Two massive solar power plants are planned for central California.
The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant.
The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water. . . .
Though the California installations will generate 800 megawatts at times when the sun is shining brightly, they will operate for fewer hours of the year than a coal or nuclear plant would and so will produce a third or less as much total electricity.
the plants are a big step for solar power, but they also highlight solar power's limitations: the need for over 35 square miles of solar panels to generate the same amount of power as a single coal plant, but without the same level of reliability.
And how much electricity will they produce on a cloudy day?
The difference, the bolded figures, is the capacity factor.
Still, the land these power plants occupy isn't exactly blue-chip land, and the amount involved is really quite modest. Some solar power plants can store the energy overnight as heat and can therefore run at night, although of course the capacity has to be derated to accomplish that and no solar power plant can store enough heat to mitigate seasonal as opposed to daily variations in sunlight.
-dk
Not to mention the horrible consequences should our solar panels fail!
The nice thing about solar is that it tends to be producing its peak power at the time of peak demand.
Although I recently heard a terrific idea. Put solar panels above all the parking lots in the US.
The person suggesting it kept yammering about efficient use of space or some nonsense like that. All I could think about how nice it would be to park my car in the shade during the summer.
If we wanted to generate all of our electrical needs via space-based arrays, it could be done. And probably for not much more than the Iraq War cost us.... though I think nuclear plants would be a far cheaper solution.
But yes, if we really wanted to do it, we could afford it.
Land is free in California now?
Yes, we can't predict the weather; some days will be cloudier than others. But over the long term, average insolation in a given area does not change much, and so over the long term we know how much power to expect.
Yes, large solar installations of this kind are new -- undoubtedly some unforseen technical challenges will arise during long-term operations.
But, once the panels are up, they're up. The sun will always be free--unlike coal or uranium its price cannot fluctuate, and unlike nuclear, there is no possibility of catastrophic failure. Since there are thousands and thousands of panels, it's unlikely that large swathes of them will ever fail simultaneously. In these two senses, the solar plants' "reliability" should be excellent.
I will have to remember that response, my friends and relatives that are enamored about solar always jaw about how sunlight is free.
Thanks to the collapse of the housing bubble and some conveniently located deserts, essentially yes.
Neither can the prices of coal or uranium, at least for those who mine it (and you could note that they pay for the land upon which they mine, but so do the solar people). Similarly, the cost of sunlight for those who mine it won't fluctuate. What will fluctuate is the price everybody down the line pays.
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Power is a measure of energy delivered per unit of time. 12.5 square miles of solar makes as much power as a coal plant, but the solar power is only available during bright sunshine.
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In order to make as much ENERGY in 24 hours, a solar plant would have to be three times as powerful as the coal plant, because the coal plant, like the tortoise, is slow and steady, 24/7.
Wouldn't you worry about the global warming problem created by piping in extra solar energy to the Earth system? The net effect of using solar energy from space would be indistinguishable from moving Earth's orbit to be closer to the sun, wouldn't it? Sounds like it'd get hotter.
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In these parts, it would also keep the snow off in the winter!
If you sum up all the absolutely useless desert land in CA, UT, NV, AZ and NM then you can build quite a bit of solar without incurring much cost in land. Now the plants themselves are rather pricey, but that's a different fish.
For a thermal plant overnight heat storage would be a relatively simple add-on that might become worthwhile as solar power's market share increases. For these plants it's not an option.
-dk
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Supposedly, that's all rolled into the "competitive with other renewable energy sources" catch all. What's not stated is that with the exception of hydroelectric, renewable energy is either more expensive (wind, solar) or more polluting (biomass burning) than coal, oil, or nat gas fired electric power plants.
Those are the solar thermal plants mentioned in the article (in fact, in the portion that Jonathan quoted); these new installations are straight photovoltaic, so they won't be working at night at all. (Well, I guess they could get some power out of moonlight, but...)
-- the absorptivity of solar panels isn't that much higher than the rocky desert that would otherwise be underneath them. --
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The comment you are reviewing was about space-based capture, not land based capture. Supposedly, space-based capture would involve transmitting energy to land via some means where the atmosphere is more transparent than it is to the solar spectrum, hence more net energy reaching the earth.
Not to mention the impact upon birds of all those orbit-to-Earth extension cords.
To be sure there is a huge amount of barren desert land in the west, especially in Nevada. But the power must be delivered to the cities. The long range transmission efficiency and operating costs over an average delivery distance must also be factored in. So yes, the sunlight arrives without cost. The electricity delivered does have costs that can fluctuate beyond amortization costs.
