What Happens When Solar Power Is as Cheap as Coal
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
So, in effect, energy has to be stored during the day, and used during "unsunny" times.
Where I live we already have a pump-storage scheme in place. During the night, when demand for electricity is low, water is pumped uphill from one dam to another. During periods of high demand (typically early morning, and evening) water is released generating hydro-power to supplement the grid. It generates about 400MW of power - suitable for supplementing a city, but not for taking it "off the grid". It also doesn't scale particularly well - a 4GW plant would take a lot of water.
However, all is not lost. With "free" electricity it's fairly easy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen isn't the easiest, or least damaging substance to work with, but it is certainly clean, storable, transportable and so on.
A power plant burning hydrogen as the fuel can run day and night. And a "hydrogen reservoir" would act as a natural capacitor - able to smooth the supply of energy to the plant.
Of course there are lots of uses for electricity which are not time-of-day sensitive. Desalination for example allows dry coastal regions (which usually get a lot of sun, and hence why they're dry in the first place) to become irrigated.
Solar power is a lot more useful than just domestic use, and I for one look forward to the day when it's cheap.
Presumably, you'd give quite high incentives to doing this. If someone only charges their car when the grid has excess power, and allows up to 50% of that power to go back into the grid at peak usage, that electricity could even be free. There'd likely be a setting on your charging station to handle this.
You don't need many cars generating 5kW before you're talking about quite a serious amount of power.
Of course, there are problems with this approach - most people park their cars somewhere else during the day, the accounting is an issue, and it seems to be more suited to wind than solar, but I really like the idea of repurposing the massive batteries that we're going to have laying around anyway.
For reference, a Tesla battery pack holds 53kWh [1], which will supply an average home with power for two days [2]. So the numbers really do add up for using it to help during spikes.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system
[2]: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table5.html
One could imagine though a big incentive (cost wise) not to charge the car during the day, or early evening but have the charger kick in after say 10pm. Then if your range is sufficient to get to work and back you're not motivated to charge during the day.
While all those batteries sitting there is somewhat appealing, the highest demand for grid power is also likely to be around the time you want to use your car.
Indeed.
However, electric cars could have a part to play in equalising electricity production & demand. Electric cars could be re-powered by removing the battery pack and inserting a new one (this would be done at the successor to petrol stations; obviously battery packs would all be the same size and have the same interface). The battery station would then need to recharge all its spare packs -- and it could do it at the times when electricity supply exceeds demand.
Electricity demand is already way higher during the day than during the night. A good example besides the obvious of "lights" would be air conditioning.
Most likely, the amount of solar power built in such a case would converge to (typical peak power during the day) - (typical peak average power during the night), with existing technologies or other renewable technologies used to cover the remaining.
yes and no. Obviously it'll differ from place to place, and climate to climate, but here the highest demand occurs in the early morning and the early evening. Both peaks are caused mostly by domestic consumption - hot water and food preparation being significant.
Now depending on the time of the year this may coincide with daylight, or night time. Either way solar performance at this time of day is poor.
Of course commercial use keeps demand up through the whole day, but during this time domestic use (including heating and cooling where required) is either minimal or sufficiently random to "smooth" the demand. There is also some use all through the night (lights being an obvious source, although more efficient lighting is becoming more common.) But there are also all-night commercial and industrial requirements.
I realize this is currently a fantasy but would it ever be feasible or are there technical limitations preventing this from ever occurring?
The most obvious issue that springs to mind is the difference in voltage supplied from country to country. In the US it's 110V, elsewhere it's usually 220V or 240V. So I suppose replacing every electrical appliance inside, or outside, the US isn't a "technical" limitation, but it's certainly a limitation of some kind.
That aside there are losses when electricity is "moved" - they further you move it the more you lose. (that's a simplification, but it'll do.)
Politically of course, there are limitations as well. Assuming the grid was mostly on land, each country becomes vulnerable to another country cutting it off. I'm not sure that the US for example would want to be dependent on Canada, or Russia, and I suspect the rest of South America may not like being vulnerable to Panama, and so on.
Most of the generation would probably occur in desert regions, and I'm thinking that's already a problem with an oil based economy.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Power_Gr...
Half of the country operates at 50Hz and the other half at 60Hz:
"In Japan, the western part of the country (Kyoto and west) uses 60 Hz and the eastern part (Tokyo and east) uses 50 Hz. This originates in the first purchases of generators from AEG in 1895, installed for Tokyo, and General Electric in 1896, installed in Osaka. The boundary between the two regions contains four back-to-back HVDC substations which convert the frequency; these are Shin Shinano, Sakuma Dam, Minami-Fukumitsu, and the Higashi-Shimizu Frequency Converter."
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/24/134828205/a-country-divided-ja...
You've got the best chance if you do something like this. No wires = no evil countries cutting wires.
At a conference a few weeks ago I was listening to a professor arguing that insulation and PV are the wrong way to go; the least resource consuming system is one with regular brick houses, warmed with geothermal energy, and with much heavier mixing of functions in our urban landscapes (actually, landscapes all together, and make the urban/rural distinction obsolete). So basically growing food on the roofs of houses etc.
He had numbers to back it all up, too. I'm not saying they're correct, but at least he's trying :)
* http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/districtoftomorrow/
* http://www.ribuilt.eu/
* http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/(of course resource consumption per se is not an externalized cost, that's obvious; but the price we pay today for many things do not include the full lifecycle ('cradle to cradle') costs.
