God Yes, NIMS training was by far the most useful and relevant training I've received in the fire service...in the current era, the problem with interagency communications is not *tech*, it's *rules*, and I was thoroughly impressed by NIMS' common sense, 6th grade reading level, scalability, and "rules for new rules".
It's a very realistic framework that accomodates, among other things, the fact that you and everyone else has other things to do and to remember, that your personnel are going to have IQs from maybe 85 on up to 150, that if you don't figure out how everyone gets paid you can't figure out anything else, etc.
I kid you not, FEMA's NIMS 100 (or -700) training is the best free mini-MBA you could give yourself. Pushing old, unsexy NIMS will do more than any amount of shiny radios or infinite numbers of useless "command center" RVs,
So, ok, in that case - a WWII USAT - and in the brief interval when this was a USAFS - who's the crew? Merchant Marine? Or do people like get trained in the Navy and then transfer briefly to Air Force control?
I know that the Army has a huge rotary-wing fleet and maybe some fixed-wing exec transports, that the Air Force has some limited rotary wing assets for Special Ops and rescue, and the Navy and Marines have lots of both, and I knew the USAF had like some fishing boats to pick up crashed drones with, but I gotta say I did think ships were an exclusive Navy province...any other counterintuitive intersections you know of?
Was anyone else disoriented by the designation "USAFS" and the very concept of a *ship* owned and operated (however briefly) by the Air Force?
The mind boggles at the concept of a USAF-staffed ship; did they somehow contract the Navy to do it?
From the broad, shallow social perspective, I do think it makes a whole lot more sense to focus a lot of money on increasing the ability of the disabled to participate in the physical world unassisted (as through something like this, R&D $$ intensive or no,) than it does to spend an equivalent amount of resources on the converse - trying to make the phyiscial world more accessible to the disabled (via curb cuts, handicapped spaces, extra-wide bathrooms, etc.)
I'm confident that the several billion $US / year focused on the latter could make some huge strides in the former at better cost...
You both started off as Effects Guys. Now, you're the focal point for a community of scientists, engineers, and technologists that may not be the one you originally came from. What's more, that community is very active, and I would imagine demanding, and you're all of a sudden its poster children. What's more, there is a nascent backlash against those who owuld explain everything using purely empirical methods. Not to exaggerate the importance of a cable science show, = ), but what is it like going from Effects Guy to this very public, potentially freighted role?
I think we agree more than disagree. I think the power towers *are* a dead end - the working fluid is heinous to handle, the plant itself is much more vulnerable to single points of catastrophic failure, it brins NIMBYs the dishes don't, and it's not that suspectible to manufacturing economies of scale. I think it's a bad application of big power plant thinking to a diffuse and distributed resource.
Where I will argue with you is that the economic failure (and failure they were) of a hundred=plus kW power tower has any bearing on the prospects of a field of dozens of 25-kW engines operating on entirely different principles throughout...
Absolutely; and I'm sure once they go out to occupy seven square miles of desert, the Environmental Impact Statement process will keep many an environmental engineer and herpetologist employed for many a month...
It's sad but true that using energy inevitably has an environmental impact; the only "free lunch" is efficiency...
My point here is that to point to a substance and process that *requires* continuous secuirty and a radiation-shielded structure - and which has a demonstrated capability of destroying all life, for a susbtantial radius around it, should your security guard eever take a break or your concerete contractor not meet spec - as having the same environmental impact as a *steel and glass dish* that *sits on the ground* is ludicrous.
This is not an anti-nuke argument, by the way; giant environmental impacts aside, your average nuclear plant has *much less* giant environmental impacts than even a modest natural gas or coal plant - there's no free lunch in energy, and Co2 is a real issue, so I guess we gotta build nukes. But arguing that a 40 acre nuke plant and a 40 acre solar plant have the same environmental impact is facetious.
Theoretically correct, practically not legitimate.
