Solar will soon be cheaper than coal fueled power

[lpetrich]

While continuing to subsidize fossil fuels or subsidizing them even more, right?

Wrong. We should get rid of the massive coal subsidies too. If they exist.

I wasn't aware of any. Did Obama just make some up?

Coal: A Long History of Subsidies | Taxpayers for Common Sense
Top Three Ways That American Taxpayers Subsidize Dirty Coal Development | ThinkProgress

How much more do you want, dismal?

Solar has a place in the mix of the nation's power generation but today it is solely to reduce carbon emissions.

Solar has a place and that is for people who are ignorant of the costs they are imposing on society to feel good about themselves.

What horrible costs?

In terms of actually producing energy it's a mole on a gnats ass.

I'm sure that you have the numbers to support your claim.

For my part, I have some very interesting numbers, like  Growth of photovoltaics. Total installed capacity has been growing exponentially, and it should pass 200 gigawatts this year.

Check that, it probably also makes sense in grid-remote locations where power demand is minimal. Like a highway callbox in the Arizona desert.

Thousands of homeowners would now disagree. In fact, I now get spammed by companies offering to install rooftop photovoltaic cells.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Which gives a value of approximately 6 for the EROI on nuke. Not 1.

Source, please.

Read your own link!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Thousands of homeowners would now disagree. In fact, I now get spammed by companies offering to install rooftop photovoltaic cells.

Because they use the electric grid as their storage system. Electrically this works fine so long as the percentage is low enough. (Economically is another matter--anyone with grid-tied solar is a freeloader. Normally the infrastructure is folded into the cost of the power but this is only fair when you have a normal usage pattern. If you split out the infrastructure costs vs the actual power cost solar ceases to make economic sense.)

 

[Juma]

I cited a source that did do the calculation.

No, you cited a crackpot site that refereed to another person that allegedly had done the calcukation...

Show a real calculation!

 

[RVonse]

Forget batteries. Batteries suck and they will always suck. The future for our energy is flywheel storage and solar/wind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Flywheel storage lasts forever. It is something we can learn to mass produce cheap.

Check the discharge rates.

According to wikipedia flywheels used for rocket launchers "They can store 122 MJ in 45 secs and release it in 2-3 secs." That does not sound a problem with discharge rate to me.

There's also the problem that a flywheel system can catastrophically liberate the energy if something goes badly wrong.

Just bury the flywheel in the ground next to the windgenerator or solar farm. Problem solved.

 

[RVonse]

Forget batteries. Batteries suck and they will always suck. The future for our energy is flywheel storage and solar/wind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Flywheel storage lasts forever. It is something we can learn to mass produce cheap.

Flywheels suck because they don't hold energy for more than few hours and they are surprisingly expensive.

According to wikipedia " flywheels with magnetic bearings and high vacuum can maintain 97% mechanical efficiency, and 85% round trip efficiency." I agree that magnetic bearings are not routinely made today but there is nothing exotic that would prevent widespread development and mass economies of scale to produce them. Furthermore, even if a flywheel lost most of its energy within a day (which the ones with magnetic bearing don't) why would that be a problem? All we need to do is store the day time solar energy to use at night.

 

[arkirk]

Batteries will improve and lithium-ion is not necessarily best fit for storing electricity at night.
Lithium-Ion has high energy density which is what needed for cars and other cases where weight is a factor.
Weight is not a factor for night storage.
Nukes are baseload therefore are not mutually exclusive with solar which coincides with demand (A/C and such) rather well.
People advocating nukes forget that nukes are very long term projects, if you build one now be prepared to live with it for the next 30 years, and chances are, in 10-15 years we will have very decent storage for solar electricity and nukes would have to be expensively shutdown.

...and the nuclear waste for thousands of years.

 

[NobleSavage]

Batteries will improve and lithium-ion is not necessarily best fit for storing electricity at night.
Lithium-Ion has high energy density which is what needed for cars and other cases where weight is a factor.
Weight is not a factor for night storage.
Nukes are baseload therefore are not mutually exclusive with solar which coincides with demand (A/C and such) rather well.
People advocating nukes forget that nukes are very long term projects, if you build one now be prepared to live with it for the next 30 years, and chances are, in 10-15 years we will have very decent storage for solar electricity and nukes would have to be expensively shutdown.

...and the nuclear waste for thousands of years.

More people die cleaning there solar cells...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Check the discharge rates.

According to wikipedia flywheels used for rocket launchers "They can store 122 MJ in 45 secs and release it in 2-3 secs." That does not sound a problem with discharge rate to me.

There's also the problem that a flywheel system can catastrophically liberate the energy if something goes badly wrong.

