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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.
Solar power blossomed faster than for any other fuel for the first time in 2016
1) Did you take crammar lessons from Chris?
2) Solar is not a "fuel".
When the performance of these things starts to drop off and they all need to be replaced, are people going to get sticker shock when they not only have to pay more to replace them but have to pay to dispose of the old ones because of "toxic" materials?
At first I thought it said PnV which is different conversation entirely...
Solar panels generally have a 25 year rated life span and, like most modern consumer durables, are effectively embodied fossil fuel energy.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I remember about five years ago, how US solar places were being barraged by attackers from China. Then the attacks stopped. Six months later, Chinese companies were selling PV panels for less than the cost of the rare earths. This effectively destroyed any solar panel makers in the US, and only a few big names survive outside the Mainland, because of this.
Oh well... Is is it true that it still takes more energy to fab the silicon, make the frames, and deploy the panels than they ever get back in their operational lifetime? So much slant from both sides on this that a straight answer is hard to find.
required comment
please, fill us in.
A renewable energy source that requires batteries to be useful when there is no sunlight is rapidly going to price storage out of reach. Alternate methods of storage, like water pumping or flywheels, is going to be the next big thing.
The dawn of the solar age is due to massive government subsidies that circumvent the free market and artificially drive down its cost. Eliminate the subsidies and the solar age will abruptly halt. The true costs are hidden as massive amounts of lost tax revenue due to the subsidies. It is harmful because ending the subsidies won't undo the damage to other industries by eliminating the free market for energy.
Always a bad thing to assume people know your 2-letter acronyms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Photovoltaics (PV) is a term which covers the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. A typical photovoltaic system employs solar panels, each comprising a number of solar cells, which generate electrical power. PV installations may be ground-mounted, rooftop mounted or wall mounted. The mount may be fixed, or use a solar tracker to follow the sun across the sky.
- Vincit qui patitur.
2018 - the Dawn of Linux on the Desktop!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Wind and solar are a tiny fraction of our supply at 2%, hydro 7%, and nuclear 4%. We have a long ways to go, but this is great news, hopefully the scale is now tipped to solar.
And all this is for fixed point energy consumption. Homes, offices and factories. For the transportation sector, oil is still the king.
Trains with electrified tracks and plug in hybrids are the two toe-holes for renewables in the transportation sector. Trucks/locomotives run on diesel, cars on gasoline, planes on kerosene, and there is no viable alternative in sight.
This means all the fossil fuels not used by power utilities, willl end up in the transportation sector. Coal will not be able to come in. But natural gas would make CNG and LPG cheaper and delay the transition of trucks and locomotives to renewables.
Given the long road ahead, thumping chest like this or declaring victory prematurely is very counter productive. "yeah, yeah! these guys have been saying renewables victory is just round the corner for ages!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We need more focus on storage. Give me a reasonably priced battery pack the size of a mini fridge that can run my house for, lets say, 5 days with no sunlight production (because we get lots of snow here) and you may have something.
What are you going to do with the HAZARDOUS materials associated with the panels? silicon tetrachloride, cadmium, selenium, and sulfur hexafluoride to name a few. Average lifespan of the panels is 20 years. Where ya gonna dump all of that "waste" material???
First came the steam age.
Second came the coal age.
Third came the oil age.
Fourth came the nuclear age.
Fifth came the solar age.
Sixth will see the dawn of the crystal age.
#DeleteFacebook
We can be certain that niiggers aren't people. Sure, they're human just like the rest of us, but our society regards them as expendable niiggers. Police kill them without justification and get away with doing so because our justice system doesn't actually provide justice. There is no equality. They are stuck in poor neighborhoods with inferior schools, dangerous streets, and high crime rates. Our flag and national anthem are symbols of a country that was founded on the principles of equality and justice for our. We have fallen short of those principles and therefore those symbols no longer deserve respect because the country they represent is not one we should be proud of right now. That is why I sit during the national anthem and refuse to show respect for the flag. It is not a show of disrespect to the military because our soldiers died for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. When there is justice for all, I will again stand for the national anthem and respect the flag. Racism is as American as baseball or apple pie. When our society stops seeing niiggers in the poorest and highest crime inner city neighborhoods and starts seeing people as valuable as all other people, then our country will once again deserve respect.
