Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016

bloomberg.com

203 pointsadventured134 comments

I really love the story of technology. Unintended consequences (eg the telephone). Also, how applications from one field affect another (eg precision boring for cannon and artillery was fairly important to the development of pistons that made the steam engine possible).

Of course, many of these consequences aren't foreseen. Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.

Battery tech is another interesting one. Battery improvements were initially spurred by laptops and then cellphones. A somewhat unforeseen consequence beyond smartphones is that battery tech (along with smartphones) are largely responsible for the development of consumer-level drones.

Electric vehicles are another obvious offshoot.

So one of the big problems with most forms of renewable energy are that they aren't constant. Wind isn't constant. Sunshine obviously isn't (even beyond the day/night cycle). Hydro has ben the one big success story here and is responsible for some of the cheapest electricity in the world where it's suitable.

I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing link in renewable energy (IMHO).

The nice thing about solar in particular is that in a lot of places in the world it's a good option because it doesn't require a lot of expensive infrastructure (ie power lines). Communities can put solar panels near them. I foresee this as being a hugely positive change and I'm happy to see it.

About unforseen consequences. I really enjoyed the original movie Bladerunner; watching it recently, it was interesting to see that while there were ubiquitous video phones, there were no cell phones at all in the movie--flying cars yes, cell phones no.

Cell phones and the internet are the two big developments that most early sci-fi missed. They're obvious in retrospect but clearly they were unexpected by futurists in the decades before they became ubiquitous. It makes me very curious what the next unexpected game changer will be!

“Beam me up Scotty.”

I’d say people were dreaming about portable communication devices for quite some time.

The Dick Tracy Watch goes back to the 1930’s. Probably wasn’t cool enough to use watches as phones in science fiction.

A glaring example is Neuromancer, where the protagonist is always running around looking for a landline to connect to cyberspace. You would think that by the 80s it would have been easier to imagine wireless communication, but Gibson is famously non-technical, so I guess it's not that surprising.

Piggybacking, does anyone know where we are with capacitors? Everyone focuses on batteries, but I've always wondered about supercaps. They can't hold a charge for years, but 12-48hrs is possible. Size is not an issue, and I had thought even fancier caps are pretty simple and environmentally friendly. Unlike molten salt and many other storage tech, they have no moving parts.

Obviously the energy density is not incredible, but these are land-based installations we're talking about, not Teslas.

Don't they have particularly catastrophic failure modes?

If you're thinking of electrolytic caps (the common barrel shaped ones), not all caps share that failure mode.

I've wondered myself why supercapacitors haven't been used more for stationary energy storage. If you search the academic literature, it looks like there are many supercapacitor chemistries that can match or surpass the specific energy of lead-acid batteries (~40 Wh/kg), they all manage incredible charge/discharge rates compared to batteries, and almost all of them have incredible cycle life compared to batteries. They can sustain thousands or tens of thousands of charge/discharge cycles with only modest capacity fade.

Here are my guesses why supercapcitors haven't been used for bulk energy storage:

1) The reported specific energy numbers are fudged somehow, so that if you wanted a supercap Powerwall equivalent it'd be much larger/heavier than the reported numbers suggest. Maybe they're excluding e.g. mass of electrolyte?

2) It just takes a long time to industrialize laboratory discoveries. It took 30 years for quantum dots to make their way from laboratory curiosity to consumer display devices. It took 20+ years for the high-efficiency PERC solar cell structure to make its way from the University of New South Wales to the commercial mainstream.

Lithium-ion is an order of magnitude better in Wh/L vs supercaps [0]. There simply isn't room to get 100+ kWh of supercaps into a ~car-sized vehicle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...

That table gives a value of 9 Wh/kg for electrochemical supercapacitors. I've seen a lot of researchers claim values over 30 Wh/kg in research papers over the past few years. That's still not adequate for mobile applications that currently use lithium ion batteries, but what we're wondering is why supercapacitors aren't being used for stationary applications where cycle life is more important than density. It could just be, as I speculated before, that these improved supercapacitor designs take a long time to move from lab to factory.

I believe there might be an issue with capacitors requiring rare-earth materials so therefore can't scale.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272884212...

It sounds like the energy density still doesn't match batteries though there may be breakthroughs that might fix it: http://www.teslarati.com/supercapacitor-breakthrough-evs-cha...

Be careful about lauding hydro. It isn't as green as many think. Depending on the location, the type of land inundated behind the dam, they can 'emit' huge amounts of net carbon as the plant life now under water is no longer sucking it up, and as it decays it emits other nasty stuff. Micro-hydro is better but isn't the pure solution many consider it.

I'd like to know more about "damless hydro". I keep hearing about water turbines used in conjunction with tidal currents or offshore wavepower. Some of the numbers they throw around seem promising, e.g., $0.055/kWh, which is ~1/4 of nuclear or 1/6 of coal.

But I have no idea where those ideas are in their maturity. I agree that dam hydro can have some nasty consequences, even if it does look super attractive at first.

Tidal/wave power must deal with corrosion issues. Moving metal parts + saltwater + electricity = headaches. There is also "micro-hydro" that replaces the dam with a long pipe, no inundation but effectively diverts a portion of a river into a pipe. There are ancient ways to reliably pull energy from tides but they involve very location-specific constructions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_mill

> huge amounts of net carbon as the plant life now under water is no longer sucking it up, and as it decays it emits other nasty stuff.

Is it a huge amount when amortized over the life of the dam?