Comparing a one-off one megawatt custom system that pumps corrosive molten salt up twenty stories to run through a massive complex capillary radiator and back down - to a gas *external* combustion process that occurs in a refrigerator-sized modular unit, and comparing aiming one heliostat to point at the sun and four hundred to point to the same place is not a visionary refusal to get caught up in the details - it's a complete failure to acknowledge the realities of power engineering.
If they're just both mirror tracker systems with heat engines, then Three Mile Island and my backyard propane generator are both just heat engines subject to the same limitations, and if one didn't work, the other shouldn't either.
Emplacing periodic dishes on a concrete monopile and burying cable between them has a different environmental impact than covering the entirety of, irradiating, submerging underwater, or intensively mining the same area.
Your neighbor could alternately cover 10 square feet of his yard with a TV satellite dish, or cover 10 square feet of his yeard with a pile of Plutonium - 39. Then we could examine the effect of each on the local environment. True, neither would b e zero, but some land uses are several orders of magnitude more benign than others.
In an environemnt where people would tear your legs off for equivocating 802.11b and g , comparing a field of 37' Stirling dish engines built in 2006 to a pair of skyscraper-sized devices filled with pumps of molten salt solution, driving a conventional power plant's steam generating gear, and surrounded by a field of heliostat-tracking mirrors seems like not enough of a distinction...I have my own skepticisms about SES, but Solar One they ain't.
Thermodynamic efficiency is almost 100% irrelevant in a zero-fuel-cost environment. Sunlight is zero $ per gallon; burn as much as you want to make me my kilowatt-hour, my concern is equipment cost and capacity factor.
As long as it's at least 10% efficient, the space requirements are reasonable, and it all comes down to cost per Watt; a $12/ Watt 30% efficient solar panel is no bargain compared to a $6 / Watt 10% efficient one.
The other SEGS plants use natural gas to hybridize during poor weather, but they're sited such that that's very infrequently.
The SES dishes have shown the ability to hybridize with natural gas (or landfill gas,) but I bet it's much cheaper and easier to put a rapidly-dispatchable natural gas plant in onsite to firm capacity.
Salient point: much easier to predict the wather two days from now, and the overall status of a hundred distributed dishes, than it is to predict the safety status of a 1 GW nuclear power plant...
The nuclear plant? Or the nuclear plant, uranium mine, processing facility, security training facility, waste plume, and (nonexistent) national storage repository for nuclear waste?
In any case, you're right, smaller.
But this is much much smaller than the area submerged by an equivalent hydroelectric dam.
No free lunches, but the desert ecosystem can withstand a 7-sq-mi CSP plant better than it can a raditation leak or a massive water assignment to a wet-cooled coal power plant.
A) They tend to use either landfill gas or natgas to hybridize at night if need, be, but you can just run a coal power plant all night to meet the minimal loads then, and hybridize just for bad weather, etc. , use the dishes just to make much more valuable/expensive midday power.
B) I think they only recently got the tracking right (they do need to be very accurate,) unlike PV they can only be used effectively in small areas of the country (not *that* small, but certainly only in the Southwest,) and until this latest generation, their engines were very, very finicky - they are basically modified versions of those submarine Stirlings, but they didn't take to the high temperature and kept failing sensors and seals.
C) I'm not sure how many people did - and do - believe Bob Liden can scale up the plant to tens or hundreds of megawatts from the tiny company he's got now.
What suckered them in? The $400,000 public campaign by the PIRGS? Or the $15 million utility counter-campaign? Or was it the water shortages exacerbated by fossil fuel plant usage? The skyrocketing and unstable natural gas prices? The growing incidence of lung disease and asthma near major power plants? The infrastructure constraints on natural gas in the far West? The deisre to move *before* massive and successive economic shocks forced the transition? Man, those voters are suckers, all right.
The GPS is in all likelihood so you can install the dish wherever you would like (geographically) and have it automatically track the sun. (The track of the sun being variable both seasonally and geographically.)
