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The US Government Keeps Spectacularly Underestimating Solar Energy Installation (qz.com)
Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: Every two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), America's official source for energy statistics, issues 10-year projections about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the U.S. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIA's projections turn out to be wrong. Last year, they proved spectacularly wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA's predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIA's 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be. To be fair, there is a caveat here: The prediction in 2006 was that 10 years hence the U.S. would be generating just 0.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy. With such a low baseline figure, any increase will look huge in percentage terms. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable trend in the data: The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
Or just perhaps in 2006 the rapidly decreasing cost of panels was not predictable?
Perhaps (actually..) they were talking about actual output not the now commonly used peak figure that assumes a bright sun is directly overhead 24/7?
Just maybe they were not allowing for the large government subsidy injections that have made large solar project profitable regardless of their output or power prices?
No, must be a conspiracy.
Next please.
Underestimating installations (what the article’s title says) is not the same as making a bearish forecast (what the article actually describes). The author himself wrote: “In the agency’s defense, the pace of technological change is unpredictable. Conservative models are almost always wrong during times of breakneck technological or economic change (as with wind and solar), and the government is not in the business of rosy speculation.” Then, why look for a conspiracy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Federal tax subsidies for renewables exploded starting in 2006. Of course any projections made in 2006 based on extrapolating 2000-2005 subsidy levels would be inaccurate.
For solar in particular, it got just $174 million in subsidies in 2007. By 2010 it got $1.1 billion. And in 2013 it received $5.3 billion. Or to put it as TFA does, it received 3046% more in subsidies in 2013 than it did in 2007.
You increase subsidies by 30x over 7 years, the story would've been if growth hadn't increase by more than 40x over 10 years.
C'mon SlashDot, we've seen this. A) Important advances make an old monopoly face a future of obsolescence. B) Monopolists lean on the government to use messaging or force to make everyone play ball the old way. C) It doesn't work in the end, making a waste of all the wrangling. Make no mistake: renewables are starting to undercut fossil fuels. If the USA didn't have a 220% or more tarriff on Chinese solar panels to protect its manufacturers, this would be even further along. The oil industry is pulling a lot of levers to get more money out of its old markets before they're obsolete is all. It doesn't change the fact that they're seeing their version of Napster.
Absolutely nothing changed in the past 10 years that could have had an affect on the prediction.
No federal subsidy changes
No multinational agreement to work on climate change
No massive change in production causing the prices of solar to plummet
No President who actually was somewhat for greening up the country
This is all just the EIA's shortsightedness, or big oil influence, or (insert other blame game whackjob conspiracy).
The EIA is a oil industry funded group!
And? The oil industry has the most to lose in the greening of the world which is what makes accurate predictions even more important. This is also why the oil industry are some of the biggest investors in wind and solar energy, they know their days are numbered.
Seems to me that all these agencies are simply pork office buildings and mouth pieces that have no credibility or duty except to the people that appointed them to the position.
one, installed power. Every solar panel installation increases the share of installed solar power.
two, production including stand-by production. while solar produces when it wants to, power is needed when its needed. while solar is producing, other plants are still producing, too. and vaporizing water to get rid of what they're producing.
Estimating installed power... They're probably not counting the backup generators people have in areas where the grid isn't as stable as in civilized parts of the world.
Predicting things is hard, especially things in the future.
I have to ask, what if the EIA was wrong in the other direction? What if instead of actual capacity being 4000% of the prediction we had a prediction that was 4000% of the actual? Would there still be outrage over this to the point that we'd be reading about it now?
This can't be just a failure of a government agency having difficulty predicting the growth of a new industry, it has to be some sort of conspiracy from "big oil". I'm pretty sure that "big solar" is a thing, as is "big wind". Wind and solar might be a small industry but there are some large companies supporting them, and they have deep pockets. Deep enough to fund a growth of an industry at 4000% of a rate that people thought it might be after ten years.
I also love the part of the conspiracy where EIA and "big oil" had similar numbers predicting growth over the next decade. Well, no shit. Oil is a big industry, and well established. It's going to be much easier to predict. Same thing with most any other commodity. I'd like to see similar predictions on housing, coffee, bananas, cars, bicycles, TV sets, refrigerators, or whatever else you might find about your house. I'll exempt things like smart phones which had similar surprising growth due to being so new to the market.
