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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.
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).
Because this is Slashdot, tinfoil hat central.
Trump will force more dirty coal to be burnt so that the projections are correct.
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.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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).
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.
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.