The other option is to go out there and do some nontrivial calculations (or approximations with some dedciated mechanical calculators and other devices that exist to do this;) the thing is, while with a photovoltaic system, you can miss the tracking by a few degrees and see no huge problem, this thing looks like it goes dark if it's off by three or four degrees. So you can't set it and forget it on an annual basis
The phototransistor schtick has been tried, particularly for the SES (Stirling Energy Systems) dishes, but it has its own set of problems for very accurate tracking - and would have to be custom-designed.
Throughout all of this, thinking about the cost of technicians, periodic recalibration, design and cleaning and alignment of a phototransistor set, etc., etc., keep in mind a GPS chipset is...what...$10? I know the last USB GPS device I bought was well under $30.
...these guys are nothing special. Here's the deal:
88%+ of the world's solar panels are still cut crystals of mono - or poly - crystalline silicon. People know how to work it, they get a reliable if uninspiring 5 - 8% annual decrease in prices from it, and they've been able to ride it through quite a bit of market growth - up over 1200 MW in 2004, up from 750 the previous year, 400-some in 2002, etc. Good stuff.
The thin-film solar people have always made these claims that they're going to cut solar from $2.50 / Watt (mfg. cost) to like $1. And theoretically, there seems to be no reason they shouldn't. But their factories, which are always supposed to just run like printing presses or coated auto glass factories, always end up being much much more finicky and expensive and labor intensive than initial projections, and they end up - not with ridiculous costs, but right back in that $2 / Watt range. Hence the sub 5% market share.
DayStar's technology is not markedly different from any of the other thin-film silicon people (or thin-film CiGS or CiS or the other materials) - their big deal is that they have that superlight titanium foil. It does jack up their manufacturing costs hugely from using like a stainless steel (Uni-Solar) or a plastic / roofing material backer (Uni-Solar / Solar Integrated Technologies) or putting it into a normal framed module (First Solar, Shell Solar,) etc. And thier new little factory in NY there maxes out at I think 30 MW / year (2.5% of annual world production) So why would they do it?
Weight-conscious applications. It costs $10,000 per pound, still, to launch things into space, and people are honestly starting to look at airships again. Even though Boeing Spectrolab has essentially owned the high-value-add high efficiency to weight ratio solar market for a long time , there's still serious money to be had there - they may either settle for being a big player there, or, take DARPA money and use it to work the kinks out of their stuff for two, three years and go to market with a cheaper substrate and a roll-out roofing product, using much less silicon than a conventional process.
The new Make magazine has a heavily-photographed and pretty intelligible partslist / walkthrough of building the actual device, as well. http://make.oreilly.com/
True enough, but those area-related costs end up being not too bad. Roof space, for instance, is essentially free in most cases, (or negative, if covering part of the roof with solar extends the life of, e.g. a commercial membrane roof,) and the area-related materials are a smallish percentage of the cost of a solar panel.
So where's the cost? Assembly, for the most part. And it costs pretty close to the same to assemble a 3 foot by 4 foot panel as it does, say, a 4 foot by 5 foot panel. Not exactly the same, but close. So efficiency is not totally unimportant, but it is not the overriding consideration it is with fueled generation.
Zoyd, you put the solar panel out there, every increment of energy output requires no increment of cost input. Free fuel. Pricey capital. What "cost" am I ignoring?
I put a gas turbine out there, I need to put in an increment of money to get out an increment of energy. This money goes not to equipment, but to an energy source which is consumed in the conversion. I pay for the capital. Then I pay for the fuel that makes energy come out.
This makes conversion efficiency a real concern, because your incremental value (energy out) depends on an incremental cost (energy in). With renewables, efficiency is a secondary concern, because your incremental value (energy out) comes without any incremental cost (you spent all your money already up front.) So the concern shifts away from conversion efficiency to capacity per capital efficency - how much money did you spend up front - a 5% efficient solar panel at $1 / Watt is a much better investment than a 20% efficient solar panel at $1.10 / Watt.
The other place making a reasoned distinction between capital and fuel costs is in fuel price hedging. Since your input cost (say natural gas) is potentially volatile for the future, a fixed-cost energy resource (as one with zero fuel cost) has some hedge "insurance" value in a market with positive or unknown future fuel prices.
