How cheap does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?
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You'd still have the time the sun is not shining, which would likely be more expensive than before (a gas powered plant would only be running half the time - effectively doubling its capital/construction cost per kWh).
So you'd definitely have an improvement on some levels but I'm not sure that would really help that much.
The real big breakthrough would be somme big improvement on storage. I'm not convinced this will happen quickly (at least not in anyway similar to the declining cost of PV panels). The consumer electronics industry has been paying $$$ for decades for better batteries/battery r&d and has seen pretty poor gains.
I think Tesla and the electric car manufacturers will definitely rapidly get the price down by say 30% because of economies of scale but will then hit a brick wall as more of the cost becomes raw materials, transport, etc which will set a floor on the cost of batteries.
Happy to be proved wrong though :)
- Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit.... Sure it's not suitable everywhere.
- There's always Molten Salt as well - http://www.solarreserve.com/en/technology/molten-salt-energy....
Also, solar isn't the be all and end all of renewable energy generation. Wind, Solar, Hydro, and Geothermal all have different strengths and weaknesses, and flexibility of generation is important.
But above all, I think security of supply is probably the number 1 requirement (unless you're a big fan of load shedding - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout), and therefore, we'll still need energy sources that are reliable.
I predict a move away from coal towards natural gas. Sure it's not perfect, but it's not the worst either.
A couple of additions and caveats.
Friend of mine at ORNL has been talking up compressed air energy storage (CAES). I'm somewhat dubious due to the Boyles law heating/cooling problem (gasses heat when compressed, cool when expanded, and the resulting heat flows affect both efficiency and equipment function -- gas turbines don't spin well when iced solid).
Pumped-hydro is the most efficient storage solution bar none, but is painfully restricted by siting opportunities. Being able to use oceans as a lower baisin might address this, though salt-water engineering is a significant concern (corrosion and other issues).
Interesting to see molten salt as at large scale that pencils out a viable for even, say, a two week total energy replacement solution for the US. You'd need tankage (insulated) roughly corresponding to current Oaklahoma oil transshipment storage facilities.
Electricity-to-fuel is another option, with Sabatier and Fischer-Tropsch cycles both proven. Carbon source from seawater appears somewhat promising, though my concern is that there's been 50 years of research without a large-scale demonstration project, making me suspect deeper issues.
I actually am a fan of load-shedding, and suspect that the concept of dispatchable load as opposed to supply may be part of the future way of thinking.
Coal => gas is a no-brainer, though also not a total solution, by a long shot.
Geothermal is highly underrated, especially if currently protected areas are opened for consideration. The Yellowstone caldera could possibly supply up to 15% of total US electrical demand.
There also are ideas to use the ocean as the higher basin. See https://trustyetverify.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/energy-from-..., https://www.technologyreview.com/s/510806/a-manmade-island-t...
I haven't seen anything about it recently, but the Navy was/is funding a demonstration plant in Hawaii. I really hope it works out as I'm skeptical that the developing world will shift to electric vehicles anytime soon.
Her Ted Talk[1] and their website[2] explains it much better than I do.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZiaTV6uvFQ [2] http://www.lightsail.com/
When sizing an industrial air system a rule of thumb is to budget 7-8hp of compressor for 1 hp of air motor. That is 12% efficiency, or only worth it if you had no other source of power. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume a tightly integrated system you could do 3x better, but it still doesn't come close to batteries.
If someone has plug-plug numbers that are better, let me know.
My understanding isn't particularly deep, and I'd like to run numbers on storage, volume, pressure, etc. But I suspect this'll have to be big enough that constructing cans really isn't viable.
If it was more efficient, than we would see air powered cars (not the scam that surfaces every other year).
Industry only uses it to power things because you can have simple & compact actuators and high rpm motors.
Pumped hydro's remarkably efficient, fast-responding (minutes), but extremely limited in scale. See Tom "Do the Math" Murphy, but I think you'd need ~1,500 or was it ~15,000 Hoover-dam sized project for US storage capacity.
Batteries are fairly efficient, but respond slowly (you can neither charge nor discharge them rapidly), and at scale virtually all have massive substrate / materials shortages -- lead and lithium particularly. Iron-based batteries should be abundant, and liquid metal or molten-salt batteries seem to be the most abundant. Storage densities aren't great, but if you're building stationary facilities, that's not a concern. The 600C - 800C temperatures may be though. Having a neighbourhood melt-out wouldn't be pretty.
Biomass might work for standby thermal generation.
Thermal salt storage also pencils out. But any thermal storage system, that is, hot stuff you use to boil a working fluid that runs through a gas turbine, suffers from Carnot efficiency losses, about 35-45 max efficiency. If in a desert area, you've got problems of cooling your working fluid without venting too much of it (or the coolant). Not insoluble problems, but an issue.
