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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! !
I wonder how many here will just believe that without checking.
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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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).
When the best thing you can say about your 'winner' is "Don't pay attention to all the shit he does because the 'loser' once did something we say is sketchy even though that's been proven bullshit multiple times"...
I mean, if all you have is deflection you could at least try to find something that is current and at least superficially relevant.
The predictions pushed money into phasing out heavy oil power plants (and presumably coal, although that was likely more influenced by fracking), along with less efficient gas power plants. While this may seem like a good thing on the surface, it has led to excess capacity of these sources; some of them should have been retired altogether.
More importantly, it likely pushed us back 3-5 years on planning for a higher percentage of renewables on the grid both in terms of policy and technology. The CAISO "net energy" graph http://www.caiso.com/Pages/Tod... (bottom of page for yesterday) represents a number of the challenges that were completely underestimated.
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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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.
Debt actually increased more under Reagan and Bush... but in the 2009 recession some deficit spending was in order. Debt growth under Obama was 68 percent, by the way.
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.
", 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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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!
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.
"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!
So, there just happened to be ten inflection point in a row.
Shut up.
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