Phew, it's a good thing that coal plants have a much smaller environmental footprint. Pity we need to level entire moutains ranges in West Virginia to fuel them.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Of course the price can fluctuate, even for the miners. To take one example, as a result of the recent uranium price rise, companies are looking at mining low-grade uranium ores which were once too expensive to extract. That ore costs them more to produce than other ore they have. Sounds like a fluctuation in their cost of production to me.
In another example, the cost of the labor required to mine coal has gone way down in the past decades as more advanced mining technologies have come online. This too has affected the price of coal -- that is, it has driven fluctuations.
Another uranium example: the energy intensity of mining. It turns out that manipulating huge volumes of rock and pumping huge volumes of water require (fossil) energy. So when the price of oil or natural gas goes up, it will cost the miners more to produce.
The cost of solar energy is almost purely capital, even more so than nuclear. Once the panels are up, the price of solar energy is unlikely to fluctuate very much: the land, the silicon, and the installation has all been paid for.
Care to elaborate on your mystifying comment?
Or you could have the skyhook concept with a tether connecting a LEO satellite with a floating derrick on the ocean, passing the power down the line.
I mean, look at how zealously they fight against drilling in ANWR -- and did so before global warming became an issue -- even though nobody lives within a zillion miles of the place or ever goes there.
Curt, sorry for the misread.
I didn't know that it was. You now have my attention. What would this mean for the proposed wind farms on the Great Plains? For energy needs in Chicago? Boston?
Very curious about this.
I've done it, I've done it!
Guess what I've done?
Invented a light that plugs into the Sun!
The Sun is bright enough.
The bulb is strong enough.
There's only one problem. . .
The cord is not long enough.
The liberals want us to turn half our farmland into solar stations, and to take the food grown on the other half, and burn it as ethanol. I may be exaggerating a little, but no more then the global warming nuts do.
Corn ethanol in the US yields about 350 gallons/acre/year.
One gallon of ethanol contains about 25 kWh of energy.
12.5 square miles is 8000 acres. One year is about 8750 hours.
Solar panel yield per acre: 875 MWh/year*capacity factor; ethanol yield per acre: 8.75 MWh/year.
So, even with a capacity factor of a measly .1, solar panels are 10 times more efficient than ethanol growing (for land use).
Now, this is before factoring the efficiency of the engine than burns the ethanol, so the comparative inefficiency of fuel use vs. electrical generation doesn't matter.
There is no water left to grow trees there buddy. Unless you've engineering a magical tree that grows without water that is. If you have, congratulations on winning the Nobel Prize in Bullshit Biology.
Sugarcane/beet ethanol is about twice as efficient (per acre) as corn. Oil palm for biodiesel is similar.
If we can figure out how to do cellulosic ethanol efficiently, switchgrass would probably be 3-4 times as efficient as corn.
So if it takes 35 square miles to get enough solar to run a power plant, we could replace coal fired plants by using 21,000 square miles of land. Even if you tripled that, which could potentially provide all electricity we currently use plus an additional load for a hypothetical fleet of electric cars, and you're at 63,000 square miles.
That's not a lot of land if you spread it out.
Still not an issue - it's a drop in the bucket. Even if we replaced ALL of our energy sources by a space-based array (and assuming it ALL goes to heat) the energy "added" to the surface would be around one-millionth of the solar energy currently absorbed at the surface.
PG&E has done that in a number of it's own employee parking lots. That kind of installation highlights the ways in which photovoltaics can complement other forms of power generation:
The economics of these things are still a bit tentative, but getting better. Even in the present form, however, solar technology can be a useful addition to a power portfolio.
Environmentalists are starting to come to grips with the fact that there is no power source with no environmentally harmful impacts. Wind and solar take up large amounts of space on which things live; wind is also bad for birds; hydro destroys river ecologies; nuclear creates radioactive waste that sticks around for thousands of years; oil and coal pump CO2 into the atmosphere. Not sure about tidal power but we can't base our economy on that.
The better path, from an environmental point of view, is to use balanced levels of each, so as to keep their harmful environmental impacts at a reasonable level.
Thanks for the comparisons, Gregory. Very interesting. I'd just like to note the importance of your parenthetical: land use.
Alas, land use is but one factor among many to be weighed when deciding the relative merits of various energy production techniques. Water use is another, and solar is a big winner here as well. Capital cost is another, and here is where solar falters somewhat--it's hard to find financing for huge solar projects relative to the capital for say planting an equivalent acreage with corn. (Hopefully soon it will be cellulosics instead of corn, though.)
Another big factor is ease of storage. Although batteries and other storage techniques keep getting better, liquid-fueled cars will predominate for another 10 or 20 years or so, at least. As long as they are with us, it's a bit simplistic to compare solar power and ethanol on strict energy bases.
