For the future of solar, we’ve got the tech – it’s the economics
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1. 1 out of 78 jobs created in the U.S. last year were solar jobs[1].
2. There are more solar employees in California than utility employees[2].
3. Soft costs (non-hardware) are 64% of the installed cost of solar[3].
4. Solar is expected to reach a load defection point (i.e. cheaper to leave the grid) in most places in the next 10-15 years[4].
Like OP's article states, this industry's hardware has gotten so good, the software in the industry hasn't kept up. So much so, in fact, that an entire startup accelerator program in the bay area, Powerhouse[5], has been created to try and attract tech entrepreneurs into the solar industry to make the next generation of solar software. My startup recently went through the program, and being a part of this industry is one of the most empowering and rewarding things I've ever done. It's one of those extremely rare instances where you can have a solid business model and a positive impact on the world.
And we need all the help it can get. Solar expected to grow 100-200x over the next 25 years[6], but it won't happen if smart people don't join in. If you're a tech entrepreneur, and want to do something that matters, please please please consider doing a startup in solar.
[1]: http://energy.gov/eere/articles/1-78-new-jobs-america-solar-...
[2]: http://www.calseia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...
[3]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs
[4]: http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2015_04_07_report_release_the_econo...
[5]: https://powerhouse.solar/
[6]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-hu...
If you included all coal, natural gas, oil, and other non-renewable equipment manufacturing, I'm positive they'd beat solar by quite a margin.
Even if the extra workers required to make solar work came exclusively from the ranks of the unemployed or retired, we are still losing the leisure time they had previously been enjoying, which is a production of sorts.
Broadly speaking, when you get the same benefits but are not draining a human being's time and talent in the process, society wins.
The question of how to distribute those wins may be tricky, but it's the type of problem that, broadly speaking, is good to have. Like when you unexpectedly receive a cash bonus, and now you have the probem of paying taxes on it... yes, it's a problem, but it's a good problem to have. And given that I've heard people complain about getting money because then they'll have to pay taxes, as if that causes the whole thing to net negative (it's silly when I say it baldly, of course, but I've heard this so often it's clearly a common cognitive template), it's really quite like that situation. Let's not be so worried about the possibility that someday wealth may be unequally distributed that we prevent it from being created in the first place.
How can it be cheaper to leave the grid? Won't energy storage be much cheaper if it is done on scale by buy and selling energy as required and letting utility companies figure out energy storage and load balancing?
But because there is so much power being generated, the householder is only paid a fraction of the equivalent price of extracting an equivalent amount of electricity from the grid.
At present those householders have no choice but to put up with that dud deal, as they have no where else to put that excess power. But move on a few years when battery technology starts to take off and battery prices come down, that will change.
When that happens, total household electricity costs will be coming down and they will be one very big step closer to being off grid.
There may come a day where the difference is so small to not matter anymore, but people won't disconnect from a competitively priced grid before that. There are plenty of entities consuming energy during the day, it's just a matter of adapting the generating infrastructure.
Anyway, and answering lumberjack's question, I'm yet to see a competitively priced grid. It's a natural monopoly, normally maintained by either an expensive government bureaucracy, or a private company whose main goal is to extract big rents. At this environment, I'd expect houses to organize into largish units that share batteries, if the government allows, or just get enough batteries for themselves.
> At this environment, I'd expect houses to organize into largish units that share batteries, if the government allows, or just get enough batteries for themselves.
This is exactly what's happening in Hawaii right now. Because power is so expensive due to petroleum used to generate power, it is cheaper to go off the grid entirely with your own batteries than to wait for the utility to approve your grid tied solar system.
I guess when more and more people generate their own power the connection fee will eventually increase while the usage fee decreases. So even if you have an average usage of 0 kWh per month because of solar panels you'll pay the grid just to be your battery to buffer the peaks and give back power at night. And I think that's actually fair. If you don't want that high connection fee you'll need to buy your down battery and disconnect completely.
pipe dream
The majority of the cost of retail electricity is the maintenance of the transmission network (>50%) (poles and wires)[1], with metering/billing being the next highest contributor (<20%). The cost of generation is around 20%.
Many of these householders with solar are paying very little or nothing for their grid connection. Thus they are being subsidised by the non-solar households for their ability to stay grid connected.
Household level batteries could change that scenario if they are good enough to allow complete disconnection from the grid.
If household level batteries are successful, then we will reach a point where it will not be economically viable to maintain the grid. Every house will then need to become self sufficient for electricity generation and storage.
[1] https://www.dews.qld.gov.au/energy-water-home/electricity/pr...
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in Australia that's just not true, since the utility companies have a tendency to "gold plate" those grids.