There is hydropower boom in the Amazon, and Brazil is the world's second largest producer of hydropower behind China. The environmental impacts of dams are mentioned about 2/3 of the way into [1].

[1] http://e360.yale.edu/features/how-a-dam-building-boom-is-tra...

> I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing link in renewable energy (IMHO).

I agree. We are nearing a maturity level in renewable energy, by say 2050, where we will be able to produce vast amounts of extremely cheap electricity with minimal environmental impact – but only in certain locations at certain times. The problem is storing and transmitting that energy.

If I could go back a couple decades and redo my college days, I would be very tempted to focus on battery technology. It does seem to be missing piece to get us the last step in our journey over the last ~200 years of transitioning (worldwide) from an energy-scarce civilization to an energy-abundant civilization.

Having effectively free, effectively infinite energy seems to be on the horizon – not necessarily by 2050 but very possibly by 2100. (I mean for the average person, not industrial/commercial/scientific use.) That will undoubtedly result in monumental, far-reaching changes. But I don't see how we get there without a breakthrough in energy storage.

But who knows, maybe somebody will invent an inexpensive magic cold-fusion energy box that fits in the back of a pickup truck and requires zero maintenance. I'm not holding my breath. :)

> Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.

Star Trek: The Original Series; 1966; Electronic Clipboard / Personal Access Display Device

Batteries are also the key missing piece behind self-flying personal transportation drones. The problem of making a self-flying drone is in many ways easier than making a self-driving car, because there's no legacy infrastructure (i.e. human drivers & pedestrians) that you need to deal with. You could create skylanes that are entirely computer-controlled and pack densities of vehicles that would be impossible with manual control. They also travel 50-100% faster than cars and use air-miles (i.e. straight-line distance, not drive-around-obstacles distance), which means that it'd become feasible to live in remote areas like the California coastline and commute to major cities.

Unfortunately, the aerospace people I've talked to have indicated that the energy density of current batteries really isn't practical for commuting, or for planes in general. You're looking at 15-20 min of flight time, which will barely get you across town.

Noise pollution is a bigger hurdle, battery density is improving but we have not figured how to tune off the noise feedback from the whirring blades

Using nameplate capacity versus actual delivered kWh is a little misleading. For instance, 1GW of nuclear can out-produce 3-4 GW of solar, and it does so at a constant rate, not correlated with all the other solar farms.

I'm hugely bullish on PV long-term, but it's important for us to keep this sort of thing in mind. And the discussion of the /peak/ output of solar or wind as a percentage of total electrical output is also not terribly helpful.

By the time solar accounts for 10-15% of total energy production on the grid, there will regularly be times when solar is providing almost all the grid's power. But overall, it's still just 10-15%.

In order for solar to displace most of the energy produced on the grid, it's necessary for solar to actually produce 2-3x the actual end-use electricity demand at times, with the output stored in batteries or sometimes just wasted.

And according to my calculations, in order for solar to provide for 100% of the power produced even during winter (without requiring weeks of storage), you're going to need a nameplate capacity approximately 20-30 times the average grid consumption (on an energy basis, oversizing the array by a factor of 3 to 5), and most of the energy will need to be thrown away. This is obviously going to be more expensive per kWh, but this is why a mix of power sources is essential for economic power production, and at high latitudes (like the UK and Germany), this is even more important.

(Note: it is possible to improve that oversizing factor if you have extensive HVDC power lines and hydrogen production, but those things are expensive and PV is cheap, so often it might still make sense to just over-size the array.)

> and most of the energy will need to be thrown away.

I won't speak to the veracity of your numbers. I have no idea your methodology or even if you're qualified to do an analysis here or the quality of your data, so...

But I will point out that the current plan to address this is to repurpose and recycle existing lithium ion battery packs at sclae, while continuing to develop very large electrical energy storage methods.

A real-life example of this is Tesla's Australian contract (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-power-tesla/tes...) which uh... literally started on twitter as a dare between rich people (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249?lang=...).

Very large power storage stations like this actually offer a lot of utility in a variety of scenarios. Not only do they make distributed grids much more reliable offer a facility to ground out excess energy on the grid (helping reduce the impact of solar phenomenon over large-scale transport networks), but they also have a lot of value in disaster recovery scenarios.

> "...but they also have a lot of value in disaster recovery scenarios."

How so?

I'd imagine that you'd need a pretty large capacity battery storage system in order for it to reliably act as a blackstart generation source.

EDIT: I did some quick research, found this recent article about IID's blackstart battery testing - https://www.energy-storage.news/news/california-batterys-bla...

Thank you for linking this, I neglected to do so in my original post.

Sure, my calculations assumed about 48 hours of storage. But there's a pretty big difference between 48 hours and seasonal storage where you need weeks (400 hours).

What Tesla is currently doing is installing about 4 hours of battery for the typical site, so about two orders of magnitude away from being able to scavenge all that wasted power on a fully PV grid, but fairly optimal to ensure full use of stored power.

It is key to understand the seasonal variation of sunlight. This is a much worse problem at high latitudes. But at lower latitudes (say, anything less than 45-50 degrees, i.e. >80% of the world's population), PV is now cheap enough it's cheaper to just over-size the PV array to provide power even when it's cloudy and/or winter than to provide weeks or months of storage.

EDIT: Maybe "wasted" is the wrong word. Is your car engine "wasted" just because it's not red-lining 24/7? Averaged over a year, your engine only has a "capacity factor" of about 0.2%, but the energy is there when you need it, and it's still affordable. Likewise with solar, it's okay if not all the electricity is utilized, as long as it produces enough on cloudier days to not require a ton of storage (up to ~50 hours of storage is fine).