Heat also doesn't store indefinitely though it should be good for hours to a few days.
Fuel synthesis has the advantage of scaling fairly arbitrarily large, particularly with liquid hydrocarbons. Put them in liquid-proof tanks and they'll stay there. Storage stability is proven to 100s of millions of years, so there's that. They're also transportable and can be utilised on-site. You lose 50% in hydrogen electrolysis, plus 65% on Carnot, for a net return of about 17%, but if you've sufficient peak surplus, that's viable.
CAES has the hot/cold problem, but there's a lot of air, and there's a lot of underground reservoir. Again I'm not sold that it pencils out, but it's possible.
Other options include direct banking of heat for buildings and/or industrial processes -- these use a lot of energy, and direct application and storage avoids electric or electric-to-fuel conversion losses.
It'll be interesting.
Anythhing exposed to fluid isn't. Groundwater flws, tanks in air.
I'm not sure about possible ignition explosion risk from residual methaane or hyrogen, say.
Molten salt is efficient because of the phase change, but also much more difficult and expensive to handle than a big (well enormous) bunch of hot rocks. Last thing I heard, he's currently trying to get demonstration plant up and running - it sounded like they'd already done some experiments at Siemens before he left.
Anyway, nowhere near ready, but just to show that there are still low-tech options out there being examined.
Another low-tech option is biomass, either wood chips/pills or other stuff processed into methane.
Yeah, it's not as cheap as coal, but with good grid connections we need less storage than people seem to think, at least according to the research papers I've seen.
Some numbers: 100% renewable energy with a capacity of 340% would require 8% storage just for Germany, 3.8% for Europe (due to larger area which means more diverse weather). Also 8% for Europe using no solar and more wind instead.
The 340% capacity is needed to get to the 100% coverage since there is more downtime compared to old energy which had 180% in 2007.
If we go to 390% capacity (which corresponds to 170 GW additional production as calculated for Germany) we only need 0.9% storage.
Depending on the relative pricing of additional capacity and storage, the price for building the whole infrastructure can go down by half. (The upper limit given in numbers is of the same order of magnitude as Europe's GDP in 2009, 12·10^12 €)
[0] (German) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piuz.201201301/ab...
Much better than water - higher energy capacity means smaller units and higher performing insulation making losses much lower.
Heat loss is a bit problem in stored water DHW scenarios and will get even more of a problem if we begin building houses properly (which surely has to happen at some point).
1) You can move them around, as in an electric car. That's useful if you want to do mobile stuff like driving. Or if you just flat-out want to move the facility somewhere it will be more useful.
2) They can be efficiently decentralized, which benefits reliability, and decreases transmission loss.
But anyway, the solution is to use any and all technologies, right? Batteries make sense some places, gravity storage elsewhere.
While an interesting theory, I can't think of a single scenario where this would be economically justified.
> 2) They can be efficiently decentralized, which benefits reliability, and decreases transmission loss.
Transmission losses are about 6%, so not really any economic gain.
I have no idea if that's realistic. Does someone know what the weight/distance to power output would be limited at...
Play with this and you'll immediately see it doesn't seem useful. e.g. storing a 50-tonne weight at 10m gives you less than 1.5 kWh of energy.
Flywheels that don't become fly-apart wheels is one problem.
Containment of fly-apart wheels another. Buried concrete pipes are usually what you're looking at. You need mass to contain these things.
The per-kg energy densities just aren't all that high. If you want reactive load to soak up very short-term demand / supply fluctuations, you can get that. And you've got crazy charge-discharge cycles.
Bearings are mostly solvable with magnets, as I understand. But you still lose a given percentage of storage over short time -- ~1% per hour or so, within a few powers of 2. Enough that long-term storage isn't viable.
And the thing that really screws you over is that the Earth moves. Geometric precession of your flywheel is something you've got to deal with.
There's a place, but I don't think it's large-scale, long-term grid storage.
There is a modern effort to use the technology in a massively scaled up fashion by Heindl Energy[1]. Their concept uses pumped water to raise a rock weight 100 meters or more in diameter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator [1] http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock-storage/overview...
Actually, it's not too bad, just slower. Batteries improve around 8% per year, if I remember right.
That's less than semiconductor based stuff improved when Moore's law held, but pretty impressive compared to lots of other technologies.
[1] http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?88468-Tri...
[2] http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?417736-Te...
Thanks for digging up the numbers!
In any case, a bit of Googling will give you more details about the improvements than my faulty memory..
It's generally used in homes with 'storage heaters' which heat up overnight and release heat during the day while you're out at work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater
http://www.emotorwerks.com/index.php/component/rsform/form/1...
In areas where the utility is not set up to do this, you can programming it to monitor the grid and prefer charging when the grid is less carbon intensive.
See my comment further below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520789
It is in fact these very expensive gas plants that solar is destroying the market for first, both because they are the most expensive to run, but also because solar happens to align with the natural peaks in demand.
