Dawn of Solar Age Declared as PV Beats All Other Forms of Power (bloomberg.com)

Solar power blossomed faster than for any other fuel for the first time in 2016, the International Energy Agency said in a report suggesting the technology will dominate renewables in the years ahead. From a report: The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar grew by 50 percent, with almost half new plants built in China. "What we are witnessing is the birth of a new era in solar PV," Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said in a statement accompanying the report published on Wednesday in Paris. "We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be higher than any other renewable technology through 2022." This marks the sixth consecutive year that clean energy has set records for installations. Mass manufacturing and a switch by governments away from fixed payments for renewables forced down the cost of wind and solar technology. The IEA expects about 1,000 gigawatts of renewables will be installed in the next five years, a milestone that coal only accomplished after 80 years. That quantity of electricity surpasses what's consumed in China, India and Germany combined.

Comments

Re:Not encouraging

[ctilsie242]

Maybe it will kick-start companies to do more battery research. Better batteries will fundamentally change a lot of items, especially transportation. Get a battery to 1/10 the energy density per volume as gasoline, and you won't need internal combustion engines anymore. Get battery tech cheaper, and Tesla Powerwall like whole-house UPS systems become common, which can allow battery banks to charge when it is cheapest, as well as provide a couple hours of power if the grid drops.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Falling off is not the same thing as not working at all. In some installations, where you have space restrictions and power requirements; this will matter. In other locations (rural/solar farms?) where space is less critical; it won't matter so much. Why get rid of the old panels when you can add a single (newer/cheaper) panel and end up with more total capacity then before? Even users with space restrictions are likely to be able to sell their reduced output panels to someone who doesn't have that restriction. There are airplanes built in the 60s still being used commercially because people still get value out of them. While I doubt that panels will remain viable after 60 years, they might do 30 or 40. The last user might have even bought them at the cost of shipping/handling just so the previous owner didn't have to dispose of toxic materials. Eventually, it will be time to scrap them; but that may well be far removed from the original purchaser and we will have plenty of time to make that as easy as getting rid of used motor oil.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

The largely overpopulated areas will be the same like today:
Beijing, Mexico City, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, New Dheli ... feel free to add your selection.
Population growth on the planet will probbaly stop in 30 - 50 years, so no worries there.

Energy will never be free. The production might be close to free, perhaps you pay 1cent per kWh, however transport, gridstability, balancing power, reserve power, and simple things as metering snd billing: will always have significant costs.

So when we are close to free energy, the prices will drop by half, but not go doown to 1cent or less.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anubis IV]

Sorry, are you referring to solar or current power plants? Because everything you said can apply to either.

As a society, we already see drops in performance when parts aren't replaced or maintained. We already deal with sticker shock when we need to repair or replace everything from turbine blades to scrubbers to pistons that can fail for any number of different mechanical or chemical reasons. We already have to dispose of filters and other parts that are contaminated with toxic materials. None of this is new.

What is new, however, are the rapidly falling prices for solar installs, zero emissions during operation, less frequent maintenance, and the fact that it's looking like 15-20 years may have been a conservative estimate, since we're already seeing them lasting far longer than originally expected. Which isn't to say that they solve all of our problems, nor that they come with no new ones, but suggesting that we shouldn't use solar until we deal with the issues you listed—issues which we already face—is like saying that we shouldn't allow a drug that cures 50% of patients suffering from an otherwise terminal disease, because it doesn't save 100% of them.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

They have no moving parts (unless you use trackers) and they take advantage of "free" energy that will be here as long as the earth is habitable.

I'm always amused that engineers miss the giant fusion reactor in the sky.

I'm still waiting for quantum tunneling junctions. These are solid-state devices which are currently researcher voodoo: you can make one, but most of its surface is useless. Boeng has confirmed they work, just that you make one the size of a quarter and you get a few square micrometers of useful area.

A quantum tunneling junction has something like 55% carnot efficiency for any given temperature drop at any absolute temperature which doesn't physically damage the material. It's similar to a peltier junction, which has 8% efficiency. Essentially, a peltier junction has electrons shifting more or less easily across a junction when a voltage potential is applied, which may cause them to release or absorb heat. A quantum tunneling junction has electrons crossing a dielectric when a voltage potential exists across two plates; the electrons have higher probability of crossing if they have higher energy, so "hot" electrons (absorb photons, i.e. thermal energy) move more-frequently, cooling one side and heating the other.

Cute. What can we do with it?

Ever filled a scuba tank?

When you compress a gas, it releases heat. release the gas elsewhere and it absorbs heat (gets cold). In fact, if you chill the tank enough and open it, you won't get any pressure: you freeze N2 into liquid N2 and now the N2 doesn't contain enough energy to produce force, thus pressure. Boiling is just molecules moving so forcefully they shove fluid out of the way and escape the vessel (buoyancy in a boiling liquid only occurs because the molecules in the bubble have enough energy to push the liquid away, making a low-density region that happens to be in the gas phase; add gravity and the low-density region is pushed to the surface by the heavy liquid).

So set up two compression chambers. Feed from a pump run off an engine; power the engine off this chamber. Use electricity from a battery (charged from an alternator off the engine) to run a quantum tunneling junction and pull heat emitted and from the atmosphere into the compressed air vessel.

Engineers like to point out here that you can't run a heat engine off a heat pump that shares its reservoir. They're talking about the atmosphere being the heat reservoir.

It's not an ideal reservoir.

You're emitting cold air into the atmosphere: the engine expands the air, which absorbs heat and spits out expanded (cooled) air. That air exits at a lower temperature than the air being pulled into the compression vessel, as well as the air from which the quantum tunneling junction is driving heat into the vessel. You're not injecting the cold output (engine exhaust) into the reservoir from which the heat pump (QTJ) is drawing--that is: the temperature of the exhaust isn't averaged with the atmosphere at point of contact with the heat pump.

Second, the atmosphere is heated by the sun.

Not only is the atmosphere big and capable of absorbing a huge amount of cold exhaust before your heat-engine-slash-heat-pump consumes the energy in its shared vessel and finally runs dry, but it's being fed energy from an external power source.

That external energy prevents the atmosphere from averaging its temperature out (in which case, it would already be at a temperature by which you can't run this machine). The heat from the sun is changing the entropy in the atmosphere, essentially playing the part of Maxwell's Demon--a thought experiment about exactly what I describe, with the mistake of not accounting for the work that the little cretin sitting on the gate expended to sort out hot particles from cold particles. The "demon" is being fed from the sun.

I've described nothing more than a Rube Goldberg machine that achieves solar power generation.

Whether you can build one is another matter; but the theory isn't totally-unsound, at least not for the reasons most engineers immediately cite.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

We have no winters in Germany anymore anyway.
If there is frost, it is for a week ... another week later. Does it snow? Sometimes. The last 30 years I perhaps had to clean the pavement 10 times.
Average winter temperature, even at night, is significantly above freezing point ... since decades.
As a child we had -30 degrees C ... snow up to a meter. The army was sent out to clear streets in the 1970s (with tanks!!). Several years in a row!
We had absurd high water marks (floodings) in spring, ships could not travel for months ... I had school free for weeks because the ferry to my school did not go/could not go.
Actually you could not even reach it as most of the road to the ferry was a dam: closed for cars because of fear of damage to the dam.
Now we rarely have a high water, because there is not enough snow in the mountains to cause it in spring.
The days with highest *percentage* of solar contribution are actually winter holidays with clear skies, like 1st of January. Of course the reason is: it is a holiday, peak demand is only 60% of a work day. But it looks amazing when you see around 12:00, 50% of your power comes from solar alone.