Governments spurred the rise of solar power
economist.com
economist.com
Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example.
Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining.
Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone?
So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt...
> Making solar cells requires a lot of energy. Fortunately, because these cells generate electricity, they pay back the original investment of energy; most do so after just two years of operation, and some companies report payback times as short as six months.
While the above article is from 2014, it likely still applies today. I would be interested to know how much manufacturing processes have changed since then.
The other big thing the article points out is the toxic chemicals and toxic process used to produce solar panels.
But it would have been less popular, because at least in the USA we don't have a good welfare system to balance out the indirect tax on poor people, who have to spend more of their income on electricity, gasoline, other pollutants.
Basically, any energy source can be thought of as an "energy multiplier" -- it takes some amount of energy to free the resource (manufacture it, mine it, etc.), then it produces some amount of energy output over its lifetime. So by looking at energy-out / energy-in, you get a sense of your bang for your buck.
Looking at the latest figures on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ap... :
- Conventional oil wells are 18-43:1 (I've heard saudi oil wells -- the easiest to drill -- are in the range of 60:1)
- Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel)
- Oil sands are 5:1
- Wind is 20-30:1
- Solar is 9-34:1
As with any lifetime/embedded cost analysis, there's lots of variability dependent on your assumptions, manufacturing conditions, and operating conditions. There's nuances in energy types, like wind turbines produce electricity but require tons of diesel trucks and concrete to assemble.
But we can roughly say that in terms of energy requirements, solar is more efficient than shale or oil sands, but it tops out at the lower to mid range of conventional oil.
>- Oil sands are 5:1
wtf? I thought oil sands were the least efficient but shale is even lower? Is there a source for this?
Solar is only becoming cheaper today because of the research and capital that was put into developing the technology, not because it's inherently cleaner than coal. To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option. And if the government is motivated to migrate businesses off of dirty energy resources, it also has a motivation to help develop alternatives that the market will accept.
Solyndra[0] was one example of a company that received government support to develop solar technology and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process.
> Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.
It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Definitely! Sorry if I came across as defensive, I'm just used to people using Solyndra to criticize the whole program. On the whole, the DOE made a big impact. It's just disappointing that one bad actor reduced that impact by turning into a political hot potato.
Edit: It just seems unclear to be what the supposed fraud was.
Do not be confused into thinking there was no government collusion. Not only was solyndra a cesspool of revolving door players, it definitely knew how to play the government contracting game. I used to deliver food for ill low income housing clients and on one complex I visited saw old solyndra tube on top of the building. Someone had to look at this project and see it as a cost plus opportunity for an unrelated and unnecessary product; and now that housing block is saddled with unsupported infrastructure. Who is going to pay to remove those solyndra panels and put some other solar system up there?
Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions. That's a non-negligible externality which your market needs to price correctly. Not doing so is in effect subsidising coal. There is nothing "pure" about this, quite to the contrary. And this has been known for decades.
It's 2021 now. We don't live in 1890 anymore.
Huh? A bunch of people with no altruistic tendencies, and who are incapable of coordinating through any means but pricing, will not stop overfishing or carbon emissions. I don't get this often repeated thing about how not taxing carbon is subsidizing it, or how cap-and-trade is indistinguishable from naturally occurring markets. Both of those things are clearly artificial constructs built on top of the naturally-forming market. It's like many people are trying to use a perfect society as the zero-mark which all deltas and relative measures are measured from, while the state of nature (and the absence of a policy) is the obvious zero-mark to use.
Compare it with sewer systems in a city. Many businesses would be much more profitable if they could dump their crap straight onto the street. Municipal cleaning services would need to clean up and everybody pays them. So they'd be subsidised though this. We don't accept this, we have rules against it since it's not fair. They have to pay their share, and excessive generation of crap needs to pay accordingly.
We don't accept this with crap on the street, and we should not accept it with crap in the atmosphere either. It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.
Why can't free markets result in the misuse of common resources? I feel like some are trying to square a circle here. Free markets aren't axiomatically the definition of good, and it's okay for something good to not be a result of them. There are these things known as "market failures," where unattended economic activity will lead to people's goals not being achieved. Overfishing and carbon emissions are market failures; far from being the opposite of a free market, they are well-recognized consequences.
The problem here being that writing "based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option." suggests that since we all want free markets we'll need to accept this. No we don't.