I also want to ask, how well did EIA predict nuclear power growth? If we are going to take the national carbon footprint seriously then nuclear power will have to be a part of that. Anyone that thinks we can run a modern economy without oil, coal, AND nuclear is ignorant or stupid, possibly both.
Here's an interesting presentation on how to use nuclear power to make fuels that can replace what we get from petroleum now. It's less than 15 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
About 3 minutes in the presenter goes over how solar power makes the problems of keeping energy cost down worse. Any claims of solar being cheap is bullshit.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Because this is Slashdot, tinfoil hat central.
The EIA is a oil industry funded group! !
I wonder how many here will just believe that without checking.
The biggest producer of solar panels, China, and also one of the countries that is betting big on solar also makes wrong predictions about this.
Their prediction of 2017 from 2016 are wrong. Their prediction from early 2017 about 2018 have already been updated.
If you want to fault the US for these kinds of things, these predictions are not the ones you should be looking at.
New things are always on the horizon
Trump will force more dirty coal to be burnt so that the projections are correct.
...which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
Well, apparently it doesn't work, so no need to keep obsessing over it.
> This post marks when USA embraced climate science to become a green-energy powerhouse.
See the -1 rating up there? Never underestimate the ability of the USA to remain stupid... heck, some are even proud to be dumb!
The EIA estimates generation, not capacity. The NRDC uses capacity, based on the nameplate rating of the installation, which is an instantaneous maximum power output.
My roommate was making a big deal about how they are going to stop producing Reeses peanut butter cups. I immediately thought to myself, "Yeah, sure. Hershey Co is going to stop marketing its best seller for no reason."
Subsequent scrutiny revealed it was a Facebook post. I chanted "Fake News" as my girlfriend immediately found evidence that this particular campaign was bullshit with 3 chants worth of Google searching.
Why do people take hearsay as fact this day in age. Middle ages when most people couldn't read and the Church was the authority on everything? Sure, take other peoples' word for it. Late 1980s when the Internet had not proliferated into our everyday life so you'd have to go to the Library and do the research yourself? Yeah, okay, I understand. in the late 2010's when everybody is 2 seconds away from a Google search and our society is reeling from a serious misinformation campaign targeting all sides of the political spectrum (particularly abusing the Facebook platform)? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?
Allow me to introduce you to reddit.
The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
I'm trying to figure out how this "boosts" the oil and gas industry.
At best some armchair investors my decide these predictions should guide their investment in either coal/oil stocks or futures contracts. Pro investors aren't likely to use a single predictive metric and will more likely be cross-referencing these predictions with past performance and actual market histories.
Otherwise it's just a prediction that wound up wrong, and mostly it seems to be in solar's favor. If they predicted X amount of solar and the actual result was X*Y solar, doesn't that signal that solar is improving rapidly, investment in solar is increasing, gaining in popularity, etc? And the opposite conclusion about oil and gas?
I'd also doubt that these predictions mean very much to the actual adoption of solar. I'm sure that's much more driven by available subsidies for solar installation, actual dollar costs for solar installation, grid resale prices, and all the other practical factors.
" [snip] Then, why look for a conspiracy?"
Because media has always responded well to conspiracy theories from the "Red Scare" onward.
It's easier than actual reporting, and technology has advanced to the point where anybodies sane or crackpot opinion can be voiced. (Remember when we thought that would be a good thing?) However, sanity's boring, conspiracy is interesting, and people are stupid.
Now to press 'Submit' and instantly see every grammatical and spelling mistake I missed in the preview...Fuck it, back to da bong...
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
I'm in China you insensitive clod.
"Why do people take hearsay as fact this day in age."
Well, I'll just quote myself from earlier in this thread...
"Sanity's boring, conspiracy is interesting, and people are stupid."
I think that pretty much sums it up.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Take Florida, they have secondary inspections above and beyond and require 'certified' installations(even if off grid) making the cost of smaller solar installs many times what it costs up north. It's a bloody shame considering the Florida sun hours.
I have a 2KW solar installation in the north east where there is only 2 sun hours a say on average, if I could do the same in Florida for a similar(or twice the) price I would in a heart beat... but it's a no go.. evil local and state governments in Florida, it's about protectionism of all established companies here.
http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/certification-testing/
http://www.xyzworks.com/solarmap.jpg
Making a mistake once is nothing.