Just bury the flywheel in the ground next to the windgenerator or solar farm. Problem solved.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying a flywheel can't deliver power quickly. It certainly can. I'm saying a flywheel loses it's power quickly, it's not a good system for storing power. In a battery it would be called the self discharge rate.

- - - Updated - - -

Batteries will improve and lithium-ion is not necessarily best fit for storing electricity at night.
Lithium-Ion has high energy density which is what needed for cars and other cases where weight is a factor.
Weight is not a factor for night storage.
Nukes are baseload therefore are not mutually exclusive with solar which coincides with demand (A/C and such) rather well.
People advocating nukes forget that nukes are very long term projects, if you build one now be prepared to live with it for the next 30 years, and chances are, in 10-15 years we will have very decent storage for solar electricity and nukes would have to be expensively shutdown.

...and the nuclear waste for thousands of years.

Reprocess the fuel, toss what's left in any large salt mine. End of issue.

 

[barbos]

Flywheels suck because they don't hold energy for more than few hours and they are surprisingly expensive.

According to wikipedia " flywheels with magnetic bearings and high vacuum can maintain 97% mechanical efficiency, and 85% round trip efficiency." I agree that magnetic bearings are not routinely made today but there is nothing exotic that would prevent widespread development and mass economies of scale to produce them. Furthermore, even if a flywheel lost most of its energy within a day (which the ones with magnetic bearing don't) why would that be a problem? All we need to do is store the day time solar energy to use at night.

Within a day? Beacon Power are/were too shy to tell you dissipation number but they told 30 minutes as a time it's supposed to keep you on after power loss. So I think "within a day" is a little bit optimistic.
And I suspect that it's inherently expensive unlike flow batteries where making bigger storage is simply matter of making bigger tank.

 

[barbos]

Also, problem of night storage is really overblown. If one is really determined to go solar one can get by with really small storage. Properly designed house will need almost no air-conditioning at night and once you got rid of that you will realize that energy usage at night is not that great. You need fridge running that's 20 watts for super efficient models I think. Lighting with LED and smallish TV all night will be another 30 watts, then you would still need some A/C, I think 50 watts should be enough. So nice 100 watts for 10 hours, that's 1 kwh for the night or less. That's capacity of 2 Lead acid batteries from your car, which should last for a year without problems. Of course I assumed laundry/cooking during the day but that's doable for determined person.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Because they use the electric grid as their storage system. Electrically this works fine so long as the percentage is low enough. (Economically is another matter--anyone with grid-tied solar is a freeloader. Normally the infrastructure is folded into the cost of the power but this is only fair when you have a normal usage pattern. If you split out the infrastructure costs vs the actual power cost solar ceases to make economic sense.)

Storage system is a bit of a stretch. It's feed into the grid. When the percentage is large enough it becomes part of the balancing act that utilities have to do. I believe most solar consumers get to sell excess to the utility. When infrastructure maintenance cost is enough of an issue, fees can be deducted from the excess sold. In the meantime, my heart's not going to bleed for the electric utilities.

When, not if solar is a significant enough contributor to the grid, I don't see why it with gas-fired combined cycle generation cannot make up the bulk of our electric power, especially in the US with natural gas being so cheap it's almost not worth pulling out of the ground.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Because they use the electric grid as their storage system. Electrically this works fine so long as the percentage is low enough. (Economically is another matter--anyone with grid-tied solar is a freeloader. Normally the infrastructure is folded into the cost of the power but this is only fair when you have a normal usage pattern. If you split out the infrastructure costs vs the actual power cost solar ceases to make economic sense.)

Storage system is a bit of a stretch. It's feed into the grid. When the percentage is large enough it becomes part of the balancing act that utilities have to do. I believe most solar consumers get to sell excess to the utility. When infrastructure maintenance cost is enough of an issue, fees can be deducted from the excess sold. In the meantime, my heart's not going to bleed for the electric utilities.

When, not if solar is a significant enough contributor to the grid, I don't see why it with gas-fired combined cycle generation cannot make up the bulk of our electric power, especially in the US with natural gas being so cheap it's almost not worth pulling out of the ground.

There are two factors:

1) The balancing act you mention. Why should the utility companies be required to spend a considerable amount of money to support solar? That's just going to come out of everyone else's pocketbook.

2) There's also the issue of capacity. That can't be overcome by what you sell back because it's not really connected to what you sell back. They need to put in enough generating capacity for what the draw will be when the sun goes behind the cloud.

We have a local example of the problem except with water. Businesses going ape over the substantial connect fees for water pipes that don't actually have any water in them. From the water company's point of view the fees are sensible--if you have a 6" pipe they need to provide enough water in the distribution pipes to fill it and enough pumping capacity to fill it. The fact that the only people that will ever actually hook anything up to that are the firemen is irrelevant.