We also don't say "well purely on human nature forces we'll have a few alpha males who keep a harem of women and try to kill all competition that's not submissive". Technically correct, but entirely unhelpful to find a way how to move forward.
A free market needs rules. "Free market" does not equate "do whatever you want". Without rules that are enforced, you don't have freedom either.
I'm really against this idea of redefining the baseline so that whatever policy choices we like are defined as the absence of subsidies and the presence of a free market. Subsidies are when the government intervenes to give money to those who trade in certain goods. Intervention is defined as doing anything other than letting people sort it out for themselves. Likewise, a free market is not one where everything we don't like is banned, it is a market where there are no constraints on the participants' process of trade and price determination.
Might sound paradoxical at first, but what would you get without enforcement?
You would get the societies depicted in Snowcrash and Cyberpunk 2077. People would hire private security to perform the security tasks they need, just like multinationals do in third world countries. If you don't want that to happen, one has no choice but to restrict the freedom of at least one market. (The market for mercenaries.) Some countries go further and restrict other markets, for example the markets for weapons. It does not make any sense to call gun control a free-market mechanism, that's just not the right use of the term.
Thanks for the debate!
In reality all human markets have rules and the ideal free market doesn't exist (nor is it ideal in any non theoretical sense.)
I think you're just confused about the terminology here, you're using a different definition to everybody else.
My feeling is you're equating free market to capitalism, but you can't do that.
It's a free market if you can hire private security to stop them. The ban on the violent trade (often called the "monopoly on violence") is an example of an area in which modern liberal democracies do not permit complete freedom in the markets they host. I guess the slogan could be, "not every policy liberal democracies like is a free-market policy."
it's just as 'natural' to prohibit the ability to unknowingly harm others without pricing that into the transaction.
9-5 trading hours are not a rule of US markets. If there was demand for trading at 8, people would organize to do that - and in fact they have, it's called after-hours trading.
Dollars as a trading medium is also an example of a non-rule. In a free market, all currencies would be lawful for transactions. In fact, in the US companies are free to sign contracts that numerate quantities of money in any currency. The only legal privilege of the dollar is its role in taxation - hardly an aspect of the free market.
Finally, the rule against taking by force is enforced by the executive branch of a democratically elected government. It is not possible to call that a free-market mechanism. A free-market mechanism for security exists, it's where you hire rent-a-cops, or in third world countries, where you hire mercenaries.
the point is that there is no real world 'free market' that meets your idealized (and arbitrary) conditions.
I don't know what kind of hypothetical utopian market you're referring to, but it's not one that exists in human societies.
Where's the evidence for that? The major point was that Solyndra bet on the wrong horse with CIGS; they were unknowingly doomed to fail from the start.
Solar would have been explored much sooner if we factored in the pollution.
You are ignoring the entire point of the post you are replying to.
Extracting coal and burning it has massive external costs. Massive health costs to the workers and even people just living near coal extraction. Massive devaluation of land near the coal mines. Huge issues with non-carbon solution. That's all before the concerns about climate change. Few people were compensated for the massive destruction of wealth/ health & quality of life in the region. In many places the companies extracted every ounce of coal then when the lawsuits started pouring in, the company went belly up.
Once you take into account all the costs outside the costs of acquiring the land and extracting the coal, coal is vastly more expensive.
> not because it's inherently cleaner than coal
Is patently false.
It took capital to get there but solar -is- inherently cheaper than coal. That is -exactly- why it's being deployed at scale now.
Coal pollutes both in destruction of the physical land (strip mining) and in ongoing pollution from huge amounts of carbon emissions.
Solar needs to be a responsible in how they get the materials (mining) and dispose of broken or outdated panels.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/01...
I have fabulous news! Forsooth, in this, the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Score, Plus One, it has come to pass that mankind hath, by workings most subtle, made manifest many wondrous heating apparatuses that requireth neither coal nor coke, nor indeed train oil.
This is orthogonal to OPs claim that "we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate"
Maybe the non-taxation of fossil fuels' externalities is akin to subsidies. Then that becomes the reason why solar power needed subsidies, but it doesn't change the fact of their existence.
I also doubt raising prices for fossil fuels would have had the same effect on research into alternatives. Solar power is now cheaper than coal, even at the low costs of coal you decry. Given enough time, solar power research will yield tremendous returns, and would have done so under any imaginable tax/subsidy regime for coal and/or solar power.