Making a mistake twice, wake up call.
Making a mistake three times, hey idiot what are you doing?
Making a mistake 4, 5, 6 etc times, we are now getting into very deliberate territory and this is confirmed by the fact that other organisations had projected the increases in renewables much more accurately by recognising that the growth in renewables was logarithmic and not linear.
So either the EIA are complete brain-dead morons who no-one should listen to or they are deliberately misleading people. Take your pick.
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PS and I've seen arguments that renewables can't supply much of our energy because of bad forecasts like these. We knew those arguments were wrong and now with renewables making up large percentages of energy usage in many countries we've been proven right. Both wind and solar can each provide as much energy as the world uses.
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Or the media is cherry picking data to make the administration look bad
What?
It's electricity, not IPv4 packets. Wtf are you talking about? Will all those roof installed solar panels clog up the electric pipes?
And who the hell heard of or ever made a meaningful decision based on the 2006 ten year forecast of some random ass gvt agency?
Had you heard of them before?
Back in 2006 did their predictions dissuade you from buying a solar installation?
This entire article is useless clickbait spam.
I would call it a success story personally. Renewables matured beyond expectations, changing the economics.
The problem is that poor predictions skew energy policy. Too much money may have been invested in the wrong types of gas power plants, too many incentives may have been created for rooftop solar, and adequate grid hardening may not have been undertaken to prepare for these issues. (All true.)
The biggest hangover I see coming is the lack of an intelligent strategy for what electric utility companies will be in the next 10 years, outside high density cities. The research that was being done as recently as 5-6 years ago was going the wrong direction in this regard, and it doesn't seem like it has caught up (beyond economic policy changes to net metering).
Maybe the EIA sells pro-pane and pro-pane accessories.
#DeleteFacebook
Was the EIA supposed to predict the future and all the advances in solar panel technologies that were going to happen in the last decade?
#DeleteFacebook
Beer is good
Take another look, Scotland is approaching 100% electricity from renewables. You're deluding yourself if you don't think renewables will be delivering the lions share of energy in the world, wind and solar are becoming the cheapest forms of energy, it's getting to the point that in some places they are already cheaper without subsidies than old energy with subsidies.
Wind and solar are getting very competitive, you haven't been paying attention. And the costs are set to half again for wind and solar, you ain't seen nothing yet. and the exponential growth of renewables will continue until there's little else. Educate yourself, your ignorance and bias is showing.
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It's not "the media." It's sime guys blog post and an online journal.
Wow, you are wrong. Solar is cheaper than new nukes and coal plants already.
PS and I've seen arguments that renewables can't supply much of our energy because of bad forecasts like these. We knew those arguments were wrong and now with renewables making up large percentages of energy usage in many countries we've been proven right. Both wind and solar can each provide as much energy as the world uses.
Oh boy, is the coal brigade ever going to swarm all over you!
But yer not wrong. Obviously the coal and increasingly the petrochemical industries are finding useful idiots who are stuck in the 1960's with regards to their understanding of energy production.
Meanwhile I can see the wind turbines not too far away providing enough power that they are moving beyond just peaking. And the solar installs are popping up everywhere, with many eschewing the grid period.
We can see solar installations in Alaska, previously cited as a useless place for solar, but it turns out they can save a lot of money and safety factor by saving the diesel fuel for winter when the sun don't shine. Kinda weird looking at circular solar arrays though.
People can go to Harbor Freight and buy solar panels. A 100 watt one is $149.00 at the moment.
Solar systems are now about $3.17 per installed watt to start with. That's a 10 percent drop from 2016. http://news.energysage.com/how... That makes a 10 KiloWatt system cost around $22K.
And if you aren't building in a place already served by mains power, you might be surprised how much installing the mains power will set you back. Old commie FDR's Rural Electrification Project isn't around any more, so you pay for the poles, the wires, and the transformers and installation of each out of your own pocket
Times change, and we don't use steam locomotives to get around any more, or DC mains, and outside of the Amish, horse drawn buggies are used for entertainment.
