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Solar Has Overtaken Gas, Wind As Biggest Source of New US Power (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Despite tariffs that President Trump imposed on imported panels, the U.S. installed more solar energy than any other source of electricity in the first quarter. Developers installed 2.5 gigawatts of solar in the first quarter, up 13 percent from a year earlier, according to a report Tuesday from the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research. That accounted for 55 percent of all new generation, with solar panels beating new wind and natural gas turbines for a second straight quarter.
The growth came even as tariffs on imported panels threatened to increase costs for developers. Giant fields of solar panels led the growth as community solar projects owned by homeowners and businesses took off. Total installations this year are expected to be 10.8 gigawatts, or about the same as last year, according to GTM. By 2023, annual installations should reach more than 14 gigawatts.
The growth came even as tariffs on imported panels threatened to increase costs for developers. Giant fields of solar panels led the growth as community solar projects owned by homeowners and businesses took off. Total installations this year are expected to be 10.8 gigawatts, or about the same as last year, according to GTM. By 2023, annual installations should reach more than 14 gigawatts.
but somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy.
Let me explain. We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them. At the rate we're going their value, while not worthless, is going to be massively diminished. And it's happening fast. Plus there's no massive natural resource to replace it.
We're going to wipe out trillions in value and replace it with, well, nothing really. Now, from a practical standpoint we've still got power. But human beings aren't very practical. When that wealth shift happens it's going to make a mess of things. The people who lose their shirts in oil futures are likely to be abandoned. And that's before we start talking about what's going to happen to the middle east.
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Tired yet of always being wrong? Drop the Fake News!
Are we near peak solar?
but somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy.
Let me explain. We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them. At the rate we're going their value, while not worthless, is going to be massively diminished. And it's happening fast. Plus there's no massive natural resource to replace it.
We're going to wipe out trillions in value and replace it with, well, nothing really. Now, from a practical standpoint we've still got power. But human beings aren't very practical. When that wealth shift happens it's going to make a mess of things. The people who lose their shirts in oil futures are likely to be abandoned. And that's before we start talking about what's going to happen to the middle east.
While I agree with your assessment, I think there's more context to this.
Tesla is about to come online at 5,000 cars a week (250,000 cars/year) and ramping up from there. Tesla is a highly desired car, and will probably be a big seller.
It's likely that Tesla charging will take up some of the slack. America (and much of China and a few other places like Canada) will transition away from gasoline and rely on electricity instead. The extra burden will be taken up by solar and other renewables, while gasoline use diminishes.
The big losers in the future will probably be gasoline producers and ICE car manufacturers. Gas stations and repair shops will either switch or go out of business (Teslas don't have many moving parts, and so don't need many repairs).
Once the country is largely running on electricity, we can look into replacing fossil fuel generation plants with something more eco-friendly.
Solar had the largest share of newly installed capacity. But solar's capacity factor (ratio of actual energy produced to capacity) is abysmal. About 0.145 for the U.S. as a whole, 0.185 for the desert Southwest (these can be improved with panels which track the sun, at the cost of needing more land area). Contrast this with wind (0.2-0.35), hydro (0.4-0.5, mainly because it's used for peaking power rather than base load), natural gas (0.5, also used for peaking load), coal (0.6-0.7), and nuclear (0.9).
Put another way, 1 GW of PV solar capacity is worth about 600 MW of wind capacity, which is worth about 350 MW of hydro capacity, which is worth about 300 MW of natural gas capacity, which is worth about 230 MW of coal capacity, which is worth about 160 MW of nuclear capacity. Comparing power generation on the basis of installed capacity is like trying to eat enough to live based solely on the weight of food you're consuming completely ignoring the different caloric and nutritional content of the different foods.
The vast bulk of energy is still coming from fossil fuels, and an ever growing dependence on natural gas is not at all something to celebrate. Enormous spending aside, solar power still barely registers in production statistics; was this really money well spent? Slashdot (or other) propaganda is never interested in exploring this question, but you will find the answer in your increasing energy bills.
Between the hours of maybe 9 AM and 5:30 - 6:00 PM, solar electricity will be so plentiful that it will sell for a very few cents per KwH, causing it to be difficult to pay for the infrastruction.
At other times, the traditional sources of electricity will prevail. Electricity prices will be what the always were.
At least until someone invents the magic battery that can spread the peak sun-gathering times out across the 24 hours the rest of us have to deal with.
it's not just retirement. There's tons of fortunes tied up in those assets and it's not easy to divest. Ideally we should be doing something to help people move on, but there's a lot of laissez faire economics going around.