Don't get me wrong: I'm no defender of corn ethanol; I'm just the type of guy who likes to emphasize "it's complicated" in response to numbers like the ones you shared.
First, the proposed plants are just bulk solar cell sites. The idea is that by building these huge sites we can generate enough wattage and ampherage to match the power in the transmission lines. For years solar advocates have stated that you can see when your solar system was adding power to the main grid by watching your meter run backward. Unfortunately, the home systems never were able to match the current flow in the power lines and the generated energy never actually flowed into the main system.
Second, these sites have no tracking systems and the panels set at a fixed angle. Thus, the two facilities will only generate the total 800 MW equivalent at mid-day and only at certain times of the year. They did this to cut costs, but it means the system will be more a bumper station for summer then a big supplier during the winter.
Third, SCE and SDGE are also in contract to built two huge sterling engine sites. Both are from 800 MW to 900 MW in capacity. To use Sterling engines they have to have tracking geostats, which give them over three times the efficiency of the solar cell systems. But they will need 34 to 36,000 of these tracking dishes for each facility. No estimate on acreage for either project but the State estimates that at least 300,000 acres have been requested for development by the BLM for 34 solar facilities generating 24,000 MW equivalent at peak periods.
Fourth, the present environmentalist movement doesn't recognise hydro-electric as a renewable energy source. These green energy mandates are minus hydro (just wind, solar, and biofuel). Thus, no matter how much energy we already get from Hydro it is not taken into account in the mandated percentages. As a result, if we get the 20% by renewables it will be on top of that power generated by the two major nuclear plants (12.8% of california's power at 5,300 MW) and all the instate hydro sites (presently 14.5% of all electricity generation).
Honestly, I think that's the best path from just about every point of view (except the lobbyists for each individual industry) - the more competitive the market, the more each source will strive to lower the cost and increase efficiency - the more diversified the sources, the less prone the market is to large fluctuations, and the more flexible we become in dealing with shortages or other problems.
Well, it would obviously ALL go to heat; if it didn't we'd be wasting energy big time. Point taken regarding the relative magnitudes though.
I think these days they call these word formations "mashups".
"To Google" seems to mean looking intensively at something, or for something, with some magical powers involving tubes, conferred by a an evil nation or other organizational entity involved with a thing called the "internet".
This magical tube characterization probably derived from some descriptions of this "internet" thing which, according to one expert is a series of tubes.
I hope this clarifies your question. It's the best I can do this early in the morning.
But my sense is that Optisolar can outcompete any proposed nuke, and that it won't be that long before existing coal plants can be replaced with cheap thin-film photovoltaics.
Of course, I've been overly optimistic about "wont be that long" for the past 30 years, and I was wrong about how long it took wind to become cost-competitive with coal, but wind is here and it looks like solar is soon to follow.
Indeed, the comparison is not apples to apples. The land best suited to solar is different from the land best suited to agriculture, etc.
But putting the comparison that way can help make some interesting points. For example, instead of sacrificing agricultural land for biofuels to displace gasoline (or petrodiesel), it appears that it would often be better (from a GHG perspective) to convert it to solar to displace coal/oil electricity.
Yeah, but the direct-mail operation of those lizards is bitch.
Ultimately, I'm with the space array, but its nice to get some things built here on earth to learn by trial and error. One thing I hope we'll learn is some better ways of dealing with those modern-day televangelists in the EnvirNOmental movement.
Not quite; peak demand is in the late afternoon, several hours after solar noon. Check out California's varying demand for electricity today.
Dick King: I ought to say that as I said in my previous post some solar plants can store heat overnight to make electricity by night as well as by day, but these new plants are photovoltaic plants, not thermal plants, and could never do that.
Even the thermal plants don't store energy overnight. They're being built with about six hours of storage — enough to shift their electricity generation into the 2–9PM peak rate period. It wouldn't make sense to produce solar electricity through the night unless it got a lot cheaper to produce.
Oren: The US power grid is divided into 3 sections, West, Middle, East roughly at the two major mountain ranges.
Not exactly; it's divided into Eastern, Western, and Texas.
For about $30K each, everyone here could put a self-sufficient grid on his/her home.
There have been other comments about the price of land and such, but solar power is NOT FREE! I worked for the company which originally built the entire Carrisa Plains project (ARCO Solar, Inc. at the time) and there is much more to consider.
For one, the primary cost of making crystalline PV cells is (drum roll) - electricity! The crystals are grown the same way that Intel makes silicon chips. Depending on how the accounting is done (those pesky statistics and all) the amount of electricity a PV panel produces during it's life is pretty much the same as what went into making it. Yes, it's a solar powered BATTERY!
