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

What happens in 15-20 years?

[RogueWarrior65]

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?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

same can be said of all other forms of power, just on much shorter timelines.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[plague911]

***Longer timelines. ***** MUCH LONGER****

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-plant-aging-reactor-replacement-/

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

Producing energy since September 1969,

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[hawkeyeMI]

I have seen a few reports that they are lasting quite a bit longer than expected and still performing, in some cases 10 years past their estimated 20 year functional lifespan. If we have to make a lined pit in the ground and throw them all in it every 30 years, that will be fine.

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. It is inevitable that they will take over energy production.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

This is one of the few valid arguments against solar. I personally don't think it's a strong enough argument to stop the switch to solar. But now that the switch is coming we should immediately start innovating iterations of solar that are less toxic and infrastructure to prevent solar-related toxins from ending up in landfills. (Plasma gasification anyone?)

CFLs had a similar problem, they were more efficient but contained more mercury.

Aside from the effects of natural disasters, fission reactors would be a perfect energy source if it weren't for the problem of disposing spent fuel, a problem we still haven't solved 65 years after the fact.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[llZENll]

In 25 years solar "panels" will be as cheap and flexible as plastic sheeting. Energy will be nearly free and we'll be struggling with who should be allowed to have children and deciding which grossly overpopulated areas need to "purged".

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

With solar cells projected to last 50 years we're looking at the same timelines

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, if only Solar arrays were like coal, gas, and nuclear plants that require absolutely no maintenance, part replacement or waste disposal.

Oh wait.

Seriously, in 20 years, they can expand their system to cover increased demand, and if these cells fail, they can recycle the valuable metals and purchase new ones. You might as well be complaining that the sun could go out, or that the cleaner air they breathe lets them go outside so much they get skin cancer.

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?

[plague911]

No they are not projected to last 50 years at full or even majority output.

http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/7475/What-Is-the-Lifespan-of-a-Solar-Panel.aspx

http://energyinformative.org/lifespan-solar-panels/

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[PopeRatzo]

Producing energy since September 1969,

Nuclear plants are magical. Hell, Fukushima's been closed since 2011 and it's still producing energy in the form of radiation.

http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[ctilsie242]

Personal anecdote, but I have a former neighbor who still has PV panels up that he threw in his backyard back in the 1980s, and they are still running at their rated wattage, if not a little bit above it.

The nice thing about solar panels is the fact that once set up, assuming no active tracking system, you don't have to do much upkeep. No moving parts, everything is solid state, and if one has an on-grid system, there are no batteries to have to keep watered or replaced.

I really can't think of anything wrong with solar, other than the obvious... it only works a part of the day.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Robotbeat]

Nothing. A well-made solar panel will last 40 years (there are some 40 year old solar panels still operating fine) and will probably last over 70 years: https://us.sunpower.com/sites/...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Lucas123]

Most people have purchased solar through power purchase agreements that are typically 15 to 20 years long. At the end of that time, they can either buy the cheaper solar panels themselves or resign another PPL. Typically, the solar provider charges a set price -- today $500 -- to remove old panels. So, no. Consumers won't get sticker shock in 20 years. In fact, solar panels are becoming more efficient, so in 20 years, you'll need fewer panels to produce the same energy and they'll be cheaper to manufacture.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[cjjjer]

Population growth on the planet will probably stop in 30 - 50 years, so no worries there.

Western civilization population growth on the planet will probably stop in 30 - 50 years, so no worries there.

FTFY

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that silicon is not toxic, it's sand.

Silicon is a *metal*. Sand is a silicate.

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

There's an OSHA limit for silicon particle exposure at the end of the article but it doesn't seem particularly toxic.

The manufacturing process for panels reportedly uses chemicals that are quite toxic, however.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Rick Schumann]

They'll have paid for themselves by then, there'll be more mass production of them compared to now so they'll be cheaper, they'll likely be more efficient anyway and therefore a better value for the price, and I'd think the old ones could be much more easily and thoroughly recycled than many other pieces of tech people toss in the e-waste bin, in fact I'll bet there'll be a 'core value' you'll get out of them *because* of the valuable materials in them.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because recycling glass, aluminum, and silicon substrates is a completely new problem and has no solutions. Yes there are other materials in there. No this is not a new problem.

But that's some nice FUD you are sprinkling around.

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?

[nospam007]

"When the performance of these things starts to drop off ..." ...their new lights, gadgets and appliances will need much less power, so the surplus to be sold is even higher.

Or you just do it like with a heating system, car, roof ...you replace it.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Salgak1]

But not **enough**. After all, Godzilla hasn't risen from Tokyo Bay. . . .

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jellomizer]

Basic Economics states if people have access to cheap power, their power consumption would increase, So they will probably have the same amount of panels, because they will be using more energy.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

I really can't think of anything wrong with solar, other than the obvious... it only works a part of the day.

There's nothing at all wrong with solar as a way to generate electricity.

The problem comes when people suggest that solar is a way to reliably generate electricity. As you note, it isn't.

Since we like the lights to come on whenever we flip the switch, that means that even if the power companies come up with reasonably low-loss storage technologies to even out the part of a day problem, that still doesn't solve the cloudy/rainy day problem. And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.

So at the end of the day, the conventional plants still get built, have to be maintained, staffed, etc., and also have to be spun up and down when needed, which decreases their overall net efficiency. And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.

(I'd be interested to know whether the graph in TFA includes backup capacity, or whether the coal/natural gas installations are solely for standalone capacity. If the former, it seems like there'd be a little something there for everyone.)

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nospam007]

'I winter in Germany, solar output is almost non-existant.'

Get a brush until climate change takes care of the snow.

"Do solar panels work in the winter?

A common myth is that solar panels do not work during winter, but in contrary, the cold temperature will typically improve solar panel output. The white snow can also reflect light and help improve PV performance. Winter will only hurt solar production if the panels are covered with snow."
http://news.energysage.com/sol...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jimbolauski]

Even if solar panel production was clean, there is still one giant hurdle, energy storage. Enough storage to handle a 10 year shade event would probably be the industry standard, that's not going to be small or cheap in most of the country. Solar is not a good replacement until storage gets much smaller and cheaper.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[MachineShedFred]

I would present the same starter question to you: Are you fucking serious? .5 * energy hitting those square feet of your roof during winter > 0 * energy hitting those square feet of your roof during winter.

Oh no, it's not perfect. Well, better that we do nothing at all and continue burning oil and coal until the perfect solution based on unicorn gall bladders is announced!

Don't be an idiot.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

Honestly, I don't understand photovoltaic installations. Parabolic dish collectors with a sterling engine were like 34% efficient and what in the hell is this?!

You can get higher efficiency off thermal because you can get 100% of the light (you know, thermal) as energy. The most-efficient sterling engine ever built hit 38.5% thermal efficiency or 77% of carnot. At 73% efficient light redirection, you're looking at over 28% total thermal efficiency.

The only way you're beating a 73% efficient reflector feeding a 38.5% efficient sterling-driven generator is to make transparent solar cells capturing different bands. Current cells are doped with split-band crystals which excite in multiple bands; if you absorb those bands and transmit the unabsorbed bands, you can use a different material for the next layer down, which absorbs one of the transmitted bands. In other words: capture 19% of the thermal energy as electricity in the first layer, and 15% of the thermal energy (18.5% of what was transmitted) in the second layer. 34%.

Such a cell would be enormously-difficult to construct and have high costs. Maybe next decade.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the problem is snow so much as low sun angle and cloudy days in the winter in northern latitudes.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[AvitarX]

Looks like both charts project majority output in 50 years.

100%-(.05%*50)=75%
or 100%-(20%*2)=60%

Your point is stronger if you use words like "dramatic reduction" or "just over half of the output remaining" or you don't link to things that contradict what you say as support.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[swb]

Won't cheap panels combined with better/cheaper battery storage lead to a trend of just breaking grid ties and running standalone?

I think it's already somewhat practical now if you're willing to accept some limits on max current output, especially at night.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[anegg]

Where I live, electric power is still too cheap (on the order of $0.11/KWH) to economically justify a private solar installation. If the PV panels drop another 50% in price that will change (for me, anyway). If we can figure out how to account for total lifetime system costs for all energy production solutions and charge accordingly, the current PV panel cost might work economically.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Western population growth already has stopped long long ago.
Nothing to fix if you have no clue at all.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

The two references you provide indicate that a reasonable , even conservative estimate is about 0.5% degradation per year. After 50 years that leaves 78% of initial output. Pretty good I'd say!