Now the unemployed coal miners that we are supposedly going to put back to work mining coal, a Government assisted project worthy of old commie FDR - howbow we set the lads up with work involving production of newer energy sources and the equipment involved with it? The rest of the world moves forward while many of us seem dead set on heading back to the late 1940's.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Its cute when you say nonsense like that. Doesn't make it true, but cute nonetheless.
1950's calld, and wants to give you a fistbump.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They didn't have solar. The power line went down.
Subsidies.
Major increases in energy costs.
Success?!?
Looks like US Federal government to me?
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System
U.S. Federal Statistical System The Federal Statistical System of the United States is the decentralized network of federal agencies which produce data
Me from 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Me from 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Me from 2008: https://groups.google.com/foru...
Or me from 2011:
http://phibetaiota.net/2011/09...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USAâ(TM)s current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue."
Frankly, I've spent almost twenty years on Slashdot arguing with many posters who disregarded solar energy (and other renewables, as well as energy efficiency); example of me debating that from 2013:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
See also Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute's work, including from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or John Todd and the (now defunct/spunoff) New Alchemy Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter design between 1969 and 1991. It was founded by John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and William McLarney. Its purpose was to research human support systems of food, water, and shelter and to completely rethink how these systems were designed."
And Home Power magazine. https://www.homepower.com/
Solar energy has been more and more effective in ever broader niche uses which drove its growth for decades (as Home Power magazine and others predicted years ago) -- from satellites, to calculators, to homes ten miles off-grid, to generator replacements for temporary traffic lights, to one mile-off-grid homes, to on-grid homes. Finally now that grid parity has been widely reached and it is becoming foolish in most places to install anything but solar PV for electricity generation, now everyone wakes up to what has been going on. Although even now their remain deniers here and there (as in that slashdot post linked above).
=== The bigger picture: general exponential trends across multiple technologies
As I noted in the 2000 post I made, the same exponential changes in technological capacity that drive cheaper PV also apply in other areas -- even for cheaper nuclear energy (whether from uranium, thorium or hot/cold fusion). But for the same reasons most people ignored the PV trends, most people ignore these other trends.
Here is a proposal I sent to DARPA in 1999 to try to deal with the consequences of exponential technological growth (including(as we see with North Korea recently increased capacity globally for making WMDs):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"I agree with Hans Moravec on several points; one of them is the implications of this chart:
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Shrub turned Clinton's debt reduction into a massive increase and Obama reduced Shrub's debt increase despite the opposition running on an overt plank of "Refuse to let this darkie think he's in control by letting him win anything".
Solyndra paid back the loan early.
The natural gas industry is doing a pretty good job itself, given that wholesale costs have dropped 80% thanks to fracking.
It's coal and nuclear that are dragging the industry down. Coal can't compete, environmentally or economically. It takes 100 people to run a power plant compared to a computerized gas plant with 15 mechanics. Nuclear is going zero emission credit hardcore, trying to convince NY and IL to keep the jobs programs alive. And the DOE is trying its best to implement ling term fuel storage, which will be economic suicide.
It is part of the Department of Energy which is part of the Executive Branch of the US Government.
Are you really just this stupid, or is it deliberate?
", it's getting to the point that in some places they are already cheaper without subsidies than old energy with subsidies."
It won't be long before both wind and solar energy costs half of what fossil fuel energy costs. Is that so difficult to understand? I'm talking renewables without subsidies here.
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Take the last five years of statistics. Understand that the growth is exponential. Calculate the growth factor. And extrapolate from there.
Although the article offers the defense, which you quote, it is (if you read the article) not a very strong defense. As described in the article, the methodology of the EIA is a poor one, that gives poor predictions and can readily be fixed in a number of ways -- especially taking into account actual project and plans of entities deploying new energy sources.
Continuing to do a poor job at prediction year after year, always failing in the same way, suggests that a revision in methodology is in order.
I saw no reference to a "conspiracy", or any conspiracy-like speculation, in the article. That is just a straw man.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Says the AC while responding to the wrong person.
Then, why look for a conspiracy?
Agreed, it isn't just the IEA, its everybody.
In recent years Greenpeace has been closer, but even they have routinely underpredicted the rate of installation. Basically nobody doing any serious forecasting has ever over-estimated it.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA's predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIA's 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be.