When it's brought up folks say you shouldn't pick winners and losers. They might have a point about picking winners but when it's clear somebody's going to lose that hard we should probably do something about it. For one thing sore losers on a global stage are dangerous. As the saying goes it's cheaper to drop food than bombs. For another thing it's just plain a humanitarian thing to do. But a lot of folks don't like humanitarianism without strings attached.
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This was the first quarter when the tariffs were in place. So the work was almost all likely to be under contracts signed before the tariffs, using panels that were already in the country. That will continue to occur, though at a slowing pace, in the 2nd quarter. We won't see the full effect of the tariffs until, probably, the 3rd quarter.
Comparing power generation on the basis of installed capacity is like trying to eat enough to live based solely on the weight of food you're consuming completely ignoring the different caloric and nutritional content of the different foods.
You mean like a panda that just eats bamboo, and when hungry just eats more bamboo?
Conservatives are supposed to be pro-business yet when the next big business comes along they do everything in their power to kill it.
About 15 years ago I spotted an extrapolated trend chart that predicted solar's energy-per-dollar-spent ratio would surpass petroleum in roughly a decade.
So, I decided to invest in solar. Sure enough, solar boomed, BUT the stocks I picked soured because the solar industry largely shifted to China. (China was later sanctioned for cheating.)
Sigh. Right church, wrong pew.
Table-ized A.I.
President Trump is a genius who will make American solar great again. Democrats let cheap foreign solar destroy our solar industry.
And you can thank China for bringing you all kicking and screaming into a new clean age.
the magic is in how to be dirt cheap.
This one has a shot: https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(17)30032-6
Air-Breathing Aqueous Sulfur Flow Battery for Ultralow-Cost Long-Duration Electrical Storage
Wind and solar generation can displace carbon-intensive electricity if their intermittent output is cost-effectively re-shaped using electrical storage to meet user demand. Reductions in the cost of storage have lagged those for generation, with pumped hydroelectric storage (PHS) remaining today the lowest-cost and only form of electrical storage deployed at multi-gigawatt hour scale. Here, we propose and demonstrate an inherently scalable storage approach that uses sulfur, a virtually unlimited byproduct of fossil fuel production, and air, as the reactive components. Combined with sodium as an intermediary working species, the chemical cost of storage is the lowest of known batteries. While the electrical stacks extracting power can and should be improved, even at current performance, techno-economic analysis shows projected costs that are competitive with PHS, and of special interest for the long-duration storage that will be increasingly important as renewables penetration grows.
In winter when its dark and everyone returns from their job and wants to internet, TV, to warm up, cook, read? Then its back to the grid and the sun is not out.
Solar is great in summer with the sun and time zones later into the day. Winter is not so great when demand is up and the sun is not up.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why is gas a new power? It has been used for a long time already. Perhaps they wanted to say 'alternative' and even that us a stretch.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In the USA they ignore planned downtime and shut down over summer (water too warm or scarce to use for cooling). But every other company and every NEW nuke plant in the USA gets about 60% of the power stated per unit time times 24/7 operation. The new plants in the USA get the world average because they haven't worked out how the new plant fails yet, so they can't arrange a downtime and therefore avoid unexpected outages that reduce your figures. Meanwhile the capacity figures are as the GP said. The quantum efficiency is already taken into effect with the nameplate and the design of the plant is already known and figured in to the nameplate so all you lose is unexpected outage of a panel and the effect of cloudier than normal weather.
First off, capitalism is all about being able to shift industries faitly easy. And stranded asset will be bankrupted ( covered by society ), or new profits from elsewhere will cover it. Secondly, we have already been.shifting away from fossil fuel for 10+ years. Coal accounts for 30% of our electricity, and should be somewhere around 20% by 2025. Thirdly, all the drilling equipment for oil will still continue. Why? Because it can also be used for Geothermal as well as oil. So no stranded assets there. Fourthly, oil processing will still be needed since oil/Nat gas are far better used as feed stock for chemical processes. Burning oil, Nat gas has been a major waste. Fithly, the burning of oil will slow down a great deal over the next 10 years. Musk is forcing that issue. Hopefully, trump will put same tariffs on Chinese cars that they put on American cars. However, that is only useful if some our billionaires decide enter this race.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Secondly, pollution is a major issue with Chinese panels.