Hence the treatment of wind and solar, in all common accounting practice, as a zero-fuel-cost resource; it better reflects their financial behavior to the end user.
I think it's closer to the truth to say you just aren't comprehending what I am saying. I never said solar was free. Solar's *ENERGY COST* - what you pay to get energy out of it - I set at that $.20 / kWh sort of range. None of that is fuel cost.
A solar panel, you have to buy and install the panel. You must also maintain it. That is your cost. You HAVE A CAPITAL COST. You have maintenance costs, too. You have to pay money to get solar energy. How many ways do I have to say it? But there IS NO FUEL COST. If you'd like to test this, I'll suggest an experiment! Go *buy* a solar array (note, again, i said buy, I'm not claiming the panel is free,) and then just *leave it outside*. Be sure - this is critical for the experiment - not to pay anybody any money. You will notice that it produces energy. For free. Hence no fuel cost.
Now, go buy a natural gas generator. You will, again, have to pay capital cost. (albeit much less.) Now. Leave it outside, don't pay anybody. Wait as long as you like. You will notice no energy comes out of it. You will have to go *buy fuel* to make it go. Hence, you have a fuel cost.
For both energy sources, the cost of energy produced is capital + O&M + fuel. Roughly, for a diesel generator, that works out to (very little + something substantial + quite a bit.), with a sum of maybe $.04 / kWh. For a solar array, it's (really kind of a lot + very little + zero.) fo ra sume of about $.18 / kWh.
Didn't say it was free. Did you even read the rest of the sentence - let alone the post?
What I said (about four words later,) was that efficiency was an irrelevant measure, and that you instead had to use cost per watt as the metric, since the device is entirely capital based and has no fuel cost. You then dervice your energy cost as a capital expenditure equation - it involves only upfront cost, (fairly minimal) operations and maintenance and (gernally of the most importance on very-long-lived equipment) interest rate.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC2XIGMI2kM for the Brits doing their worst case....
"Ay - Nope - Er."
God Yes, NIMS training was by far the most useful and relevant training I've received in the fire service...in the current era, the problem with interagency communications is not *tech*, it's *rules*, and I was thoroughly impressed by NIMS' common sense, 6th grade reading level, scalability, and "rules for new rules". It's a very realistic framework that accomodates, among other things, the fact that you and everyone else has other things to do and to remember, that your personnel are going to have IQs from maybe 85 on up to 150, that if you don't figure out how everyone gets paid you can't figure out anything else, etc. I kid you not, FEMA's NIMS 100 (or -700) training is the best free mini-MBA you could give yourself. Pushing old, unsexy NIMS will do more than any amount of shiny radios or infinite numbers of useless "command center" RVs,
So, ok, in that case - a WWII USAT - and in the brief interval when this was a USAFS - who's the crew? Merchant Marine? Or do people like get trained in the Navy and then transfer briefly to Air Force control? I know that the Army has a huge rotary-wing fleet and maybe some fixed-wing exec transports, that the Air Force has some limited rotary wing assets for Special Ops and rescue, and the Navy and Marines have lots of both, and I knew the USAF had like some fishing boats to pick up crashed drones with, but I gotta say I did think ships were an exclusive Navy province...any other counterintuitive intersections you know of?
Was anyone else disoriented by the designation "USAFS" and the very concept of a *ship* owned and operated (however briefly) by the Air Force? The mind boggles at the concept of a USAF-staffed ship; did they somehow contract the Navy to do it?
From the broad, shallow social perspective, I do think it makes a whole lot more sense to focus a lot of money on increasing the ability of the disabled to participate in the physical world unassisted (as through something like this, R&D $$ intensive or no,) than it does to spend an equivalent amount of resources on the converse - trying to make the phyiscial world more accessible to the disabled (via curb cuts, handicapped spaces, extra-wide bathrooms, etc.) I'm confident that the several billion $US / year focused on the latter could make some huge strides in the former at better cost...