To be brief, I left it out, but my ballpark guesstimate is that, due to the cost of storage, for the main grid, solar for free is still not cheap enough. So, that is an answer to a question in the OP -- how cheap does solar have to be? My guesstimate is $0.00 per megawatt hour is still not cheap enough. In really simple terms, the grid doesn't want solar, even for free because of the need for storage and the fact that solar is unstable, e.g., due to just a sudden summer thunderstorm. The grid is super big on stability -- a small source of instability, and the whole grid of the US NE can go down, and at least once did.
Another, related point is that often the wholesale cost of power on the grid has been ballpark $0.005 per KWh, that is, half a penny per kilowatt hour. So, already, now, on the grid, intermittent power is nearly worthless, even when it is excess power from a rock solidly stable source.
And why might there be excess power? Because at the generators it's not so easy to adjust power levels quickly. So, when there's an excess, just sell it off where can, get half a cent for it, and go on.
Very much what the grid wants from the generators is rock solidly stable power, 24 x 7, no snap, crackle or pop, not even for two seconds, for years at a time. And we have that, now, that is, at least from the generators. Sure, for the lines and poles out to the burbs, during an ice storm, the reliability can be lower.
Solar? Fine, if it is cheap enough AND there is good storage to make it reliable enough AND the storage is not too expensive.
Again, the short answer, for solar, for the grid -- the storage costs too much.
Again, we're talking about the grid. There are other candidate uses for solar power -- taking salt out of water (get to store the clean water), pumping water uphill (if have a big dam handy), getting hydrogen from water (get to store the hydrogen or just pump it into a pipeline), making gasoline from coal and water (get to store the gasoline and pump it into a pipeline). So, these uses all have the feature that there is a good way to store the results of the solar power.
People have worked hard on storage for a long time, and that there is little or none installed on the grid indicates that so far no one has a good approach to storage.
Likely, get the solar panels with 100% efficiency for free, and the issue will remain -- cost of storage. A lot of this is just my opinion, but what's been deployed on the real grid makes me suspect I'm basically correct. We can be sure that lots of smart engineers have checked the figures very carefully, and so have the public utility commissions, so we don't really have to go over all the figures ourselves. It's pretty clear that the smart engineers that have done all the arithmetic carefully don't want solar for the grid.
But, sure, some people want to tax carbon, and tax it enough that solar with available storage will be cheap enough. That's another issue.
Panels which are the roof have potential. The "solar shingle" vendors are making progress.[1]
[1] http://msdssearch.dow.com/PublishedLiteratureDOWCOM/dh_0944/...
The wiring can be on the underside and can be then connected after construction. (By some other team than roof constructors). After 30 years, they can be swapped. There might be some new technology then.
Another alternative would be roll-out plastic panels on ordinary roof materials. External wiring.
Everything should be laughably easy if you don't need to deal with snow and ice. They are a whole new design problem. To best limit CO2 emissions, the manufactured panels should be installed in places with best production ability, so freezing tends not to be among the first problems.
But for the vast majority of dwellings that means removing a roof, which doesn't exactly lower the installation cost...
Elon Musk's goal with tesla is to boost battery production volume significantly to reduce the cost of batteries.
This is a really low quality article.
Alas, that's not everywhere.
For solar to affect petroleum, whose primary use is transport, we'll need to solve the storage problem. Tesla notwithstanding that has not happened. Electric vehicle sales were 0.66% of unit auto sales in 2015, and actually represented a sharp numeric decrease from 2014.
(The dollar volume is higher given the higher price of electrics, but it's unit sales you want to watch.)
The obvious solution here is solar-generated biofuel, such as the algae projects now being investigated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...
Sasol, the South African energy company, did run commercial coal-to-liquids via Fischer-Tropsch, since the 1950s, and I believe may still do so. The US tried but ran into technical issues.
Can you site this source please? I am very curious to see the data! thanks
US EV sales in 2015 were 116,000.
That's 0.66% of total unit auto sales.
EV sales compares with 122,000 units in 2014, or negative growth in 2015 by 6,000 units, or about 5%.
http://www.autonews.com/article/20160105/RETAIL01/160109995/...
http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
(I'd happened to have looked this up a day or so back in another discussion.)
To ask an actual question: is this still the case? (Was it ever?)
Over its entire lifecycle, utility-scale photovoltaic power creates 48g of CO2-equivalent emissions per kWh. Natural gas emits 10x this; coal 17x.
Furthermore: the majority of PV emissions are dictated by manufacturing processes, which will probably get cleaner and more efficient over time. The emissions of coal and gas are dictated by chemistry, and will never change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
[0] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/solar-panels-n...
Lately I've read EROEI numbers for solar PV from 10-15X.