SB

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Depends where you life.
In europe household battery storages are more and more connected into so called 'virtual power plants'.
They are used for balancing power snd reserve power.
That earns the owners money.
Going disconnected would make them lose that money.
In other words in the center of a city it makes no sense to go disconnected.
In a hut in a forrest up the mountains, perhaps it does.

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]

And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[eriks]

Right now, I have 26 2yr old "265W" panels. They should still put out at least 75% of their rated power in 25 years (those are the replacement warranty terms, they can lose 1% per year, but most don't lose that much, though the curve isn't linear)

I actually look forward to replacing a handful of them in 20 years or so, with the inexpensive ~400W panels that will likely exist by then, which will bring the system back up over the capacity that I have now. That's if I haven't already expanded the system by then, which I probably will.

It's possible (though unlikely) that I'll have to replace (some of) the micro-inverters in the 10-25 year timeframe, though they're cheap, and easy to replace. The system will have paid for itself already by then, even if there weren't any subsidies. The subsidies (and RECs) will allow me to purchase storage in the coming years as well, though I'd probably do that anyway, since the grid isn't super-reliable where I live, and at some point I'd get sick of maintaining my emergency gas generator.

The sticker shock for solar is 100% upfront. Ongoing costs over time are definitely going to be less than other methods of generating electricity, mostly for the obvious reason: you're not paying for fuel -- granted, there are labor costs with any retrofits or replacements, though for a correctly installed system, the hit there shouldn't be too bad either. On my system you remove eight bolts to take a panel off the rack. The inverters have modular connectors. Replacing an inverter or a whole panel should take about 10 minutes.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[seven of five]

simple things as metering snd billing: will always have significant costs.

So stop metering and billing. Duh.

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.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually I would not know how to increase my power usage.
Except for getting lazy and not switching off the lights in rooms I leave.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Maxo-Texas]

Sticker shock?

Lol.

Have you not been following solar?

Solar panels are still improving in capacity by about 5% per year and dropping in price by about 5% per year.

Batteries are *also* doing about as well.

You may have a point on the disposal costs except...

Solar panels don't fail like that (except cheap ones that fail to weather). A solar panel produced will *still* be producing significant power in 50 years. Someone will be interested in using them at the right price.

And the absolute king of disposal cost explosion is nuclear. Plants estimated at 39 million in disposal costs are running over 600 million (and the tab is still going up) and there is literally no place to dispose of some radioactive materials.

---

It's much more likely that lack of critical raw materials like chromium, manganese, magnesium, etc. will bring our civilization to a hard over shoot scenario* before solar panels fail.

*that's when we over a very short period of time realize we are several billion people past the carrying capacity of the planet. We might avoid it- but only by inventing replacements for stainless steel and dozens of other materials all within a 10-15 year window.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

PV cells do not capture thermal energy.
So I have a hard problem understanding your random percentages you throw at us ...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Maxo-Texas]

It's like that in texas too. We used to have 6 good weeks of winter with regular periods longer than a week where there was ice on the ground while I walked to school.

Now, we get a few hours at night of freezing temperatures. But (on topic) we did get 8 weeks of overcast a couple years ago. That would have been a bad case for solar.

That said...

https://cleantechnica.com/2017...

Germany has gotten 85% of their total power generation from solar some days this year and projects that such days will become increasingly common going forward. By 2030, they project year round coverage (which means during sunny months they will have power to spare.).

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Known Nutter]

And that means the top-line numbers of installed solar capacity don't have much bearing on how much conventional capacity they're actually displacing in operation.

Right. That's why system operators like California ISO aren't counting each and every megawatt generated by renewables.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/o...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

http://www.caiso.com/informed/...

Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology. Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.

https://www.edison.com/home/in...

It ain't your grandpa's solar panel anymore. The system is evolving.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

Ummmmmmm....

"Thermal energy" refers exclusively to electromagnetic energy emissions. The representative particle is the photon. Wifi routers emit photons. Cell phones emit photons. Bluetooth devices communicate using photons. All of these things are thermal energy.

PV cells only capture thermal energy, and they only capture it in a narrow band.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

Oh, I see. Thermal energy is the energy internal to the system due to its temperature; thermal radiation is the photon. My bad, wrong terminology.

PV panels capture thermal radiation.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[mpercy]

Pretty much every night all of Africa is in the dark. Same in the US.

Having a backup solar plant in California doesn't do South Carolina much good if the one in Cali goes dark just 3 hours later...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[plague911]

I stand about 1/2 corrected. The original rule of thumb was 1% each year which I referenced, which would be exactly half, which is why I chose the word "majority".

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

It's funny how people post stuff they don't understand. You'd think they'd know better and if unsure would go AC to protect their "reputation" if nothing else.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

We had that same 8 weeks of overcast in Oklahoma. It was kind of depressing for a while there, like living in a sunless world or under a wet blanket. Though interestingly, it took me a while to notice that I hadn't seen the sun in some time.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

Heavy footprint? Solar is installed where there are already roofs, usually. What ends up happening is that we have millions of little generating stations, the tricky part is connecting the different grid segments. A lot of that already exists though, which is why Enron was able to so easily rape Californians with "demand based" electricity pricing a 15 years or so back.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

storage

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[drinkypoo]

Won't cheap panels combined with better/cheaper battery storage lead to a trend of just breaking grid ties and running standalone?

And/or microgrids, but only in the country. In cities, there's too much consumption for that. When you have a bunch of tall buildings jammed up against one another, you'll be hard-pressed to generate all the residents' power from the rooftops without significant efficiency improvements.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[drinkypoo]

Stirling engines require maintenance, PV systems generally don't except for some battery replacement, or maybe the replacement of the odd module. Turbines are nice as far as rotating machinery goes because they require relatively little maintenance, and they can get over 37% efficiency to boot. So if you're not using the convenient, no-moving-parts PV, it still makes more sense to use a steam turbine with your solar concentrator.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

Look at his sig.
He must be making lots of money.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[drinkypoo]

If you had a thing like a peltier junction but 55% efficient, there would be absolutely no need to dick around with baroque systems including compressors in order to efficiently make energy. You'd just use thermal masses, solar reflectors, and heat sinks, and probably heat pipes. You wouldn't need any pumps or indeed any moving parts at all.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[mpercy]

OP:

Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?

Not disagreeing with storage, per se, just his stupid questions and "solution".

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Zorpheus]

I heard some years ago that the inverters only last 5-10 years though. Renewing them is quite a substantial part of PV system cost, or was at least some years ago.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

Yeah, but our whole hemisphere is (excluding poles) experiences a big cloud period lasting anywhere from about 10 to 14 hours daily. We commonly refer to that as night but it might as well be clouds for purposes of discussion. So, we have to deal with supplying power at night, to put up with cloudy days we use storage and the tremendously distributed capability that home solar power capturing gives (surely not all the US will be under cloud cover most of the time). The system would be very flexible and resilient indeed if surges and drops could be handled gracefully.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Applehu Akbar]

PV panels will work fine in winter, provided you keep the snow swept off them, on the same sunny days they make use of in summer. Meaning not so much in those leaden German winters.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Nethead]

So that's where it went!

https://www.seattletimes.com/s...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

I was more thinking about a moving system, e.g. to power your car.

It was more a long and amused comment about free energy from the sky.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Thanks for the links. I'm all for having as concrete discussions as possible about this stuff -- I think people spend a lot of time talking across each other on this because they don't use actual numbers and/or look at the big picture.

Also, SoCal Edison has been bringing online some incredible advances in energy storage technology.

As I read your Edison link, it says they're buying a bunch of Tesla battery packs (400MW in total) and installing most of them as fairly small buffers at some of their conventional plants, and also tagging 125MW of those batteries as a renewable pilot. That's a statistically irrelevant amount of capacity.

Your first California ISO link shows a peak solar supply of about 9500MW, which looking at the area under the curve is probably available about 9 hours a day. Let's go with 10 and say that's about the average sunny-day yield year-round, which should be conservative. So you'd need about 13GW of battery capacity to be able to supply 9500MW around the clock.

Then you need additional generation capacity to be able to charge your batteries with 13GW over your 10-hour sunny period, or another 1.3GW for a total of 2.2GW. Statewide electricity consumption looks to average about 32GW, so now we're up to 66GW of solar generation capacity and 430GW of battery capacity.

And we still haven't touched the cloudy day problem. A margin for that which is both safe and feasible doesn't exist, but let's say we're willing to live with 3x (assuming some level of averaging across the system and with some sort of conventional last-ditch generation capacity for the weeks you're wrong). Now 200GW of solar generation capacity and 1.5TW of battery capacity.

