coal plants. Perhaps you don't care to actually be able to breathe the air? If you want to see the effects of your suggestion in real life I encourage you to go travel to China and see the results of abundant coal power. Never mind the fact that burning all that sequestered carbon is without question going to wreak havoc with the global climate. What, you thought that putting billions of tons of carbon that is currently buried into the atmosphere would come without consequence? That's a foolish and dangerous thing to believe.

Re:Coal is a poor option

[Crashmarik]

"Most abundant energy source"? Nope. Solar energy is far more abundant [mpoweruk.com] and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground.

Hows that go at night ?

Why would we do such an idiotic thing? Natural gas plants currently make a lot more economic sense and while not clean are certainly cleaner than coal plants

Really think that will be the case over the lifetime of a power plant ?

Re: Coal is a poor option

[dywolf]

Guess they dont have batteries over in shill land.

Re:Coal is a poor option

[SharpFang]

" and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground"

Nope, it won't, not from behind the thick veil of smog from all that coal :)

Re:Coal is a poor option

[Barsteward]

its early days but solar panels aren't quite dead on a moonlit night, I found this regarding solar and moonlight. http://weswen.com/news/a-new-t...

from another site
"Moonlight can be used to power PV cells at cost of 345:1. That is, a panel that would normally produce 3450 W at high noon would produce only 10 W of power during the full moon. The quarter moon (50% illumination) would likewise produce only 5 W, and so forth. Concentrating moonlight using reflective or refractive techniques would enhance the wattage. As long as the light has a wavelength within 400-1127 nm (violet to near-infrared), the PV cell will convert it to electricity. It doesn't matter if it is sunlight, moonlight or flashlight."

Apples an Oranges

[mschaffer]

Just goes to show you that anyone can compare numbers and draw conclusions---whether it makes sense or not.
Different industries. Different kinds of products (minerals versus engineered product). Sure, why not compare meaningless metrics.

Subsidizing dirty energy

[sjbe]

"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"

No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.

The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.

That's not how investing in new technologies works. Nothing new is cheaper until it can get to sufficient scale. Cars were not cheaper than horses for quite a number of years after the car was invented. Email wasn't cheaper than postal mail at first. Furthermore when you take the full cost of coal (including pollution mitigation), solar and wind are cheaper TODAY - without subsidies even. They only seem more expensive because coal doesn't have to clean up after itself. When we stop allowing fossil fuels to dump endless amounts of pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere without direct economic cost, then you can come and tell me how expensive wind and solar are.

Re:Subsidizing dirty energy

[LynnwoodRooster]

"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"

No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted.

Investing in "dirty" sources of energy instead of subsidizing "clean" ones is idiotic and short sighted.

One man's subsidy is usually another man's investment. When you look at subsidies per kWh output, solar and wind exceed "dirty coal" by orders of magnitude. Solar receives 4.5 times the Federal subsidies as coal and we're getting 55 times more energy from coal tha solar, meaning we're spending over 200 times as much subisidizing solar as coal, per kWh.

Re:Subsidizing dirty energy

[david_thornley]

I take it you're counting direct subsidies only. Wind and solar do not do as much collateral damage as coal by a long shot. It's hard to figure, but I'm not convinced that, with externalities accounted for and no subsidies, that coal would look good next to wind and solar.

Re:Subsidizing dirty energy

[Rakarra]

No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.

Most of the "let's build coal plants now, rah rah rah!" folks do not give a shit about 100 years in the future. They got theirs, and they don't particularly care about anyone else. They're fine with the short-term, short-sighted approach, because why should they care what happens to people far off in the future? They're all about delaying and obstructing so they can get it while the getting is good.

Converted energy

[sjbe]

All biofuels are in fact solar.

Yes and no. Most biofuels really are just an inefficient conversion of diesel to biofuel. Solar is a necessary part of the equation but until you can get substantially more of the stored solar out of the biofuel than the cost of the diesel you put into farming it then it isn't really anything more than a conversion with no net energy gain. This is the main problem with corn generated ethanol. It's not clear that it results in more energy than the diesel fuel used to create it.