But markets aren't always capable of reaping such rewards. Not because they are evil, but there was a lot of uncertainty and extremely long timelines involved that those institutions just aren't set up for.
Politics, however, are. And it worked. Score one for that dirty concept.
My FIL was head of a large coal plant in the UK, and is very critical of renewable energies, their cost, the impact on the fossil fuel industry etc... It simply isn't possible to have a conversation with him about global warming - he will simultaneously argue it isn't happening and it's natural and not caused by us. He might be an extreme example, but there is general scepticism of government subsidies here.
I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
Preventing climate change and becoming independent from non-renewables seems like a worthwhile strategic goal to me, too.
And these are only the active subsidies. We're not even talking about the externalities.
The challange is finding equivalent of early adopters for commodity markets such as electrical energy. That where the government policies could step in. There are some things that initially are too expensive, but at scale could be game changing.
Instead of grants, I would allocate $100mln - $1Bln / year to auctions. to buy at lowest price, the cheaper price available should unlock bigger pool. Good examples for government subsidies:
1. Negative carbon emission.
2. Carbon-free steel.
3. Carbon-free concrete.
4. Synthetical fuels such as natural gas or gasoline.
Of course, it is difficult to judge what the locals produce best, but somehow I still think that induced demand would be helpful, and better than just dumping the money there.
We know how infrared scatters on CO_2 from quantum/EM physics, so from that it should be possible to take the difference in global concentration due to humanity and incident solar radiation, and derive as a result an expected temperature rise. This can then be matched against historical average temperature records.
I'm being a classic physicist and assuming everything is a first-order approximation, so someone do correct me if I'm wrong.
That coal plant relies on infrastructure to get its coal. It needs fair utility prices to deliver its power to customers. It needs reliable (abuse free) markets to sell the power on. It needs voltage and frequency/time standards to access the network. It needs contract enforcement to actually get paid by its customers. It needs insurance and educated workers and a CEO who won't embezzle.
All provided by government, all welcomed by industry. But suddenly government has no place in free markets when it comes to CO2.
Given that the market has selected the least energy-efficient cryptoasset, we should not expect markets to just change given the existing incentives.
Oil/utility/nuclear are the main groups that pushed for this idealistic notion of "free markets" in the first place via think tanks like CATO and AEI and groups like ALEC.
At the time when they pushed it the hardest there were few alternatives so the "free" market naturally selected them.
While the concept gained a lot of mindshare in the American public they've since stopped pushing it quite so hard and are obviously not quite so keen on it.
It's especially ironic that they criticize renewables mainly on the basis of variability, which is probably best solved by market based solutions.
Essential technology investment of US tax dollars?
NASA spinoff technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
NSF, DARPA, IARPA, In-Q-Tel, ARPA-e (2009)
List of emerging technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
You could be interested in this book:
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
Solar follow exponential cheaper trajectory with no signs of slowing down. Virtually all forecast underestimated the trend.
In less than a decade solar will be way cheaper than operating cost of gas or coal plants. It make sense to overprovision capacity and shut down pretty much anything that could be shut down during the day.
Plus cheap spurious electricity opens a lot of new frontiers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/electricity-its-wond...
this is the reality
“Before the year 2000, when Germany embarked on its large-scale and expensive Energiewende (energy transition), that country’s residential electricity prices were low and declining, bottoming at less than €0.14/kWh ($.13/kWh, using the prevailing exchange rate) in 2000.”
“By 2015, Germany’s combined solar and wind capacity of nearly 84 gigawatts had surpassed the total installed in fossil-fueled plants, and by March 2019 more than 20 percent of all electricity came from the new renewables. However, over an 18-year period (2000 to 2018) electricity prices more than doubled, to €0.31/ kWh. The E.U.’s largest economy thus has the continent’s highest electricity prices, followed by heavily wind-dependent Denmark, at €0.3/kWh.”
and finally,
“A similar contrast can be seen in the United States. In California, where the new renewables have taken an increasing share, electricity prices have been rising five times as fast as the national mean and are now nearly 60 percent higher than the countrywide average.”
2. If not renewables or other form of non-fossil fuel, the price of energy would be increasing anyway. We are reaching peak of fossil fuel production. Fracking make it cheap temporarily, but overall we are depleting cheap fields and would be forced to use ones which are harder to access.
+ ???/kWh in environmental cost.