Forgive me, but it seems to me like you didn't read the materials that I passed you in instead based your commentary on Tesla's powerwall product?

Ive never understood why they use nameplate, it should be possible to predict t fairly accurately the yearly output based on latitude or whatever.

Though note that something similar works against solar PV sometimes as well e.g. people will say something like "we use X amount of energy a year, to replace this we need such and such an area of PV.

Often these calculations don't take into account the percentage of coal, gas or oil energy which is thrown away as heat in order to get generate electricity, or move vehicles. (Even when generating heat, electric heat pumps can often do better than 100% by moving it around instead).

That can make PV 3 or 5 times better than it seems. EROEI calculations in particular are bad for this.

It's a direct vs indirect measure, and can be directly compared between sites (regardless of capacity factor). It also more directly represents costs.

The general problem is common in metrics and assessments.

It takes a lot more than just the latitude, but we can make a very accurate prediction. I once worked on internal modeling software for doing precisely that, and IIRC our target was being within ~1% over a 10-year period (there's a bit of year-to-year variation depending on weather). Those numbers generally aren't released publicly though (because everyone wants to talk about the much bigger nameplate number), and at least as of five years ago the freely available tools for doing similar calculations were much less accurate.

I agree, there are some mitigating factors though.

One nice thing about solar in warmer climates is that its peak output is in line with peak air conditioning demands. On top of that if the solar is installed on the building roof it can lower the thermal load on the building. A double win.

Also in a ideal world we would have a world wide grid where solar energy is being routed around to where its needed with much less need for storing for night. Its always sunny somewhere right? There are of course line losses, not sure how that would stack up to battery round trip losses.

Doesn't this assume maintaining existing usage patterns? There could be enough flexibility in workloads that with an economic incentive they will be run at peak production times with only the necessities being turned on at other times.

China is becoming an absolute economic monster. I mean that with no negative connotations. And we're not talking trailing-edge tech here, but leading-edge.

FTA:

“The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar grew by 50 percent, with almost half new plants built in China.”

“In 2016, China was by far the largest electric car market, accounting for more than 40% of the electric cars sold in the world and more than double the amount sold in the United States”

And:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

“Mainland China has 37 nuclear power reactors in operation, about 20 under construction, and more about to start construction. The reactors under construction include some of the world's most advanced, to give a 70% increase of nuclear capacity to 58 GWe by 2020-21. Plans are for up to 150 GWe by 2030, and much more by 2050.”

Economies by GDP PPP:

http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gd...

   China:   23,194.411
   USA:     19,417.144
   India:   9,489.302
   Japan:   5,420.228
   Germany: 4,134.668
   Rest:    meh

(in billions of $ of course)

I'm sure there are lots more examples.

To your point RE: the electric car market: It is noteworthy that the GM announcement this past week - that they will be focusing on an "All electric" future - seems to have been a strategic decision made largely because China is pushing the entire auto-market in that direction.

Indeed, they all seem to have made it a priority to meet China's aggressive push for EVs:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/china-to-...

Regulated capitalism does work. Who knew?!

Funny..

The market only exists because of the rule of law, we just argue about the detail.

GM sells more cars in China than the US.

https://www.wired.com/story/general-motors-electric-cars-pla...

GDP PPP is a near worthless reference for countries like China and India. India has a billion people living in extreme poverty, with the word extreme not doing the context justice. China still has about half a billion people living in that type of poverty as well. Both of those are semi-masked by the fantasy PPP figures.

PPP is a way of pretending that just because you can afford a Starbucks cup of coffee in Beijing, you're economically equivalent to someone earning $60,000 per year in Frankfurt. Back in reality, there are vast objective economic differences of reality that go with comparing China vs highly developed nations on PPP. Can you afford to travel to Paris or Toronto? Can you afford a BMW or Mercedes (cheap Chinese cars are death boxes on wheels)? Can your savings or income get you out of cities with extreme pollution so you can live better? Do you have access to the kind of healthcare available in Finland or Denmark? What kind of social safety net does your nation provide?

Once you get much beyond comparing hamburger prices, the value of the PPP premise collapses when comparing highly developed nations vs eg China.

Every system is flawed. Even within a single nation, a salary of £26,000 is great if you live in Aberystwyth, a struggle if you live in London.

Rubbish. Where are the numbers to prove what you're saying?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/8-facts-about-chinas-...

In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And shrinking each year.

“At the outset of the reforms in 1978, China was poor. It had a GDP per capita level similar to Zambia – lower than half of the Asian average and lower than two thirds of the African average. China experienced an average GDP growth of close to 10% per year until 2014, raising per capita GDP almost 49-fold, from 155 current US Dollars (1978) to 7,590 US Dollars in 2014, lifting 800 million people out of poverty – an unparalleled achievement. In urban centres in China, poverty has been virtually eliminated.”

---

At market rates China's economy will be the biggest in the world sometime in the mid-20s. I have never seen anywhere that PPP† is a worthless metric. Point me to a decent source that corroborates your opinion.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

> In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And shrinking each year.

Saying that extreme poverty in India is 20%, is grotesquely absurd. As recently as 2014, half of India's population (58%, or ~750 million people) was living on about $3 per day. Pretending that $1.25 is extreme poverty, but $3 per day isn't, is the obvious absurd part. That just demonstrates again how worthless PPP is. $3 per day is objective extreme poverty no matter how one attempts to hide from that fact.