Re:Converted energy

[F34nor]

You are right that it requires inputs to free up those energies. That being said there is no reason that that diesel cannot be a biofuel -- eventually --. Corn is the worst bio fuel on the planet. How many gallons per acre, 13? Lab algae is at 8000 by some accounts with wild claims up to 8m. But then again what is oil other than subducted algae? Even switch grass ethanol is a joke compared to these numbers. Primary producers win every time.

Re:So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal

[AmiMoJo]

It's like that time we decided everyone had to have running water and a flush toilet in their house, instead of just using the communal well and latrine. Massive amount of labour invested to replace a perfectly good system.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal makes 50x more power for the same amount of jobs.

Re: But...

[dywolf]

Apples and oranges

No surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when the government does everything it can to undercut one industry and prop up the other.

And mimsy were the borogoves

[mpercy]

aays the oaid shill... as he reprats the loe...and mimsy were the borogoves

Or is it

aays the oaid shill
as he reprats the loe
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou'd the gowans fine;

Wasteful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely a decentralized power source isn't as efficient as centralized power sources. There's a lot of waste in generating power at each building.

Re:Wasteful?

[PPH]

Not necessarily. Setting aside the efficiencies of each source, local generation doesn't suffer from the same levels of transmission loss.

Re:Wasteful?

[eyenot]

If you had a system with a lot of moving parts, constant monitoring, maintenance, and upkeep like a coal-steam-to-turbine-to-power or moving-water-the-turbing-to-power or the like, then sure, guy. Sure, you're right.

Nice fucked up way to use a completely irrelevant argument against a more or less passive install-and-routinely-checkup system like solar, though. Even today's smart meters have devices that use cell towers to report status and problems so a similar system in solar can cut that routine maintenance down considerably to only when and where it is needed.

Stop shilling for centralized power despots.

Re:Wasteful?

[eyenot]

Furthermore, your use of the language "centralized" versus "decentralized" speaks volumes as to the who/what your argument defends.

A better, more accurate argument uses language about distribution, not centralization.

It's distributed power that is less efficient. It needs endless miles of cable to be conducted to distant locations that might not even need it at any given time, and along the way there are endless stations and switches to balance the load to make up for this, all of which also waste power in the form of shed heat and spinning fans.

Meanwhile with independent, renewable, passive power systems such as can be had with on-site solar, you can tailor the solar on a site to that site's historical peak usage and if that site allows more square footage that can be dedicated to solar then you can produce power for other sites nearby if you feel like it.

But what you're more concerned about, and this is very plain, is where is all the energy money supposed to go once energy is more or less free thanks to renewables and on-site systems?

Every time I see people and companies dropping off the grid they are quickly chased down by people sporting backwards arguments like yours, trying to force them to still somehow pay power companies, even when they're off the grid.

Re:Wasteful?

[eyenot]

A.C. was just dropping by with the typical, dopy-ass argument of the sort used by energy companies to keep people from becoming non-customers.

It gets pretty bad in some places. I remember in Florida when people started spreading DIY (albeit pricey) methods of feeding power back into the grid and getting a return on your bill, the power companies started giving vouchers instead and those vouchers could only be cashed in at participating locations like the sports arena or mob owned restaurant. Then with the power company feeling their oats over that win, they started suggesting that companies who retool or renovate their plants to be much more energy efficient should not get to pay lower bills. Instead they'll pay the same bill as they normally would based on their historical average usage for that day of the year and anything they don't use will be given to them in the same form of vouchers. That's right around the time I left that part of Florida, between that and NASA continually screwing with the statistics of Cassini blowing up on launch and irradiating the entire coast.

