We don't have abundant solar power because of financing, not science | Hacker News Reader

We don't have abundant solar power because of financing, not science

singularityhub.com

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Ultimately, the problem with solar, wind, and any other "periodic" or localized generation method is storage and distribution. I live in an area with incredibly cheap power due to hydro dams that generate well in excess of what we need. However, there's only so much we can do with that excess in terms of efficiency of generation because it costs so much to send that energy long distances.

In addition, you have the obvious periodic nature of solar and wind, which mean that not only do you have the distribution problems, but you also can't just flick it on and offset a bunch of peak load or burst demand (such as when hospitals "turn on" in the morning).

You could have 100% efficient solar technology, and it wouldn't change much the economics of green energy because of the physical nature of problem. Thus, you need to change how we deal with the physical nature, and thus the economics themselves by improving the technology in other places. I work for a startup which is building a combination of efficient storage infrastructure and a distributed software system to help manage the heuristics of controlling supply and demand with this storage system and generation technology (including solar and wind, but also traditional generation as well), helping to do things like smart "time shifting" of energy supply.

Since superconductors are still a ways off, and even with them it doesn't change the nature of periodic generation, I think storage technology is likely the most important area for investment in the immediate future (and not just because that's where my paycheck comes from :) )

On the other hand, and from what I remember from a conversation with someone who works on the UK National Grid, Solar and Wind power have the advantage of predictability; which in many ways is just as important as availability for large-scale power infrastructures. (That's short-term predictability, generally < 1 hour).

As they've been saying since the 1950s, fusion is only 20 years away to solve all our problems anyway.

Oh, I don't mean to imply that solar and wind are entirely unpredictable (I was hoping my comments about hydro would cover that), but they aren't always predictable when and where you need it. One of the problems for BIG infrastructure (say, hospitals and apartment buildings), is that they often have their peak demand almost instantaneously in the morning - often before the sun comes up. For solar, that means you can't directly address this peak demand without some way of shifting that generation capacity. But, as you say, unlike some of the arguments over the years trying to prove that solar is untenable, I think it's predictability, combined with additional advances elsewhere, will indeed push us toward a better future, at least until that "fusion" stuff gets around to being feasible :)

The electricity distributer in South Australia is able to control the compressor pump of a wide area of the population's air conditioners. They use this during high demand periods (like hot days in summer) to reduce the loading on power lines.

People don't really notice that their compressor pump is being cycled to reduce system demand. Are you working in this area too?

I'm in the US and my electric company has that too. They pay up to $30 per month in the summer if you opt-in to the program.

https://www.peco.com/Savings/ProgramsandRebates/Residential/...

> During high summer energy use periods, PECO Smart A/C Saver works to reduce electricity usage by "cycling" central air conditioners throughout the region

The trial [1] I saw suggested that:

> Using around 1000 volunteer households, trials to date indicate a 19 - 35% reduction in peak load where direct load control demand management is utilised.

There is a 19 - 35% percent reduction in power usage using the technique. Payment for opting into the program looks like a great idea. Could the concept be extended to freezers and fridges? Imagine if you controlled a network of these small appliances and sold the ability to reduce peak demand to your distribution company.

[1] http://www.etsautilities.com.au/centric/our_network/demand_m...

I can't speak to overall strategy, as that's above my pay grade, but I can say that I HAVE worked in that area and I think everybody here is really interested in getting into that.

At my last startup, we had a prototype going at my house where we had a specialized smart meter with relays attached to the hot water heater, and an internet enabled thermostat. We could monitor, control and schedule peak load over the course of the day pretty easily. It was pretty labor intensive to set everything up (it was mainly the tapping of the mains and running the relays to the hot water heater), but actually worked well based on some simple schedules. I estimated that I saved about 15 to 20% of my power bill once it was in place.

The great thing about all of this, is that like most internet applications, the benefits become more pronounced and easier to achieve at scale. The more you can feed into a system, from both the supply side and the demand side, the better you can get at predicting and controlling the nature of the grid. And that transitions into some pretty serious effects on the economics of the situation, without really needing any major technology breakthroughs.

That sounds like a great start up. Are you allowed to clarify what you mean by efficient infrastructure? That is, do you mean the topology of the network, the routing on the links or the type of nodes? What type of algorithms do you use for load balancing? Are you storing on more efficient batteries for example? What is the chemistry of your batteries? Or are they the dual, fuel based?

Sorry, this has been a bit of a ramble just curious about your system.

I really appreciated this interview http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5059.html with the guy who wrote the book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Industrial_Revolution

He stresses that financing, generation and distribution must all be improved in sync for a successful transition to occur. This is based on his experience in Europe helping them transition to distributed renewable energy.