I hope my post was offensive. I will stop saying the word 'niigger' when society stops treating people like niiggers and there is justice for all. Offended? Good! Get off your ass and take a stand for justice!
Maybe we should DRM our technology?
Around 2005 I spotted a graph with the projected cost-effectiveness of solar panels compared to oil. The lines were extrapolated based on past trends and crossed around 2015, meaning around 2015, solar would be competitive with oil.
So, I tried to get a jump on things and purchased stock in 2 US solar companies. While the chart was right, the 2 companies I picked were duds. Chinese competition wiped them out. I should have checked the China growth graph also. Some of the Chinese companies cheated, but the damage was done, either way.
Table-ized A.I.
Net Expansion just means more of it is 'being built' because of subsidies and other government perks.
The percentage of installed capacity is a more important thing to consider, because the infrastructure in place still dwarfs photovoltaic cell production.
Anything can be said to be 'dramatically increasing' in comparison to something else, if you pick the right snapshot of time during which a large change is occurring.
I mean, folks can "declare" whatever right? I can declare myself to be the Queen of France.
I've had solar panels for two years now. I pay nothing in the spring, summer and fall months for electricity and far less in the winter than I ever did in the past. There no moving parts. The panels have a 25-year life span. The only thing left for me to do is buy a lithium-ion rechargeable battery for my home so I can have power when the sun goes down or it's really, really cloudy. It's kind of a no-brainer.
Mr. President, stop this communist madness and shut down all scientific institutions! Don't let the technocracy take away our rights! MAGA!!!!
People will be in the dark with a spoiling fridge.
Its about time Texas decides to build the biggest, knowing they will collect insurance - paid by the rest of us whencycle whatever trashes the panels - because god is angry at them.
Solar augments other power generation
Does it make the climate colder? Sun beams no longer reach the ground / roof tiles etc. but are consumed by solar panels which turn them into electricity.
IEA is known for persistently underestimating the rollout of renewable energi. Here's the latest analysis I know of.
Basically, they project a linear growth, even though they've themselves increased their estimates with several percents on each revision of their estimates, i.e. exponentially...
In other words, any discussion based on their forecasts is most likely going to be way off.
And nuclear plants have absolutely no expense involved in maintenance or refurbishment.
So assuming the non-renewable expansions averaged a 50% capacity factor, we get:
We had first mover advantage in solar, but instead of ramping up, we were tricked by academics and Chinese, using their clever reverse psychology, into believing that global warming was a hoax, so that we'd not go full steam ahead and we'd lose the early mover advantage. Now the Chinese have the expertise in building the very soon to be cheapest, cleanest sources of energy and we have to buy it from them rather than them buying it from us.
So either it was a conspiracy, or we're just idiots.
You ARE aware that being [one who nigs] has nothing to do with whether you're black or white-skinned, right?
Correct. Skin color differences exist primarily to regulate solar-powered production of Vitamin D based on the latitude in which one's ancestors dwelt.
Actually Solar would be beneficial, during a disaster. Solar energy is wonderful because it is Energy that each home user can produce themselves without the need of a major infrastructure.
Normally when these disasters take place Damage isn't uniformed. However for the Electric Grid system if something hits the grid, power will go out for an area much larger then the area affected. So today a storm that may had damaged a dozen homes, would cause a community to be out of power. Vs. if everyone had solar, or their own personal power generation. Then just a fraction of those Dozen homes (the ones that actually lost the solar cells) would be out of power, while the rest of the community would be able to function. So for the unlucky individual who did get their power out, they can probably just go to their next door neighbor for basic needs. Vs having a community needing to leave a large area to an other one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
because god is angry at them.
You mean like "for letting fags get married?", that sort of thing?