IMO the policy has been a natitonal disaster for German, not only have prices increased without materially offsetting carbon, it has also made them much more dependent on Russian gas which increases the economic cost of standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. The promises of jobs from domestic production of panels also never quite panned out due to competition from Europe and installation/maintenance related jobs are likely offset by reduced competitiveness from electrical costs not to mention increased strategic dependence on China for components.
Wind has been quite a bit better but locals are starting to push back from what I've been reading.
Germany emits 485g of CO2 per kWh. [1] France emits 80g of CO2 per kWh. [2]
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/co2...
[2] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-emissions-de-co2-par-...
You can tell this because there are multiple European countries which have a higher proportion of renewables than Germany, yet (as you point out yourself) they have lower electricity costs.
The BIGGEST expense for a power company is infrastructure. They have all of these electrical lines running everywhere. When they run the lines, they are designed for growth YEARS from now AND for the HIGHEST demand time frame.
This is to say: the company spends LOADS of money to run wires that are 99% unused. The cost of running the wires is a fixed expense that gets passed on to the consumers. As people move to solar power, they stop paying the power company. They stop paying for the electrical lines that were already run and already expensed. This cost is then shifted to the other consumers. Thus raising the cost of electricity for everyone else (in the short term).
They will probably end up paying less than everybody else in 10 years as the rest of the world plays catch up.
Building out new capacity costs more than using existing capacity.
When France's nuclear power plants EOL and they have to build out new capacity they will have to pay for it sometime as well.
This is utter nonsense. The first sentence is about the future cost of power, and the argument is specifically about how the price is changing such that the future cost will be lower. The second sentence then argues that the past deployments have led to higher prices.
Even the most uninformed observer of global energy markets can pull up 2020 PPA auctions and see the staggering void that has emerged between bids from gas, coal and nuclear vendors vs bids from solar+storage and wind+storage.
As a random example, here is the draft plan Siemens is drawing up for my hometown, it includes PPA estimates for gas turbines, wind and solar+storage, current as of a few weeks ago. The recommendation from Siemens is to immediately stop all construction of anything other than solar+storage, a complete reversal from prior plans for my utility in bright-red Missouri.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e8NCSh6VNJVpiUVyw5-XVCo-o1h... (see page 7)
But I want to point something. While I think solar power is great and we should keep working on expanding it, we shouldn't approach renewable energy as our only source.
Right now in Spain we had the worst snowstorm in decades and temperatures have decreased in the whole country. Around 80-85% of the solar panels are useless. Nuclear is at 100% and we're burning coal like crazy. And electricity price went up 27%.
France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear because they understand the risks are very, very low and they can produce enough energy to fulfill their needs and to sell to their neighbours.
Unfortunately there is very strong support on dropping nuclear power in France in favor of renewable energy, across almost all the political spectrum. Nuclear share of electricity production is already planned to be lowered from 70% to 50%.
Nuclear is also bad at this kind of thing. You really want either storage (storing heat is easy, by the way), or cheap plants. It doesn't really matter if they are expensive to run as long as they only run a few days a year.
https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-C...
Spain can also import power.
I think the price increase means we're not ready to rely only on solar as our biggest energy source because it can fail when we need it the most.
Cloud cover or solar flares are NOT black swan events, they are just the opposite: they are events that we know for sure will happen (just like global pandemics) even if we don't know when they will happen.
Nonetheless in a system with wind and solar, wind over producing in storms should mitigate the effect of losing solar coverage.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
Yet, even with what you say, spain is actually (right now) quite green: https://www.electricitymap.org/map
Citation needed. Honestly. A graph with power factor -> expected average number of days per year would add to the discussion.
To use 100% green power we would need a combination of long term energy storage, and HVDC transmission across Europe.
The latest such simulation I've seen is the 2035 Report from Berkeley, I wrote a summary of it here: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/
You can read the full report here: https://www.2035report.com/
Also, I think advocacy groups tend to underestimate the obvious and not so obvious impacts an increasingly larger share of so-called clean power. I suggest we do not yet know the true cost of grid-scale battery, e-mobility battery, solar pv and wind because we have not yet reached the end-of-life for a statistically significant percentage of installed projects.
“Solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has grown at unprecedented rates since the early 2000s. As the global PV market increases, so will the volume of decommissioned PV panels, and large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s. Growing PV panel waste presents a new environmental challenge, but also unprecedented opportunities to create value and pursue new economic avenues.”
https://www.irena.org/publications/2016/Jun/End-of-life-mana...
