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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.
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
. People's retirements are heavily vested in them.
Why would anyone with sense bet on one industry for their retirement? People should diversify for retirement. This is not a great argument against solar as a good argument against terrible investment advice.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Broken window fallacy
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
On the plus side, there will be a lot of very cheap power available. That's a very big opportunity right there.
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.
I think that's a valid concern although I don't see results as dire as what you're describing.
My impression is funds that invest in energy products/services are beginning to diversify into renewables. These people spend their days watching the markets in an attempt to anticipate changes. And I think the drop in demand for oil will be gradual; not sudden.
But I do agree re fossil fuels; esp. oil. Oil has been a world-wide exchange medium for several decades, but that is about to change. Coal, IMO, is on its way out. I just reviewed a potential investment (energy sector) where the group was clearly moving out of coal since more and more energy producers (aka utilities) are switching plants to gas. These utilities also seem to be looking at blending renewables into their grids.
And I know there are plants that are going to use coal, but I think those are meant more for PR than any actual trend.
So, again IMHO, anyone invested heavily in fossil fuels should be watching the markets.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
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.
A lot of the more sensible investment schemes have already heavily divested from fossil fuels, so they won't be directly affected by such a crash.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well, it's a good thing that all the big energy companies are investing heavily in renewables then, right?
Most of the buying in actual fossil fuel stocks in the past decade has been institutional. Yes, a lot of day traders play the energy derivatives, but they'll make money either way.
Switching to more renewables isn't going to happen fast enough to crash the economy. Anyway, the bubble's got to pop. Corrections are good for everyone, and when it's done, we'll have cleaner energy (and in the case of renewables, cheaper too).
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You don't know how investments work do you?
BTW there are plenty of retirement funds divesting from fossil fuels for this very reason, it will be impossible to time the drop in value of the existing fossil fuel companies. CalPEL and NY and several other major retirement funds have already began to divest because of this future risk.
Anyone smart realizes the risk and has either divested or keeps fossil fuel stocks at less than 5% of the portfolio so a collapse won't significantly harm investments. But these stocks won't collapse to zero overnight, it's going to be a long slide as people realize the value the stock holds for fuel in the ground is not there and consumption declines.
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.
Crashing the economy by cheapening the energy would be a truly spectacular feat. A little bit like when the green revolution "crashed" agriculture.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, we now know how his investments work, anyway.
Count me in as one who has heavily invested savings into "oil and gas" companies recently. In some cases due to price dips because of renewables hype.
Don't get me wrong, I think growing solar and wind options are great.. I'm just realistic. When I read summaries like this (having a background in math), I can immediately spot where they are using statistics to distort the facts. Energy consumption is additive as new technologies come online, and this growth is not at the expense of fossil fuel growth, which continues to grow as well. Remember, more energy used == higher quality of life. People aren't going to stop using any source of energy they find.
Second, what you think of as "oil & gas" companies largely don't exist, they have all long since diversified to "energy" companies. In most cases, the big "oil" players are the world's heaviest investors into renewable energy installations and infrastructure. Kind of funny to think the same companies you blast as "big oil" are probably doing far more for renewables than you or any activist I've ever heard of...
Interesting side note: some of these companies I have invested in have started in the last two years or so to sell their solar and wind assets. In not so many words, their reasoning is: current hype has these assets so overvalued it makes sense to sell them and reinvest that money elsewhere into something that makes better money.. usually back into Oil & Gas (natural gas is a popular one lately). In particular I hear reference to falling subsidies, which make the shaky economics even worse.
Lastly, rather than just hype about maybe making money in the future, most of these companies earn lots of steady cash, which you should count on for dividends far more than share price growth. If you understood any hydrocarbon market dynamics or fundamental uses of fuel, you'd realize it's not going anywhere. In the best scenario, say solar power replaces all transportation fuel; absolutely great! There will still be people lined up around the block to buy it for other uses. It will always be valuable.
All it takes is one bad experience with sea food. Pandas have been sticking to the "safe" choice ever since.
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.
So why idle here when you can save so many from the impending doom? You could make a sign and stand by the interstate to warn all the people!
Not even close. I think it's going to double in about 7 Billion years or so.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My shares in buggy whips never recovered. I was ruined!
There should be firm laws against this sort of 'progress'.
No sig today...
...overproduce power that needs to be dumped.
...or just put to good use. Merely replacing global world hydrogen consumption for agricultural and chemical purposes with electrolytic hydrogen would necessitate something like 800 GW of nameplate solar capacity dedicated to the task.
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
Loosers hang on...
I think we have a paradox here.
> 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.
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 fossil backup that is necessary to keep society working will be expensive though.
As repeated studies have shown, it is cheaper to supply power through a combination of renewables and fossil than either alone.
That is correct: adding renewables *lowers the cost of fossil fuel electricity*. Mostly through less wear and tear. This is not purely theoretically, many of the studies are in-market, notably California.
> In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Here in Ontario when you buy a EV and a charger, you get a deal so night-time power is free.
Right-wing all up in arms over this of course.
Yet, when you examine the numbers, it turns out giving EV owners free power is actually cheaper, because Ontario Power Generation currently *pays* New York to haul away our excess.
0 > -ve
Yes, energy use may increase at night.
Electricity usage is lower at night and during winter.
Stop trying to push a strawman.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!