You both started off as Effects Guys. Now, you're the focal point for a community of scientists, engineers, and technologists that may not be the one you originally came from. What's more, that community is very active, and I would imagine demanding, and you're all of a sudden its poster children. What's more, there is a nascent backlash against those who owuld explain everything using purely empirical methods. Not to exaggerate the importance of a cable science show, = ), but what is it like going from Effects Guy to this very public, potentially freighted role?
I think we agree more than disagree. I think the power towers *are* a dead end - the working fluid is heinous to handle, the plant itself is much more vulnerable to single points of catastrophic failure, it brins NIMBYs the dishes don't, and it's not that suspectible to manufacturing economies of scale. I think it's a bad application of big power plant thinking to a diffuse and distributed resource.
Where I will argue with you is that the economic failure (and failure they were) of a hundred=plus kW power tower has any bearing on the prospects of a field of dozens of 25-kW engines operating on entirely different principles throughout...
Absolutely; and I'm sure once they go out to occupy seven square miles of desert, the Environmental Impact Statement process will keep many an environmental engineer and herpetologist employed for many a month...
It's sad but true that using energy inevitably has an environmental impact; the only "free lunch" is efficiency...
My point here is that to point to a substance and process that *requires* continuous secuirty and a radiation-shielded structure - and which has a demonstrated capability of destroying all life, for a susbtantial radius around it, should your security guard eever take a break or your concerete contractor not meet spec - as having the same environmental impact as a *steel and glass dish* that *sits on the ground* is ludicrous.
This is not an anti-nuke argument, by the way; giant environmental impacts aside, your average nuclear plant has *much less* giant environmental impacts than even a modest natural gas or coal plant - there's no free lunch in energy, and Co2 is a real issue, so I guess we gotta build nukes. But arguing that a 40 acre nuke plant and a 40 acre solar plant have the same environmental impact is facetious.
Theoretically correct, practically not legitimate.
Comparing a one-off one megawatt custom system that pumps corrosive molten salt up twenty stories to run through a massive complex capillary radiator and back down - to a gas *external* combustion process that occurs in a refrigerator-sized modular unit, and comparing aiming one heliostat to point at the sun and four hundred to point to the same place is not a visionary refusal to get caught up in the details - it's a complete failure to acknowledge the realities of power engineering.
If they're just both mirror tracker systems with heat engines, then Three Mile Island and my backyard propane generator are both just heat engines subject to the same limitations, and if one didn't work, the other shouldn't either.
Emplacing periodic dishes on a concrete monopile and burying cable between them has a different environmental impact than covering the entirety of, irradiating, submerging underwater, or intensively mining the same area.
Your neighbor could alternately cover 10 square feet of his yard with a TV satellite dish, or cover 10 square feet of his yeard with a pile of Plutonium - 39. Then we could examine the effect of each on the local environment. True, neither would b e zero, but some land uses are several orders of magnitude more benign than others.
All of those things are true. However.
In an environemnt where people would tear your legs off for equivocating 802.11b and g , comparing a field of 37' Stirling dish engines built in 2006 to a pair of skyscraper-sized devices filled with pumps of molten salt solution, driving a conventional power plant's steam generating gear, and surrounded by a field of heliostat-tracking mirrors seems like not enough of a distinction...I have my own skepticisms about SES, but Solar One they ain't.
Thermodynamic efficiency is almost 100% irrelevant in a zero-fuel-cost environment. Sunlight is zero $ per gallon; burn as much as you want to make me my kilowatt-hour, my concern is equipment cost and capacity factor.
As long as it's at least 10% efficient, the space requirements are reasonable, and it all comes down to cost per Watt; a $12/ Watt 30% efficient solar panel is no bargain compared to a $6 / Watt 10% efficient one.
The other SEGS plants use natural gas to hybridize during poor weather, but they're sited such that that's very infrequently.
The SES dishes have shown the ability to hybridize with natural gas (or landfill gas,) but I bet it's much cheaper and easier to put a rapidly-dispatchable natural gas plant in onsite to firm capacity.