That's about 100x the battery capacity Tesla is promising to build by "the 2020s". Just for California.

You now need to multiply the above numbers by about 15 (back of the envelope -- national average consumption looks to run around 450GW). Even if we say a true national rollout would allow us to significantly decrease the cloudy day buffer, that's still approaching on the order of 7-800x Tesla's anticipated battery output over the next several years. And that's not even taking into account practical realities of availability of scarce resources to be able to build (and, eventually, rebuild) batteries on that scale. Nor does it consider the feasibility of securing the ~20 million acres the solar panels would require (which, remember, must be geographically distributed enough to average out weather patterns). Which, it must be said, is a relative bargain compared to the ~200 million acres it would take for a national wind farm (hand-waving that the average effective duty cycle of the wind is about that of the sun, which it probably isn't).

Systems like these will begin taking hold across the country over the course of the next decade, changing the dynamics of solar energy availability and reliability.

See above. I don't think people really comprehend what it would take for something like this to scale across the country.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Applehu Akbar]

I don't like using recycling cost as an argument against any widely deployed technology. If any electronics is made in sufficient quantities for recycling its discards to be regarded as a disposal problem, we ought to take the time and trouble to develop a customized recycling scheme for it. This should have been done for the lead glass in all those CRTs which have ended up being surreptitiously dumped in arroyos because landfills and recycling centers wouldn't take them. Doing so for PV cells will enable us to recover tons of the rare earth elements we need in making new panels.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Thermal energy is usually brown movement of molecules or atoms. As in 'Theromodynamics'.

Photons that carry 'thermal energy' are photons in the IR band. That are the photons that give you a warm feeling if you hold your hand in fromt of them, e.g. a char coal fire.

PV panels don't capture photons in the IR band ... and they don't capture the movement energy of the molecules in the sun.

PV panels capture photons in the visibke spectrum ... nothing thermal about them.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Yes, you build two plants.
And 90% of the time you have the power of: two plants.
If that is to much, you sell it to 'elswhere'.

And your example is in no way different with a single solar plant and stupid fossile 'back up plant', energy grids don't work that way.

Real estate in the US costs neear to nothing ... no idea what you want to say.
I guess the land I need to build a 1GW solar plant in Arizon costs me $100 ...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jwhyche]

fission reactors would be a perfect energy source if it weren't for the problem of disposing spent fuel, a problem we still haven't solved 65 years after the fact.

Yeah we have. Spent fuel rods can be recycled and most of the fuel recovered. Stuff we can't recycle could be buried deep below the ocean surface in a Convergent boundary where plate tectonics would carry it deep into the earth and out of the biosphere.

All these problems wouldn't be problems if a bunch of smelly hippies from the '60s and '70s hadn't decided to protest everything nuclear instead of just nuclear weapons. Infact just about everything from global warming (if it exists), to plastic in the oceans, to famine in Africa can be laid at the door step of these smelly hippies.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Which part of 'clouds' did you not get?
Daylight?
Water vapour?
Distribution?

There is no way that all of the US or all of Africa is covered in clouds
And I for my part don't care what the clouds do over my solar plant at night ... just in case you want to nitpick about nights.
If you have trouble with the concept of nights, I gladly explain it to you:
dark
sun on the other side of the panet
no solar power

You got that do far ... so why bringing up nights in discussions about clouds?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[David_Hart]

And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?

Yeah, lets completely ignore the energy loss due to transmission. Europe hasn't been able to economically transmit electricity from solar power stations in Africa. That's changing through new power line technology and system upgrades. But if they can barely get energy to Europe from North Africa, what makes you think that they can transmit energy to the US?

http://blogs.worldbank.org/ene...

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.scientificamerican...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Night != clouds.
At night people sleep.
At night factories are offline.
At mit the power consumption is ... google your local load curve.

We talked about clouds for a reason, idiot.
We know it is dark at night, idiot.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[mpercy]

It certainly seems to me that the crux of your argument is that we can use backup solar plants elsewhere for periods of time where local solar plants are not keeping up, for example because they are under clouds. As you say, it's never cloudy over the whole country.

If you're not concerned about clouds covering all your backup solar plants--because hey, there's never clouds over the whole country, right?--it seems to me that you're dismissing the larger and far more regular impact of darkness due to it being nighttime would have on your solar plants. To the point where backup solar plants far away are just as incapacitated as your local solar plants due to darkness.

Clouds over your solar plant during the day are certainly less of an impact that the sun being on the other side of the planet, but we'd still need power during the night, right? And a solar plant on the other side of the country doesn't help. Or more to the point, if your solution for diminished capacity due to clouds is a remote backup solar plant that is (hopefully) not also under cloud cover, I simply fail to see that it helpful. We've got to cover the problem of nighttime power generation, and if we can cover that then periods of clouds are certainly not an issue.

The answer to these problems is not a backup solar plant on the other side of the country, but adequate storage to cover diminished capacities, e.g. due to nighttime, clouds, sandstorms, what have you. Obviously the normal daylight load capacity must be able to support both live load and filling the storage, whether that should be batteries, water pumped uphill, etc. Wind power, unlike solar, is available during the nighttime.

Any solution that covers nighttime outages of solar plants should obviate the similar problem of cloudiness, and far better than remote backup solar plants and crossing fingers about it not being cloudy there too.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jellomizer]

There is not turning off your lights, Leaving your TV on. Buying appliances that have more power vs Energy Star Ratings. Getting bigger stuff...

Just like when Fuel Prices go down, people buy Large Cars and Trucks, when prices get high, they buy the smaller cars or ones that use less fuel.

In college we didn't have to pay (directly) for Heat or electricity. So we left our Desktop Computers on all the time, with the monitors playing fancy screen savers which looked cool. If in winter it was too hot in the room, we just opened a window vs turning the heat down, because it takes less time to warm up again if it got too cold. We would take long Hot Showers...

In short our power usage is based on what we pay. If Solar Energy is very cheap, when we upgrade, we would probably be using more power so will get more power as to maintain your comfort level.

It is easy to fall into a comfortable life style, it is harder to go back.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

We can get solar energy very cheaply from north africa to europe.
Most certainly more cheaply than water power from Norway to Spain.

But we lack somthing important: we have no solar plants in north africa. Idiot.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

We, my parent and me, talked about clouds.

You are now the fifth or sixth idiot I have to inform: I'm an adult human being. I lived for a few years. The concept of day and night is not shocking new to me.

Perhaps shocking new to you is: at night you need significanlty less power than during daytime.

Go figure. Get a clue. Use google. Get an idea about what a load curve is ... etc. p.p.

Hint: if you would build a 'back up power plant' for every solar plant, 50% of them would idle at night, probably more. Because: no one needs the power.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, in europe people learned how to conserve power decades ago.
This window opening thing is frowned upon very severly.

I know no one who sold his car to by one which needs less fuel because the fuel price changed.

Anyway ... unless I get a new electricity consuming hobby, I hardly can imagine how I need/consume more.

The only thing would be a Sauna in the house ...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Known Nutter]

All great points, and you're right. Storage is definitely the next hurdle and one that will be difficult to overcome. But we have to start somewhere. It wasn't all that long ago when driving ~250 miles on a battery was considered impossible -- or cost prohibitive at best. It's not acceptable to just throw our collective arms in the air and keep doing what we're doing just because the numbers don't work out today. What SCE and other utilities are doing in this area is important, even if the overall impact seems insignificant right now.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Hint: if you would build a 'back up power plant' for every solar plant, 50% of them would idle at night, probably more. Because: no one needs the power.

The nighttime reduction in demand is not nearly as extreme as you're making out. Take a look at a real-world example in California here.

The useful solar generation period ends around 5:30pm. Demand continues to increase (people going home after work), peaking around 8pm and not returning to mid-day levels until around 11pm. That first part of the night takes a big bite out of the period of reduced consumption from midnight-6am.

There will of course be more imbalance in summer, and less in winter. This time of year probably just about splits the difference.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

I'm not talking about california.
I'm talking about principles how grids work.
Night time power usage in germany is 40% of peak of daytime.
That is different in every country, for many reasons.
E.g. in France it is 60%. (their reprocessing plants run over night, and they use electricity for water heating for showers etc. over night)

All that does not change the fact that our parent has no clue ... you don't need a 'back up plant' for a solar plant ... you need a working grid, thats all.

As Europe is interconnected in the world larges synchronous power grid, we have solar power basically 20h per day.

