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World's Cheapest Energy Source Will Be Renewables Within Three Years (qz.com)
Morgan Stanley researchers predict renewable energy will become the world's cheapest form of power within three years. An anonymous reader quotes Qz:
Renewable energy is simply becoming the cheapest option, fast... "We project that by 2020, renewables will be the cheapest form of new-power generation across the globe," with the exception of a few countries in Southeast Asia, the Morgan Stanley analysts said in a report published Thursday... Globally, the price of solar panels has fallen 50% between 2016 and 2017, they write. And in countries with favorable wind conditions, the costs associated with wind power "can be as low as one-half to one-third that of coal- or natural gas-fired power plants." Innovations in wind-turbine design are allowing for ever-longer wind blades; that boost in efficiency will also increase power output from the wind sector, according to Morgan Stanley.
The researchers also predict America will reach its Paris Climate Accord targets in 2020 -- five years early -- simply because renewables are already becoming the cheapest option for power.
The researchers also predict America will reach its Paris Climate Accord targets in 2020 -- five years early -- simply because renewables are already becoming the cheapest option for power.
If this pans out, the Middle East problems will become largely irrelevant, outside the Middle East. And Saudi Arabia will revert to what it always was.
Try living in a town or city filled with coal stoves. No reason to go back to that.
No, technology, science, and engineering FTW. "free market" parasites show up after the fact and guilt us into giving THEM credit.
What about the cost of energy storage? Producing it is not enough if you can't use it at-will.
If this pans out, the Middle East problems will become largely irrelevant, outside the Middle East. And Saudi Arabia will revert to what it always was.
I’m not so sure about that. There is more at stake in the region than just oil revenue, like competing regional influence (with military benefits), mass migrations, exportable terrorism and, of course, the Israel-Arab conflict in which the U.S. has always been knee deep. Turning the region into a resourceless dump of poverty is unlikely to improve things for anyone. If coal country here in the U.S. can effortlessly swing to radical extremes because their outdated jobs have gone away, think of what’s likely to happen in the Middle-East when it’s their turn. It would probably be smart to help them to a soft landing and rebound to better opportunities.
Net metering at the residential scale. Forcing energy companies to pay retail instead of wholesale is a direct subsidy to residential solar. Requiring some fraction of renewable generation forces the power companies to pay wind even when Nuclear is cheaper. That's a direct subsidy. California, in particular, requires power companies to,buy all available renewable power, whether or not they need it. That subsidizes renewables by ensuring that they never have idle capacity. The EPA Andrew other federal and state agencies giving coal construction, particularly major repairs and upgrades, a pocket veto by just not responding to permit actions is an indirect subsidy, as they are deliberately driving up the construction cost to competition. Ignore direct congressional pressure on major landholders in the desert southwest to force them into leasing their land to politically connected renewable companies at well below market rates. And let's not get started with the average of a decade and a half of regulatory and judicial delays to nuclear construction which increase the cost ten-fold. No subsidies here.
degree in Animal Science
Might be quite useful in the Republican Party.
I can buy a 20 watt solar panel at walmart for a hundred bucks. Standard solar output is way less than the max though, because of clouds, night, sunlight that isn't at the right angle, etc. Usually you figure 20% of max production. So that's 4 watts 24 hours per day. Say it lasts 20 years, which is conservative IMO. 4 watts * 365 * 20 = 29.2 megawatt-hours over the course of its lifetime.
If your ideas are correct, that's a subsidy of $230 per megawatt hour, or $6,716 total subsidy for that solar panel.
Let's think about that for a second. Do you really think the government is shelling out $6,716 every time someone buys $100 worth of solar panel from Walmart? And that there's a giant conspiracy to hide that fact from consumers? Does that seem like a sane explanation to you? Or maybe that website should not be trusted without double checking elsewhere on the web.
Here's my link.
All those money you claim unfair taxation has boost the renewable industry with by paying more than what is was worth?
Not free market. Rather discriminating.