I stated my reasons for why I believe PPP is worthless, numerous times over. Let's see you refute what I said. There are blatant objective economic lines involved in the standard of living gap between China and highly developed nations - which PPP as a fantasy attempts to ignore - and I listed several of them.

Going from $1.25/person/day to $3/person/day might do nothing for you in Manhattan, but in Nairobi it makes the difference between a shack in a shanty town in the first instance, and indoor plumbing, locked doors, and an electricity supply in the second.

Source: I’ve visited a home in Nairobi whose rent was in the order of $1,000 per year including bills, and housing 4 people.

Next line in the 4th paragraph of the Wikipedia article you quoted, “According to the Modified Mixed Reference Period (MMRP) concept proposed by World Bank in 2015, India's poverty rate for period 2011-12 stood at 12.4% of the total population, or about 172 million people; taking the revised poverty line as $1.90.” (And that's already two years out of date and India's economy is growing at ~7% annually.)

I'm not arguing with you any more because you use phrases and terms like "grotesquely absurd", "near worthless", and "fantasy" which are all both hyperbolic and uncharitable. I'm not arguing that there isn't poverty in India and China, I'm arguing that though there is poverty, and some of it extreme, both countries are raising millions out of poverty annually. Only this month India announced the world's largest electrification scheme† to electrify the remaining population. And GDP PPP is a way to measure that change, economists agree on this to the best of my knowledge. I'm not taking your word for it, show me a source that disagrees.

† http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41397022

For many location-dependent services, which are a major part of modern economies, PPP GDP is a more appropriate measure than nominal GDP. Thai food in a decent restaurant in Thailand costs less than a comparable meal, Thai or another cuisine, in the States. Basic healthcare in many developing countries costs a fraction of the same services in the US with similar quality.

GDP is a near worthless reference for comparing things as well [1]. The PPP doesn't really matter that much in correcting for its deficiencies.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/gdp/

You're bringing in quality of life issues, which it's true are very different between the developing and developed countries today, and not accounted for in PPP.

But that being said, it's a huge exaggeration to say 1 billion are living in extreme poverty in India, much as it would be inaccurate to say that the 30% of the Indian population categorized as the middle class has the same quality of life standards as their analogues in the developed world.

During the time of the greatest industrial development in the US, working class people had to cope with very extreme environmental hazards that diminished their quality of life, i.e. in Gary, Indiana:

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/638.html https://www.amazon.com/Environmental-Inequalities-Industrial...

I remember reading an article several years ago about China's economic leadership. At that time it said that it's not quite clear whether or not China leads the U.S., but even if it led it, it probably wouldn't make a big deal out of it, because it doesn't want to have that responsibility of being the most powerful nation on Earth (at least economically).

I think China is starting to become ready to take that leadership role, especially when the U.S. government seems to run around like a headless chicken, arguing about the role of science, or whether or not coal has a future, or that climate change is real, having schizophrenic and increasingly more bully-like foreign policies, and so on.

I'm not particularly looking forward to China becoming the world's leader, because just like the US had a positive influence on other democracies in the past decades, I expect China to have a mainly negative influence on other democracies in terms of human rights and other stuff like that. I'm just saying that this is going to happen, while the U.S. decays.

It also helps that China has 4x the population of U.S., so it's almost as if it's only a matter of time before China has a stronger economy. Well, unless AI does steal everyone's jobs, and then I suppose China would have a bigger problem on its hands than anyone else...

China isn't close to having a larger economy than the US. The US is ~60% larger and is growing its economy as fast as China in dollar terms.

2014 to 2015, the US added roughly $650b to its economy, China added $580b. 2015 to 2016, the US added $530b, China added $140 billion (due to the dollar's return to being strong).

And if we're talking coal, China is the king of coal. They have no plans what-so-ever to do away with it any time soon. They're not reducing their use of coal, in fact they're expanding their coal use, while simultaneously adding a lot of renewable energy. Meanwhile the US has reduced its coal use by about 1/3 in a decade. This chart says it all:

https://i.imgur.com/hcPeoAB.png

> having schizophrenic and increasingly more bully-like foreign policies

Uh, you mean like using military aggression to annex a massive area of six other nation's territories in the South China Sea? Or did you mean the constant military threat to use force to invade and annex the independent nation of Taiwan?

When was the last time the US annexed territory like that or the last time official US policy was to annex another nation when a convenient opportunity presents? Imagine, tomorrow the US decides to annex all of Mexico's gulf water territory, and then some more territory in the Caribbean Sea from six or seven other nations. The next day, the US declares that Toronto and Vancouver belong to the US, and that it has the right to invade at any time to force that outcome. That would be almost equivalent to what China is doing right now.

Economic growth is usually measured in percentage terms. There are good reasons for that. If they can keep the growth rate, the Chinese economy will be larger than the US in about 10 or 15 years.

China's is still a developing economy and they have a lot of ways to increase productivity compared to the US. They are also at a leading edge in many technologies of the future so they do not need to spend as much as other developing countries to purchase them from abroad.

China's growth rate may slow down but it will continue to be faster than the US rate for many years.

US Dollar is the world's reserve currency. If US dollar becomes less strong in the future, the size of US economy may not be as large in relative term anymore. The petrodollar system may not be as powerful when renewables are more important. Perhaps China also considers this when they push so hard for renewables.