I see that capacity word in there. Solar generation is less than 1% of total US power generation (lagging behind biomass, and not even 7% of all renewables). Methinks protesting about errors in estimates about capacity, rather than looking at the accuracy of projections of generation, is a big red herring. My bank account has the capacity to hold hundreds of billions of dollars! Unfortunately, the generation side isn't quite so endowed with zeros...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Take another look, Scotland is approaching 100% electricity from renewables.
Sure, that's easy to do when you have the geography for hydro, access to lots of open sea for wind, and favorable weather/latitude for solar (which might not exactly apply for Scotland). Hydro applies double on this because it's useful as storage for unreliable wind and solar. Here in the pancake flat Midwest USA we don't have a whole lot for hydro. Sure, we got some dammed up rivers that give us some electricity but that's no Hoover Dam.
Wind and solar are getting very competitive, you haven't been paying attention.
It's only cheap if you have pumped hydro for storage or access to lots of cheap natural gas for backup turbines.
And the costs are set to half again for wind and solar, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Ah, I see, wind and solar can get cheaper but nuclear power never will. Whenever I bring up nuclear power the immediate reply is that it is expensive. Well, it's going to stay expensive until people start to build reactors and learn how to make it cheap. Build lots of them and economies of scale make it cheaper yet. Nuclear power as it is right now is as cheap as any wind or solar and it can get cheaper if we start building them again. You want cheap, safe, reliable, and "green" energy? Then build some nuclear power reactors. Out here in the Midwest that's what we need. We don't have geothermal, tidal, hydro, or solar. Well, we can do solar but we need that sun to grow food. Wind works, let's do some more of that, the cows in the pasture underneath don't seem to mind the spinning blades overhead.
Educate yourself, your ignorance and bias is showing.
You first.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Not relevant. They didn't make a mistake and get corrected 10 times... they made a prediction but didn't know it was wrong yet because it was a 10 year forcast, then made another prediction a year later still not knowing their previous prediction was so off, etc. That's not 10 years of mistakes. That's 10 years of preferring to err on the side of caution rather than speculate that rampant growth would occur. Don't forget that 10 years ago solar was not competetive yet, and we had not even seen the leasing business model that has fueled the recent growth.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Once full human level AI becomes common, they will quickly take over the profitable portions of the economy. Given that Earths biosphere is toxic to robots (oxygen, water etc) they will want to leave for a better environment (moon, asteroids etc). That will leave Humanity living in a low tech third world backwater (the zoo) while the computers expand and grow and advance.
Why do these people still have jobs? Clearly they can't do the job, so their boss should fire them and hire someone else. Or thy are doing the job their boss gave them, it just doesn't match their job title.
Fossil fuels are also heavily subsidized. You should be comparing Total Cost for both groups.
Just because they say so dors not mean its true.
Proof is needed.
If the state is required yo buy their electricity and "no less than" a certain price, its a subsidy. Wether they got money to build it or not.
The Natural Resources Defense Council spectacularly underestimates the cost of disposing of and replacing degraded panels.
Need a geographical production equivalence number from US EIA to understand how much solar electricity can be produced. A solar panel in Maine will produce much less electricity than a solar panel in Arizona. If Northern areas, such as Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago are the major growth areas for solar installations then the capacity number will be highly misleading as opposed to installations along the southern US border, such as Arizona, Texas, etc.
Aw, someone down-voted the original post because the truth hurt someone's feelings. This isn't Trump doing the underestimating.
If I gave you lots of facts and solid arguments I doubt you'd believe it anyway.
Have you seen the price of solar panels lately? Do you know what the ROI is for a panel bought today? What do you think is going to happen when all of the investments in to newer panel technology and new factories is paid off? will they A) close the factories or B) produce even cheaper panels?
If you followed wind technology closely you'd understand that there is massive investment going on improving wind turbines and their production efficiency and their installation in many ways. The price has got a long way to fall yet, even though wind can already compete with coal and gas. The latest off-shore contracts are starting to approach parity with fossil fuels, there are many innovations in the pipeline to bring the cost down further.
Solar and wind are technologies in their infancy and already they are threatening fossil fuels domination. As more panel and turbine factories pop up, as more efficiencies of scale kick in, the non-linear growth in renewables will continue. The writings on the wall, you're just refusing to see it.
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"Bearish" is not predicting 1/40 of the actual. A prediction of 1/40 of actual means "we didn't have a clue".