Re: What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

My 10 year old PV array is still going strong and has paid for itself many times over. I know it wont last forever but its required no maintenace in that time and im really happy with it. Of course I should give it a wash to get a couple of % back but hey.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Gr8Apes]

Who cares about reputation?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Second, the atmosphere is heated by the sun."
Um, wrong. At last not directly. The Sun heats the Oceans, and some bits of land, and the Heat that they store couples to the atmosphere. The atmosphere, if somehow liquified, is only ten meters or so thick. The average Ocean depth is some 3500 meters. The mass of the atmosphere is only ~0.5% that of the Oceans. In terms of water content, the atmosphere only has ~0.00001% as much water as the Oceans.
One thing that the atmosphere is particularly good at is moving heat around quickly. We usually call this phenomenon wind, driven by changes in atmospheric pressure. The winds within the Oceans are molasses slow by comparison, but they act as equalizers as well; the shallow California Current actually changes direction twice a year. Deeper Ocean Currents can flow in one direction at a constant rate for thousands of years. It's the heat content of the Oceans that trigger those recent evanescent Hurricanes.
This is the point that Muller et alia have been making for years now, with little notice. Atmospheric changes drive Weather, Oceanic changes drive Climate, and the Oceans _are_ warming. Note that Muller started off as a Climate Skeptic...
So logically, for large scale extraction of Energy, for Continental level Heat Pumping, screw the atmosphere, the Oceans are where it's at.

BTW, I wouldn't toss the phrase "Quantum Tunneling" as easily around as you have. A phrase coined by Gamow and experimentally proven by Ghiorso, it refers to the _smallest_ possible transfer of Energy in terms of probability. The Experiments involved Fusion below the Coulomb Barrier; what Al initially termed "Cold Fusion", a phrase stolen without any comprehension by some Mormon nutters. In "Cold Fusion", Nuclei fuse by a "Tunneling" process, without any excess of energy being spat out by ejecting too many Neutrons and Gammas. These new Nuclei are thus particularly stable in nature, what Seaborg termed "The Island Of Stability". But the probabilities are extraordinarily low, with Cross-Sections in the Microbarn to Femtobarn region. "Quantum Tunneling" had other later useful implications, but only at very very small scales. This is what "Boeng" (sic) actually proved: the Process exists thermally, but only as a Laboratory curiosity.
It can't be scaled up. It is statistically impossible.

But I like the way that you are thinking. The thing is, you are thinking about the wrong things. Think vertically, the temperature differences between say the surface waters of Monterey Bay and the water temperatures in the Canyon far below. Just take the enormous Heat Engine circulating there, and concentrate it, with large vertical Pipes. Close the loop; extract energy. It really is that simple.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

Agreed, that's why I put it in quotations.

btw
If dRumpF says fake news, he thinks it makes him look bad and is in denial. It is probably also not fake.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I suggest you actually read what you linked. Or check out the real world where an early (1980s) solar installation in Sweden was dismantled after 25 years to be found generating within original manufacturing specs. It's absolutely possible with quality panels to look at potential five decades of operation, the worst problem being perhaps catastrophic encapsulation failure (with moisture ingress).

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Billy the Mountain]

The purpose of solar energy is to suck in photons and produce electricity (or gather heat). They are not designed to flood airline pilots eyes with glare as that is wasting energy. (That would mean they are doing it wrong)

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't forget transducer lobes!

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So does the manufacturing process for pretty much anything these days, I'm afraid.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Ichijo]

Did you know that increasing supply is not the only way to solve a supply/demand imbalance?

It's true. eBay has known this for years, and time after time has successfully managed demand to prevent too many bidders from winning the same auction. It really works!

Power companies do the same thing. Mine calls it "demand response." Instead of increasing supply to meet demand, they can decrease demand to meet supply in order to keep the lights on. It takes very little power to keep the grid charged, so energy storage during long dark winters isn't a problem even with today's energy storage technology. The only hurdles are political.

So whenever someone tells you that renewables require a fossil fuel or nuclear backup, you can tell them they are full of sh*t.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Gr8Apes]

If dRumpF says fake news, he thinks it makes him look bad and is in denial. It is probably also not fake.

I'm not too sure about that. The cynic in me says that he does it because he doesn't like it and it goes against what he's selling today. To be in denial would mean there's a potential understanding somewhere in there. Until there's some sign of that, I am not holding out hope. After all, does a 3 year old throwing a tantrum realize he looks like an idiot? Or is he only interested in whatever has attracted his attention at that moment and is being denied him?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[DanielRavenNest]

Solar panels in the field degrade about 0.5-0.7% per year in output. They are silicon electronics which by their nature are exposed to a lot of solar UV. This degrades the junctions that make it function. Contrary to the misinformation spread around the web, solar panels are made from silicon, glass, aluminum, plastic, copper, and tiny amount of silver. The last is used for the cell electrical contacts, but it is the thickness of printed ink. All of these are recyclable. Since almost no solar panels (0.1%) are older than 30 years, essentially none have needed replacement due to degradation. Some of them have needed replacement because the weather seals in some early panels did not last well. It is likely parts like the panel mountings and panel-to-panel wiring will degrade faster than the panels themselves, because those parts are not encapsulated against the weather.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[DanielRavenNest]

No utility or grid operator proposes using *only* solar power. But if it is the cheapest producer (which it is when running, because no fuel cost), then they prefer it whenever possible. This is why solar, wind, and natural gas have supplied the majority of new power plants in the US the last 5 years. All three are cheaper than coal or new nuclear. Building such plants isn't cheaper than already existing hydro, nuclear, or geothermal, so the plants already built will continue to run.

The end result is a mix of power sources, like we already have, and likely having 2.2 times the installed capacity relative to average demand (which is today's situation). We have more than twice the capacity for two reasons. Demand varies by time of day and season, and you need to meet the peak, not the average. Also, no power plant can run 100% of the time. They all need maintenance sometimes, or are unavailable for various reasons. For example, California had severe droughts in recent years, so they could not use much hydro, because there wasn't enough water.

So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection. We already have it, and we are not going to get rid of it. We are shifting the mix of power sources, but we will always have a mix.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Ol Olsoc]

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?

We'll always have whale oil.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[losfromla]

I agree with what you're saying.
I must be deeply misunderstanding your sig, which is what I responding to there. Oh! you're saying it is 99% likely to be true news, not fake. I thought you were saying it was 99% likely he was correct in calling it fake news.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[DanielRavenNest]

Rooftop solar can power about two floors of a home, or a big box store that is the equivalent height. It can't power a restaurant or a tall building, they use too much per square foot to operate.

Re: What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate your attempt to educate, but these trolls will complain until a solar car can travel cross country without stopping during a hurricane total eclipse, and back on a single charge from a station which has been off grid and under a volcanoes ash cloud for a month while running an aluminum smelter.

They don't care that the east coast peak power can be provided by more western states. Or that the west coast morning peak can be handled by eastern states. They look for problems. Not solutions. They are whiners and complainers.

So if you want to rebut their willfully ignorant points. Point out that the point of a battery in an ICE car isn't to drive from a to b, but to start the engine. The gas in the tank isn't to get from a to z but from a to fueling/charging point c. Solar is the same, the goal is to let your turn off the least efficient power supplies while solar is available. Eventually coal will be displaced as will other poor forms in which case solar can be expanded to the point where grid based energy storage will be cheaper than even natgas.

Solar advocated don't say use solar and only solar, that is a straw man of the fossil fuel industry.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection.

Nonsense. As you noted, the installed capacity of the current grid is greater than average demand (you say by 2.2 times -- we'll go with that) because the grid has to be able to instantaneously deliver peak demand. A watt of solar or wind capacity cannot be relied upon to deliver that watt when needed to meet peak demand, because the sun may not be shining or the wind may not be blowing at that time. So another watt of capacity has to be available -- on a completely sporadic timetable -- to stand in for that solar/wind unit. The only way to guarantee that to the degree needed to reliably be able to deliver peak demand is to pretty much have that extra conventional watt of capacity on standby in the event it's needed. So a solar grid would have to be roughly 2 times peak demand, not 2.2 times average demand.

That's not at all the same thing as having a bit more capacity to compensate for infrequent events like plants being taken down for maintenance, or the loss of ~5% capacity due to hydro having a slow year.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[aphelion_rock]

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?

Nothing is more toxic than the waste from a Nuclear power station which stays toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.
Coal fired power stations need constant maintenance of their turbines, generators and the equipment that digs the coal from the ground and transports it to the power station.
Coal gets more expensive, Nuclear material (both the initial purchase of, and the disposal of) gets more expensive.

Once you have the renewable infrastructure installed, the cost of the energy ( Solar, wind and water) is the same cost it always was - free!