The oil industry becomes less profitable as the tax breaks they have had in the past began to close. All things being equal, expect renewables to get cheaper and fossil fuels to get more expensive just on the tax benefits.
(tax deductions are not a subsidy in the strictest sense of the word)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you're talking about cutting edge stuff. It's mostly the Government. There's a good reason lots of STEM professors carry/carried some level of clearance.
Also see transistors (gov contract to Bell Labs to develop components for radar improvement, general purpose computers for ballistics calculations, ARPAnet, GPS, EPIPEN, etc....). Free market can't be bothered to see things veyond a fiscal quarter.
You are still thinking of the 1980s there AC.
Many of the current solar panel designs do not use arsenic in the panel doping process. Much of the research has been in the development and use of inexpensive organic molecules, and even plastics instead.
This is one of the reasons why the price has declined so precipitously; It is not just China flooding the market with cheap (artificially price lowered) panels-- It is also ACTUALLY LESS EXPENSIVE manufacturing processes that do not incorporate toxic metaloids, like arsenic, which have costly refinement processes with expensive waste materials-- instead favoring organic molecules deposited with a simple chemical reaction onto pure crystalline silicon, or onto a suitable plastic substrate. In some cases, the photon collecting capabilities come from nanostructures generated inside the silicon using laser assisted vapor deposition, and other novel techniques.
If you had actually been following the research and science in emerging panel designs and technologies, you would know that-- but you were clearly too busy poopooing it instead.
If you think that the US or international economy is a free market based on real costs then you are a fool. The game is rigged, and it has always been rigged. Pointing to a study funded by entrenched special interests is, to use your phrase, "bullshit."
If you are so in love with coal power then move to Beijing. You will be coughing most of the time and you life expectancy will decrease by a few years, but it will get you away from that evil subsidized renewable energy.
Choke on that, Mr. Free Marketeer.
Why is Snark Required?
I live outside of the US and I can get a 100W panel for less than $100 so I guess the US is subsidizing solar in other countries too.
That's good, because most of the poor assholes who would otherwise mine coal are dying from either cancer, lung disease or opiate addiction. And you can thank the coal industry for all three.
Coal destroys communities.
All of what you said and literally. I give you the Centralia, Pennsylvania mine fire:
The Centralia mine fire is a coal seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962.
The fire is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet over an eight-mile stretch of 3,700 acres.[1] At its current rate, it could burn for over 250 more years.[2]
The blaze has resulted in most of the town being abandoned. The population dwindled from 2,761 in 1890 to only 7 in 2013, and most of the buildings have been leveled.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yeah. Here in NC, the legislature has been mandating wind+solar, so our electricity prices have been going up. We're around $.11 / kw-hr, retail, now. So in 20 years that 20W panel would produce about $77 worth of electricity, valued at current retail price.
But, of course, the true value of intermittently supplied electricity is actually much LESS than the WHOLESALE value of reliable electricity.
Also, the panels diminish in output over their lifetime, AND they probably won't last 20 years, AND they don't include installation costs, AND they don't include the expensive inverter (which also won't last 20 years), NOR the extra expense when it comes time to replace your roof (if you mount the darn things on your roof), etc., etc.
The bottom line is that solar is nowhere near as cost effective as wind, which is nowhere near as cost effective as gas and coal fuels.
It can also be the other way around. Solar production tends to correspond with peak demand, and peaking power costs an arm and a leg. A solar user importing power at night and exporting power during the day is doing operators a favour.
That said, I think it would be fair to do what we do in Iceland with power bills, that is separate the infrastructure cost on your bill (aka, what it costs them to provide you with a power connection, amortized) from the generation cost. So if you want a grid connection, you always pay the infrastructure bill - but your generation bill could be net metered, even negative, ideally wholesale** both ways with time-of-use taken into account.
** Wholesale because you're already paying the overhead cost separately.
Citation needed for specifics showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all. The feds generally have no say in "coal construction" excepting where it touches upon the EPA, which is obligated by law to respond to all permit actions. Coal-producing states are generally extremely coal friendly.