What makes this a possible conspiracy is that the forecasts closely match those produced by fossil fuel industry analysts.
Now, of course, this administration is moving towards undercutting solar by applying tariffs to imported solar panels.
In decade or two, the rest of the world will have cheap renewable energy and the USA will be left paying the Koch brothers and their like. This will be devastating for the competitiveness of the US economy.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It depends what you call total cost, if external costs were included as they should be then fossil fuels are a multiple more expensive.
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It's not just ten years, they chose to ignore the previous couple of decades too.
And yes, getting a prediction wrong several times is what you could call a mistake, or just plain dumb. The EIA have an agenda, it's very obvious.
Other smaller organisations were perfectly capable of making far better predictions.
So, after this would you trust any predictions the EIA make regarding renewables???? Would you quote their predictions?
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Maybe that is the problem with needing a policy in which government effectively bets blind on one technology or the other. Government has to be cautious, and has to bet on technology that is mature enough that they can predict its growth accurately. That puts any truly groundbreaking innovation outside of anything government would consider.
The underlying mistake here is classifying wrapping a wide error bar around an inflection point as a "mistake" in the first place, a mistake which you are apparently here to interminably repeat.
The very first time I see the government correctly estimate an inflection point, I'm going into full-on Dick the Butcher mode: "the first thing we do, let's kill all the neoliberals", because surely once government perfects centralized estimation, the neoliberals among us have survived well beyond their Best Before date.
Chances are, not going to happen, confidence level 99.999 etc. %.
You should be advised that using hydro for storage is merely proven technology, it is not an actual useful practice. So no, Scotland having mountains doesn't mean it is better suited for PV or wind generation.
So, more beerish than bearish.
The EIA is a oil industry funded group!
You might want to be advised that the Government isn't tasked with regulating industry for the public benefit, but rather to regulate industry for the benefit of the affected industry as a whole; they're not trying to protect the public from industry, but to prevent or mitigate individual businesses from gaining an unfair advantage over their competitors.
You're wrong on the facts here, but it doesn't even matter; your mistake is in thinking that the government would naturally have different interests than industry. And that just isn't a reasonable understanding of what exists, or what is supposed to exist by US law.
That is the reason that a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created, and the FTC has a Bureau of Consumer Protection. These are agencies that benefit the named group, not law enforcement agencies. So the natural expectation is that FTC would be managing their Consumer Protection office primarily to support trade; so their emphasis should be on the perception of consumer protections, and the need of the consumer to feel safe in order to support confidence and maximize trade. Whereas the CFPB might actually contain focus on the actual needs of financial services consumers.
Now if they could get that number down, that 75 solar workers = 1 fossil fuel worker in terms of energy produced, we'd have something
I will like solar only when I can power my lights at night and it costs as much as my normal power and I live in NH, which has the highest or 2nd highest electrical cost in the U.S., so it's a lower bar. Until we have cost effective electrical storage, we will always need the same baseline fossil and nuke plants and more swing plants.
I'm quite certain the Tennessee Valley Authority would disagree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's just one of at least a dozen operating in the USA right now. I mention that one only because I took a tour of it years ago.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I saw no reference to a "conspiracy", or any conspiracy-like speculation, in the article.
I was thinking of this sentence: “overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.”
Continuing to do a poor job at prediction year after year, always failing in the same way, suggests that a revision in methodology is in order.
I agree. However, I also imagine that, in general, production forecasts are very difficult to get right, and I don’t find it shocking that they have been much more accurate with energy sources that (1) have been used for a long time (they can rely on long-term historical data), (2) require long-term planning on the part of operators (because deploying a typical utility-grade power plant is very costly and requires lengthy construction) and (3) have traditionally been concentrated among a relatively small number of operators. It seems that solar production dramatically changes the rules of the game, and I would have actually found it surprising if forecasters had managed to accurately predict the astounding success story (to borrow aaarrrgggh’s phrasing from an earlier comment) of solar energy production (both from technological and economical standpoints). Nonetheless, I certainly agree that it has now been well established that solar is here to stay and keep growing at astounding rates and, you’re right, they need to look at revising their forecasting methodology.
And it was the first when zero posts replied to this thread. I made it because I've never seen a thread about climate change that didn't have hundreds of feeble arguments spewing from the dotard, let alone zero.