The usual Windy lies.
Electricity growth is practically flat. So we don't need to build any more powerplants right now.
But the solar guys are building more that isn't really needed. "Yay! We have the highest growth this quarter! Woohoo!"
2.5 gigawatts! That's enough to power 2 DeLoreans!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
> When it's brought up folks say you shouldn't pick winners and losers. They might have a point about picking winners
If politicians weren't picking winners and losers, we wouldn't be focused NEARLY so much on solar-electric, which is about the fourth-best renewable energy source overall. We don't even use solar heating - a simple black tank sitting in the sun is pretty darn effective water heater nine months out of the year. Instead of cheap and effective solar energy, we're 100% focused on the complex and expensive way. That's just *solar*. Compare solar-electric with wind, battery storage with hydro. Our government policy, including billions in handouts of taxpayer money, over the last 15 years has been ridiculously on favor of solar-electric, practically ignoring better, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly options.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that a powerful senator and vice president made hundreds of millions of dollars on solar electric. It's not at all related to the fact that the people funding the politicians, their donors, were also the ones getting billions of dollars from tax payers for putting a sign that said "solar panels" on an empty building that didn't ever produce solar panels.
You don't have to pick winners and losers in order to have a gradual transition to better technologies. *NOT* picking winners and losers would have done that.
Unfortunately, politicians discovered that calling your kickback slush fund "green energy" was very effective at keeping voters and others from asking why exactly the politician is handing a a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to their friend and largest donor.
You know the GF doesn't make solar panels right?
but somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy. Let me explain. We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them.
This is true of every change in technology, of course. People who invested in radio stations moved their investments elsewhere. Radio stations still exist, of course, but because demand is down they aren't the huge moneymakers they were when everybody listened to the radio. Fossil fuels will still exist and still be used, of course, but if demand goes down they won't be the big moneymakers they once were.
People move investments around. This is what happens. The economy does not crash, in fact, it is actually GOOD for the economy to build new infrastructure to replace old, run down infrastructure.
... And that's before we start talking about what's going to happen to the middle east.
I can't help but think that what will happen in the middle east will be good (and good for ALL the parties involved) once all the powerful interests that have no motivation but oil, oil, and oil stop messing around.
I think that's similar to the argument that technology is going to take all of our jobs while we are at 'full employment' and been made for 100s of years
I'm much more scared of that, actually. In this case what the "disruptive technology" is making obsolete is people. As long as it makes new jobs for people, that's fine. But I'm not sure what happens when AI can do things better than any person in any job.
The broken window principle states that having broken windows in a neighborhood encourages crime. The city thus requires people to repair their broken windows immediately. The broken window principle actually helps window repairmen get business.
On the plus side, there will be a lot of very cheap power available. That's a very big opportunity right there.
There already is a lot of cheap power available. It turns out to be available when nobody wants it: from roughly midnight to 6 am, the actual cost of power is zero. (Not the price, but that's because regulators don't allow time-dependent pricing.)
This is something a lot of people commenting don't seem to understand. Utilities dump power in the dead of night-- they can't spin down to zero generation.
In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Intermittently cheap power when all those panels and wind overproduce power that needs to be dumped....
Yes, what happens is that the period of cheap energy will change from midnight to 6 am to roughly 9am solar time to 3pm solar time.
They have approximately doubled their end consumer energy cost for grid tied electricity thanks to their "cheap" expansion of green retardable energy.
Correlation does not imply causation.
In this case it is causation, but the ultimate cause is not the technology itself, but simply early adopter cost. ("An early adopter is likely to pay more for the product than later adopters, but accepts this premium" -- Investopedia).
The early adopters end up paying down development costs to allow the rest of us to buy at cheap rates, so: thanks, Germany.
Nissan makes the #1 selling LEAF all-electric car, Toyota makes the Prius Prime that has an all-electric mode along with improved hybrids using the lithium ion battery, and these manufacturers are not positions to make all-electric cars?
It is this kind of over-the-top bragging that has serious people shorting the Tesla stock?
The crashing the economy warning is in the context of a command from on high telling the nation (or world) that they will stop using fossil fuels on some timetable.
The economy isn't crashing. The transition from one energy source to another had been incremental, replacing the most expensive fossil fuel plants first.
