Nothing will force companies to use Solar than high ROI. Google and Apple now use Solar in a major way, with Tesla's cars and SolarCity's roofs, we are living in exciting times.
The drop in Oil demand would mean the end of the OPEC bloc.
The drop in Oil demand would mean the end of the OPEC bloc.
You might not have noticed, but OPEC is dead.
A combination of shale oil in the US, Saudi and US desire to the disrupt the Russian oil-economy and Iran/Saudi rivalries mean OPEC can't set prices anymore. The best they can do is try to restrict supply enough to stop them going bust[1].
Even that isn't a sure thing anymore - no one can be sure that even that small agreement will stick[2].
An Exxon/Russia agreement under the Trump presidency will bury OPEC. (Not sure Exxon/Russia will be better than OPEC, but OPEC won't be able to do anything about it.)
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-01/opec-get-its-cartel-mo...
[2] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Goldman-Flip-Flops-Aga...
Are you sure? OPEC's November 30th deal moved world oil prices drastically in every direction. For a dead entity, they sure seem to exert change upon the living.
PS: I'd love for OPEC to die also, but I think they are very much alive, albeit less relevant than 20 years ago.
OPEC is still alive and well, and even speculating about their deal's success is pushing prices wildly.
This is not the OPEC who could move prices by 50% or credibly threaten to cut off supply.
On top of that, we now have a wide range of viable plug-in cars. If oil were to get up to $100/barrel again, lots of people would switch to a car that can cover 90%+ of their driving on electricity. $4/gallon gas really hurt our SUV market, but now we can make it a 20 kWh hybrid and avoid the pain at the pump.
What I am afraid is that the nuclear renaissance may be further delayed in the west, which is what we badly need now to reduce carbon footprints, provide stable energy production and to fill te gap until fusion gets there. (Which despite the recent great news is still 30 years far, as ever since the 1970s)
As a European as much as I hope that the OPEC shall fall, I am also afraid of the turmoil it may cause as its core states are rumored to be closely linked with the funding of terrorism in the middle east for their political purposes, which recently has reached Europe as well.
Of course we need storage and backup generators for renewables. It will be mostly pumped water with gas and oil. Nuclear does not fit as a backup.
In the future, the pricing must include renewables PLUS their backup plan (e.g. a gas generator on standby) to achieve level pricing and availability.
Having a large grid and moving to more flexible consumers in order to distribute and smoothen out supply and demand will also be a huge factor.
In the end I'm positive that it can be done.
It makes the most sense for base load, as well as night time load (which is mostly the same as base load).
3 billion / 5500 = 545454 545454 * 14 KwH ~= 7.6 GwH.
try at google ((3 billion / 5500) * 14kwh) in Gwh
That is the current state of the Nuclear power construction world.
What sane investor is ever going to invest in power generation that is online 12 years after the decision to go?
Sellafield: 2005 estimate: $59 billion. 2015 estimate: $155 billion.
German utilities set aside $45 billion but an additional $26 billion may be needed
The EU estimated recently that funds set aside to cover the cost of decommissioning 16 nuclear plants would fall short by $137 billion.
Source: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/soaring_cost_german_nuclear_shu...
How much should it cost in some abstract sense? How much should it cost to be safe? Who knows. But one thing is certain based on historical observation, it'll cost exactly and precisely every penny that is available, and not a penny more or less. There's a lot of profit to be made off spending each penny, and each penny will be spent.
That mindset doesn't mesh well in an industry that has competitors like coal plants or natgas peaking plants or solar plants. What does "spend every penny you can" mean at a coal plant? Or what does "a penny not spent is a penny lost" mean at a solar plant?
Meanwhile you're comparing a product that's been shipping for half a century, admittedly at various levels of technical and economic success, with vaporware under so far successful development. You can't compare the price of a commodity gallon of standard cow milk in 2016 to the price of a shipping in 2028 Intel CPU in a useful way.
In the end cleaning snow, while a pain in the ass, is not a real challenge. Much like desert sand cleaning, this is automatable (and small snow removing robots exist already) and would be worth the investment in northern (or extreme) southern climates.
We are basically talking about plant equivalence. You need 3x nameplate capacity and about 12 hours of battery storage for equivalency between a solar and a nuclear solution. Assuming night load is equal to day load. That assumption does not hold for a grid, night load is normally half the day load. So a system must only survive the evening peak plus the normal night load.
The quip about battery storage price basically showed that if you throw as much money at it as a single nuclear power plant then yes it is a solved problem today.
I love solar though, and yes, storage dependency is there, but then, we have done no research on it. the main problem is the will to do research.
I'll give you an analogy, for pumping water to x height, we use an electric water pump. As you might be aware trees are the best water pumps available, with 0 noise they pump water all the way upto their top, some trees are just crazily huge, so if we are to harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top, we'll have a revolution on our hands, but in the words of Henry Ford, "If I asked what people wanted they'd have said faster horses" :-)
I want to see the entire world powered by solar with microscopic solar panels which are stuck to things like walls and stuff sending electricity wirelessly (invented by Tesla) to the home/office/car etc
I guess the problem is not one of replication (see [1]) but of throughput. A pump that replicates the tree transpiration process would be too slow for any real energy application.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410833/synthetic-tree-hau...
https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/our-positions-and-campaigns...
During the day, energy is used also to pump water behind a dam. At night, when the solar output is null, the water is released and produces power via normal hydro turbines.
For example in Romania, which produces exces power [1] almost all the time, there is a plan to build a huge reservoir in mountains to use this power to pump water from the major rivers into it, thus building a reserve energy store.[2]
[1] http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart...
From what I understand, far less birds are killed by windmills than by flying into windows and power lines, yet nobody is arguing to ban those.
According to [0], windows are even worse than cats.
(I still prefer solar, though. It just feels like free energy that we're wasting by not making use of it.)
[0] http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mort...
I hear this argument a lot, but it's not usually connected with concern for birds in any other context. No concern for habitat depletion from oil sands extraction, nor from acid rain, nor domestic cats, nor windows (which kill a much larger number of birds), nor global warming itself.
The effect of tidal turbines on marine life seems to be basically .. unknown. Probably dwarfed by the known impacts from fisheries and pollution. The continued existence of fish depends on putting fishermen out of business, which is politically fraught.
> harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top
Evaporation. You can demo this on your desk with a piece of rolled up paper in a glass of water. It takes energy from the sun and air and you can't use it to pump water into a reservoir.
> microscopic solar panels
.. produce microscopic amounts of energy, although you can run a calculator or watch from that.