Salient point: much easier to predict the wather two days from now, and the overall status of a hundred distributed dishes, than it is to predict the safety status of a 1 GW nuclear power plant...
The nuclear plant? Or the nuclear plant, uranium mine, processing facility, security training facility, waste plume, and (nonexistent) national storage repository for nuclear waste? In any case, you're right, smaller. But this is much much smaller than the area submerged by an equivalent hydroelectric dam. No free lunches, but the desert ecosystem can withstand a 7-sq-mi CSP plant better than it can a raditation leak or a massive water assignment to a wet-cooled coal power plant.
A) They tend to use either landfill gas or natgas to hybridize at night if need, be, but you can just run a coal power plant all night to meet the minimal loads then, and hybridize just for bad weather, etc. , use the dishes just to make much more valuable/expensive midday power. B) I think they only recently got the tracking right (they do need to be very accurate,) unlike PV they can only be used effectively in small areas of the country (not *that* small, but certainly only in the Southwest,) and until this latest generation, their engines were very, very finicky - they are basically modified versions of those submarine Stirlings, but they didn't take to the high temperature and kept failing sensors and seals. C) I'm not sure how many people did - and do - believe Bob Liden can scale up the plant to tens or hundreds of megawatts from the tiny company he's got now.
What suckered them in? The $400,000 public campaign by the PIRGS? Or the $15 million utility counter-campaign? Or was it the water shortages exacerbated by fossil fuel plant usage? The skyrocketing and unstable natural gas prices? The growing incidence of lung disease and asthma near major power plants? The infrastructure constraints on natural gas in the far West? The deisre to move *before* massive and successive economic shocks forced the transition? Man, those voters are suckers, all right.
The GPS is in all likelihood so you can install the dish wherever you would like (geographically) and have it automatically track the sun. (The track of the sun being variable both seasonally and geographically.)
The other option is to go out there and do some nontrivial calculations (or approximations with some dedciated mechanical calculators and other devices that exist to do this;) the thing is, while with a photovoltaic system, you can miss the tracking by a few degrees and see no huge problem, this thing looks like it goes dark if it's off by three or four degrees. So you can't set it and forget it on an annual basis
The phototransistor schtick has been tried, particularly for the SES (Stirling Energy Systems) dishes, but it has its own set of problems for very accurate tracking - and would have to be custom-designed.
Throughout all of this, thinking about the cost of technicians, periodic recalibration, design and cleaning and alignment of a phototransistor set, etc., etc., keep in mind a GPS chipset is...what...$10? I know the last USB GPS device I bought was well under $30.
...these guys are nothing special. Here's the deal:
88%+ of the world's solar panels are still cut crystals of mono - or poly - crystalline silicon. People know how to work it, they get a reliable if uninspiring 5 - 8% annual decrease in prices from it, and they've been able to ride it through quite a bit of market growth - up over 1200 MW in 2004, up from 750 the previous year, 400-some in 2002, etc. Good stuff.
The thin-film solar people have always made these claims that they're going to cut solar from $2.50 / Watt (mfg. cost) to like $1. And theoretically, there seems to be no reason they shouldn't. But their factories, which are always supposed to just run like printing presses or coated auto glass factories, always end up being much much more finicky and expensive and labor intensive than initial projections, and they end up - not with ridiculous costs, but right back in that $2 / Watt range. Hence the sub 5% market share.
DayStar's technology is not markedly different from any of the other thin-film silicon people (or thin-film CiGS or CiS or the other materials) - their big deal is that they have that superlight titanium foil. It does jack up their manufacturing costs hugely from using like a stainless steel (Uni-Solar) or a plastic / roofing material backer (Uni-Solar / Solar Integrated Technologies) or putting it into a normal framed module (First Solar, Shell Solar,) etc. And thier new little factory in NY there maxes out at I think 30 MW / year (2.5% of annual world production) So why would they do it?