It's funny you mention that - that book has been making its way around at work, and I've got it sitting on my desk to read right now.

I think the author is right on, though I bet we'll see some significant incremental progress in the next couple years. I also think, based on the blurbs I've seen, that he's missing out on one key part of the equation that a lot of non-energy startups can go after - intelligence in the system. We'll be building the distribution, storage and generation side, and the smart grid will continue to plug into more and more devices, but it's the smarts of the system at scale, doing things like we've all been working on in the social space for a few years now, that will take those raw materials to the next level, and do something really clever that none of us have thought about yet.

For me, the biggest surprise in the interview was the reaction of the legacy energy companies. At first, they were very unhappy with the idea of independent, distributed generation (no surprise). But once it became clear that A) It's happening with or without them. And B) There's a new role for them in distribution intelligence. They got on board and now are actually pushing progress forward.

It's a great company to work for. Lots of smart, motivated folks with tons of experience both in the energy industry and other connected industries. I'm in the second wave of new hires, working as an architect on the software system that will be managing the scale of the infrastructure as we build out. That said, my knowledge is obviously fairly specific to the software, and the hardware bit that I've come to understand is primarily through osmosis :) To try and answer what I can without violating the usual secret squirrel stuff:

Efficient infrastructure - we're able to charge and discharge at a high level of input to output efficiency. Typically, in the energy storage business, you lose a lot of energy via inverters and other technology. Our secret sauce gets around a lot of this, though I don't think I'm able to disclose exactly how it works. It's incredibly elegant in it's simplicity though, and can plug directly into the wild west of the grid. We're also able to network together a significant amount of capacity in almost any configuration for a very reasonable cost per KW. That means we can take our storage system and sell you 80kw/h discharged over 4 hours (20kw per hour), or 40kw over 2 hours, or just keep adding capacity to change those numbers further. While we're a bit young to be just "plug and play", we'll get there as time goes by.

In terms of battery technology, we have a few tricks up our sleeves and are working with a variety of researchers, but for the most part we just work with what's on the market - meaning high end lead acid (best bang for the buck, and the maintenance story is improving), and lithium ion where people want it. This helps keep purchase and maintenance costs low, but we've also built our own battery management system that lets us plug and play any battery tech on the market today, as well as several that are on the way but haven't hit a decent economy of scale yet.

I can't comment on specifics of the BMS, other than we're building the hardware as well as the software, which lets us play with a variety of models for handling battery input and output.

It's a market that's seeing plenty of entries and new competition every day, but it's also really cool to see how people are approaching the problem and working with partners to drive the cost of energy down. That can only be a good thing for all of us!

Very common problem with similar optimistic analysis is that they compare end-user price (includes taxes and distribution costs) with the price of solar panels (no installation and maintenance costs).

In reality, you have to calculate additional costs when dealing with unpredictable sources. Either you have to have 100% backup in traditional source or you have to conserve the energy (usually below 50% efficiency).

Indeed.

You have to buy land. You have to pay architects and engineers to design your plant. You have to build facilities. You have to hire people to run it. You have to maintain it. And eventually it'll be decommissioned, which works out to an effective operating cost.

"Researchers at Queen’s University in Canada have compiled a comprehensive study of solar power plants and found that improvements in financing, and industrial streamlining could allow for the technology to become as cost-effective as traditional electrical sources. In other words, a much larger part of the globe could currently reach grid parity if cheap loans and better supply chains were available."

In other words, solar photovoltaics are not yet affordable without technological improvements in the supply chain and without subsidy in the form of below-market financing. I'm glad we've cleared that up.

Solar power is a classic disruptive technology. It currently does not meet the mainstream market's needs in terms of:

  - availability
  - cost per MWh
  - suitable locations (close to established high voltage power lines)

Each of these factors is being steadily improved over time. And once solar technology meets the mainstream market's expectations for energy production, incumbent producers will need to retreat their offerings into a vanishingly small market for those needs not met by solar.

I think we'll know its disruptive when it actually disrupts something. On its own, without subsidies and other crutches.

And that may have happened with special assistance, as many other disruptions have.

But its still not a sure thing. There may be other technologies that might have gotten there first. But since we've biased investment in solar so much, such alternatives may never develop.

We did something similar with the automobile in the US, giving it advantages and subsidies like free roads. Is it any wonder that more efficient ways of getting around withered?

What were the more efficient ways (of getting around)?

Mass transit is what I had in mind.

Personally, I prefer the car. But if I had to bear all of the costs of using a car directly, and urban sprawl were not so preferred by planners, mass transit would be my choice more often.