All for solar, but,no fan of sloppy reasoning and lazy writing. As I'm sure many have pointed out, growth in coal-fired electrical production grew at the rate of electrical consumption, which was relatively moderate for most of their lifespans. The explosive growth in electrical usage is a relatively recent development. Comparing growth of solar production to the growth of coal production, without factoring growth of demand levels, looks pretty, but, is illogical. Calling solar energy clean ignores the manufacturing and transportation of the new products, as well removal and recycling once end of active life is reached. I not aware of any solar energy product, past or current, which does not include a number of toxic chemicals and substances. Not as dirty as coal, or oil, but, far from clean. Who pays for the cost of removal and recycling, or disposal? Where will we recycle, another process which is not nice and clean? Where do we store the materials we cannot recycle? Historical reality: taxpayers in most oil producing areas are on the hook for clean-up costs of tens of thousands of abandoned wells. No one knows how much the final tally will be, but, everyone agrees it will be astronomical. We should expect the same when solar manufacturing and generating facilities reach the end of their active lives.
TFA didn't even mention clean coal!
"Mass manufacturing and a switch by governments away from fixed payments for renewables forced down the cost of wind and solar technology."
Surely it goes, "Mass manufacturing and years of public investment and research into renewables forced down the cost of wind and solar technology."
You could send 136 Deloreans into the past with that kind of power!
Perhaps people don't realize this, but a sentence like this actively kills brain cells. Stupidity, you're soaking in it.
To be fair, it doesn't outfight kill brain cells, but it does actively repurpose them away from gainful employment (which might, in fact, be worse).
First off, you'd want to be comparing per capita growth rates, and confine yourself to developed countries. Exponential population growth, it's a thing.
Then you might consider that coal was mainly used for generation only where hydro wasn't convenient, because hydro was the big story of the day for electrical generation, while coal's glory was steam and steel production.
What an incredibly stupid sentence, precisely sculpted to serve as yet another nail in the ignorance coffin.
Sure doesn't beat much when the sun is down.. and now you have to pay for TWO systems to produce power...
For definitions where all means "all but the good ones".
It is true that solar PV is the largest new build electricity generation component in non-military sources (and, actually, even in military sources, supply lines are difficult to maintain).
The problem is that:
1. residential total energy use is shrinking. Part of this is, in fact, residential purchases of solar PV and powerwalls or similar batter systems that doesn't feed back into the grid, but part is literally the more efficient appliances and lighting of modern homes.
2. the existing base on non solar energy use is quite large. We see the drop of oil and coal and the replacement is mostly natural gas (and also LNG CNG propane etc) for shaping purposes in systems that add solar PV and wind.
3. the cost of solar PV is cheapest in commercial usage (rooftop dead space, think LA warehouses) but most buildings before 2010 were not built to a standard needed to support the electrical and weight components to support adding solar PV, except in a few counties. this is changing quickly, but the lowest cost of solar is industrial scale solar, which costs about half what residential solar PV panels do.
That said, it's good news for the planet. Or, more specifically, the humans on the planet. Earth doesn't care if we go back to dinosaurs, they lasted a heck of a lot longer than humans have.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Please stop posting claims about "installed capacity". It means nothing. Tell me about solar when the actual generated power is no longer down in the noise.
Anyone taking into account those costs for both pv panels construction and disposal?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Here in sunny TX, net metering has to be "allowed" by your local utility and they charge for the service. Public utilities in some states are looking to either strangle individual PV connections or control the process to their financial benefit. Net metering should be a right.
"Mass manufacturing and a switch by governments away from fixed payments for renewables forced down the cost of wind and solar technology. "
So government subsidies were keeping the prices of wind and solar inflated? Who'd'a thought?
Proof-of-Work mining algorithms worldwide consume more electricity than an entire Nation. That's ridiculous. Wasting energy and driving up CO2 levels and temperatures, all for some digital monopoly money that is worthless at the end of the day except to speculators.
Out on the bleeding edge, you can already build electrical storage that is maintenance-free, and does not require grid connection. I built a pilot installation for my radio trailer - I'm a ham operator - where the storage is entirely ultracap based. I've got enough out there to provide about as much power as two 110 AH car batteries, which is more than enough to run the three LED lights in the trailer and my 265 watt consume / 100 watt output (on transmit only, it's about 10 watts consumption on receive) radio. I mostly listen, so that's an excellent consumption to supply ratio.
One of the thing that many people don't appreciate about standard solar panels is that they produce energy on cloudy days, albeit a reduced amount; my system never, ever goes down, because there is sufficient capacity to keep it up as compared to the amount of use it gets.