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Power companies do the same thing. Mine calls it "demand response." Instead of increasing supply to meet demand, they can decrease demand to meet supply in order to keep the lights on.

Demand response aren't intended to decrease net demand as much as to displace demand into lower-priced times of day (e.g., overnight). That doesn't buy you anything with solar. And a system where the higher and lower priced periods fluctuated from day to day and week to week would be largely ineffective because people wouldn't have the price signals they need to decide how to plan their consumption patterns.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Gussington]

When the performance of these things starts to drop off and they all need to be replaced, are people going to get sticker shock

Being solid state, then if $thing cost $1000 now, it will cost $100 in 20 years.

Re: What happens in 15-20 years?

[jwhyche]

Flammable. Seems some smelly hippie doesn't like it when the damage they are responsible for is pointed out.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bingoUV]

You could sequester the carbon from atmospheric CO2 with enough surplus power.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bingoUV]

You could just call it electromagnetic radiation. There is nothing thermal about it, except that the usual source we use to generate the radiation uses thermal methods.

If you take a charged particle in your hand and move it really really fast simply harmonically, you could generate infrared radiation. Go faster, and even X-ray is possible.

Re: What happens in 15-20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to look up the physics. Solar panel output is temperature dependant and 1 degree reduction in temperature means a few percent more power for the same sunlight. It's not quite worth water cooling solar panels, but it makes the difference between summer and winter less dramatic than you'd think.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[TheRaven64]

It's not quite that clear cut. If you have a finite amount of land and you fill it with 12% efficient panels now, in a few years you'll be able to get 16% efficient panels for the same price. This means that you can get 50% more electricity production for the same land area. If the break-even point for your panels was 2 years (very quick for rooftop, but about right for larger-scale deployments), then the break-even point for the new ones will probably be around 18 months (depending on installation costs). So, after five years, your best economic decision may be to replace all of those panels. You can try to sell the old ones off, but if everyone else is also upgrading, then you won't find buyers for them.

Solar panels are much like mobile phones in this regard: they're replaced because people want the newer version more often than they're replaced because they've stopped working.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jellomizer]

1. Energy Prices are generally much higher in Europe. So there is still an intensive, if the college I went to decided to frown and/or remind us of the carbon foot print, and price to the tuition. Then the actions would change.

2. While you may not personally know of a person. Trends show More Fuel efficient cars are sold when/where prices are higher. When prices are lower more high end cars are sold. Fuel prices may not cause the person to switch a perfect good car over night. However when we get a new car, if we are going to pay $50 a month for fuel vs $150 a month on fuel. This will make us choose, if having the 4 wheel drive is necessary, or just being seated higher on the road, or you never need to haul 2 tons in the past 2 years. When prices goes lower so that $150 a month goes down to $80 a month. You may want the bigger safer, nicer feeling car.

3. We are also getting more Always On Technology. In the past 20 years, homes now power Multiple TVs, and Multiple Computers, charge many Cell phones, Tables, We have Video Game Consoles, And to support all this there is a wireless router and internet connection modem. Cable boxes with DVR... All this stuff generates heat so we have more Air Conditioning. Also if we are going to get electric cars in the future they will probably want to be charged mostly at home.

It isn't an Electricity Consuming hobby, but hobbies that consume electricity.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, with proper plating techniques, you can run a sterling engine on something like PTFE. Engines are often run around 329C, e.g. when being fed from waste exhaust as a heat source; you'd have to settle for 260C if your seals were all PTFE-coated. There are flexible elastomers which are modified PTFE, as well as

You can make the maintenance pretty low on moving parts.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, black material captures photons in the visible spectrum and increases in temperature.

Thermal radiation ranges in wavelength from the longest infrared rays through the visible-light spectrum to the shortest ultraviolet rays. The intensity and distribution of radiant energy within this range is governed by the temperature of the emitting surface. The total radiant heat energy emitted by a surface is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature (the Stefan–Boltzmann law).

Britannica.

In case you didn't know, the visible spectrum is between UV and IR.

How does a microwave oven heat up food even though it emits no thermal radiation?

A microwave oven does emit thermal radiation to heat up food. Microwave radiation is thermal radiation. For some reason, pre-college teachers and books have a mistaken notion that thermal radiation = infrared radiation. All frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum carry energy, from radio waves, microwaves, infrared waves, visible light, ultraviolet, and X-rays to gamma rays. All frequencies of radiation heat up an object that they strike and therefore can be thermal radiation. When physicists use the term "thermal radiation", they either mean radiation that has the ability to heat up an object it strikes. Or they mean a broad spectrum of frequencies with a certain shape that depends on the emitter's temperature.

So yeah, a theoretically-perfect black object (we have what, 99.7% material now?) captures a lot more thermal radiation than a PV panel. I suppose a transparent PV passing near-100% of what it doesn't convert to electricity would be a good first pass, and then take the rest through a mechanical system. Still.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Rick Schumann]

If you feel that way about it then sell the used panels to someone for a reasonable price, it's not like they reach a point where the output is zero, they just degrade over time. If you got 10% of your original purchase price after 20 years of use you'd still be doing better than just scrapping them, and especially with the way things are going economy-wise 20 years from now someone will be grateful as hell to even get mostly-used up panels for a cheap price because that's all they can afford and it'd be better than nothing.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nasch]

The infrastructure isn't there to support it (I think we'd need a bunch of HVDC lines) but a solar array in Nevada 68 miles on a side could supply the US with all of its power needs. That ignores the need for storage for night time but the sun is pretty much always shining during the day there. I'm not saying that should be our sole source of power, but it puts the potential for solar power in perspective.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nasch]

Chemical batteries will not be solution for large scale energy storage any time soon. But how much energy can be stored and recovered by pumping a lake up into the mountains?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nasch]

How much does it cost to bury stuff at the bottom of the ocean?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Ichijo]

Why would you need a price signal to tell you whether to do laundry that day when you can look outside and see if it's sunny or cloudy?

In fact, humans have been doing just that ever since we started washing clothes!

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jwhyche]

Actually not as much as you would think. All most all of the technology has been developed. The oil industry has been poking holes in the bottom of the ocean for 30+ years. They have gotten really good at it. The only technology that I'm not sure has come to maturity is the storage part.

The term is called glassfication. Basically the waste is mixed in with slag and turned in to glass. This could be ground up and pumped in to the holes along with a binding agent.

An if you don't want to poke more holes in mother earth just for this issue. Then we can make it even cheaper by piggy backing on oil extraction. If oil exploration comes up with a dry hole examine it for the feasibility of waste storage.

The object is to get the waste so deep in the bedrock that it will eventually be carried into the planets mantel for a few billion years. But the important thing is to get it out of the biosphere.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nasch]

I thought the point of glassification is to embed the waste inside a shell of glass. If you grind it up, doesn't that lose the benefit? Or did I understand it wrong?

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[Gr8Apes]

I changed the sig to be a little more clear. Snarkiness/tonal delivery (in my head) doesn't come over well in less than 140 chars of text.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,
point 2 implies for me: the decision to buy a new car was already made. And the fuel price influences which car to take. My point was: no one is selling a car with high fuel usage to buy a new one with low fuel usage just because the fuel price has changed, again.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jwhyche]

You are correct. I should have previewed that before I posted it.

I should have said is you grind up the waste then you mix it for the glassifictaion process. I would imagine that you want to keep the final product small, say the size of a marble so it can be easily mixed with a medium for pumping. I wonder if ordinary concrete would work for this part of the process.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[nasch]

That makes sense.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[houghi]

Also invested a lot in wind energy and solar energy i Schleswig-Holstein. They have the highest electricity bill of all and can't even export it to other places as the line to do so is still not in place.

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

Up to yoou to find Schleswig-Holstein on the map: http://www.geni.org/globalener...

Re:What happens in 15-20 years?

[jimbolauski]

You missed the 3rd option, you don't understand what a X year weather event is? To put is simply it's the longest or highest stretch of weather over that given period. A 10 year shade event is probably a week of little to no sunlight.

Love how they borrow tech...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[HangingChad]

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?

Although I'm sure Exxon would like that misinformation to stay popular, that question was put to rest long ago, both in terms of the panels themselves and the PV industry as a whole. And that's reaching back to pay for panel development when production was inefficient.

Video if you don't like reading.

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Even if that was true, which it ISN'T, they would STILL make economic sense as a sort of battery that last 30+ years. You could manufacture them near a hydro plant or nuclear plant and ship them.

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[MiniMike]

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?