“This report, prepared jointly by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), is the first-ever projection of PV panel waste volumes to 2050. It highlights that recycling or repurposing solar PV panels at the end of their roughly 30-year lifetime can unlock an estimated stock of 78 million tonnes of raw materials and other valuable components globally by 2050. If fully injected back into the economy, the value of the recovered material could exceed USD 15 billion by 2050.”
edit: here's a 2017 in depth EU sponsored study
EU Commission: JRC Science for Policy Report – Materials Impact on the EU’s Competitiveness of the Renewable Energy, Storage and E-mobility Sectors – wind power, solar photovoltaic and battery technologies
See section 6.1 "Recycling of materials from wind turbines, solar panels and batteries"
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...
Someone made the point that it's a rather daunting materials design challenge to make PV panels: They must withstand 30 years of water, heat, salt and UV light with no degradation, and then trivially separate into their constituent components at recycling time. We are definitely gearing up to create an enormous recycling headache 30 years from now.
Replacing old wind turbines is also a financial problem, without the higher-than-now subsidies of the past many aren't viable. So wind turbine parks are actually shrinking. One may see this as a positive, because it weeds out subsidy-driven inefficiency.
It seems like we have the brains to be doing studies on the long term environmental impact of turbines and panels. I confess I haven’t looked too hard for this but I don’t see others posting them and imagine it’s not a very popular topic.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/balancing-mechanism-pric... : UK is currently paying quite a lot ot the few marginal producers ("peaker plants").
Peaker plants are a big business: https://www.energyassets.co.uk/about-us/news/article/peaking...
Yes, as you overbuild renewable capacity the number of such occasions goes down. This is why is said that it's hard to reach 100%, but it's not impossible.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...
https://www.ademe.fr/sites/default/files/assets/documents/re...
Study on many countries:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259033221...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...
The problems with solar and wind can be solved with scale and storage. Nuclear has a number of problems which require technology that doesn't exist at an economical price.
Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology.
In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction)
And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
[1]: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+sol...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Oh I know. I'm french, the Flamanville EPR is a running joke. But this is merely a consequence of dubious political choices having lead to putting a hold on building nuclear power plants for a long time, which means the people who knew how to do that are either in other companies or retired. There has been a horrible loss of skill in this subject in most of western Europe and the US. We've built dozens of nuclear power plants are are one of the cleanest countries in the world when it comes to CO2 per kWh. I dare say that at one point we definitely understood how to do it.
Korea has demonstrated they have the ability to build multiple third generation reactors in 5 to 6 years. So does China.
> And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
The way the electrical grid is made in Europe is fully made with centralisation in mind. A few core production points distributing to everything else. For this to apply to solar, that would require absolutely gigantic solar parks.
> Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
Except Germany doesn't sell their solar energy. Germany is running on coal and natural gas, producing over 40% of their energy through these means. The absolute insanity of phasing out a solution as effective and safe as nuclear has lead to horribly worse.
> But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather.
How ? solar panels produce a _pitiful_ amount of energy. We would need dozens of millions of them. A small nuclear power plant produces about 10 TWh per year. A well running solar panel produces, if you're lucky, 300kWh per year. Thirty million solar panels, thirty million square meters plus the needed infrastructure, maintenance... for one measly small nuclear power plant.
Wind is not better. Hydraulic is okay, but most countries have run out of space to make dams. Geothermal is very limited.
Do we wiggle our magic fingers and generate gas out of nowhere ? Renewable gas accounts for about, at best, 10% of gas consumed in a year. As in, that's about as much renewable gas we could make. And it's not exactly an instantaneous process, so we would still be wasting energy. The best existing solution is storing that energy as water that we would pump up a basin, to be released later and used in a dam. That would work, if we did not need to flood areas where major cities are to make it work.
If we have excess (more or less free) electricity, i don't think we need magic fingers for this. Hydro storage is quite expensive and difficult to build, for natural gas there is already a storage and distribution network in place. And it's quite easy tonstore for a long time.
Nuclear plants also operate *efficiently* for decades whereas solar panels only for a few years to a decade. That means replacement has to come more often for panels. They also require more land to generate the same amount of energy (I don't know if that's taken into account in the calculations).
And of course energy has to be retrieved from other sources when solar won't operate which might be more expensive than solar.