> They have no plans what-so-ever to do away with it any time soon. They're not reducing their use of coal, in fact they're expanding their coal use,

That's not in fact true any more. China's coal consumption peaked in 2013, and has been falling for 3-4 years.

That's why your parent's graph went only to 2012. There's no point in arguing with adventured, they're obviously only interested in using skewed stats to bolster their world view.

The very first hit on Google for "Chinese" "Coal" "Consumption" is a January 2017 article from the World Resources Institute whose title reads, “China’s Decline in Coal Consumption Drives Global Slowdown in Emissions”

http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal...

Who knows what the future may hold?

Very hard to predict geopolitical outcomes.

Humans need more humility in the face of future uncertainties. Let us make our decisions based on what players do, not what we think they might do. Considering that China does not as far as we know engage in unilateral drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, and extra-legal imprisonment one could argue that (internal political freedoms aside) China may be a better global steward than the current US/Nato crew.

As you say, Given that China has 4x the pop., eventually it should have 4x the economic might, all other things being equal (which of course they are not!).

Macro economics aside - the demand for renewables and EV in China is outsized due to how polluted it's become:

https://youtu.be/2nFZaSbkf0U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwOBRH56Ic0

Doesn't that make it more acute rather than outsized?

Is anyone rational committed to long-term/indefinite use of fossil fuels?

If not, isn't this simply a matter of switching over?

Please, when making comparison, don't use PPP - it's misleading for most people.

Please explain.

PPP is inherently tied to the basket of goods, but the baskets aren't standard. Even if they had the same products in it (they don't), products themselves can vary a lot. Some yogurt can be made from real milk made in a clean factory or can be a fake based on palm oil mixed in a dirty garage with rats and no health controls.

It also includes the cost of housing, so you end up comparing building-controlled and highly regulated areas like Bay Area with who knows what in India.

that might be the case; but many economists worry about China over-investing in infrastructure at the moment. ..

The USA also over invested in infrastructure at various points. During the transcontinental railroad boom companies built way more tracks than were actually needed at the time. Some companies when bankrupt, but eventually demand caught up with supply and those tracks delivered major benefits for long-term economic growth. The same thing happened with backbone fiber optic lines during the first Internet boom.

China has 100 cities with a population greater than 1 million. And they are planning to build another 100 cities with 1 million+ people in the next 10 year.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/20/china-100-cit...

To put that into perspective, europe has 33.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by_pop...

We have 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

There has been a correlation between cities and civilization. The rise of cities and economic growth/production. And the rise of cities and power.

It happened with ancient civilizations. It happened with europe. It happened with the US. The question is whether this will hold for china and what it will mean for the world.

They are building a university every week.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35776555

This is similar to what we did in the US in the 1800s as our economy grew by leaps and bounds. Most of our top universities from stanford to MIT were founded in the 1800s.

Will the european and american model of the past 500 years hold for china? How will they maneuver through the current international order to get the resources they need for their cities and to gain access to markets?

If the model holds, then we are looking at an explosion of science, culture, innovation and growth. But the worrisome part is that europe and american also expanded, stole land, resources and conquered territories.

Again, more proof if one needed it. And fascinating links that you provide that shows the societal changes are massive in terms of urbanisation and education.

I think the difference this time is that there is nowhere to expand to that is way "behind". The world has already globalised to a great degree.

You raise interesting questions and I'm glad you put your thoughts as questions rather than the usual "this will happen" or "that will happen" when the truth is it'll only be obvious through hindsight or unless we get far better societal predictive tools.

> China has 100 cities with a population greater than 1 million.

Correction: China has 102 (specifically) urban areas over 1 million people. The same report lists 42 for the US (I didn't bother to count Europe, but I think it's larger).

"City" is an arbitrary and unreliable unit of measure. For example, there are over 6 million people in South Florida, but no city over 500,000 people and only two over 200,000.

That's great, but "Use of New thing is growing faster than use of already-widely-used Old things" is hardly surprising.

The story of solar’s growth seems like a big deal now, but it’s nothing compared to a few years from now when costs fall so low that it becomes cheaper to replace a coal or nuclear plant than to continue operating them.

I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this:

“The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’

“Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. …

“And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know it’s going to keep losing money.

“In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other generators in the market.’

“Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'”

That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.

Small caveat: the Trump administration is looking into using a national security law from decades ago to prop up coal plants (the law provides subsidies to generators who can keep 90 days of fuel on hand). If this policy were to go into effect, it would raise rates consumers pay, very likely speeding the adoption of rooftop solar in those markets.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry...

That's kind of ironic, considering that solar plants can keep an effectively unlimited number of "days of fuel" on hand.

They can't though -- the next day could always be cloudy and there's a very strong chance that one day in 90 will be.

So solar panels can't stock a reliable X day supply, even if over any (moderate) period of time, they have a very guaranteed supply.

They can with batteries, but that is a slightly different situation.

In answer to the question below, this isn't practical with modern battery technology.

Is there a battery technology that can store 90 days worth of full-plant production (which doesn't require a second generator consuming a fuel later)?

All the ways I know of on that scale actually require a second plant/turbine -- in which case, you didn't store 90 days of solar production capacity, you actually stored 90 days of the second plant's fuel, which you produced intermitently with solar capacity. (Which can still be a very good and environmentally friendly thing to do! But isn't what we're talking about as a technical point.)

Ways of the second variety:

- Hydro pumping

- Hydrocarbon synthesis

- Hydrogen separation

- Compressing gasses

And there's probably more that I'm forgetting.