In the future, I expect the cost of ultracaps to come down considerably, and if that happens, the whole battery issue will go right out the window. Ultracaps have very long lifetimes, just as solar panels do. They're not nearly as toxic, either.
For now, I freely admit up front that the cost to do this was not something that is practical for a large installation, such as that which would be required to run a home with a typical 10 KW electrical service. You'd need a lot of panels and a lot of ultracaps (ultracaps are presently at about 10%-20% of energy storage as compared to a comparable size / weight bank of batteries.) However, that 10 KW service is almost always that large to deal with surge demands, rather than constant demand, and that means that you'd need fewer panels overall. The ultracaps are actually far better at delivering surge power than either the grid or batteries, so that cost is only about what you use on average, not peak usage. The converter (ultracaps have a very different discharge curve than batteries do, and require dedicated electronics to produce a steady output comparable to batteries), however, still has to handle the peaks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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In six months, your nuke station needs to be refuelled. In 2 years it needs a full inspection. In 5 years it needs another. And every five years thereafter.
Your coal station needs refuelling much more often than once every six months.
Both requiring massive payments over 20 years to occur.
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Go google nuclear shutdown france heatwave summer.
The USA takes out their outages in summer from their capacity factor and thereby get their 90% figures. If they included it, it would be slightly higher than the first world average of 60% CF, but not by much. When new designs in the USA are added, their average CF for the new plants is 60%. Because they don't know how often to expect to have to shut it down and therefore cannot include the standard deduction.
The above post titled counterproductive is insightful and frankly good advice. However, it illustrates what is mostly wrong with the world. It is you.
Tribalism runs so deep that you do not even see the ugliness and illogic of your thoughts. The post would have been very productive if it just stopped at why solar may overtake other power sources and why. Instead, it swerves into cautioning against chest thumping. Do you understand why that is so messed up?
One chest thumps when they are crowing victory over a hated opponent. This means you have a hated opponent. By context, this means you think anyone who uses or advocates the use of fossil fuels is the enemy. Not someone who disagrees about a technical matter, but an enemy. That dude, is just fucked up.
Do you really think fossil fuel advocates sit around all day and say "Gee, I really love pollution. That cheap, clean fuel makes me sick. I want to spend the most money that I can on the dirtiest possible things. I hate birds and babies and anything that could remotely lead to a rainbow. My favorite flavor of ice-cream is toxic sludge." Seriously, are you that twisted that you think this, or is it the case that you do not merely think?
The honest answer is that so far, solar and other renewables do not YET have nearly the consistent energy density to provide stable power for the maximum number of people. It is not even close. This is why people still chose fossil fuels. I am willing to suspect that you do not voluntarily live large swaths of your day without electricity on demand. So, do not for a comment think other people should.
In the future, solar may even do what this article suggests and produce stable, cheap, clean energy. It may even do so without causing more environmental damage to create it, than burning something does. As was suggested, when this happens renewables will replace fossil fuels, because it is the rational choice. Nothing to crow, or chest thump about. There is no enemy. There is just people making economic choices based on hard facts, not fantasies.
Now, the reason this makes you one of the worst people in the world is that this mentality that you have so totally internalizes (with many other's on this forum) is getting people killed. You are dehumanizing people instead of intellectually debating them. This leads to violence, and things like the Las Vegas killings. Your intellectual ancestors are truly the Nazi's.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
If only we could harness the wind power of our politicians, we could get 50% of our energy from that alone!
Who's With Me!!
...of the Age of Solarius!
Any venture capitalist around?
Want to try this out, in the real world?
Paradise Valley? That's sunny enough for the entire world's needs?
Personal Vaporizer? We can harness the hitherto lost energy of vape smoke?
Principal Value? A breakthrough in QM allows us to move Schrodinger waves to values on a different sheaf?
Photovoltaics? Oh yeah...
`Perche non reggi tu, o sacra fame de l'oro,l'appetito de' mortali?'
Thanks to all the tax livestock out there paying for this. The Government forces the innovative and industrious to pay up, and then hands lots, and lots of money as 'incentives' to companies like Solyndra, and to keep the solar schemes running (they generally are not sustainable without taking money from the citizens).
This is quite the Ponzi Scheme.