Up here in Michigan there were cases I ran into just as bad. One guy had built a reservoir and was self-sustaining his own collected treated water on his own property. He heated water off some kind of biomass tank underground, and produced a lot of power from a couple of small windmills. He started looking into taking his house completely off the grid and was told he wouldn't be allowed to, that if he did his house would be condemned.

The argument was that local legislation demanded that every home's power supply (that's as complex as the language got) be routed through an approved-of meter, that approved-of meant owned and maintained by an approved-of company (energy provider company), and that the company reserved the right to come out, take readings, and charge appropriately for 'usage'.

So even if the guy kept up his argument for the right to unbridge his house from the power grid entirely, the local energy company still reserved the right - ensconced in habitat regulatory legislation - to actually come out there, read their meter measuring his own usage of his own produced power, and charge him for it as if it was theirs. Otherwise his house could be condemned for not having power "running to it".

Fuck these shills and their stupid fucking arguments and their stranglehold on the people. Fuck energy companies and all of their shills, right into the dirt.

Coal apologists

[sjbe]

Hows that go at night ?

Pretty well. Last I checked batteries are still a thing and the sun is always shining on roughly half the globe at any given time. Plus it's pretty easy to move power from place to place or did you forget about those power lines we have strung up everywhere. And of course there still are nuclear plants and fossil fuel plants aren't going away in the next several decades at minimum.

Really think that will be the case over the lifetime of a power plant ?

Yes. Oh I'm sure the price of coal will fluctuate and become more competitive at times but as long as fracking remains viable, natural gas will have a price advantage over coal. Once solar and wind reach sufficient scale there really becomes little reason to continue to have this massive infrastructure to support coal as a fuel source on the scale we do today. Cheap solar = expensive coal.

Re:So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal

[RightwingNutjob]

No, a massive amount of labor saved so that everyone doesn't have to walk to the town well and get their own water every time. Follow along. The correct analogy is replacing running water with rain barrels and manually operated wells on everyone's property instead of a centralized pumping and distribution system.

Plus amortized cost of coal power plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

The solar system produces electricity. The coal produces heat. You still have to capture it and convert it to electric power. This has cost.

Re: You forgot to account for efficiencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal plants are about ~34% efficient at converting that energy to coal. So... it actually looks more like a wash between the two.

I personally would rather have solar panels on my roof vs a coal burning plant up there... ;-)

Re:So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal

[hey!]

Actually, neither analogy is in any way useful.

Re:So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody who was informed, would know that due to numerous factors, the wasting of stormwater (aka, rain), is a serious problem in many communities, as the flow exceeds the ability of management systems to intake it. Even when it is, it's usually just wasted by the dumping elsewhere, rather than utilized locally.

We would actually benefit from more such water retention methods in those cases.

Plus with your own well, you don't have to worry about the local supply having problems. Lots of folks have to deal with lost pressure that they can't do much of anything about.

Of course, the real reason to use solar panels is the avoidance of the pollution by burning fossil fuels, the convenience of going off-grid is merely a potentially desirable gain. Though of course, with the prevalence of water filters, and the problems in Flint, it is obvious there are severe perils when it comes to a centralized water supply anyway.

That's the problem with your average RWNJ, who lives on frenetic denial and objection, and doesn't look at solutions unless they fit some distorted utopian ideal. Case in point, Trump this morning, tweeting about security and boasting over the well-written order, but not realizing how ham-handed his actions and faulty his orders really were.

Re:So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal

[AmiMoJo]

That whooshing sound you hear isn't the loo being flushed.

More an artifact of coal...

[Anonymous Coward]

This "statistic" is more an artifact of how coal has basically dropped off the economic table because of natural gas production and costs, with leverage from the radically higher thermodynamic efficiency of natural gas via 2-stage generation which can not be used by coal (gasifying coal takes more extra energy than saved by 2-stage natural gas thus the latter still wins).

PV costs have largely only changed because of Chinese over-capacity and dumping of production artificially lower prices but not by enough to create the statistic cited.