Because they are usually required to pay customers a lot more for feed-in power than they can generate it for, with no allowance for their internal cost overheads, etc.
Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).
You cite factors that fall against solar, but miss all the ones that fall in solar's favor. The biggest is peak shaving. In many areas, usage peaks coincide with when the sun is shining. Peak power is the most expensive power. Imagine building a power plant and running it seven hours a year. Welcome to peaker plants. That's some hellishly expensive electricity. In places like Hawaii, Texas, Arizona, and southern California, when people put more solar PV in, the utility needs fewer peaker plants. This is HUGE. You know how much credit most utilities want to give to solar for that? Zero.
But if the utility does something to eliminate the need for a peaker plant, you can bet your entire net worth the utility will be asking the rate commission for higher rates to reward them.
The best work on this subject (trying to figure out what price has no one subsidizing any one) is coming out of the Rocky Mountain Institute. A good starting place is their survey of existing literature (http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center%2FLibrary%2F2013-13_eLabDERCostValue). Austin electric also appears to have done really good work in establishing what they call a "fair value of solar". By their measure, the fair value of solar in Austin is currently higher than the retail rate. As more solar is added, this rate will fall. The rate is assessed annually.
> BTW, they are also paying about 35 cents per kilowatt hour,
Most of that is taxes.
Current German solar feed in tariffs for solar range from 11.8 to 17.5 Euro cents per KwH. The 11.8 cents (which is what larger installations get) is actually cheaper than new coal plants.
If you want to see how an upper bound on how much renewables are really costing German consumers, look at the EEG surcharge. That funds all the feed in tariffs paid to renewable producers. I say upper bound, because renewables get no credit for the downward pressure they put on conventional electricity prices (google merit order effect).
Solar accounts for 0.17% of our electric production in this country, tripling it won't make any difference.
So far this year, Germany's gotten about 5% of their electric production from solar and Italy is around 7%. Solar is way cheaper now than when those countries installed the bulk of their solar PV.
So yeah, tripling will do very little. No reason not to hit up a factor of 30 to 50.
Washington DC to Chicago has a distance of about 595 miles. Light travels 186,282 miles per second. That is 3.19 milliseconds. The article keeps saying 7 milliseconds. What am I missing here?
So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.
Solar used to only work in Germany because of the subsidies. At this point, solar is Germany is much cheaper than retail electricity. As far as German's paying much more for electricity because of solar, that's not really so clear either. If you look here:
you can see where Germany's power is coming from at any given time. Solar is doing an incredible job of peak shaving, which lowers the cost of electricity. The accounting problem then becomes that people know how much the solar subsidy costs, but don't know how much lower the cost of all the other power is because of solar.
You mention solving the storage problem, and the Germans are working on that as well:
Best estimate I've seen is that solar+storage for an average retail German customer will be cheaper than grid power sometime next year.
Even if none of this is cheap enough for you, just wait a bit. Solar is getting around 7-8% cheaper every year. Best estimate I've seen for the USA is that between 1/3's and 2/3's of American's will be able to save money by 2020 with unsubsidized solar power. A great tool to play around with and see this is here:
LOL, how did you know? Actually, only my very first SSD was OCZ. It did the insta-blank thing something like 5-6 times before I threw it in the trash. Most of my drives these days are Intel drives, and I've only had one of them insta-blank.
I've owned several hundred hard drives over the last 30 years. I've never had an active hard drive drive just blank out. I have had drives that had not been powered for a couple of years refuse to ever come back. But if I did not feel the need to even power the thing on for years, you can imagine how little I cared for what was on it.
In the last four years, I've owned around 20 SSDs. I've had five failures. Every single one was the drive just instantly lost everything. Amazingly, in four of the five cases, the drive still worked fine! It had simply lost all the data on it and believed itself to be a blank drive.
That said, the speed of SSDs makes them worth the risk to me. But I take backups far more seriously than I used to. I need them far more often.
It isn't damage control. It is technician stupidity.
Apologists need to stop trotting out equivalents to, "Don't attribute to malice.. bla bla stupidity," at every corner.
I don't really care if it is malice or stupidity. Either way, the handling of the Fukushima event has turned me from an ardent nuclear supporter to mildly anti-nuke.
According to this website, Indian airlines accident rates are spectacularly higher than western airlines. Air India's accident rate is even higher than KAL's, which is the example airline for Gladwell's theory.
OK, this could be really interesting. One of the problems of compressed air storage is that the air is very cold when it is decompressed. You generally need to burn a little natural gas to warm it up a bit before hitting the turbines.
Now we put this at a data center that has enormous cooling requirements....
