41–50 of 110 posts
>> 25 cents per watt by 2050 — down from around $3 per watt today Can I trust a report that does not even have the units right?! Price should be proportional to energy (i.e., Joules or Watt-seconds) not power (Watts).
>> 25 cents per watt by 2050 — down from around $3 per watt today Can I trust a report that does not even have the units right?! Price should be proportional to energy (i.e., Joules or Watt-seconds) not power (Watts).
I think the issue is that OK, say we managed to get to 100% electricity being solar when the sun is shining. You'd still have the time the sun is not shining, which would likely be more expensive than before (a gas powered plant would only be running half the time - effectively doubling its capital/construction cost per kWh). So you'd definitely have an improvement on some levels but I'm not sure that would really he…
Storage is the /only/ way for solar to provide baseload power. Pumped water storage is vastly cheaper than batteries, and a better example of grid scale storage today. I should add that battery prices are coming down as volume increases (manufacturing learning curve), but not as fast as photovoltaic cells. Elon Musk's goal with tesla is to boost battery production volume significantly to reduce the cost of batteries.…
Pumped water storage is awesome where you have the geography to support it. Alas, that's not everywhere.
*edit looks like the article has a convenient link to another article talking about this exact problem:
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10970858/flattening-duck-curve-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the whole world could get their s * together, we can perhaps have a worldwide grid.
Electricity transmission is constrained by line loss, which is proportionate to amperage. To minimize it, voltage is raised to as much as over a million volts, keeping amperage down. This makes for very serious cross-country transmission lines, and electric companies still lose a quarter of the generated power to it. In my opinion, the two great strengths of solar are cleaner power and localizing power generating wit…
For one, there is nowhere where solar is the baseload power, because it can't be, so it gets a bit of a "free rider" advantage. For another, solar plants depreciate like any other, but those costs aren't really factored in to a lot of solar power costs yet.
We'd need to build out a significant amount of energy storage capacity and change a lot of the grid as well in order to fully adopt solar as a baseload power source. And that would increase its cost by non-trivial factors. Would it still be worthwhile? Maybe?
I think the issue is that OK, say we managed to get to 100% electricity being solar when the sun is shining. You'd still have the time the sun is not shining, which would likely be more expensive than before (a gas powered plant would only be running half the time - effectively doubling its capital/construction cost per kWh). So you'd definitely have an improvement on some levels but I'm not sure that would really he…
Everyone seems a bit obsessed by batteries as a storage method, when we have more traditional methods: - Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... . Sure it's not suitable everywhere. - There's always Molten Salt as well - http://www.solarreserve.com/en/technology/molten-salt-energy... . Also, solar isn't the be all and end all of renewable energy generation. Wi…
I have no idea if that's realistic. Does someone know what the weight/distance to power output would be limited at...
>> 25 cents per watt by 2050 — down from around $3 per watt today Can I trust a report that does not even have the units right?! Price should be proportional to energy (i.e., Joules or Watt-seconds) not power (Watts).
There's an economics caveat to interpreting solar prices, which I think may have put a lot of people on the wrong track. Suppose solar panels were priced such that, after accounting for installation costs and subsidies and everything else, solar was much cheaper than grid power and paid off quickly. Then pretty much everyone would want one, and the manufacturer would have a huge backorder. So the manufacturers wouldn…