Again, "Citation needed showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all." What you're describing is eminent domain - quite common with roads, oil pipelines, power lines, etc, but can you name a single example of it being used for building "renewable" power plants in "the desert southwest"?
Pure nonsense. Name a single nuclear power plant that has had its cost "increased ten-fold" due to "regulatory and judicial delays". One can easily take a look at power plants that have gone way over budget - for example, here's one of the most extreme cases in modern times. Planned for 2010, but now probably not operational until as late as 2020, and coming in at three times its initial budget. Why? NIMBYs? Red tape? Hardly:
"The delays have been due to various problems with planning, supervision, and workmanship"
"The first problems that surfaced were irregularities in the foundation concrete, "
"Later, it was found that subcontractors had provided heavy forgings that were not up to project standards and which had to be re-cast"
"An apparent problem constructing the reactor's unique double-containment structure also caused delays, as the welders had not been given proper instructions"
"... told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction"
"...are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default."
Tell me, when was the last time that you welded a large-diameter zirconium-alloy pipe and X-rayed it for defects, with any possible sign of imperfection meaning having to cut it off and start from scratch? How many people in the world do you think have that skillset? Because that's what's involved in nuclear power plant construction - it is extremely exacting. And if you think it'd be just jolly to cut corners, by all means hold that view, but understand that I most definitely will not be joining you in that.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
The researchers also predict America will reach its Paris Climate Accord targets in 2020 -- five years early -- simply because renewables are already becoming the cheapest option for power.
And the coal miners will be blaming EPA, regulation and government conspiracy for their loss of jobs. Their "drill baby drill" chants crashed the natural gas prices and made coal unviable economically. People who tell this stark truth unvarnished are pilloried by them.
In fact EPA is what has kept most coal jobs alive till now. All the old coal powered power stations were grand-fathered from most EPA regulations. So even when natural gas becomes cheaper than coal, the new plants have to comply with the latest standards. So the cost of gas plants were high and gas has to become significantly cheaper to make retiring old coal plants viable economically. This was the reason why the old coal plants continued to survive, at least maintaining some level of demand for coal.
Cost of new generation of renewables is within striking distance now, but gas prices can keep falling and stretch the transition period.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because it doesn't have to pay for externalities. People die from the generation of that coal power you buy so cheap, that is why it's so cheap.
Chinese solar panels face anti-dumping tarriffs upon import to the US to combat this, in some cases as high as 239%, due to the low-interest loans the Chinese government gives solar manufacturers. And they've faced these tarriffs since 2012. China, for its part, denies that its dumping, and says that the loans are simply an investment in clean power and an attempt to improve the environment. Of the top 10 manufacturers, 4 are from China, 2 from the USA, 2 from Taiwan, one from Canada and one from South Korea.
China not only produces extensively to export, but also has a huge domestic solar consumption as well. For example, China just completed the world's largest floating solar farm. China is the world's largest market for photovoltaics and is the world's largest producer of solar power. They're on track to have over 100 GW installed solar power by 2018 (up from 77GW in 2016). They also use 70% of the world's total installed solar water heating.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
How exactly is a solar farm supposed to black out in 100 msec? Do clouds move at orbital velocities over solar farms? Or if we're talking solar farms spread across large geographic areas, then relativistic velocities?
Most grid battery buffers have traditionally been used to stabilize frequencies on long lines, having nothing to do with supply constraints. The new, large-scale grid batteries are designed to function as peakers. Tesla's Australia battery, for example, is cited at 100MW with a cost estimate of $62M ($0.62/W), By contrast, a NG peaker usually costs $1/W or more. The former's batteries have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, with a current replacement cost of around $40M (presumably well lower 15 years in the future); otherwise they're largely maintenance free (unlike NG peakers).
At present, NG peakers are still the go-to solution for pairing with renewables. But the numbers on batteries are looking impressive, and they'll probably take over at some point in the future.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.