Under 2.5 cents per a kWh is very cheap, but I'm guessing there are other costs like storage on top?
Anyways will be interesting to see for the future if solar actually becomes a more dominant source of energy worldwide.
Anyways will be interesting to see for the future if solar actually becomes a more dominant source of energy worldwide.
Additionally, in hotter places like the UAE, solar irradiation tends to correlate much more with grid load, since cooling is the primary energy use. So, you could safely push well beyond the 50% penetration point for solar/wind.
[1]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc...
[2]: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/pdfs/2010ulw_ellis.pdf
This is a very interesting remark. Last week, we had relatively high temperatures in Germany and France (above 30°C). In Germany, because the weather was perfect for solar, this reduced the middle of the day spot price where in France, this increased the spot price[0].
[0]: https://www.eex.com/en/ "European Energy Exchange"
In the UK, meanwhile, peak load is driven by tea kettles and Eastenders.[1]
[0a] http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/21/utilities-cry-fowl-over-...
[0b] http://businesstech.co.za/news/hardware/86252/new-battery-te...
[0c] https://www.cnet.com/news/a-technology-race-to-curb-peak-ene...
[0d] There's a great NPR viz on power sources around the US, though somewhat dated now: http://www.npr.org/2009/04/24/110997398/visualizing-the-u-s-...
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatime...
Keep in mind that this number will vary depending on generation mix. Specifically, it will depend on the response time of your dispatch-able generators. If your primary source of non-renewable generation is big steam turbines with a painfully slow ramp-rate (e.g. coal generation) then you're going to have a bad time.
Which is why most coal in the US is being displaced by combined cycle natural gas turbines; ~10-30 minute ramp, depending on load demand.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/a-users-guide-to-natural-gas...
Furthermore, desalination will probably also play a major role in electricity consumption and I can imagine that plants can be adjusted to solar power production instead of running them at the same level 24/7 (pure speculation, no idea how the technology behind this works).
Edit: All water in UAE comes from desalination[0], so using clean water storage with larger plants instead of energy storage could be cheaper.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
Not really, I was living in Dubai last year, and during the summer it was around 48C/120F in the day but it's still 35C/95F+ at night. As you can imagine literally everywhere inside is air conditioned, even some bus stops are!
Due to the lower latitude the days are also quite short (at least compared to Europe), so solar less effective without some sort of backup or storage.
The desalination plants are usually combined with power plants. The main source of fuel for power generation is natural gas, which is a by-product of oil drilling and often just burned off as it's harder to transport or store. Clean water is needed to run the turbines, so sea water is desalinated and then afterwards used for the water supply. It leads to an overall efficiency of ~86%, but if you assume the gas would have just be burnt off it's effectively free energy.
For desalination, you could still use solar power for desalination plants and sell the natural gas instead of burning it? At 2.5c/mwh I can imagine that it's more lucrative to switch power and sell the gas to a country like US or UK where NatGas is needed for power plants as solar power is much more expensive.
In any case, I think now is a good time for them to invest in developing these alternatives, perhaps on a smaller scale, so that when they run out of all the plentiful fossil fuels, they would then have another system that meets their needs.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/fur... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/wha...
Still unclear whether future developments (like mass desalinization mentioned by dx034) will change this. Or storage just could become unexpectedly cheaper, like solar itself did.