141–150 of 352 posts
I'm mostly gratified by what a "Dog bites man" story this is. Solar prices have been decreasing steadily for a long time so we should expect to see a story like this every few months until the adoption curve flattens out - which hopefully won't be for a while.
The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap. As solar installation grows, coal baseload falls behind due to cheap natgas, and nuclear languishes due to huge capex, established baseload capacity will decrease. From now on, new capacity will largely b…
> The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap. Solar does line up with peak consumption. The duck curve is not a consumption curve, but a "Net Demand" curve -- the demand remaining after solar and generation is removed. Peakers existed before solar.…
Why is this a surprise? Solar costs have been falling for multiple decades. NON-SURPRISING HEADLINE: "Falling Costs Are Actually Falling". The important statistics to pay attention to are the implementations and if the components are recyclable not the cost per megawatt. Increasing renewable energy is important but not if you cannot recycle the components.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling/europes-f...
Keep in mind, solar panels have a 25 year warranty, and after that will continue to produce power (at about 80% rates output). We have decades to get recycling infrastructure in place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As you have more and more renewable, you need more and more gas plants This is only true if the load on the grid is growing. In North America, it is not. Otherwise, you already have enough dispatchable generation available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
This is assuming that you're replacing old, bad power (ie coal, or old-fashioned unresponsive gas plants) with a solar/responsive gas turbine combo. The US still has a fair bit of coal that could stand to be replaced, but I doubt there's enough gas to take up the slack of a solar/gas system without building more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a decade old, but I think that the proportions are still about right: https://desline.com/Geneva/Banat.pdf See the slide "Cost composition for a typical seawater RO (reverse osmosis) plant" Fixed charges (primarily capital cost): 31% Energy: 26% Maintenance and parts: 14% Membrane replacement: 13% Supervision and labor: 9% Chemicals: 7% Really cheap solar electricity could reduce the second largest expense (e…
That's reverse osmosis. In a scenario where energy is very cheap (even if only for part of the day) there are other processes which require less maintenance, but more energy.
Fixed charges (primarily capital cost) 42%
Energy 41%
Maintenance and parts 8%
Supervision and labor 7%
Chemicals 2%
Energy is nearly even with fixed costs for MSF, but fixed costs are even larger here. Leaving this type of plant idle between dusk and dawn would again raise per-unit costs a lot.
The true price of solar is the price to produce reliable, continuous energy. That requires something to smooth out the signal and store the energy, most probably a battery. The solar + battery price is also going down, though not as fast as the solar only piece. But that's the metric we should be following. When that hits $30 per MWh, it'll be game over.
False equivalence. A similar argument could be made of nuclear power (which needs to run at/near 100% output), or supercritical coal (similar operating constraint to nuclear). Do we need to add batteries to those as well to make an apples-apples comparison? (Incidentally, much of the pumped hydro in the US was built to integrate nuclear power). Unless you're trying to power the grid with a single power plant (like on…
I'm not even remotely an expert in this field, but the towers at the solar furnaces I've seen continue to glow well into the night, meaning they're hot enough to still generate steam, and thus electricity, long after it's dark.
I don't expect they generate electricity all night, but maybe not as much energy needs to be stored as people assume.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Planet Money covered this recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... Here's an entry on the storage facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... "The biggest battery in the world is a giant lake tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains on the border between Virginia and West Virginia" One of the more promising things is actually water-based storage using bac…
Pumped storage is great where the geography makes sense, but there are a limited number of good sites which can be economically connected where needed to grids. Long-term, I'd have more hope for currently emergent tech (flow batteries etc).
maybe there is a possibility for retrofitting some existing dams that are used primarily as resevoirs and not power plants, since pumped-storage are net-neutral on resevoir storage.
example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Dam
...but i am NOT an expert by any means, and it's probably way more complicated than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market economy would charge the almond cartel and alfalfa growers a lot more money for their water abuse in California, which would instantly eliminate the water problems for the entire state. Versus allowing $10 billion of agriculture industry to hold a multi trillion dollar economy hostage.
Let's add cannabis to the list which will use huge amount of water.
The internal combustion engine seems to have been milked for all the efficiency our current materials can get out of it, while new materials and economies of scale in solar tech keep pushing prices lower. However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again. Solar-ification seems to be the trend, but it is not guaranteed.
>However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again I doubt it. We've passed peak oil and have resorted to expensive techniques like fracking to collect the scraps. Meanwhile, even if no advances in solar panels occur in the future, the price of power produced by solar will only go down as more panels are added to the grid. The biggest hurdle n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't bet on batteries, or at least conventional batteries, being the long term solution. There's interesting work being done with air pressure storage, flow batteries (the largest batteries currently under construction are mostly flow batteries in the 500MWh-1GWh range, though the technology is still in its infancy), and big scary vacuum flywheels. All of these are far less developed than lithium ion cells, but…
Planet Money covered this recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... Here's an entry on the storage facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... "The biggest battery in the world is a giant lake tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains on the border between Virginia and West Virginia" One of the more promising things is actually water-based storage using bac…