Regarding the amount of energy used; PV panels have working life of 20-25 years. The links I provided below include numbers (well, somebodies interpretation of them) somewhere on the consumed/produced ratio; I don't know how they relate. I'm just saying that using dollar value cost to calculate grid parity is wrong, from an environmental point of view, and that that goes for both sides (the coal and the PV side of the equation).
Looking at solar on my roof as an investment (never thought I would say that about solar) for an ~10K investment (after tax credits) over the next eight years it gives a positive return with the potential for a very positive return (And this is ignoring the house value increase which is ~20K for every $1k you save in electricity costs). A nice extremely stable investment that adds diversification to my portfolio. This is way better than a say a 5 year 10K CD if you are looking for something super stable to round out your portfolio.
(Not to mention you are not taxed on the energy you produce via solar unlike the CD's interest.)
Does this article point out some breakthrough that I missed, or some other reasoning? All I saw was some fluff about grid parity, apparently derived from a quote in the almost as fluffy Bloomberg source article by the CEO of a solar cell manufacturer saying that they were nearing parity, without mentioning any numbers. Given that the only hard numbers given in the source article claim a ~3x difference in the article, and the CEO of Solar City claiming that prices of installations have been dropping 5-8% a year, this doesn't add up to the 66% cost reduction in two years necessary to reach parity. This is even without considering all the auxiliary problems with solar, including energy storage.
Flagged for being inaccurate.
That all is not terribly relevant -- the article isn't claiming that solar power will be cheaper than coal by 2013, rather it is simply fielding speculation about the implications of solar becoming cheaper than coal. There's a much longer article linked, and it deals with the practical issues of solar power:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-supernova...
The article did make a point of saying that they would reach cost parity by 2013, and I'm fairly sure that they were intentionally glossing over facts to make their article more linkbait-worthy.
That solar/wind continue to be championed by the media is keeping the public from taking seriously the fact that we don't have that many realistic options when it comes to getting off fossil fuels besides nuclear.
Let me guess -- you're not Scandinavian? :-) :-(
There are only two technologies I've heard of (sodium and redox flow) being developed and they are not enough (and not portable).
added: here's a complete list of ALL we have and most of them are not viable for home/large vehicle power http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies...
First, I'd like to see numbers that show solar panels are less damaging to the environment. I suspect that they require significant energy to manufacture as well as cause pollution in the process. Let's see some numbers that show it saves far more than it costs, energy/pollution-wise.
I'd also like to see this supposed day (as soon as a year and a half from now, according to the article), when solar power suddenly becomes affordable. It sure wasn't one year ago and I'm pretty sure it's not, today. In fact, if you calculate the cost of materials and installation, you will often find that you don't start saving a dime until the warranty on the product has expired (around 20-25 years). Not to mention, the efficiency degrades over time, so I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect when the warranty expires and it starts finally saving you cash.
I want it to happen. Trust me. I seriously considered it (although I don't think it's allowed in my city and I know that panels on your house are forbidden by many cities and many HOAs). When I realized that the tens of thousands of dollars I'd have to invest up front in it wouldn't start to pay off until I was almost retirement age, I decided I'd just stick with what I've already got. If things change drastically in a few years, I'll revisit the idea. Until then, I'm not going to let my bank account get caught up in the hype that only benefits the solar panel installer industry. I don't see how it's going to mature significantly in a whole two years.
The energy cost of a panel isn't a concern if the power comes from a renewable. Cannot speak to the damage to the environment mining and production does but I would be surprised if it surpassed coal's damage.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q
So there you go. Not sure about the credibility of the source but reading this - or the myriad of other easily found sources on this matter - might be an improvement on this snarky "huh huh, I'd like to see this stuff that probably no-one before me has ever thought about" approach to the problem.
While you are honing your reading skills by actually finding out something, you could revisit TFA to see this:
"But the solar industry is moving so fast that those costs will be equal--at least for utilities--by 2013."
... so they're not talking about rooftop solar, which you decide to start talking about almost immediately, because you once priced up a solar panel and are thus an expert.
Do you seriously think that your local utility is going to have massive solar fields that are going to provide the kind of power demands they have or even a chunk of it? The only long-term option is for existing space to be used - power generation on the space used by the house it generates. Until that is affordable, I doubt it's going to make the impact we're hoping for.
Plus, come on. We all know how utility companies behave. They'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the type of investment necessary to roll these out, even if they're cheaper in the longer term.
Also, yeah, I wouldn't have had a clue what to google for the type of information you pulled up. Good for you. You get +1 google points for today, sport.
For the record, the Google string to find out about the environmental costs of solar panel construction was "environmental costs solar panel construction". There's a mountain of information and conflicting viewpoints to sort through, naturally.
As for the business about there being no place to put solar, face it, you're just making things up. You could easily look up where solar power boosters figure they're going to put these facilities (for example, ask Google "where will utilities put solar panels" - literally). Then you could form an informed opinion pro/con but once again that's too much work.
Do I get another Google point?
Emplaced at a Lagrange point, one could imagine a potential 24/7 source of energy.
Also, one of the proposed ways to transmit the energy back to earth is via lasers. Could be fun if there are issues with the targeting subsystems :)