Yes, energy transfer is most certainly a gating concern.
Tesla's supercharger cable transmits power at the rate of 90kw right now. The Model S can have an 85Kwh battery, so we are looking at recharge times of about an hour. If the batteries are not limiting in any way, one would need to connect 57 of these supercharging cables to the car to recharge in 60 seconds. Clearly, a new charging port would be needed. Let's see, if we want to move 85 KwH in one minute, our charge rate needs to be 5100 Kw or 5.1 Mw. That's going to be one h**l of a charging port....
OK, if this actually works out, this is great news. Fast charge and discharge are incredibly useful. Unfortunately, the article does not say anything about storing more energy than existing batteries, which I assume means energy storage is about the same. So, you will be able to recharge your phone very quickly (seconds?), but the phone will still last as long on the batteries as it does now.
What you're forgetting is cost. Let me give you a car analogy. Let's say you have a choice between buying two identical cars. One gets 30 MPG and costs $30k, and the other gets 60 MPG but costs $60k.
Let me fix that car analogy for you. First car gets 30 MPG and costs $30K. Second car gets 60 MPG and costs one and a half million dollars.
The super high efficiency cells cost around 500 times more than bulk produced generic silicon cells. To the best of my knowledge, they are only used in space because of the price tag.
And if it was just the six months, that might have been OK. But the prosecutor was also insisting on a guilty plea to multiple felony counts. Once you are a convicted felon, many of your rights disappear forever. Do you vote? Convicted felons don't.
Or even more reason to be afraid...IIRC part of the problem was they weren't telling people how bad it really was wasn't it?
That said "among those who lost their homes" would seem to include the many thousands of tsunami victims rather than just the ones displaced due to the nuclear issues.
Attributing that to Fukushima isn't a fair metric (and I'm one to widely denounce nuclear power...)
Sigh...This is Slashdot, where no one actually RTFA, right?
The article specifically mentions "But uncertainty, isolation and fears about radioactivity’s invisible threat are jeopardizing the mental health of the 210,000 residents who fled from the nuclear disaster."
This is about the people who were forced out of their homes because of the nuclear disaster, NOT people whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami.
...And, somehow....they have to be honored, I mean, people worked their whole lives and are dependent on that as their means of retirement.....Sure, you honor your contracts with those till now, but WTF are we not stopping said practice immediately going forward?
worked only one day for the state and will wind up with a pension of $108,000 a year. I'm sorry, there are some games that were played that are simply not defensible.
This is not a victory for renewables, but for democracy. German citizens want to go renewable enough that they are willing to swallow the costs. Germany is a rich enough country to do that, and rich countries can accomplish amazing things when they have the will to do so. That doesn't mean renewable became any more viable economically, or that other poorer countries have any chance of replicating this feat.
I agree with the first part of what you wrote, but not the second. Germany has purchased so much solar PV that it has pushed the PV industry far down the experience curve. This results in far lower PV prices for everyone else.
I've been saying for years now that basically the entire world should be sending a Christmas card to Germany every year. The Germans took a HUGE economic hit that wound up making solar PV much more cost effective for everyone.
Actually, Germany is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of renewable sources in the electricity mix. The problem is that they also consume a lot of electricity (industry and population), so their consumption really matters in absolute terms. That's why it is an important country -- if they can pull it off, it means that other large industrial producers like France and the UK also can.
Keep in mind that that report is 2 years old now, and many countries like Spain and Portugal have invested additional resources, with Portugal passing the 50% mark this year.
My, how things can change in just a couple of years. Germany has already blown through the 2020 goal and in the first half of 2012 got 25% of its electricity from renewables.
Solar and wind installations in the last 2.5 years in Germany have been crazy huge. I believe Germany also generated around 6% of their electricity from solar PV so far this year, and that number is also going up quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they are usually required to pay customers a lot more for feed-in power than they can generate it for, with no allowance for their internal cost overheads, etc.
Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).
You cite factors that fall against solar, but miss all the ones that fall in solar's favor. The biggest is peak shaving. In many areas, usage peaks coincide with when the sun is shining. Peak power is the most expensive power. Imagine building a power plant and running it seven hours a year. Welcome to peaker plants. That's some hellishly expensive electricity. In places like Hawaii, Texas, Arizona, and southern California, when people put more solar PV in, the utility needs fewer peaker plants. This is HUGE. You know how much credit most utilities want to give to solar for that? Zero.
But if the utility does something to eliminate the need for a peaker plant, you can bet your entire net worth the utility will be asking the rate commission for higher rates to reward them.