Here are some detail:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/goldplating-the-power-grid-20...
When governments sold the grid to private enterprise they also allowed them to "gold plate" their systems and pass on the costs to the consumer.
The result was massive increases in electricity prices.
What those utility companies got wrong was thinking the consumer was a captive audience and would put up with those rip off prices.
Those massive increases in electricity prices actually made solar an option, hence the massive addition rate in roof top solar here in Australia.
What those utility companies have got wrong is the genie is now out of the bottle.
Some of those customers are going to be better served by doing something else. As the price of solar and local storage goes down compared to the legacy cost structure of utilities, it can make more sense for more of those customers to leave.
Some more info about solar tech companies here: https://powerhouse.solar/companies/
[1] http://www.seia.org/policy/finance-tax/solar-investment-tax-...
Which is why there are all those people working on storage technology.
thats like saying a stone wheel would be good enough
if we didn't have pneumatic/michelin tires
anything is good enough when its the only option
No, it really isn't. If it costs more than it generates, it's not good enough. That's why the power plants were built as they were in the first place; a lot of them date from when a solar installation simply couldn't pay itself back, ever.
> the recent drought
Desalination is normally shot down for being very wasteful of energy, but given the energy can't otherwise be stored and California seems in constant drought, are there any reasons why isn't it a viable use of the surplus energy in this scenario?
Moreover though, I think the general class of chemical storage is likely to be another winner. Reversible reactions in liquid provide so many benefits: modest infrastructure costs (compared to anything but pumped hydro) and scalability in terms of both throughput (more reactors in parallel) and capacity (additional tank volume).
And I think we're just skimming the surface with flow batteries (pun not intended). There's a massive amount of potential for new materials here.
What? The biggest problem is the cost of storage, not the fact that the underlying technology is not yet efficient enough to compete with non-renewables cost wise?
Can someone please summarize and explain this article to me? I saw no data, and there was no serious discussion of the underlying technology or economics of solar power.
> At that point the International Energy Agency (IEA) was still predicting that solar power would struggle to reach 20 gigawatts by now. Few could have foretold that it would in fact explode to 180 gigawatts.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11958916/Paris-...
Battery storage for solar power plants and even homes is going to explode over the next 5 years.
To a grid connected system it means you can't sell your power during the solar peaks, but it also means that you have enough capacity to sell more power during the edges of the solar periods.
Certainly any business which invests in long lived capital equipment would like to operate it at 100% capacity all the time, but most industries realize this doesn't happen. Solar will adjust.
For off grid people "excess" capacity means getting by better on partly cloudy days. I'll probably double my capacity next spring for just this reason.
PG&E in California does this one a fairly large scale in the Bay Area. Pumping water into the Helms Creek reservoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant)
;-)
The only other energy storage technology that is economically competitive with rechargeable batteries [in 2015] is compressed air. A pressure vessel approximately the same mass and volume as a lead-acid battery bank can store about the same amount of energy. It also has a longer useful lifespan and lower maintenance requirements. But the additional equipment required to connect it to your house power system is more complex and expensive.
Rather than stacking two giant swimming pools, you would likely be better off burying a giant concrete sphere wrapped in Spectra/Dyneema/UHMW-PE fiber in your yard, and using a thermo-pneumatic engine to fill or drain the energy reservoir.
So there are several levels of storage:
- 100% off-grid will need several days of storage.
- Grid-independent will need enough storage to cover
the *worst* winter day without resorting to the grid.
- Summer-independent will need enough storage to cover
the *average* summer day without tapping the grid.
- Peak-independent will need enough storage to avoid
tapping the grid during daily usage peak times.
- Emergency backup will need enough storage to run
only critical systems during a grid outage.
So for your example, a 5 kW solar array, and 75 kWh (270 MJ storage). So two reservoirs of 2700 m^3 with a 10 m head would do it. To make calculations easier, let's make each reservoir 10 m high. A cylindrical reservoir with diameter 20m, height 20m, and an internal floor 10m high would be about the right size.
Or you could use 8 Tesla 10 kWh wall units, costing $28000, and taking up just 1.4 m^3 of space.
I'm going to have to recalibrate my idea of how much energy a AA holds and also physical work compared to running electronics.
One joule is a kilogram meter squared divided by seconds squared (J = kg m^2 s^-2) . And Earth surface gravity is about 10 m s^-2. So one ton raised one meter is 1000 kg x 1 m x 10 m s^-2, or 10000 J.
