Slashdot Mirror
India Eyeing a New Monster 100GW Solar-Capacity Goal (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: In a confirmed report India's energy minister suggested that the country is considering issuing a tender for 100 gigawatts of solar energy, which may be tied to solar panel-manufacturing buildout. In 2015, India set a goal to reach 100GW of solar capacity as part of its larger aim of 175GW of renewable energy in general by 2022. This latest 100GW tender would be for a 2030 or 2035 target.
The existing goal is ambitious, so a stretch goal further into the future is even more so. The country's current total solar capacity is just 24.4GW, (for context, as of this month the US has about 55.9GW of installed solar capacity total) but it's growing quickly. Utility-scale solar capacity grew by 72 percent in the previous year.
The existing goal is ambitious, so a stretch goal further into the future is even more so. The country's current total solar capacity is just 24.4GW, (for context, as of this month the US has about 55.9GW of installed solar capacity total) but it's growing quickly. Utility-scale solar capacity grew by 72 percent in the previous year.
There are lots of places in India with no power at all. If you have trouble raising the capitol to build a full scale power plant a solar installation might be more appropriate especially without a nationwide grid. This might be practical -vs- environmental.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yes, more energy will help with infrastructure problems and should be a priority.
Thanks for showing us what can be done.
what an idiot. the country has pollution levels through the roof, inefficient coal plants built in the 60s and is at least attempting to move in a positive direction to reduce pollution; and our resident genius gets to talk about their trains and corruption. I assume they should put everything on hold till they fix trains and corruption? what do you say about Trumpism then...
Translating a few numbers from here, that means India would be getting about 23% of total energy consumption from solar (it's currently 2.89%). And is attempting to roughly double nuclear power generation within 25 years...
With even India onboard for a rapid ramp-up in low CO2 energy production, the CO2 reduction targets the world desires will be beat quite handily and without any additional effort. It was always the nations like India and China that were the big sources of CO2 so they are the main ones to watch in dealing with this issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What matters is actual output, and in India that is around 15-19%. So installing 100 GW of "capacity" really means installing around 15-19 GW of actual generation, or about 2% of their actual electrical need.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Power grid? This is a country plagued with Lucas electrics from their time dominated by the UK. The only people who have it worse are the Lebanese who not only have that fabulous British wiring but also benefit from French plumbing!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What matters is actual output, and in India that is around 15-19%. So installing 100 GW of "capacity" really means installing around 15-19 GW of actual generation
That's an interesting point, but that data seems to be from 2013 so it seems like upcoming generation would be quite a bit better.
This article on Wikipedia indicates that even currently solar generation exceeds the 2% figure you gave, it's at 2.9% now - so essentially an order of magnitude expansion should be a pretty decent amount of actual output.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yawn. Yep. Annnny day now. Just like the past 520 days. You'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath.
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion. So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity. This will generate 400 Wh of electricity per day (pV generates about 4 hours of nameplate power output per day), so it'll run a lightbulb, and maybe half of a small fridge.
Wow, that's transformational.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
From your own link it says "Total primary energy use of 775 Mtoe in 2013"
775 Mtoe = 9013250 Gw
100 * 100 / 9013250 = 0.001%
Also the article states India curently already has 24.4GW of solar, so again (100GW + 24.4GW) / 24.4GW does not equal 23% / 2.89%....
When the sun is up.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
India does not want to rely on China for solar panels - they want to build them locally. To justify building a local factory there has to be a stable demand to pay for it. You do this with large, long term projects -- like this one. It is important for India to not have their future energy production dependent on a country like China.
Confusing GW and GWh
Using the wrong case for an unit.
Yeah.
aaaaaaa
We'll sequester you, fart, and use that instead!
aaaaaaa
There is an economic imperative for them too. Europe, Japan and the US have all made money exporting energy generation technology. Now there is a big shift to safe renewables that don't have any of the old down sides (pollution, CO2, requiring nuclear fuel/disposal/regulation) there is a big opportunity to sell vast amounts of new technology and engineering knowledge.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's when it is needed, yes. Electrical power consumption at night is quite a bit lower.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
What do you mean by "Lucas electrics", the only Lucas I can think of is motor industry based.
A comment almost completely devoid of information, probably because you'd rather not get it wrong yourself and look like a dick...
OK so attempt 2...
775 Mtoe = 9 013 250 GWh
according to
https://www.iea.org/statistics...
So to get GWh from a 100GW power station...
100GW x 24 x 365 = 876 000GWh
100 * 876,000 / 9,013,250 = 9%
which is still not 23%
We are already past the c02 limit for a 1.5 C temperature increase. We blow thru the 2.0 C temperature increase in 2025. To not do so, we would have to lower our carbon output by 90%.
I just don't see that happening.
In the mean time, natural gas extraction is leading to very sharp increases in methane.
Nothing short of directly removing CO2 is going to work. And we are not even close to reduction much less extraction.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
True, it'll be very expensive to replace them all. But it's quite a sight to behold... the clock turns midnight on their 25th anniversary, and they just crumble into dust and drift away in the wind.