The best work on this subject (trying to figure out what price has no one subsidizing any one) is coming out of the Rocky Mountain Institute. A good starting place is their survey of existing literature (http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center%2FLibrary%2F2013-13_eLabDERCostValue). Austin electric also appears to have done really good work in establishing what they call a "fair value of solar". By their measure, the fair value of solar in Austin is currently higher than the retail rate. As more solar is added, this rate will fall. The rate is assessed annually.
> BTW, they are also paying about 35 cents per kilowatt hour,
Most of that is taxes.
Current German solar feed in tariffs for solar range from 11.8 to 17.5 Euro cents per KwH. The 11.8 cents (which is what larger installations get) is actually cheaper than new coal plants.
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?page_id=14068
If you want to see how an upper bound on how much renewables are really costing German consumers, look at the EEG surcharge. That funds all the feed in tariffs paid to renewable producers. I say upper bound, because renewables get no credit for the downward pressure they put on conventional electricity prices (google merit order effect).
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?tag=eeg-surcharge
Solar accounts for 0.17% of our electric production in this country, tripling it won't make any difference.
So far this year, Germany's gotten about 5% of their electric production from solar and Italy is around 7%. Solar is way cheaper now than when those countries installed the bulk of their solar PV.
So yeah, tripling will do very little. No reason not to hit up a factor of 30 to 50.
But will it detect that guy you've seen in your rear view mirror switching lanes doing 40mph faster than you?
Yes. And it will almost certainly do it better than almost any human driver.
Washington DC to Chicago has a distance of about 595 miles. Light travels 186,282 miles per second. That is 3.19 milliseconds. The article keeps saying 7 milliseconds. What am I missing here?
So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.
Solar used to only work in Germany because of the subsidies. At this point, solar is Germany is much cheaper than retail electricity. As far as German's paying much more for electricity because of solar, that's not really so clear either. If you look here:
http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/
you can see where Germany's power is coming from at any given time. Solar is doing an incredible job of peak shaving, which lowers the cost of electricity. The accounting problem then becomes that people know how much the solar subsidy costs, but don't know how much lower the cost of all the other power is because of solar.
You mention solving the storage problem, and the Germans are working on that as well:
http://bosch-solar-storage.com/
Best estimate I've seen is that solar+storage for an average retail German customer will be cheaper than grid power sometime next year.
Even if none of this is cheap enough for you, just wait a bit. Solar is getting around 7-8% cheaper every year. Best estimate I've seen for the USA is that between 1/3's and 2/3's of American's will be able to save money by 2020 with unsubsidized solar power. A great tool to play around with and see this is here:
http://www.ilsr.org/projects/solarparitymap/
LOL, how did you know? Actually, only my very first SSD was OCZ. It did the insta-blank thing something like 5-6 times before I threw it in the trash. Most of my drives these days are Intel drives, and I've only had one of them insta-blank.
I've owned several hundred hard drives over the last 30 years. I've never had an active hard drive drive just blank out. I have had drives that had not been powered for a couple of years refuse to ever come back. But if I did not feel the need to even power the thing on for years, you can imagine how little I cared for what was on it.
In the last four years, I've owned around 20 SSDs. I've had five failures. Every single one was the drive just instantly lost everything. Amazingly, in four of the five cases, the drive still worked fine! It had simply lost all the data on it and believed itself to be a blank drive.
That said, the speed of SSDs makes them worth the risk to me. But I take backups far more seriously than I used to. I need them far more often.
It isn't damage control. It is technician stupidity.
Apologists need to stop trotting out equivalents to, "Don't attribute to malice.. bla bla stupidity," at every corner.
I don't really care if it is malice or stupidity. Either way, the handling of the Fukushima event has turned me from an ardent nuclear supporter to mildly anti-nuke.
> Indian culture is hierarchical, and deference to your superiors counts enormously. Yet, Indian airlines do not have worse-than-average crash rates.
Well yeah, that's true as long as we ignore reality.
http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
According to this website, Indian airlines accident rates are spectacularly higher than western airlines. Air India's accident rate is even higher than KAL's, which is the example airline for Gladwell's theory.
OK, this could be really interesting. One of the problems of compressed air storage is that the air is very cold when it is decompressed. You generally need to burn a little natural gas to warm it up a bit before hitting the turbines.
Now we put this at a data center that has enormous cooling requirements....
This could turn out very well.
Wish I had mod points today. I came here to post exactly what you just said.
Yes, energy transfer is most certainly a gating concern.