This doesn’t worry me. In fact I like the idea of coal power plants being a backup and ready to go. The more solar we have the less backup we’ll need, but it’s always nice to have a backup.

Coal generators don't work this way. It can take 12-36 hours to ramp from a cold start. Natural gas (combined cycle turbines) can throttle up in minutes, which is what pushed coal out of the generation mix (natural gas is a perfect compliment to renewables until battery storage is cost competitive, you have to be able to fill in generation intermittency gaps with little response latency).

Here's a great story [1] from the Tampa Bay Times about what happened when TECO (the local utility) didn't want to power down a coal fired boiler to take the generator out of service to clear slag from the bottom of the boiler (TL;DR several people died a horrible death from the equivalent of flowing magma).

Coal is almost dead, just a bit more of a way to go.

[1] http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/tampa-e...

Coal is dead in Britain, there will be zero generation in the next few years. It was the deregulated energy industry that killed it, starting in the 80's, out-competed on price and flexibility by gas.

I don’t want to sound like I’m a fan of coal, but coal died in the UK before it became uneconomical: the coal miners went on strike for long enough that the government made it a strategic goal to never let striking workers be politically relevant again.

A much better plan is to use an excess of solar energy to power processes that produce ethanol-based fuels and then keep a reserve of those (which by the by, is carbon sequestration at best and neutral at worst).

Coal power plants are awkward and inefficient and require a lot of work just to move the fuel around. There's a reason the world worked hard to develop better fuel technologies as quickly as possible.

The oversupply in the generation market is why I've lately been confused why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity. With pretty much every other electric appliance having only gotten more efficient I don't see any other way to drive significant increases in demand.

"Utilities Should Charge Into Electric Vehicles"

"The total potential market for electricity fueling American vehicles is staggering (warning: large back-of-envelope ahead).Let's just take light-duty vehicles (not heavy trucks or buses), of which there were about 190 million on the road in 2015, according to government figures. For the sake of simplicity, replace them all with a full battery-electric vehicle that gets 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, loses 10 percent of the power it takes as it charges and discharges, and travels 13,000 miles a year.Presto! You've basically created an entirely new center of demand for power rivaling the entire industrial sector of the U.S.:"

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electri...

Well you need to subtract what is currently burned off in refineries in those calculations it is quite significant (roughly same amount of energy for refining oil and electric cars per mile driven but only 1/5 or so in electricity and rest in burning oil products).

Gasoline cars use lots of electricity...

I don't think electric vehicles lack promotion.

When was the last time you saw or heard an ad for a electric car? If you went into a car dealership, would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car to you if you didn't ask?

> would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car

Not in the US perhaps but here in Norway I think I might. It has a lot to do with the attitude of the authorities and how much they are willing to skew the market in particular directions. In the past they skewed it for diesels now for electric. The US has historically tended to skew the market to favour on-shore producers, regardless of what they made, at the expense of imported vehicles. Now there are subsidies for electric cars so I can easily imagine that there will soon be a time when a salesperson recommends an electric car even in the US.

Every single day for months.

I ended up buying one. Tesla doesn't advertise much, but Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, BMW etc sure do.

>why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity

Well, on the coal side, they can hardly maintain that coal isn't bad for the environment whilst simultaneously claiming that electric cars are better.

There are advantages that electric cars have that have nothing to do with their evironmental benefits. They have massive torque, smooth acceleration, are silent at low speeds, you never have to go to a gas station, fewer moving parts so less to go wrong, etc. And even on the most coal-intensive grids in the US electric vehicles produce less greenhouse gas emissions than the average ICE vehicle and there's still a public health benefit to displacing non-GHG emissions away from cities where people live.

Although, coal produces its pollution many miles away from population centres, whereas internal combustion cars produce it feet away from people breathing it in on city pavements.

Nuclear in particular should be promoting it, it matches perfectly with the overnight charging demand. Perhaps in that case it's just that nuclear isn't that significant an industry, they have enough effort trying to promote themselves.

Certainly it's strange that utilities in general aren't all guns blazing for electric cars, I suspect we'll see that start to happen soon.

Various utilities give $10K rebates on EV purchases. I've never run the numbers to see how that works out for them economically. Though they often get government support to roll out insulation and other efficiency improvements so maybe it falls under that.

The ones that pay to control the timing of EV charging make more immediate sense to me.

There isn't much additional profit in the selling of additional electrons to consumers for a number of reasons, not limited to the fact that electric utilities are regulated monopolies, and widespread decoupling[1] of utility rates which incentivizes utilities to get customers to save electricity.

The profit to be made is in the building of the generation capacity itself. The problem with this is that coal plants and traditional nuclear plants are very expensive to build compared to natural gas plants and renewables like wind and solar.

After being built, they are very expensive to fuel and maintain compared to renewables.

So utilities are more likely to choose natural gas or renewables for new generation capacity. It's not that the coal industry hasn't tried to convince people that they are the fuel of the future (i.e. the "Clean Coal" marketing effort), but the costs just don't line up in coal's favor, and that's not even considering the cost of the currently unaccounted externalities of coal burning.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_(utility_regulation...

That's why I said "coal and nuclear industries" rather than electric utilities. Even if the generators aren't making money from increased output someone still needs to mine the minerals that power those plants. While I agree that those technologies are not viable in the long term, in the short term their interests (staying in business a few more years) align with the long term interests of the environmentalists (who want to decouple transportation from fossil fuels which is impossible with ICEs).