It's called embedded (or embodied) energy. It's not true, unless there's an incredibly inefficient production/distribution method being used somewhere. Even if it were true, it would still make sense to produce them using other renewable energy types (i.e. hydro, geothermal) and use them where they were replacing non-renewables (though still not ideal).

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[jeff4747]

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?

You haven't spent much time thinking about the energy requirements in making just the cement in a conventional power plant, have you?

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Six months later, Chinese companies were selling PV panels for less than the cost of the rare earths.

In other news, apples are often sold for less than oranges.

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.

Assuming this was ever true with commercial panels, the last such time must have been in the 1970s or so.

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It doesn't take a supergenius to grasp the notion of manufacturing energy being a part of the selling price, or the notion of manufacturers not commonly selling for prices below manufacturing costs.

Re:Love how they borrow tech...

[david_thornley]

Energy costs money, so the total cost of energy used in manufacture is accounted for in the price. If solar cells took more energy to produce than they made, people couldn't afford them.

PV = Photovoltaics

[Arkham]

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.

Re:PV = Photovoltaics

[DesertNomad]

Yeah, I thought it was "Palos Verdes" (LA thing)

As another commenter has said, now that we have so much photo-voltaic power available, we've reached the point where are ready to bootstrap ourselves beyond having to measure in fossil fuel terms. Pretty cool. Bulk purchasers of solar panels must be paying less than 50 cents a watt. The biggest challenge for solar panel lifetime is hail, and they're pretty durable even then.

Re:PV = Photovoltaics

[UnknownSoldier]

I work in software, not hardware, you insensitive clod! :-)

Re:PV = Photovoltaics

[plague911]

https://trends.google.com/tren...

PV is common enough even in the US its usage is about 1/50th of the word "solar"

That amounts to enough to indicate that people on a tech website should know it. It is not an esoteric term that implies snobbishness in usage. Criticizing the original author for assuming that you would know it is ungrounded.

Re:PV = Photovoltaics

[K. S. Kyosuke]

We're so, so sorry, we completely forgot that there had never been an article on photovoltaic on /. before.

Re:PV

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea what PV was:

photovoltaic

Aren't abbreviations supposed to be spelled out before first use?

Re:What is "PV"?

[Bruinwar]

Photovoltaics.

Bing! The best way to google something!

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:Rather a Short 'Age'

[spun]

That's already figured into the cost. Still comes out ahead. And once we start using photovoltaic energy to make photovoltaics, we take fossil fuels out of the picture entirely.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, after 25 years it "only" has 80% of its initial rated max output. Which means you can use them for 50 years easily.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[spun]

What about the even bigger subsidies that fossil fuels get? Why don't you mention that? Unlike you, I can back up my posts with facts. You consider Forbes a neutral source? Here you go. https://www.forbes.com/sites/u...

Next up

[LynnwoodRooster]

2018 - the Dawn of Linux on the Desktop!

Re:Next up

[Bing Tsher E]

On Solar Powered i7 laptops with bulging muscular GPUs!

Re:Not encouraging

[plague911]

Battery problems of this nature are hard, very very hard. My random semi-informed estimate is that true grid scale demand shifting battery storage will not be viable to at earliest the end of my lifetime.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[plague911]

There is no such thing as the free market, never has, never will be. Cars as a whole are massively subsidized, via the public paying for roads, gasoline cars were massively by the military investment in product production infrastructure and governmental actions to stabilize oil producing regions, oil production continues to be insanely subsidized but the government refusing to charge a fair price for production on public lands and refusal to tax/punish externalities . Eliminate all subsidies and society will collapse, with you, me, and everyone we know likely dead within a few years.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[angel'o'sphere]

Most solar panels have a WARRANTY of 30 years or more.

No idea why people here on /. are so eager to spread that 20 or 25 year myth.

It begins

[DontBeAMoran]

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.

Re:It begins

[Bing Tsher E]

The Crystal World

Re:It begins

[thinkwaitfast]

The Crystal Method.

Re:It begins

[Bing Tsher E]

The Crystal Radio

Re:Not encouraging

[angel'o'sphere]

We already have that.
It is called 'flow batteries'.

Re:Not encouraging

[DesertNomad]

A renewable energy source that requires batteries to be useful when there is no sunlight is rapidly going to price storage out of reach.

don't see that at all. This is driving energy storage technology in ways it had never been pushed before. Now there's a market for energy storage and it's for the US to lose.

The next decade could be really rough for the traditional energy providers, as we will have to figure out ways to keep them afloat and at the same time, improve our transmission and distribution capabilities. I'm looking at the Texas model, where generation, transmission, distribution, and retail can all be separated, and wondering how that's working out? Is that a model for the future?

Crystal Ball

[Tablizer]

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.

Net Expansion

[Bing Tsher E]

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.

Is this like the year of Linux on the desktop?

[Wrath0fb0b]

I mean, folks can "declare" whatever right? I can declare myself to be the Queen of France.

Re:Is this like the year of Linux on the desktop?

[nospam007]

"I mean, folks can "declare" whatever right? I can declare myself to be the Queen of France."

Does that mean we can eat cake?

Re:Is this like the year of Linux on the desktop?

[Wrath0fb0b]

Yes. You may eat cake.

And why wouldn't they take off

[Lucas123]

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.

Re:And why wouldn't they take off

[Bing Tsher E]

And I pay about $35-40 most of those months for electricity. What is your monthly payment on the loan for the solar panel installation? Or was it a large lump sum payment?

Re:And why wouldn't they take off

[tomhath]

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

You don't have power except when the sun is high overhead on a clear day? That would explain why your electric bill is so low.

Re:PV

[DontBeAMoran]

They're supposed to be, but the Slashdot "editors" seem to assume every reader is an expert is all fields.

Re:PV

[DontBeAMoran]

in all fields.

Re:What is "PV"?

[DontBeAMoran]

Ned? Ned Ryerson?

Does it make the climate colder?

[eminencja]

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 renewable forecasts are not trustworthy

[olau]

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.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[Bing Tsher E]

Point me to a solar panel company that can issue a 30 year warranty and be assured of being here in 30 years. Solyndra?

As opposed to coal plants that last forever.

[Brannon]

And nuclear plants have absolutely no expense involved in maintenance or refurbishment.

Re:As opposed to coal plants that last forever.

[nospam007]

"And nuclear plants have absolutely no expense involved in maintenance or refurbishment."

And they don't have to pay for insurance either, because they ain't got one because nobody will insure them.

Re:When they wear out?

[Bing Tsher E]

Don't be silly. We always kick the can further up the sidewalk.

Plus, there's money to be made in the whole regulatory soup of that mess. Get involved in politics. Become close to the agency heads. Set up a 'clean up' company for your son to run. It isn't easy being green, but it sure brings in the green stuff!

Can't compare capacities between power sources

[Solandri]

Because the ratio of nameplate capacity to actual power generation is not the same for all power sources. If you replace a 1 GW nuclear plant with 1 GW of solar panels, you're going to have a huge, huge power shortfall. To get actual power generation, you have to multiply nameplate capacity by capacity factor. Typical capacity factors are about:

• 90% for nuclear
• 60% for coal
• 40% for gas and hydro (these could be higher, but they're typically used for peaking load since they can be throttled very quickly)
• 30%-40% for offshore wind (yes I know they hit over 60% off Scotland; unfortunately the rest of the world is not so fortunate to have such consistent winds)
• 20%-25% for onshore wind
• 14.5% for PV solar in the continental U.S. About 19% in the desert southwest, 10% in the northern latitudes (including northern Europe). This accounts for angle of the sun, night, weather, as well as some downtime for maintenance.

165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply.

So assuming the non-renewable expansions averaged a 50% capacity factor, we get:

• 165 GW or renewables (mostly wind and solar) @ 20% capacity factor = 33 GW actual production.
• 82.5 GW of non-renewables @ 50% capacity factor = 41.25 GW actual production.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[thinkwaitfast]

I remember a couple years ago when it was 1 GW actual production.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[nospam007]

*Typical capacity factors are about:

        90% for nuclear..."

Article is bullshit. Nuclear does work only if cooling works, the article ignores that when rivers are frozen in winter or too hot in summer, the reactors have to shut down, just as the innumerable times when some 'incident' happens.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[dunkelfalke]

https://www.icis.com/resources...

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[angel'o'sphere]

You are a prime example why a capacity factors are a complete pointless metric.

So I will fix a bit for you:
90% for nuclear^H^H^H^H^H^H^H base load plants, regardless if nuclear, coal, lignite, water, gas
60% for coal^H^H^H^H for load following plants, regardless if nuckear, coal, lignite, water, gas
40% for gas^H^H^H and hydro ^H^H^H^H, peaker plants/load balancing plants/reserve energy plants, regardless of ... yadda you get it?

