How Solar Power Could Slay the Fossil Fuel Empire (2014)

The "discussion inside the discussion" here is money. As inverter and management technology has gotten better, it becomes possible for a single family home, in the lower 48 states, to locally generate perhaps 95% of its annual power requirements, and to supplement that last 5% with onsite generated power using propane or methane.

In such a configuration, the consumer's on going payments are either lease payments or a maintenance contract on the gear to keep it running. Not some utility company. And that means that you cannot distribute the cost of "big" energy projects across a wide base of payers (as a utility, you can still do that with taxes). And that leads us too ... Commercial power.

While you and I might be able to live off grid, your typical multi-story office building or apartment can not. They don't have the square footage available for panels, and they generally don't have the space for back up power equipment. So they still need generators and transmission lines and a "grid." And because the cost of that grid is distributed across fewer people, their costs are significantly (I've seen estimates of 10x) higher. That raises rents, and the cost of goods, and generally puts a real crimp in any economy. Not to mention the power utility is now just another botique supplier to these guys and so loses a lot of scale it had before.

The shifting balance of power (pun intended) is going to cause a lot of disruptions and cost shifting. At the end of the day it could be the thing that puts a lot of brick and mortar stores out of business.

If you look at predictions for renewables from a few years ago you will find out that they are all - no matter who you asked - largely wrong. I remember that not that long ago nobody would have expected that prices for onshore wind and solar would go down so rapidly. On the other hand offshore wind was often praised as the tech that would make renewables cheap. The opposite has happened. Onshore wind and solar got cheaper in a speed that even the most outspoken renewable advocates hadn't predicted, offshore wind is one of the most expensive ways to get renewable energy.

Basically today there is not a single country that largely relies on "new" renewables (wind + solar). Denmark comes close, but they are small and interconnected with neighbors that have a lot of water power capacity and pumped storage.

I think it is pretty much impossible to predict which techs will work out in a future grid that will need a lot more storage tech. Some things we think today are promising will spectacularly fail and maybe some things we don't have on the radar yet will provide solutions.

Running the numbers we could build several days worth of 100% electric storage for fairly minimal costs. (10TWh = 1 day's storage.) The problem is having a back to your backup costs money and someone needs to cover the costs for a facility that effectively never gets used.

Another approach is to simply over build, renewables are rapidly becoming the cheapest option so simply over building say 10% can drastically reduce the need for grid storage.

But as usual the truth lies somewhere between the delusional hype and the denialists, in the form of a gradual rollout. Realistically the newly-commissioned gas power plants are not going anywhere for 30 years, especially when shale gas is so cheap in the US. The short term in Europe is dominated by the Combustion Plant Directive closing down coal plants that reach the end of their working lives. Southern US will see more and more solar. The grid is not going anywhere and will probably require ongoing point upgrades. And so on.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

The kind of person who frequents this site might like the Rocky Mountain Institute's take on this:

http://www.rmi.org/our_goals

Loads of boring wonkery about more efficient buildings, and better ways of regulating utilities to align incentives properly, or ideas for financing the deployment of new technologies for efficent shipping and so on.

The other big issue is how fast can you repair 'own generation?' Utilities typically do a good job in restoring power and assist each other to restore power. Today everyone wants power all the time, 50 years ago power outages were not as much of an issue.

Something like power generation capacity, of peak load, for 30% solar, 30% wind, 30% natural gas, 30% hydro, 30% nuclear and 30% compressed air storage. Note it goes over 100% so that parts of it can be offline and peak demand can be still supplied.

The only fossil fuel, natural gas, would only be fired when electricity price was very high, like it is operated in many places already today. It is suitable for this use as the investment cost is low and the reaction time is short.

Embarrassing for HN community this comment is top voted.

If the price matches the supply I'm sure people will get quite creative in reducing the demand enough to make the problem go away.

I'm on the grid, and I had a three-week power outage two years ago. Getting to 99.999% would require no power outages for the next 5700 years. Even getting to 99% would require no power outages for the next 3 years, which isn't going to happen; I had an overnight power outage a few months ago. That's because I live in Argentina. Not out in the boondocks — in the capital, with flatscreen TVs, world-class medical care, and subways crammed full of people glued to their Samsung Galaxy Whatevers. A friend of mine in Pakistan isn't even getting one nine; he has a rolling blackout of an hour every few hours. He's at maybe 70% or 80% grid uptime.