Electric vehicles = widely-available high-capacity batteries = solar eats their lunch, very very quickly

Note that there is a difference between retirement and destroyed. I believe my company still keeps an old coal boiler from the 1880s connected to a generator from the 1920s in operating condition. Because this generator exists and can be started in an emergency (with 12 hours warning for warm up time) we get a substantial discount on our power. I understand that about every 5 years the power company asks us to turn it on at which point we supply power for most of the town.

If you look you will see many businesses have their own generator running on the hottest day of the year - they get a discount. Because diesel generators can start on a minutes notice they get are higher on the priority list as to when they get asked to run on their own generator rather than grid power.

The above isn't to say that the power company is retiring these old power plants in the same way. I would guess in some cases the maintenance required to make them safe (or emissions legal) to use might be too high and they are destroyed.

It would be prudent to have backups,but it's hard to imagine why many nuclear plants would be kept in operating condition.

The levelized cost of solar is already less that the fuel and maintenance cost of coal, for many locations. However that’s the levelized cost, which means that it has to be used when the sun is out in order for solar to be competitive.

It’s why the DOE is ignoring the findings of their own baseload reliability study to try to impose coal and nuclear subsidies:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule...

The weird and arbitrary “90 days of fuel onsite” requirement says nothing about reliability, but it is a way to define what coal+nuclear can do (though I wonder if coal plants keep 90 days onsite these days...)

While coal is more expensive, natural gas plants can still be cheaper for many locations. And older nuclear plants presumably have extremely low ongoing costs (as they don't pay for storage of waste in most countries).

Yes, and since most natural gas plants are fed by pipeline, the subsidies seem designed specifically to exclude natural gas.

This is despite coal stacks freezing during the last polar vortex, causing much of the reduction in resiliency.

(Side note: though many old nuclear plants are still cost competitive, utilities seem to favor fossil fuels to the extent that many if not most of them are at risk of being decommissioned. And in competitive energy markets, many of these old plants can't bid on price any more either, leading to many proposed nuclear-specific subsidies in particular markets.)

Nuclear and coal often can be shut by warm weather too, if their water supply is affected.

I'm not sure anyone is upset about the idea of having to build new mass storage stations for major grids and sell storage for new homes.

Distributing the grid COULD be the next big infrastructural push for the western world, if folks could just agree to stop propping up the fossil fuel world's influence.

This is looking like the final blow for Western economical dominance unless serious catch up begins. Investing in coal, what a joke!

It won't be easy to compete with a manufacturing powerhouse that practically runs on free energy to provide the world with goods and services. Good luck competing with that!

I'm always glad to hear news about the advancement of solar power, but I don't hear as much about advancement in batteries or storage. The manufacturing of batteries is not a clean and renewable resource, or have I missed some new methods or ways of extracting rare minerals.

This is what I wonder, especially with Elon building the so called 'giga factory'. How sustainable really is it?

https://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycl...

Lithium isn't terribly rare, and li-ion batteries can be recycled and all of its contents can be reused in the production of new batteries.

Lead acid car batteries are already collected for recycling at very high rates in most areas, so there's no reason why li-ion car batteries wouldn't be collected and recycled as well.

They really ought to put a surcharge on Lithium batteries and convenient places to recycle them at some point. Do for Lithium what we did for aluminum. (it's also time to probably upgrade the return value for cans as well)

Its not the Lithium that's problematic. Its the Cobalt.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...

Newer forms of Lithium Ion batteries may avoid the Cobalt, but Cobalt-based Lithium Ion is still the most popular IIRC. Cobalt Mining is dangerous, toxic, and centralized in politically unstable regions (Child Labor, poor conditions, etc. etc.)

--------

Lithium itself is located in many locations around the world. IIRC, there's a bit Lithium Mine in Nevada.

http://media.greenmonk.net/greenmonk/files/2015/11/Li-IonDen...

Technology hasn't kept up with that line. Here are 18650 cells on the market, sorted by Wh/kg:

http://batteries.parametrek.com/index.html?size=18650&wh_kg=...

The best are still only 276 Wh/kg, no where near the 350 Wh/kg the graph would predict.

The use of the word "rare" seems to be a reliable indicator that people have been exposed to anti-renewable propaganda.

Rare-earth elements are not rare.

"Despite their name, rare-earth elements are – with the exception of the radioactive promethium – relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, or as abundant as copper."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

And, further, many batteries and renewable power sources don't even use any Rare-earths.

As to your question, there's lots going on in storage, it wouldn't suprise me if 1/5th of the stories on a renewable tech blog were about progress and breakthroughts in various types of storage.

This is definitely not my field of expertise, I want to hear that energy is becoming cleaner, and renewable. I guess I believe that this is the right direction, and still better than just continuing on the road we've been on. But when I see articles like this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...

I can't help but wonder if we still have a ways to go. Or is this anti-renewable propaganda?

It is if you act like it only applies to renewables. Coal gets mined too, killing people from the very start to the very end of its lifecycle.

I note the actual headline has an iPhone icon and the text "This is where mobile technology begins".

A similar common bait-and-switch is to talk about how EVs are bad if you generate your electricity from coal. The mental gymnastics necessary to take that data and decide "Maybe we shouldn't use EVs" rather than "Maybe we shouldn't use coal" is a wonder to behold.

So, as long as you're saying, let's do the cleanest of all the options, that's cool. Because the cleanest answer is solar, wind, EVs and storage (including lithium ion) amongst other techs and any honest approach to doing the most efficient, least destructive thing is only going to help speed them on their way.