We should definitely build nuclear power stations instead. They don't have any kind of limited lifespan, or require any kind of maintenance or additional costs to deal with any byproducts like those terrible solar panels.
Wrong, 100 GW of solar power at about 20% capacity factor is about 6.3e17 joules of annual output, which is about 2% of 775 Mtoe = ~3.25e19 joules.
Ezekiel 23:20
> What do you mean by "Lucas electrics", the only Lucas I can think of is motor industry based.
http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html
They made all sorts of things, but are worst known for their motoring products, yes.
There's an old joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer? Because they keep it in Lucas refrigerators."
As a Lukas.... what?
And when the sun is up, you pump water up into hydropower lakes, and at night you let it flow back.
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion.
"Will be"? The current population of India is roughly 1.324 billion today. Are you thinking India will lose 300 million citizens in the near future?
So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity.
Are you trolling or idiotic? They already consume 751W per capita. Using your (incorrect) math that would be an addition of over 11% to their generating capacity so that's far from trivial.
Wow, that's transformational.
Yes it is. It would provide stable power to a lot of people who don't already have access to reliable power. That is a LOT of people in India. 58% of India's population reportedly lives on less than $3.10 per day. If you actually knew anything about India you'd know they have some pretty severe infrastructure problems holding the country back, not the least of which is their power grid.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
Only to an arrogant rich westerner with no clue how a large portion of the world actually lives.
All the materials you mentioned are raw materials. You cannot make them. You mine them. India wants to be the one to turn raw materials into finished products. Much like Indonesia wants to smelt the copper and stop exporting the ore.
I guess an electric train runs well on solar power ...
(*facepalm*)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sounds like the US. What are they focusing on? Space Marines...
What, you don't want your kid joining the Mobile Infantry so they can become a citizen?
Ah, I'd never heard Lucas being synonymous with poor quality.
No in nations that have real industrial output. That can have jobs in shifts and work all day and night... Power is needed day and night.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thats great if the dam exists and was designed that way :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Power grid? This is a country plagued with Lucas electrics from their time dominated by the UK. The only people who have it worse are the Lebanese who not only have that fabulous British wiring but also benefit from French plumbing!
Electric shower heads - now that's like combining the electric chair with a Swedish sauna room
http://trialandstyle.com/edito...?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Simply a matter of industrial economic development. Clearly the India government wants to promote the manufacture of solar panels in India for export to the rest of the world in very large volumes. So it is seeking to promote the development of major very high production level solar panel plants. So it is putting out a tender which will promote that development to fill that contract and then go on to export panels as well as fill local need at a low manufacture cost per kWh of energy produced.
This might seem a major investment but compare it to pouring similar amounts of money into the black hole of military misadventures and espionage corruption and crime promotion. The Billions going into those solar panels to provide a future economic advantage in the production of solar panels is a sound investment into the future.
So how low can the solar energy limbo bar cost per panel go before it breaks the back of say, coal as a start. This kind of investment is what will drive it and why US fossil fuel corporations fight so hard to block it's development in the US, via lobbyist corruption but will ultimately cripple the US in the future as a result of this quarters greed. Being the cheapest at making solar panels in largely automated factories will be a big thing in the future competition between nations, having the raw resources close to production facilities they will favour by regulation, will be critical.
If you have the raw resources why would you not force the export of solar panels only and not the raw materials, things will get interesting.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Oh please. Just watch the last Star Wars movies.
-- Cheers!
(100GW + 24.4GW)
Dude, look at the subject of your own post, a copy of my point - the figure in question is 175GW (the 2022 figure), not 100+24.
Also you are using figures from the Slashdot article and comparing them to a percentage from Wikipedia, both of which are bound to be written against different levels of solar power generation. You can't say directly the 2.89% is related to the 24GW from the article here, you'd have to adjust first for the difference in base.
I'm not saying my estimate is exact, it was off the cuff. But it's much closer than any of the "corrections" I have seen posted, especially the ones that amusingly claim after India adds a lot of solar generation capacity it will some have produce far less a percentage of total power...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is pretty easy to disprove
https://www.agora-energiewende...
I took a couple of days of the last week as an example and you can see pretty clearly the difference between the power requirements during the day and during the night. As you may or may not know, Germany is a nation that has some real industrial output.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You've never heard of "Lucas Electrics, The Prince of Darkness"?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Letâ(TM)s just for arguments sake say that the US doesnâ(TM)t have those problems. What do they focus on? Separating children from their sex trafficers... way to make the world a better place.
FTFY. You do realize that is why the Democrats passed the law, right?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The saying was that Lucas killed more RAF pilots than the Germans... Bad taste, but - if you've ever worked on a British pre-1975 car, you'd understand...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Solar power is one of the emerging reliable source of power. It is a good step for future. But at the same time, well project management and planning is required to achieve this target.
I'm not denying that people's choices matter, but technology, legislation and economics have a much larger role to play.
Being a vegan is great if you are into it, but that one spiritual retreat a year to Nepal or business trip to Paris is going to totally wipe out any CO2 reduction you've achieved by eating fresh local produce, cycling to work, showering every other day, recycling religiously and taking your own bags to the supermarket.