Off shore wind plants in germany often have a CF above 100%, because often enough the wind is so high that they produce 4 times the power of their rated capacity ... so goes your CF and what you actually can measure with it: out of the window.

Solar plants could be tracking ... you know? So: they have a 100% CF from sunrise till sunset, minus the energy cost of the tracking system. Of course they produce no power at night. So ... on winter and summer solistice they had an CF of 50% unless: there is no sun (cloudy). In summer the days would be longer, and in winter shorter, that evens each other out. So the only question is: how many sun hours do you have per year?

No one is so idiotic to use a CF to estimate how 'cool' his PV installation is. People use 'insulation' at your 'location', converting that into a CF is completely pointless: unless you want to brag on /. with your inferiour knowledge about power plants.

Hint: there are three kinds of hydro plants: pumped storage, flow water (rivers) and dams. All of them have nealry 100% CF, no idea where you got you stupid number from.
A pumped storrage pant will continiously either pump up, or let water downhill to balance the grid. It is basically always on high power tthroughput, either in one direction or the other.
A flow water plant in a river, will always constantly run on 100%, untill there is a summer with low water.
A dam plant will always be either used as base load plant (and run around 100%) or support the ramp up time of the day, so it is load following plant.

No idea what you wanted to calculate anyway :)
The CF of a plant is determined by WHAT you do with the plant, not on what technology it is based.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[dunkelfalke]

90% happens just during few months. The average capacity factor in France over a year is around 80%.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[Ogive17]

If we started producing PV roof panels to deliver the power directly to the home, you would eliminate the power loss via cable transfer that currently exists. That would make up a large portion of the overall gap in efficiency.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[jeff4747]

So assuming the non-renewable expansions averaged a 50% capacity factor

So...you're assuming a lot of nuclear plants were built in the last year?

Um....no. Virtually all expansion (at least in the US) of non-renewables has been natural gas plants.

Re:Can't compare capacities between power sources

[Ichijo]

If you replace a 1 GW nuclear plant with 1 GW of solar panels, you're going to have a huge, huge power shortfall.

Yes, except at noon on a sunny day.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[perpenso]

Most solar panels have a WARRANTY of 30 years or more.

To the original purchasers only, non-transferable to subsequent owners? One average people only own a home for 12 years in the US.

Re:Win quietly. This is counterproductive

[olau]

Transportation sector:

- Cars: battery tech is improving exponentially at the moment, and it's no longer a question of how, but how soon

- Trucks: short range trucks are going to appear in a couple of years, long range are probably not as far off as you might think as people need to take breaks anyway

- Trains: batteries + electrification of some tracks - I've seen an analysis for passenger trains, and it's viable today, some train manufacturers are already looking into it

- Planes: You can produce renewable jet fuel today - it's more expensive, but the tech is there

Re:A great start...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually wind and solar are over 5% of average power supply now and growing exponentially, with large double digit year-on-year percentages. And wind is already well over 10% of power in Europe.

Re:Not encouraging

[WolfWithoutAClause]

They're already for sale. You can store a few hours/days of electricity, no problem at all. They're just about economic now, and still plummeting in price. Tesla is currently installing a whole bunch in Australia for example.

Re:What is "PV"?

[Bing Tsher E]

Rex? Rex Ballard?

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[Bing Tsher E]

via the public paying for roads,

Roads are paid for by the end-user in the form of a gasoline tax.

gasoline cars were massively by the military investment in product production

I suppose we could have defeated the Nazis with horse-drawn carriages....

oil production continues to be insanely subsidized but the government refusing to charge a fair price for production on public lands

You pay for it coming or going. The end user just pays at whatever point.

Re:Not encouraging

[plague911]

No they do not. The best case grid scale they have now is for frequency regulation.

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

I assume that is what you are referring to? They would need a storage capacity of about 150 times what they are installing for your "days" of electricity to be accurate. Completely and utterly out of the question to be cost effective.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[pr0fessor]

Damaging winds, thunderstorms, snow, tornadoes, and damaging hail are all common in my area and a large solar install would be prone to taking damage. Wind on the other hand would do very well so long as you could easily secure the turbine for times of extreme weather.

Re:Win quietly. This is counterproductive

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I agree, we are getting there.

Existing battery tech is good enough for 66% of the cars. It is merely a question of cost.

Deliver vans and mail vans and school buses can switch to battery with existing technology. Again a question of cost

Price break through is what we need now, for cars and delivery vans. And long range fleet trucks will be next with battery swaps. Again price, not range, not new tech.

A conspiracy by the Chinese!

[Mr MW]

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.

Re:A conspiracy by the Chinese!

[ceoyoyo]

That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.

Re:A conspiracy by the Chinese!

[dj245]

That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.

Russia is the bigger winner and has a bigger motive to promote anti-climate-change ideas. Large parts of uninhabitable land become habitable, the warmer parts become temperate and near-tropical, AND a large part of their government's revenue is based on exporting fossil fuels. Russia would be stupid not to promote anti-climate-change ideology.

Re:A conspiracy by the Chinese!

[ceoyoyo]

I was thinking more along the lines of the growth of the Chinese solar panel manufacturing industry. Nobody was seriously going to do much about climate change anyway, until a competitive alternative source of industry came along. China looks like they're going to be the primary manufacturer of the main alternative.

Regulation of solar D production

[tepples]

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.

Re:What happens in Earthquake / Flood Cyclone?

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Not encouraging

[thinkwaitfast]

I'm offgrid and find it very useful. I reorganized my day to do all the heavy power lifting while the sun is up and as a consequence have little need for energy storage. Power management, while too complicated for some people, goes a long way.

Re:Not encouraging

[thinkwaitfast]

Finding a new battery is like finding a new combination of elements that will make a bigger bang when mixed. With a finite number of elements and finite ways to mix them, most everything has been tried.

All good, nothing bad to see here!!!

[tflf]

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.

Re:A great start...

[GLMDesigns]

Take a look at a chart of solar power costs and you'll see that it's an exponential chart. You may see that it's "only" 5% now. But it was at 0% in 1970 and energy use has gone up.

Re:Good grief

[anegg]

Solar is not a fuel per se, but is the exploitation of an energy source just as any other system that helps us do work. The original energy generation just takes place outside of the system, unlike (for example) combustion-based energy production where the system must first combust a fuel, then capture the energy that is generated.

Wind power, wave power, and standard hydro-electric power also rely on exploiting energy generated outside of the system. Excluding forms of energy capture/exploitation that don't generate the energy within the system boundary seems somewhat arbitrary.

Re:Storage.

[thinkwaitfast]

Solar should be implemented where it's most economically viable first. That will take a couple of decades.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[nospam007]

"Roads are paid for by the end-user in the form of a gasoline tax."

'The tax was last raised in 1993 and is not indexed to inflation. Total inflation from 1993 until 2015 was 64.6 percent.'

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

Re:When they wear out?

[nospam007]

"What are you going to do with the HAZARDOUS materials associated with the panels"

The same things as with the nuclear waste. Bury them for 184000 years.

165 Gigawatts?!?!

[Tighe_L]

You could send 136 Deloreans into the past with that kind of power!

Re:What is "PV"?

[Bruinwar]

Funny stuff but no... John Oliver at around 3:20.

idiocy milestone

[epine]

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.

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.

Re:idiocy milestone

[micahraleigh]

Gave up on looking for content in the sea of invectives, which you are soaked in ...

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[angel'o'sphere]

The warranty is to the item, regardless who owns it.
If that is differnet in you country, you have a fucked up law system.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[plague911]

"Roads are paid for by the end-user in the form of a gasoline tax."

Factually wrong. No they are not for the large bulk of costs. https://taxfoundation.org/gaso.... Annnd that is for the current state, The massive build out of the road system was primarily funded by general tax liabilities.

I suppose we could have defeated the Nazis with horse-drawn carriages...."

Nope. Note I do think subsidies are bad when done right, I just brought up that point to illustrate how "free market" crusaders are just completely ignorant of reality.

"You pay for it coming or going. The end user just pays at whatever point."

I have no idea what point you are trying to make.

Re:Niggers aren't people

[Maxo-Texas]

Oh, it's grimmer than that. The father was first put in jail as a young man. Gaining a felony record and never having a chance at a regular life.

Meanwhile, the white kid wasn't even stopped, and if he had been stopped, would not have been searched, have been let off with a warning, or if he had actually have been arrested would have been given a deferred sentence (because he had a bright future), and finally if he had actually been sentenced- it would have been 50% to 90% lighter than the sentence given to the black youth for the same crime.