While the price of solar is dropping of course, so is the price of nuclear as new reactors are being developed and prototyped: can't remember the name right now but one was funded by Bill Gates and is built in arrays from multiple mass producible units. That allows building smaller, localized reactors at a lower price.
I was about to say something to the effect of: does it really matter if electricity prices spike greatly in response to the supply of renewables? Why shouldn't we discourage people from using electricity at these times? I suppose this doesn't apply to vital things like heating though.
One of the reasons the electricity costs spike is because you’re maintaining two generation facilities in Germany and Spain. Solar takes massive investment but the coal plants still need to be maintained and fed for when the Sun is obscured. And I think I recall that in a place like Germany, electric demand actually goes up, not down, when the sun is obscured - more people indoors.
I would also like to add that it matters significantly on an individual/family basis to productive capacity and well-being when electricity costs go up, whether manifested as blackouts or much steeper bills. Not everyone is wealthy enough to absorb that without noticeable pain. There’s a bit of a “let them eat cake” aspect to comments like this.
Nuclear power is also just too expensive. I know the tech crowd is still angry about the safety debate, and that may even be justified. But it just doesn't matter any more.
Solar + battery is now cheaper than coal, of all things, for new construction, in fairly typical situations.
Solar panels are also fairly productive in winter, more than people realise. That's because we tend to believe their output is proportional to temperatures, which it is not. Solar irradiation varies far less throughout the year than temperatures. Length of daylight in higher latitudes is an issue, but correlates surprisingly well with stronger winds, at least in Europe.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
The point is that the government does not pay you incentives to consume oil like it does for electric cars or solar panels.
Where are the cheap panels and storage solutions?
I have lived in my bus for most of the past five years. I have a solar array on the roof (with lots of python glue[0]). And panel (and for that matter, battery) prices that I'm seeing today are no cheaper - and in some cases, a bit more expensive - than when I architected the system five years ago.
Is all the reporting about cheap solar somehow specific to grid-tied solutions?
Praising them is like praising a reckless driver with a fat, greedy business dude in the passenger seat and people in the back staring at their phones, who decides to act normally seconds before an accident.
Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? - And at the expense of fossil fuel shareholders who have handsomely paid for their legislative privileges?!?.
Where's the honor in that?
I would argue that they are not. Rather I'd like to see Governments close the broken incentives that lead companies to not broadly benefit the public. The key is that, IMO, government should not in any way be in business or making business decisions (eg solar over another technology), but rather making societal standards (0.x grams of CO2 per GW Hr, or whatever a reasonable metric would be)
Then let people exercise their freedom to choose which upstanding business they support.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-ha...
If we are to survive and thrive on this planet, it would be good to do it more wisely.
In general, the "free market" can be easily overstated, it has ever been this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Not to mention colonialism as a driver of early capitalist economy.
The Economist is not a perfect newspaper, but they're possibly the only non-specialist press that would dive deeply into "what is a PN junction and how does it make electricity"!
> the oil shocks of the 1970s saw governments get interested
Solar thermal (not PV) was put on the roof of the White House by Carter, taken down by Reagan, and eventually ended up in a museum in China (!) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
The same issue of fuel imports drove France to build a huge number of nuclear plants, which certainly worked but are now ageing out into a maintenance headache. As the Economist points out, economy of scale and accumulation of experience in manufacturing has worked brilliantly to drive down costs in solar (and also wind).
I myself got solar panels on my roof about 5 years ago, locking in a subsidy rate for 20 years. The government incentives to the renewables market have really worked brilliantly. It's just odd how few politicians want to take credit for it.
China did. They were acutely aware of how militarily exposed reliance on oil was for them and how polluting coal fired power stations were and were keen on pushing all possible alternatives.
When China recently banned all coal imports from Australia, the country suffered widespread electricity blackouts.
The scandal was not about fake CO2 calculations.
It was about Volkswagen having its engine management systems detect if a car was being tested and alter how it ran so that it generated less NOx emissions at the expense of power output[1].
When the car was used outside the lab it would produce a higher power output at the expense of illegally high NOx emissions.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
https://www.ft.com/content/2a123e88-9582-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee...
I believe other unrelated manufacturers were also caught at a similar time pulling the same NOx trick with their own engines.
You can also give credit for the Energy Derivative market that used trading on Energy futures to help companies financially hedge any risk on green energy.