The businesses see several hundred dollars a month for no meaningful service (because what's actually being provided is capacity) and yell.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Storage system is a bit of a stretch. It's feed into the grid. When the percentage is large enough it becomes part of the balancing act that utilities have to do. I believe most solar consumers get to sell excess to the utility. When infrastructure maintenance cost is enough of an issue, fees can be deducted from the excess sold. In the meantime, my heart's not going to bleed for the electric utilities.

When, not if solar is a significant enough contributor to the grid, I don't see why it with gas-fired combined cycle generation cannot make up the bulk of our electric power, especially in the US with natural gas being so cheap it's almost not worth pulling out of the ground.

There are two factors:

1) The balancing act you mention. Why should the utility companies be required to spend a considerable amount of money to support solar? That's just going to come out of everyone else's pocketbook.

They are simply paying for the electricity being supplied by the consumer. Not that I necessarily agree with this arrangement. Were it me, if I'm not using it, as far as I'm concerned someone else can have it.

2) There's also the issue of capacity. That can't be overcome by what you sell back because it's not really connected to what you sell back. They need to put in enough generating capacity for what the draw will be when the sun goes behind the cloud.

We have a local example of the problem except with water. Businesses going ape over the substantial connect fees for water pipes that don't actually have any water in them. From the water company's point of view the fees are sensible--if you have a 6" pipe they need to provide enough water in the distribution pipes to fill it and enough pumping capacity to fill it. The fact that the only people that will ever actually hook anything up to that are the firemen is irrelevant.

The businesses see several hundred dollars a month for no meaningful service (because what's actually being provided is capacity) and yell.

That's where combined cycle gas-fired comes in. Their start up time comes in at under an hour now. Take Germany for example, solar is expected to reach 30% of capacity by 2020, the answer will have to be something with quick start up times. Seems to me, for solar to move forward in any meaningful way, it would have to do so with combined cycle gas-fired plants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There are two factors:

1) The balancing act you mention. Why should the utility companies be required to spend a considerable amount of money to support solar? That's just going to come out of everyone else's pocketbook.

They are simply paying for the electricity being supplied by the consumer. Not that I necessarily agree with this arrangement. Were it me, if I'm not using it, as far as I'm concerned someone else can have it.

2) There's also the issue of capacity. That can't be overcome by what you sell back because it's not really connected to what you sell back. They need to put in enough generating capacity for what the draw will be when the sun goes behind the cloud.

We have a local example of the problem except with water. Businesses going ape over the substantial connect fees for water pipes that don't actually have any water in them. From the water company's point of view the fees are sensible--if you have a 6" pipe they need to provide enough water in the distribution pipes to fill it and enough pumping capacity to fill it. The fact that the only people that will ever actually hook anything up to that are the firemen is irrelevant.

The businesses see several hundred dollars a month for no meaningful service (because what's actually being provided is capacity) and yell.

That's where combined cycle gas-fired comes in. Their start up time comes in at under an hour now. Take Germany for example, solar is expected to reach 30% of capacity by 2020, the answer will have to be something with quick start up times. Seems to me, for solar to move forward in any meaningful way, it would have to do so with combined cycle gas-fired plants.

You're making the mistake of thinking the only thing the utility company provides is power.

In reality they also provide the availability of power. In the old model that was your connect fee and otherwise simply folded into your power bill. Solar breaks this model and requires a very different pricing model. Unfortunately, it's very hard to come up with a model that's fair to both solar users and regular customers.

 

[bilby]

Solar and wind power may be better used for making liquid fuels by polymerising carbon dioxide with hydrogen, using something like the Audi Sunfire process (a multi stage process turning water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are then converted via the  Fischer-Tropsch process) to make synthetic oil.

That way, you make oil, as and when the sun shines or the wind blows; and just put it into a big storage tank. It isn't particularly important to manufacture continuously, so the issue of intermittency of the source disappears.

You can then use nukes to provide base-load electricity, burn some of the 'blue crude' derived hydrocarbons in rapid-response (gas or oil) power plants to cover peak loads, and use whatever surplus hydrocarbon you end up with for fuelling vehicles, or as lubricants, or as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries. As you can always use any surplus, it ceases to matter so much if the peak generation level exceeds current demand - you just ramp up the demand in real time by bringing more hydrocarbon manufacturing online; and scale production back as demand increases and/or supply declines.

Of course, the pilot Sunfire plant is a tad small - it makes only 1 barrel of 'blue crude' per day - and the fuel it produces is rather expensive as a result; but economies of scale, coupled with the ability to use only the cheapest electricity* should help here, as the technology is expanded to commercial scale.