In general, upgrading infrastructure helps the economy, rather than hurt it.
and of course YOU cannot buy solar (and use solar), like you can buy (a steady stream of) natural gas, oil, coal from just around the corner.
just look up, the sun is there, pretty much ANYWHERE!
stop trying to fix the world for everybody. fix it for yourself first and hopeful it will fix it for everybody else too? :P
tah best is still nuke: enjoy NOW and let the future offsprings deal with the problem; afterall they'll be wayyy smarter with their two heads
BTW, some say fusion reactors are economically viable now (6).
Since nobody has yet demonstrated a fusion reactor that generates even one watt of power, no. Maybe some day, but not "now".
(6) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-...
This is an example of why you should always read the article, not just the headline. The first sentence of the article you cite says:
Decades from now. Not "now".
then why hasn't the price of oil collapse? It looks pretty steady to me. If the asset was already deemed worthless you'd expect it to be around $10 or $20 a barrel, It's pushing $60 as I write this. That's below it's peak of a $100, true. But that's more a correction than a crash. And that correction was mostly brought on by stabilization in the middle east due to the Iran deal and a decline in oil fired power plants as natural gas got cheap due to fracking.
There's still trillions of dollars tied up in oil. And it looks like that money is going to become worthless. You can say anyone caught holding the bag deserves what they get, but it's still going to hurt everybody when it happens. Just like the housing bubble from 2008 did.
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Thanks.
In fact, the US is using less each year. Under these conditions expanding with something productive 24/7 is not necessary, in fact new power isn't even needed, Solar is just a feel good story at this point that helps politicians, and with tax breaks and grants a few manufacturers and installers.
Don't get me wrong, someday we will need it, but not today, fortunately this gives us a chance to evolve the technology before it becomes necessity.
Biggest new source still a drop in the bucket
https://xkcd.com/1162/
Used that one as desktop for a while....nice conversation starter and great trigger of fundies...
All I need is to have enough solar on my house to provide at least 10% of my power. 20% would be even better, but I can phase it in.
It will not run my AC, but it will run my gas furnace, water heater, and fridge.
It means that when the power goes out I can still live at my house, and will not lose all my food, or have the water pipes break.
And when the power is not out, it means my electric bill will drop.
And as a real world example, about 0.25 miles down the road from me is a large pre US Civil War, limestone house, who power 25% of the place with solar. They are very happy with the system, and the savings.
The main reason I have never gotten solar before is the 5 large pin oaks in my yard... which now have whatever the disease is that is killing them off throughout the Midwest. No more shade means I will need to offset my electric bill.
As to "where to put solar"... I work in an area where every building is surrounded by acres of blacktop parking. Across the street is an amphitheater with parking for 2600 cars. Put in solar panels, raised up high enough that a semi can drive under them... suddenly that sea of blazing hot asphalt is making money anytime the sun is up. The building I work in, we could just pull the power in, and my car would be in the shade, nice and cool when I get out at night.
"Citizens should stop installing non-coal energy and invest in big, beautiful coal! Who are these people and why do they hate coal?
Stop the war on coal!!!!!!!!!"
(Says a certain orange leader stuck in the past)
nuclear is only that high because it can *only* be used for base load. It can't scale back very well at all. That doesn't make it bad, it just means those numbers aren't the whole story. Grid infrastructure or storage breakthroughs could modify those numbers without the generation tech changing at all. But distributed grids are also large surface area targets for cyber attack.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
They will be replaced with new powerful interests.
Assume Solar takes off massively. Any place with large swaths of mostly sunny land will then be fought over by the same interests.
The other thing to consider with these types of investments is that the lifespan of both Wind and Solar are much lower in terms of assets. They get subsidies to get built and make money, great, but in 20 years when the panels need replacing, or the turbines need replacing, where are those capital costs are going to come from? So it makes sense to "jump on the bandwagon" when they are profitable, however it also makes sense to "jump ship" before all the replacement costs come due. Depending on how things go in the future, if they are not going to be profitable, they are not going to get replaced without incentive. There is a reason why they sign 20 year electricity contracts, because that is about the useful life of the asset. Anyway that is how I see it.
We are going to need cheap electricity to power desalination plants. We will also need to pump fresh water to the interior of the country. Lots of jobs will be created.
According to GOP Congressional members, there isn't that much sun in the Untied States.
I have 15KW or so on my roof doing absolutely NOTHING! County is dragging their feet to inspect it and the power company is taking its time to replace the meter. I have to wonder if they order each solar installation's meter individually from China or something. Taking a crazy long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't have a position in Tesla, but I got to get me some "put" options real quick to make me some money!