An AA (LR6) battery is about 600-3400 mAh, depending on composition. A joule is also a coulomb-volt, or ampere-second-volt. So an alkaline AA battery with 2500 mAh and nominal voltage 1.5V is 2500 mAh x .001 A/mA x 3600 s/h x 1.5 V = 13500 J. A NiMH AA with 2300 mAh at 1.2 V is 9936 J.
One of my spring projects is to trip the well pump early and pump up the pressurized accumulator tank early when I have surplus power. Ordinarily I let it cycle through a wide range since a gallon stored at low pressure takes me much less energy than a gallon stored against high pressure. More than linearly since it is a centrifugal pump and between the head and the lift I'm pushing the limits.
I can't do hot water. I use an on-demand propane unit that can't throttle down enough to accept preheated water. Once that wears out I'll replace it with a unit that can accept preheated water.
Two olympic sized pools would be a little decadent plus, I've only got about 12 feet of altitude variation to work with. Constraint of a small island, on the other hand, I do have over 1000 cubic miles of water in the lower pool.
Regarding storage, that doesn't entirely come into play until the big power plants are scaled down enough that your total available supply is less than the usage, which is not the case on most places most of the time. The risk is that you try to rely on renewables when renewable energy supply is at a minimum and load is at a high, and it exceeds your margin. That's when you need to tap into stored energy. Again, you can usually plan against that.
So you've got an issue, you generate a bunch of energy that's not being used, so it's thrown away. That means the effective cost of an average kwh of solar electricity goes up a lot because you're not just paying for when you're using it, you're also paying (not really, but in a way when you average it) for electricity that's generated and then wasted. i.e. if I build a machine that produces energy for $1 per unit on average, but half my units are generated when I'm not there (and wasted), my actual average cost per unit of energy is $2. The $1 may be competitive with non-renewables, but because half is wasted, the actual $2 price is not.
But of course you don't have to waste it, you can store it, but then you need large amounts of storage and that's not easy or cheap. Take the Tesla powerwall for example, roughly has the capacity to run 1 clothes washer + dryer cycle, and it costs $3k (and doesn't last forever, either). Paying for battery storage for everyone (for when renewables are a big part of total energy production), would put the cost in my hypothetical example somewhere between $1 and $2.
For the actual data (rather than my silly numbers above) you're better off using google, there are a ton of studies that look at the kwh premium when running storage in different contexts. A quick back of envelope calculation for example for home-consumer storage prices... the above powerwall, $3k, lifetime of around 3500 cycles, at 7 kwh capacity, you're talking about the ability to store and use about 24.5k kwh of electricity at a cost of $3k before the device dies, or 12c per kwh. Now 12c per kwh is roughly the average price of a kwh in the US, so a powerwall essentially doubles the cost of of any unit of electricity you want store (the excess power solar generates around noon which can become very significant if we increase renewables a lot). Doubling in price for those kwh is massive, on average it makes little economic sense. In Hawaii, it makes total sense because prices of electricity are much higher. But this is a consumer solution, utility scale is cheaper, and some things can be much, much cheaper (like pumped hydro, way cheaper than a powerwall in general, and way way cheaper if you've got the natural resources like Norway does to build cheap pumped hydro capacity).
So why not turn off the power plants (e.g. coal/natgas) when solar production is high at noon? Because these plants can take 24-48 hours to startup, they provide base power and you can't just shut them on and off.
So yeah, storage is essential and it's not quite there yet. Battery tech has always lagged behind, and now we need it at a massive scale.
The most likely arbitrage factor will probably be the rise of electric cars which will provide a natural, decentralised, consumer-driven battery storage on a large scale. Cars are idle most of the day, e.g. when you're at work at noon and solar generates peak power, they can be programmed to charge when prices are low, and at peak times prices would be pushed down due to extra supply.
Right now, the way your electricity bill is structured is heavily biased towards consumption. The service charge is a small part of the overall bill.
What happens if 50% of the costumers have PVs is that the utilities will lose a lot of revenue but they will still have exactly the same amount of costs because they are not able to turn down their plants during the day and the PV people will still consume the same amount of peak grid energy during the night.
So there is two ways to fix this. One of them is for the plants to downsize their constant power generation methods like coal fired boilers and get a bunch of gas peaker plants.
The other one is to increase the service charge on your electricity bill.
In rough numbers, half of your electric bill is for energy, the other half is to pay for all the grid and capacity. Billing is purely on energy consumption. The effect of this is that low electric users get subsidized by high electric users.
When someone installs a domestic solar system they reduce their payments, but they still depend on the grid infrastructure. The system reaches its ultimate perversion when a grid tied domestic user achieves a negative bill. Not only have they been paid for their energy, they have been paid for the utility having a grid.