Add in the issues of not producing anything at night, not being able to re-size the capacity easily and the whole environmental issues of using huge swaths of land and PV does not have a future for industrial-grade generating centers. It works great for off-grid applications, from ocean buoys and sailboats battery charging to freeway call boxes and mountain-top radio repeaters. But don't expect to run your city on PV power.
Which is precisely why solar thermal makes for a better option than PV, not to mention the benefits of being able to store up the heat.
"Clean" is a relative term (should be "cleaner" is suppose). I'm no sure who's "ignoring" that.
The energy required to manufacture a photovoltaic (PV) panel is less than 10 percent of expected production in Southern California (thin-film panels are at the low end of energy consumption and monochrystaline panels at the upper end).
Put another way, for the first ~2 years production, the panels are simply replacing what they consumed. For the following ~20 years, they are essentially emission free.
It's hard to guesstimate the energy used in transportation without knowing where they were made. Of course, there are installation energy costs too.
Manufacturing PV panels also has some harmful byproducts (principally heavy metals). I haven't seen much work done on recycling spent PV panels. Can't be much worse than "disposing" of spent nuclear fuel.
That said, I'm skeptical that remotely located, large-scale PV arrays are really an economical choice. If you want a large solar plant, hybrid NG/solar thermal probably make more sense for the time being. Still, today's PV technologies are useful in other applications.
As for California's energy rates, they go up all the time. PV panels have little to do with that. Compared to buying energy for our peak demand from the open market, PV panels do have a very predictable operating cost.
I did some work with a utilty in Washington State. They would pump water upstream to a large lake at night, when demand and costs were low, and then use the water during the day to run additional hydro-generating equipment. They were essentially 'storing' additional generating capacity for use during the day. This allowed them to defer building new dams and larger expansion projects.
How does that compare to "it's too much" fraction of ANWAR for oil?
If you sum up all the absolutely useless desert land in CA, UT, NV, AZ and NM then you can build quite a bit of solar without incurring much cost in land.
All the cheap land is far from the urban areas, requiring additional cost for power transmission. Would it still be cheaper than prime real estate? Probably. But it won't be "cheap". Tanstaafl.
And snakes and politicians. But I repeat myself.
Nick
I've driven California Highway 58 through that stretch many times. California Valley would be a good location from a land use point of view.
Solar is unsuited to baseload power. We knew that. The point is that there is enough variability that justifies using it on the margins.
The arrays can be tilted westwards to align the maximum power with maximum demand.
Power for LA County already travels from the OR-WA border (see my post above). The deserts of CA/NV would be closer still.
Actually, the nice thing about the LA/PACNW link up is that during the summer, the power flows south while during the winter, the power flows north. Everyone gets to invest less capital meeting peak demand while being average-demand-neutral. Transmission costs are more than offset by this HUGE gain in efficiency.
Price is a huge part of this move. I was watching Charlie Rose last month, he had guy on who worked for several of the oil companies (totally blanking on his name at the moment). One of his major points was that if you look at price per kW/h, solar has a much better ROI than either coal or nuclear. Also that the new cells they have in the lab show a vast improvement over what can be deployed today.
Also look at what companies like Next Energy, SolarCity and Sun Power are doing in San Francisco.
No, the Chinese are going to pay for it. It's future taxpayers who are paying them back.
You're still wrong. Tax benefits aren't needed in order to justify building either nuclear or coal fired plants. The only thing they need is a rational permitting process. They wouldn't be building any large scale wind or solar farms right now if it weren't for massive tax breaks, other subsidies and mandates.
In general, the less expensive (and less desirable for agriculture and housing) the land, the higher the installation costs of the solar array. You have to haul the stuff out to the desert, and you have to pay people to relocate to the desert while they're installing it.
Does anyone know how the startup costs of a solar array compare to coal-fired or nuclear plants of equivalent power capacity?
What costs as much as a solar panel array to build? I don't know ... how about a light rail system or a freeway? The average light-rail line under construction or in planning stages today costs $25 million per mile ($50 million per mile in both directions). An average lane-mile of freeway costs roughly $5 to $10 million. (Source.) Is this good or bad?
Alas, that ain't saying much -- photovoltaic installations of the past were expensive.
Both plants in the same area; California Valley is in the Carrizo Plain.
"But, once the panels are up, they're up."
What about labor and water and soap (or solvent) to clean them - if not clean, not efficient?
Don't the cells get fried and lose efficiency in 2-3 years? If the claim is 20 years of useful life for a cell, what is the empirical basis? I would guess it needs to be "repainted" every 5 years or so. Still, worth exploring to see what can be done.