Weight-conscious applications. It costs $10,000 per pound, still, to launch things into space, and people are honestly starting to look at airships again. Even though Boeing Spectrolab has essentially owned the high-value-add high efficiency to weight ratio solar market for a long time , there's still serious money to be had there - they may either settle for being a big player there, or, take DARPA money and use it to work the kinks out of their stuff for two, three years and go to market with a cheaper substrate and a roll-out roofing product, using much less silicon than a conventional process.
The new Make magazine has a heavily-photographed and pretty intelligible partslist / walkthrough of building the actual device, as well. http://make.oreilly.com/
True enough, but those area-related costs end up being not too bad. Roof space, for instance, is essentially free in most cases, (or negative, if covering part of the roof with solar extends the life of, e.g. a commercial membrane roof,) and the area-related materials are a smallish percentage of the cost of a solar panel.
So where's the cost? Assembly, for the most part. And it costs pretty close to the same to assemble a 3 foot by 4 foot panel as it does, say, a 4 foot by 5 foot panel. Not exactly the same, but close. So efficiency is not totally unimportant, but it is not the overriding consideration it is with fueled generation.
Zoyd, you put the solar panel out there, every increment of energy output requires no increment of cost input. Free fuel. Pricey capital. What "cost" am I ignoring?
I put a gas turbine out there, I need to put in an increment of money to get out an increment of energy. This money goes not to equipment, but to an energy source which is consumed in the conversion. I pay for the capital. Then I pay for the fuel that makes energy come out.
This makes conversion efficiency a real concern, because your incremental value (energy out) depends on an incremental cost (energy in). With renewables, efficiency is a secondary concern, because your incremental value (energy out) comes without any incremental cost (you spent all your money already up front.) So the concern shifts away from conversion efficiency to capacity per capital efficency - how much money did you spend up front - a 5% efficient solar panel at $1 / Watt is a much better investment than a 20% efficient solar panel at $1.10 / Watt.
The other place making a reasoned distinction between capital and fuel costs is in fuel price hedging. Since your input cost (say natural gas) is potentially volatile for the future, a fixed-cost energy resource (as one with zero fuel cost) has some hedge "insurance" value in a market with positive or unknown future fuel prices.
Hence the treatment of wind and solar, in all common accounting practice, as a zero-fuel-cost resource; it better reflects their financial behavior to the end user.
I think it's closer to the truth to say you just aren't comprehending what I am saying. I never said solar was free. Solar's *ENERGY COST* - what you pay to get energy out of it - I set at that $.20 / kWh sort of range. None of that is fuel cost.
A solar panel, you have to buy and install the panel. You must also maintain it. That is your cost. You HAVE A CAPITAL COST. You have maintenance costs, too. You have to pay money to get solar energy. How many ways do I have to say it? But there IS NO FUEL COST. If you'd like to test this, I'll suggest an experiment! Go *buy* a solar array (note, again, i said buy, I'm not claiming the panel is free,) and then just *leave it outside*. Be sure - this is critical for the experiment - not to pay anybody any money. You will notice that it produces energy. For free. Hence no fuel cost.
Now, go buy a natural gas generator. You will, again, have to pay capital cost. (albeit much less.) Now. Leave it outside, don't pay anybody. Wait as long as you like. You will notice no energy comes out of it. You will have to go *buy fuel* to make it go. Hence, you have a fuel cost.
For both energy sources, the cost of energy produced is capital + O&M + fuel. Roughly, for a diesel generator, that works out to (very little + something substantial + quite a bit.), with a sum of maybe $.04 / kWh. For a solar array, it's (really kind of a lot + very little + zero.) fo ra sume of about $.18 / kWh.
Didn't say it was free. Did you even read the rest of the sentence - let alone the post?
What I said (about four words later,) was that efficiency was an irrelevant measure, and that you instead had to use cost per watt as the metric, since the device is entirely capital based and has no fuel cost. You then dervice your energy cost as a capital expenditure equation - it involves only upfront cost, (fairly minimal) operations and maintenance and (gernally of the most importance on very-long-lived equipment) interest rate.