If you're bringing it up for the same reason people bring up birds being killed by wind power, or coal powered EVs generating pollution, or how global warming isn't even a real thing etc. then yeah, it's fairly well-funded propaganda you're spreading around.

The difference is that copper tends to be concentrated into minable deposits. REE tend to be spread out. Also comparing Ce with Cu is not totally fair the HREE are also important industrially and they are much rarer than the LREE - and tend to be less well concentrated into minable deposits.

A lot of the rare-earths are produced as a by-product of other mining activities. Also, as soon as supply is seriously in constraint, recycling technology for EOL products would be developed, and as the price of sourcing from mines increased, recycling rates would tend towards 100%. Ultimately, the mining product is not being destroyed in the production of something like a battery, so it is fundamentally different, and fundamentally more sustainable than burning a fossil fuel.

There was a crisis around 2010 and this did not happen.

Agree that recycling is probably going to be important (as it is already with other metals).

Battery prices are falling each year too https://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/15/ev-battery-prices-looki...

Maybe you don't hear as much but progress is ongoing. I thought the recent stuff on rechargeable polymer alkaline batteries sounded promising https://www.wired.com/story/bill-joy-finds-the-jesus-battery... Potentially <1/2 the price of Li Ion and without a fire / explosion risk that could make them good for bulk gird storage. Already batteries are starting to compete with gas peaker plants https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ge-digital-gas-...

Does the Twh figures take into account the capacity factor where for nuclear power it is 90% and photovoltaic solar from 10% to 20% ?

Yes, that's the meaning of reporting annualized TWh. It takes capacity factors into account.

The article says China was by far the biggest purchaser of new PV.

Any global change skeptics out there who want to defend Trump's claim that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy?

Isn't this a bit disingenuous. A bum with a penny finding a dollar would see a faster growth in wealth than bill gates earning $1 billion in capital gains.

Solar is coming off such a low base that any growth will outpace any other fuel.

What is that solar in percentage of total power production?

In the UK, solar was able to provide 23.7% of power demands. That's more than Nuclear provided.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/26/solar-po...

Now, the caveat is that was at "solar peak" one afternoon in May.

As I type this, on a grey afternoon, solar is providing 6% of the UK's electricity. See http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

The early peak records are also often on holidays or weekends, as total demand is lower and coal/gas gets shut down first as it has a higher marginal cost.

Still good to see progress, but you're going to see records broken regularly for years to come as the instant, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly records get broken again and again.

My infant child grew faster than any other person in my house 2016.

1) congratulations on the baby 2) that child will outlive us all.

Well yes, but there is a backstory here of IEA refusing to believe in solar, severely underestimating its growth for every projection over the course of the past decade (assuming linear rather than exponential).

This has had real implications for investments in oil/gas/coal.

"Authorities finally realize infant will grow to adult."

This reminds me of the story where the Secretaries of Education of the German states recently found out that their projection for the number of first-graders in 5 years was off by about 400,000 (in a country of 80 million people).

Because, y'know, it's not like you could get any reliable data on how many people in your country will be six years old, five years from now...

Immigration, Emigration, Infant Mortality, Private Education, etc., are just a few factors that could influence that number.

400,000 is a 40% error on a population of 80 million with a life expectancy of 80 years. Unless 45% of recent asylum seekers were 6 years old, or unless 40% of 6 year olds emigrated (I don’t know which way the error went), that is too large a surprise to be so easily forgiven.

I never said a single factor fell into the 400k figure.

I'm also highly skeptical of the figure itself, as the total number of enrolled 6-year-olds is only 675k (97% of population) in 2012 (the last year the number was available), and for the years prior, it was pretty stable (+/- 50k). [1]

Being off by an order less than that makes some sense, but being off by 60% in a pretty stable country seems completely improbable.

[1]: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=RPOP#

That's amusing, but there is a confounding factor: http://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/germany/statis...

How many people born in 2016 will come in, and how many will leave? (Hopefully child mortality is low enough and will stay low enough so as to not be relevant.)

Haha, I see reports now on someone in solar industry saying that IEA is still very sceptic about solar and downplays it as much as they can in their forecasts, even as they announce that the age of solar is here in words (sorry only links I have now in Norwegian.. https://www.dn.no/nyheter/2017/10/04/0900/Energi/slakter-iea...)

It's not just a small number increasing quickly, it already represents the majority of all new plants coming online: "165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply". Especially in China the solar growth is massive, at the expense of coal.

That's no surprise. Your infant is likely being fed and cared for. Probably doesn't have to compete with NIMBYs. And it's probably not competing with over-subsidized megacorps for scraps.

well why not extend the analogy further? it's worth noting that in this arrangement, the natural is order is the parent eventually dies after a long and possibly painful period of decline, while the child rapidly develops into an adult within 18 years, with the expectation of outperforming the parent by the time it reaches middle-age (35 or so). at which point the cycle repeats and continues.

this is HN, you have to think through your snark or it will snark you back.

> This is HN, you have to think through your snark or it will snark you back.

Mind if I borrow this? "to snark" would be a nice addition to the English vocabulary, in my opinion :)

sure, but i'm going to have to charge you a royalty of $5 per use.

I think you've been beaten to it by prior art, already in the public domain:

Origin

Mid 19th century: originally in the dialect senses ‘snore, snort’, ‘find fault’.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/snark

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