So no, this is not true, and likely has not been true for a long time. It might have been true back when PV was kind of a lab curiosity and niche item.
Year EROEI
1920 125
1970 30
2010 15
Suppose solar panels were priced such that, after accounting for installation costs and subsidies and everything else, solar was much cheaper than grid power and paid off quickly. Then pretty much everyone would want one, and the manufacturer would have a huge backorder. So the manufacturers wouldn't do that; instead, they'd price the panels a little higher, sell everything they could produce but not have the backorder, and invest the extra money into expanding their production capacity.
I think this is where we're currently at; solar power is in fact cheaper than grid power, it's just priced to support investment into expanding the manufacturing/installation capacity to properly take over.
That's what finance is for. I assume if this were actually the case, wouldn't the manufacturers _take_ the backorders and separately raise money for expanding their production capacity? I don't buy it.
jimrandomh's scheme would require a significant amount of collusion between all major producers.
Is that anything special about the solar-panel industry?
Even cheaper solar would be nice but I'm not sure why it would be better than a radical battery breakthrough or some cheap and cheerful fusion thing or some mix of different solutions.
The pricing structure will flip though, electricity at night costing probably 2-3 times peek daytime rates. One would expect industrial users would adjust and avoid using power at night[1]. That would reduce demand.
[1] Think of a mini-mill (steel) that currently runs its electric furnaces at night when rates are cheap. If rates are cheaper in the day they'll switch to daytime operation.
*edit looks like the article has a convenient link to another article talking about this exact problem:
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10970858/flattening-duck-curve-...
For one, there is nowhere where solar is the baseload power, because it can't be, so it gets a bit of a "free rider" advantage. For another, solar plants depreciate like any other, but those costs aren't really factored in to a lot of solar power costs yet.
We'd need to build out a significant amount of energy storage capacity and change a lot of the grid as well in order to fully adopt solar as a baseload power source. And that would increase its cost by non-trivial factors. Would it still be worthwhile? Maybe?
(1) Utility Scale Solar is already less <$1/W installed in India, and heading for sub $1.5/W in US.
(2) The price of Solar PV panels is already at $0.40/W. US-based $FSLR is has a roadmap to get to $0.25/W by 2019. In addition PV efficiency is increasing by 10% yoy. This is just from purely riding the 'industrial learning curve'. See [1].
(3) "Value deflation" is a policy issue that has a simple policy solution. As a tech that produces an intermittent product, but has high fixed-costs but zero-marginal costs - solar (like wind) should be financed (and paid for) via a fixed tariff (feed-in tariff or FiT). See [2]. This is how Solar is financed in the rest of the world outside the US. If 'value deflation actually became an issue - then my guess is that regulators in the US would step in (but one can never say with US regulators who tend to get captured by various lobby groups).
(4) Solar will account for 30% of all new capacity power additions going forward globally. This is happening - now. There is over 100,000MW installed globally already.
In addition - every time solar or wind comes up for discussion on HN or elsewhere, the same misconceptions and confusions about baseload, intermittency and costs arise.
To summarise the counter-points again:
(1) Renewables does not need to be base-load or compared to 'base-load'. 'Base-load' is spectrum not a point. See [3]
(2) There is a difference between intermittent and 'unplanned'. Planned vs unplanned is the main issue. Even nuclear has unplanned shut-downs - no tech has a 100% 'capacity factory' running 24/7 365 days. see [4]
(3) Renewables can get to 60-80% penetration via:
(a) increasing efficiencies (happening now)
(b) increasing energy storage efficiencies with declining prices (happening now)
(c) geographical grid-integration (happening slowly)
(d) more flexible software-led demand-side and supply-side management (happening). See [5]
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/first-sola...
[2] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/3-ways-renewable...
[3] http://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/02/base-load-power-is-a-myt...
and http://cleantechnica.com/2014/08/08/rmi-blows-lid-baseload-p... [short video in article]
[4] http://www.energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-no...
[5] Links on renewable energy penetration potential
- NREL Analysis of how to achieve high-penetration renewables in US http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/
- Ramez Naam http://rameznaam.com/2016/01/31/how-far-can-renewables-go-pr...
- California http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/04/04/what-will-california-...
If you follow hackernews, you'll regularly see articles about places like Florida (and possibly Nevada if memory serves) where solar could easily power homes, but disingenuous legislative instruments and manipulativly worded ballot initiatives are housed to effectively block solar adoption.
This is an example of the top result in Google news http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fre...
Not the greatest example I've seen, but again, if you follow HN you've seen variations on this story dozens of times.
Lobbyists protect big utilities instead of facilitate solar.
It's tragic to think how much further along we could be.
Power companies and non-solar ratepayers will get increasingly unhappy with net metering customers. That joyride will end.
Can I trust a report that does not even have the units right?! Price should be proportional to energy (i.e., Joules or Watt-seconds) not power (Watts).