China Installs Nearly 10 Gigawatts of Solar in First Quarter

Solar and oil (and natural gas) supply different markets and compete mostly at the margins.

I wouldn't make predictions like that until there were similar investments into storage or international/continental transmission. It could be done, but we're not doing it.

The odds of having enough energy storage in place in 10 years to eliminate fossil fuel energy production approach zero. Solar and wind are great production methods, and are proving more and more econoimcal every month, but neither con produce energy on demand in all conditions.

Without a huge national grid to compensate for weather patterns (problematic due to transmission losses), or a massive increase in storage capacity and technology, we just can't eliminate fossil fuel energy.

If we care about eliminating fossil fuel usage, we need the gradient in the renewable uptake to high enough to cause a catastrophic shock to the fossil fuel technology and delivery chain. If it is too low, it renewables will drive down the price of oil, causing a jevons paradox follow on effect, where the price of oil falls, but because the infra structure is already in place, it is easy to use (infra can be useable but decay over time). Worst possible outcome is that the oil supply redirects to the developing world and millions of lawn mower style engines are put into high utilization.

Fossil fuels need a total shock to the system to end their use, otherwise we will indeed burn everything that is in the ground.

>...I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

The odds of that actually happening are zero.

For example, the National National Renewable Energy Laboratory, tried to model what it would take for California to get 1/2 its power through solar.

>...Those can only go so far, though. To meet the 50 percent photovoltaic threshold economically will require energy storage. The state already has 3,100 megawatts of pumped storage, with 1,325 megawatts of additional storage set to be deployed by 2020, per the state mandate. Under the most optimistic flexible grid scenario and with PV prices falling rapidly to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, California will need another 15 gigawatts of storage by 2030.

>That’s more than 11 times the amount mandated currently in California, and 66 times the total megawatts deployed in the U.S. last year. And any delays in the price declines of solar, or the rollout of EVs, or the flexibility of conventional power plants, will raise the bar on the amount of storage required.

>That sounds daunting, admitted NREL Principal Energy Analyst Paul Denholm, who co-authored the research with Robert Margolis.

>“Storage costs are going to have to come down,” Denholm said. “I don't want to sugar-coat it: we're not there yet.”

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-much-energy...

As Bill Gates said in an interview about this kind of advocacy: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

China is investing a lot of money in solar, but they don't pretend that will solve all the problems of producing power. China plans to have 1400 GW of nuclear power by 2100, so they also realize that the situation will require a multi-faceted approach.

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

> I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

What? Fossil fuel usage has increased not just in china but around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bp_world_energy_consumpti...

It's far more likely that solar will disappear than fossil fuel usage especially with china wanting to urbanize another 500 million people and India, ASEAN and Africa looking to industrialize.

> the rate of solar being installed isn't slowing down

It has slowed down tremendously. Seems like you haven't been paying attention, but the solar industry has collapsed around the world. Elon Musk even had to bail out Solar City.

What's with the ideologues. It's either the peak oil fanatics or the renewable evangelicals.

The only way we aren't using fossil fuels in 10 years is if civilization collapses.

It really depends on the publication's target audiance. For the less technical reader an estimated power output converted to "households" is a good unit of measurement. I think maximum capacity in Gigawatts works well for CleanTechnica.

Air quality is merely one measure of how this stuff hurts a population. There is massive poverty in the USA. And these huge oil companies who start fracking? They literally destroy people's homes and don't care.

http://insideenergy.org/2016/03/30/oklahoma-earthquakes-who-...

> but this doesn’t have much to do with the USA unless you

The parent comment was all about the USA. I am responding to a comment directly about the USA and its ability/desire to implement renewable energy.

> You are comparing third world pro or s to first world ones

I am not. Much of the US is living in third world conditions [1], despite the definition meaning originally ~"not the US or Russia", an enormous amount of people in the US live in poverty, and a lot of them next to huge corporate pollution nightmares. West Oakland is a good example. These people have lifelong respiratory problems and few people care - certainly not the city nor the company who gave those people long term health problems. That pollution mostly comes from the Port - but my point still stands.

If you think the US is "mostly solved" when it comes to pollution you are dearly wrong.

> A unless you want to talk about carbon instead.

That's pretty much all I was talking about in the first place.

Edit: [1] I'm being told off for this comment, like it isn't true or something? But a commenter below told me that something like 40M people in the USA live in poverty. That's a big number, and certainly is "much of the US". I'm not wrong about a very, very large number of people in the US living in poverty.

I guess you're not aware that the latest EPA rule proposals are taking aim at the very notion that PM2.5 is harmful (albeit indirectly)?

The legal authority to regulate PM2.5 is based on Harvard studies (that have been replicated) and private medical data from the 70s and 80s. The new EPA rule would forbid it from using non-public data (such as these medical records). The new rule would forbid using non-public datasets (such as medical records), which would make it practically impossible to issue regulations based on human health.

Good question. I simply did some googling for comparative efficiency per unit area between PVC and solar thermal -- the 3x factor seemed to come up regularly from different sources. The kWh/m2 was the unit most of those sources were using.

Time of day is very interesting, as PVC's are going to be useful earlier in the day, and solar thermal can still be providing good power output well after sunset. Consequently, in practice, I'd see a combination of both technologies (combined with good storage and grid capabilities, etc) as being most effective way of harnessing sunlight in the short to medium term.

Averaging over a year ... geo / climate variations (eg distance from equator, monsoon cycles, etc) are likely going to affect both technologies similarly.

Doing it in the accounting manner that a typical firm would do is foolish in this instance.

A homeowner is going to sweat assets, and in the case of Solar a 1% degradation per year means that, short of some damage or failure, the time you're likely to sweat them is between 20 and 80 years.

I am all for witty sarcasm, but this one doesn't add much value to the discussion given weak correlation between mass surveillance and renewable energy.

I was implying that earth government are not going to control outerspace nations.