Not tax benefits, just direct subsidies. Nuclear fuel production is subsidized by the government (it used to be produced directly by the government--now only parts of the fuel production are done by the government the rest is done by private companies who bought the production facilities for the government for practically nothing). Plants are indemnified by the government. And the costs of nuclear waste disposal are borne by the government.
Depends what you want to include in the cost model. If you ignore all those "extras" (e.g. pollution, EIRs, permitting, not-in-backyard-syndrome, etc.), the answer is easy: old-fashioned, coal-fired power is the cheapest technology on the market.
No need to look any further.
Opher Banarie left a link to a company that lets you compute how much energy you might (key word might) generate from solar arrays on your home. I ran my parents, biggest roof- fewest stories, and concluded that if everything works to 91% efficiency they will only produce enough power to cover 2/3 of their normal daily consumption. And thats without the air conditioning on. So even if they totally cover their roof they will still need to tie into an outside energy producer.
To me the biggest question is what would be the production if we used Galium Arsenide cells which are three times as effective as the silicon cells everyone keeps pushing.
Obviously, whatever the cost may be, solar has to justify itself against other forms of energy production on a net cost basis (including externalities, which all energy sources have). The land cost is just one factor, but it's probably not significant in much of the southwest.
Not really a concern here in California, where cloudy days are a rare commodity in much of the state.
See for yourself.
An easy way to accomplish this in a state that also has hydroelectric power is to simply stop generating hydro when the solar plants come on lin e every day.
Actually, all operating power plants pay a tax for the government Price-Anderson reinsurance [above $540 million -- they have to insure that themselves] and they pay a nuclear waste disposal fee for which they have not received any service.
No money has ever been paid out under Price-Anderson. It's liability insurance only; the companies have to insure the plants themselves by themselves. Some of the waste disposal fee has been spent, but not much, and more importantly the nuclear companies have been paying this fee all along but still have to deal with the waste.
-dk
And why rape 50 square miles of land to produce as much juice as a 1000 megawatt Nuke can produce on 100 acres?
These plants would provide 800MW peak, less most of the day and none at night. The new AP1000 nuclear plant provides 1150MW all day and all night. If 12.5 square miles = 800MW * .2 (capacity factor) = 160MW/day. 1150 MW*.9 (capacity factor) = 1035Mw/day. To get as much power as a single nuclear plant solar would need 80 square miles.
1150 MW could supply 1,150,000 homes. There are 13,174,378 houses in California. That’s 11 Nuclear power plants or 916 square miles of solar panels, and that’s just the residential power needs. How much Arsenic, Chromium, Cadmium and other toxic chemicals will be in those solar cells and what happens at the end of their useful life? After 30 years how much deadly (long lived) nuclear waste is produced? After 30 years how much deadly (forever) chemical waste from disposing of all those solar cells is produced?
Solar is great for picking up the excess in peak demand periods in the south. Nuclear is needed for the heavy lifting
Gimme some of that free land, MarkField.
But if it's not free, quit talking out your ass. I have an engineering background, and I know watermelon bullshit when I see it.
Without heavy taxpayer subsidies, there is no way in hell that wind power could possibly compete with natural gas, oil, coal, or nuclear. Rate payers are concerned about rates -- not about meaningless feel-good platitudes. If you don't think so, let's have a vote on the question... if the watermelon contingent has the balls for it. Which most assuredly they do not.
Um, that's equivalent to a square 251 miles on each side. It's also about as much land as the entire state of Oklahoma. Quite a bit of land, even if you spread it out.
Also, it would be hard to argue that solar plants are better for the environment when they destroy so much habitat. We can't even put a single oil well about 35 feet wide on each side in the desolate tidal plain that is ANWR but we can sure put 35 square miles under a permanent black-out in the lower 48 because it is good for the environment. Yeah right. Go ahead and pull the other one while you are at it.
I will say it again. Greens are too hysterical and scientifically illiterate to be given a say about our energy policy. It would be like putting a Marxist in charge of the economy or having a numerologist calculate the trajectory of your moon rocket.
The PG&E press release says 1,650 GW-hr/year, implying a capacity factor of 0.24.
Meanwhile, the AP1000 would produce 1,150 MW * 0.9 * 8766 hr/yr = 9,073 GW-hr/yr, or 5.5 times as much.
The AP1000 will produce heat at a rate of about 50 GW(thermal)-days per tonne of uranium fuel. Or
1 GW(thermal) : ~0.02 t/d;
1 GW(electrical) : ~0.06 t/d = 22 t/yr.
Over 30 years, that's 660 tonnes. Enriching the fuel produces on the order of ten times as much depleted uranium. And 30 years is about half the lifetime of the reactor, so add some prorated figure for the mass of the decommissioned plant.