This is especially true at rush hour. Most highway construction happens just to serve rush hour traffic, a time when mass transit is at its most efficient.

If these subsidies did not exist, mass transit would be much more widely used. There'd be many more choices and there'd be no need to subsidize mass transit.

We actually have subsidies to counter the negative effects of other subsidies. Getting rid of all subsidies would be better and allow people to make the right choices for them with fewer negative side effects.

I remember reading an opinion here on Hacker News not long ago where it was suggested that in the future with self-driving cars we don't all need to own a car. Instead a car could come and pick us up and drop off at the destination. Do you think that this micro transportation (instead of mass transportation) option could be environmentally friendly?

Microtransport works against energy efficiency to the extent that empty vehicles are moving around unoccupied. On the other hand, if they achieve higher utilization, then that is offset to some degree by better utilization of the embodied energy required to manufacture the vehicle.

Further, if self driving vehicles are well coordinated, they could achieve higher utilization of roadways, which would require less land and less concrete and steel to carry the same volume of people. Also, they would potentially be able to operate with more optimal acceleration and breaking.

Before you can compare things on an environmental basis, you have to be comparing things that are equivalent.

I could compare rubbing a lamp to taking the subway in environmental terms and the lamp comes out way ahead. It just takes more walking to get places with the lamp method.

If you do wish to compare two things, you probably should include the cost of your time and the environmental impact you would have during that amount of time.

You also want to consider the actual impacts of building the transportation systems, whether its rail or road.

It would be infinitely easier for you if each process involved were taxed according to its impact. Then the costs would be included in the price you pay and you could decide according to what works best for you.

Oh right, but mass transit has hardly withered. There are probably similar numbers on the mass transit systems as there are in cars (in most cities).

You don't have to look far in the US to see that PV solar is winning against grid-connected power. I don't know the exact shape of the niche, but it seems to be a combination of relatively low power needs vs the cost of bringing grid power to the location. Safety lighting and monitoring or communications seem to be common applications.

And I'm talking about utilitarian applications, not places where the PR value of appearing "green" gets factored into the equation. One place I've seen things like this are is path lighting in parks or campuses that are run of batteries charged by a solar panel. In the past, they would have pulled power to the location, and the solar option wins out because of lower up-front costs.

In Japan, most of the country (well, mountain) roads are illuminated by street lights charged by a PV panel on top.

All 4-way stop intersections also have a blinking red light embedded in the road, once again charged by a PV cell.

> In Japan, most of the country (well, mountain) roads are illuminated by street lights charged by a PV panel on top.

That tells us that the cost of getting power to those locations dominates the cost of power used at those locations.

Other locations have different characteristics.

"Other locations have different characteristics."

That's rather obvious. I'm talking about places where it works well in Japan, along the same lines as the parent talking about places where it works well in parks.

Yes, and the point is that there are market niches that would either have gone unserved, or would have been served at greater expense because there was no suitable alternative that are now being served by PV solar. This what the start of disruption looks like (though by no means speaks to how far it ends up going)

Wrong, we don't have abundant solar power because of science, not financing. Go build something using solar power, the technology just isn't there, but most importantly neither are the physics. I spent a couple of years building an industrial product that ran off of solar power. We are in the sun belt, which is a region of the U.S. that has the most sun relative to the rest of the country. What I learned is that solar power is a joke. There just isn't enough solar energy arriving at the surface of the planet to make it worthwhile to use. It's a fantasy, get over it and invent something new, like a 600cc nuclear reactor.

Wow, what a completely misinformed comment. Start here:

http://energyselfreliantstates.org/content/solar-grid-parity...

No, your article is misinformed. The article does not discuss the total cost of generating power from solar panels, namely, cost of batteries and their regular replacement, panel cleaning, and the cost of the amount of land required for enough panels to generate 50 Kwh (avg) per day. This also does not consider that you need 7 times as many panels to generate the same amount of electricity on a partly cloudy day as you do on a clear summer day. It is much worse in the winter months. I dare you to prove me wrong, not with an article of someone's estimation, but real field work.

Instead of dismissing people's optimism with an impossible-to-refute "argument from field experience", why not write up some of your hard-won lessons so interested people can educate themselves?

I'd be very interested in an account of real world PV solar costs and hurdles by someone who's been there, done that.

We don't have abundant solid gold toilet seats because of financing, not science, either. Now this isn't to say that there is no market for solid gold toilet seats. Surely, I'd buy one, if the cost was the same as a regular toilet seat. But it isn't, now is it? Yes yes, I know this will kill my Hacker News karma. Deduct away.

Solar is not a viable means for today's energy consumption, and it certainly won't be a viable means for tomorrow's energy consumption.