And yes- everything I just wrote has happened to black and white kids over the last 5 years. It's STILL happening. We need equal justice. If the laws fell as harshly on white families (especially rich white families) then the laws would be changed to be less harsh.

Within the last decade, while minority mothers are going to jail for 11 years for less than a joint- willie nelson was paying a $4,000 fine and being let off for a damn bag of pot.

And it's the same story all over the country.

Black kid has a toy gun- reported as "black male brandishing a piston" police pull up and shoot him dead in literally under 2 seconds on the scene. Meanwhile a drunk white man has a loaded ak-47 and the cops spend a half a hour talking him down.

Just in the last year we had a white sheriff defending a bunch of young white rapists because he didn't want to "ruin their life".

As an older white texan who voted for reagan and bush sr, the injustice makes me sick.

 

Re:Not encouraging

[ctilsie242]

Only problem with flywheels are the bearings. If those seize or wear out, all that momentum has to go somewhere, and it isn't pretty when an object spinning at 20,000+ RPM hits something else.

While the facts are true, the grammar is not

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Capacity != generated

[tomhath]

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.

Re:Capacity != generated

[DanielRavenNest]

In the 12 months ending July, 2017, solar supplied 70.1 TWh out of the 4058 TWh used in the United States. This is 1.73%, and is triple the value from calendar 2015 (23.0 TWh). I'm not sure what level you consider "down in the noise", but it has reached a quarter of hydroelectric, which surely you consider a major power producer.

Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricit... (last row, last column)

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[perpenso]

The warranty is to the item, regardless who owns it. If that is differnet in you country, you have a fucked up law system.

Its likely up to the manufacturer, not local law.

"Nontransferable: Many warranties are not transferable from the original owner. "
http://solarbuildermag.com/fea...

Re:Not encouraging

[Billy the Mountain]

How do magnets seize again? I must have slept through that part of my physics class. Also, why 20,000 RPM, when 200 R.P.M. gives you 50+ megajoules of power to draw from?

Environmental costs?

[aglider]

Anyone taking into account those costs for both pv panels construction and disposal?

Re:Not encouraging

[angel'o'sphere]

That is why they have no 'bearings' but are floating in a magnetic field.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[angel'o'sphere]

Cars as a whole are massively subsidized, via the public paying for roads
Public payed roads are payed by taxes on cars ... at least in my country.

Re:Not encouraging

[angel'o'sphere]

I'm looking at the Texas model, where generation, transmission, distribution, and retail can all be separated, and wondering how that's working out? Is that a model for the future?
That is how it is done in the EU, and there is another player: reserve power.
All is traded via an electronic spot market.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[angel'o'sphere]

Of course it is the local law, what else would give a manufactor the power to restrict the warranty to the first owner?
In europe the warranty is on the item. You have the original bill, you have the warranty, because: the law says so!

A switch by governments...

[mpercy]

"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?

Re:Good grief

[DickBreath]

So you're saying solar is not some magical energy source? Yeah, right.

Next you'll be telling me Keebler cookes are not baked by little elves in a hollow tree.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[Farmer Tim]

BP, Sharp, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Bosch probably aren't disappearing soon.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[perpenso]

Of course local laws can trump manufacturer wishes. I was referring to regions where it is not legally required, where only a minority of companies *choose* to make their warranties transferable.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[plague911]

Which far away land do you live in? Not the U.S

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

"The money for the Interstate Highway and Defense Highways was handled in a Highway Trust Fund that paid for 90 percent of highway construction costs with the states required to pay the remaining 10 percent"

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[plague911]

Assuming that spending increased with inflation (not a reasonable assumption) at 64.6% increase on roughly 50% still leaves about 20% subsidized from other sources.

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

"pior to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the establishment of the Highway Trust Fund, roads were financed directly from the General Fund of the United States Department of the Treasury"

Also

"During 2008 the fund required support of $8 billion from general revenue funds to cover a shortage in the fund. This shortage was due to lower gas consumption as a result of the recession and higher gas prices.[4] Further transfers of $7 billion and $19.5 billion were made in 2009 and 2010 respectively.[5]"

TLDR Quote after quote after quote indicates the gas taxes never have been enough to fund road construction/maintenance let alone land purchase values, let alone environmental costs, let alone regional stabilization efforts, let alone government sponsored R&D into engines.

Once again I actually don't have a problem with many of these subsidizes I just have a problem with the psychotic myth that the industry is not massively subsidized.

Ultracaps happen. Hopefully.

[fyngyrz]

No moving parts, everything is solid state, and if one has an on-grid system, there are no batteries to have to keep watered or replaced.

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.

Re:Ultracaps happen. Hopefully.

[ctilsie242]

Ultracaps also use a physical mechanism for storing electricity, not chemical... so they don't really "wear out" as conventional batteries do.

Very snazzy setup. I'd love to see about having something similar for RV boondocking.

Re:Rather a Short 'Age'

[spun]

There's plenty of arsenic in lots of organics, it's not that toxic. Face it, the hippies were right all along, solar is the way of the future. But we're such a fractured, tribal society, people don't care what's "right" or "true" or "objectively the best path forward." If "those guys" like it, we're going to fight to the death to oppose it. People don't operate logically. Logic is just a tool for finding evidence that what our guts tell us is true. And what's "true" is that those guys can't possibly be right, because then they win and we lose.

Re:A great start...

[painandgreed]

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.

Where the hell are you? That's even worse than the USA. We're running at 6% wind and solar, 7% hydro, and 20% nuclear.

Re:PV

[Applehu Akbar]

They're supposed to be, but the Slashdot "editors" seem to assume every reader is an expert is all fields.

As we used to be before all the trolls showed up.

Re:Dawn of massive subsidies

[angel'o'sphere]

I live in the country where the Porsche911 is build :)
Do you even have taxes on vehicles in the US?

Insightful, but emotionally disturbed

[Texmaize]

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.

Re:Not encouraging

[jeff4747]

No, there are several locations in the US with an unreliable connection to the rest of the grid. They've installed massive battery banks as a backup. They get from a few hours to days of their entire mini-grid, depending on the installation.

These are not off-the-shelf devices, because as the previous poster mentioned they are not economical. Usually they're large banks of lead-acid batteries since size and weight are basically irrelevant in this application.

Consumers can similarly do days of storage using deep-cycle lead acid batteries if they have enough space. But again it is not an off-the-shelf product.

Re:When they wear out?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, I dont know...perhaps dissociate those materials from the panels in our heads by actually learning something about them?

Re:Win quietly. This is counterproductive

[DanielRavenNest]

> - Trucks: short range trucks are going to appear in a couple of years,

Overhead catenary wire power is already being tested with trucks in Scandinavia and Germany. Even just on main highways it would allow the trucks to save their battery power for the ends of the trip.

Re:Niggers aren't people

[Maxo-Texas]

You may not believe it but it's been reported regularly over the last two decades.

Such as when a mixed group of white and black girls are picked up shoplifting. The white girls parents are called and they are released without an arrest record. Meanwhile- one of the officers says "Trash goes in back" and formally arrests the black girls. This girls live in the same neighborhood. They are friends. Same socio economic group. But one group has white skin and the other has black skin.

And just look up what happens in florida. Seriously -suspended sentence for 18 year old white kid- 4 years prison for the 18 year old black kid for the *same crime*. A study of the DA and the judge show this kind of behavior is a pattern.

This kind of behavior creates enormous costs for society. If you criminalize a person at 18, you could be paying $31,000 a year to incarcerate them for most of their life. And that means higher taxes. And that also means a person who might have been paying taxes is instead a drain on taxpayers.

Re:Not encouraging

[plague911]

You can do just about anything if you burn enough money. Restating that has no impact on the grid-scale discussion. Looking at the above chain it looks like there may be two groups talking past each-other. One about grid-scale, one about some niche off the grid use.

Re:When they wear out?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually half of those materials are usually neither in the panels, nor in the manufacturing process. Selenium and cadmium are *not* vital for the spread of photovoltaics at all, 95% of panels on the market just doesn't need them in any capacity at all.

PV?

[dabrowsa]

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...

Re:Niggers aren't people

[slashdotwannabe]

You ARE aware that being a 'n ig g e r' has nothing to do with whether you're black or white-skinned, right

You ARE aware that nobody in the HISTORY of that word used it in such a manner?

You ARE aware that the only people who actually make this claim are racists trying to revise history and rationalize their use that word at the same time, right?

Fucking pussy AC racists. As if we didn't know you were an asshole to begin with, hiding behind AC proves it.