Until we can firmly pin the real cost of CO2 on the activities that produce it (aviation, power generation, logistics), there's no real incentive to make any reductions.
The problem with saying "just build extractors" is that it is never more economically viable to build an extractor that can pull XX tonnes/year of CO2 out of the air than it is to build a clean power plant that can replace a fossil-fuel plant putting that XX tonnes/year into the air in the first place. Once we have a very clean grid it might be worth building extractors for the aviation-CO2 that is harder to reduce, but then aviation will (rightly) get a lot more expensive than it is now. Our best bet is to pin the external costs on the polluters now, and let the market sort it out.
Oh, and India is trying to use this one source of solar power to power their entire country, is that it? Once this is finished they're going to demolish all other power plants? No point in adding capacity during the peak usage times, right?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Better tell Germany, because they're about to convert a coal mine to do exactly that with a huge pipe running in a 10 mile underground loop for storing that water underground. They're going to add pumps to pump water to the surface during times of generation excess, and then when generation is lower they run the water back down into the mine reservoir and send it through a turbine on the way. So, quick, Slashdot expert, save Germany and tell them that this isn't going to work because the coal mine wasn't designed to hold an underground reservoir and pumping station.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
We are talking about India not Indiana
**Life is too short to be serious**
No, more like unifying the disparate Air Force, Navy and Army space commands.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Didn't you get the memo?
If you are opposed to unfettered illegal immigration you're a mouth breathing racist.
If you support the notion that a nation has the right and obligation to its citizens to maintain a border, you're a mouth breathing racist.
Let everyone in who wants to come, then tax the vanishing middle class into oblivion to pay for it. Else you're a mouth breathing racist.
You haven't played Sim City have you? Or are you one of those people who don't understand why the buildings aren't being built despite having roads and trains but no power plant?
That's not how you spell "street".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oy
Sim city isn't real life my friend, solar actually works during the night there not so much in this world.
What I do know is that the countries with the largest percentage of the generating base derived from renewables have the highest retail electric costs in the world. So to borrow your analogy, the data centers and heavy industry powered by electricity rather than coal aren't going to be built because they will be too costly to operate, and the country won't be able to fully exploit developing internal demand because the transport system is crap, and the financial is something that makes snidely whiplash envious.
Well we don't have the technology yet but wouldn't it be nice if we had something powered by renewable energy that directly produced graphene from the air in amounts sufficient to make a difference?
For one thing, we could use it to replace the sand we are running out of for concrete (can't use desert sand- it's spherical).
If we do get a technology that does it, then we will have the problem on the other end as carbon extractors deny co2 levels are getting too low. But that's probably over 100 years away.
A lot of the nanny-ism flows from overpopulation. If we get the world below replacement levels, we might wean back down to a more sustainable population level which supports a higher standard of living per individual.
But then we risk an over shoot there too. Rats in the Calhoun rat universe experiments did not resume breeding even with plentiful space, food, and water after they stopped breeding due to overcrowding. They were in a behavioral sink that persisted until they went extinct.
On the other hand, it's also possible that if all but one population drops below replacement level then the lone population which continues to breed at high levels will eventually come to dominate the population.
I think the CO2 situation will not be resolved well short of us finding a technological solution.
The overall situation is extremely complex.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sim city isn't real life my friend
No it's not. But since you had no real life experience either I was hoping you at least had some relatable experience as to why your comment was silly.
What I do know is that the countries with the largest percentage of the generating base derived from renewables have the highest retail electric costs in the world.
That is what is called observer bias. The countries with the highest percentage of renewables are also countries which had a first mover disadvantage adopting at the time expensive technologies. The countries with the highest percentage of renewables are also countries which have ALWAYS had high electricity costs due to the local peculiarities and infrastructure.
So to borrow your analogy, the data centers and heavy industry powered by electricity rather than coal aren't going to be built because they will be too costly to operate
Great analogy given the number of new data centres and industry specifically turning to renewables to cut costs. I actually worked at a gas power plant for a while. One of the cost cutting projects I put in was to install solar panels on the roofs of the switchrooms to run the airconditioning units because it was cheaper than the wholesale cost of electricity from our own turbines.
Come join us in 2018 when you're ready to discuss power infrastructure and pricing.
No it's not. But since you had no real life experience either I was hoping you at least had some relatable experience as to why your comment was silly.
I'm an electrical engineer and you are using a video game as your experience.
That is what is called observer bias.
No in your case this is what's called innumeracy. The inability to process numerical information.
One of the cost cutting projects I put in was to install solar panels on the roofs of the switchrooms to run the airconditioning units because it was cheaper than the wholesale cost of electricity from our own turbines.
Well bragging you're inefficient is hardly an argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Combined cycle natural gas runs $53/mwh vs solar at $73/mwh of course that doesn't cover the fact you have to use something besides solar at night.
Indeed. You can store it in many different ways and potential energy is usually a relatively cheap one. In the US there was even the plan of riding heavily loaded trains uphill during energy excess, and let them decsend again to produce power at night.
But the power lakes can hold much more energy, and as such it is already being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...