The energy race has been decided already, and the only answer to fossil fuels is Liquid Floride Thoriam Reactors (LFTR). It's an alternative form of nuclear energy that has been around since the Manhattan Project. Unlike the current nuclear power plants of today, it is impossible for a nuclear explosion to occur, there is no waste generated (well, there is about 1% waste, but the waste generated is actually a very rare metal NASA uses to power deep space satellites), and Thorium (the equivalent to Uranium) is 1000x more abundant than Uranium.

LFTR will be the worlds core energy source within 30 years. China is the only country actively developing a LFTR program- if it comes to fruition, they could be the power suppliers of tomorrow.

Learn about it in 5 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

It's not financing. It's the fact that we don't have a carbon tax. Price carbon near the cost of sequestration and you will see plenty of money invested in alternative energy. Anything else keeps the decision making in the hands of the central planners. Ask Gorbachev how well that worked.

So, you're admitting that the problem is financing. You're just proposing one way of incentivizing financing.

I am not sure why y'all are arguing. Either a carbon tax or better financing would help.

They both help reduce climate change? Not sure. Without a carbon tax you could burn 100 tons of coal to make a "green device" and nobody would know the exact figure. With it, you don't even need to do the calculation. It's in the price.

No. The article is a coded call for subsidies of solar through "improved" financing. Subsidizing a specific activity means the government picks the technology. A carbon tax would bring all the same benefits and would not have the government deciding which technology to favor. For example there is a competing technology called "smaller houses". A carbon tax would promote that and leave the choice in private hands.

So wait, it is your argument that with a carbon tax, solar panels become economically viable? I'm not sure I buy that. Under this scenario, solar would have to be competitive with other forms of energy generation such as nuclear, and that isn't going to happen. Ever. Even the Obama administration is behind nuclear plant expansion.

I forgot to mention the radioactive cesium tax. There, fixed that. Seriously though, the government will never be able to out-optimize individual choice in choosing technologies. Besides, the system needs to be tech-neutral or else we get a new generation of special interests.

Finance is the most important issue for solar adoption, especially for distributed generation. For residential customers there is very little reason not to invest in generating your own power from rooftop solar, unless you don't plan to be in your house for 5-7 years. Even then there are studies that show you can get your money back from increased resale value.

Think of solar like this - why would you not want to independently produce your own power and escape the clutches of your local utility company? In most states in the US, utilities are monopolies and although they are regulated, they employ thousands of lobbyists to influence those who regulate them. The result, predictably is annually escalating electricity rates. The utilities raise rates to build new plants, transmission lines, increase management and employee salaries, and lately in California, cover underfunded employee pension costs!

Unfortunately, without a finance option available, you have to come up with a big chunk of money to install a system (essentially pre-paying for 7 years worth of electricity up front).

So, if you can finance the system over a reasonable period of time so that you don't have to pay for the entire system upfront, it makes makes it much easier to pull the trigger on purchasing a system.

Of course, if you can afford to pay for it upfront, it makes even more sense.

I wonder how the failure of Solyndra fits into this thesis.

Solyndra failed because its secret-sauce technology couldn't get cheap enough fast enough compared to the plummeting cost of photovoltaics. So it fits pretty well.

We've only heard of Solyndra b/c the big-oil/big-coal GOP needed a talking point. Solyndra is what they came up with.

That's only true for people who don't follow the solar industry. They got their loan in March 2009 (http://cleantechnica.com/2009/03/21/fremonts-solyndra-wins-f...), filed for IPO in December (http://gigaom.com/cleantech/solar-tube-maker-solyndra-files-...) and cancelled it in June 2010 (http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/solyndra-ipo-can...), and all three events were relatively well-covered.

Solyndra's tech didn't use polysilicone. Which was great when polysilicone prices were high. When the prices went down, the vast majority of panels that used polysilicone got much cheaper and Solyndra couldn't compete. Solyndra's circular tube technology also was problematic because it was designed to work with reflected light from the rooftop and in real world conditions when the roof got dirty you lost a lot of reflected light. So really, it doesn't.

A friend of mine founded a start up to finance solar power.

http://www.clearspotenergy.com/

1. Bullshit. 2. you all are better at math than I am, so I won't bother to point out the obvious.

Solar power on its own cannot supply base load electrical power. Period. Full stop.

Only in combination with an extensive power storage infrastructure could such a thing be possible. Constructing such things would easily cost as much, or more, as constructing all of the necessary PV plants.

Moreover, very substantial changes to the national power grid would also need to be undertaken.

At the best possible costs this work would easily exceed what it would take to build enough fission power plants to provide all of the base load, and that isn't happening with any degree of rapidity either.

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