The thing with solar energy is that it relies upon the sun, and who knows how long that's going to be around for? Now with fossil fuels, everyone knows those will be around forever.
Industry needs an impartial assessment in many ways. This assessment eventually gets corrupted and stops serving its purpose... but government agencies tend to take longer than private institutions.
So where are the "widespread" fuel cells and microturbines? Whatever "widespread" means. I won't even get into some of the other claims.
It's true that widespread nuclear technologies were bound to happen with widely available not only computational power to design the vehicles and warheads, but also gas centrifuges. It something like SILEX or AVLIS becomes widespread then even more countries will want to have nuclear weapons.
It helps a whole lot to have pumped storage. Not to mention being close to the North Sea's wind resource. Also Scotland doesn't generate 100% of electricity from renewables even. That's plain BS. Last year (2016) they generated an estimate of 54% of electricity from renewables.
Donald Trump is of course...
As a giant bag of fetid, putrid gas, he could be used as a limitless source of wind to power turbines, a source of methane to fire natural-gas-powered generators... he's wireless, in that he's completely disconnected-- from REALITY, and his ego is so massive that placing him near a body of water SHOULD be able to create large oscillating mechanical waves that could form the basis of yet another kind of clean-power generation.
Long live Donald Trump, a giant, super-massive gas-bag hovering over a giant pile of flaming BULLSHIT!
The investment in factories already paid off. China bought the market and destroyed western manufacturing capability. We're the chumps, and our subsidies let them do it.
yep, not much point trying to explain to those that do not want to hear, they have their head of their ass listening to their "gut" feelings so block out sensible dialogue. they always moan about subsidies in green energy but conveniently forget about the decades of continual subsidy to the fossil fuel industry
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"Nuclear power as it is right now is as cheap as any wind or solar and it can get cheaper if we start building them again" - because nuclear is subsidised, have a read of these articles
http://thehill.com/opinion/ene...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Predictions are hard, particularly when they deal with the future.
Did AC realize that what he or she said was very funny in a Yogi Berra kind of way? Hard or easy, predictions are, by definition, always about the future. D'oh! Either way the remark is a gem. I think my stock broker might have told me the same thing once.
Here are a few more Yogi-isms.
FYI I recall reading once that many of these witticisms were supplied by Mr Berra's publicist. Does not make them less funny.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It helps a whole lot to have pumped storage.
No it doesn't! It helps your fantasy because people in your echo chamber told you so.
The way to measure how useful it actually is in Scotland is by simply measuring how much of it they are doing. And they're not doing it, because it doesn't have all the advantages your echo chamber told you, and they left out the disadvantages to boot.
Scotland is a major wind power producer, and it doesn't run water pumps; it goes onto the grid.
You didn't comprehend my comment.
To avoid the exact idiot response you gave, I chose the words "merely proven technology." So your response is to point at a demonstrator project. Durrrrrrrrrrrrr
And no, they wouldn't disagree with me at all! If you'd think for yourself, you'd know if you're the Tennessee Valley Authority, or somebody else. (Spoiler: You're somebody else) If you actually read the fucking link before you posted it you'd see that that project was complete in 1978! So you can fucking just look and see if other utilities were building a bunch of them after that. Spoiler: They just built the demo project they were paid to build, they don't actually waste money on that shit!
Try to comprehend the difference between what I said, and what you responded to. Otherwise, there is no need for you to even read the words, much less reply to them.
I hope your measure of how they "don't use pumped storage" is better than the one the other guy used which claimed that 100% of their generation was renewables.
If pumped storage hydroelectric is not useful in actual practice then why is there, according to the US Department of Energy, 51 active pumped storage hydroelectric projects as of 2014?
https://www.energy.gov/sites/p...
If the Raccoon Mountain project was just a demonstrator built 40 years ago then why is it still in operation? Why did they bother to repair it 5 years ago? Why build 50 more in the USA if Raccoon Mountain was "merely proven technology" but not "actually useful in practice"?