Tesla's supercharger cable transmits power at the rate of 90kw right now. The Model S can have an 85Kwh battery, so we are looking at recharge times of about an hour. If the batteries are not limiting in any way, one would need to connect 57 of these supercharging cables to the car to recharge in 60 seconds. Clearly, a new charging port would be needed. Let's see, if we want to move 85 KwH in one minute, our charge rate needs to be 5100 Kw or 5.1 Mw. That's going to be one h**l of a charging port....
OK, if this actually works out, this is great news. Fast charge and discharge are incredibly useful. Unfortunately, the article does not say anything about storing more energy than existing batteries, which I assume means energy storage is about the same. So, you will be able to recharge your phone very quickly (seconds?), but the phone will still last as long on the batteries as it does now.
T-platforms is a Russian company headquartered in Moscow. This is no more surprising than Boeing selling military equipment to the USA.
What you're forgetting is cost. Let me give you a car analogy. Let's say you have a choice between buying two identical cars. One gets 30 MPG and costs $30k, and the other gets 60 MPG but costs $60k.
Let me fix that car analogy for you. First car gets 30 MPG and costs $30K. Second car gets 60 MPG and costs one and a half million dollars.
The super high efficiency cells cost around 500 times more than bulk produced generic silicon cells. To the best of my knowledge, they are only used in space because of the price tag.
This has got to be one of the dumbest ideas for a training exercise I've ever heard of in my life.
And if it was just the six months, that might have been OK. But the prosecutor was also insisting on a guilty plea to multiple felony counts. Once you are a convicted felon, many of your rights disappear forever. Do you vote? Convicted felons don't.
Or even more reason to be afraid...IIRC part of the problem was they weren't telling people how bad it really was wasn't it?
That said "among those who lost their homes" would seem to include the many thousands of tsunami victims rather than just the ones displaced due to the nuclear issues.
Attributing that to Fukushima isn't a fair metric (and I'm one to widely denounce nuclear power...)
Sigh...This is Slashdot, where no one actually RTFA, right?
The article specifically mentions "But uncertainty, isolation and fears about radioactivity’s invisible threat are jeopardizing the mental health of the 210,000 residents who fled from the nuclear disaster."
This is about the people who were forced out of their homes because of the nuclear disaster, NOT people whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami.
For comparative purposes, an incandescent bulb puts out about 52 lumens per watt.
That's the theoretical maximum, that no bulb actually gets near. For example, a typical 60 watt bulb will give you 15 lumens per watt.
http://www.efi.org/factoids/lumens.html
...And, somehow....they have to be honored, I mean, people worked their whole lives and are dependent on that as their means of retirement.....Sure, you honor your contracts with those till now, but WTF are we not stopping said practice immediately going forward?
The Preckwinkle gentleman from this article
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-22/news/ct-met-pensions-teacher-perk-20111023_1_state-teachers-pension-fund-teachers-union-public-pension
worked only one day for the state and will wind up with a pension of $108,000 a year. I'm sorry, there are some games that were played that are simply not defensible.
not everyone should be expected to share their work.
Nor should Github be expected to host such repositories for free.
That's true. However, if Github can afford to provide the service for free and chooses to do so, I see no harm in it.
The reason it is +4 insightful is that he was responding to someone who was claiming nuclear is zero carbon but wind and solar are not zero carbon.
And you are correct, nothing will ever be zero carbon.
This is not a victory for renewables, but for democracy. German citizens want to go renewable enough that they are willing to swallow the costs. Germany is a rich enough country to do that, and rich countries can accomplish amazing things when they have the will to do so. That doesn't mean renewable became any more viable economically, or that other poorer countries have any chance of replicating this feat.
I agree with the first part of what you wrote, but not the second. Germany has purchased so much solar PV that it has pushed the PV industry far down the experience curve. This results in far lower PV prices for everyone else.
I've been saying for years now that basically the entire world should be sending a Christmas card to Germany every year. The Germans took a HUGE economic hit that wound up making solar PV much more cost effective for everyone.
Actually, Germany is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of renewable sources in the electricity mix. The problem is that they also consume a lot of electricity (industry and population), so their consumption really matters in absolute terms. That's why it is an important country -- if they can pull it off, it means that other large industrial producers like France and the UK also can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union
Keep in mind that that report is 2 years old now, and many countries like Spain and Portugal have invested additional resources, with Portugal passing the 50% mark this year.
My, how things can change in just a couple of years. Germany has already blown through the 2020 goal and in the first half of 2012 got 25% of its electricity from renewables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
Solar and wind installations in the last 2.5 years in Germany have been crazy huge. I believe Germany also generated around 6% of their electricity from solar PV so far this year, and that number is also going up quickly.