I don't understand this myopic focus on "Seattle, London, and really most of Europe". What percentage of the population lives in the US and Europe? 14%. 86% of the population lives elsewhere. How about Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Delhi, Mexico City, Beijing, Lagos, São Paulo, and Mumbai? Those are the world's ten biggest cities, and by themselves they total nearly the population of the US. As it happens, none of them are in the US or Europe.

Also, as it happens, most of them are at much more equatorial latitudes than most of Europe and even much of the US.

Speaking of rolling blackouts, I lived in California in 2000. At the time, political corruption in the energy markets led to rolling blackouts there, with a total of several hundred hours of blackout at each location (except hospitals, national security installations, and things like that). So California isn't going to reach 99.999% on-grid reliability within the next couple of millennia either, even without any further outages. Reliable electricity is very important to some industries, like semiconductor fabrication. Maxim has a fab there in San José, or at least they did last year. Maybe they'd would be better off depending on solar panels on the fab roof instead of the fickle governance of the California transmission grid.

The upshot of all of this is that transmission-line parity for most of us is going to occur pretty soon actually. It doesn't need to hit 99.999% or 99.99% or 99.9% or even 99% reliability to be an improvement from where we are now. In fact, in Pakistan and in much of the world, even if it's 50% reliable, it's a big help, as long as the times when it's out aren't the same times the regular power grid is out.

Molten-salt solar is certainly capable of some load following, although not as fast as a gas turbine, but it can also handle baseload, because it can run at whatever time of day or night you need. Can it be extended? Well, the materials you need are super common and well understood (we were recently treated to an explanation the other day of how Lavoisier made significant improvements to the handling and production of the salts in question in the 18th century), and the heat engine is typically a closed-cycle Parsons steam turbine, same as in a coal or combined-cycle plant. There's no reason I know of to expect it to be any harder to scale than other types of steam turbines. The only issue is that it will have a hard time producing energy as cheaply as photovoltaic unless we can bring the cost of the machinery way down and its lifetime up.

You mention deserts, I suppose because enormous land area is cheap and the skies are not cloudy all day. But how much area do you really need to generate the electricity we use? Argentine electricity use, for example, is only about 3000 kWh/year/人, or 340 W/人. With a typical panel efficiency of 15% (not 22% like some advanced unijunction panels), a typical capacity factor of 18%, a solar constant of, say, 1000 W/m², and a latitude of 34°36’ (thus a cosine of 82%), this works out to 15m²/人, or 65 000 人/km². The actual population density here in Buenos Aires — the densest and most populous city in the entire country — is 14 000 人/km². Rooftop photovoltaic is plenty to replace the existing rickety power distribution infrastructure.

Pumped water storage might be useful, wind is useful, deserts are certainly going to be immense resources, and cheaper batteries could eliminate the intermittency problem (if they work), but none of those are actually necessary.

As a means of electricity production, it's already better than fossil fuels in large parts of the world but fossil fuels are storable and that makes all the difference.

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/31/rare_metals_mineral_re...

These technologies are currently only accessible to highly-determined and resourceful people (those willing to make fundamental changes to their electricity consumption patterns, or those with 2+ sigma annual disposable income to fund their individual solution), and are still not ready for mass, de-centralized adoption. Grid-scale deployments might be another story, but any talk of a mass wave of private individuals adopting this technology is not matching up with the numbers I've run.

A combination of energy conservation and energy production technologies and techniques, I can see gaining traction, but that is a long, long (2+ decades) ways off in the US (Germany is potentially leading the way here IMHO).

So you'd be getting (saving) 4K annually from a 40K investment? Try getting that kind of return elsewhere.

Seriously though, the best solar strategy for the homeowner is do-it-yourself ground mount installs. If DIY is not your thing at a minimum get separate quotes for install and supply. The markup solar installers add to equipment is outrageous.

Good luck with all your coal plants.