So, we agree it is a proven technology. It is also useful in practice. We've built plenty of them in the USA, and we are building more. You said to look if other utilities built any more after Raccoon Mountain. I see that they did. Therefore, according to your argument, pumped storage hydro is useful in practice.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
EIA has in fact addressed their shortcomings explicitly, and in a fair amount of detail:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/supplement/renewable/pdf/projections.pdf
In the report, they're a little defensive, no surprise. From a quick read, two factors seem to pre-dominate:
1) They are required to use *current* law in their main forecasts. So if the law says that the tax credits expire in year X, that's what they have to use -- even though Congress constantly extended the tax credits at the last minute (or after the last minute, retroactively). EIA does alternative projections with other assumptions, but that's not what everyone compares them to. This factor is particularly harsh on wind projections.
2) They keep up to date on *current* PV prices, but they (along with a lot of market forecasters) missed just how cheap the Chinese panels would get, so their projections suffered. The real question isn't how badly they did compared with subsequent reality, but were they significantly worse than other forecasts issued at the same time? I don't know the answer to that.
But if you actually care about the details, then *read the report*.
Nuclear power is "expensive" for a bunch of reasons - first and foremost being the vendor lockin on fuel. The rods are not interchangeable between designs of vendors so when you build it you're committing to a supply contract from the same vendor for 60 years.
The secondary cost - decommissioning - is an interesting one.
In Europe, nuclear plants must pay a levy into a trust account for every kWh generated - when shutdown comes around, decommissioning is paid for.
in the USA, operators have not put enough aside during operations to pay for decommissioning and the standard practice is to sell the plant to a subsidiary close to end-of-life and then have that subsidiary go bankrupt, putting decomissioning costs onto the goverment.
The _real_ problem with nuclear power as it stands, is safety.
Yes, they're over 300,000 times safer than coal, 10 times safer than wind and twice as safe as solar but the reality is that a contemporary nuclear power station is a Heath-Robinson/Rube-Goldberg contraption that generates high pressure, high termperature steam by having water in direct contact with internally white-hot(*)(**) radioactive fuel rods and then allowing it to flash to steam once it leaves the nuclear reactor in order to drive turbines.
Water is corrosive at the best of times. High temperature/high pressures makes it worse and the addition of boric acid is just icing on the cake. Most of the world's nuclear incidents have been related to or seriously compounded by water in one way or another.
There _ARE_ safer nuclear technologies (molten salts for so many reasons I won't go into it here(***)). The USA proved that at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. The technology is also highly weapons-proliferation resistant, which is likely why the US military opposed its further development. It's ironic that the chinese bought up all that research and are now the largest investors in developing the technology and that they will probably be the largest nuclear civil players of the 21st century.
(*) The core of a conventional fuel rod sits at about 1000C, whilst the cladding is about 400C (as is the water it's immersed in). The extreme thermal gradient across the rod is due to the fuel being a ceramic matrix and ceramics are very poor heat conductors. This is also why it takes days to get rid of heat after a SCRAM event.
(**) The limiting temperature of most fission reactions is about 1150C die to doppler effects. This is why fuel rods are that temperature internally, but water cooled systems can never be allowed to climb to that temperature or the water molecules will start disassociating (and long before they they'll start corroding the zirconium cladding, producing hydrogen gas - which is what happened at Fukushima)
(***) Yes there are some drawbacks to MSRs - which are all solvable on paper and in most cases already in practice - but overall, they have the potential to improve nuclear safety by at least 1 if not 3 orders of magnitude, whilst simultaneously creating markets for things we can only dream of now, such as cheap and highly available helium.
1: Pumped storage is useful.
2: Pumped storage requires fairly specific geography
3: Such geography is only available in a few places.
The potential for pumped storage is therefore limited by available geography. Low hanging fruit and all that...
Pumped Storage (or the lack of it) and practical limits on electricity transportation distances is why South Australia had 2 major sets of blackouts earlier this year and even if the proposed Snowy Mountain schemes had already been built they wouldn't have prevented them. (Ie, South Australia is effectively flat as a pancake and the Snowy Mountains are at the limits of transmission distances)
With the ever-increasing percentage of the grid being supplied by prioritised intermittent sources, there are a lot more requirements for energy storage - and those requirements are increasing both faster than pumped storage facilities can be built and to a greater level that can possibly be built. (Hence why Elon is selling battery backup systems)
They could take us along as 'pets', as in Banks' Culture-series.
They will "want" exactly what they're told to "want". And strong domain-independent AI is still a long way off.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.