A few very simple back-of-an envelope calculations reveal that, at 250 W/m2 insolation at the Earth's surface, solar power is never going to be a meaningful contribution to energy needs. There's no need to convince people of this because there's no danger that they'll change the laws of physics. In the future, we'll have a whole lot of nuclear plants, or we'll still be burning alot of fossil fuels, and there just isn't any third option no matter how much a bunch of technically ignorant people wish for it.
Build tens of thousands of square miles of solar panels? Heft thousands of tons of equipment into orbit and beam it back with giant microwaves? No need to argue with people about this stuff - none of that is ever going to come remotely close to happening. A bunch of non-engineers who believe in magic are going to have exactly zero impact on this reality. Why argue? Reality doesn't care what any of us think.
Oh by the way: Hydroelectric power is as close as you can get to something-for-nothing in the energy game, so if there are any sites left where a productive dam could be built I'm all in favor of it. Note, about 80 feet of elevation change is needed to get any kind of reasonable output, so forget about ocean tides, but there may still be a few sites left and I think they should be exploited as quickly as possible. The main barrier to this? Environmentalists.
To some extent I blame energy companies. Outfits like Exxon-Mobil and GE put some R&D funds into the solar and wind nonsense as PR window dressing, even though they are fully aware that they are dead ends. I think that is deceptive of them, but I can sort of understand it...if they try to explain reality to the public, they'll just be demonized for it. They figure it is a waste of time and they're probably right.
Please don't take my word for it folks. Please, just look up a few figures - current electricity usage, total energy usage, sunlight intensities, the amount of power available from windmills - you'll be able to verify it for yourself very quickly with simple arithmetic, and you won't have to waste any more brain cells thinking about solar energy or wind power.
the concept that seems to elude people's thinking and is mysteriously and constantly overlooked is centralized vs decentralized power generation.
look at this thread: the whole discussion revolves around centralized power.
think of it this way - if each residence in this country were to have a 4kw solar system in a grid tied arrangement where would this discussion about huge solar, wind, nuclear, coal, power plants be? I suspect it would become a non issue - so why isn't it happening? well duh! can you say big oil, big gas, big coal???
the localized solar concept in this country is virtually sabotaged and is swimming uphill against a huge current of corporate greed.
does this sound whacko? think about it . . .
Hey Sarcastro, you still reading? If so, do your thing...
Wow, can I get one of those magic wands to make this happen?
So, inefficient centralized solar plants will be replaced by even more inefficient decentralized solar sources, and that will make solar competitive?
Nice try at sarcasm, but I'm afraid you'll find those laws apply very rigidly in Europe as well.
Denmark consumes about 0.25%, and Spain about 1.7%, of world electricity usage; so two tiny markets (both still plugged in to controllable power sources to deal with the uncontrollable fluctuation in wind power output) have managed to make impressive-looking percentages.
If you artificially select some small energy consumer and look at their percentage of wind or solar use, it isn't hard to make it look reasonable. Installing enough wind or solar power to supply one house is certainly doable, but it doesn't prove anything. The point is that it doesn't scale up. It is not doable to cover a meaningful percentage of world supply that way.
To put a serious dent in fossil fuel use requires not only generating electricity some other way, but also reducing point of use direct consumption, such as transportation and heating. Those uses of energy are several times as large as current electricity use. In other words, current worldwide electricity use (and transmission infrastructure) would need to increase by a very large factor - making Spain and Denmark's wind power contributions even more miniscule.
I think it's a mistake to think of the oil and gas companies as energy companies. What they do is find oil, get it out of the ground, refine it, distribute it, and sell it. They are oil and gas companies companies. Sure, they have some other irons in the fire, but it's mainly oil. That's what they are good at.
Notice nobody ever expects them to provide nuclear power? So, why look to them for solar, wind, or geothermal?
As an aside, does anybody think state utility commissions will allow utilities to hike rates to pay for these proposed massive solar arrays? And if the arrays are built, how many years of lawsuits will it take before the power lines can conect them? It's a safe bet we can find some group that is against anything, and all these groups have access to years of litigation.
In the Old World, the speed of light is 1.803 terafurlongs per fortnight, but in America it is 186,000 miles per second.
Also, I never questioned the need for conventional (preferably nuclear) power plants to take on the baseload and fossil fuel (preferably gas) plants to meet fast-changing needs. In between those two, however, there is ample room for solar, wind and hydro power to proive 30-50% of our bulk power needs.