You can solve this economic distortion by a couple of ways:
• split billing into a grid-tie fee and an energy consumption charge: This accurately covers the solar houses, but it also raises the bills of the poor and cuts those of the wealthy (generally larger consumers).
• only pay domestic solar producers half what you charge for power: This works out asymptotically for a huge producer where the grid portion vanishes, but it doesn't work for people reducing their consumption but maintaining a grid tie or selling a little bit.
• put a surcharge on each watt of solar capacity: This works out accurately, but feels abusive. 1 watt of solar panel is going to make about 100 wHr of power a month. If grid-tie privilege includes a surcharge to cover the grid portion of 100wHr then this 1 watt solar panel user will end up paying the same for the grid as he did before. If a domestic solar installation is a net producer, it will end up getting paid for the energy and the grid fees will cancel.
Even before we get to a point where the power company may say "no thank you" to a domestic user that wants to sell power at 1pm on a sunny day, we still need to straighten out the billing. The current system ends up with the utilities (and by extension all grid users) subsidizing solar installations by forgiving their grid costs. I'm in favor of that now, but in a future where our carbon emissions are under control the distortions will need to be smoothed out.
This is not the case in many jurisdictions, and sometimes varies within a jurisdiction.
In British Columbia, my summer electric bills were regularly more than 50% constant fees.
In England, providers offer plans with varying levels of constant fees/"standing charge" and only very few plans have zero standing charge.
Why is this? Can they not regulate how much output they produce by shutting down "sections" of the plants?
I like the observation that it's about the economics because it's always about economics. If solar could have had a consumer product like personal computers, cell phones, or big screen TVs, we would be using a lot more solar today. There was nothing to bootstrap the industry. No Intel of solar energy was ever created.
(In the US anyway, but I guess they weren't so widespread in Europe in 1990 either, so it has an at least similar adoption profile.)
So it could be that the moment for solar is still coming. I guess there is a good chance that a consumer storage product tips the scales, if people buy storage to save money on grid power, they benefit from incrementally installing solar even in the absence of net metering.
Solar seems to be on its own little island without anything to drive it into the mainstream. If some sort of affordable consumer product existed, that could drive research.
"40 years later and solar is still the future.... Now we're only 15 years away."
For some context, the President of the United States wanted to stress solar energy in the 1970's:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house...
We could probably dig up a few issues of Popular Sciences
>By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepresidentandcabinet/tp/Hist...
Carter puts solar panels on the White House in 1979. Reagan orders them to be removed when he comes into office in 1981 (they were eventually removed in 1986).
Apart from government subsidies. Which, at least in some countries, worked very well. Germany being a key example.
Check out this graph showing growth in installed solar generation capacity:
http://www.nippon.com/en/files/a01505en_fig011.gif
This growth is at least in part due to the German Renewable Energy Act, which came into force in the year 2000:
I mean, this article talks a lot about "overproduction" - how the grid gets taxed by massive daytime spikes in production on sunny days. But it seems like if the problem really is going to be "too much electricity", then maybe green vehicle designers can find ways to put all that "clean" energy to good use.
You can see that although wind is broken out to its own meter, solar is not yet broken out. The effect of solar so far is a small dip in noonday demand. The daily high point is about 6pm at the moment, as the end of the working day overlaps it getting dark here.
From the rest of the graphs you can see gas and coal ramping up and down over the course of the day. Gas is capable of fairly rapid response. At the peak, the pumped storage (Dinorwig) is turned on.
Until rooftop solar pushes daytime net demand below the 4am current demand low, I don't think we need to panic about storage.
The government policy on subsidies is incoherent; subsidies for renewables are being cut, but the Hinkley Point C nuclear deal includes an obligation to buy the power at a price far above market or renewable levels.
Personally I have 3.8kW of panels on my roof. At some point I'll go and have a look at the data logger and see what conclusions to draw.
Does California not use Location Based Marginal Pricing like New York, New England, and Texas?
http://www.caiso.com/pages/pricemaps.aspx
Not sure how the pricing varies over time, but the data is available at least.
The dollar is a debt-based system which means when something is bought with a dollar that thing is assumed to be owned and loaned by someone. No one owns the sun, it's free and basically infinite.
Oil is the commodity which creates the most demand for and thus the most value out of the dollar. 6 of the 7 richest companies in the world in terms of revenue are oil and gas companies.
So with all things considered the cost effectiveness of solar power to the dollar is not a valid comparison because what you are basically doing is comparing the cost benefit of solar for oil production and the ability to create debt.
>Even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.
-Hafez
Are you suggesting that we should not pay the companies who do the conversion, routing, and storage of this energy because nobody owns the sun?