*Wholesale electricity can actually have a negative price at times of low demand and high supply; if there is widespread wind conditions close to the optimum for power generating turbines, it is often cheaper for the generators to pay people to take the surplus power than it is for them to go to the effort of shutting down some of the production for a short period

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Solar and wind power may be better used for making liquid fuels by polymerising carbon dioxide with hydrogen, using something like the Audi Sunfire process (a multi stage process turning water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are then converted via the  Fischer-Tropsch process) to make synthetic oil.

That way, you make oil, as and when the sun shines or the wind blows; and just put it into a big storage tank. It isn't particularly important to manufacture continuously, so the issue of intermittency of the source disappears.

Yeah, in the long run I think we will use renewables more to power processes that are energy-limited but not that expensive to provide the capacity for.

 

[KeepTalking]

Batteries will improve and lithium-ion is not necessarily best fit for storing electricity at night.
Lithium-Ion has high energy density which is what needed for cars and other cases where weight is a factor.
Weight is not a factor for night storage.
Nukes are baseload therefore are not mutually exclusive with solar which coincides with demand (A/C and such) rather well.
People advocating nukes forget that nukes are very long term projects, if you build one now be prepared to live with it for the next 30 years, and chances are, in 10-15 years we will have very decent storage for solar electricity and nukes would have to be expensively shutdown.

No, I don't think that we will have decent storage options in 10 to 15 years. If you can't name the technology it probably can't be in widespread use in 10 to 15 years.

Look at the Tesla battery. I told you that they were most probably shooting for a cost of production of $100 a kWh, down from say $250 today for the LiFePO4 batteries, the best in production and use now. We don't know if they can do it.

Also, I didn't include a section that I wrote, because my posts are longer than most people are willing to read already. In it I pointed out even if Tesla could reduce that $250 number by ten times the battery technology would still be too expensive. A change of this magnitude in 10 to 15 years is utterly impossible. The 2.5 times reduction that they are trying to get now is most probably wishful thinking.

I don't know what technology you are thinking about when you say lithium ion batteries. All of the lithium battery technologies are lithium ion batteries. I agree that most aren't suitable for stationary, deep discharge service. But this is true of any battery technology out there, lead acid, nickel cadmium, etc.

But in the category of deep discharge batteries the lithium ion technology of the LiFePO4 battery is about the best that we have currently in production, whether for a vehicle or a stationary application. The fact that it has a high energy to weight and volume ratio is less of an advantage in stationary applications but it is still an advantage. They take up less room for example.

Compared to lithium cobalt or lithium polymer the LiFePO4 battery maintains its voltage better through the full discharge cycle,d allows for quicker charging and has a longer life. They require more sophisticated controlled charging but this easily accomplished with smarter chargers. They don't require the thin noble metal cathode wires that cause the fires.

How about the new aluminum-ion battery developed at Stanford: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion-battery-033115.html

It seems that this may have the potential for household solar applications. Here are some highlights from the article:

Aluminum batteries are safer than conventional lithium-ion batteries...

Besides safety, we have achieved major breakthroughs in aluminum battery performance....

One example is ultra-fast charging. Smartphone owners know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery. But the Stanford team reported "unprecedented charging times" of down to one minute with the aluminum prototype...

Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote.

By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles...

"Our battery produces about half the voltage of a typical lithium battery," he said. "But improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage and energy density. Otherwise, our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days. It's quite exciting."

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How about the new aluminum-ion battery developed at Stanford: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion-battery-033115.html

It seems that this may have the potential for household solar applications. Here are some highlights from the article:

Aluminum batteries are safer than conventional lithium-ion batteries...

Besides safety, we have achieved major breakthroughs in aluminum battery performance....

One example is ultra-fast charging. Smartphone owners know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery. But the Stanford team reported "unprecedented charging times" of down to one minute with the aluminum prototype...

Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote.

By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles...

"Our battery produces about half the voltage of a typical lithium battery," he said. "But improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage and energy density. Otherwise, our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days. It's quite exciting."

Looks good but we'll have to wait and see how it does in the real world rather than just the lab.

 

[Togo]

Source please?

I keep seeing these weird claims that solar is stopped cold by a passing cloud. You realise that solar is used in countries in which seeing the sky is an unusual event, occurring maybe once or twice a week?

Nobody has claimed it's stopped cold.

You said it needed 100% backup from conventional sources. That is a claim that it is stopped cold.

I don't have any good data on power production when it goes behind clouds but we can get a decent back of the envelope from photography:

No, we can't. Partly because you're looking at visual light intensity, and not power generation, but mainly because this doesn't touch your core assumption here - that solar panels are designed for cloudless days and anything short of that results in an unexpected hole that has to be plugged somehow. Or to put it another way, that solar power is designed by idiots.

I'm in a country where horizon to horizon cloud is normal. We manage to use solar power just fine. Therefore your contention that some special measure must be taken when clouds appear is nonsense.