In 2005, the entire US used about 10^17 btu, or an average rate of about 3.3 TW. At 250 W/m2, that would be 13 billion square meters, or 3.2 million acres.
That sounds like a lot (and it is), but there's more than 500 million acres of land in use for agriculture in the US (including both cropland and pasture).
This is not to say there are not serious challenges to getting a significant portion of energy from solar (efficiency of energy use, costs and difficulties of manufacture and installation, and timing of energy delivery, to pick out major ones). But to dismiss it as prima facie impossible is ignorant or dishonest.
like I sed - nobody wants to think in these directions - it's the big energy corporate brainwashing and it's worked on you - of course nobody wants to spend any money on anything - duh - but do you really want to be always and increasingly under the thumb of corporate america? or are you willing to take your own steps towards individual energy independence? it starts with you - if you think the government and / or big corporate energy is going to save your ass someday think again - they will keep you on a string forever because it's in their best interests, not yours. and that's why they don't really want it to work. if they can't own it and control it they don't want it to happen - is that a difficult concept to grasp?
talk all you want about centralized power systems and what will work and what won't work - it's the great distraction from where you should be thinking.
Now, about that 3.2 million acres of solar panels - well, OK, factor in the losses of solar panel efficiency (currently the best available are only 12%) and transmission losses - now you're looking at many times more. Do you understand how large 3.2 million acres is? Do you have any concept of the cost of building and maintaining something like that? It utterly dwarfs anything that has been done before. You wouldn't be able to cover an area like that with plywood at a reasonable cost, let alone solar panels with a power transmission infrastructure.
I have no reason to be dishonest and I've had more professional involvement with power generation and transmission than most. I may be ignorant, but you can be pretty ignorant and still be smart enough to see that solar power is a non-starter.
Yes, prima-facie impossible. Again, no amount of argument is going to change that. I'm not sure why I waste any time on it - it's not clear what the value of trying to gather converts is.
Getting 15% of our power from solar, 25% from wind, 10% from hydro, 40% from nuclear and the remaining 10% from fossil fuels in the next 2-3 decades, OTOH, is fairly reasonable. That amounts to roughly 4,000,000 acres of solar plants, easy to fit in otherwise useless deserts, which total about a hundred of million acres (roughly).
Combined with increased efficiency on both the production and consumption end, energy independence seems eminently doable.
Billions of barrels of oil just sitting there for the taking, and under only 3.13 square miles of complete waste land. And that oil will produce a lot more energy than this hair-brained scheme ever will.
Only the envoroweenies and their string puppets in Congress stand in the way.
Same thing with wind/solar. It's a complete waste of taxpayers' money. When the market develops solar panels that produce a watt for $5, every home will have panels, batteries and an inverter. 2 kilowatts, $10,000. Payback in a few years.
Moore's Law applies to lots of different technologies. Why should solar panel technology be much different? The only thing I see going on here is special interests money-grubbing for more tax dollars and subsidies. Let the market decide. Because the gov't will screw it up big time - guaranteed.
And for those poor souls so frightened of carbon dioxide, check out what Prof. Freeman Dyson and tens of thousands of other scientists have co-signed. Read the second paragraph real close. The truth will do you good.
Also, Moore's law emphatically doesn't apply to a lot of other technologies. Storage media (both persistent and not) for instance, stubbornly insist on growing linearly. Whether solar panels are 'Moorish' or not is yet to be seen.
Four million acres of solar panels isn't remotely doable. Put it this way, it is estimated that there is about 12 million acres of paved road surface in the United States - accumulated over the course of about 100 years. Paving a given area is orders of magnitude cheaper than covering it with a solar panel. And yet, that four million acres of solar panels only provides around 3MWh/year of power at current efficiencies, without counting (significant) transmission losses. That compares to world electricity consumption of around 16MWh/year, before switching fossil fuel uses over to electric and before accounting for rising living standards in the rest of the world.
I don't think it is worth wasting time on solutions that have no potential to have a meaningful impact.
Why bother with solar or wind? Why not just use nukes for 80%, hydro for 10%, and fossil for 10%?
And also please forgive me if I've been a little rude or dismissive in some of these posts, but the whole thing is very frustrating. People are yapping on about solar power in every direction while it is obvious and easily verifiable that it cannot possibly make a meaningful contribution. The situation with wind power is a little more complicated to explain, but it is even more of a ridiculous fantasy than solar. (I've somewhat avoided it because I feel my posts are already kind of obnoxiously long). In both cases we are dealing with an energy-density problem that is handed down to us from Nature and that we can't do anything about.
