Moore's law for Solar Energy?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).
The key point here is just a restatement of Christiansen's "Innovator's Dillemma": a new product incapable of meeting the needs of most users of an incumbent product, but capable of meeting the needs of some other related market.
When Christiansen is paraphrased as saying solar won't become a big deal in the US, I took that to mean "not a big deal, in total", whereas everyone else seems to be reading it as "in comparison to fossil fuels".
As a result, the new product won't be adopted by the core market for the incumbent product. It's used by a different market, or at the margins.
The "dilemma" here is, over the long term, the new product improves as it captures more and more market share. The new product has room to evolve and isn't locked into a core market with fixed expectations. Eventually, the benefits of the new product exceed those of the incumbent product, even for the incumbent's core market, and the incumbent product loses.
This all plays out in slow motion, so that even if the incumbent sees this happening, they can't do much, because they're dependent on the revenue from their core market.
Put fossil fuel in the "incumbent" box, "solar" in the "new product" box, "the industrialized west" in the "core market" box, and "the developing world" in "the new market" box.
PV is not efficient/cheap-enough to catch on in the developing world, yet.
As the developing world cannot subsidize/commodify something it cannot afford, by definition, the only way PV becomes more efficient and more inexpensive, is by chasing western demand/subsidies.
Which then means that for PV to ever be big in the developing world, there is a precondition of substantial generating and production capacity for PV in the developed world.
Given that such installations must exist for PV to even make progress toward the developing-world-changing tipping-point, it seemed strange to me to say that Solar will never be "a big deal" in the developed world.
One could likely do the math and determine approximately how much installed generating capacity and how much production capacity the industry would need to have created, to drive price-per-watt down to rates that are attractive to the developing world. And I'm thinking the numbers you'd come up with amount to "a big deal" by any reasonable objective measure.
(Though I do concede that such a substantial number may still pale in comparison to fossil fuel usage in the developed world.)
The newcomer technology displaces the incumbent by making a concession the incumbent can't make.
Here, solar can, in the developing world, make the concession of providing less power, less reliably. Since the developing world often lacks any power, bringing reliable high-output power to a region is likely to be more expensive than bringing in low-output, low-reliability solar.
Maybe you already get that, too, but I don't see you addressing the point in your comment.
My objection is to the casual dismissal of the quantity of PV build-out in the developed world that's implicit in PV reaching the cost/efficiency tipping point for the developing world.
e.g. It takes an awful lot of people buying panels at $2/watt for them to ever hit $1/watt. And though, say, Africa may go on to generate a much larger percentage of their power from $1/watt panels than the US ever will, I don't think it's fair to say the big pile of $2/watt panels is "not a big deal" in the US.
Yet, PG&E pumps water uphill at night so it can get more hydro during the day. Maybe they made a big mistake, but I'd like to see some actual numbers.
PG&E isn't perfect, but they're not obviously incompetent either, so ....
To put it another way, if you're correct, you're ignoring gobs of money.
> The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning.
Most places don't have air conditioning.
And if renewable power becomes cheap enough you can synthesis gasoline from air. Renewable power does not have to become incredibly cheap for this work. If the price of oil rises high enough that alone could make synthesizing fuel using solar power profitable.... in theory.
(Coal emissions, btw, are estimated to kill at least 13,000 Americans per year, and many more Chinese.)
A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...
And another that takes a close look at wind is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/
We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.
Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405
The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.
1) shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts on reducing the requirements from the grid to near zero for new housing builds?
Newer builds will (hopefully) also incorporate the latest in conservation technologies (better performing insulation, etc) resulting in a lower energy requirement regardless of the source. One would also imagine that new home builders implementing solar solutions would see cost benefits from scale.
2) wouldn't the efforts of concentrating on new home builds have a two pronged benefit on everyone else?
Not only would technology advances become available for retrofit projects, but the reduced strain on the grid could potentially reduce the costs grid wide?
3) what would be the benefit of having a centralized solar installation?
Any solution that centers around having a mile square cube (from the linked article) seems a bit silly to me, wouldn't houses having their own battery solution make much more sense? Having individual batteries would allow for a market for these solutions and, one would hope, from the competition within this market, new and better solutions would emerge.
Efficiency is definitely some low-hanging fruit. It only gets us so far, though. Rooftops are probably the most effective place to deploy solar, but housing is only one piece of the puzzle.
Smart grids enable many applications like large scale cooling to shift of demand without building new storage infrastructure on the supply side. Not to mention simply shifting maintenance cycles can shift a lot of 'supply' to different parts of the year without building any infrastructure at all.
Add it all up and Wind + Solar meet total energy demands and have near ideal capacity factors with ~2-4 new hours of total grid energy storage. VS. the 6 days which he assumes.
PS: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-ti...
Even at 4 hours of storage, the scale we need is a bit mind-boggling.
Your link is really interesting though. That's the kind of analysis we need. I see too many articles that just talk about rated capacity with no consideration of actual output or reliability.
My second link does similar analysis for Australia, and there it doesn't work out so well. The wind drops low over wide areas for days at a time.
In any case I have nothing against renewables, as long as they don't use up too much land...offshore wind is perfect. But I think we should be building GenIII and better nuclear reactors, too.
Building 4 hours of storage is a rather extreme step that's also extremely unlikely. California already has a 40c/kwh cost differential between peak summer demand and the middle of winter, but nobody is building massive grid energy storage to smooth that out. Even over the course of a single day you could make 10c/kwh just from grid storage but nobody is building it. Rather we add peaking power plants because base load power + storage costs more than peaking power plants and that's likely to continue to be the case even in a world dominated by solar + wind power plants.
A hydro plant running at baseload has a river downstream that is like... a river. Water levels vary with something close to the natural rhythm.
A hydro plant used for peaking will have no water flow for hours, and then heavy water flow. That puts extreme stress on organisms living downstream.
Hydro here have carefully regulated flows to reduce the natural variation in the river so that for example an optimal flow is created for the various salmon runs.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700006602/USGS-Gains-from...
"The HOMER energy modeling software is a powerful tool for designing and analyzing hybrid power systems, which contain a mix of conventional generators, cogeneration, wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, hydropower, batteries, fuel cells, hydropower, biomass and other inputs."
Edit: looks like it's for small-scale installations.
[1] http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-...
But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it.
I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling.
Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.
From the article: Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives.
If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?
It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.
Well, s-curves (sigmoid curves) certainly are common, but Moore's law - so far - is not a sigmoid AFAIK.
Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.
Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials.
We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.
As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.
"the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads"
I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?
Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power
falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months