If we wish to operate under the hypothesis that fossil fuel use is going to destroy the environment unless usage is sharply curtailed in the near future, then it is pretty urgent that we go about dramatically upgrading the power transmission infrastructure and building nuclear plants as quickly as possible. Current technology would allow us to eliminate almost all fossil fuel use with no need to invent anything miraculous - everything but portable generators and aircraft engines, as far as I can determine. (Maybe everyone could keep their natural-gas cooking stoves installed, since the electric ones suck).
And, for those who doubt global warming - I submit that it doesn't matter very much. At some point in the future, fossil fuels are going to get too difficult and expensive to obtain. They won't be worth extracting for anything other than chemical manufacturing feedstocks. That is just a matter of time and there's no getting around it. I have some doubts about global warming myself but I don't see where it makes any difference to this issue.
And one final note, I think we need to re-evaluate how concerned we are about the environmental impacts of hydroelectric projects. I think that route should be exploited almost anywhere the geography allows it. Yes, nuclear reactors can be built with extremely safe designs, there are known solutions to the problem of disposing of the waste, and the supply of uranium is for practical purposes limitless - but still, nothing is cleaner or cheaper than hydro.
If environmentalists had any brains they'd recognize the superiority of both options to strip-mining coal, and stop waiting for the solar-and-wind-power fairy who is never going to come.
Are you sure? According to figures here, the interstate highway system is 46,837 miles long, and cost $425 billion. That's $9.1 million per mile. That checks out nicely compared with this:
Let's assume that the paved area of a highway is 100 feet wide (8 total lanes, including shoulders, at 12' per lane). So a mile of highway is 528,000 square feet of pavement. That's 49,053 square meters. Figure a cost of $8 million per linear mile, and that works out to a cost of $163 per square meter.
I can buy a solar panel, here. The cost works out to $675 per square meter. $163 per square meter is not "orders of magnitude cheaper" than $675 per square meter. It's not even one order of magnitude cheaper.
I realize there are all sorts of problems with this analysis. For example, the highway cost probably includes the cost of buying land. Then again, the solar cost is unfairly inflated because the panels undoubtedly cost a lot less when you're not buying them one at a time. Anyway, it's hard to figure where you got "orders of magnitude cheaper."
I think you're using the wrong units. World electricity consumption is around 17 trillion kWh/year (I just noticed you acknowledged the error). Also, I don't know why you're bringing in world electricity consumption. The statement that was made was about US energy consumption. Let's take a look at that. The US uses this much energy: 29 trillion kWh/year. That's energy in all forms (including oil), not just electricity. That works out to an hourly rate of 3.3 trillion watts.
Just for fun, let's supply all the US energy needs (including what we currently get from oil, coal and nuclear) with solar panels that we buy on the internet. The panel I cited generates 130 watts per square meter. To get 3.3 trillion watts, we need 25 billion square meters of panels. If I buy these one at a time over the internet, the amount I'll pay (probably via PayPal) is $4 trillion. Now I need to put them somewhere. 25 billion square meters is 6 million acres. Total US farmland is 900 million acres. So I need to get my hands on 0.7% of that.
$4 trillion is a lot, but let's put that in perspective. It's not much more than the total long-term cost of the Iraq war, according to some estimates. It's also about 10 years of oil imports (assuming the current price of $115/barrel). It's also roughly ten years of our military budget.
I made one simplifying assumption that's very unfair: I pretended that solar panels generate power 24 hours/day. Of course they don't. Not even close. I also realize I'm setting aside the very large problem of energy density, and how to use electricity for transportation. On the other hand, I'm sure we can do a lot better than a panel I randomly selected on the internet, paid for at unit-one prices.
And keep in mind this analysis is not about using solar just to replace all our current sources of electricity. It's about using solar to replace all forms of energy, in the US. I'm not suggesting we do that, but I think the analysis is a useful exercise.
I meant to say this:
Agreed 100%.
Now, suppose arguendo (and contrary to the facts) that the nuclear industry is currently building plants as fast as technically possible. Perhaps there is some room for solar/wind to grow in the meantime in the most favorable places for them (e.g. Cape Wind, Texas win farms)? In those places, the cost of solar/wind are comparable to nuclear in the short term (longer term, nuclear will win but the up-front capital costs are a real problem).
When the market develops solar panels that produce a watt for $5, every home will have panels, batteries and an inverter. 2 kilowatts, $10,000. Payback in a few years.
Actually, the full retail cost for core hardware (PV panels + inverter) has been at $5/watt for a few years now. I wouldn't recommend batteries for most grid-tie systems (few people will take proper care of them) and the rest of the system is only loosely a function of watts.
That said, PV doesn't seem like a sensible choice for utility-scale production right now. And, the last time I checked, few homes have these panels.